The Housemaid's Daughter (2 page)

Master Edward didn’t make me feel like I was his, which was a pity because I didn’t have any other father. For a long time I didn’t think you needed a father to have a baby. In any case, I thought only white children had fathers.

My mother Miriam had left KwaZakhele township outside Port Elizabeth when she was eighteen years old to go to work for Master Edward in Cradock. He had just bought Cradock House and was waiting for Madam to arrive from across the sea. Master had been saving for years, Madam said, before he could buy Cradock House for Madam who was to be his bride. Yet Master never came into Madam’s dressing room, and only sometimes into Madam’s bedroom. I could tell: the bed, when I made it each morning, carried the imprint from Madam’s body on its own. I was surprised about that. I thought that married people always wanted to be together, especially after saving for so long for Cradock House. But I didn’t ask my mother why not. It would be unfair to ask such a question when she didn’t have a husband of her own. But having no husband was not unusual. There were many like Mama. Mrs Pumile next door, for instance, although she had many callers to her
kaia.
But callers were not husbands and could never be relied upon to keep calling.

When I asked my mother Miriam about her early life, before the possibility of husbands, she used to say that she came with the house. I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t think you could buy people along with houses, even then. But perhaps you could – perhaps that was why next door’s Madam kept Mrs Pumile even when she ate too much sugar and entertained too many callers?

But it is true that Mama worked all her life in Cradock House and died there one day while she was polishing the silver at the kitchen table.

I wanted to stay in Cradock House all my life as well. I didn’t want to live in that place where Bree Street ran out of steam, fell into a township and disappeared. I wanted to live and die in Cradock House, where I’d been born. Where I surely belonged because of that?

But I wanted to die while I was polishing silver under the kaffirboom tree in the garden, where the emerald sunbirds darted among the red flowers and the sky poked bright blue between shivering leaves.

Chapter 2

The distance we are from Bannock village, Ireland, is further than a hemisphere.

And yet I do feel a curious sympathy with the townspeople I’ve met, though I know nothing of their past and they nothing of mine. And I remind myself that wherever one finds oneself, home and love is lent to each of us only for a while. We must care for it while it’s ours, and cherish its memory once it’s gone.

So I embrace this new life, and these new people.

Soon, I hope, we will no longer be strangers to one another.

M
y mother Miriam never went to school and neither did I. Mrs Pumile never went to school either. There was a small school in the Lococamp township that served the railway workers across the Groot Vis, but the children there were always dirty and played wild games, my mother said. A bigger school lay in the township on our side of the river beyond Bree Street. It was called St James and it was run by the Rev. Calata. It had sports fields and a choir and it looked away from the town and towards the open veld. It was much more strict, Mama said, and that was a good thing for a school to be, but it was too far for me to walk to such a strict school on my own.

We didn’t go across the Groot Vis often, only on Mama’s Thursday afternoon off, when we went to visit her older sister, my aunt. ‘So many people,’ Mama would gasp, perhaps reminded of her old KwaZekhele days, as we pushed across the bridge. ‘Stay close to me, child.’

Auntie lived in a mud hut with no door and she had to wash her clothes in the river. Bad people came and stole the drying clothes off the bushes along the riverbank when Auntie went home for the next bundle of washing. Auntie washed for a living. In the matter of schools, Auntie agreed with Mama that the Lococamp school was not to be trusted. Auntie said it was as rough as life on the riverbank.

It fell to Madam and Master to talk about a school for me.

‘Edward,’ I overheard Madam say one day as I was coming out of the kitchen carrying the ironing for my mother, ‘we can’t ignore it, we have a duty. The township school is too unsettled, perhaps Lovedale Mission?’

‘It’ll only lead to trouble later on, expectations and whatnot,’ said Master Edward, flapping a page of the newspaper over. ‘But look into it if you must. Will you play the Beethoven for me this evening?’

I don’t know what ‘trouble later on’ Master was afraid of. And going to the mission school might have meant leaving Cradock House and leaving my mother, who needed me to help her as she got older and smaller, like a bird, while I got bigger. It seemed to me that life was strange in the matter of size, but maybe it was meant to be that way; you grew from a tiny baby into a tall grown-up and then you shrank until you died and were small enough for God the Father to deliver you to the ancestors.

