The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  And what of me?

  My mother Miriam was less strong these days, and needed to turn more of her duties over to me. And with the piano-playing necessary to fill Cradock House, and the trips to town to fetch groceries and post letters, my days were busy from dawn until dark. Such busyness was just as well, for I soon discovered – as Master Phil could have told me – that those who die are never truly gone. Master Phil was beside me everywhere I went. He whispered words in my ear and he watched me with his light eyes as I dusted and polished. Sometimes I even thought I saw him in the garden beneath the red-flowering kaffirboom, standing pale and thin in his soldier’s uniform. ‘Come,’ he seemed to be saying, holding out his hand, ‘let’s take a walk. We’ll go down to the Groot Vis…’

  If I had been idle, there would have been no escape from the tears that came along with his voice in my ear, and his light eyes upon me. But my work came in between and there was no time to cry. Instead, I fought to carry the best of him with me – the young Master who had clattered about Cradock House as a boy, the lean soldier who’d hugged me in front of white crowds at the station. When the world confused me, I repeated to myself what he’d taught me about numbers and the Sahara, about banks and cricket, about the nature of war. And also about things that hadn’t needed explanation, like kindness and honesty, whatever the world thought.

  And I thanked God for the privilege of knowing him, even though my heart ached. For there was something that I didn’t understand, something that troubles me still, something that perhaps only a minister of the church can explain.

  Why did God the Father do what He did?

  Why did He choose to take Master Phil so soon? Why did God take Master Phil when there was such a long world ahead of him?

  Chapter 13

  Miss Rose got into trouble in Johannesburg. Perhaps that was why she never came to her brother’s funeral?

  What sort of trouble I do not know, but trouble it was. My mother said it might have been to do with a young man but there was no baby which is usually what happens when girls get into trouble. It also made me think again of the trouble later on that Master had been afraid of if I went to school. I spent some time wondering if Miss Rose’s trouble and my possible trouble were in any way connected. Perhaps it had something to do with being away from home? Both the mission school where I would have gone, and Johannesburg where Miss Rose was, were far from Cradock House. I began to understand that it might have been the loneliness of being far away that would make Miss Rose – and maybe me – want the comfort of a baby, however shameful that would be without a proper husband.

  Mrs Pumile from next door said that the fact of no baby did not mean that there had never been one. Girls in places like Johannesburg, where there were riches in the ground and all manner of doctors above it, would find a way to get rid of a baby that they didn’t want. Mama would let me listen no further to Mrs Pumile, and shooed me away from the hedge through which Mrs Pumile talked. Auntie from the township across the Groot Vis simply shook her head while she scrubbed clothes on the riverbank and said Miss Rose was a bad girl to bring disrespect to her family, especially since Master Phil – God rest his soul – was dead.

  After the first anxious telephone calls, and talking in low voices between them – Madam shakily, Master with a frown and tight lips – Madam and Master said very little about Miss Rose. It was as if she was no longer theirs; it was as if God had taken her in life like He had taken young Master Phil in death. I knew this was hard for Madam. She spent a lot of time writing to her sister in Ireland and I once discovered her weeping over her book in the dressing room.

  ‘What can I do, Madam?’ I asked, reaching a hand towards her but not touching. ‘Is it Miss Rose?’

  Madam sat up and felt for her hanky with the lace edges. ‘Such a wilful girl,’ she said, fighting the tears, ‘I really tried…’

  I found the word ‘wilful’ in the dictionary that Madam had bought me, and it said headstrong. I decided it was a good way to describe Miss Rose. She followed whatever her own head said and never took account of other people’s head thoughts.

