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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
New Zealand, 1943. Violet Trench crosses Lake Rotorua with a small boy, Wing Lee, but rows back alone.Twenty years later, the same body of water is the scene of an event that will have lasting repercussions for Violet and her employees at the café she now runs on the lake shore. The lives of these young people will diverge, their paths to independence taking them as far apart as Cambodia and the USA, but Violet's influence will continue to mark both those who leave and those who stay behind.
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SONGS FROM THEVIOLET CAFÉ
FIONA KIDMAN
For Reuben and Thomas and Raphael
Author’s Note
Songs from the Violet Café is a work of fiction. With the exception of some events in Cambodia which reflect the history of that country, all other situations come from the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual people, their names or circumstances, are unintentional, and should not be construed as real.
Contents
Index of Characters
2002
The Andersons, owners of the house by Lake Rotorua once lived in by the Messengers
1943
Hugo’s Family
Hugo, a piano tuner who moved from Manchester to New Zealand after the First World War and married Magda, who died of cancer
Ming, his second wife, who moved from China to New Zealand to join her first husband, who died
Chun (also known as Harry) and Tao (also known as Sam), Ming’s children from her first marriage, adopted by Hugo
Joe, Hugo and Ming’s son
Wing Lee, the boy brought to Hugo and Ming by Violet
Violet Trench, daughter of a New Zealand tin canner who served alongside Hugo in the war, offered Hugo her help as a nineteen-year-old when Magda was dying and later moved to Europe, studying music at the conservatorium in Versailles before moving to England. Married with a daughter, Caroline, her husband is away at war
1963–4
The Sandle Family
Irene Pawson, a war widow, remarried
Jock Pawson, her second husband, a government clerk
Grant, Belinda and Janice Pawson, their children
Jessie Sandle, Irene’s daughter from her first marriage
Aunt Agnes, Jock’s sister
The Linley Family
Sybil Linley, a divorcee land agent
Marianne Linley, her younger daughter, waitress at the Violet Café and engaged to Derek, a banker and rugby player
The Messenger Family
Lou Messenger, sells sports goods and fishing tackle, a keen boater
Freda Messenger, his wife, a radio shopping reporter
Evelyn, their daughter, waitressing at the Violet Café before starting university
The Hunter Family
Hal Hunter, a pastor, founder of the Church of Twenty
Lorraine Hunter, his wife
Belle Hunter, their youngest daughter, a dishwasher at the Violet Café
Wallace, her fiancé, a preacher and follower of Billy Graham
The Hagley Family
Ruth Hagley, bookshop owner, a widow
Hester Hagley, her only child, a seamstress and a cook at the Violet Café
Owen, her fiancé, a farm labourer
At the Café
John, a cook at the Violet Café
Felix Adam, the doctor
Pauline Adam, his wife
Shorty (Nigel) Toft, the butcher
David Finke, a radio technician and pianist at the café, lives in the boarding house
1980
Annette Gerhardt, a Swiss doctor with the Red Cross
Donald, her assistant
Kiem, a driver
Bopha, a young Chinese Cambodian girl
Part One
Burning
2002
On a perfectly still night, that night of the year when the trees begin to wheel with light and the stars come tumbling, and backyard bonfires illuminate the children’s faces, the Andersons push the boat out over the lake.
‘Whose boat do you suppose it was?’ Don asks his wife, when she first tells him of her plan.
‘Who knows?’ She is like a high-tailed pony, flicking her gathered hair from side to side, her face alight as she phones first one friend then another, telling each one on her list: this is the way we’ll get rid of our old baggage, what a sight, it’s something different don’t you think. ‘Look, does it matter?’ she asks him, when he still seems irresolute. ‘It’s not as if you can do anything with that boat. It must have been sitting in the basement at least fifty years by the look of it. Haven’t you seen the rot in it? One of the boys might try and use it, even if you tell them not to. You know what kids are like when they’re in the mood.’
Of course, he can see that she’s right. She is about most things — their finances, what schools to send the children to, whose parents they should be celebrating Christmas with this year, all those things that he never cares to consider. He doesn’t know why he hesitates over the rowboat that’s been sitting in the basement since they bought the house. Once a solid wooden craft, painted red that has faded to a dingy rust colour, a strip of yellow drawn around it, missing a rowlock, it might have been built by a boy in the backyard. He thinks it is this homely quality that makes him not want to part with it. When they bought the house on the edge of the lake he saw the list of people who held the title before him, but it was meaningless. The people who can afford to live by the lake these days are people like him, transient in their living arrangements, moving from one better house to the next, able to afford shiny new boats. Upwardly mobile, a term his own mother had lighted on in the eighties. She says it with pride. My boy. My son. He’s doing well for himself.
‘It’s not as if we’re breaking any law, are we?’ his wife asks.
‘Perhaps you should check,’ he says absently, studying a window frame that he thinks he might like to shift. This house won’t suit his family for ever but, while they are here, he restores and adds to it as previous owners have. In the evening, he walks down to the water’s edge at the end of the garden, watching midges dance above the transparent water and trout rise. He will not own the derelict boat for ever, any more than the house. He won’t change it and improve it and make it safe for his sons to use. Not that they would, not a boat they would care to be seen in, although there is something about its flowing bow that shows a kind of grace, despite its faults. This evening, before the fireworks are about to begin, he wonders fleetingly about a boy who might have stood under the leafy trees at the water’s edge, hammering away on a night like this, getting his boat ready to launch in the summer holidays.
