The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  So I turned my head away from the actions of those like Jake and Silas who wanted not just liberation but revolution as well. There could be no place for me in that kind of war if I was to serve God the Father by keeping my child safe. I began to set aside some coins once more from my wages to save for Dawn’s first shoes now that she was almost walking, although my most urgent task was to train her to sit quietly by the piano while I played for daily assembly.

  ‘This is a special day,’ announced Mr Dumise one morning in the months after Dawn’s illness. The staff on the stage nodded to one another and leant sideways to look past the curtains into the wings.

  The high windows were open and I could hear familiar shouting on the street outside and, from further away, the sudden moo of a cow. There were a few cows in the township, brought there with difficulty by workers off farms, but they struggled to survive on the harsh scrub and usually died.

  ‘From time to time we receive money for books from generous supporters of our school. This is one of those times.’ He held up his hand to stop the enthusiastic clapping. I put a finger to my lips to hush Dawn into silence. She loved to clap along with the children. She stared up at me with huge blue eyes, and put her thumb in her mouth.

  ‘We are honoured to have with us today the person who has led this donation.’

  He turned aside and motioned someone forward. Mr Dumise was very good in this respect. He often invited visitors to the school, ignoring the sighs of Silas who thought our needs would be better met by noisy demands rather than quiet persuasion. Mr Dumise said it was to do with raising something he called a ‘profile’. I had looked up the word but I was more used to it in its other form, where it meant a picture of you sideways on. It was a good word, I thought, for me to add to Lindiwe’s list of words that took different moods.

  I glanced up.

  It was the cream day dress that I saw first. Then the slender arms and strong hands that I remembered so well and the soft brown hair in a bun. Madam stood tall and dignified against the drooping red curtains, and smiled down at the youngsters. Mr Dumise said more words and there was more clapping. I reached down with urgent hands and pushed Dawn between the legs of the piano stool.

  Oh Madam, please look away, please do not see me, or the child! Please don’t hold Cradock House in front of me once more …

  ‘Miss Hanembe! Miss Hanembe, the march!’

  I stared at the piano, my fingers frozen into a hardness to equal the stained ivory keys. The tentative, hard-fought rhythm of our lives, the fragile hope of a future – even the many deceptions – hung ready to be torn away.

  But it would not do to show this in front of Mr Dumise and the staff.

  And Madam.

  Once again I must harden my heart, I must hide what I feel, I must hide as much as possible. I reached for the tune in my head and forced my stiff fingers over the keys and began to play. The piano heard me and poured out its music. The children streamed out of the hall, the staff followed them. I kept my head down and played Chopin’s Military Polonaise and my fingers followed what they knew for my eyes were blind with tears. I played it again and again until the notes echoed through the empty hall.

  ‘Ada?’ she called over the music.

  I stopped and looked up. She was standing on the bare stage next to Mr Dumise. Her cream leather shoes, I could make out from my place at the piano, were rimmed with dust from walking through the scuffed earth of the playground. They would need polishing.

  She held out her arms and said once more, ‘Dear Ada.’

  Mr Dumise looked from Madam to me and I saw understanding in his look – and something else I could not quite read – and then he turned quietly and left the hall.

  I got up off the stool and stepped up on to the stage where Madam put her arms around me and hugged me like the time she did when Mama died and the doctor closed Mama’s eyes in death. Over the smell of the mildewed curtains I picked up the old scent of flowers on Madam’s skin, and felt the familiar softness of her dress against me.

  ‘Why, Ada, why? Why did you leave us?’ She was laughing a little now, through her own tears. She had not yet seen Dawn. She had not yet found out that her husband had sinned and that I had sinned. ‘We’ve missed you so!’

  I couldn’t find any words. I have always liked to prepare sentences for important times, like when I asked Mr Dumise for a job, although sometimes I forget what I have learnt and say more than I intend. But now, with Madam looking down at me with such kindness and with such misplaced relief, I found myself with no words at all.

