The Housemaid's Daughter (8 page)

And he didn’t seem to need to touch Madam like he used to during the war. My mother said it was because Master had a lot on his mind, especially young Master Phil’s illness, and so there was no time for touching.

I still read Madam’s book on her dressing table.

Letters have been the currency of our betrothal. Can we meet in Cape Town on the day of our marriage and pick up where they left off?

Edward says I write well. And I know I do, giving him a twist on all the Bannock news and a sprinkle of gossip about those he remembers. But is it a mistake to allow outside news to carry such weight? To avoid the personal in favour of the general?

And what if words – of any kind – dry up when we’re face to face?

Will we find things to say that won’t need to be written down first?

That won’t need the safety of prior thought?

Every day Master Phil stayed upstairs in his bedroom. He even took his meals there. Mama made his favourite hot sponge puddings but he was never very hungry. Master would look in in the mornings before he started work, and stand in the doorway and ask Master Phil how he was, and adjust the chain on his waistcoat.

After morning cleaning, I would change my sweaty overall for a fresh one and go upstairs to read to Master Phil because his eyes were no longer good. They had been good enough to take him to war, but now they were too weak for peace. I read from books that Madam chose and that I didn’t really understand. But Master Phil listened and sometimes he took my hand in the way that he liked to do, and held it against his thin cheek and explained what I couldn’t understand, like he’d told me about war and the place called Sidi Rezegh. But none of the books we read had anything to do with war, for Madam did not want him reminded of it. The books helped Master Phil. Like the piano for me, they took him to a new place.

‘We all have something of Pip in us,’ he murmured one day, of a book called
Great Expectations.
‘Don’t you think so, Ada? Dickens makes us look at ourselves as well as worry about Pip…’

‘What part of Pip do you have, sir?’

He looked across at me in surprise and was silent for a while, watching me where I sat on the chair with the book open in my lap. It was late afternoon and the sun, where it squeezed through the drawn curtains, was growing dim. Our voices were the only sound in the house.

‘Ada,’ he whispered, his voice slowing over the letters of my name, ‘you already know.’

But I didn’t know and he must have seen it in my eyes for he turned away and closed his, as if my not knowing was too heavy for him to bear.

But this was the only time of difficulty; mostly we talked easily. Almost as easily as we’d talked when we were children and he had shown me numbers and the purpose of a bank and the long wait I would have for a future to arrive. Madam said I was the only one who could make young Master Phil forget his illness. Master never said anything to me, and avoided my eyes, but sometimes I caught him speaking in a low voice with Madam and shaking his head, and I know it had something to do with how much time I was spending in caring for young Master Phil. I don’t think Madam agreed with what he was saying because she would often walk away. I still don’t know what I could have done differently. Perhaps Master’s disapproval was not just because Master Phil had once hugged me in front of white crowds or because I had lately comforted him in my arms; maybe it was because Master Phil treated me as a member of the family, and touched my hand, and sometimes smiled at what I said. Perhaps that was the part Master did not like.

During all this time of Master Phil’s illness, and the emptiness in Cradock House, and the restlessness of the townships, Miss Rose never came back from Jo’burg. She sent postcards with pictures of tall buildings instead.

Chapter 10

I
 was now seventeen years old. My world revolved around young Master Phil. I hardly went out any more, the gardener posted Madam’s letters to Ireland at the post office on Adderley Street as I used to do before. I had, in any case, found all the words I would ever need and surely read all the possible signs in the shop windows that there could ever be. I also knew how to write down the words that I saw. I have always been better at writing English words and English sentences than words in Xhosa, Mama’s language.

Cradock had by now left me behind. The few young girls that I knew, daughters of maids like my mother and Mrs Pumile and her cousin who worked at the bank, all found young men and had babies. They went to live in the townships, or they stayed with their babies in
kaias
like Mama and I did while their husbands went far away to work. Sometimes, when Master Phil was sleeping, I stood on his toy box and looked out over the town like I used to do as a child and saw some of these girls with babies on their backs, walking down the street. They looked tired but proud. There would be no young men left for me. Mrs Pumile used to shake her head and mutter to Mama that it was time for me to find a young man because I was pretty now but I may not be pretty in a few years’ time. Whether she was right about me being pretty, I can’t say, for prettiness was what Miss Rose had with yellow hair and slate-blue eyes and a voice that teased men.

