The Housemaid's Daughter (7 page)

Were the dunes purple at sunset, was the sky coloured more vividly than I saw above Cradock House each evening? Or did the beauty come from the hardness of the place, from the power of the wind to lash sand into new shapes?

‘There’s no shade,’ I heard Master Phil say, drawn back to the cruelty. ‘Flies on your face, in your hair, sand stinging your eyes, scratching your throat till it bled.’ He lifted one of the restless hands and put it against his neck as if the dryness still held him in its grasp. ‘Half a cup of water to shave in, no way to get clean. Heat dried you to a crisp, cold froze you as soon as the sun went down.’

‘Where did the water come from, sir, that you were given?’ For there could have been no rain in such a place, no Groot Vis winding between sand mountains to bring relief.

‘They carried it in trucks,’ he said, smiling for once all the way to his light blue eyes. ‘From miles away, where there was a river, or an oasis.’

‘An oasis?’

‘A spring in the middle of the desert,’ he lifted himself up a little against his pillows, ‘a place where water from deep down bubbles to the surface.’

‘Did you see such a place?’

‘Yes,’ he said, before putting his head back and lifting a thin arm across his face. His hair was no longer wavy, and lay pale and flat against his head. He spoke again with his eyes covered.

‘When I was injured. It had palm trees, and there was shade.’

‘Like our palms? In the Karoo Gardens in Market Square?’ I broke in, excited at the possibility that I knew of something that was also found far away, that I’d sat in the shade of trees that grew at the other end of the world, that I could touch something that was part of war.

‘Yes.’ He took his arm away from his face. ‘Just like them.’

I stared at him. I had read music that came from across the world, I had felt it quicken beneath my fingers. And down in Market Square there was shade that I had shared with Master Phil without knowing.

‘But it’s the sand you remember the most.’ He brushed his fingers, as if they would never be free of it. ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ he murmured, ‘how in a desert it’s the sand that flows…’

The house was quiet. Madam was teaching at school, Mama was resting downstairs, Master was at the town hall. I had already peeled the vegetables, and made the pastry to go on top of the steak and kidney pie. The ironing was done. I waited for a moment.

‘How were you injured, sir?’

He glanced at me, the light blue eyes suddenly focused, as they were when I shaved him and felt his gaze on my face.

‘I want to understand about war.’

He hesitated, his eyes probing mine. ‘It’s not something to admire, Ada.’

‘I still want to understand.’

From the station came the irregular sound of shunting. Low pitched, a drawn-out semibreve, then a rush of crotchets. It carried me back to the laughing and crying crowds on the platform, the buglers playing, and the quick warmth of Master Phil’s hug. Perhaps he remembered it too, for he gave a sad smile and then nodded. Maybe he knew my plan. Maybe he knew it was less about me than about him. Maybe in remembering out loud, he might learn to forget.

‘We were ambushed,’ he began after a pause. ‘That means to be caught, to be surprised by your enemy.’

‘What happened, sir?’

‘Don’t call me sir.’ He shifted in the bed irritably and looked down at his narrow, veined wrists. I waited in the shadows, pushing down my questions. I knew that men fought each other in war, but surely not like this? Only animals ambushed one another. Lions of the veld lay in wait to attack buck, for buck were their prey. Did war force men to lie in wait for one another, to stalk one another as prey?

‘They had tanks, with mounted machine guns,’ he went on, his voice clipped with remembered detail. ‘We had rifles. They could move about, we were in slit trenches – holes in the ground, Ada, just a foot deep. They pinned us down, we couldn’t dig deeper because the sand became rock.’ He covered his ears with his hands.

I realised, then, that it wasn’t only the sights of war that returned to soldiers, but the sound and feel of war as well. Perhaps the closed curtains that I’d thought were Master Phil’s way of blocking out the world were also necessary to deflect the remembered rip of bullets over his head as he cowered in the shallow hiding place, and to expel the grit under his fingernails as he scratched desperately to deepen the trench …

‘There were shells, too, that whistled before they hit,’ he muttered, hands still over his ears, as the battle pounded against his skull. I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. ‘You could hear them coming – high pitched, like a screaming violin – coming faster than you could get away – they explode, they splash sand – and blood.’