  ‘Mama?’

  It was Dawn who found the words.

  It was Dawn who told Madam what she didn’t yet know.

  Dawn had pulled herself up on the side of the piano stool and stood there unsteadily, perfect pale skin gleaming, the blue eyes of her father wide and questioning.

  I watched Madam.

  I heard her gasp, I saw confusion in her face, then shock, then I saw the recognition wash over it in waves, like the rising waters of the Groot Vis in flood. Her pale skin flushed. She turned back to me and I could see her fighting what she feared was the truth.

  ‘You must leave us.’ I found my voice. ‘Please, Madam, you must leave us here and say nothing.’

  It was the first time that I spoke to Madam as one woman to another, rather than as a servant or a pupil. And I saw her recognise it.

  ‘But Ada—’

  ‘It is better this way.’

  She stood before me and I could see her tallness begin to wilt, like I’d longed to bend on the day that Dawn was born and Auntie had thrown us out. I could see the awful truth begin to make itself at home in her and I prayed that God the Father would comfort her, for I never meant her to be hurt like this.

  Oh God, forgive me.

  Madam, forgive me, although I know you never can.

  If only I could find a way to say that I did what I did out of duty.

  I reached out and took her arm – I had never touched Madam in this way before – and led her to one of the hard chairs on the stage. She sat down and folded her hands in her lap, the knuckles as white as on the day the doctor saw Master Phil and told him that he couldn’t do any more for him. Her hair was no longer completely brown but had flecks of silver at the temples. Young Master Phil’s military brooch gleamed at her throat. From down by the piano, Dawn began to whimper.

  ‘You must go home, Madam.’ I bent down to her urgently.

  ‘You must forget this day.’

  ‘It’s your home, too.’ She looked up at me, eyes sore and weeping.

  ‘I am grateful for everything you taught me, but it’s better for me here.’ My voice shook as I lied once more.

  I turned away from Madam who I loved even more than Mama, and went down the steps and gathered Dawn in my arms and left through the side door.

  Chapter 31

  The march to the town hall had taken place while Dawn was ill. Jake told me this when he appeared through the doorway one night with an egg for Dawn.

  ‘It was a start,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘We must organise better next time.’ He touched Dawn’s cheek as she lay sleeping, then squeezed my hand and was gone.

  Dina said afterwards that only about half the staff had taken part, on account of the sirens echoing across the river at the time the march was to start. I’d heard them as well, from Lindiwe’s hut where Dawn slept from the medicine that was making her better. I heard, too, the noise from St James School, as their group were broken up by the police before they could get along Bree Street. The screech of car tyres on gravel, the barking of dogs, the brave chants dying in the Karoo air to leave a loaded silence that hung over the township all day.

  ‘Even the St James choir,’ muttered Dina. ‘The police stopped the choir and arrested the choirmaster!’

  Several of our teachers began to drift away as Silas’s small group headed across the Groot Vis and up Church Street.

  ‘We went fast, for the streets were empty,’ D
ina said with a toss of her turban, ‘but they were waiting for us at the town hall.’

  Silas had planned a speech and then the handing over of the petition, but it never happened. Instead, several large white policemen piled out of their vans and began slapping their truncheons in the palms of their hands. Silas tried to enter the town hall but his way was barred. At this, the remaining staff took fright and ran back to school. Only Silas and the jazz man left at walking pace, Dina sheltered between them.

