The Housemaid's Daughter (12 page)

The Master came to me three times. We never spoke a word. His footsteps down the corridor, turning from the kitchen, were the only signal I had.

Earlier, each evening, I would still play the piano. I had wondered whether to stop but then thought he would find it strange if I did. It seemed to me that the darkness chased away the sunset too quickly on those nights, bringing with it a terrible gloom that seized my fingers, made my playing forced and filled me with uncertainty over whether he would come tonight.

‘Good night, Master.’

‘Thank you, Ada.’

When I heard his steps, I would take off my nightdress and lie down on the bed that I’d once shared with my mother Miriam. He would tap on the door and then enter, turning off the light as soon as he came in. He would come to the side of the bed and stand there for a while and then reach one hand down and touch me.

And the next day I would wash the sheets and sweep the floor and make him breakfast and dinner as if nothing had changed. And he would work and eat and read the newspaper and write to Madam – oh, Madam, forgive me, God forgive me – in Johannesburg with Miss Rose who was in trouble.

Chapter 16

I
 used to wonder what it would be like with young men, the ones who caught my eye on the street when I went to the post office or when I walked with my mother to visit my aunt on Thursday afternoons off. They were bold, though, these young men. Especially when they came back from initiation –
abakwetha
– and they wore their new clothes around town, looking out for a wife.

‘Don’t look at him!’ my mother Miriam warned when I cast teenage eyes at one particularly promising boy in well-pressed khaki trousers on the corner of Market Street. ‘He will find out who you are if he wants to.’

But he never did. And once young Master Phil was back from the war, my life was confined to Cradock House anyway, and the young men who might have taken the trouble to pursue me cast their eyes elsewhere. Except for Jacob Mfengu from the butcher’s. And he was not bold, but respectful. I had hoped that this was my chance. But I never heard from him again, although the touch of his warm hand stayed on my skin for many seasons.

And then my mother became ill and I needed to nurse her and take on her duties in the house. The possibility of a young man, the possibility even of marriage, had to be put aside.

‘You needn’t do everything yourself, Ada,’ Madam said, finding me drooping over the ironing board one day. ‘I can get Mrs Pumile from next door to help out.’

‘No need, Madam,’ I said, straightening up. Mrs Pumile would rob Madam before the first day was over. ‘I’ll be finished soon.’

When young Master Phil died, I still had Mama. But when Mama died, I had no one but Madam and Master. And when Madam went to visit Miss Rose in Johannesburg, I had only Master. And after that I had shame. It stayed out of sight at first but then it grew within me and began to swell my body. And it followed me every day for the rest of my life.

Tomorrow I disembark.

Tomorrow I marry Edward in the cathedral on the slopes of Table Mountain.

My wedding dress is ironed and laid out ready, the embroidered skirt double-hemmed to manage the uneven streets of the port. My short veil – a gift from the village school – hangs over the chair.

Mrs Wetherspoon has promised me a bouquet of fresh pink roses, although we do not know if it is the season for them in the Cape. Reverend Wetherspoon will give me away in morning dress and dog collar.

We are all rising at dawn to see the mountain appear over the horizon. When I see it I will know that there can be no turning back.

I have refused Charles Saunders, and he understands that I must do my duty. But I shall always wonder how it might have been.

How it might have been to marry a man with whom I felt a quickening such as I’ve never known before
…

At first, of course, I didn’t know what was happening. My work dress tightened, my body felt tender. The natural cycle my mother Miriam had told me about stopped. In Johannesburg, Miss Rose remained in some sort of trouble, Master said. His eyebrows drew together, his lips tightened and he turned away to go into the study.

So Madam stayed away.

Madam, who could have told me what was happening to my body, but who would never have needed to do so if she’d remained in Cradock. Madam, whom I had betrayed. Madam, from whom I could never receive – or deserve – forgiveness.