He stopped suddenly, and wrapped his arms round his thin torso and began to clutch at himself, as if wondering again how it was possible that he could still be whole despite the terrible rain of death all about. I put out a hand and touched his shoulder. The bones felt jagged under the cotton of his pyjamas.

‘I still see them, Ada.’ He grabbed hold of my hand and stared wildly at me, his eyes aflame. ‘Ben, Frank, my sergeant…’

‘I will pray for them, sir,’ I said, trying to stop my hand shaking within his frenzied grip. ‘God the Father will make them well, I know He will.’

He stared at me, but I’m not sure he saw me at all.

‘Did this battle have a name, sir?’ I didn’t want him to stop talking. It was too soon. He needed to talk more, he needed to let the poisonous memories escape. I knew battles were given names. I had learnt of Waterloo, and other places in France with difficult names where many men had died in a previous war. But in that war death had come in mud, not sand.

‘Sidi Rezegh,’ he said wearily, his hands falling to rest limply on the covers. ‘It was called Sidi Rezegh.’

I wanted to ask him something else but I never did. I wanted to ask him if his fear of war had gone away during the actual fighting. Or whether it was to blame for what had happened. Whether fear – and not just the enemy – had pinned him down and drawn the bullet to his chest, and left him with a wound that no longer bled but still gave him no peace.

I wanted to ask him, but I never did.

* * *

A season went by. Master Phil stayed in his room. The inside wound and the memory of the cruel Sahara never left him alone. His hands fidgeted. The heat of the desert came on him in the night to make him sweat and cry out. Then, as if to remind him even when he needed no reminding, a drought fell on the Karoo and brought winds that scoured the veld and dried the skin on the tips of his fingers until they cracked, and attacked his throat with familiar grit.

‘Why won’t it leave me?’ he would mutter with quiet despair as I brought wet flannels to lay on his forehead, and my mother Miriam’s cold lemonade to soothe his throat.

The ground between the
koppies
broke into steep gullies. The water in the town dam went up into the air and left a line where it had been – like a ring on a bath that hasn’t been cleaned. The Groot Vis was reduced to a trickle and Auntie’s washing business struggled. In the town’s gardens, dogs panted in the shade of the bluegums. Our apricot tree dropped hard, wrinkled fruit. Water was rationed, and Mama and I washed from buckets. As I read to Master Phil each day in the close darkness of his bedroom, Church Street rumbled with the sound of farmers driving animals to slaughter because even the Karoo bush dried out. Dust devils blew into Cradock House and stained the curtains where they hung limp behind the fanlights we kept open to catch a breeze. I had to take the curtains down one by one and wash them in the smallest amount of water and then haul them over the line outside to dry while I prayed that the dust would stay away. The furrow in front of the house that used to carry brown river water to the garden no longer ran. The only wetness in the world seemed to be the thin stream of water from the tap in the laundry where, after morning cleaning, I would hold my neck and feel the coolness trickle over my cheeks and into my hair.

The drought lived with us until one day I heard the chirp of the
langasem
– the rain grasshopper – that only spoke when rain was on its way. The same day Mama pointed out to Madam how the songololo worms knew what was coming, for they began to creep inside and curl up into neat circles on the wall.

‘How do they know, Miriam?’ Madam wondered, carefully moving one out into the garden.

‘They know, Ma’am. They knew long before we did.’

And so it came. Mama and I watched from the
stoep
as the sky turned black and cracked open, spitting silver hail on to the roof in a fearful racket, stripping Madam’s few wilted shrubs and covering the hard ground between them in a stony carpet. I put out a foot and felt the iciness beneath my toes. After the hail finished its noisy business, the rain hissed sweet music and filled up the water tanks and the town dam and the Groot Vis, and I knew we were saved. Even Master Phil roused himself to look outside and marvel at the kaffirboom leaves bending in the downpour against an overflowing sky. I think it washed away some of the desert from his heart.

* * *

The nights were difficult in Cradock House. During the day, it was the memory of sand and thirst and whistling death that tormented Master Phil. At night, his fellow soldiers came to him and called for help.

‘Sarge! Sarge!’ he would scream, and twist his sheets into knots. ‘This way!’

I would listen for the first cry and run upstairs and stroke the sweat from his forehead with a damp cloth.

