The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘Don’t,’ said Madam with a catch in her voice. ‘You and Dawn deserve it. Now,’ she went on more briskly, ‘I think it’s time to dispense with “Madam”. I’m sure you can find another way to address me.’

  Master Phil had once told me not to call him Master, but I never managed to call him Phil except to myself. Dina said that one day we would call all whites by their names – after a war of Liberation had swept the country. But now, it seemed, a small liberation had taken place within Cradock House.

  I would find a new way to address Madam. Something that fell between Madam and Cathleen, something that showed respect but also admitted the moment in the school hall when she and I met as women for the first time. Perhaps I could call her Mrs Cath.

  ‘You’re free to come and go as you like, to accommodate your teaching.’

  But what of Master? I wanted to say. For all Lindiwe’s persuasion that Master and Madam have come to an arrangement, how can I be sure? Will my township strength hold fast if he tries to touch me?

  First, though, before anything else, there was the piano. With Madam holding Dawn, I ran into the lounge and opened the Zimmerman and brushed my hands across the keys and felt their resilience after the sponginess of the school piano. Then sat for a moment, and waited for the piano to remember me, and for the music to find me once more.

  ‘Come, Ada, some Chopin!’ said Madam gaily. ‘The Raindrop prelude?’

  So I began, and I could tell Madam approved, for the single notes fell into Cradock House as sweetly as they ever had. Yet for me, the school version played in the quest for a job outdid my playing here for it spoke with a passion I could never match. And I realised that music – and maybe life – depends less on the quality of the instrument or the player than it does on the commitment with which it is played.

  Mozart’s lively Turkish rondo, then a Beethoven sonata, then a Debussy arabesque …

  Dawn responded to the music the only way she knew, clapping and wiggling her tiny body like she’d seen my students do back at school. I was briefly worried that Madam might be offended but she pressed her hands to her cheeks and stifled her laughter at the little one’s cavorting, and then bore Dawn off to the kitchen for some milk and rusks. And still the music rose and fell under my joyful fingers, and I played until the sun began to dip behind the hedge where the beetles were now silent.

  * * *

  Madam did not expect me to step back into the kitchen as I would once have done. Indeed, she had prepared a meal for us that evening and said we would share cooking duties in the days ahead. And that I had no need to wear aprons or overalls unless I wished. So when Master arrived, I was not cooking but walking in the garden with Dawn, listening out for the bokmakieries that she’d only ever known from stories in the gloom of Lindiwe’s hut.

  ‘Where are they, Mama?’ Dawn’s hand in mine stiffened with excitement.

  ‘You have to be quiet and listen.’ I bent down to her. ‘Some things can’t be seen, they must be listened for, and maybe they’re in their nest already.’ And then, as if the birds themselves understood, the calling and answering rose from opposite ends of the garden.

  ‘We stay here all the time, Mama?’

  He came with Madam down the kitchen steps and past the apricot tree, his back rigid and straight as it had ever been. I stood waiting, holding Dawn’s hand in mine, restraining her from dashing off in search of the birds that had now fallen silent, but in reality clutching her in case he was coming to snatch her away.

  It was Madam who stepped in with the right words, Madam who found the courage to make the introduction, Madam who had always softened him.

  ‘This is your daughter, Dawn,’ she said quietly. Her face was pale, perhaps she’d used more of the powder that sat on her dressing table than usual.

  Master’s stern gaze swept past me and fastened on Dawn. He did not move. I stared at him, searching for the shame that had followed me but only recently found its way to him as well. To my horror – for I am not a vengeful person – I found rage churning within me like the Groot Vis in flood, because maybe he felt no shame, maybe he cared little for how he’d hurt Madam and used me to avert his loneliness for her.

  But then I saw it.

  I saw how he had withered within his uprightness, how his body was lost inside the dark suit with its chain across the front. How his side-parted hair had turned completely white, and his blue eyes were washed out, like Madam’s eyes used to look during young Master Phil’s illness or Miss Rose’s troubles in Johannesburg. Shame had destroyed his body like it had almost destroyed my mind. This faded man, I realised, was a shell. He had no claim on me any more; I would have no trouble in refusing this man. I loosened my grip on Dawn’s hand.

