Dancing Lessons (16 page)

“No,” he said, and I turned to see him put his hat back on. “See you later.” He inclined his head towards us both, so I never knew to whom this promise was addressed. I assumed it was to me. I didn't know where he was going, why he wasn't coming with us, but how could he not return?

At first I thought that Ma D's children were so indifferent to her that she served as nothing more than a food factory for them, sending cooked meals and cakes over to the Bull Pen, leaving food for her daughter in the kitchen for whenever she chose to eat. She never ate with us. Hardly spoke to us at all. It was only after I was there for a while that I realized Ma D was still the powerful matriarch, for they deferred to her on everything important in their lives.

That day, Ma D took me in and tried to feed me, though the lump in my throat prevented me from swallowing. She made me wash up and she gave me a white cotton nightie and a cup of cocoa and put me to bed, asking no questions, murmuring nothing but comforting words all the while. She opened a big chest to take out clean sheets and pillowcases, releasing into the air the familiar aroma of dried khus khus root that scented the linen and left me aching even more, as if I had lost something precious but didn't know what it was. “Don't worry, my dear, everything will seem better in the morning,” Ma D murmured as she bustled about. “It will work out, you'll see. It's not the end of the world.” But it was for me. He hadn't returned. That was all I could think of as I spent the night trying to choke down my sobs. That was all that drummed in my head until near morning when I fell into a restless sleep.

I don't know what Sam told his mother, but the first thing she did, I learned later, was to write to Miss Celia. By the time the messenger arrived, they already knew who I had run off with, and how. Aunt Zena returned a note to say on behalf of her mother and the rest of the Richards family, they never wanted to see me again as long as I lived. I was an ungrateful wretch, and a thief to boot.

Ma D was more disturbed by this last piece of news than all the rest, for she didn't immediately show me the letter. She only said she had a note from Aunt Zena to say I had stolen something from her. Had I taken anything? All this in a very gentle voice, and perhaps surprised, too, for she could see I had come empty-handed. It was only then that I remembered the grocery money in my pinafore pocket still, along with the list for Mr. Lue. It didn't matter that Ma D returned the money the very next day, with an explanation, I was forever tarred with the designation of thief. My family declared that nothing on earth would move them to take me back. The messenger was given a cardboard box—Drax Soap—packed with all my worldly goods. It was addressed to “Mrs. Daisy Samphire,” for they never communicated directly with me.

Once I settled in, I was so glad to be away from their constricting care that it took me a while to realize the enormity of what I had done. They were the only family I had. With a child's optimism I thought their anger would never last, they would come around, I would be able at least to visit again, but to the day she died, Aunt Zena did not speak to me. Miss Celia never did either, her head as high as Aunt Zena's when they passed my house. But when my first child was born, someone sent me a beautiful piece of linen and a five-pound note. Although the bearer said she couldn't reveal who it was, I knew it could be no one but Miss Celia. I was so touched, I gave my baby the middle name Celia and I saved up the linen until she and my second daughter, Shirley, were old enough and I made it into dresses for them one Christmas.

The day the bearer came I was sitting on the veranda with my baby in the cradle beside me, studying her sleeping face, my feelings oscillating between elation and utter despair from the first moment I looked at her, wondering if I would ever be up to the task. From the kitchen I could vaguely hear the sounds of Millie as she cleaned up and prepared to leave for home. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw a patch of blue sticking out from behind the cedar tree near the road and my heart leapt, but when I stared it vanished and just then I was distracted by Millie's shout from the back to tell me she was going.

