The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘I need to know this reading, Ada. I will pay you for the teaching of it when I am rich!’ She giggles and rubs her fingers to denote endless amounts of money. ‘I will be so slow at it that you will become a wealthy woman!’

  And so we start.

  Just like Madam taught me my letters, I will teach Lindiwe. Just like Master Phil told me their meanings, so I will tell Lindiwe.

  ‘TomorrowIsailforAfrica.’

  We try to do one letter a day.

  Slowly she begins to recognise letters and then the words that they form, just like I did. Then we start to make sentences out of the words. I show her how words can have different meanings even though they look the same. And then how those meanings change again when words gather themselves into groups.

  Like me, Lindiwe is learning about a world that she thought might be there but until now could never be touched.

  It makes me sad to think how much I owe Madam that I can never tell her.

  Chapter 21

  I still cannot understand why Ada left.

  Edward says he has no idea, he says she worked so hard to get the house ready and then simply disappeared. He says: ‘That’s why you can never trust them, you can educate them and pay them well and take care of them, and they will just go off and leave without a word.’

  I am not so sure. I think something must have happened. I feel I know Ada as well as Miriam did, perhaps even better, for Ada had surpassed Miriam in some respects. And yet, in others, Ada was less experienced than her mother. She’d hardly been in the outside world. I worry for her. What can have made her leave? Is she ill? How can I find her? Surely I must try. The new maid is unsatisfactory. I think I will get Mrs Pumile in for the ironing and manage the rest myself. There’s only Edward and me, after all. And I will look for Ada …

  ‘Ada! Ada!’

  I jump. It is Auntie, from further down the riverbank where she is gossiping with a friend. ‘Go fetch the next lot!’

  I squeeze out the sheet I am rinsing and get to my feet – the child makes this hard, he does not like to be interrupted at his rest – and find a bush to stretch it over. Then set off to Auntie’s hut to fetch the next bundle of washing. The bank is slippery with gravel and steep in places where the feet of washerwomen have worn a path between the rocks and the bush. The sun burns down directly from overhead and that means there is at least one more session of scrubbing that can be done today and be ready for folding by evening. I have started to measure the day in loads of washing.

  But Auntie is fair to me. She sometimes finds a small amount of milk to give me to help strengthen the baby, like the doctor said it would. And she takes me with her on Sundays to the church by the koppie outside the township. The people there are welcoming to me because I am related to Auntie. Some of them are neighbours and I know their names. They ask no questions about the baby and the lack of a husband. Auntie, though, is still troubled by this lack. I think that is why she brings me with her. She prays that I will be saved despite my mislaid husband.

  Even so, I like going there. Not to be saved – for I already believe in God – but for the space, and the lack of pushing people, nosing dogs, smoky fires and cooking maize meal. Also, it’s a part of the Karoo I’ve somehow always known, even if I could only see it from a distance. Beneath my feet is the hard thirsty land that I used to stare at from Master Phil’s toy box, as it stretched to the mountains where there is snow in winter. Now, though, it is the end of summer, and all about me the earth is clothed in waves of fragile grass with golden paintbrush tips. From where we stand in their yellow tickling midst, I can look straight up at the koppie and watch the sun wander across the brown stones and make them shine. I spot a single thorn tree at its base, like the bony tree that overhung the kaia at Cradock House. Wherever I go I seem to find something to remind me of Cradock House and those that I have loved there.

  The minister wears a robe – better ironed than the minister in KwaZakhele – and stands on a large boulder and tells us that God the Father wants us to be brave and to show mercy to others even though they do not show mercy to us. He talks about skin difference and the word ‘apartheid’ that Mrs Pumile first told me. He says that we are being tested in a fire and that the time will come when we will be free to take our place alongside all other free people in the world. Several of the men shout out words that the congregation pick up and shout back. This church is more lively than Master and Madam’s church.

  It is a war, he calls out at the end of his sermon. A war of liberation!

  ‘Amen!’ the congregation roars.