‘Please,’ his wife had said, when they were holding their territory on the far sides of their king-sized bed the night before. She has small compact breasts and fair skin with a pale moony whiteness that makes him think of treasure. ‘I’ve told everyone, they think it’s so neat.’ Her voice was sorrowful in the wasteland of duvet between them.
‘It’s all right,’ he’d said. ‘Just do it.’
When dusk is settling, and his family and their friends, wrapped up against the breeze of late spring, have eaten the barbecued meats and salads, they cry, ‘It’s time, let’s set off the fireworks.’
The boat is waiting where it has been dragged down to the beach, not quite floating but bouncing around among the reeds. The women and children have brought an assortment of items to put in the boat. Mostly it is the women, their shining made-up faces gleaming in the light of the fire behind them, who place inside the hull what he thinks of as offerings to the gods. One puts in a bundle of old letters; her sly smile and the nod of appreciation from the other women tell him that they are love letters. Another adds a calendar for what she says was a very bad year, someone else a stained quilt, another some yellowed school books. His wife’s best friend whispers to her son that it’s his last year’s school reports and he need never see them again. Then there are things that would normally go in the white elephant sale, such as a paper lampshade decorated with hieroglyphics. (There is only one rule, that everything must be combustible. He’s worried about the quilt and the metal rings in the lampshade but should he say anything? He doesn’t.) One by one, then, the women toss in notes they have written, all the old bad karma they are discarding. He tries to see what his wife is putting in the boat, but he can’t. It’s something very small and she puts it in quickly among everything else. Alongside her, one of her friends wraps an offering in a wad of tissue and slides it in with the rest. She is a slim wily woman, dissatisfied and hungry. When his wife first introduced them, he was surprised by the friendship, she hadn’t seemed like his wife’s kind of person. But he knows her scent.
Suddenly, he’s afraid. This whole idea has always been a mistake.
Finally, the boat is ready for its last voyage. He walks back up to where the bonfire is still smouldering and seizes the end of a flaming log, carrying it quickly through a crowd of spectators. As well as its freight of cast-offs and memories, the boat contains newspaper impregnated with kerosene. His wife’s friend emerges from the shadows and runs to the bow of the boat, now riding the small waves that lap at the water’s edge, fossicking for something, as if she’s changed her mind. He holds his breath. Her skirt is wet at the hem. Without looking at him, she turns and walks back up the beach. He plunges his brand into the paper and a flame roars, ripping straight away through the length of the boat. The men help him to heave it away, sloshing through the water to push it as far as possible into the eddies of the lake.
And there it burns, this barge carrying its cargo of nightmares to the bottom of the lake. On the shore, the women and children cry out and clap. Some of them join hands and begin to sing.
Perhaps there is a law against it. If there isn’t, shouldn’t there be? What was the message his wife placed inside the boat? Will she really sleep better, released from the dreams that sometimes cause her to wake in panic?
The boat glows in the dark for an hour or more, the sides collapsing inwards, fragments and sparks scattering in all directions. The wind rises and the licks of fire and the choppy waves seem to become one. In the end, there is just a scum of flame, the quilt perhaps, and it too subsides into the depths of the lake.
Part Two
Hugo and Ming and Violet
1943
The lake was settled like skim milk, the afternoon Hugo saw the woman rowing across the water towards him, a small child seated beside her. As soon as he saw the figure in the boat he knew who it was. Something about the soft slope of the shoulders when she rested on the oars, the defiant tilt of the head. He had had her letter in his pockets for months, warning him of her arrival. I don’t know when I will come, she wrote, because to get a ship from England, the way things are with this war … well, God knows, I may never get there. I’ll simply turn up, if that’s all right with you.
All right with him? The presumption of it. But she’d done this before. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know about the changes in his life. She knew exactly where to find him, sending the letter to the correct address, when most people from his past would have thought him untraceable. As for her, she had sent no return address. That was her way though, even when she was a child — a touch of imperiousness, a certainty that made opposition seem unthinkable.
A bank of dun-coloured cumulus cast sullen shadows between the horizon and the thin surface of the lake. It was one of those days when the smell of sulphur lay especially heavy over the garden, his own uneasy earth. This was dangerous country, water boiling away under a volcanic poultice, setting traps for the unwary. Even at the water’s edge soft bubbles rose from underground springs. As he watched her rowing towards him, a drift of clouds separated above, allowing weak sunlight to filter through, illuminating the shape of her face, so that for a moment she seemed closer than she really was. Then the clouds closed in again and all he could see was her black shape and the outline of a smaller figure beside her. Only, now that he had glimpsed that luminous remembered quality, he saw the delicate grace and surprising strength of the woman, like that of a dancer with enormous reserves of power. A surge of anticipation swept through him unbidden, as if she were a lover coming towards him. He steadied himself against his hoe, a thin stooping man with a job to do, a row of cabbages to be weeded. His face was worn, an old avocado of a face, with tobacco-coloured eyes. His long fingers were thickened from planting in all weathers, the hands of a piano tuner and sometime musician gone to rack and ruin. Braces supported his pants around his skinny waist, a cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth. But a good-looking man, you would have to say. He was handsome once, even if his nose is too big for his face, and a pity about his teeth, like scrambled tent poles.
