He turned away from Miss Rose, now admiring herself in the hall mirror I’d cleaned that morning, and looked down at me. There was still fierceness, but also something else, something strange that I hadn’t seen before in Master’s face. It was, I realised suddenly, the look of my young Master in the garden before the war, when he’d wondered if he would be brave enough to fight. Yet what nervousness could Master possibly feel on the return of his beloved son?
‘Soon, Ada,’ he said quietly and touched my shoulder. Master had never touched me before. Perhaps he was distracted by Miss Rose. ‘Soon.’
* * *
Master Phil arrived the next day. They carried him up to his room on the top floor. All I saw of him was his face above a blanket and the face was different from the face he’d taken to the war with him. Madam told me that Master Phil was very tired and needed to sleep a lot. I could understand that. After all, Mr Churchill had required very great actions and bravery from all of his soldiers. There had been a church service at St Peter’s for the families of Cradock boys who never came back. Madam and Master went along and said prayers to God to thank Him for sparing Master Phil and bringing him home. The other boys had mostly died and been buried in the desert ‘up north’ or in another country called Italy, where Mendelssohn went to find a new symphony in a land that was said to be almost as hot as our Karoo.
‘But why,’ I asked my mother in our room after a week had gone by and Master Phil still slept, ‘why are some of the other living soldiers walking around town? Didn’t they fight as hard as Master Phil?’
My mother looked up from her crocheting. She crocheted tea cosies and bed socks for the church. They always were short of tea cosies and bed socks.
‘Master Phil is wounded, Ada,’ she said and laid the work aside.
‘Then why can’t I help you nurse him, Mama?’
My mother Miriam smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile. ‘Some of Master Phil’s wounds are inside, Ada.’
‘Under the bandages?’
‘Further inside than that. These are wounds that don’t have blood.’
I stared at her. She picked up her crocheting. The owl hooted outside in the kaffirboom. I wondered if Master Phil could still hear owls, or if the inside wounds had taken sound away from him as well.
* * *
Miss Rosemary left for Johannesburg soon after Master Phil returned. I don’t know why she went, although she seemed very happy to be going. She said that the future would be better in Jo’burg. I remember reading about the future in Madam’s book at about the time she was to leave Ireland for Cradock. It was clearly something that rich people needed in their lives. I wished I could find people who had already found the future, and then I could ask them what was so special about it.
‘Wish me luck!’ Miss Rose called from the window of the car taking her to the station. There were more cars and fewer horse carts these days since the war. Miss Rose looked very happy, waving her lace handkerchief from the car. She was wearing the new blue dress from Anstey’s and red lipstick from Austen’s the chemist. She hadn’t wanted Madam and Master to go to the station to see her off – ‘Too much fuss,’ she laughed gaily. Perhaps she wanted to spare Madam and Master the reminder of her brother leaving for war? But I don’t think so. Miss Rose was not that thoughtful. I think she just wanted to be away with as little delay as possible.
Master stared down at his shoes that I’d polished that morning, then up at Miss Rose in the car and lifted a hand to shade his eyes from the sun. The breeze fluttered Madam’s cream skirt against her legs. Upstairs in his room, Master Phil slept.
‘Take care, darling! Write every week!’ Madam blew kisses and felt for the brooch at her throat.
* * *
‘Cathleen Moore for Union Castle Steamship Walmer Castle, Southampton’ – it says on the label on my trunk. Train from here, boat to England, train again to Southampton and then the Walmer Castle. I’ve never been further than Bannock village.
‘Well, Ada,’ Madam said, blowing her nose as we closed the garden gate behind us and went back up the path to the house, ‘you’re the daughter of the house now.’
‘Then let me help you with Master Phil,’ I said, watching the Master’s straight back climb the step up to the stoep and go inside, ‘like a daughter should.’ Madam stopped on the path. She bent down and nipped the dead head off a rose. Afterwards, when I told Mama what I’d said, she was angry with me. But she knew and I knew – and Madam herself knew – that Miss Rose had never been helpful, never been the sort of daughter Madam needed.
