The Housemaid's Daughter (3 page)

‘Look, Ada – there’s Father!’ he cried, jumping up and down and pointing out the Master on a platform with a lot of other men beneath a sign that said ‘Bank’ and another word that I didn’t recognise. ‘Doesn’t he look important?’ And he did, in his best suit and with the shirt that Mama had starched so carefully the day before.

‘What does a bank do?’ I asked, pulling on young Master Phil’s sleeve to get his attention. Several of the white children nearby giggled.

‘What?’ He was craning forward to get a better look.

‘A bank.’ I cupped my hand towards his ear, so the others wouldn’t hear. ‘What is it for?’

‘It’s where you put your money,’ he said, then shouted, ‘Father, Father!’ waving his arms and jumping up and down again to get the Master’s attention. The nearby children stared, the girls among them covering their mouths against the dust from his jumping boots. Master turned impatiently in our direction, then turned back to a man who was cutting a red ribbon across the front door of the bank with a pair of scissors. I suppose young Master Phil shouldn’t have tried to interrupt the Master, but he never thought too much before he did anything – like eating too many apricots without worrying about the consequences for his stomach. Unlike Miss Rose, who could be silent for ages when she really wanted something, storing it up with sighs and shrugged shoulders until the moment when she knew Madam and Master could never refuse her.

Rosemary has not been an easy child. Perhaps I was spoiled with Phil, whose good cheer was evident even in the crib. In contrast, Rosemary finds fault with the world in general, and her mother in particular.

Such ill temper has been thrown into sharper relief by the demeanour of Ada, who has Miriam’s stoicism but also a lightness about her that is immensely appealing. Perhaps the fault lies with me. In my inability to be the right sort of mother. Yet every effort I have made has been rebuffed. There seems to be no pleasing Rosemary.

Note to self:

Try to find some simple readers for young Ada. I am determined her reading should progress, whatever Edward’s reservations. Perhaps the school library could oblige. I could say they are for a private pupil.

I wasn’t allowed to go into the new bank, but you could see big ceiling fans and brown desks through the windows and signs that I could read saying, ‘Enquiries’ and ‘Manager’, although I didn’t understand what they meant. Mrs Pumile’s cousin was allowed to go into the bank because she polished the floor with red Cobra floor polish every morning. She brought Mrs Pumile sugar that was left over on the tea trolley. People went into the bank to give them money to look after. That’s what young Master Phil meant. But my mother Miriam said her money was safer in a shoebox under the bed, where she could watch it.

There were many days that summer when I was too busy with the necessary sweeping and tidying, and with the washing of the family’s clothes that got dirty trailing in the dust, to spare much time to read. I would stare at Madam’s book on the dressing table in longing while I ran the
lappie
in slow circles around it and then Mama would call and tell me there was washing to take off the line.

A whole winter of cold winds passed too; winds that blew in from the mountains I couldn’t quite make out from the top of Master Phil’s toy box. Sometimes I thought I saw in the distance a light dusting of white, like icing on top of fairy cakes, but I could never be sure that it wasn’t just me wanting to see such a sight. I have always wanted to see further than my eyes can manage.

‘The roof would be better for sightseeing!’ laughed Master Phil coming upon me one day as I craned out of the window when I should have been dusting.

‘Sorry, sir.’ I scrambled down and grabbed my
lappie.
‘Just going.’

‘Wait! Wait, Ada!’ He grabbed my arm. ‘What’re you looking for?’

‘The mountains,’ I pointed over the brown veld, ‘where there is snow. Have you ever seen snow?’ I could never ask such a question of Miss Rose. And I would never want to trouble Madam.

‘Once.’ He grinned, slinging down his school blazer. I noticed one of the buttons was missing. ‘It was like wet cotton wool. You could roll it into balls and throw it. Snowballs!’ He mimed a bowling action, hair flopping forwards on to his forehead as he swung his arm. Master Phil always answered my questions. He never made fun of me, like Miss Rose did. Then he climbed up on the toy box himself, and showed me how he could brush the ceiling with his fingers as he pretended to bowl once more, and said he often did it to check how tall he was and that one day maybe even his head would reach the ceiling.