  I will need to find a dictionary to look that up. I have heard this word ‘liberation’, but I don’t think it means the same as peace. I’ve had difficulty with the meaning of peace before, like when I asked Miss Rose why there was still fighting during peace. Perhaps liberation holds the same difficulties?

  I look at the people around me. To my surprise, they are smiling and clapping. I feel a clutch at my stomach that is not the child. They surely cannot want a war like the one I remember. A war with bombs and fires that made Master wring his hands and Madam weep? A war of ghosts that took young men and wounded them like young Master Phil was wounded? Black people were not trusted enough in the matter of guns to fight in that war. They did not pay its price. They do not know the pain of it. If they did, they would not smile and clap. But if such a war does come, I tell myself as the baby turns within me and I rub my stomach to make him rest, I must be prepared. I must harden my heart, I must choose sides carefully. I must be prepared for the enemy-in-waiting.

  The people chant and clap and Auntie sways against me and closes her eyes and lifts her arms. The women in their blue and white dresses send their swooping hymns up past the koppie and towards the horizon. I feel the same trembling that I used to from the organ in Madam and Master’s church. For the moment, there is no war, there are no enemies-in-waiting. The sun is warm and the air shakes with our voices for I, too, join the singing and it lifts me and the child up and lets us fly away.

  * * *

  It is raining, the first rain for many months. The Groot Vis has come alive. Brown water races beneath the iron bridge, carrying trees and animals and perhaps people, too, that have been caught in its path. The rocks where we scrub are hidden beneath foamy waves. The drifts are closed. Children stand on the bridge and jump up and down and throw sticks into the water and watch them carried off in the torrent and they scream at the shaking of the bridge from the force of the water. The sky pours, the township streets become rivers too, and carry their own load of rubbish and lick at the opening of Auntie’s hut. There will be no washing today. I hold a towel over my head and tell Auntie I am going to see Lindiwe.

  The streets are almost empty, but on high ground outside each hut sit buckets and tins and calabashes normally used for transporting water or keeping beer or sour milk – anything to catch the spare rain and avoid a trip to the communal tap. Auntie put out hers overnight.

  The school is quiet. I am relieved. I hurry across the bare playground, my feet squelching in the hard earth that has now turned to mud. No one comes to send me away. I knock on the door but there is no reply. I knock again, then push open the door and go inside and shake out my towel and wipe my feet on the linoleum floor. I have never been inside a school before. A long passage stretches ahead of me, with doors on each side. It is dark but I can make out pictures taped to the walls and there are also rough drawings scrawled on the walls and over some of the pictures. Each door has a small window at head height and I look inside but all the classrooms are empty. At the end of the passage there is a door with no window and I knock.

  ‘Yes?’ comes from inside. I push open the door.

  ‘School is closed,’ a black man says, looking up, frowning, from a laden desk. ‘You must come back tomorrow.’ The man is about Master’s age, but his hair is a dark fuzz and he wears a shirt that is grey with washing. The points of his collar curl.

  ‘I am sorry to disturb you,
sir, but I am not a student,’ I say, clutching my towel. He waits. I take a breath and battle to remember the sentences I have been practising. I think the baby is stealing some of my memory because I don’t remember as well as I used to. ‘I play the piano. I know about music. I am looking for a job, sir.’

  He looks me over, his gaze stopping on my swollen stomach before returning to my face.

  ‘I met a blind woman and she said that you had a piano but no one to play it, no one to teach the children about music.’ My words come out in a rush, and they are not the words that I practised.

  ‘Where did you study?’ the man asks.

  ‘I was taught by my Madam. I can play for you, sir, you will see I speak the truth.’

  He gives a little smile. ‘Where have you been teaching?’

  ‘This is my first time to be a teacher.’

  He raises his eyebrows and gets up and comes round the desk. He is tall, taller than Madam or Master or young Master Phil. ‘You will have to prove yourself…’

  ‘Take me to your piano, sir, and I will prove myself.’

