The Housemaid's Daughter (25 page)

It was another hot day when I returned. Swimming youngsters competed with the washerwomen for space down at the Groot Vis and threw stones at yellow-eyed dogs nosing in the shallows. Lindiwe had delayed her departure to see me off and she wiped Dawn’s sweaty face with a wet cloth before we left and promised that her hut – or one of the huts she planned to build as a landlord – would always be there for us if we needed to return. God was truly kind when He gave me Lindiwe as a friend. Her strength has become my strength. Even so, tremors shook my body as we said goodbye.

‘It is the right thing to do,’ I said, looking into Dawn’s trusting face set with the eyes of Master who would surely not want me back. I should have listened to Master Phil’s voice in my ear, I should have—

‘It will benefit Dawn.’ Lindiwe heaved a load of washing on to her back.

‘Ndwe!’ Dawn heard her name and held out her arms. Lindiwe leant down and nuzzled her nose against Dawn’s in a familiar game.

‘This is your chance.’ She straightened up with difficulty beneath the load and squeezed my arm hard. ‘There are many who long for such good fortune.’

I never thought to make the journey back again. Only the emergency of Dawn’s illness had forced me into town. Yet here I was, my pale child in my arms, the ‘Township Bach’ fading at my back, returning to what was once my home and might be yet again. Women with similar bundles and babies on their backs pushed past, wondering what luck – or cruelty – had fallen upon me to make me go this way. And then God the Father came upon me as I walked, and the newness I’d felt on my first day of teaching began to fill me and overflow into the heat of the day. It sparkled off the brown water, it rose in the song of the washerwomen. I clutched Dawn tighter with fierce hope. This must be the plan: a new future.

Madam was sitting on the
stoep
of Cradock House in one of her cream day dresses, waiting for me. Nothing had changed. Jasmine twisted through the pergola above her head in thick ropes, wafting its perfume through windows left open to catch any breeze that might come by. The old house with its pale stone walls and its red tin roof watched me as I came up the path with Dawn on my hip – she was too heavy for the blanket – and my cardboard suitcase in my other hand. I wondered if the place remembered me, as I hoped in the dark township nights that it would. Whether the apricot still carried me in its sap, whether the stairs and the doorknobs remembered my polishing of them, whether the piano held special music in store for me to play. Whether the souls of Mama and young Master Phil were smiling on me as I walked up the path through the heat towards Madam. Whether I was the only part of it that was changed. Or – I trembled again – whether I was making the biggest mistake of my life since I took off my nightgown and lay down with Master. After all, I had work in the township, I had shelter with Lindiwe, I had found rhythm in the noise.

‘Big!’ crowed Dawn from my hip. ‘Big trees, Mama!’ I put down my suitcase.

‘Ada!’ Madam rose and came down the steps. ‘How wonderful!’

She embraced me and I smelt her flowery perfume that I’d been close enough to smell for the first time on the day Mama died. She turned to Dawn with a sharp intake of breath, as if taken aback once more by the sight of the child’s family likeness. ‘Will she come to me?’

It was strange, that first time of seeing Madam with Master’s daughter in her arms. I could sense the love in her for my child, but also an immense sadness beneath, like the crying that lay beneath laughter when soldiers left for war. Dawn stared at her with Master’s eyes and then reached for Master Phil’s brooch that Madam wore at her throat.

‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘Toy for Dawn?’ I’d only ever spoken to Dawn in English, like Mama did with me unless she was angry. Good English, I had reckoned, would be Dawn’s passport out of the township.

‘Careful,’ murmured Madam, swaying gently and capturing Dawn’s tiny fist in her own hand. ‘Don’t prick yourself. We’ll soon find you some toys to play with, won’t we?’

We did not move back into our bedroom in the main house on account of the laws that said whites and blacks should not mix in that way. Instead, I carried Dawn past the apricot heavy with orange fruit, past the kaffirboom guarding the washing line, past the boundary hedge where unseen beetles rasped, and set her down in the
kaia
at the bottom of the garden beneath the bony thorn tree.