  ‘Mama?’ She looked up at me, uncertain as to why we were standing in the garden like this, standing and staring at one another with no words between us.

  ‘I have agreed to support Dawn, Ada,’ Master said distantly. Even his voice was thinner. ‘Provided she is not told of it. And there must be no talk about this among your friends.’

  I glanced at Madam but she remained silent. The bokmakieries started up again, one on the roof, one in the hedge.

  ‘Mama!’ Dawn cried, pointing, and turning her head back and forth to follow their calling. She wasn’t used to songbirds. She’d only ever heard hadedas in the township at evening, or seen crows squabbling over rubbish in the streets.

  ‘I shall say nothing, sir. But I cannot hide Dawn.’

  There was a pause. Then he said, ‘She could attend the mission school.’

  ‘But, Edward,’ Madam interrupted, putting out her hand to him, her eyes darkening with anxiety, ‘you never said—’

  ‘That is the school you thought of for me,’ I found myself breaking in, the anger rising once more, ‘but Mama wouldn’t let me go so far away.’ I looked at Master squarely but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, he wouldn’t see the mother of his child. ‘I won’t let Dawn go that far away either. She can go to the township school with me.’

  ‘Up, up!’ Dawn lifted her arms and I bent to pick her up. Master looked at me properly, then, as if noticing someone who up till that point had been invisible. It was the first time I had talked back to him; the first time I had spoken with my own voice and not as a servant.

  ‘Of course she can,’ resumed Madam swiftly, glancing at Master with a passing coldness that I’d never seen in her before. Perhaps Madam is stronger, too, than she was before. ‘That would be for the best.’

  ‘As you wish.’ He inclined his head and turned away.

  I felt the clutch of Dawn’s arms as she wrapped them round my neck. ‘Thula thu’, she began to sing, as if to join the birds in their chorus, ‘thula thu’…’

  ‘Sir?’ I managed, but he was already walking away.

  Will you not greet your daughter, sir? Even if she may never know you’re her father, will you not greet her? Will you not see she is a fine child? That I have cared for her well?

  Madam touched me briefly on the shoulder, and followed him inside.

  I suppose I was foolish. I should have expected he would distance himself from Dawn as much as possible. After all, there was the law to consider; it made sense not to reveal himself to her as her father. Yet something else struck me in Master. Something behind his shuttered face, something beyond his unwillingness to greet his child, something besides the withering that had so reduced his body. It took me a while to understand what it was. It worried me through dinner – which a chattering Dawn and I ate in the kitchen while Madam and Master dined in uneasy silence next door – it worried me through the washing-up, it worried me through the pegging out of the cloths on the line in the familiar soft purple of evening.

  It came to me later as I lay in the kaia and listened to the tap of the thorn tree on the tin roof and watched Dawn finally asleep in her smart cot and waited for the hoot of the owl in the kaffirboom, and wondered if I had made the right decision to return. It was a thing that I had grown used
to in the township but never seen in Cradock House before.

  It was disgust. Master looked at Dawn with disgust: that worse version of dismay that he had shown towards the bond between his son and myself. Disgust like Auntie showed, like Silas showed, like those in the street who turned away from the evidence of my sin. Madam did not see it. She did not recognise it on Master’s face. And I am grateful, for it would have hurt her even more than she was hurt already.

  How was it that a man could look upon his own child – his own blood – in the way that a stranger would? How was it possible that there could be no stirring in his heart for his own daughter? Then I remembered what Lindiwe had said to me on the day Dawn was born. She said that God was not like the white man. He did not hate Dawn for my sin. So I should have expected that Master might do so. I should have expected him to turn away from his daughter. I should have expected his disgust.

  For white people, the dividing power of skin is clearly greater than the closest ties of blood.

  Chapter 34

  Briefly:

  Ada has returned with Dawn. The first meeting with Edward was strained but we managed.

  The child is tremendously appealing, and having Ada back is, for me, the return of a beloved daughter.