  My heart is pounding and this man must surely see it in my neck and in my throbbing temples. He must also think I am very bold. But this is my chance. This is my chance to earn a living doing something I love. This is my chance to break free. Free from the longing for Cradock House and its people, perhaps even free from the poverty I find myself in with Auntie. I once had a chance – a different sort of chance – with Jacob Mfengu from the butcher’s, but it came to nothing. This chance, this time, I must not fail.

  ‘We will see,’ he says, leading the way out of the door and striding quickly down the passage.

  He goes through a door that leads to a second passage and then through another door and we are suddenly in a hall, not as big as the town hall on Market Square, but still bigger than any other room I have seen on this side of the river. There is a row of windows high up on one of the walls, and a small raised stage at one end. It is dark. It is also hot from the closed windows, and there is a smell that comes from when a place needs to be aired. As my eyes start to see better, I see red curtains drooping from rails on each side of the stage. They are missing curtain rings and some of their bottoms drag on the floor and some of their hems are undone.

  ‘There is the piano,’ he says, pointing through the gloom towards a brown upright pushed against the side wall.

  I walk over to it, the child for once still within me, and open the lid. My hands come away covered in dust, and I wipe them on my towel. I look down at the piano for a moment, remembering Madam’s beautiful Zimmerman, the creaminess of its ivory keys, the satin shine of its wood. I touch a key. It feels spongy and gives off a flat tone. I pull out the stool and sit down. It wobbles on uneven legs.

  This piano will not be in tune, I tell myself, for it is old and no one has taken care of it and no one has played it for a while. But it still carries music within it – as all pianos do – and if you play it with love, it will give you the music you’re looking for. The tuning and the broken keys mean nothing. Play for Mama. Play for the child. Play for Madam. Play for Master Phil. Play for a job.

  So I lift my hands. The tune rises in my head. My fingers reach for the keys and find the opening notes, and I begin. It was as I thought; the sound was flat and tinny, the pedals didn’t depress properly, some of the keys no longer worked. But I encouraged the piano and I played all the way through and in the hot, dusty silence of the empty school, it was the most beautiful ‘Raindrop’ I had ever played.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asks, when I have finished and the last chord has faded away.

  ‘Mary Hanembe,’ I say, a name that I have made up. No one will connect a young woman called Mary Hanembe who plays the piano and who has a coloured child with the Ada that once lived at Cradock House. But I do not have a Pass with that name on it – my Pass identity paper says Ada Mabuse and I keep that folded at the bottom of the suitcase next to the Raindrop prelude score – and I must hope that he will not ask for one.

  ‘What will you do, Mary Hanembe, in your first lesson? When there is noise and shouting and the children misbehave?’

  ‘I will play a march, sir, or a polka, and I will let them sing and dance. And when they are tired I will tell them about the man who has composed the music and why it is special.’

  ‘We do not have much money for a music teacher.’

  ‘I will take whatever you can give, sir.’

  He glances at my stomach where the child swells beneath Auntie’s overall, and nods. And so it is done.

  He says I can start the next week and he names an amount of money that is a little less than what I used to earn with Madam and Master but will be enough to pay Auntie for her piece of floor and have something left over. Auntie will be angry to lose me from her washing business but her anger will be reduced by the money I will pay for rent. And she will become used to this arrangement so that by the time the baby arrives, the money may even make her look past the colour of the child and let me stay.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ the man asks, as we walk down the passage past the scrawled-upon pictures. ‘Your English is good, you will help the children by speaking such good English.’

  ‘KwaZakhele,’ I say quickly, ‘but my family is here in Cradock.’

  He nods, but doesn’t ask me how it is so. Perhaps he suspects that the Madam who taught me the piano also taught me good English. He does not ask me why I no longer continue with that Madam. He does not ask about the coming child. I have prepared answers for those questions, but he does not ask them. He also does not ask for references. A maid like me without references means only one thing: that such a maid must be untrustworthy, must have lied or stolen from her Madam and been sacked for her wickedness. I have no easy answer for my lack of references. I would have to lie. I would have to say, perhaps, that my Madam became ill and went away, that I could not get references before she left.