The
kaia
was newly painted and Madam had moved Mama’s old bed and rug in there, along with a cot for Dawn like I had seen for sale in newspapers for large amounts of money. Although there was no hot water – we used the downstairs bathroom in the main house for bathing – there was a basin with a cold tap. There was also a proper toilet with a chain that pulled and made Dawn’s eyes widen with excitement, and the floor was smooth concrete polished to a red shine. Madam had worked hard. She had even put up curtains for us. Dawn ran to finger them, and patted their folds and hid behind them. Dawn had never seen curtains before.

The
kaia
was bigger than Lindiwe’s hut in the township. It was just for Dawn and me. It was riches such as I had never expected to see again.

‘Thank you, Madam,’ I said, sitting on the soft bed, letting the old harmony steal over me. I’d forgotten what it was like to have such a refuge, and such kindness given so freely. No harsh din in my ears, no smoke in my throat, no press of strangers staring at Dawn’s skin, no fear of robbery and the need for sharpened bicycle spokes.

‘Don’t,’ said Madam with a catch in her voice. ‘You and Dawn deserve it. Now,’ she went on more briskly, ‘I think it’s time to dispense with “Madam”. I’m sure you can find another way to address me.’

Master Phil had once told me not to call him Master, but I never managed to call him Phil except to myself. Dina said that one day we would call all whites by their names – after a war of Liberation had swept the country. But now, it seemed, a small liberation had taken place within Cradock House.

I would find a new way to address Madam. Something that fell between Madam and Cathleen, something that showed respect but also admitted the moment in the school hall when she and I met as women for the first time. Perhaps I could call her Mrs Cath.

‘You’re free to come and go as you like, to accommodate your teaching.’

But what of Master? I wanted to say. For all Lindiwe’s persuasion that Master and Madam have come to an arrangement, how can I be sure? Will my township strength hold fast if he tries to touch me?

First, though, before anything else, there was the piano. With Madam holding Dawn, I ran into the lounge and opened the Zimmerman and brushed my hands across the keys and felt their resilience after the sponginess of the school piano. Then sat for a moment, and waited for the piano to remember me, and for the music to find me once more.

‘Come, Ada, some Chopin!’ said Madam gaily. ‘The
Raindrop
prelude?’

So I began, and I could tell Madam approved, for the single notes fell into Cradock House as sweetly as they ever had. Yet for me, the school version played in the quest for a job outdid my playing here for it spoke with a passion I could never match. And I realised that music – and maybe life – depends less on the quality of the instrument or the player than it does on the commitment with which it is played.

Mozart’s lively Turkish rondo, then a Beethoven sonata, then a Debussy arabesque …

Dawn responded to the music the only way she knew, clapping and wiggling her tiny body like she’d seen my students do back at school. I was briefly worried that Madam might be offended but she pressed her hands to her cheeks and stifled her laughter at the little one’s cavorting, and then bore Dawn off to the kitchen for some milk and rusks. And still the music rose and fell under my joyful fingers, and I played until the sun began to dip behind the hedge where the beetles were now silent.

* * *

Madam did not expect me to step back into the kitchen as I would once have done. Indeed, she had prepared a meal for us that evening and said we would share cooking duties in the days ahead. And that I had no need to wear aprons or overalls unless I wished. So when Master arrived, I was not cooking but walking in the garden with Dawn, listening out for the bokmakieries that she’d only ever known from stories in the gloom of Lindiwe’s hut.

‘Where are they, Mama?’ Dawn’s hand in mine stiffened with excitement.

‘You have to be quiet and listen.’ I bent down to her. ‘Some things can’t be seen, they must be listened for, and maybe they’re in their nest already.’ And then, as if the birds themselves understood, the calling and answering rose from opposite ends of the garden.

‘We stay here all the time, Mama?’

He came with Madam down the kitchen steps and past the apricot tree, his back rigid and straight as it had ever been. I stood waiting, holding Dawn’s hand in mine, restraining her from dashing off in search of the birds that had now fallen silent, but in reality clutching her in case he was coming to snatch her away.

It was Madam who stepped in with the right words, Madam who found the courage to make the introduction, Madam who had always softened him.

‘This is your daughter, Dawn,’ she said quietly. Her face was pale, perhaps she’d used more of the powder that sat on her dressing table than usual.

Master’s stern gaze swept past me and fastened on Dawn. He did not move. I stared at him, searching for the shame that had followed me but only recently found its way to him as well. To my horror – for I am not a vengeful person – I found rage churning within me like the Groot Vis in flood, because maybe he felt no shame, maybe he cared little for how he’d hurt Madam and used me to avert his loneliness for her.