‘Husband. Come and take tea.’ His wife, Ming, walked across the paddock, calling to him, although she knew he scarcely heard her. It had been years since he heard any sound distinctly, but he knew what she said; their understanding of each other was seemingly telepathic.
A beam across Ming’s shoulder supported the tea billy on one side; on the other hung a bucket of pig manure to spread on the garden. A sack apron, pinned across her front, covered a long sombre-hued dress. Her hair, drawn back severely from her face, fell in a single plait all the way to her waist.
Hugo ground his cigarette out with his heel and looked past his wife towards the house. The corrugated iron roof was held fast with extra planks nailed horizontally along a shallow arch, the timber walls were unpainted and bare. He and his stepsons had built this house together. Only a symbol painted above the doorway relieved the drab exterior. The symbol is for lightness and peace within the soul, his wife said, and he believed her. Ming had a lightness of spirit that made all of this bearable. He had promised himself to her when she was alone in the world and so, for that matter, was he. After the girl, Violet, had gone away. He vowed to be her good husband and he believed that he was.
When Ming drew level with him, she stopped, following his gaze across the water.
‘Who is she?’
She asked in English, as if the woman were already there and she must make herself understood. When Ming first came to New Zealand she had had to pass a literacy test of up to one hundred words, chosen randomly at the pleasure of the examining customs officer. She had learned five hundred words, which, as it turned out, was enough on the day. They included please, thank you, yes, forgive me, yellow, dog.
The memory of that day was scored in Ming’s memory, as if drawn there by the pillar of stone at the peak of Meng Bi Sheng Hua, both terrible and beautiful, otherwise called Tip of the Magic Writing Brush.
‘Her name is Violet,’ he said.
Violet had come to him when she was nineteen, hardly more than a child in his eyes. His first wife, Magda, was dying of cancer. The Depression era was looming and he had no idea how he was going to carry on nursing her at home. The work was too hard and he had too little money. Sleep was a rare bonus in his life. The girl wrote to him, the sheltered daughter of a man who had become strange and possessive, and of a mother who had given up on life. I am so unhappy here, she told him then, everything is stifling me, the tennis parties Mother sends me to, just to get me out of the house so she can brood in peace, the mealtimes that go on forever in bitter silence, not to mention the beef stews — why couldn’t my mother have learnt to cook decently? I’ve asked my brothers if I can go to them but they are like my father, obsessed with work, and their wives are tied up with children and complaints. Even though I could help them, they don’t seem to see that. I could come and help you now. Why don’t I do that? The nuns at school at least taught us to look after people. I’ve bathed sick people in the infirmary. I have been saving my allowance. My father may have lost his mind but he has not lost his business — remarkable these days, but there you are. Perhaps you could spare me for an evening or two and I could go to some concerts, if there are any shows left in town. So go on, what do you think?
Her father had been his friend in the past, when they shared the same battlefield during the war — Hugo an infantryman from Manchester, Violet’s father a young colonel in a New Zealand regiment. It had been one of those odd juxtapositions, when a cup of water on a French battlefield saves a life, and roles are reversed. Later, when Hugo visited the man to whom he had offered his mug, in a shadowy, ill-lit English hospital, the colonel said, ‘There’ll be another war and England’s sure to go down next time round. I’d get out of it now. You chaps will be in trouble then.’ Meaning Hugo’s race, the unmistakable Jewishness that set him apart in his youth, the fragile unexplainable quality in himself that he had never understood, because his family had set themselves outside the memory of their ancestors. The man’s head was swathed in bandages.
‘You’d be better off out in our part of the world,’ the colonel said. ‘Plenty of work out there. I’m a bottler.’
‘Bottler?’ Hugo said, puzzling over this.
‘Tin canning. I preserve fruit for a living. I’ll give you a job in my factory.’
‘I tune pianos,’ Hugo said.
‘Pianos. Well, never mind, we’ve got plenty of them in New Zealand. Book yourself a passage. My treat.’
On receiving the daughter’s letter, Hugo had written back: My dear, it simply wouldn’t do — your father would not take kindly to me stealing you from him and using you in such a manner, and I must respect his wishes. He wrote the letter several times, crossing out the parts that said, indeed it would save my life but I cannot allow it, or, I have thought long and hard about it. I cannot allow it, he wrote firmly and without embellishment, in his final draft.
He remembered how much easier in himself he had felt when the letter was posted. As he walked briskly from the red letterbox at the corner of the street, he plunged his hands into his pocket, finding sixpence. He whistled some Schubert, that section from ‘The Trout’ where the water rushes over the rocks in the stream, and because the sound came from inside his head, he heard the music perfectly. He had no idea how he would see out this bad time. Soon his wife would have to go into hospital, although it was not what she wanted. But at least he had made a right decision. A correct one. He didn’t need the complication of the girl. When he returned to the house a telegram was waiting for him. The girl had already left on the train. Arriving tonight. Violet.
For her embarkation in New Zealand, Ming was dressed in a long blue linen frock with a high collar, her black hair parted carefully down the centre and plaited braids gathered in loops around her ears. Her face was solemn with a composure she didn’t feel, as she waited for the moment when she would see her husband again and all the years between them would fall away. When she passed through the gates onto the wharf, after completing the dreaded language test, nobody was there to meet her. Her two sons had come with her on the boat. Their father, her husband, had left China seven years before; she had struggled to raise her boys in the village near the mountain, waiting for the little money he sent home from New Zealand, and for the call to come and join him. When the call finally arrived, she left accompanied by the boys and a small trunk that contained their clothes, a bolt of red silk embroidered with black roses, a rolled-up painting of yellow reeds, Chienmen cigarettes and a smoking pipe for her husband, and some cooking pots. In her hands she carried a wickerwork basket and a silk umbrella. She thought she would die of grief leaving her mother and brothers and sisters.