  In the matter of talking, it was sad that Madam and Master never spoke of Master Phil at all as a way of forgetting Miss Rose’s troubles. There seemed to be no comfort for them in remembering him, as there was for me. I could think of his laughter and his lost buttons and his light blue eyes and how he showed me numbers. I could remember how handsome he was in his uniform before he went to war. These thoughts became a way to stop the tears for me. Perhaps, though, when it was your own child, the remembering became a torment rather than a comfort. Perhaps any accident to your children was a nightmare so great that the only remedy was to try to forget not only the bad times but the good as well. It certainly seemed to be that way for Madam and Master. Maybe they talked in private together, but there was nothing in the evenings between them as there had once been in the past, just Madam’s hands straying from time to time to Master Phil’s military brooch pinned to her dress.

  I knew this from watching through the crack in the door, my heart hurt by the silence. Madam would work on her sewing, although there was very little these days, or write letters to Ireland that I posted in town, or look at a library book. Master would sit behind the Midland News. The light of the lamp shone on their bent heads. Sometimes she would play if I was busy with supper and Master asked specially, but her fingers were no longer eager. And when she practised, her scales whipped the piano keys as if she was punishing her fingers for not keeping Master Phil alive and Miss Rose out of trouble.

  * * *

  A season later, Miss Rose came home for a short holiday. It was the first time she had been back since she left that day in the blue dress from Anstey’s Fashions and the red lipstick from Austen’s the chemist. She was just as beautiful as before, perhaps even more so now she was properly grown up. But there was no sign of a baby, either with her or in the way her body looked. She arrived by train, wearing a yellow dress with a tight waist and a full skirt that stood out about her legs. No one in Cradock had ever seen such a dress – and others like it that she wore – and Miss Rose was followed by people’s eyes wherever she went.

  ‘Doesn’t it crease?’ asked Madam, fingering the folds of soft material.

  ‘Ada can iron it for me!’ Miss Rose said with a merry glance at me as I brought tea on to the stoep for the family. ‘You still iron, don’t you, Ada?’

  ‘Of course, Miss Rose,’ I replied. ‘I do all the ironing.’

  Miss Rose was not at all changed by her life in Johannesburg. ‘Not on the bed, in the cupboard, Ada!’ she snapped, like she used to, as I brought a pile of clean washing into the bedroom. Then, glancing away from the mirror on the dressing table where she’d been powdering her face, she looked me up and down, noticing the navy dress that Madam encouraged me to wear instead of a uniform, and said, ‘You’ve grown up, haven’t you? Quite pretty for a black girl.’

  I caught sight of my face in the mirror – round, smooth, not unattractive – yet Miss Rose’s words, unlike Mrs Pumile’s, carried no compliment. And it was clear she thought I should still be wearing an overall. Anything better would mean that Madam thought of me not as a servant but as a part of the family.

  There were soon several young farmers, and one older town councillor, who began to call for Miss Rose while she was at home. She went out dancing or taking rides in their motor cars to nearby farms. I often wondered what she did there, for Miss Rose had never shown an interest in animals or the veld. My mother and Mrs Pumile disapproved.

  ‘No shame for that trouble in Jo’burg,’ sniffed Mrs Pumile through the hedge, ‘and still no manners.’

  ‘Out every night, no time for Madam and Master.’ My mother shook her head.

  And it was true. Miss Rose spent very little time with her parents. It was almost as if she’d forgotten that she was their last remaining child. Forgotten that she had a duty to be a daughter, a daughter in a house that had lost a son.

&nb
sp; But Madam was hopeful, I could tell. She began to talk again in the evenings to Master.

  ‘She could make a fresh start,’ Madam would say. ‘She just needs a steadying influence.’

  ‘Rosemary will never settle here,’ Master would mutter and flap his paper in annoyance, ‘not when she’s seen the bright lights.’

  But Madam refused to be discouraged and would jump up and give us a Strauss waltz or some lively polka, listening all the while for the sound of Miss Rose’s return with her latest young man and any hopes of a suitable marriage.

  But no marriage came to pass. My mother said Miss Rose was too late, as all the good young men had been snapped up soon after the war. Mrs Pumile said Miss Rose had indeed received some offers – she wouldn’t say how she knew this, but maybe it was through her cousin who worked at the bank and had access to extra sugar, and also had very good ears. Anyhow, Miss Rose had refused them all, hoping for better prospects with the older councillor. But the councillor turned out to have a previous understanding with a well-known widow who’d inherited a large farm in the Tarkastad area.