As soon as Millie disappeared down the road, a figure in navy blue emerged from behind the tree and approached me, fingers to her lips. I nearly died laughing. It was Miss McDonald, the village dressmaker, a lady so full of secrets and so scared of spilling any that she spent her days entirely buttoned up. Literally. Though she was renowned for making the most exquisite dresses, she herself affected plainness of garment; her only concessions to adornment were the buttons that she liberally added to her own clothing. She was wearing a simple paisley print shirtwaist with a self-made belt, and matching covered buttons marching in close order all the way up the front, right to the high neck she affected. There were buttons in tight rows holding the cuffs of the long sleeves together. She never exposed more flesh than she could help. Miss Mac was childless, tall and thin, so of course all the children called her Macaroni, though she wasn't round but totally flat from whatever angle she was viewed. As she approached I smiled at a vision that floated into my head of her lying on her back with the row of buttons showing above her supine body like a second backbone. Her own backbone she carried very straight from the tips of her sensible laced-up shoes and thick stockings to her greying hair. Miss Mac was noted for her dignity.

Her hair was the one thing she could not control. She pulled it severely back into a little bun and wore a hairnet, but wiry wisps always haloed around her head and softened her rather hawkish features. The source of these very European features and brown skin was the only thing Miss Mac never wanted kept secret. Everyone knew her father was a Staunton, the white Busha of the property where her mother worked as a field labourer, who never acknowledged the child. But that mattered little to Miss Mac's mother, who had rejoiced in her brown-skin girl and passed on to her ridiculous notions of her genealogy. Poor Miss Mac acted as if she were way above the group she rightly belonged to, yet she was constantly rebuffed by the one to which she yearned to belong. Such as never once being allowed to enter the Richardses' house through the front door. Of all the people I knew in my childhood, Miss Mac for all her silliness was the one with whom I could feel an affinity, for I sensed she was as out of place in the world as I was.

“My dear Miss G,” she greeted me, like everyone else acknowledging my newly married status by giving a handle to my name. She moved to bend over the cradle and smiled and cooed. “How you keeping? How is the little one?”

“Fine, Miss Mac.”

She looked around. “You one here?”

I nodded. She was fishing in her large cloth bag with the wooden handles at the same time she was looking around in all directions. Satisfied that we were not overheard, she brought out a parcel in brown paper tied with string.

“Take it,” she whispered. “Don't tell a soul.”

“Thank you, Miss Mac,” I muttered and took the parcel, wondering why all the secrecy.

“No, no, don't thank me, child,” she whispered. “Someone asked me to bring it to you.” And then, I swear, she winked and tapped her nose with her finger as she took a seat on the bench beside me.

“Someone? Who? What is it?” I was so mystified that I made no attempt to open the package.

“Someone who wish you well. But don't want other people to know she send you anything. She don't want a fuss so she ask me to bring it. Our little secret. But go on, open it,” she urged. “There's a nice piece of cloth that I will make into a lovely dress for you, as soon as you get back your figure you can wear it to the christening. A five-pound note to buy something for baby.”

Five pounds! That seemed such a fortune I knew it couldn't have come from Miss Mac herself.

“Miss Mac, who?” My mind was racing as I feverishly tore the parcel apart and found inside the piece of yellow linen, neatly folded, and a white envelope with the money inside. To my great disappointment, no note or anything written on the envelope. I put the money back inside the envelope and held it in my hand, my heart thumping in my chest. The only person I could think of was Miss Celia, but why couldn't she have sent it to me openly, or even brought it herself? Didn't she want to see her great-grandchild?

Miss Mac might have been reading my thoughts. “It's the other one,” she whispered. “She still vex. She don't want them to have nothing to do with you.” She must have noticed that my eyes were filling with tears, for she patted my hand. “Just wait, my child. Time longer than rope. One day they will come around. You can't do anything for now.”

When I said nothing she added, “Just remember, she don't want anyone to know, especially certain people. I will tell her you send thanks. But this is a secret between the three of us. Not even Sam to know.” Miss Mac actually took my hand as she said this and held it against her bony chest as if she were forcing me to seal a pact. I almost laughed at the conspiratorial look in her eyes.

“Okay, Miss Mac,” I mumbled. “Please tell her thanks for me. And tell her if—if she wanted to see—” but I got so choked up, I could go no further.

“Never mind, my child.”