At first, she stood on the street, in Auckland, looking up and down, thinking that it had been such a long time since she and her husband had seen each other that they had walked past each other, without recognition. Her sons stood huddled beside her like babies as they sensed her alarm. She saw others who had travelled with her being met. Chun Yee must surely be waiting for her.
‘Where are the husbands?’ she asked a woman who seemed at ease, as if she already lived there. ‘There must be more husbands.’
The woman spoke to her in Mandarin. ‘Are you the wife of Chun Yee?’
‘Yes,’ said Ming, her heart already full of dread.
‘It’s too late,’ the woman said, shaking her head. ‘My husband went to Chun Yee’s funeral last week. Your husband is dead.’
‘How can that be?’ Ming said, thinking that it might be a trick. The boys clutched their boxes more firmly. The elder one, who was ten, stood up straight, trying to make his head level with his mother’s.
‘Come quickly,’ the woman said, ‘or they will send you back. Tomorrow we’ll find the papers to show that he’s dead. If they catch you on the street without a husband you’ll be in trouble. They’ll send you back for sure.’
That night Ming and her sons sheltered with the woman’s family, in a house in Freeman’s Bay, where her husband had an opium and pakapoo house. She felt as if she were dead too: afterwards, she told her second husband, it was as if I was dead, there is nothing anyone can do to someone who has been already dead. See, I have a strong spirit that was brought back so that I could be with you. I know what it is like to be already dead. I did not like it dead, but it is bearable. She talked to the men who came to visit the house, about the last days of Chun Yee, and how he had died of tuberculosis. Yes, he knew he was sick when he wrote to her, they said, but he thought that when she came he would get better. In the morning, she went to the Births, Deaths and Marriages office to get Chun Yee’s death certificate.
‘Does immigration know about this?’ asked the man behind the counter.
Ming shook her head. She didn’t know which of the five hundred words were the right ones with which to answer him. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘You’re in trouble,’ said the man. ‘Big trouble. You know trouble?’
‘I know much trouble,’ said Ming in a low voice.
Behind her in the queue stood a man who had also come about a death certificate, for his wife. His long thin face might have been humorous at another time, nice-looking, although his mouth was full of crooked teeth.
‘Be kind to her,’ he said to the official behind the desk. ‘Can’t you see, she’s just had a shock?’ He returned her gaze when she looked at him with her grave steadfast eyes that said I have nowhere to go.
‘Wait for me,’ he said.
Ming’s body was not much thicker now than when he met her, a tiny blade of a woman. She harboured strength, in much the same way as he remembered in Violet. She makes two of him, whatever they do. Sometimes he blushed to remember the beginning of their time together, when he first lay down with her as his new wife. He had touched her as if she were a porcelain doll to whom he had no rights at all, and she responded as if she were a knife that had to strip away his own delicacy and pare him down to the truth of his own needs. As she unplaited her hair over her bare light sepia back, it was she who put her fingers to her lips, Do not be afraid. They have had a son of their own, as well as Ming’s boys. Too old, he said at first with a self-deprecating pride, I’m too old. Later, he just said it to himself, with a small astonished murmur, because she didn’t like him saying this. He did not say, what will they make of me, this old man from a shack at the edge of the lake with his rakes and hoes, but he knew, even before it happened, that his children would burn their report cards and letters from teachers, rather than have him turn up at the school.
The town where he took her was a bustling place in the summer where tourists came to visit, or at least they did before the war, to take in the thermal sights and enjoy spas in pretty gilded buildings. The visitors stayed in huge hotels with high ceilings and chandeliers, smoking rooms and dining rooms set with crystal and silver, glamorous flower arrangements and liveried waiters; they looked across the streets from their balconies, strolled on the streets, so that you could close your eyes for a moment and think that you were in some other place. At the dazzling blue-and-white-tiled swimming baths, there were tearooms and a band that played jazz. He took his children when they were small but Ming stayed at home. The local people lived in comfortable bungalows spilling this way and that from a railway line carved out of the makeshift changing landscape, or, if they were Maori, near the lakes where they caught fish. The lakes and streams and tributaries spilt out across the countryside, filled with rising trout. When it was dark, the Maori sang, their voices travelling across the surfaces of the water. It was a place where it was possible to live unnoticed if you kept quiet and looked straight ahead when you walked down the main street. But cold, it got cold in the winter.
When he first met Ming nobody could afford luxuries like piano tuning, but now that it was wartime, everyone wanted their pianos to sing for them. His hearing, though, was all but gone, the part of his listening skill that followed a scale like an animal after its prey, separating one interval from another. None of this worried Ming, the woman from Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountain. Slowly he learnt of her past, of the mountain shrouded with mist and pine trees and fantastic rocks, of her favourite peak, Shi Xin Feng, the Beginning to Believe Peak, of her work in the rice fields, the growing and preparation of food.