  Madam and Master said nothing, but when the veld became crisp with frost in the mornings, they put Miss Rose back on to the train in one of her swirling dresses the colour of kaffirboom blossoms and waved her goodbye once more.

  ‘I’ll be up with you soon!’ called Madam, holding on to her hat as the smoke billowed round the engine and Miss Rose waved out of the train window.

  ‘Lovely,’ cried back Miss Rose, her head disappearing inside the carriage before the train had chuffed its way out of the station.

  Chapter 14

  Mama died while she was cleaning the silver. The doctor said it was a weak heart, that she wouldn’t have lived longer anyway, even if the clinic had noticed that she had a weak heart. Madam was upset that Mama might have died because she was working too hard, but Master said she should not feel that way because I had already taken over most of Mama’s duties. But Madam still wept into her handkerchief and I guessed it was about losing someone she had known since she came from Ireland. Mama may not have realised it, but she was Madam’s longest friend.

  I have put the disappointment of Rosemary’s visit behind me.

  But now Miriam is gone …

  I could not – and still cannot – bring myself to write about Phil. Sometimes even Ada’s glorious playing overwhelms me and I need to contrive a visit downtown or an urgent task at the furthest extent of the garden.

  Miriam knew this, and many other things beside. She would say nothing, but was always there when I returned: faithful, practical, discreet. Such words to describe a life lived for others seem so paltry, so insufficient. Maybe her best legacy is simply Ada herself.

  * * *

  The doctor was the same one who had delivered me and attended Master Phil, but he was kinder to me this time and put his hand on my shoulder. Master put his hand on my shoulder as well. The doctor leant over my mother’s tiny body and brushed his fingers over her face, closing her eyes. He pulled a white sheet that Madam had given him over her face. Mama had gone. I pray there is a place in heaven where Mama will see Master Phil and walk alongside him like I once did.

  Madam took me in her arms and hugged me against her. Her cheeks were wet. She smelled of flowers, not the strong flowers I was used to in our Cradock garden, but gentler ones, maybe like those she’d known from across the sea, those that grew in songs I’d played on the piano as a child. Lilac, primrose …

  * * *

  It was just as well that Madam didn’t come to Mama’s funeral, because KwaZakhele was not a place for a lady like her and in any case Master said no.

  ‘I won’t allow it, Cathleen,’ I heard him say as I listened in the corridor through the crack of the door. ‘It’s not safe. And remember, my dear, these people have their own beliefs at a time like this.’

  ‘But Ada knows none of that,’ broke in Madam in a low voice. ‘Why, she’s taken on our values, our beliefs.’ She stopped and then went on, ‘Have we been wrong to encourage that?’

  I peered past the door hinge. Was this another one of those times when I couldn’t understand what Madam was saying? Another time like the one when she said the school was deaf? Master Phil had later explained to me that this was a way of saying that something would never be allowed. At the time, I didn’t tell him that it was my schooling alongside him and Miss Rose at the town school that would never be allowed.

  I watched as Madam moved to sit on the chair at Master’s side. She didn’t often go and sit beside him; she usually chose the chair opposite. The tortoiseshell comb in her hair caught the lamplight. She still wore grey for Master Phil, and perhaps also, now, for Mama. I can’t show how I mourn by means of indoor clothing; all I have is Mama’s funeral coat.

  ‘I’m afraid for her, Edward,’ Madam went on, twisting her hands like she’d done over Master Phil. ‘How will she manage?’

  ‘There’ll be other relatives,’ Master Edward said, and picked up his newspaper. ‘There always are. Especially as we’re paying for it.’

