The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  I stumbled to the door through which they’d brought me, not sure if it was a trick, some other way to get a confession.

  ‘Now go! Voetsak!’

  I stepped out, turned back to see what was to happen next, and felt rather than saw the door slam in my face. For some time I stood swaying on the concrete step, my vision blurring and then clearing. It was night. The river rushed heavily in the background. There must have been rain. Wind stirred the trees on the pavement. The stars that had been hidden now burst from their places in the sky. No one opened the door behind me. I sat down on the step and tried to put on my shoes with my swollen fingers. It took a long time, and all through the struggle I waited for the door to open, for someone to reach out and seize me. My shoulders hunched themselves in anticipation of a blow to my head. Then the shouting, and the questions starting all over again …

  No one came.

  I got up and hobbled on to the road. My feet had also swelled and the shoes began to cut into my flesh so I sat down again and took them off.

  I don’t remember how it was that I managed to get along Bree Street with my damaged feet, and then across Church, and then along Dundas Street to Cradock House. But perhaps God the Father came to my rescue, not with words in my ear, but with the means to keep me alive. I found myself creeping into the garden of a smart house where there was a tap. I turned it on and opened my cracked lips to the stream of water and drank and drank until the sweet water overflowed from my mouth and wet my shirt and ran down my legs.

  It was a long way from the jail to Cradock House. Stones on the pavement cut my feet and I stumbled often. The trees that during daylight gave welcoming shade now cast threatening shadows like men advancing in war, or men waiting in ambush once again, men intent on killing me outside prison walls where they could not be blamed.

  The furrow was running with river water. Dogs barked as I made my clumsy way. In one house, a light appeared and a face leant out of the window to check for burglars.

  Voetsak, they’d said to me. It’s what you say to dogs.

  Then, after what seemed hours, there was the gravel driveway and the sturdy outline of Cradock House. And the footpath leading past the angled spikes of strelitzia flowers – like broken spears in the night. From the back garden loomed the kaffirboom, as if waiting for me to hang washing on the line, as if ready to listen once more to Phil talk of war and the fear of it.

  ‘Mrs Cath,’ I croaked, rapping weakly on the front door, ‘Mrs Cath…’

  And then she was there, in her blue nightgown, with her hair floating in a cloud about her face.

  ‘Ada, thank God! Thank God!’ She knelt down and embraced me where I lay on the wooden stoep that I have scrubbed so often in my life.

  ‘No orders,’ I muttered, my vision blurring again, ‘nothing of Dawn.’

  Chapter 50

  I have never sought to be well known. I have preferred the shadows ever since my sin of lying with a white man – and the shame that walks with me every day because of it. But it seems I am no longer allowed to sit on the side. People seek me out now, rough people that I have always shied away from on street corners, people who are part of the struggle, people who live underground lives, people who talk of Mandela, people who see me as a rallying figure.

  ‘You can speak out!’ they hiss with excitement, while looking over their shoulders. ‘Your name has been in the papers – the police can’t touch you any more! The compensation we’re getting is because of you!’

  But I don’t like this. I’m not used to being at the front. And I don’t want to preserve what has happened in the jail on Bree Street – I want it to go away. I followed what God said, I tried to make a difference. I tried to show there was another way to make a revolution, a quieter way than with guns and shack-burning and confrontation. I can’t say if my way succeeded, I can’t say if it made those in power think again, but what it did do was leave me sleepless with the terror of it, and unable to control my body that I once took for granted.

  I am ashamed to say that my jail experience has become a badge of honour for others to notice, and the reason for further upheaval, rather than a check upon it. And as for those who think I am safe to speak out now because of my name in the papers, they are wrong. The police can take me whenever they want to. I am being watched again, I see a van on a street corner as I walk by, with a policeman speaking on the radio. The Midland News and the paper overseas will care less the next time.

  The policeman meets my eye. I look away. I pray they do not find Dawn. I want to get back to my classroom with my wild pupils and play jazz for them, and show them how music can set us free. I want to ease my shaking fingers and my lame arm into some pure Mozart. I want to return to the sweet distraction of Debussy. Only the piano can cure me. Only the piano can help me forget.

