Songs from the Violet Cafe Read Online Free Page B

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 bestthey 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 bird-like 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, practise.’ 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