  Mama did not want to be carried over the river here in Cradock, she wanted to be buried with her ancestors. So I put her black funeral coat on, took my identity Pass and pinned it to the inside pocket, and went by train and then by donkey cart with her coffin to KwaZakhele. Madam pressed pink roses from the garden into my hand for Mama’s grave.

  The light was not yet up when I caught the train from Cradock with Mama’s coffin beside me in the carriage at the back. Mist hung over the tracks and mixed with the steam from the engine so that we moved along inside a cloud until the sun came up and burned it away. It was my first time on a train. I stared out of the window and wished that Mama could rise up out of her coffin and see the veld unfolding before us in yellow waves. Halfway through the journey I had to change to another train. Two old men going the same way saw me struggling with Mama’s coffin and helped me to lift it out of the first train and into the next one.

  No one came with me – Auntie couldn’t afford the train fare but promised to pray at the outdoor church on the koppie – and I found no relatives in KwaZakhele who had heard of her even though the Master was paying. I had never been to KwaZakhele before. It was far bigger than the place where Auntie lived, or the township at the end of Bree Street. Many thousands of people live there, in rows of tiny houses or in shacks packed close to each other with no spare ground in between. Even though KwaZakhele gets more rain than Cradock, there were no trees. Instead, smoke from cooking fires hung over the place all day.

  After a long time of searching the narrow dirt streets – it was frightening for me with so many strangers shouting and so many dogs barking and hundreds of shacks stretching as far as I could see, and me worrying about Mama waiting in her coffin on the platform back at the station – I found the church that Mama had attended as a child.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, leaning tiredly against the door round the side that said ‘Vestry, knock first’. ‘My mother has died and wishes to be buried in your churchyard with her ancestors.’

  The minister looked up from his desk and ran his eyes over me in Mama’s black funeral coat.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I have come from Cradock today, sir, with my mother’s coffin on the train.’

  At first the minister said he was too busy to help and that he did not know of any living relatives at his church with our name. Once I said that I could pay him from the money Master had given me, he agreed to bury Mama. I had to be careful with the money, for it had to cover the cost of the coffin, the train fares, the donkey cart from the station to the church and then from the church to the cemetery. I could never repay Master for his kindness, but at least I could show that I was grateful by giving him back what was left over.

  The minister put on a creased white robe – why did he not have someone to iron for him? – and sat alongside the driver.

  I squatted in the back, holding on to the coffin to stop it slipping off the
back of the cart. It took a long time to get to the cemetery. I felt sorry for Mama being jolted so hard along the uneven roads. I clutched Madam’s roses and looked out over the head of the minister and the driver and the horse. The sea was out there somewhere, as blue as the sky, and I longed to see it with ships on it like I had read about, and that had carried our piano to Cradock House, but the land in that place was flat and the township stretched beyond the horizon and no one can see further than the horizon.

  Unlike where Master Phil was buried, this cemetery had no grass and the wind threw grit from the bare ground into my face. But I believe God the Father does not think any less of His children if they have a poor funeral with no congregation. It does not mean they are less worthy than those buried in a cathedral with crowds watching and an organ making the walls shake. Mama served other people all her life. God would be pleased with her, I was sure.

  There could be no service like Master Phil’s, of course, but the minister and I sang Abide with Me over the hole that had been dug where the coffin would go, and where I placed Madam’s roses, delicate and beautiful against the broken earth. Although the wind stung our faces, it also surely carried our voices up to heaven where God – and I hope Master Phil – were listening. I gave the minister some extra money and he said he would put up a sign with Mama’s name so that I could find it if I visited again. Even so, before we left, I tried to fix in my mind where Mama’s grave was amongst the many hundreds of mounds. It lay in line with a distant shack with a tin roof like the kaia back in Cradock, except that there was no bony thorn tree but a straggly creeper over a piece of fence. In the other direction was a tall light – taller than any light I had seen before – that shed an orange glow even although it was still the day. Where the two directions met, was Mama’s grave. Behind me, in the rutted street alongside the cemetery, a lively group of children kicked a ball, their voices rising into the air with Mama’s soul.