The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘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 a
t 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.

  ‘Look, Ada – there’s Father!’ he cried, jumping up and down and pointing out the Master on a platform with a lot of other men beneath a sign that said ‘Bank’ and another word that I didn’t recognise. ‘Doesn’t he look important?’ And he did, in his best suit and with the shirt that Mama had starched so carefully the day before.

  ‘What does a bank do?’ I asked, pulling on young Master Phil’s sleeve to get his attention. Several of the white children nearby giggled.

  ‘What?’ He was craning forward to get a better look.

  ‘A bank.’ I cupped my hand towards his ear, so the others wouldn’t hear. ‘What is it for?’

  ‘It’s where you put your money,’ he said, then shouted, ‘Father, Father!’ waving his arms and jumping up and down again to get the Master’s attention. The nearby children stared, the girls among them covering their mouths against the dust from his jumping boots. Master turned impatiently in our direction, then turned back to a man who was cutting a red ribbon across the front door of the bank with a pair of scissors. I suppose young Master Phil shouldn’t have tried to interrupt the Master, but he never thought too much before he did anything – like eating too many apricots without worrying about the consequences for his stomach. Unlike Miss Rose, who could be silent for ages when she really wanted something, storing it up with sighs and shrugged shoulders until the moment when she knew Madam and Master could never refuse her.

  Rosemary has not been an easy child. Perhaps I was spoiled with Phil, whose good cheer was evident even in the crib. In contrast, Rosemary finds fault with the world in general, and her mother in particular.

  Such ill temper has been thrown into sharper relief by the demeanour of Ada, who has Miriam’s stoicism but also a lightness about her that is immensely appealing. Perhaps the fault lies with me. In my inability to be the right sort of mother. Yet every effort I have made has been rebuffed. There seems to be no pleasing Rosemary.

  Note to self:

  Try to find some simple readers for young Ada. I am determined her reading should progress, whatever Edward’s reservations. Perhaps the school library could oblige. I could say they are for a private pupil.

  I wasn’t allowed to go into the new bank, but you could see big ceiling fans and brown desks through the windows and signs that I could read saying, ‘Enquiries’ and ‘Manager’, although I didn’t understand what they meant. Mrs Pumile’s cousin was allowed to go into the bank because she polished the floor with red Cobra floor polish every morning. She brought Mrs Pumile sugar that was left over on the tea trolley. People went into the bank to give them money to look after. That’s what young Master Phil meant. But my mother Miriam said her money was safer in a shoebox under the bed, where she could watch it.

  There were many days that summer when I was too busy with the necessary sweeping and tidying, and with the washing of the family’s clothes that got dirty trailing in the dust, to spare much time to read. I would stare at Madam’s book on the dressing table in longing while I ran the lappie in slow circles around it and then Mama would call and tell me there was washing to take off the line.

  A whole winter of cold winds passed too; winds that blew in from the mountains I couldn’t quite make out from the top of Master Phil’s toy box. Sometimes I thought I saw in the distance a light dusting of white, like icing on top of fairy cakes, but I could never be sure that it wasn’t just me wanting to see such a sight. I have always wanted to see further than my eyes can manage.

  ‘The roof would be better for sightseeing!’ laughed Master Phil coming upon me one day as I craned out of the window when I should have been dusting.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ I scrambled down and grabbed my lappie. ‘Just going.’

  ‘Wait! Wait, Ada!’ He grabbed my arm. ‘What’re you looking for?’

  ‘The mountains,’ I pointed over the brown veld, ‘where there is snow. Have you ever seen snow?’ I could never ask such a question of Miss Rose. And I would never want to trouble Madam.

  ‘Once.’ He grinned, slinging down his school blazer. I noticed one of the buttons was missing. ‘It was like wet cotton wool. You could roll it into balls and throw it. Snowballs!’ He mimed a bowling action, hair flopping forwards on to his forehead as he swung his arm. Master Phil always answered my questions. He never made fun of me, like Miss Rose did. Then he climbed up on the toy box himself, and showed me how he could brush the ceiling with his fingers as he pretended to bowl once more, and said he often did it to check how tall he was and that one day maybe even his head would reach the ceiling.

  That winter, the cold winds from the snow that Master Phil knew about cut through my uniform and numbed my face when I went down Adderley Street to post Madam’s letters to Ireland across the sea. Did those letters hold the same thoughts as the book on Madam’s dressing table? Or did Madam leave some things out of her letters, like she left some things out of her book?