‘Perhaps you can, Ada,’ Madam said, straightening up. Her eyes looked sore, like when you’ve been standing with your face into the wind and there’s snow on the mountains. I had still not seen that snow – it lived high up, about two hours away across the Karoo. It sent hard white frosts that fell in the night, and crunched under my bare feet at sunrise when I fetched the milk.
And so I began to take care of Master Phil.
* * *
‘Remember that night I got sick, Ada?’ Master Phil turned his thin face towards me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’d eaten too many apricots from the garden.’
He smiled a little and shifted in the bed. His arms weren’t brown and strong like I remembered, and long bones pressed against the skin like the washing line under a wet sheet. When he walked to the bathroom, his steps were the steps of an old man. When he bent to get back into bed, the knobs of his spine showed through his pyjama top.
‘Do you want to sit up, Master Phil? Shall I open the curtains? It’s a lovely day, you could watch the clouds.’
‘No, no.’ He subsided on the pillow. ‘The light hurts my eyes.’
‘That old apricot still makes fruit,’ I said, after a while. ‘Did you see apricot trees in the war?’
Master Phil stared at me, his eyes pale as the lightest sky, like that time in the garden when he said he might be afraid. Then he began to cry, his shoulders hunching under the flannel pyjamas that Mama and I had to wash every day on account of his sweating in the night.
‘Sorry, sir,’ I said, trying not to cry myself. ‘Sorry for disturbing you.’
He didn’t turn away when he cried, like he used to do as a boy when he’d fallen and hurt himself. Now he just lay there in bed facing me, the tears going down his cheeks, his shoulders shaking. He didn’t make much noise either. Maybe soldiers learn to cry quietly in a war.
I didn’t know what to do so I took his hand. He placed his other hand on top of it.
‘Play for me, Ada,’ he muttered. ‘Play something gay.’
And so I did. I left the door open and went downstairs and played something cheerful and gay to cover his crying. Maybe a waltz, like Madam used to play when there was a dinner party before the war. Or a polonaise with its lively march up and down the keyboard. And Madam would come in and say thank you with her eyes. And Master would open the door to the study and listen as well.
I learnt about ‘Up North’. This was where Mr Churchill had sent Master Phil in the war. I wanted to learn about it, I wanted to understand what sort of place could have wounded Master Phil so deeply. Perhaps then I would understand about war.
But I also wanted to know about it because it was a new place for me. Was this wrong? Was it wrong to have such thirst for new places even though they had caused such pain?
All I knew was Cradock. All I could see from Master Phil’s toy box was the Karoo. What, I would ask myself as I peered over the veld, what lay beyond the brown koppies and the distant mountains with their imagined snow? Books and music could only take you so far. Words, drawn from real life, took you further. Madam’s words had taken me to Ireland and a blue stream that tumbled over cliffs to the sound of Grieg …
At first I asked him nothing. I cared for him quietly, and cut his once-bright hair, and shaved his thin face when he was too weary to do so, and held his hand while he fell asleep, and waited in the chair across from him so he wouldn’t be alone when he w
oke.
Then he began to talk about it. And so I discovered the desert from Master Phil, a desert that made our Karoo with its struggling bush seem rich by comparison. The Sahara he spoke of was a place where life had given up trying. Not even a bony thorn tree found the will to grow. Brown sand dunes, bare of plants or animals, smothered the land and rose higher than our koppies. Yet what the dunes lacked in inhabitants they made up for in movement of their own. They moved, Master Phil told me, his face for once keen. Whole dunes moved!
‘But how?’ I gasped, peering at him through the gloom of the dark bedroom, dark on account of the sun hurting his eyes.
‘Why, it’s the wind, Ada,’ he said patiently, like his patience had once explained words with strange meanings, or numbers I’d not yet understood. ‘Wind shears the top of them, you see, or shifts them sideways. Into a new place, a new shape.’