‘Covering fire, the flank, the flank!’

‘Hush, sir,’ this from me. ‘The war is over.’

Thin hands scratching the covers, head tossing from side to side, the racket of the battlefield making his eyelids flicker.

‘Ben, hold on! I’ll come for you!’

‘Shhh, Master, shhh.’

‘No ammo, no ammo, Father – Father?’

Sometimes the only way to calm him was to take him in my arms and sing to him like Mama had once sung to me,
Thula thu’
… and feel the rigid cords of his arms slacken and the terrible, wracking battle fade from his face.

Sometimes Madam would reach him before me, and together we would hold him and soothe him, Madam’s eyes bright with tears, her hair falling about her face in a cloud, her hands trembling as they never did at the piano.

‘When will it end, Ada?’ she would whisper, as she’d whispered to Master during the time of war when bombs fell and ships sank. ‘Will there be no end?’

Master never came to comfort Phil, even when he called out his name. Perhaps he felt it was woman’s work. But he did come to stand at the door. I looked up once, and saw him there. It was hard to see because of the darkness, but he stood there in his dressing gown and slippers and watched me with my arms round Master Phil, and with his restless head against my shoulder. It seemed to me that Master looked on not with anguish for his son or even gratitude for my nursing, but with the face he’d shown across the crowded station after Master Phil left. There, as I’d stood with Master Phil’s hug still warm upon me, his face showed dismay. Now, in the darkness, as I in turn held my young Master, the dismay hardened to disapproval. When he saw that I had seen him, he turned away.

‘Ada,’ murmured Master Phil, his eyes flickering and sliding from the doorway to my face, ‘are you an angel?’

‘No, sir,’ I said, slipping from him, laying him back against his pillows, stroking the hair from his forehead. ‘Rest now.’

* * *

Outside Cradock House, life moved on.

A new waiting room was built at the station for all the people who would need to come back to town now the drought was broken. And the number of trains increased until it seemed that the shunting and whistling never stopped from dawn until night. Along with the trains came more people living across the Groot Vis to work on the railway and on the road that would one day go straight to Johannesburg where there was gold to be dug out of the ground and riches to follow it. Auntie’s business did well out of all the extra washing that needed to be done.

Then there was talk of something called a boom, on account of the money to be made from wool taken off sheep in a curly coat. But there was also discontent in the township beyond Bree Street; the boom had not paved the roads or strung wire to bring light to the tiny houses or pipes to take away their waste like it had in the white part of Cradock.

In the midst of this boom, diphtheria fell upon the Karoo. It showed no bias about whom it attacked. Your throat turned white and you couldn’t swallow and then you died. I worried that Master Phil might catch it in his weakened state, and so I didn’t mind that he stayed in his room while the diphtheria caught those who went outside. Some people thought such a disease was caused by the drought, others thought it was caused by the rain that ended it. Life and death didn’t choose sides in a way you could predict, my mother Miriam said. It was a matter of luck and the influence of ancestors – not weather or fortune – that decided whether you would live or die.

Cradock House would never die, I told myself as I polished the banisters with oil and scrubbed the
stoep
with soap and water where it had become stained during the drought. No disease, no war, could shake its thick walls or shift its place in the brown Karoo earth. Yet – I stopped and listened – its passages were quieter now that Miss Rose was gone and Master Phil lay in darkness upstairs. And I realised that a house is more than stone and foundations and a roof. A house needs sound and activity to keep it alive. I think only Madam and I understood this.

So I sang as I worked – ‘We’ll meet again’ – and Madam played for an hour each morning to get the day underway. Scales rushed through the house as before, although a little more quietly on account of Master Phil. And when we were not making our own music, Madam was careful to keep the radiogram playing.

Master did not seem to notice the emptiness we tried to fill. Perhaps he welcomed the silence of the day, after the cries of the night. He continued with his usual job of reading his papers in the study. Lately he also spent time looking at his new car in the garage that had been built on to the side of Cradock House. The car was black and had large headlamps that shone in the darkness like the night eyes of spooked animals. Master used the car to go to meetings in the town hall, so Madam was often at home on her own in the evenings, when the only sound was the creaking of the tin roof. When he got home, it was often too late for Madam to play for him as she used to. But it didn’t seem to matter any more.