The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  There is also no time to be lonely. Our day starts at sunrise, like it did at Cradock House, but here in the township there is no milk to fetch from the gate. We dress in the dimness of the hut – Auntie doesn’t waste candles on morning darkness – and eat our breakfast of black tea and maybe some bread or leftover porridge. I find the mornings hard; the floor hurts my back in the night and the child would like to sleep longer. But there is no time to lose. Even before the first rays of sun pick the koppies out of the shadow we are on our way, balancing loads on our heads or in our arms, pushing through with the early, grumbling crowds, Auntie deaf to all in her rush to claim the best washing spot.

  I thought I knew about washing but I learn that outdoor washing in the Groot Vis is very different from the washing I used to do in the laundry at Cradock House. For one thing, there is no ironing. But Auntie’s customers still want their clothes and sheets smooth. This means we have to be very careful about how we drape the wet washing over the bushes on the riverbank. These are not the sort of shrubs that lit up Madam’s garden with their colourful blooms – they would have been too soft to take the weight of wet clothes. No, these are tough Karoo bushes, like the stunted kind that you see at the edge of town where the veld stretches to the horizon. Here, on the riverbank, the bushes can dig down to the Groot Vis for spare water so they grow a little bigger and that suits Auntie’s business.

  ‘People come to me,’ Auntie murmurs with satisfaction, while the other women fling their washing about with less care, ‘because I can make clothes look ironed without ironing. Look.’ She demonstrates, flapping a pillow case in the breeze and then deftly letting it drop over a bush, pulling the damp material tight and smoothing it out like icing over a cake.

  ‘Then you got to fetch it before it’s dry,’ she wags a finger to make sure I am listening, ‘and then you fold it and it will dry out into the good folds – just so.’ She smoothes the pillowcase and adds it to a pile. ‘Also, if you fetch it before it’s dry the skollies take someone else’s pillowcase first.’

  Under her strict eye, I learn to stretch and smooth the washing, and to choose the best bushes to dry it on. White washing goes on bushes with the smallest leaves so it doesn’t get stained, dark washing goes on whatever is left over. The wind blows in a particular way on the riverbank, and I must make sure each piece is anchored to its bush by bending twigs or thorns like pegs. I learn to shoo away the goats that like to chew up the bushes and the washing on them.

  I learn to look out for strangers on the riverbank who might be there not to wash but to steal. For if a customer’s washing is lost, Auntie not only loses that customer but also many coins that she – or I, if it is my fault – must pay back for the loss. As I patrol the drying linen, I realise it is not just about the money. Auntie is as proud of her almost-smooth pillowcases as I used to be of Madam’s perfectly ironed cream day dresses, or Miss Rose’s difficult pleats or Master Phil’s well-creased cricket whites. I can understand this pride. And it makes me forgive Auntie’s impatience with me just a little bit. There is one further thing that I learn, which is not something that Auntie teaches me. I learn to position myself among the other women even if it means settling for a lesser rock, and I start to wear a doek like they do. Like Mama used to. I become one of them. Anyone passing near the river will surely not recognise me now.

  I tell myself I am growing up. I tell myself that loneliness can be banished if you train your mind on washing, or on recognising neighbours, or on separating out the sounds that make up the background noise of township life. And here is an unexpected thing: I never thought to find music in noise, but it’s there if you search hard enough. Shouts, singing, goats bleating, metal clattering, odd drumbeats … Without trying, they each find a place and squeeze themselves into a shifting, vibrant counterpoint. I christen it ‘Township Bach’.

  At the end of the day I sit down against the mud wall of the hut, let my arms and shoulders fall by my sides, and rest my aching hands on my stomach where the child kicks and turns inside me. I put aside the matter of washing, and I close my eyes to the rush of passers-by. Are you there, Master Phil? Are you watching me, sir, in this crammed place? Have you forgiven me?

  ‘Bread?’ a street trader shouts out, his bare feet shuffling along in the dust. He hauls out a loaf wrapped in brown paper from the bag he carries on his back. ‘One or two slices?’

  I would rather close my eyes again, but it is my duty to buy a slice for Auntie and me from the dwindling amount of Mama’s shoebox money.

  ‘Where you come from?’ he asks, squatting down beside me, his breath smelling of tobacco and drink.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ I ask, nervous about telling who I am. It must never get back to Madam and Master that I am here, just a short distance from Cradock House. So close that the evil hadeda birds that flap overhead every afternoon could carry my voice – if I speak too loudly – along with them and drop it on Cradock House as they pass.

  ‘You look different from the girls round here,’ the street trader says, looking at my still-smart overall. ‘That uniform cost white money.’

  ‘I come from KwaZakhele,’ I say quickly. ‘That’s where I worked before. That’s where my family is from. But I’m here to be with my auntie.’

  He nods, distracted by the arrival home of Poppie and her grandchildren. ‘Bread?’ he croaks, getting to his feet with difficulty. I notice that he charges me more for my slice than he charges Poppie.

