Free Songs from the Violet Cafe by Fiona Kidman Page A

anyone in town. Violet Trench was the nearest Ruth had ever come to meeting her match, and when it came to Hester she had a way of winning that Ruth could never fully comprehend. Hester was twenty-eight and her only child. They had gone through so much together. There was Hester’s birth when Ruth was forty-six years old and the thought of a child was so unlikely in brief late marriage that the idea simply never occurred to her until one day her clothes wouldn’t fit and then a few days later she was bleeding almost to death in hospital and Hester was breathing her first heart-wrenching gasps, her face as blue as anemones, and there Ruth was, a mother. As if that were not enough, widowhood and poverty followed in short order, and then, when it seemed she had nowhere to turn, in one of those sudden reversals of fortune that seemed to follow Ruth, an inheritance came from abroad.
    Ruth considered her young life as dense, packed, virginal. I’ve had an interesting life, she was wont to say. She would describe it as genteel and a little impoverished with some treats thrown in (her father was a professional soldier; he moved his family often). When she immigrated to New Zealand with Monty, a retired civil servant who had wanted to see the world before he died, as he put it, and had fallen in love with Auckland on a blue summer’s day and wouldn’t leave, she decided that she would take things as they came. But then there was Hester and everything changed so quickly. She moved south and bought her shop from the money that had fallen like a merciful rain from afar. Hester grew up surrounded by the smell of new ink on the page, counting stationery packs after school. A girl of quality, her mother believed. She expected her to go far. Hester would win scholarships and go to university, she too would stay clear-skinned and virginal. Instead, Hester grew more quiet and shy as one year followed another. When she was fifteen her frothy brown hair became mysteriously streaked with grey, as if she was already old.
    Cooking and sewing were all that interested her. Rather than study classics she propped recipe books above the sink and cooked. Le Guide Culinaire by that Frenchman, Escoffier, was thumbed and stained beyond recognition. It made Ruth shudder to see the disgusting thing, but when she arrived home from the shop, dinner was always waiting. ‘You shouldn’t have done this, dear,’ Ruth said each evening, but the fact was her own dinners were always late, the potatoes not properly cooked. It was a comfort to sit down to Hester’s inventions. The aromatic scent of spices and herbs that Hester wrote away for reminded Ruth of school trips across the Channel, the week in Provence, the little cafés in the south of France. While other girls were still chasing hockey balls, Hester took up ballroom dancing and met a boy called Owen. They had been engaged for five years. An impossible match, her mother declared. A farm labourer who came from common stock. Don’t go ahead with this, Ruth warned her daughter. I’ll cut you off without a penny. By this time, Hester worked in the shop because Ruth could see that the girl had no ambition at all. Hester sewed ballroom dresses by the dozen. They accumulated like giant glittering puffballs in her bedroom. When there were too many she sold off the last year’s lot and made a small profit. This was her dowry, she said, so her mother needn’t bother herself about the money, she and Owen would manage. You’ll get over it, Ruth cautioned, you mark my words.
    â€˜Would Violet mind if you stayed home and ran up a few sandwiches?’ she asked her daughter the night of the book rep’s visit. Because Hester no longer worked for her mother. Ruth still didn’t know how she had met Violet Trench. It seemed as if some act of seduction had taken place. One day Hester was pricing paperbacks and the next day she was working as a cook at the Violet