But then I saw it.

I saw how he had withered within his uprightness, how his body was lost inside the dark suit with its chain across the front. How his side-parted hair had turned completely white, and his blue eyes were washed out, like Madam’s eyes used to look during young Master Phil’s illness or Miss Rose’s troubles in Johannesburg. Shame had destroyed his body like it had almost destroyed my mind. This faded man, I realised, was a shell. He had no claim on me any more; I would have no trouble in refusing this man. I loosened my grip on Dawn’s hand.

‘Mama?’ She looked up at me, uncertain as to why we were standing in the garden like this, standing and staring at one another with no words between us.

‘I have agreed to support Dawn, Ada,’ Master said distantly. Even his voice was thinner. ‘Provided she is not told of it. And there must be no talk about this among your friends.’

I glanced at Madam but she remained silent. The bokmakieries started up again, one on the roof, one in the hedge.

‘Mama!’ Dawn cried, pointing, and turning her head back and forth to follow their calling. She wasn’t used to songbirds. She’d only ever heard hadedas in the township at evening, or seen crows squabbling over rubbish in the streets.

‘I shall say nothing, sir. But I cannot hide Dawn.’

There was a pause. Then he said, ‘She could attend the mission school.’

‘But, Edward,’ Madam interrupted, putting out her hand to him, her eyes darkening with anxiety, ‘you never said—’

‘That is the school you thought of for me,’ I found myself breaking in, the anger rising once more, ‘but Mama wouldn’t let me go so far away.’ I looked at Master squarely but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, he wouldn’t see the mother of his child. ‘I won’t let Dawn go that far away either. She can go to the township school with me.’

‘Up, up!’ Dawn lifted her arms and I bent to pick her up. Master looked at me properly, then, as if noticing someone who up till that point had been invisible. It was the first time I had talked back to him; the first time I had spoken with my own voice and not as a servant.

‘Of course she can,’ resumed Madam swiftly, glancing at Master with a passing coldness that I’d never seen in her before. Perhaps Madam is stronger, too, than she was before. ‘That would be for the best.’

‘As you wish.’ He inclined his head and turned away.

I felt the clutch of Dawn’s arms as she wrapped them round my neck. ‘
Thula thu’,
she began to sing, as if to join the birds in their chorus, ‘
thula thu’
…’

‘Sir?’ I managed, but he was already walking away.

Will you not greet your daughter, sir? Even if she may never know you’re her father, will you not greet her? Will you not see she is a fine child? That I have cared for her well?

Madam touched me briefly on the shoulder, and followed him inside.

I suppose I was foolish. I should have expected he would distance himself from Dawn as much as possible. After all, there was the law to consider; it made sense not to reveal himself to her as her father. Yet something else struck me in Master. Something behind his shuttered face, something beyond his unwillingness to greet his child, something besides the withering that had so reduced his body. It took me a while to understand what it was. It worried me through dinner – which a chattering Dawn and I ate in the kitchen while Madam and Master dined in uneasy silence next door – it worried me through the washing-up, it worried me through the pegging out of the cloths on the line in the familiar soft purple of evening.

It came to me later as I lay in the
kaia
and listened to the tap of the thorn tree on the tin roof and watched Dawn finally asleep in her smart cot and waited for the hoot of the owl in the kaffirboom, and wondered if I had made the right decision to return. It was a thing that I had grown used to in the township but never seen in Cradock House before.

It was disgust. Master looked at Dawn with disgust: that worse version of dismay that he had shown towards the bond between his son and myself. Disgust like Auntie showed, like Silas showed, like those in the street who turned away from the evidence of my sin. Madam did not see it. She did not recognise it on Master’s face. And I am grateful, for it would have hurt her even more than she was hurt already.

How was it that a man could look upon his own child – his own blood – in the way that a stranger would? How was it possible that there could be no stirring in his heart for his own daughter? Then I remembered what Lindiwe had said to me on the day Dawn was born. She said that God was not like the white man. He did not hate Dawn for my sin. So I should have expected that Master might do so. I should have expected him to turn away from his daughter. I should have expected his disgust.