  So the daylight hours leave no time or space for loneliness to gather. It is the nights that I must guard against. The nights are when inside loneliness could strike. But perhaps God the Father is being kind. The crying, arguing, coughing neighbours disturb me less and less. I start to fall asleep quickly when otherwise my heart might turn to Cradock House. To Mama and Master Phil and Madam that I miss so much – oh Madam, forgive me – and to the house that I hope has not forgotten my cleaning of it, and the piano that I hope still remembers my touch.

  I stood in the garden this morning with an uncontrollable urge to cry out Ada’s name to the Karoo sky, to the koppies, to wherever she is.

  I confess that I am frantic with worry. Cradock House is her home, the only home she has ever had. We are her family, surely?

  Where could she be?

  Chapter 20

  The child within me grows. I no longer fit into my uniform and Auntie lends me an overall of hers that I can use until the child is born. I allow myself no wondering about how it will be, what he will look like, who he will look like. Auntie does not ask me any more about the father of this child and for that I am grateful. I have at least a few months to prepare for the questions that will come when she – and the other women that I have met on the riverbank – see the pale colour of the newborn and turn away from me, as I know they will. For the moment I am just like any other girl who gets into trouble with a boy who does not stay. Like my mother. Like Miss Rose?

  There is a shame to this, but for most people it is an everyday shame. Girls fall in love. Boys leave them. A child is a blessing whether or not the boy stays. But it will not be like this for me.

  There are some coloured families nearby, but they keep to themselves and I stare at them and see that the whole family is the same colour. There is no extra paleness or extra darkness between the children or their parents. All are the same shade. It is strange that at a time when the new word ‘apartheid’ is forcing blacks and whites away from each other, I should bear a child whose colour falls between the two like the brown water of the Groot Vis.

  I go to see the doctor once more on a quiet washing day. There is a little boy crying on the ground from a sore on his knee and I squat next to him and comfort him and try to keep further dirt from his wound until the doctor can see him and clean and stitch up the hole. I am reminded of Master Phil as a youngster, his missing buttons, his many scraped knees.

  ‘Do you know nursing?’ asks the doctor when he gets to see me.

  ‘A little,’ I reply. �
�I cared for someone when they were dying.’

  It is the first time that I have admitted to myself that young Master Phil was in fact dying all the while I cared for him. That the wound with no blood was far more dangerous than the wound of the boy the doctor had just fixed. That it is the inside wounds that never heal, that eat away at the good flesh until there is nothing left. If I had known that, I wonder what I could have done. Are there ways to cure inside wounds? Are there doctors who know about such things?

  ‘He was the son of my Master,’ I say, as the doctor feels my stomach. He looks at me quickly, wondering. ‘He was in the war and when he came back the outside wounds healed but the inside ones stopped him from getting better.’ I find tears on my cheeks, then, and the doctor helps me to sit up. Women waiting their turn on the floor murmur among themselves. One calls out something gently in a language that I don’t understand and the others nod and sway against each other.

  ‘I did my best,’ I say through the tears. ‘I made him laugh, I read to him, I played the piano for him, I loved him the only way I knew how but it was not enough.’ The tears drip down on to Auntie’s spare overall, like they dripped on to the smart clothes Madam gave me for the funeral. I take a deep breath and the child settles within me. ‘What makes such illness? Is it the work of ghosts in the war, making wounds that no one can see?’

  The words come out of me like a fresh discovery. Why had I not thought of it sooner? Ghosts causing invisible wounds? If men did indeed fight ghosts in the war, then perhaps the wounds they suffered would be invisible too. And yet young Master Phil had told me that war was not about ghosts. But maybe he was wrong about that, like I had been wrong about him getting better. Even Dr Wilmott seemed to think that ghosts from the war were chasing Master Phil. He’d seemed to say that work was the only thing that would frighten them away.

  I start as the doctor places a hand on my shoulder. ‘You mustn’t think of such things at this time, child. You must save yourself for the baby; he will grow more from love than from sadness.’

  ‘But are there doctors for such silent wounds?’

  The doctor nods. ‘I believe so. But it takes a special training to cure a soldier such as your young Master. Now try to drink some milk to make the baby’s bones strong and yours, too. Come back and see me when you feel the child dropping within the womb.’ He smiles. ‘You will have a fine baby.’

  I meet his eyes and I know that he is saying this to be kind. He knows what I will face when the baby is born. He knows that this baby is also like an inside wound.

  ‘Uhambe kakuhle, go well. Next, please.’

  * * *

  ‘You play piano?’ One of the women pulls at my shoulder as I rest on the ground outside the doctor’s house before setting off for Auntie’s hut. This talk of ghosts and silent wounds has troubled me. I rouse myself to look up at her. She, too, is being kind. She has left her place in the queue to come and talk to me.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  She is an old woman. She wears a faded blue dress, much mended. I glance at her hands, they are twisted and the knuckles are swollen. The fingers do not look as if they could play. I am too troubled to talk much about music right now.