  Dina said many white people watched. She said it was only the presence of the white people watching that stopped the police from using their weapons. I did not meet her eyes when she said this. It made no difference. Madam now knew where I was. She had seen Dawn, she knew my shame. And I had left her alone with this knowledge on a dusty stage in an empty hall with mildewed curtains. I am not proud of that, and I cried inside as I carried Dawn away, but what could I do? The pain for Madam would be far greater if it became known that her maid had lain with her husband and borne him a child with pale skin and his own blue eyes. If Auntie shrank from the knowledge of a relative that was not black, if people on the streets of the township turned their faces away, how much worse would it be for Madam – and Madam’s friends – to accept a child that was not white? Dawn fell in between. She pleased no one, she was at home nowhere but with me, and one day she might even reject that. I had been foolish enough to bring a coloured child into a world where black and white were the only alternatives. In the white world, she could even be used against Master to send him to jail. Did Madam realise that?

  But if she did as I asked and went home and said nothing, she could escape the shame. She could even fool her heart into thinking it was a dream, or a nightmare – like my fear of Dawn being seized by the car with the eyes of night animals. She could pretend she never saw me, that the brown upright piano with the bad keys remained silent, that the child with the coloured skin and the blue eyes did not exist. She could instead take comfort in Cradock House. It would not fall, it would stand as sturdy as it had ever been. The apricot tree that once carried me in its sap would bloom and make fruit for jam, the red tin roof would thunder with hail every year or two, the beautiful Zimmerman would sound to the music of Grieg and Debussy, and Madam would continue with Master as before. Only her diary might know the truth.

  I have learnt many things in my life and understood only some of them: inside wounds, a future that arrives unexpectedly and cannot be bought, words that mean different things when grouped together, trouble that leaves one place only to search for a new home. All these things, it seems to me, gather themselves into a greater knowing or unknowing that cleverer people than me call wisdom. What wisdom I had found told me that Madam should turn away and go back to Cradock House, and I should turn away and go back to Lindiwe’s hut. That would be the end of it.

  It has been a month since I found Ada.

  There are many truths that I have had to accept and suppress – for the moment.

  The worst of them are hard even to write down.

  I must record at the outset, though, that I believe Ada has been an innocent victim. Edward took advantage of a sheltered young woman for his own pleasure. Witness his insistence that I stop looking for her.

  And the outcome of his guilt lies in the innocent eyes of a child. And such eyes – the eyes of Edward as they once were, the eyes of my beloved Phil who is no more.

  In the time since, I have wandered the house. I have endured tea parties. I have been civil to Edward. I have sent cheerful letters to Rosemary in her latest crisis. I have played our piano and wept at the memory of Ada fighting through Chopin on an instrument so battered she had to improvise around defective keys.

  And I have visited the library.

  I have read up on the laws of parliament: the Immorality Act, the Mixed Marriages Act. I am discovering that what I feared years ago when I was refused a place for Ada at the children’s school on account of her colour has come true.

  We have allowed the creation of a divided land. And Cradock House lies along its fault lines.

  Chapter 32

  Madam came on a hot afternoon.

  The latrines smelt bad, flies settled on rubbish in the streets and the heat rolled over the township in pressing waves. Down at the Groot Vis, women struggled to find space to wash in the idle current. Across the river I imagined dogs panting in the shade of covered stoeps.

  I had just fed Dawn and was singing to her Thula thu’ thula bhabha like Mama used to sing to me in our kaia at the bottom of the garden beneath the bony thorn tree. Dawn was sweaty and I fanned her with a cloth before laying her down on the foldout bed for a rest. She was too big, now, for her washing basket. At night she slept in a broad cardboard box that I found in the school yard.

  ‘Ada!’

  A slender figure blocked out the harsh sunlight where it fell through the doorway on to the mud floor. I jumped up, horrified that she’d risked the dangerous streets, the surging crowds. Master should never have allowed this.

  Dawn pointed. ‘Ndwe!’ she shouted. ‘Ndwe!’ Dawn couldn’t say Lindiwe’s name so called her Ndwe.

  Madam stepped carefully inside. She was wearing a pale green dress with a sweeping skirt, and a straw hat with a broad brim angled well down over her face to protect her from the sun. She stood there for a moment, disconcerted by the lack of space, unsure how to greet me in such a place, for she had surely never been inside a mud hut before.