She said she liked it where they lived. It reminded her of home, especially the hot springs, for in her village there were clear springs that maintained a warm steady temperature and never ran dry, even in the worst droughts, of which there were many; times when poor people like her came close to starvation. She had seen the springs and the sapling pine trees that grew in plantations as a sign that this was where they should seek land for a market garden. It will be all right, she told him, if I stay with you I will find food and harmony enough for both of us. Music that came from a piano was music made by man, she believed, but the sun, the mountains and the earth itself vibrated with never-ending frequencies. The seventh dragon is the dragon that listens, she said. You must not let the dragon lie down just because you can’t fix the black boxes that stand in the corner of ladies’ parlours. Ming had never attended a concert, had no wish to. She was unmoved by Western music, but not, she insisted, by music itself. He thought of that, watching the oars dipping and rising as the other woman rowed towards him across the mirror-glass lake and supposed that, even at this minute, he was hearing a kind of music, coming closer and increasingly persistent. When she was a child, he had tuned the piano at her parents’ house. It was an ordinary enough little instrument but when it was tuned the child, Violet, produced a sound radiant with possibility. I sound awful, she would complain when he turned up at her house on his travels through the country (for he was a known expert in those days and it was only his friendship with her father that took him to the out-of-theway place where they lived). When he left Violet absorbed over the keyboard, he thought it was worth the visit, even though he wasn’t paid. He never thought of not returning.
‘Tell me,’ Ming asked, ‘who is coming? Who is this woman?’
‘She’s the person who wrote me a letter,’ Hugo told her. ‘The letter that came a while back. I think I mentioned it to you.’ Not that he had read the letter to her, or discussed it. More like an implication that he’d had a letter from an old friend. Nothing much. I used to tune this person’s piano, he might have said. A word of advice, a note of warning. Any of these ways he might have described the letter, but he had said nothing.
‘What does she want?’ Ming stood in front of him, making quite sure that he saw her lips making the question.
‘I don’t know exactly. She’s in some kind of trouble.’
‘That.’ Ming turned away, her voice contemptuous, as if she perceived already that the woman’s difficulties were different from her own. ‘She is sometime wife?’
‘Not wife.’ Ming never complained about anything. This transparent note of anger, even jealousy, about a woman she had not met and of whom he had never spoken, was alien and alarming. He had learnt to love Ming, the woman from Yellow Mountain. How could he begin to explain the role this other one had played in his life? Or, in that of Ming herself?
The woman was now so close he could make out her features, but she rested more often on the oars, as if she had become tired. Or afraid.
As if reading his thoughts, Ming said, ‘Maybe bad woman.’
‘Not,’ he said, straightening himself. ‘Not bad.’ The boat was within hailing distance. A fleet of shoreline ducks followed in its wake. The woman would see smoke rising from the chimney behind them. He had loved three women in his time and two of them were about to meet each other. Inwardly, he cursed himself for his evasion, the way he had put off telling Ming about Violet’s letter.
‘Over here,’ he called. Turning to Ming, he said, ‘She’s asked that we look after a child.’
Ming gave a startled cry. ‘A child? That child?’ Her eyes darted towards the boat, then wildly around the smoking garden as if seeking a way of escape.
‘A little boy,’ he said, looking away. ‘Her father was my friend.’
‘You knew,’ his wife said. ‘You knew she bring a little boy.’
He walked towards the water’s edge, the water slopping around the ankles of his rubber boots as he stepped out to catch the bow and bring the boat round, running his hand over the familiar timber. He knew this boat, wondered how she had come by it. The woman looked up at him with those astonishing, brilliant eyes of hers, her mouth, always too large for the oval of her face, parted with exertion. He was shocked to see how roughened and dark her skin had become. She was dressed in a light cotton shirt and trousers, like a man, the pale ash-brown hair, already threaded with grey, tied carelessly behind her head. The collar of her shirt was open and he saw that her throat at least was still the colour of an arum lily, remembering the small muscles that rippled there, never still even when she was not talking or laughing.
‘Hugo,’ she said, looking up with such pained recognition that he understood again how much he too had changed. She turned to pick up the drowsing child beside her. The boy was perhaps two years old, round-eyed and small-boned with a large head of dense hair supported on the slender thread of his neck, one hand curled over the edge of the blanket wrapped around him. Hugo thought he saw a resemblance between them, but perhaps it was his overheated imagination.
‘Moses in the bulrushes,’ she said, pulling a face.
‘Violet, this is Ming,’ he said, as his wife advanced on them. Ming had drawn herself up to her full five feet. She glared hard at the woman, almost causing her to turn away.
‘You’ve told her?’ Violet said, when Ming didn’t respond to the introduction.
‘You have to speak loud,’ Ming said in a scornful voice.
‘I haven’t asked her,’ he said, humbled.
‘We have enough children here,’ said Ming.
‘What a hell of a place to live,’ the woman said, offering up the child. Ming held her arms by her side. ‘Why here?’
‘Because of the war,’ Ming said, before he could answer. ‘They think I am Japanese woman.’ She held the other woman’s eye steadily. ‘Japanese, phoo. They know nothing here, they think everyone looks the same.’
He was taken aback, hearing this blunt statement of the necessity of their lives. Ming had never spoken of her need to be invisible. Sometimes he wondered whether she was even aware of it. Already, he thought, things are changed.
‘You will come into our house, please,’ Ming said to their visitor.
‘I don’t want to stay,’ said the woman. She spoke to Ming more loudly than was necessary, as if it was she who was hard of hearing, then flushed when she realised what she had done. She tried to speak more evenly. ‘I’ve come to bring the boy. His name is Wing Lee.’
