The Housemaid's Daughter (27 page)

And Cradock House has indeed welcomed us back. The bokmakieries call from opposite ends of the garden in the freshness of morning, the hadedas flap overhead in the waning heat of late afternoon. In the warmth of the kitchen, I feel Mama on my shoulder, while from the pages of books that I once read to him, young Master Phil’s voice rises. Mrs Cath and I resume our secret conversation through her diary while downstairs music of all kinds tumbles out of the piano and into my fingers: scherzos and pavanes and études and the African jazz of Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks. I am sure Phil hears it and is happy that I am home – just as surely as I know he loves Dawn from the place where he is now.

If the world had been different, if skin difference had never mattered, Dawn could have been our child.

Chapter 36

S
o far, the law has left us alone.

But it has not left my students alone. Across the Groot Vis, and in the township beyond Bree Street, many youngsters have been thrown into jail, some of them those that I teach. The only way I know this is when they are absent from school.

‘They were taken,’ the remaining children cry, and dance with frenzied energy to cover their fear that it will be them next time.

There is talk of boycotts. The dictionary says it means refusing to do business with a place or a person. It occurs to me that it is what Master does to Dawn and me. But Jake says it’s a tool for blacks to use against white shops in town. For we may be poor, but there are many more blacks than whites in our country and if each one stops buying white goods then there will be white hardship. Jake says there are many different ways to make a revolution.

The matter of Passes fed this revolution. Beneath the music and the rhythm of my new life it lurked, like the
tokoloshe
of my childhood, or an illness you do not see until it is too late. The Pass defined who you were, and where you were allowed to stay. It was a piece of paper that proclaimed skin colour as the most important part of you. Since the failed marches, the police showed even less patience. No Pass meant instant arrest. The township complied with sullenness, but hissed its hatred of the men with their truncheons and their dogs, and their convenient jail.

‘Will there be war over Passes?’ I asked in the staffroom one day as we drank our tea and Veronica called, ‘Kiep-kiep’, out of the window to her chickens in the yard.

‘It’s happening already,’ said Dina with conviction. ‘Look at this.’ She gestured to a week-old newspaper that showed reports of Pass burning and policemen beating the burners, in a township near Johannesburg many times bigger than KwaZakhele where the huts stretched beyond the horizon.

‘Will there be a war, Mrs Cath?’ I risked asking her one day as we bottled apricots in the kitchen. Dawn dropped the stones one by one into a metal pot counting, ‘One, two, three!’ and giggled at each clatter.

‘A war over Passes?’ She stopped for a moment from writing labels in her sweeping style, the branches of the ‘A’ in apricot extending above and below the rest of the letters. I did not often ask her about matters beyond the house, I was careful to say nothing that could cause her to regret my return, or the forgiveness that she had somehow found in her heart for me. Yet I wished to know more. It was time to know more.

‘I hope not,’ she began. ‘The government should see sense and abolish them, but…’

‘But what, Mrs Cath?’

‘Some people say they want a war, a confrontation. I can’t believe they’d be so foolish, but I’ve learnt men can be like that over many things.’ She picked up her pen and began to write more labels. ‘It won’t affect us, Ada. Not here in Cradock.’ She looked across at me and her eyes softened. ‘You’ll be safe here.’

‘It won’t be like the other war?’

‘What’s war, Mama?’

‘Have you counted all the stones?’ I asked her, ladling the fruit into the labelled jars.

‘Will I do it? Will I do war?’

‘Oh no, dear,’ Mrs Cath said, slipping Dawn a peeled apricot half. ‘War is only for soldiers.’ She turned away for a moment, her free hand reaching for her throat. She no longer wore Phil’s military brooch every day, but couldn’t help reaching for it even when it wasn’t there.

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Cath,’ I murmured to her back.

She turned back and reached for the jar I’d just filled. I watched her tighten the lid with hands made strong from the piano.

‘Will there be bombs?’ I asked.

Mrs Cath looked at me across the glistening jars and smiled with her mouth, like young Master Phil had smiled that day in the garden when he confessed he was frightened of war but tried to cover it up. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Ada. That was a war between countries, this would just be a disagreement within our borders. Not the same at all.’ She reached over to touch my arm. ‘I will protect you and Dawn.’