  In the matter of compensation, it is hard to know if my threat to the Superintendent actually worked. The letters were never published in the Midland News, or overseas, and there was no detail of my arrest, although Mrs Cath says the papers printed my name and were aware of why I was in jail, and sent a reporter to check I was alive. Nevertheless, it’s true that compensation has now been agreed, and people are moving to Lingelihle to their new homes made of brick, but I can’t claim that it is because of me. And somehow it no longer matters, in view of what came afterwards. For, all through the days I spent in bed at Cradock House while Mrs Cath bathed my still-trembling hands in cool water and rubbed them with sheep lanolin, the rain fell and the Groot Vis rose and rose.

  Mrs Pumile, looking in nervously from next door – perhaps more due to my new reputation than the rising waters – insisted it was a sign, but she would not say what such a sign meant. The swelling river and its shadow, the gathering revolution, were also on Mrs Cath’s mind as she nursed me, but she said nothing. She didn’t have to. I heard it in her fingers when she played. Liszt’s La Campanella taken too slowly, arpeggios lacking bite …

  I could hear the river clearly through the kaia door.

  At first it was a brisk eddy, then a howl of demented water that went way beyond the Beethoven rush of my youth, or the tumbling Grieg of Mrs Cath’s Irish stream. This flood had no musical equivalent, and it raged at a pitch both higher and lower than anything I’d ever heard on the piano. The drift disappeared beneath angry waves. The washing rocks gave birth to huge whirlpools. The legs of the iron bridge were choked with uprooted trees and the carcasses of drowned animals. Those township residents on the move to Lingelihle had to wade through torrents as the skies poured for days without end. ‘It is the ancestors,’ I heard Veronica say with a fearful glance upwards. ‘They weep because we’re leaving our old places behind.’

  Despite the rain, Lindiwe came to visit me.

  ‘There is talk of you,’ she whispered nervously, shaking out her battered umbrella. ‘They want you to speak at a rally at St James.’ Lindiwe’s face always showed what she was thinking. She feared what I had done, and what it might mean for those around me. She already lived with the possibility that one day the police could arrest her for the crimes of her brother. Lindiwe is no coward – indeed I have never known anyone as brave – but she is practical. She knows that taking a stand can be foolhardy against truncheons and tear gas and jails that starve you to death. She is determined to live through the struggle and not be consumed by it. She wants to get to the other side of liberation.

  ‘They won’t leave you alone, now,’ she murmured. ‘Not after this.’

  ‘You mean the police?’

  ‘No, the struggle—’

  ‘Ada?’ There was a flurry of knocks on the door. I felt my hands begin to shake, but these were not blows on the door, it was not night. Mrs Cath hurried into the room, holding Master’s golf umbrella at her side. She was wearing rubber boots on her feet, and thick gardening gloves over her strong hands. Red spots stood out on her cheeks.

  ‘Oh!’ She stopped, then came forward with a gloved hand outstretched to welcome Lindiwe. ‘Good morn
ing, Lindiwe. How did you manage on the roads? Bree Street is flooding! They’re calling for help to save the houses. You must be cold,’ she went on, seeing her damp clothes. ‘Here, wrap Miriam’s shawl about you. Ada,’ she turned to me, ‘there’s no time to lose. I’m going to see what I can do. I’ll lock the front door but the back will be open—’

  ‘Be careful, Ma’am,’ Lindiwe said quietly. ‘The river is angry.’

  Mrs Cath looked at her, then at me, and nodded, for we knew more about the Groot Vis than she did. We had forded the river and washed in its brown waters, we had learnt how its usual mood of sluggishness could swell to one of frenzy. Like an undercurrent turns a crowd …

  ‘Ada.’ She glanced nervously at the garden behind her, where the grass was slowly sinking beneath veins of rainwater. ‘Cradock House…’

  ‘I’ll get up, Mrs Cath.’ I pushed away the bedcovers and reached for my clothes, ignoring the pounding in my head that came upon me so often these days. ‘I’ll watch for the water.’