‘Your baby?
‘My friend’s child. I’ve told your husband, he knows about him.’ Despite her determination, her voice had begun to rise in a shrill and frantic way. ‘Take him quickly. I can’t stay. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get here but the ship was holed on the way out from England, it was terrible, it was taking water and we were going for the lifeboats but the captain told us to hold on harder, and we were rescued. We slept on the deck of a dirty little steamer that took weeks to get here. I can’t tell you how bad it’s been.’
‘I think this is your child.’ Ming’s words were flat and unfriendly.
‘As I said. My friend’s child. I can’t keep him in London, there are bombs falling all the time, and my daughter’s gone to the country.’
‘So. You have a child already?’
‘A girl of my own. Yes.’
‘But this child. He is a Chinese baby, like my youngest one, a little Chinese, a little not Chinese.’
‘His mother is dead, she was killed by the bombs. Whoosh. Boom.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ said Hugo sharply. ‘She understands what a bomb is.’
The woman coloured again. ‘I’m sorry, Hugo.’
‘So,’ Ming said, ‘you can come many miles far, but you cannot keep your friend’s child. You’d better come inside now.’
Hugo lifted Wing Lee out of the woman’s arms, although for a moment the child fought him, clinging to Violet. When he had prised him away, Hugo cradled his head against his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Violet, ‘but you see how it is. There’s a way it must be done. She won’t just take him in.’
‘Not even if you tell her to?’
He allowed himself a smile. ‘Things are all very equal here.’
‘A modern household. Well, it’s not what I expected.’
They followed Ming into the house.
Don’t go, he had said when Violet prepared to leave, the day after Magda’s funeral. I need you here. When he thought about it now, he was ashamed of that weak moment of longing. Looking back, he thought how piteous he must have sounded. All the same, he had pleaded with her. I know it’s not right with Magda just gone but, well, you know how it is, a fellow gets lonely on his own. When she was silent, he’d said, you feel it too, I can tell. They were sitting in the bay window of the small bungalow he rented in Ponsonby, looking out on a clutter of ramshackle cottages with wet washing flapping on the clotheslines.
Don’t be silly, Hugo, she said then, I’ve got all my life worked out. I’ve had time to think.
What was it, he wanted to know. What sort of life?
A reckless life, she told him, and he remembered the rich way she laughed, as if she had grown up and grown away even then.
As she walked shoulder to shoulder with him from the shore of the lake towards the house, he thought that’s how it will have been. Reckless. But not without regrets. I’d do anything for you, he told her when she left. Anything at all. Only, now he was to be put to the test, he didn’t know whether he could deliver. He was married to a woman of such strong disposition that once she made up her mind it was almost impossible to change it.
He’d asked Ming, more than once, how she had survived all those years on her own, that period of her life when she was in China and she was a wife but not a wife.
Through meditation and discipline, she told him. I went to the mountain for inspiration. More than that. She had gone underground into the caves, with hundreds of people at a time, fasting in total darkness, only a ration of water and an apple to sustain them. Her spirit was purged, tempered, ready for what might befall her. She was not like the reed in her picture that hung in its shabby splendour above the smoking fireplace. She didn’t bend this way and that.
Ming took her place at the wooden bench that ran down one side of the main room, picking up a knife with a long flashing blade to continue the task of food preparation, begun earlier in the day. She took a handful of green vegetables from a bin and chopped them on a board with long hard strokes. ‘Always, there is a friend,’ she said, tossing the remark over her shoulder.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Violet.
‘I told her you were the daughter of my friend,’ Hugo said.
Ming took two plucked ducks from a platter, their heads and beaks still attached to their bodies, and rinsed them in a bowl of bloodied water. ‘Friends,’ she said, derisively.
‘That was all,’ he said, finally provoked into reminding her that he was, after all, her husband. ‘She wants us to take this baby and care for him, because her husband’s at war and he’s been injured. Soon he’ll come back from the hospital and Violet will have to be free to look after him. She’ll give us some money now and send more each month.’
Ming cleared fat from the birds’ body and neck cavities. She mixed chopped onion and celery with spices and a dash of rationed sugar, and soy sauce tipped out of a Mason jar. Violet opened a thin canvas purse slung over her shoulder and extracted a wad of notes. ‘There’s three hundred pounds here.’ She laid the money out on the table in front of them.
Ming eyed the money, her eyes at once covetous and contemptuous. It was easy to see how much she wanted the money, how much easier it would make their lives. ‘I think,’ she said. ‘After food, I tell you.’
‘I can’t eat,’ the other woman said. She glanced round with evident distaste for her poor surroundings, a fretful child near the bench.
‘That boy needs sleep,’ Ming said to Hugo. ‘Put him down.’
He laid Wing Lee on a blanket roll near the fire, tucking the covering around him. As soon as the child touched its soft fabric his eyes snapped into sleep. A silence settled over them. Violet sat down, her hands folded awkwardly in front of her, watching Wing Lee.
‘Come into the garden,’ said Hugo abruptly, after a time in which nobody had spoken. ‘I’ll show you round the place.’
Ming didn’t look at them as they left the room. The atmosphere was alive with her reproach. Outside, a light wind had risen, so that the surface of the lake stirred.
‘I really should get going,’ the woman said, ‘it’ll be dark soon.’