My hair was dark and curly and although Mama often said approvingly that I had kind eyes, I don’t think eyes are enough where prettiness is required. In reply to Mrs Pumile, Mama said that there was no time for prettiness or boys while my young Master lay ill in bed. But I was not downhearted, I was honoured to care for Master Phil instead. My life was filled with love for him and for Madam and Master and Mama, and for Cradock House where I surely now belonged – daughter of the house, Madam had said – and for the piano that was my special joy.

* * *

The doctor came one day in his new black car while I was sitting with Master Phil as he slept. He used to get frightened if he woke up and I wasn’t there. The room was dark except for a stripe of sunshine that fell across the floor from a gap in the curtains. Dr Wilmott looked across at Madam and Master, then at me, then back at Madam and Master.

‘You may speak in front of Ada, Doctor,’ murmured Madam, laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘Ada cares for Philip more than any of us.’

The doctor had a stern face, rather like Master’s. My mother said he was the same doctor who had delivered me at Cradock House.

‘We can’t expect…’ he began with a disapproving look at me. Perhaps he had forgotten that I, too, belonged in Cradock House.

‘Ada keeps Philip alive,’ came Master’s voice quietly, from behind the doctor.

No one said anything. I felt a hotness in my face that I hadn’t known before.

‘Very well.’ He reached down for Master Phil’s wrist and held it for a while near his wristwatch.

I slipped off the bed and went to stand near the cupboard. The curtains stirred in the breeze, shifting the stripe of sunshine on the floor. Master Phil stirred too.

‘Good day, Philip. How are you today?’

Master Phil stared at them. Then moved his neck painfully and looked at me.

‘Time you were up and about,’ the doctor said in a loud voice and unbuttoned part of Master’s pyjama top to place a round metal thing on Master’s chest and connect its tubes to his ears. ‘Breathe deeply.’

Master Phil breathed, his thin chest rising and falling, the ribs clear to see against the material of his pyjamas. No one said anything. A dog barked and growled outside and my mother Miriam shouted at it from the kitchen.

‘Your chest is clear.’ He took the tubes out of his ears. ‘The wound,’ he opened the pyjamas further and probed with his fingers over a red scar, ‘is fully healed.’

The doctor sat down on the bed and looked at his hands.

‘There’s nothing further that I can do for you, young man. Physically, you’re fine. The rest…’ he stopped and looked up at Madam and Master, ‘must come from you.’

No one spoke.

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Madam into the silence.

A fly buzzed between the window and the curtains, freed itself and fell on to the floor. The doctor opened his bag and put away the round thing with its tubes. The Master turned away, his shoulders low. Madam clasped her hands hard behind her back, the knuckles white. Madam had very strong hands from the piano; she could twist caps off jam jars that no one else could shift. The curtains swayed again in a fresh draught from outside, bringing outside things – the F sharp whistle of the midday train leaving the station, the smell of Mama’s lamb stew drifting out of the kitchen, the raised voices of Mrs Pumile and her Madam next door – into the dark bedroom.

‘You don’t know!’ Master Phil’s voice rose in a scream. He reared up in the bed. The covers fell back to show bony legs below his pyjama trousers, like the branches of the thorn tree by the
kaia.
‘You never saw what I saw!’ He covered his face with trembling hands, as if they could block out the guns and the blood and the sand of the desert. I made to go towards him but the doctor shook his head at me before turning back.

‘Get on your feet, young man,’ he boomed. ‘Find a job!’ He shot a look across at Master. ‘Work for a living! That will banish the ghosts.’

‘But—’ I blurted out in shock, turning to Madam and then Master, who shook his head strongly at me. Wars didn’t contain ghosts! Master Phil himself had said so, that day under the washing line when he talked of being afraid. And in any case how could men fight ghosts? Ghosts were mostly ancestors, or maybe an evil spirit like the
tokoloshe
…

‘I’ll see you out, Doctor,’ Master said quickly, sending a fierce look at Master Phil’s weeping figure.

