The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  The first man shrugged and turned his torch off. The kaia plunged back into darkness, Dawn’s pale skin and furious eyes disappeared into the night. Mrs Cath edged towards the door, still holding out her arm for them to leave. The second man hesitated, watching me coldly.

  ‘Come on,’ said his partner.

  The second man followed, deliberately swiping his truncheon on the door frame as he left. The blow splintered the wood and I felt Dawn shrink back on to the bed. Mrs Cath ignored it and nodded formally to me. ‘Good night, Ada.’

  And I realised that Mrs Cath’s lies had not only driven the policemen away and saved us from arrest this night, they had also saved Dawn from learning what we’d concealed from her so far: that her father was not some unknown man who took me by force – as I think she believed – but the Master.

  * * *

  Dawn was awake before I was the next morning. She had quickly fallen asleep after the men left – the young live only for the moment – whereas I lay for hours in the pressing darkness, hearing the wind worry the door within its damaged frame, and reaching over to touch her every so often to make sure she was still there. It was only as first light began to creep around the curtains that a fitful sleep came.

  ‘Who is my father, Mama?’

  I roused myself and sat up. She was on the side of the bed, arms wrapped round her knees, light eyes meeting mine in accusation. Her words wheeled about us within the kaia, like the torch of the men chasing around the walls.

  Who is my father?

  And who is mine? I wanted to ask. She is asking me as I asked my mama. I have given up knowing but it haunts me still. Is ignorance worse than knowledge? Will Dawn find more comfort in knowing, for all the shame it might bring? At least my unknown father and I shared the same skin.

  Dawn’s eyes – light as Master Phil’s – never wavered from mine. In their depths I saw the conflicting sides of my child: the biddable one at Cradock House, the wild girl of the township. I had thought it was only her skin that goaded her on, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe this second Dawn was forever in violent, unknowing escape from her father. Maybe it was the secret of his identity that drove her away from me and from white Cradock, and towards the explosive streets. For driven away she increasingly was. I feared where it might end.

  ‘Ada?’ There was a knock on the door.

  I nodded to Dawn and she went to open it, picking her way over a splinter of wood from the truncheon blow of the night. Mrs Cath had not slept either, I could see that. Her green eyes were swollen, her hair fell about her face in a cloud as it had once done at the time of Master Phil and the apricots. She reached for Dawn straight away and embraced her. I watched as Dawn’s dark head lay for a moment against Mrs Cath’s shoulder, like young Master Phil’s had lain as a sick child and as a tormented man.

  What should I say, Phil? I asked him, as Mrs Cath whispered words of comfort to my daughter. And what would we say if Dawn was your child and not Master’s? But if that was so, then surely we would have found a place where we’d be welcome despite the difference in skin between all three of us? Perhaps in Ireland, where you once said we might go … Or is such a place unheard of in the world? And such a skin discrepancy never able to be overcome?

  Mrs Cath had not even dressed before coming out to see Dawn and me. Mrs Cath normally never appeared downstairs in her nightclothes.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ada,’ she said hoarsely, meeting my gaze over Dawn’s head. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Will they come back?’ Dawn asked, breaking free of Mrs Cath’s embrace. She was tall now, taller than me, but not as tall as Mrs Cath yet. In a few years she would be a woman, a beautiful brown woman.

  Mrs Cath gathered herself after Dawn’s pulling away, and chose her words carefully. ‘I don’t think so, Dawn. I will ask Edward to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

  I opened my mouth to protest – surely if Master went to the police it would make matters worse?

  ‘Why did they come?’ Dawn persisted, looking first at me then at Mrs Cath. ‘Did they think they would find my father here?’

  ‘Oh no, child,’ I rushed in, before her words could gain any import from the pause between Mrs Cath and me. ‘It was a mistake, just as Mrs Cath said.’

  My reply hung on the air, too swift in denial, too ready with the lie.

  ‘You don’t want to tell me, do you?’