Miss Mac and I sat there for a while, neither of us speaking, and then she patted my knee and got up to go. She was halfway to the gate when she turned back and said in a rush, “Miss G, you have to learn patience. Sometime you have to wait a whole lifetime for someone to acknowledge you, you know. And then they could die and it would never happen.” She had a strange bitterness in her voice as she said the last part in a rush. She turned quickly and set off with a firm stride, her straight nose leading the way.

I hid the parcel under the mattress. When Sam came home I told him I wanted to name the baby Celia, but he didn't seem very keen. “Why,” he asked, “after the way they treat you?” I didn't answer and he didn't pursue it, knowing full well it was a story that didn't show him in a particularly good light. We ended up calling the baby June—Sam's choice, with Celia as her middle name. But Celia is the name she came to be known by.

Shirley, our second daughter, had Daisy as her middle name after Sam's mother. I wanted to name one of my daughters after my mother too, only to realize that I did not know my own mother's name. I had never even seen my own birth certificate. It had remained the property of those whose property I became—Miss Celia and then my husband, for they would have needed one when I got married. But I never thought to ask Ma D or Sam for it. At the time everything was arranged for me, I didn't need it myself, and it never occurred to me that my mother's name would have been on it. No one had ever spoken of my mother in my hearing, except to name her a slut. How could it be that I knew nothing at all about her, this woman who bore me? How could she have so offended the Richards women, apart from being, as I suspected, black, poor, without family, and forcing them to take an unwanted orphan into their care?

Of course I never thought of asking Ma D or anyone from my district. Even my father's other brothers and sisters, who came to visit their mother and sister from time to time. I was too cowed by the Richards women to think other people would have known what I most wanted to know. But could it also have been that they had made me so ashamed of her I was afraid of catching the disease of her poverty, her lowly origins, her blackness, her inability to survive? For how many times had I created a fantasy mother—echoes of a white pre-Raphaelite woman, I later realized—that bore no relation to the real? How many times did I hate her for leaving me? How much grief and guilt did I feel in the certain knowledge that it was I who had caused her to go?

THE WAY THEY TALKED
about me when I got married and moved back into the district with Sam, two years after I left! Think I didn't know? Think I didn't know how they passed by and called out, stopped to visit, all the women I'd known all my life, so they could smile to my face and snicker behind my back? Because after all I had been tossed out by the district's leading family, the arbiters of manners and good taste, and serve me right, what would I do now I'd been cast down low? Sam's little child-bride. As if they knew more than I did what that meant. Good old Sam! The women all hugged him and the men slapped him on the back as if he had gotten into the henhouse by stealth and snatched something away from the hens. Sly mongoose! Was that saying something about their attitude to the hens? Or did they know that the treasure was not a pretty little chick but an unhatched egg? Not one of them hugged me. But then, I wasn't huggable, I was already folded into myself, and the prickly stuff that Ma D had managed to smooth away was bursting into growth again as if the egg was turning into a spiny sea urchin. I didn't speak to them either. Opened and closed my mouth just enough so I would not seem rude. Not from malice, as they thought. Or false pride. Though pride enough I had. The smile was always just hovering behind my lips, the words on the tip of my tongue. I couldn't get them out. They must have remembered how I was from before. It wasn't that long ago, and they could go away with the thought that marriage hadn't changed me and wonder why that was so. Hadn't I achieved the status that was every girl's dream? A man every woman wanted? After a time they couldn't be bothered and left me more or less alone, which suited me fine. It made my sorrow invisible and more easily borne if there was no one to remark on it. No one to spread it abroad as news. All I ever made them see was my garden flourishing, my laundry out every Monday like every good wife's, and, too soon, nappies on the line forever.

Things might have turned out differently if we hadn't gone back there, living just a mile away from the Richards house with Aunt Zena throwing out words and poisoning the atmosphere. If we'd gone to a place that was new to both of us. Or even if we had stayed down on the family property with Ma D to support me. But I had nothing to do with any of it. Nor did Sam, I think. It was all Ma D's doing. I got the feeling she wanted me and Sam to get away from there, as far from the rest of them as we could. A cousin of theirs who was living in what was to become our little house moved out just then and left it empty. A sign, as far as Ma D was concerned.