‘I’m grateful, Ma’am,’ Miriam said to Madam when the subject of school came up again. ‘But Lovedale Mission is far away and Ada would be alone.’

Leaving to go to school, and leaving to go to Africa must be about the same, I calculated, hiding behind the door while Madam and Master talked one evening in the lounge. Both meant losing your family and never seeing them again. I didn’t want to lose mine, like Madam had lost hers. I watched through the crack above the door hinge. Master was reading the paper and Madam was shaking her head. The round green stone she wore at her neck caught the lamplight. She had changed from the loose, low-waisted dress she wore during the day – Madam’s day dresses were made to withstand the heat, and were the colour of cream on the top of milk – into a fitted one in pale green to match her brooch.

‘I’d like to get her into the children’s school here in town but the head won’t hear of it,’ she said. The stone flashed at me again. I didn’t know what it meant when people wouldn’t hear of things. I didn’t think it had anything to do with being deaf. ‘Why is everyone so difficult about this, Edward?’

‘For the simple reason, my dear,’ Master said, frowning at her over the top of his newspaper, ‘that if you let one in, they’ll all want places.’

‘Is that so wrong?’

He didn’t answer but instead turned another page, his dark head with its side parting disappearing behind the paper. I don’t know what he meant, or what Madam meant. But I don’t think Madam agreed with him. Perhaps she didn’t understand the trouble he said he was afraid of later on if I went to school. The trouble that I didn’t understand either. I would never want to cause Madam and Master any trouble. If going to school meant trouble, then I should not go.

I watched as she stood up, looked out of the window for a moment, then walked over to the piano. When there was silence between Madam and Master, she would often go to the piano. Sometimes she played straight away, and sometimes she sat stiffly, staring at the keys.

‘Ada!’ hissed my mother, pulling me away. ‘The
tokoloshe
comes for bad girls that listen at doors!’ I ran back to our room and lay down, covering my eyes so I couldn’t see the evil
tokoloshe
when he crept on to the bed and took me away to hell. But he didn’t come. And Madam played Beethoven. The
Moonlight Sonata.
But she was distracted, I could tell. I could hear it in her fingers.

* * *

‘The child can learn all she needs here, Madam,’ Mama said firmly the next day as she looked for elastic for young Master Phil’s garters in Madam’s sewing basket. My mother had given me a talking-to when she later came to bed. She said that I didn’t deserve Madam’s kindness if I listened at doors. And that she wouldn’t have my schooling bothering Madam and Master.

Madam pushed her needle into young Master Phil’s sock that she was darning. There was always a lot of sewing to do with young Master Phil. He seemed to be able to walk out of the house and tear his shorts or lose a button straight away. But all boys tore their clothes, Mama told me. It’s what boys do. But it didn’t seem to matter, for we all loved Master Phil, who was as sunny as Miss Rose was forever peeved.

‘We’ll see. I won’t give up just yet. You didn’t have the chance for school, Miriam dear, but Ada should.’

But I never went to school.

Instead Madam started to teach me my letters at home at the dining-room table when Master was at work and the children were busy. I don’t know why she wouldn’t teach me when Master was at home, but that was the way it was. We always had to pack up very quickly when Master’s footsteps were heard coming down the path. And my mother Miriam and Mrs Pumile from next door clapped their hands and said I was very lucky to be getting something they called an ‘education’.

I began to read from the book Madam left in her dressing room as well, on the table next to her silver brush and her powder box where I dusted every day. No one else saw that book, not Master or Miss Rose or young Master Phil. I knew this because I could tell from the outline it would make in powder or dust if it had been moved by anyone apart from Madam and myself. I watched for this every morning when the sun came through the window and fell upon Madam’s dressing table in a revealing, yellow beam. And I made sure to put the book back to the page she’d been writing so she would never know.

There were often sentences that I didn’t understand but I could think about them all day as I went about my dusting and polishing, and sometimes the meaning that had been hiding within them would jump out at me long after I had read the words. Musical notes, I later discovered, were also like words: they meant one thing when played on their own, and quite another when strung together.

I don’t think that Madam knew I was reading her book, but maybe she did. Was that why, many years later, she left the book behind when she went away to Johannesburg? Left it for me? After all, without Madam and the children, Cradock House would be empty and silent. There would be only my footsteps and Master’s footsteps on the narrow stairs.