‘I’ll get one of the boys to row back with you later.’ He nodded to two young men carrying sickles and rakes and spades, as they finished their day’s work in the garden. They were swarthy young men with handkerchiefs tied around their heads, wearing old mended clothes. They passed her with curious glances. One of them shrugged, and spat on the ground, but he could have just been clearing phlegm from the back of his throat. He pointed to the boat, saying something quick and sharp in Mandarin.
‘My sons,’ Hugo said. ‘Chun and Tao.’
‘Surely not. They’re too old.’
‘I adopted them. I’m their father. It’s not that difficult.’
‘Neither of them wanted to go back to China?’
‘Well.’ He hesitated, because this was something he had wondered about himself, but his sons had never told him, and he hadn’t liked to ask. ‘I think they’re people of China, but there’s no way back for them really. I wish they’d come here earlier because it hasn’t been easy for them at school. The younger one could have gone to university, but it’s too late now. His mother was disappointed, but I’m sure he’ll be persuaded to leave here. He doesn’t say much. And then we have one of our own, a late surprise, although I’m afraid Joe’s life will be difficult. A problem at birth. Ming feels it’s her fault, but it was a medical problem.’
‘You’ve got your hands full with the spirit of China.’
‘It’s no joke,’ he said sharply. ‘I wish I could have gone there myself. I believe I would have fitted in.’
‘Really?’
He gestured helplessly, unable to convey to her what his family meant to him.
‘I do see,’ she said, as she followed him into the vegetable patch. ‘You might think I wouldn’t, but I understand the way it draws you in, once you’ve started down that path towards Asia. It is so compelling.’
Thinking about the boy she had brought with her, he decided she would know, but like his sons and their secrets, she would be keeping that to herself. They stood among the cauliflower rows, Violet looking out over the water rather than at the garden. There wasn’t much for him to show her. He thought of her inside her clothes, as he had imagined her that summer when Magda was dying. Her presence in the bathroom, the perfume of her body when he lay down in the bath where she had been, the sight of her clothes hung out to dry on his clothesline, the glimpse of her breast as she leaned over the sickbed. She was not a child then, even if she was used to being treated like one. Remembering that summer gave him a ghostly glow, a shiver of recognition, the distance between what was right and what was not. She had been there and he had wanted her, even on the nights when they turned Magda’s rotting body together and comforted her as best they could. He thought the girl felt it too, the way their eyes met over the bed, or her hand brushed his. Magda had been a birdlike woman whose eyes were piercing in their directness, even more so in that last appalling illness. It’s all right, she had said to him one night when they were alone, take care of yourself. Violet will take care of herself, don’t grieve when she goes.
‘You played Schubert in the afternoons,’ he said. ‘And sometimes, Delius. I thought you might have carried on with your music.’
‘Well, I tried. I had a stint at the conservatorium in Versailles but I soon found I wasn’t good enough. All very romantic, those cobble-stoned alleyways and the cathedrals, and music pouring through every window, even the children playing in the streets making polished music. I mean, look where I’d come from. The nuns were very encouraging when I was a child, but it was different over there. I was just a girl from down under.’
‘Perhaps you didn’t practise enough.’
‘Oh, practice.’ She sounded weary. ‘I got sidetracked. There was so much jazz in the cafés at the time. And blues. I liked that stuff. Do you still play at all?’
‘Well, as you know, my hearing’s gone. It’s got worse.’ On what would I play, he might have added.
‘I remember what you told me once when I asked how you knew the piano was tuned.’ She spoke in a normal voice, as if refusing to acknowledge what he’d just said. ‘You said, tuning is constant motion. It’s knowing when to stop, you told me. I can see you lifting each hammer and putting it down on the next pin and settling it. And all the time you were striking the piano key with your other hand, pushing and pulling, pulling and striking. Then you’d stop and you’d know. And I said, how? Do you remember what you said?’
‘Well, it was just the moment to stop,’ he said, embarrassed.
‘You said that you stopped when you heard perfection, not a sound at all. You said it was like silence would be, if we could hear it. Only of course we can’t.’
‘What do you hear now?’ he asked quietly.
‘Chaos. A piano in need of tuning.’
‘I can’t help. This isn’t the way.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said, her eyes filling. She wiped her face with her sleeve, as if hoping he wouldn’t see. ‘If it doesn’t work out, I’ll find some work, do something.’
‘Have you worked before?’
‘Have I worked? Good God, yes, of course, what do you take me for? All over the place, all sorts of jobs. Lady’s companion, nanny, I worked in a flower shop for a while, I’ve even washed dishes in Soho.’
‘You?’
‘And in Paris, of course, when I was in school. The men are beautiful there, but they give you a terrible time when you work for them. Don’t look so shocked. I enjoyed it. One learns a thing or two in places like that. Then I got married.’
‘Oh yes. Your husband?’
‘Pleasant. What do you want to know? Is he rich? Above average, but not fantastically so. It’s not noblesse oblige, nothing like that. His parents farm. Country people. He has a brother and an uncle who work on the farm, more than enough men to do the work. My husband was a soldier before this war started, it was a career. My father would have approved. We met when he was on a weekend leave in Paris. We had marvellous times on his leaves. Our daughter was born six months after we got married. The wedding was in London — not his village as you’ll understand, in the circumstances — but our daughter was christened there wearing a lace gown that my husband’s great-great-grandmother had worn. It was yellow with age and I thought Caroline might get asthma from the dust in it, because it was so brittle, of course it couldn’t be washed. It was a relief when the war came. She’s staying with her grandparents now. It’s not that bad, she could have been sent to strangers. Enough? You need some shelter belts round here, don’t you, something to keep off the wind and frosts. I seem to remember the winters are very cold round here.’