That winter, the cold winds from the snow that Master Phil knew about cut through my uniform and numbed my face when I went down Adderley Street to post Madam’s letters to Ireland across the sea. Did those letters hold the same thoughts as the book on Madam’s dressing table? Or did Madam leave some things out of her letters, like she left some things out of her book?

I hurried on my journey, wrapped in Mama’s old funeral coat, too cold to search for new shop signs or to read the words outside the newspaper office. Back at Cradock House, Mama and I made pumpkin soup and roast chicken stuffed with last summer’s dried apricots, and hot sponge puddings that young Master Phil loved. ‘More, please, Miriam,’ he would say after eating a mountainous bowl. ‘Best sponge ever.’

Only after the winter was past did I realise that, in one important way, Madam was the same as me: we both carried sentences inside ourselves that we never spoke out loud. The difference was that she could tell her sentences to the book, or to her letters, whereas I had to keep mine forever inside my head. Because, you see, even although I could read, I wasn’t yet able to write.

Chapter 4

M
iss Rose took piano lessons.

Not at Rocklands School that I couldn’t go to because of trouble later on, or from Madam who was a music teacher herself, but from another lady teacher in narrow glasses who came once a week.

‘Arch the fingers, Rosemary,’ she instructed. ‘Up, up, up!’

I used to dust the piano every day, so I could see what Miss Rose was learning. I could see the book with its pictures of white and black keys, and how they were named like the letters Madam had taught me – only the piano letters didn’t go all the way to the end of the alphabet. I wondered why not.

So I could tell where Miss Rose needed to put her fingers to make a tune.

Sometimes if I was dusting in the room and she made a mistake, I could show her where she should have put her fingers.

‘Smarty-pants!’ Miss Rose stuck her tongue out at me and tossed her long yellow hair back from her face. Miss Rose knew she was very beautiful but still spent hours looking at herself in the mirror in her bedroom to make sure, widening her eyes and turning from one side to the other. Unlike Madam’s soft green eyes, Miss Rose’s were dark blue, like slate on a roof or the Karoo sky just before night. Mrs Pumile had no time for Miss Rose because Miss Rose would never say good morning to her when she passed her on the street. My mother Miriam said that Miss Rose would ‘grow out of it’. Certainly Miss Rose seemed to grow out of her clothes very quickly because she always needed new ones, but how you grew out of rudeness I didn’t know.

One thing was certain: Miss Rose did not love music.

‘I hate the piano!’ she would hiss at the back of the teacher in glasses as she and Madam talked in low voices at the front door after each lesson. ‘Arch, arch – I hate it!’

This pained Madam, who had played the piano since she was a child over the sea. Indeed, one of the first things that Master Edward bought when he moved into Cradock House, and was waiting for Madam to arrive, was a piano.

‘It was made in Leipzig, Ada, in a country called Germany,’ Madam told me the first time it was my job to do the dusting. ‘Look,’ she pointed at gold lettering, ‘here’s the make – Zimmerman. We don’t often find words with a z, do we?’

‘Only “zebra”, Ma’am. How did it come here?’

‘Across the sea by boat, dear, just like I did. How kind of Master Edward to buy it for me.’

I watched Madam as she looked up from the piano and out of the window towards the Groot Vis.

Will I still love Edward?

Will I be able to play for him as passionately as I play for myself ? Will he want me to?

All I knew was Cradock and the Karoo with its dust and rocky
koppies
and its lazy river, so a sea with endless water and places beyond such a sea were a mystery. Even the ragged place where Auntie lived across the river, and the crowded township at the far end of Bree Street where Mama sometimes took me to visit friends, and where the strict St James School lay, were better known to me.

I could not imagine what a boat looked like. Clearly the people who lived in those faraway places were very clever and could make things like pianos and boats that we weren’t able to on our side of the sea.

‘Will you ever go across the sea?’ I asked Master Phil one day as he did his homework upstairs with the door shut, while Miss Rose fought with the piano downstairs.