  I hurried on my journey, wrapped in Mama’s old funeral coat, too cold to search for new shop signs or to read the words outside the newspaper office. Back at Cradock House, Mama and I made pumpkin soup and roast chicken stuffed with last summer’s dried apricots, and hot sponge puddings that young Master Phil loved. ‘More, please, Miriam,’ he would say after eating a mountainous bowl. ‘Best sponge ever.’

  Only after the winter was past did I realise that, in one important way, Madam was the same as me: we both carried sentences inside ourselves that we never spoke out loud. The difference was that she could tell her sentences to the book, or to her letters, whereas I had to keep mine forever inside my head. Because, you see, even although I could read, I wasn’t yet able to write.

  Chapter 4

  Miss Rose took piano lessons.

  Not at Rocklands School that I couldn’t go to because of trouble later on, or from Madam who was a music teacher herself, but from another lady teacher in narrow glasses who came once a week.

  ‘Arch the fingers, Rosemary,’ she instructed. ‘Up, up, up!’

  I used to dust the piano every day, so I could see what Miss Rose was learning. I could see the book with its pictures of white and black keys, and how they were named like the letters Madam had taught me – only the piano letters didn’t go all the way to the end of the alphabet. I wondered why not.

  So I could tell where Miss Rose needed to put her fingers to make a tune.

  Sometimes if I was dusting in the room and she made a mistake, I could show her where she should have put her fingers.

  ‘Smarty-pants!’ Miss Rose stuck her tongue out at me and tossed her long yellow hair back from her face. Miss Rose knew she was very beautiful but still spent hours looking at herself in the mirror in her bedroom to make sure, widening her eyes and turning from one side to the other. Unlike Madam’s soft green eyes, Miss Rose’s were dark blue, like slate on a roof or the Karoo sky just before night. Mrs Pumile had no time for Miss Rose because Miss Rose would never say good morning to her when she passed her on the street. My mother Miriam said that Miss Rose would ‘grow out of it’. Certainly Miss Rose seemed to grow out of her clothes very quickly because she always needed new ones, but how you grew out of rudeness I didn’t know.

  One thing was certain: Miss Rose did not love music.

  ‘I hate the piano!’ she would hiss at the back of the teacher in glasses as she and Madam talked in low voices at the front door after each lesson. ‘Arch, arch – I hate it!’

  This pained Madam, who had played the piano since she was a child over the sea. Indeed, one of the first things that Master Edward bought when he moved into Cradock House, and was waiting for Madam to arrive, was a piano.

&nb
sp; ‘It was made in Leipzig, Ada, in a country called Germany,’ Madam told me the first time it was my job to do the dusting. ‘Look,’ she pointed at gold lettering, ‘here’s the make – Zimmerman. We don’t often find words with a z, do we?’

  ‘Only “zebra”, Ma’am. How did it come here?’

  ‘Across the sea by boat, dear, just like I did. How kind of Master Edward to buy it for me.’

  I watched Madam as she looked up from the piano and out of the window towards the Groot Vis.

  Will I still love Edward?

  Will I be able to play for him as passionately as I play for myself ? Will he want me to?

  All I knew was Cradock and the Karoo with its dust and rocky koppies and its lazy river, so a sea with endless water and places beyond such a sea were a mystery. Even the ragged place where Auntie lived across the river, and the crowded township at the far end of Bree Street where Mama sometimes took me to visit friends, and where the strict St James School lay, were better known to me.

  I could not imagine what a boat looked like. Clearly the people who lived in those faraway places were very clever and could make things like pianos and boats that we weren’t able to on our side of the sea.

  ‘Will you ever go across the sea?’ I asked Master Phil one day as he did his homework upstairs with the door shut, while Miss Rose fought with the piano downstairs.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Master Phil, considering. ‘You’d like to, wouldn’t you? I know you like new places, that’s why you climb up on my toy box to look out—’

  ‘But will you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Master Phil, his eyes wandering from the exercise book in front of him to the cricket bat and ball propped near the door for a quick getaway.

  He brightened. ‘Tell you what, we’ll go together one day. To Ireland, to see my Aunt Ada that you’re named for!’ He leant back dangerously in his chair.