‘Oh, Phil.’ Madam knelt by the bed and took him in her arms. His fair hair, lately sprinkled with strands of grey, lay against her shoulder, like it had the night he’d eaten too many ripe apricots. The dog barked again on the street outside and I heard my mother Miriam’s footsteps going to investigate. ‘Dear Phil, learn to forget. We need you well, you’re all we have now.’

Master stopped at the door, frowned, and beckoned for me to leave. I followed him and the doctor out of the room. It would not do to risk more disapproval from Master, or to ask about ghosts right now. Master Phil needed to cry. And Madam needed to cry with him. Maybe they both needed the Master there as well. But grown men like the Master don’t cry. They only stand at the door and watch. My mother Miriam says men have no patience with tears.

And yet for all Madam’s tears, and Master’s impatience, and the unsettling mention of ghosts, I found myself filled with hope. The doctor’s instruments had told Master Phil that he was cured, and so the doctor had told young Master Phil to get up. I was sure he would do so. And when he did, the world at peace would welcome him back while the memories of war and the cruel Sahara would fade. His fallen comrades would find their own place and would surely leave him to rest at night. And then he could find a job – perhaps in the Master’s office writing letters? Or perhaps in the bank, where I had still not been, on account of Mama keeping her money under the bed in a shoebox.

This would be the start of Master Phil’s full recovery. I was sure of it. So I ran downstairs and hugged my mother in the kitchen over the lamb stew and told her that Master Phil would soon be up and about. And then I played a quick scherzo to rejoice in what would surely be.

* * *

The day after the doctor’s visit, I got out young Master Phil’s clothes from peacetime and laid them on the chair. They were a little big for him but still good quality on account of having no one to wear them for so long.

‘It’s a good day, sir,’ I said, drawing the curtains back slightly, ‘not too sunny for your eyes.’

And he dressed himself and felt his way downstairs – holding on to the banister, so uncertain compared to the headlong rush of boyhood – and stood swaying in the kitchen as Mama clapped her hands and Madam smiled with tears in her eyes to see him up and about.

At first he walked around the garden, hesitant, as if he’d never seen such a place before. He seemed surprised at the beetles rasping in the hedge and the bokmakieries calling to each other from one end to the other. It was as if the desert had swept away all memory of plants in bloom and grass underfoot, and all memory of sound save for the whine of bullets.

‘Was it always like this, Ada?’ he asked, his hand sometimes touching my arm for balance, his tall frame stooped as if to protect the inside wound. ‘This beautiful?’

‘Yes, sir. Even in the drought.’

He smiled then, and reached out to pick a leaf and stroke its velvet underside.

‘We could walk into town, sir,’ I said, keen to cement his progress. ‘There’s no dust now the roads are tarred.’

Adderley Street was crowded on the day Master Phil went on his first outing. If the garden had been a surprise for him, then the town was surely even more so. Much had changed since he left for the war. Motor cars now outnumbered horse carts and, as they edged along, they blared their horns and revved their engines and made exploding sounds that startled passers-by.

‘Ada!’ Master Phil gasped, clutching at his ears, ‘No, no—’

‘Come, sir, we’ll go somewhere quiet,’ I said hurriedly, taking his arm because his legs did not seem to work that well any more. ‘We can look at the bridge – at the Groot Vis.’

We took a back road towards the iron bridge and I didn’t talk in order to give his ears a rest. It was the exploding cars, I realised; the sound of war. But if he couldn’t face the world and its noise again, how would he ever find its beauty? If he kept his curtains closed, how could he see the Karoo shimmer in the midday heat? Or spot the orange aloes glowing like candles against the scrub?

He kept his arm in mine as we walked further, our footsteps matching. From a hidden back garden came the shouts of children playing. Purple bougainvillea tumbled over a fence by the garden gate. I picked a flower and gave it to him. He examined its papery petals as if it was a rare jewel and smiled at me. I remembered the first time I had met Master Phil in town, when he was in his uniform, and how uncertain I’d felt about being a black girl walking beside a white boy. Then, I had held back and followed behind him, and felt in turn behind me the disapproval of the white lady he had been talking to.