  I stared at her, this lovely, fierce girl with the dancing feet that had somehow sprung from Master and me, and I could not tell her. Not now. Perhaps not ever. If I told her, everything that we had built for her at Cradock House would collapse into the brown earth. She would be angry with Master, she would be hurt for the sake of Mrs Cath, she would disapprove of me for not having had the strength to say no. For Dawn, there would never have been a conflict between duty and loyalty. She would have made her choice of her own free will; she would have shut the door on Master if she so wished. Even as a girl, my daughter has the strength and determination of a grown woman.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ I said firmly over my quaking heart, reaching for my own hard-won township strength. ‘There are some things that are best left alone. I must answer to God the Father for what I’ve done.’

  I held myself straight, as I’d done when I showed her pale face to Mr Dumise and to Silas on the day she was born.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Dawn shrugged. She turned away to pick up the sack she used for her school books.

  ‘What do you mean, Dawn?’ Mrs Cath spoke then, clasping her hands so that the knuckles showed white.

  ‘I can always go and live in the township.’ She lifted the sack over her shoulder. ‘Then there’ll be no one for them to find when they come looking for hotnots again.’

  Chapter 39

  I fear that God may become angry with me. So far, He has allowed me to go unpunished for my sin provided I raised my daughter in a godly way. This was Lindiwe’s view, when she first comforted me over Dawn: God will forgive you if you serve Him through the child. God will keep you safe so that you can keep the child safe for His later purposes. And over the years – like when Dawn was ill, like when Mrs Cath found me in the township – I believed that God was indeed protecting me, offering me a future in order that I should protect His child. This was God’s plan.

  But now Dawn sought to leave my protection. She wished to take her chances beyond my ability to keep her safe. Did that mean that God would now have no further use for me? Or had I raised her well enough to be granted His long-lasting forgiveness?

  We have fixed the kaia door frame. Mrs Cath said she was sure we would have no further night visits. Master said nothing, not at breakfast when I saw him that morning, not when he walked past me in the kitchen later that day, not when I laid a pile of folded washing in the linen cupboard opposite his open study door. It was as if it had never happened. Like his lying with me had never happened.

  In fairness to him, I decided that Mrs Cath had probably ordered him to stay inside when the police came, reckoning that they might pick up the family resemblance if he was present, but even so his lack of the smallest sympathy towards us filled me with contempt. I opened my mouth to say something and then closed it again. Master has given us shelter so far. I must be grateful for that. I must not expect more.

  For Dawn, the midnight visit was the catalyst she had been waiting for. From the time when the policemen came, I knew it would not be long before she left. But her reasons for going had nothing to do with a fear of being arrested. She was going because she preferred to be somewhere other than Cradock House. When I tried to understand this, the fact that my daughter wished to go back to the place from where she had been rescued, I could not do so. For me, the only place that made sense was Cradock House. The only solace that there was lay in the piano.

  Each afternoon, on our way back from school, Dawn and I grew silent as we approached the house, expecting to see a police van in the driveway and rough men swaggering on the lawn. But everything was quiet –
everything except my heart and, no doubt, Mrs Cath’s, for we both knew the police were simply biding their time before the next attack.

  I played a lot of Beethoven in the weeks after the midnight visit. Its grandeur and certainty – unlike the wanderings of my beloved Debussy – became my anchor. With Beethoven you knew where you were going. Even minor keys stood up for themselves. There was time to steel your fingers, and your heart, for the crescendos.

  ‘You play more Beethoven these days, Ada,’ Mrs Cath said, coming into the house with fresh roses from the garden, for the rains had come to feed the flowers and swell the furrow with brown river water, and Mrs Cath was filling the anxious days with gardening. ‘You used to prefer the romantics.’

  I ran my hands over the gleaming keys, my fingers hesitating for a moment where the bad keys would have been on the school piano. B flat, G. ‘I like his tunes because they’re clear, Mrs Cath, and sure of themselves. You can be certain what they mean.’

  She nodded and lifted the roses towards me. ‘Smell. Aren’t they glorious? Isn’t the joy of music what we read into it? What isn’t certain? What we open ourselves up to hear?’