  Will the law leave us alone? And what of our friends?

  I must take each day as it comes.

  I cannot write of this to Ireland.

  ‘Ada! Ada!’ Mrs Pumile waved a hand through the hedge as I stepped out of the kaia that first morning after a sound night’s sleep for both Dawn and me. A soft bed, no unnerving shouts from nearby huts, no trek to fetch water at first light with Dawn heavy on my back.

  ‘Where you been? Your Madam has been so worried!’

  ‘I have been away,’ I began.

  ‘Mama?’ Dawn crawled down off the step in front of the kaia and ran to the hedge to see where the talking was coming from.

  I waited. For once Mrs Pumile could find no further words. I could see her eyes bulging through the hedge, I could see her mouth wide open. I could see her head trying to get around what was before her eyes. I could see her throat swallow and her tongue run round the edge of her lips.

  ‘Is it,’ she pointed towards the house, ‘is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I am a teacher, now, Mrs Pumile. In the township.’

  She stared at Dawn, seeing the skin pale as tea and the eyes blue as early-morning Karoo sky.

  ‘Not Ndwe,’ called Dawn, pointing through the hedge.

  ‘No,’ I said, scooping her up in my arms. ‘This is Mrs Pumile.’

  ‘Umile,’ said Dawn, with a smile that showed two teeth.

  As with every friend faced with the evidence of my shame, Mrs Pumile swung for several moments between condemnation and sympathy.

  ‘Your Madam asked you back?’ This I could see was causing her great difficulty. That a white Madam could be forgiving enough to welcome back the black person with whom her husband had sinned …

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She wished to give Dawn a good future.’

  ‘Your Madam,’ observed Mrs Pumile after a pause, ‘could teach many Madams how to be. Welcome back, Ada,’ she thrust her hand further through the hedge to grasp mine, ‘but do not parade the child about!’ She leant forward and hissed, ‘This apartheid never leaves us alone. Keep the child out of sight, away from visitors.’

  A call came from her kitchen. Mrs Pumile straightened her doek and yelled over her shoulder, ‘Just coming, Ma’am.’ She turned back to me and wagged a finger, ‘Keep her out of sight, Ada, out of sight.’

  But it was not possible to keep Dawn out of sight. Each day I walked down Church Street and across the Groot Vis to teach at school. Each day Dawn came with me, either on my hip or skipping alongside me. Yet the reaction that I feared most – arrest for my sin of lying with a white man and bearing him a child – did not happen. Policemen lounging outside their station near Market Square took no particular notice of the discrepancy in skin between my daughter and me. And whereas Dawn’s skin caused much talk and insults on the township streets, in white Cradock very little was said. People noticed but looked away quickly. I realised it was a part of a pattern I knew well: they didn’t want to see Dawn’s skin. If they didn’t see it, then it wasn’t really there. Like if they looked away from Master Phil and me walking side by side and stopping beneath the tree for him to tell me that he loved me, then it didn’t really happen.

  The shopkeepers on Church Street whose signs I had read, the post office where I had posted Madam’s letters for so many years, the butcher where I collected the family’s meat – and where I still looked for Jacob Mfengu – all these saw us and turned their gaze away. They never responded when Dawn smiled and waved at them. It was as if she didn’t exist. For her part, Dawn loved to enchant strangers and must have wondered, in her baby way, why she was ignored. For Dawn had no idea that she didn’t belong. She had no idea that she fell in between, like the brown water of the Groot Vis divided black from white. Dawn, as a child, was happily colour-blind.

  Master’s ignoring of Dawn within the walls of Cradock House was equally fixed. I never expected him to embrace her, but I hoped that there might be a softening, or the odd kindness. But there was not. Dawn was a constant reminder of his failure, the living expression of his disgust. An inside wound that would eat away at him, like the memories of war and ghosts had eaten away at young Master Phil until there was nothing left of him. I wonder if Master recognised this wound in himself. I wonder if he knew its hunger.