‘Maybe,’ said Master Phil, considering. ‘You’d like to, wouldn’t you? I know you like new places, that’s why you climb up on my toy box to look out—’

‘But will you?’

‘I guess so,’ said Master Phil, his eyes wandering from the exercise book in front of him to the cricket bat and ball propped near the door for a quick getaway.

He brightened. ‘Tell you what, we’ll go together one day. To Ireland, to see my Aunt Ada that you’re named for!’ He leant back dangerously in his chair.

I giggled. Silly Master Phil. Such things weren’t meant for girls like me.

‘Even so,’ the chair wobbled as he flung an arm wide to take in the bedroom and the vast Karoo beyond the window, ‘what could be better than here?’

* * *

Madam practised every day for an hour first thing in the morning before school. The whole house woke to her music except for the weekends when she and the Master rose late. And she played in the evenings as well, when Master asked her or when there were visitors who asked her. I grew to know what she would play at different times and for different people.

The mornings were full of scales and arpeggios. Scales made smooth sweeping sounds that ran up and down the piano like wind, while arpeggios leapt off the keys like hail on the tin roof. Mrs Pumile used to say she could hear Madam’s scales rush all the way down the garden every morning and into her
kaia
next door.

In the afternoons, when the children had finished their homework and Master Phil was restless, Madam would play marches for him to stamp about to as if he was a real soldier. Or, for Miss Rose, pieces with a swinging beat that made your feet want to tap in time – to encourage her to practise.

But at night, after Miss Rose and Master Phil were in bed, Madam would play quieter tunes, tunes that slid about in your head and came back to you the next day while you were busy with washing or dusting. I used to creep out of Mama’s room – for by then we were living in the main house – and listen in the corridor leading to the lounge. It was dark there and I was afraid the
tokoloshe
would come.

When Madam and Master had guests, Madam wore dark green satin and played bright music like waltzes. Sometimes the guests would sing along. Madam loved the songs from across the sea where her family lived and would sing them on her own or accompany a guest who had a fine voice; songs like
Galway Bay
and
Take me home, Cathleen,
which was the Master’s favourite. Except he liked to hear her play it when there were no guests. Master wanted Madam to himself. He did not want to share her. But Madam was happy to share herself, and her music.

‘
This is the future,
’ I read one day hurriedly during my chores. ‘
Edward, a man whose face and touch I haven’t known for five years, and Cradock, a small town at the foot of Africa. This is where I will make my home, start a family, find new music
…’

And what was this ‘future’? People talked about it and always sounded worried. Was it something you had to pay for? Like Master paid for the piano? Or was it something Madam brought with her from Ireland?

I asked Master Phil one day, and he said it was something that you got when you grew up, so I shouldn’t worry about it just yet. Miss Rose said the future was something I wouldn’t get at all unless I went to school, so there.

While Madam was playing, Master would stand straight by the piano and smile for the guests and pull out his watch from his waistcoat when he thought she’d played enough. When I was young Cradock House was never quiet.

One day, Madam caught me correcting Miss Rose’s piano-playing.

‘Rosemary, dear, that sounds so much better!’ she had called cheerfully, coming into the lounge with floury hands from making scones, then stopped, seeing my fingers on the keys. Miss Rose tossed her yellow hair and paged noisily through her music book.

‘Sorry, Ma’am, I’m just going,’ I said and ran out of the room and into the laundry where Mama was starching Master Edward’s collars. Miss Rose would not be pleased to be shown up in front of Madam.

‘Why do you rush so, child?’ my mother asked me, thinking I had done something wrong.

‘Ada,’ Madam said, hurrying in and finding me behind my mother’s skirt. Maybe Miss Rose had already complained to Madam? She knelt down and looked me in the eye, like she did when she was first making me repeat my letters. ‘Would you like to learn to play?’

Chapter 5

I discovered Ada correcting Rosemary at the piano today. This has happened before. Rosemary was annoyed but I pretended not to notice. I remember the first time I encouraged Ada to sit by my side and watch me play. The child was nervous, but then put out a finger to touch a note and turned to me with such wonder that the breath caught in my throat.

I
 learned to play the piano while something called the War grew.