He grimaced a little, and I wondered whether the inside wounds became sore if he spoke too much. It would be a pity if the first time he’d shown some spirit was to be the cause of more pain. After the tears over the apricot trees, I’d been careful not to ask too many questions. I waited for him to tell me things while we sat together in the fading afternoons, or over the midmorning cup of tea I brought him during my daily chores. Sometimes he talked, like today, sometimes he stayed quiet for days at a time. In this respect, Master Phil was very changed for me. Gone was the laughter, the keenness, the energy he’d had as a young man, even the fear he’d been able to confess before he went away. What was left was as empty and as dry as the place he described.
‘There’s a strange beauty,’ he once said of the desert, when I risked a further question. ‘But it’s cruel, Ada.’ He stared down at his fingers in surprise as they fidgeted on the bedspread, almost as if their movement was happening outside his control, like the sands of the desert had no control over where the wind sent them.
‘What’s beautiful about it?’
Were the dunes purple at sunset, was the sky coloured more vividly than I saw above Cradock House each evening? Or did the beauty come from the hardness of the place, from the power of the wind to lash sand into new shapes?
‘There’s no shade,’ I heard Master Phil say, drawn back to the cruelty. ‘Flies on your face, in your hair, sand stinging your eyes, scratching your throat till it bled.’ He lifted one of the restless hands and put it against his neck as if the dryness still held him in its grasp. ‘Half a cup of water to shave in, no way to get clean. Heat dried you to a crisp, cold froze you as soon as the sun went down.’
‘Where did the water come from, sir, that you were given?’ For there could have been no rain in such a place, no Groot Vis winding between sand mountains to bring relief.
‘They carried it in trucks,’ he said, smiling for once all the way to his light blue eyes. ‘From miles away, where there was a river, or an oasis.’
‘An oasis?’
‘A spring in the middle of the desert,’ he lifted himself up a little against his pillows, ‘a place where water from deep down bubbles to the surface.’
‘Did you see such a place?’
‘Yes,’ he said, before putting his head back and lifting a thin arm across his face. His hair was no longer wavy, and lay pale and flat against his head. He spoke again with his eyes covered.
‘When I was injured. It had palm trees, and there was shade.’
‘Like our palms? In the Karoo Gardens in Market Square?’ I broke in, excited at the possibility that I knew of something that was also found far away, that I’d sat in the shade of trees that grew at the other end of the world, that I could touch something that was part of war.
‘Yes.’ He took his arm away from his face. ‘Just like them.’
I stared at him. I had read music that came from across the world, I had felt it quicken beneath my fingers. And down in Market Square there was shade that I had shared with Master Phil without knowing.
‘But it’s the sand you remember the most.’ He brushed his fingers, as if they would never be free of it. ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ he murmured, ‘how in a desert it’s the sand that flows…’
The house was quiet. Madam was teaching at school, Mama was resting downstairs, Master was at the town hall. I had already peeled the vegetables, and made the pastry to go on top of the steak and kidney pie. The ironing was done. I waited for a moment.
‘How were you injured, sir?’
He glanced at me, the light blue eyes suddenly focused, as they were when I shaved him and felt his gaze on my face.
‘I want to understand about war.’
He hesitated, his eyes probing mine. ‘It’s not something to admire, Ada.’
‘I still want to understand.’
From the station came the irregular sound of shunting. Low pitched, a drawn-out semibreve, then a rush of crotchets. It carried me back to the laughing and crying crowds on the platform, the buglers playing, and the quick warmth of Master Phil’s hug. Perhaps he remembered it too, for he gave a sad smile and then nodded. Maybe he knew my plan. Maybe he knew it was less about me than about him. Maybe in remembering out loud, he might learn to forget.
‘We were ambushed,’ he began after a pause. ‘That means to be caught, to be surprised by your enemy.’
‘What happened, sir?’
‘Don’t call me sir.’ He shifted in the bed irritably and looked down at his narrow, veined wrists. I waited in the shadows, pushing down my questions. I knew that men fought each other in war, but surely not like this? Only animals ambushed one another. Lions of the veld lay in wait to attack buck, for buck were their prey. Did war force men to lie in wait for one another, to stalk one another as prey?