At the mention of her name again, Dawn looked up, her fists full of apricot stones, and grinned at us. ‘Protect Dawn!’ She giggled and jumped up, flinging the stones back into the pot. ‘Protect Dawn! Protect Dawn!’ She began to dance and slap her hands against her thighs like the youngsters did on the rough streets across the Groot Vis. Mrs Cath and I stopped our bottling and watched her elastic body, and separately marvelled at her ability to cross the divide as if it was no more than shallow water.

So Mrs Cath would be on our side if such a war did come? Was it just the side Dawn and I were on or was it the side on which all black people lay? And what about Master? Master who believed that black people should stay in their place, yet Master who had broken the laws of the land to lie with me. I knew how important it was to pick the right side in a war. In the last war, Master and Mrs Cath and I and Miss Rose and Master Phil had been on the same side. Their enemies – the people across the sea who had made our piano – had been my enemies. Their worry had been my worry.

But in this war, who would be enemy and who would be friend? Were Master and Mrs Cath already on opposite sides?

* * *

I have rescued some money from the bank. I asked Mrs Cath to take me there so that I could understand how banks work and how I could get my money back if I wanted to one day. She did not know I intended to take some money out of the bank at the same time.

Mrs Cath went into the study and found the bank book that I had searched for in vain before leaving Cradock House. I waited in the doorway, as I had waited on the day Mrs Cath was to return from Johannesburg. I could still see Master sitting behind the desk, in the dark suit that she liked and the shirt I had starched and ironed, telling me he was leaving to fetch Mrs Cath as the train might be early. He never looked up, he never once lifted his eyes to meet mine. It was as if his lying with me had never happened. Like the white people on the street who looked away from Dawn so they didn’t have to accept that she existed.

I took the small ridged book from Mrs Cath’s hand and said I would keep it safely in the
kaia
under my mattress, along with the Pass that I now carried every day on account of the extra attention that Passes were getting.

‘But why, Ada?’ Mrs Cath straightened up from Master’s desk to look at me with anxious green eyes. She knew that important papers could be stolen. She knew that
kaias
could be burgled. Mrs Cath didn’t know I had made a slit in my mattress that was invisible to the eye.

I put my hand into my pocket and felt the book under my fingers.

‘I needed money one day – Dawn was sick.’ I felt the fear in my heart as I remembered her coughing, and the agony of wondering whether my coins would be enough for the medicine at the chemist. ‘I couldn’t go to the bank to get it.’

Auntie had been right in that respect: money was no use just sitting in a bank. Money was only valuable if you had it in your hand. I never again wanted to be without the means to get hold of it. If anything happened to Mrs Cath, I would have to appeal to Master, and I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be in a position of asking him for anything. I had also decided that, since it was my bank book anyway, it should be my choice about where to keep it. See how my township life has made me strong?

We went one afternoon after school, when Dawn was playing under Mrs Pumile’s uneasy eye in the garden next door.

‘Watch her,’ I warned quietly, ‘she’ll be off and into your Madam’s house before you know it!’

‘I’ll keep her out of sight, poor child.’ Mrs Pumile still found Dawn’s skin a worry. ‘And ask my cousin why she keeps all the sugar for herself.’

It was the first time I had been inside a bank. There was a long wooden counter with ladies and gentlemen sitting behind it with papers in front of them. The place smelt of linseed oil and floor polish. I looked out for Mrs Pumile’s cousin, whose job it was to polish the floor, but she wasn’t there. Perhaps she was making tea that she wheeled around on a trolley, along with the sugar that the bank seemed to order too much of. Large ceiling fans creaked slowly overhead and sent cool breezes against your neck as you stood in line below. The school hall in the township could have done with such a fan.

Mrs Cath explained to the lady behind the counter that I owned the money described in the bank book.

‘I would like to have some of it back,’ I spoke up, showing her my Pass to prove that I was the same Ada Mabuse as the one who owned the bank book.

‘Ada,’ Mrs Cath ventured, exchanging a glance with the lady, ‘your money is safer here, you might be robbed if you carry it round with you.’