  ‘But she will leave, Ma’am!’ The old word slipped out before I could stop it. I struggled to keep my breath.

  Mrs Cath put a gentle hand on my shoulder and leant down to look me in the eye as she’d done when teaching me my letters. ‘Yes, one day she will. You need to be brave.’ She straightened and turned to the window like she used to years ago, looking for Ireland and the family she’d left behind and the place she’d called home where the land was soft and green and the stream fell over the cliff to the sound of Grieg. And I realised Mrs Cath had travelled this route more often than me, firstly when she was the one doing the leaving, and then when Miss Rose left, and then our dearest Phil. I remembered the many days when she wore grey dresses and reached for his badge at her throat and whipped her fingers through her scales, and I knew that I had much to learn in the matter of leavings.

  I have become inured to partings, although this one was particularly poignant. It happened when Dawn was thirteen.

  I’d seen it coming for some time and I knew we were powerless to prevent it. Dear Ada did her best but Dawn possesses a quantity of her father’s stubbornness and was utterly determined. She hopes to find her way in the township but it is a tough place and I fear she will falter. Poor child, she is very confused by her mixed race and who are we to say that we would manage any better? The ramifications of Edward’s folly will resonate long after we are all gone.

  Rosemary – from Johannesburg – says it was inevitable and seems to suggest that Ada herself should relocate too. She says the prosecutions for immorality are rising in the city and are sure to reach even our little dorp.

  Edward is much reduced in stature over all this. He finds it impossible to engage either with Ada or his daughter in any way whatsoever. He leaves it to me to provide the cohesion between the two halves of our lives – Cradock House and the kaia.

  I do the best I can, although I, too, am reduced.

  There are no dinner parties. Our friends are tentative with us.

  I take pleasure in the small things: the blue flash of Dawn’s eyes, the perfume of roses, the majesty of Ada’s Beethoven.

  Chapter 40

  I know that Lindiwe is lonely. She misses her brother. Even though Jake inhabited the shadows and only appeared rarely, she still felt protected by him. I miss him too. But now he has gone. And in Johannesburg, in a place called Sharpeville, the war on skin difference has entered a dark place. Police used their guns to kill sixty people who gave themselves up for arrest for not having a Pass.

  I found Mrs Cath in tears over it in the kitchen.

  ‘What have we done?’ she whispered. ‘Some were children – shot in the back.’

  ‘In the back, Mrs Cath?’

  ‘They were running away.’

  The townships mourned, and raged. My pupils arrived at school with their pockets weighed down by stones, ready for hurling at the police vans that prowled the perimeter of the playground. Blood stained the school’s corridors once more from their skirmishes, for the truncheons were never far away and the hard Karoo earth is not kind to young arms and legs. In class, the quiet songs I’d introduced no longer satisfied. It was fighting songs they wanted, liberation songs, songs whose words cried for power and freedom – and revenge.

  ‘Amandla!’ they shouted in the school hall, drowning Mr Dumises’s pleas for calm. ‘Amandla!’ they shouted on the streets, in defiance of the lurking police.

  Amandla ngawetu! Power is ours!

  The townships were ringed with soldiers in riot gear. They fired gas in the air that made you cry. Dawn stumbled into Cradock House one day with streaming eyes.

  ‘Here.’ Mrs Cath rushed on to the stoep where Dawn sat weeping, and set down a bowl of cold water and soft flannels. ‘Gently now.’ And together we bathed her eyes, and wiped her face.

  ‘I hate them!’ Dawn screamed, hands raking at her swollen face. ‘What have I done to them?’

  Mrs Cath and I exchanged glances. Master was in his study, he would hear her. But he never came out.