  I could see this injury in Master, but he kept it well hidden from Madam. Most evenings she sat upright in her chair opposite him and never saw it in his face or heard it in what he said, for their talk was of ordinary things. From the crack in the door I overheard them discussing Dawn from time to time, and Master did so with detachment, as if it was young Master Phil’s ability on the cricket field they were talking about, or Miss Rose’s reluctance over piano lessons, or my schooling from many years before that might lead to trouble later on. Madam managed to respond to his control with a clamp on her own feelings. She did not ever weep, she did not ever accuse, she did not look out of the window for Ireland. The time for tears and accusations had gone. What was left between them was an emptiness. An emptiness worse than any that had gone before. An emptiness that I believe would have struck even if I’d remained in the township, and Dawn had never been before Master’s eyes each day – for a betrayal such as his can never be undone.

  And afterwards Master would pick up his newspaper, and Madam would go to the piano and play safe nocturnes; quiet, deliberate pieces that stole through the house but didn’t echo in your mind the next day. Instead, matters beyond Cradock House occupied our heads, though we never spoke of them out loud.

  Chapter 35

  Apartheid announced itself in heavy black letters like those used during the earlier war. It filled the Midland News, and dominated the posters outside the newspaper office. For me, it spoke in the words of brave Rev. Calata fighting for his people, and the minister under the koppie calling for liberation, and the feel of a bicycle spoke under my shaking fingers. For Master it spoke in the face of a coloured child, and in the fact of breaking a law and ending up on the wrong side of a war.

  Mrs Pumile was right. This apartheid would never leave us alone. We were caught up in it, all of us, whether we wished to be or not. Failures committed in the past could now rear up again, at far greater cost. Master’s inside wound was not just about disgust; it was also about fear.

  * * *

  ‘You are lucky, Mary,’ observed Dina, leaning over the piano as I finished the morning march, ‘to find someone to give you lodging and also let you teach.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, reaching for an answer that I had prepared. ‘This Madam knew my first Madam.’

  There was no choice but to lie once more. One day Dawn, too, would see through such lies. One day I would have to tell her. I laid a
hand on her head as she played at my feet with a toy clown of young Master Phil’s that Mrs Cath – as I now called her – had given Dawn. ‘This Madam doesn’t need much housekeeping from me.’

  Dina raised an eyebrow and straightened up. ‘You seem to find the only generous whites in the world,’ she remarked.

  ‘Jam?’ said Dawn, grabbing on to Dina’s skirt. ‘Deen got jam?’

  ‘Not today, monkey.’ Dina laughed, but with an edge. ‘Ask your new Madam!’

  Dina did not intend to be mean or jealous. She was simply suspicious, suspicious that I had fallen upon such good fortune. A kaia of my own, a Madam that supported Dawn and me and asked for very little work in return, an escape from the teeming township that Dina herself would secretly have prized, for all her contempt of Madams and servants and the grovelling she believed was required between them.

  Mr Dumise, too, was suspicious.

  ‘You are well, Mary?’ he stopped me in the corridor one day, looking over the new skirt and blouse that Mrs Cath had laid on my bed in the kaia one day. The skirt was dark blue and the blouse was white – she had bought two – and they were the first truly grown-up clothes I had ever had, apart from the clothes for Master Phil’s funeral. Even Miss Rose might have been prepared to wear such clothes.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied. ‘I have been lucky as well.’

  He nodded and glanced down the passage as if checking to see it was empty. ‘You are not in further trouble?’

  I stared at him for a moment, wondering whether to explain everything, the connection to Mrs Cath, the name of Mary instead of Ada. Yet how much did a name matter? It was only a small deception compared to what I had already done in hiding the colour of Dawn until she was born.

  ‘I am not in trouble, sir. Mrs Harrington has given me shelter.’

  He looked at me, and I could tell he was reviewing all the facts that he knew about me: my arrival at school while expecting, my explanation of who taught me music, the subsequent colour of Dawn, the lack of a husband. To that he added the shock of Mrs Cath when she saw me in the hall, followed after a while by the improvement in my circumstances and dress. Everything pointed towards her family being not only my lifelong employers but also the home of Dawn’s father.