  ‘Bless you.’ She managed a smile, wrestled the umbrella open and set off across the soaked lawn. The hem of her dress clung wetly to her boots. I watched her go. Mrs Cath was not young any more, she should not be doing heavy work. It was I who should be going, and she who should be remaining at home.

  ‘You must go too,’ I said to Lindiwe, as I climbed into my skirt and an old jersey. ‘You need to watch out for your new house.’ For the huts that Lindiwe had built with her own hands were already gone, pushed by council bulldozers into the Karoo earth, and all she had was her new place in Lingelihle, and it still waited for glass in its windows.

  Chapter 51

  They called it the Great Flood.

  The Karoo has always been a place of dust and little rain, so when the rain does come, the hard earth is never ready for it and shrugs it off and lets it drain into the Groot Vis, instead of welcoming it into the ground to make the soil soft for planting. During our Great Flood, the water was not content just to surge, but chose to rip out everything in its path. It was this debris that choked the bridge and made the water back up behind it in a vast dam, and steadily rise above the riverbank until with a mighty gush it overflowed into the nearby streets. This made it not just a normal flood, but a Great Flood.

  It soon became clear that white Cradock had suffered more than black Cradock. Or perhaps it was the case that white Cradock had more to lose. Many of the houses along Bree Street were washed away or so badly damaged they had to be pulled down. St Peter’s survived, but few other buildings. The maps and documents in the town engineer’s office floated away. The jail’s records were only partly saved. I wondered if the record of my own arrest – so fresh, so likely to be at the top of the pile – was amongst those swept away by the raging tide and, if so, whether I might slip back into the shadows once more. For white people, if there’s no paperwork, then it never really happened.

  Cradock House, and our end of Dundas Street, somehow escaped the Great Flood. The brown water prowled along the street like a hungry animal but never quite reached the house.

  Mrs Cath tried to help save some of the furniture and paintings from the magistrate’s house on the corner of Church and Bree. The magistrate himself, returning from a case of stock theft in the Graaff-Reinet district, was stranded on the far side of the Groot Vis and could only watch. The floodwaters were already surging ankle deep through the house when she arrived. Mrs Cath and Mrs Maisie, the magistrate’s wife, carried out the Dutch family Bible and the rare books from the library, before rescuing the small riempie stools and the fabled Baines painting that hung in the hallway. By then the dark waters were swirling too deeply, and the rest of the furniture – the yellow-wood dining table, the brocade armchairs – had to be abandoned.

  ‘Such a tragedy, Ada!’ she gasped upon her return, dress caked with mud and hair plastered to her head from the relentless rain. ‘Maisie wept. I wept. The water just kept rising, like the beach as the tide comes in – a tide of mud. We couldn’t save the house. Oh God,’ she cried, pressing her hand to her chest, ‘this is the whirlwind, I know it is.’

  ‘Come,’ I said, helping her off with her sodden boots, ‘drink your tea, eat some of this date loaf. Then you must rest, Ma’am.’

  ‘You’re so good to me. I don’t know what I’d do…’

  In the half-demolished township at the end of Bree Street, many of the huts not already flattened gave up and toppled into the waters of their own accord. If the town council had wanted a means aside from compensation to encourage blacks to move to the new township, nature provided it. My school across the Groot Vis was inundated and the brown upright piano with its defective keys lost to me forever. So, too, the battered desks, the dusty red curtains with their trailing hems, Mr Dumise’s cramped office, the yard for Veronica’s chickens, the hall where my students sang and danced to their own beat. So, too, the shacks and huts of the lower Lococamp. All of it disappeared under the water and, when that subsided, lay forever buried under a slick layer of dark Karoo mud.

  The community across the Groot Vis was gone.

  Now there was no choice about whether to move or not. White men and their laws made no difference. My quest for compensation made no difference. The river had spoken. The river had determined the future.