‘But I needed money when Dawn was sick,’ I repeated, ‘and I had no means to get hold of it.’

‘I understand,’ Mrs Cath nodded, putting a hand gently on my arm, ‘but that won’t happen again.’

The lady behind the counter was watching us. She wore a pink blouse with puffed sleeves that are difficult to iron, and a matching hairband. I could see she was surprised by my English, and by the way Mrs Cath and I spoke as if we were equals. She stared when Mrs Cath touched me.

‘Please, Mrs Cath,’ I said, calling on the boldness I had learnt in the township. ‘I need to have some money in my hand.’

Mrs Cath inclined her head and smiled. ‘Of course. It’s yours to do with as you choose.’ She turned to the lady in pink. ‘Can Ada withdraw two pounds, please?’

The lady raised her eyebrows and counted out the money. I rolled it into my handkerchief and pushed it deep into my pocket. When I got home I would slip the book and my Pass and the money deep within the hiding place I had made in the mattress. Mama had kept her money in a shoebox under the bed, but I knew that robbers looked under things – under mattresses, under beds. Lindiwe had taught me that. But they don’t look inside them.

Chapter 37

D
awn was growing as fast as the granadilla creeper that Mrs Cath tended for its purple fruit. Alongside her growth in length, she grew two ways of behaving.

The first was reserved for Cradock House, where she minded her manners and learnt to help with the dusting and polishing as I had done under my mama. But each day as we walked across the Groot Vis, where the washerwomen sang and the brown water flowed sluggishly, Dawn changed from the daughter I knew into one who was a stranger. She did not seek out the few coloured children in the township – the small community where I had hoped she might find a home – but instead ran with the toughest black youngsters she could find, as if her skin was goading her into proving herself worthy of a greater blackness than she had been born with.

At the same time, men like Jake began to talk not of war or revolution, but of the Struggle. A struggle where Passes still burned, but so too did the huts of blacks thought to be uncommitted. The house of the kind doctor who wrote the letter for the medicine that saved Dawn was burnt to the ground as a warning that even missionary money was tainted. Jake himself no longer appeared out of the crowds to swing Dawn off her feet, or stepped through the doorway of Lindiwe’s hut with spare sausages from the butcher. Or sought me out down by the river.

‘He is part of it,’ Lindiwe whispered to me over an early bowl of soup before I hurried home in the light. ‘He says he must leave the country to learn about guns – guns, Ada…’

‘Why don’t you find different children to play with?’ I would press Dawn, while suppressing my fears for Jake. ‘There is Lindiwe’s niece Nomse, or Bongani who learns the piano with me.’

But Dawn would toss her head and laugh at me with her light blue eyes and tell me not to worry and then run off to her wild friends for another day of troublemaking.

‘You don’t understand, Mama,’ she would insist whenever there was some particular upheaval. ‘You need to be tough to live here.’

‘But you live in Cradock House too, Dawn. How can you behave so differently between the two places?’

‘Because I’m two people, Mama!’ she responded gaily, and I had no answer to that.

Mr Dumise, grey haired now, was as diplomatic as ever and overlooked Dawn’s skirmishes. Of all the staff, only Dina was able to reason with Dawn, for Dawn loved Dina’s glamour and her colourful turbans and her determination to fight the white man’s government and not grovel. But even Dina battled to temper Dawn’s wilfulness.

‘Where does she get this?’ Dina said in dismay, after failing in another attempt to stop Dawn’s fighting.

‘It is her skin that drives her on.’

Dina looked pained and then nodded in agreement and took my arm as we walked back to class. I remembered Mrs Cath describing Miss Rose as wilful. And I wondered again about inheritance and how much of Dawn came from myself and Master, and if it was possible for her to have gained an extra dose of wilfulness from Miss Rose. And how much came from the surroundings in which she found herself.

‘Why do you fight so much, Dawn?’ I asked as we lay in the darkness of the
kaia
at the end of the day.

‘Because I’m different from you, Mama.’

I sat up and looked at her where she lay on her back in the new bed Mrs Cath had recently bought on account of her increasing length.

‘I’m sorry every day for giving you the skin you have.’