Once I started to understand letters, I began to make out words on the front of shops in town when I went to post Madam’s letters to Ireland at the post office on Adderley Street. I started to search out new ones every time I went to town, peering into windows for so long that often the shopkeeper would come out and shoo me away.

I learnt to walk slowly one way up Adderley, cross over the broad dirt road with its donkey carts and snapping dogs and fine gentlemen on horses and then slowly the other way so I never missed anything. Madam didn’t seem to notice if it took a while to post letters, so I could return via the Karoo Gardens on Market Square where there were wooden benches that I was allowed to sit on. I could stare up at the palm trees over my head, or at the flaming aloes in their square flower beds, and repeat the words I’d read while the sun warmed my bare feet. Then it was along Church Street – like Adderley, also broad on account of wagons and oxen needing to turn about in years gone by – and the last signs before the shops ran out at the edge of the Groot Vis.

The first words I learned on my own like this were ‘Austen’s the Chemist’, ‘White and Boughton for paper and ink’, ‘Cuthbert’s Shoe Store for personal fitting’, and ‘Ladies find Quality at Anstey’s Fashions’. Outside Badger & Co., there was often a table with rolls of cloth, saying ‘… for a bolt”. I never could work out what those missing words were – I saw them in lots of places – but they weren’t made of letters I recognised, so they must have come from another sort of language that I didn’t yet understand. I never found any of those unknown words in Madam’s writing. I longed to ask her what they meant but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for all that Madam was teaching me anyway at the dining-room table, and secretly from the book on her dressing table.

So I asked Miss Rose and young Master Phil instead.

‘I don’t have time to explain,’ said Miss Rose over her shoulder, as she brushed her yellow hair in front of the mirror. ‘You haven’t any money so you probably don’t need to learn to count.’

‘Why, they’re numbers, Ada!’ said Master Phil, grabbing a pencil with a chewed end and drawing some of the strange shapes on a piece of paper. ‘They tell you about quantity, how many of something you’ve got. I’ll show you some more after cricket practice – here, take this, you can try.’ He stood over me for a moment, and corrected the way I held the pencil. ‘That’s right, just like that!’ then ran off, his cricket bag banging against the banisters as he raced downstairs.

‘Less noise, Philip!’ came Master’s voice from below.

But before the possibility of numbers, there was Madam’s book in her dressing room. It had a cover of dark red velvet, with a red satin ribbon that tied round its centre in a bow. I would stroke the velvet and the satin, and bend down and rest my cheek against them. Very often Madam didn’t bother with the bow and simply wound the ribbon around the book. I never meant to read it, I only started when Madam left it open one day and I had to move it during dusting. And it wasn’t as if I was stealing anything from Madam, like Mrs Pumile stole from her Madam. This wasn’t sugar or biscuits or jewels.

At first I read each letter, beautifully formed in black ink, a slanting pattern of unrelated thick and thin strokes.

‘
TomorrowIsailforAfrica
…’

Then, after many times of struggling, I began to separate the words. ‘
Tomorrow I sail
…’

What was this thing, ‘sail’?

And then the words joined together to become sentences. And then the sentences began to tell me what Madam was saying to the book. And sometimes what she wasn’t saying. ‘
Five years of betrothal, Edward in Cradock, self in Ireland. Marriage is a step in faith, Father o’Connell says. But of course I still love him. And everyone says we’re made for each other.
’

The book became a secret conversation between Madam and myself.

Chapter 3

A
 whole summer of heat and flies passed. In the garden of Cradock House the orange and blue strelitzia – crane flowers – swelled into huge clumps and the pampas grass waved feather heads that made you cough when you passed by. Invisible beetles rasped all day in the plumbago hedge, and yellow bokmakieries with black collars called to each other from opposite ends of the garden. In town, the new bank was finished on Adderley Street and everyone came to look at it; ladies in dresses with tucked bodices that needed lots of ironing, gentlemen in suits with watches on chains like the Master’s, little girls in smocked dresses, and boys in shorts and long socks and caps on their heads. People like Mama and I watched from the back of the crowd, although at first young Master Phil pulled me along to stand at the front. Master Phil often pulled me along with him.