‘They had tanks, with mounted machine guns,’ he went on, his voice clipped with remembered detail. ‘We had rifles. They could move about, we were in slit trenches – holes in the ground, Ada, just a foot deep. They pinned us down, we couldn’t dig deeper because the sand became rock.’ He covered his ears with his hands.
I realised, then, that it wasn’t only the sights of war that returned to soldiers, but the sound and feel of war as well. Perhaps the closed curtains that I’d thought were Master Phil’s way of blocking out the world were also necessary to deflect the remembered rip of bullets over his head as he cowered in the shallow hiding place, and to expel the grit under his fingernails as he scratched desperately to deepen the trench …
‘There were shells, too, that whistled before they hit,’ he muttered, hands still over his ears, as the battle pounded against his skull. I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. ‘You could hear them coming – high pitched, like a screaming violin – coming faster than you could get away – they explode, they splash sand – and blood.’
He stopped suddenly, and wrapped his arms round his thin torso and began to clutch at himself, as if wondering again how it was possible that he could still be whole despite the terrible rain of death all about. I put out a hand and touched his shoulder. The bones felt jagged under the cotton of his pyjamas.
‘I still see them, Ada.’ He grabbed hold of my hand and stared wildly at me, his eyes aflame. ‘Ben, Frank, my sergeant…’
‘I will pray for them, sir,’ I said, trying to stop my hand shaking within his frenzied grip. ‘God the Father will make them well, I know He will.’
He stared at me, but I’m not sure he saw me at all.
‘Did this battle have a name, sir?’ I didn’t want him to stop talking. It was too soon. He needed to talk more, he needed to let the poisonous memories escape. I knew battles were given names. I had learnt of Waterloo, and other places in France with difficult names where many men had died in a previous war. But in that war death had come in mud, not sand.
‘Sidi Rezegh,’ he said wearily, his hands falling to rest limply on the covers. ‘It was called Sidi Rezegh.’
I wanted to ask him something else but I never did. I wanted to ask him if his fear of war had gone away during the actual fighting. Or whether it was to blame for w
hat had happened. Whether fear – and not just the enemy – had pinned him down and drawn the bullet to his chest, and left him with a wound that no longer bled but still gave him no peace.
I wanted to ask him, but I never did.
* * *
A season went by. Master Phil stayed in his room. The inside wound and the memory of the cruel Sahara never left him alone. His hands fidgeted. The heat of the desert came on him in the night to make him sweat and cry out. Then, as if to remind him even when he needed no reminding, a drought fell on the Karoo and brought winds that scoured the veld and dried the skin on the tips of his fingers until they cracked, and attacked his throat with familiar grit.
‘Why won’t it leave me?’ he would mutter with quiet despair as I brought wet flannels to lay on his forehead, and my mother Miriam’s cold lemonade to soothe his throat.
The ground between the koppies broke into steep gullies. The water in the town dam went up into the air and left a line where it had been – like a ring on a bath that hasn’t been cleaned. The Groot Vis was reduced to a trickle and Auntie’s washing business struggled. In the town’s gardens, dogs panted in the shade of the bluegums. Our apricot tree dropped hard, wrinkled fruit. Water was rationed, and Mama and I washed from buckets. As I read to Master Phil each day in the close darkness of his bedroom, Church Street rumbled with the sound of farmers driving animals to slaughter because even the Karoo bush dried out. Dust devils blew into Cradock House and stained the curtains where they hung limp behind the fanlights we kept open to catch a breeze. I had to take the curtains down one by one and wash them in the smallest amount of water and then haul them over the line outside to dry while I prayed that the dust would stay away. The furrow in front of the house that used to carry brown river water to the garden no longer ran. The only wetness in the world seemed to be the thin stream of water from the tap in the laundry where, after morning cleaning, I would hold my neck and feel the coolness trickle over my cheeks and into my hair.
The Housemaid's Daughter Page 5