  In the township beyond Bree Street, Lindiwe’s new hut – a hut built with her own carefully hoarded money from washing – was torched the day it was finished. You would think that mud walls and a corrugated-iron roof would not burn, but burn it does if petrol is thrown upon it. The walls crumble, the carefully beaten floor melts. The iron roof tilts and its anchoring stones slide off, then it falls down and is stolen the moment it is cool enough to handle. Lindiwe does not feel targeted herself, because those that set fire to things do so randomly, but she does not like to dwell upon it. And she speaks of Jake only when asking me to check the newspapers for his name where they write about arrests and protests and the new word, terrorism.

  I remember when apartheid was a new word.

  It seems to me that words can give birth to other words that might never have come about on their own. This new word has been born out of apartheid. These burned huts and dead children and streaming eyes have been born out of apartheid.

  * * *

  Lindiwe has once again proved to be a faithful friend to me. Of her three huts that survive, one has a spare place with a bed. This, Lindiwe is prepared to give to Dawn for free so she can live in the township one day, as she is determined to do, despite my fear for her, despite the children her age that died in Sharpeville, and those that goad death on our own festering streets.

  ‘I can pay you when the time comes,’ I insisted to Lindiwe one afternoon when I was visiting. It was winter and the light was fading fast. Cooking fires were already burning. I would need to leave soon to make it out of the township in daylight. The dark was not just for robbers, now, it was for the police too. ‘And Dawn must help you with washing – it will occupy her outside of school.’ I was determined Dawn should contribute. There is nothing to be gained without work.

  Lindiwe shook her head impatiently. ‘I don’t wash any more, Ada, I look after my huts!’ She thrust a muscular arm towards the rough streets now milling with the unemployed. Without jobs, all that was left was loitering and setting fire and robbery. Even honourable people were driven to it by the emptiness in their bellies and the lack of a place to stay. ‘After the fire, and with so many squatters looking to steal a place, I must guard my huts every day.’

  I nodded. I knew it had become so. Unless you defended your possessions in the township, they would be stolen off your back, or from under your bed, or from over your head. There is no limit to what people will do if they are desperate.

  ‘Now,’ Lindiwe lifted her kettle off the paraffin stove and poured hot water into her aluminium teapot, ‘what has happened that makes Dawn want to come here? Is it your Master?’ Lindiwe has always felt that it would only be Master who would break the arrangement under which Dawn and I lived at Cradock House.

  ‘It is not Master. It is Dawn’s skin that drives her.’
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  It was what I had told Dina at school years before. Dawn might be in flight from her father as well, but in the end it came down to skin. It was ordained from the moment I lay with Master. Any child with a skin that does not belong, that is neither one thing nor the other, will always rush to extremes in an effort to find a true home.

  Lindiwe laid a hand on mine. ‘When the time comes, I will see she goes well. I’ll be her spare mother.’

  And so it was done. And when Dawn came to me one day and said she wanted to leave, I would not weep and forbid her. I would keep my tears in check and tell her that she could go provided she stayed in the hut that had been organised for her. It wasn’t a true negotiation, but more of a trade. I will let you go, my precious brown girl, provided you stay where you will be safe. For I know that I cannot keep you here. I know that Cradock House is not the refuge for you that it is for me. You need to find your music elsewhere.

  ‘I’ll be fine with Lindiwe, Mama.’ Dawn sat cross-legged on the bed in the kaia, her books in her sack, her clothes packed into my old cardboard suitcase that had once carried my few possessions across the Groot Vis to a township future.

  ‘Stay away from tsotsis that throw stones, and come back often,’ I managed, holding on to my breaking heart. ‘To see Mrs Cath, to eat…’

  ‘To see you, Mama.’ She leant forward and put her young arms round me and I rested my head on her shoulder, like Phil had rested his head upon my shoulder in the darkness of his bedroom. Dawn has always had tenderness bound up within her wildness. In some ways, it is the tenderness that I fear for the most.

  * * *

  Since she has moved, Dawn has promised that she will meet me in the hall before assembly each morning. Sometimes she doesn’t come, and I struggle to play the march, imagining what might have happened. Every night, alone in the kaia with its fixed door, I worry that she may never reappear. The dead youngsters of Sharpeville haunt me.