He nodded. ‘We’re putting in a row of oaks.’
‘Oaks. You’re still English at heart, aren’t you?’ Violet said. ‘Some people never get over it. I’d have thought closer ground cover would have been better. You should grow tomatoes by the way.’
‘Too much trouble.’
‘People will want more of them, believe me,’ Violet observed. ‘The Europeans depend on them. The next best thing to an onion.’
He smiled at this. ‘Well, I have onions, as you’ll see. People have never had much of a taste for tomatoes in this country. Except cowering among lettuce leaves, plastered in mayonnaise.’
‘Tell me, do they still make it with condensed milk here? My father tried canning tomatoes. It’s true, they were disgusting.’
Both her parents had died since she last saw him. This was something he already knew. His friendship with her father had collapsed after Violet’s defection to him, and then her disappearance, for which, it seemed Hugo was to blame. I should send the police after you, her father had written, this is a clear case of abduction. Don’t think you’ll get a penny out of me. You Englishmen are all the same. Not that Hugo thought her father was sane. He had seen the way he walked through the house where Violet grew up, holding his war-damaged head in both hands and shouting curses. As for Violet, there had been a letter or two, and then silence for years. Until this.
‘The food’s quite different in Europe,’ she was saying.
He sighed, bringing himself back to the present. ‘It must be quarter of a century since I was in Europe. Several lifetimes ago.’
‘Things’ll change here. You’ll see, Hugo, after the war, people will start wanting different things. You should be prepared.’ She took a tin of cigarettes out of her shoulder bag and offered him one. They lit up, his lungs filling with strong Egyptian tobacco smoke. In repose, her face looked naked with grief, lit by the flare of the match he used to light their cigarettes. The dark was settling around them, and he thought that he was making the whole thing worse by the moment, standing outside here with the woman, smoking and talking and gazing at the lake.
‘Hugo, I think I’m going to die,’ she said, leaning against him so that he had no option but to put his arm around her. She reminded him of flowers, even her name, of cool earth and violet light at evening. Like now. He dropped his arm, removing himself from her.
‘Was there nobody else who could look after Wing Lee?’ he asked sharply, hoping to move things along, to come to some resolution. Because he couldn’t promise her that the boy would be able to stay. He found himself thinking about the money on the table and tried to push these thoughts away. I’m human, he told himself and, in the next instant, that the amount she had left there would keep all of them, never mind the boy, for a year or so. He wondered how she had come by so much.
‘Your wife was making dinner,’ she said, straightening up. ‘D’you think it’ll be ready?’ Nearly two hours had passed since her arrival.
Hugo nodded as they turned away from the garden. ‘Just get it straight in your head,’ he said, ‘that if she lets him stay, he’ll become her child. Ming’s suffered a great deal, and I won’t let you play fast and loose with her. I want you to understand what it is you’re doing.’ Their backs were to the chilly lake; the house looked more inviting, crouched in the dark, a light burning inside. Violet walked steadily towards it, without answering, but by the way she had drawn into herself, he knew he had been heard.
In the kitchen, the ducks were cooked, their steam rising from a huge serving platter Ming had placed on the table, along with bowls of rice. She held her fingers to her lips as they came in. Both little boys were now asleep, head to head in front of the fire. It was impossible to tell what Ming was thinking. There was no sign of the money Violet had left on the table.
All the family, except the two sleeping children, seated themselves on planks running down each side of the table, supported by saw-horses. The guest, now she was used to her surroundings, seemed unfazed by their appearance.
‘All these boys,’ she said, without looking at the children by the fire.
Ming motioned for the family to stand back and wait while she served the woman a portion of the duck. Violet tried the food at once, because not to have eaten would have given offence. At once, her face lit up.
‘It’s very good,’ Violet said. ‘You’re a terrific cook, Ming.’
Ming nodded, knowing perfectly well that the food was irresistible, the duck so crisp on the outside, the flesh beneath meltingly tender and full of subtle flavour.
‘Perhaps you could tell me how you did it. A recipe, if you have one.’
‘She just makes it up as she goes along,’ Hugo said, thinking that Violet would know this, but wanting to humour both women.
All the same, Violet persuaded her to tell her what the sauce was made of, writing down the ingredients on a page torn from one of Tao’s old exercise notebooks. Once it was written, Hugo thought she might not look at it again; perhaps it would float away on the lake even as she was leaving. But she’d remember what she’d been told, in the way she could once remember a musical score, as some people remember whole poems, or mathematical equations.
Ming said something in rapid Mandarin to her eldest son, Chun, who also went by the name of Harry, and they both laughed.
‘What did she say?’ Hugo asked the son, because Ming was still laughing and wouldn’t tell him.
Chun hesitated, glancing at his mother. She nodded, allowing him to speak, her eyes suddenly cruel.
‘She says, in China, the duck would be especially tasty because they would have made him dance on a red-hot stove before he died to get his blood racing.’
‘I have to go,’ Violet said, agitated again. She pushed herself violently away from the table, causing everyone seated on the same plank to be pitched backwards. Outside, through the uncurtained window, a crescent moon was rising, a curved slice of light.