  ‘How did you find us?’ I blurted out, forgetting my manners, feeling the same clutch at my heart as when I saw her on the stage at school, the same clutch as when I heard Master’s steps coming down the corridor and then stopping outside my door. ‘Why have you come back?’

  But she didn’t reply straight away. Instead, she took off her hat and fanned herself for a moment. Then glanced again at the cramped space between the beds, the paraffin stove in the corner, the uneven window, the bare earth floor under her shoes, as if now seeing the narrow parts of this life properly. I realised she was looking for a chair, but seeing none – and no space for one anyway – she gathered her full skirt beneath her and sat down on the end of the bed as if it was as perfectly made as her own back at Cradock House. Then she smiled at Dawn who stared up at her with curious eyes made large by the gloom of the hut. Dawn was used to skin darker than her own, the only person she had seen with skin paler than hers was the chemist who gave her the medicine that saved her life.

  ‘I wanted to ask you to come home.’

  There it was.

  I got up and went to stand by Lindiwe’s bed. I wished the hut was bigger; it was hard to tell lies in such close proximity.

  ‘I can’t do that, Madam,’ I began. Dawn, sensing something was wrong, cried and lifted her arms to me. I reached down and gathered her in, holding her soft body close, this child who I loved and who I hoped would always love me even when she discovered the price of the skin difference between us.

  Madam looked at me and she looked at her husband’s child. Her eyes were clear, not sore and weeping as they had been when she was at the school, or on the day Miss Rose had left or the day young Master Phil died. Perhaps all the weeping had already been done.

  ‘Let there be no misunderstanding between us, Ada,’ she said quietly, leaning forward to stroke Dawn’s tiny foot, ‘only acceptance and the need to go forward.’

  What of forgiveness? I wanted to say. Can you ever forgive me for doing what I thought was my duty? Surely that was beyond us, surely that was too much to ask. ‘I have sinned,’ I said, unable to meet her eyes.

  ‘The sin is not yours alone to bear,’ she said firmly. ‘Look at me, Ada.’ She leant forward, forcing me to look at her. ‘Listen to me. Edward is responsible for this. You and the child should not suffer alone and…’ she glanced around at our poor circumstances, ‘I will not allow it to happen.’

  I felt the walls of my heart that I had hardened for so long begin to loosen, but I could not weaken yet. There was more to consider t
han the sin against Madam herself.

  ‘It is against the law,’ I said. ‘Master could go to jail.’

  I saw fleeting surprise on her face, as if she hadn’t expected me to know such things. She shook her head. ‘No he won’t, as long as we’re discreet. Those laws are not pursued in Cradock to the same extent as in larger cities.’ She paused, then added, ‘I have made some inquiries, Ada.’

  I sat down on Lindiwe’s bed. A silence fell between us. Dawn kicked her feet. Madam started and half rose from the bed, her hand reaching for her throat, as shouting burst out on the street.

  ‘There are other matters that lie beyond the law,’ I ventured, ignoring the noise outside. I had never talked to Madam like this. My school teaching and my outcast status in the township had made me brave. In any case, I had nothing left to lose. ‘What of your friends who will see the child and know where she comes from? People will turn away from you,’ I stopped and caught my breath, ‘as they have turned away from me. Even strangers turn away.’

  For the first time, I saw her control falter. She lifted a hand and wiped her forehead, shielding her eyes from me in the process. The hut was very hot, I could feel a channel of sweat trickling down Dawn’s back where she sat pressed close to me.

  ‘If they turn away,’ she murmured, more to herself than me, ‘then they are not worth knowing.’

  ‘But it is so hard,’ I cried out then, willing her to understand, feeling the heavy air tremble with my words. ‘You don’t know how hard it is! They will make you feel a stranger in your own place, they will never forgive you! And what about Dawn? She belongs nowhere, but in the township there might be other coloureds for her…’