  ‘There is a piano at the school,’ she says, turning to point with a gnarled finger but somehow she gets the direction wrong. The school, the only building in the township, is the other way. ‘But there is no one to play it.’

  My heart leaps from its trouble at her words. Madam’s face rises up before me. A piano! The child kicks strongly and I gasp.

  ‘Go there,’ urges the old woman, her hand fumbling down from my shoulder to shake my arm, ‘go there and play.’

  ‘Do you play?’

  ‘Once,’ the woman says with a smile that is neither happy nor sad and exposes blackened teeth in an expanse of gum. ‘When I was young.’ She bends towards me again. I realise she is not looking at me, she is not focused on my face. ‘If you have a gift,’ she says, milky eyes staring at where she believes my face to be, ‘then it must be shared.’

  ‘I will go,’ I say, shaken by her blindness, and my own selfishness. ‘I will find a way to go there and play for the children.’

  A younger woman comes out and takes the woman’s hand to lead her back inside. Before they step through the door, the old woman turns back.

  ‘Tell me what you play.’

  ‘Chopin,’ I say. ‘The Raindrop prelude.’

  She closes her empty eyes and lifts one hand for a moment over imaginary keys and then feels with her slippered feet for the entrance and shuffles inside.

  I get up to go.

  It’s getting dark – Auntie allowed me off only after I had finished my share of the day’s washing – and darkness turns the township into a place of danger. It offers cover for the robbers that hide during the day. I must choose a route that avoids the shebeen, from where men stumble red eyed and mad from drink. They will make no allowances for my condition. Sometimes the police come and raid the shebeen and chase everyone out of the place with their truncheons. Then they overturn the barrels of beer so that the brown liquid runs on to the street. The next day, the shebeen women begin brewing again because – like Auntie with her washing – that is their only way to make a living.

  Smoke from cooking fires hangs in a ribbon above the alley I hurry down. I smell simmering maize meal, a smell that never bothered me before, but since the baby its sweetness makes my stomach feel ill. I turn my nose away from the fires where people are cooking, and I turn my thoughts away from robbers and ghosts and young Master Phil who I loved but could not heal, and I look up and out over the huts that surround me. In the distance is the iron bridge over the Groot Vis. Beyond it, the sky is clear and painted with orange streaks above Dundas Street and Cradock House.

  I want to report Ada’s disappearance to the police but Edward will not allow it. He says we must give it time.

  He does not understand.

  He does not realise what I have lost.

  It is not only my family that I miss. My fingers miss the piano and my heart misses music. My eyes miss words and my head misses reading. All I have is the score for the Raindrop prelude but that contains only musical words to tell your hands how to play the tune. Even so, I touch it every day where it lies at the bottom of my cardboard suitcase for the feel of the paper under my fingers.

  Yet if I had a book, I would need to find time to read it because we wash all day, and at night I am too tired and I would have to buy extra candles to have enough light to see the pages in Auntie’s dim hut. But I don’t want to lose my reading, so I ask the man who sells bread to pick up any thrown-away newspapers that he can find on his trips into town. This he does, and each day I fold a single page under a stone above the riverbank and whenever there is a free moment I go up and sit under one of the mimosas and prop the page on top of my growing child and read every sentence. Sometimes there are new words in the newspaper, and I struggle with them as I have no one who can help. Auntie’s language is not good and most of the women I work with cannot read.

  My reading tells me a lot about what is happening across the Groot Vis. It is strange, because I realise that I am learning more about the town now than I ever knew when I lived in the middle of it. I learn about elections for the mayor – the man who wore the gold chain that I saw at the meeting in the town hall before the war – and I wonder if Master still goes to meetings and leaves Madam on her own at night. I read about the Reverend Calata from the township beyond Bree Street who begs the town council to continue giving soup once a day to hungry people in the townships and the council says no. I read about new rules that say you cannot go to certain places if you have a black skin like mine. It does not say what rules there are for coloured people with skins that are the same as my child will have.

  ‘What does it say, your newspaper?’ one of the women, Lindiwe, always asks when she sees me reading. Lindiwe is small and round but very strong in her smallness. She sometimes helps me lift heavy bundles
of washing on to my back.

  ‘Today they talk about the price of wool,’ I say, pointing to the sentence I am on. ‘And if it’s a lot, they call it a boom.’

  Lindiwe is young, like me, but she has lived in the township beyond Bree Street all her life. She never went to school but I think she is clever because, although she lives on her own, she knows a lot about people and why they do things. Lindiwe always makes sure to find out what other people think of a problem that she is thinking about at the same time. In this way, she is the opposite of Miss Rose.

  ‘Can you teach me to read like you, Ada?’ Lindiwe is saving her money to buy an iron and an ironing board so she can start a business offering perfectly ironed laundry. She whispers this to me one day, and I promise not to say a word because Lindiwe could put Auntie out of business.