Songs from the Violet Cafe Read Online Free Page A

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 shelaughed, 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