I couldn’t go to Dr Wilmott who had delivered me, who had treated young Master Phil, who had closed my mother Miriam’s eyes in death. He would have to tell Master or Madam. So, on one of my Thursdays off, I put my Pass in my pocket and walked across the iron bridge over the Groot Vis to my aunt in the small township by the Lococamp.

‘It is my body,’ I said, sitting with her in her one-roomed shack. My aunt was old by then, older than my mother Miriam would have been, and she had seen girls like me before. She leant over and put her hand on my stomach.

‘Which boy did this? You must marry him!’ she said, heaving the pot of hot water for tea off the fire. ‘You got no family, so he won’t have to pay bride price.’

But I said there was no particular boy.

And she slapped her hand against her
doek,
then she slapped me a little for being with more than one boy and having no shame. She said I was no better than Miss Rose in trouble in Johannesburg. I took the beating and said nothing. She told me of a man who dealt with babies and pushed me out of her shack and left me to walk the dusty alleys until I found the man she talked of. It was getting dark by then and the streets had no lights and gangs of boys roamed around and thin dogs followed me. Smoke from cooking fires hung over the shacks and made the sky grey long before it would have been grey over Cradock House. It reminded me of KwaZakhele when I had buried my mother Miriam. So I prayed as I walked, prayed to calm my fear of the darkness and the rough people who jostled me. And I prayed to Mama to tell me what to do. But Mama did not answer me, and God Himself was silent for I had sinned with my Master and for that there was no forgiveness.

The doctor, when I found him, was a kind man. He wore a stained white coat, but he also carried a tube with a metal disc like the one the doctor had used on young Master Phil and so I trusted him. There was a queue of people to see him in his tiny two-roomed house. They sat all over the floor inside and spilled out on to the bare earth outside. Wounded youngsters spilling blood, mothers nursing crying babies, old men with terrible coughs.

It was late by the time the doctor had treated all of the wounded, crying, coughing patients but even though he must have been tired, he was still kind. He told me that I was going to have a baby. He also told me that I should tell the father of the baby because I was a fine young woman who would bear many more babies for my fine young man.

‘It is not a fine young man, sir.’

‘An older man can be just as fine,’ he reassured me with a weary smile. ‘He can provide more for his children.’

‘It is my Master.’

He sat down on a bench against the peeling wall. His shoulders slumped and I wondered why.

‘Then you will need my help.’

‘To help the baby get born?’

‘Oh, child.’ He shook his head where he’d leant it against the wall. ‘You should not be having this baby.’

‘But why, sir?’ What was this? Was he a
sangoma
– a witch doctor? Did he see things that I could not see?

‘The child will be cursed with a pale skin, paler than yours and mine,’ he pointed at his own black arm, ‘but not as pale as your Master’s.’

‘He will be coloured?’ I cried.

I knew coloureds. They lived halfway between Madam and Master’s people and halfway to black people. They were not one, and they were not the other. Only during the war, when they became soldiers and fought alongside white soldiers, had people been proud of them. But nowadays they belonged nowhere.

I had not known about inheritance. I had not known that this was how coloured people were made: that black people could be diluted and that white people could be darkened and the result would be a boy who belonged nowhere. And why did I think it would be a boy? A boy for the Master in place of young Master Phil? How could anyone replace a firstborn son?

And this child would be coloured. He would not belong to the Master, and he would not belong to me. I would have to tell him that his father had left before he was born, just like my own father. Perhaps that would draw us closer, this pale child and me.

But whereas my own father had disappeared never to return, this child’s father was just across the iron bridge over the Groot Vis, a short, dusty walk away. I would have to see to it that he never knew this. I would have to see to it that he, like me, never found his father.

Chapter 17

T
here are many things in my life that I have not understood at first but then come to understand later on. Like places and people that would not hear of things but were not deaf. Like a future that you could not buy, that always seemed – like the sea – to be just beyond the horizon. Like war that caused a shortage of food and cake tins, and made soldiers die and ships sink and young men never recover from wounds that no one could find. Like Master Phil’s love for me that I did not understand until it was too late.