  Chapter 52

  Mrs Cath stayed in bed. After a week, I walked downtown to Dr Wilmott’s surgery. The streets were paved with a black mud that sucked at my shoes. The lamp posts showed the watermark of how high the river had come. Many pepper trees lay on their sides, their roots exposed like dirty underwear. I searched with my eyes for the tree where Phil and I had stood when he told me he loved me, and the tumbling bougainvillea nearby, but both were gone, overwhelmed by a sea of mud and broken branches.

  Such was the destruction, the policing of skin difference and its laws faded before the larger crisis. In those first days, police vans went about the business of rescue rather than pursuing blacks for Pass offences. Truckloads of casual labourers were picked up in the township and set to work freeing the bridge of its collar of congested trees and dead animals. White and black technicians scaled poles to restore the telephone cables. The sun shone from a pale, apologetic sky.

  ‘Mrs Harrington is not well,’ I said to the lady in the pink dress behind the desk at Dr Wilmott’s surgery.

  ‘Mrs Harrington will call us, I’m sure,’ she said, turning back to her typewriter and inserting a fresh sheet of paper.

  ‘She does not know that she isn’t well,’ I said.

  Several women waiting to see the doctor looked at one another and then looked down at their magazines. I was not supposed to be in their waiting room. Dr Wilmott had a separate entrance for his black patients, like the chemist that cured Dawn had had a separate entrance for blacks.

  ‘Go and sit in the non-European waiting room,’ the lady said without looking at me, and briskly turned the roller at the top of her machine to feed the paper through.

  So I did. I waited quite some time until the doctor had seen all the people in the white waiting room.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ Dr Wilmott was old, now, as old as Master had been when he died. ‘Why, it’s the Harrington maid. What seems to be the problem?’

  ‘It is my Madam,’ I said. ‘She is sick, sir, but she does not know it.’

  He looked at me, and I wondered if he remembered that he was the one who delivered me in Cradock House, and he was the one that closed my mother Miriam’s eyes in death, and that I was the one who had borne Master’s child.

  ‘She helped during the flood, and she doesn’t want to get up.’

  ‘Well then, she should take all the rest she needs. Now,’ he made to return to the white waiting room that was filling up once more, ‘I have many more patients. The floods, you see.’

  I could tell he didn’t believe me because in his eyes I was only the Harrington maid. He also didn’t know that I was all that was left of Mrs Cath’s family, for Miss Rose had never called even when the
telephones had started working again, even though the floods had been on the radio news. But I wouldn’t let him go. Doctors are not always right. After all, he was the one who believed Phil was no longer ill.

  ‘You must call and see her. Or I will have to take her to the hospital.’

  He stared at me, his face reddening, his hands fiddling with the buttons on his white coat, his thin hair standing up on his head as if in outrage at my behaviour, my rudeness, my insistence. My sin.

  ‘You will do no such thing,’ he boomed, like he’d boomed at my dear young Master. ‘Now leave. I will call on Mrs Harrington during my afternoon rounds.’

  * * *

  ‘Who is this?’ There was no mistaking the quick, annoyed voice. I could almost see her tossing that beautiful yellow hair, rolling those slate-blue eyes.

  ‘It is Ada, Miss Rose. From Cradock. Ada Mabuse.’

  ‘What is it that you want? Where did you get this number?’

  I waited for a moment, not for the purpose of negotiation, but to remember the words I’d practised in my head for I am not used to the telephone. I have no need to use it because no one that I know possesses one. I would have no one to call.

  ‘Ada? Just get on with it, please.’ Miss Rose’s voice was as crisp – and as cold – as the frost beneath my bare feet in winter when I fetched the milk from the gate.

  ‘It’s Mrs Cath,’ I said. ‘She is not well.’

  There was a pause from the other end.

  ‘Was the house damaged? In the flood?’

  ‘No. But Mrs Cath helped to save other houses, and now she is ill.’

  ‘Why hasn’t Dr Wilmott phoned me? Why does he get the maid to call?’

  I flinched at the withering note she put on ‘maid’. Mrs Pumile was right. She always said Miss Rose would never grow out of her rudeness.