  ‘My name is Shepherd Dumise,’ he says, instead of questioning me further. ‘I am the headmaster. You were lucky to find me; the other teachers might not have been interested.’ He smiles. His face is kinder now, since I played the piano. I smile back.

  ‘What was the piece you played, Mary?’

  ‘The Raindrop prelude, sir. By Chopin.’

  We have reached the front door. A strip of linoleum is curling away from where the floor runs out and Mr Dumise presses it down with his shoe. He tells me to arrive early for my first day, so that I can be ready to play a march while the children arrive for something he calls assembly. He tells me that I will be the first music teacher that the school has ever had.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Dumise. I will be here early on Monday.’

  I step out of the door and into the playground. It is still raining. The Groot Vis rages beneath the iron bridge. I wish I could run for joy, but the child is too heavy and the headmaster still watches me, so I will walk in the rain and it will soothe me and calm the child and make a song like it used to on the kaia roof beneath the bony thorn tree.

  ‘What do you think, Master Phil?’ I whisper with hidden excitement to the sky, and to the swollen clouds that race across it. ‘Are you proud of me for this?’

  Chapter 22

  ‘You think you can come and go when you want!’ Auntie shouts over the rush and roar of the Groot Vis. ‘Go find another place to stay!’ She turns her back on me and disappears into the dimness of the hut. Poppie’s grandchildren stand in their doorway, fingers in their mouths, noses dribbling, and listen to the river and stare at me until Poppie pulls them away.

  ‘But I will pay you instead for my place,’ I say from the entrance, wiping the rain off my face. ‘I will pay you a good sum for the place. And I will wash with you when I’m not at school.’

  Auntie looks up at me from where she is sitting on her bed. The floor is piled with bundles of dirty washing. I can see she is reconsidering. ‘How much?’ she asks.

  I tell her what I can afford to pay that will leave a
little money left over from my wages. I have also taken Lindiwe’s advice about what such a place on a floor should cost.

  ‘It is not enough,’ says Auntie, turning away again.

  ‘I would pay more if there was a bed,’ I say.

  Auntie snorts and reaches for her kettle to make tea. ‘A bed! Where you think I can get a bed?’

  I wait outside. A couple slosh past, ankle deep in a furrow of dirty water that swirls down the middle of the street. Rubbish – paper, tins, waste – crusts the edge of the flow. The couple look at me and wonder why I and the child stand in the rain outside a hut when we could go inside for shelter.

  I say nothing. I remember young Master Phil explaining that talk about money between people is called ‘negotiation’. He said there was a time for talk in negotiation, and a time for silence.

  ‘Maybe you can stay till the baby comes,’ Auntie mutters after some time has passed. ‘I do this only for the sake of your mother.’

  ‘I have a chance to be a teacher, Auntie. Why are you not pleased for me?’ I struggle to keep my voice steady. ‘Mama would be pleased.’

  The roar of the river reaches a new crescendo. I remember Madam and I playing the opening to the Grieg piano concerto. I remember she said it was the sound of the stream tumbling over cliffs near her home in Ireland. But the Groot Vis is not Grieg; it is Beethoven, grand and heavy and a bit frightening.

  Auntie sniffs and roots about for her tin of tea. ‘Come out of the rain.’

  * * *

  I don’t have a dress that fits me, and the shoes that I wore at Cradock House have become scuffed from walking on dirt roads and up and down the riverbank. I do not have any polish to make them shine.

  But I must make the best of what I have got. I will wash and stretch Auntie’s blue overall to get it smooth, I will arrange my hair with neatness and I will see if Poppie or Lindiwe have any shoe polish that I could borrow until I get enough money to buy some. And maybe the children and the teachers will be satisfied by my music and will not notice the poorness of my clothing and shoes.