As I grew up I learnt that sometimes these things could be explained by the different moods that words took. Other times the things I didn’t understand turned out to be new for the world as well. A new thing of this sort rose up in the 1950s: the creeping fear of skin difference, whispered at first, then shouted, and made real as the child who would be coloured grew within me.

‘Apartheid!’ Mrs Pumile spat out the word that described this thing, like she spat out tea with too little sugar.

It was a new word for me. I had never seen such a word on the signs in the shops or on the boards outside the newspaper office that had said ‘It’s War’ all those years before. But although the word was new, I understood where it came from. Here was the thing that had worried me about walking with my young Master in town, here was what made white people turn away from me, here was Master’s dismay at his son’s dependence on a servant. Here was one word that could hold all of those fears.

‘It will make us move,’ Mrs Pumile hissed at me through the hedge, ‘across the Groot Vis, or to the township past the jail on Bree Street, with all those
skollies
and drunks. Be grateful to the Lord, Ada, that your mother never lived to see this day.’

‘But what can we do?’ I asked, glancing back at the house where Master worked in his study while Madam remained with Miss Rose in Johannesburg.

‘I will go back to my family in Umtata,’ said Mrs Pumile with a satisfied smile. ‘There is a man there who will marry me if I return. But you,’ she peered though the hedge, ‘you should find a husband quick-quick. You’re still pretty enough. There’ll be no place for girls with no man to protect them. Coming, Ma’am,’ she turned and yelled over her shoulder at a voice calling from the kitchen door. ‘Just digging vegetables, Ma’am.’

* * *

It had been two weeks since I had visited the doctor in his two-roomed house across the Groot Vis. After he explained about inheritance, he told me that it was too late to get rid of the baby even if I had wanted to. He also said I did not need to pay him because he received money from the mission to do his work. The same mission that gave schooling to black pupils like I once might have been. It was very dark by the time I walked back and I kept up a fast pace and stayed near the light of street fires where people cooked. Men called out to me from the shadows and dogs nosed around my legs for scraps and the stars were hidden behind smoke and the fear of looking up. Was Master Phil judging me as I hurried along so fearfully? Did he understand that it had been my duty? Or did he feel betrayed by what I had done with his father? Like I had betrayed my beloved Madam …

I slipped into Cradock House by the back gate and the unlatched kitchen door. Master had had a dinner meeting at the town hall and had not needed food. The garage was empty and I heard his car later on as I lay in bed holding on to my stomach with its burden of child that I longed to love but was afraid would not love me. Not when he saw the difference of skin. Not when he saw he was inferior to white, but also – shockingly – to black as well. What would become of us, this child who fitted in nowhere and me?

* * *

‘Ada,’ said Master, as I served him his scrambled eggs at breakfast, ‘the Madam is returning next week.’

I stood next to the table, feeling a hotness stain my face and the child stir like a butterfly within me.

‘Miss Rosemary is better now and Madam doesn’t need to be away any longer. She is looking forward to coming back. We must make the house especially perfect for her.’

He looked up at me briefly, and then down at the eggs cooling on the plate in front of him. His hands flexed in his lap, then stilled. ‘I want Madam to see that nothing has changed since she went away.’

He stopped, lifted his hands and reached for the linen napkin that I wash and iron each day.

‘You understand, don’t you, Ada?’ he went on, addressing a spot on the table in front of his plate.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘I understand. Everything will be the same as before, just as Madam likes it.’

Edward brought me roses as well. I combined them with Mrs Wetherspoon’s. Edward is somewhat changed, as I’m sure I am for him. More serious, thinner lipped, but ever polite. Too polite, and my fear that we would find no words between us was renewed but then thankfully postponed; what with the Wetherspoons’ friends and some local Irish folk who’ve hosted Edward in the past, there was enough cheery talk to cover the reticence between us.

And now I write this from the train which will carry us to Cradock and our life together. The roses lie beside my coat in the luggage rack above, still breathing their perfume. Edward has gone to reserve a table for dinner in the dining car, giving me the chance to write these few words.