The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘That is not your husband’s bed?’

  ‘I have no husband.’

  She looked at me, then looked at the rusty paraffin stove, the hooks for my towel and Auntie’s towel, the piles of washing, the dented kettle.

  ‘I will see if I can get you some jam. You need to be strong for the baby.’

  Chapter 24

  ‘Auntie,’ I gasped, ‘wake up, Auntie, it is the baby!’ I cried out as the agony rose from my stomach and wrapped itself round my back.

  I had been lying in pain for some time, thinking that it would go away, but now it grasped me too firmly to resist and I felt the gush of my waters breaking beneath me. It was night. I could hardly see Auntie as she struggled into her overall and felt about for the candle next to her bed. She struck a match, lit the candle and her face floated towards where I lay on my place on the floor.

  ‘I will get the doctor,’ she said hoarsely, stepping over me. ‘Hold this to your face.’ She pulled a cloth from the wet washing pile and pressed it across my forehead.

  I lay on my side and watched her stumble out of the hut. Through the open doorway loomed the shape of nearby huts and above them the prick of stars. I remembered seeing stars at Cradock House when hanging out the dishcloths after supper. You don’t normally see stars in the township because of the smoke from cooking fires, so it must be very late at night or very early in the morning. Another spasm of pain caught at me and I twisted on the floor. The stars blurred.

  ‘Hush, hush,’ whispered a new voice and a hand stroked the cloth over my forehead, like I had done with young Master Phil. But this wasn’t young Master Phil. The Master never approved of me caring for young Master Phil like that …

  ‘Poppie?’

  ‘Yes, child. The doctor comes soon.’

  ‘I did what I thought was right, Poppie.’

  ‘Hush, child, hold my hand.’

  ‘It was my duty,’ I said, the loneliness of Master’s face appearing in my mind, the sound of Clair de Lune playing as the sun set and the purple light following my fingers on the piano … ‘Will I be forgiven, Poppie?’

  ‘Shhh, shhh, turn on your side.’

  ‘Madam must not come.’ I struggled to sit up and Poppie pressed my shoulders down again. ‘Is Madam here?’ I stared out of the doorway, expecting to see Madam at any moment in one of her cream day dresses, perfectly ironed.

  Then the doorway filled and it was not Madam but the doctor who had been kind to me and he knelt over me and turned me on to my back and felt my stomach.

  ‘Boil water,’ he said to Auntie, who had also reappeared. She and Poppie busied themselves with the paraffin stove. ‘Give me a fresh sheet for Ada to lie on.’ Auntie hesitated, then pulled a folded sheet from the clean washing pile. The doctor rolled me slowly to the side, slipped one part of the sheet under me and then rolled me to the other side and spread it fully beneath me.

  The pain seemed to have stopped for a moment and I could see Auntie and Poppie’s lined faces in the candlelight. Poppie saw me looking at her and took my hand again and began to sing, like the women on the riverbank. I tried to push the pain away and think about the tune that she sang, the key – maybe D minor – and the length of the notes and the rests between them …

  But soon the pain was back and I found myself crying out and twisting on the floor again.

  ‘Will I be forgiven?’ I gasped and caught at the doctor’s hand. ‘Does God understand?’

  ‘Think only of the child,’ instructed the doctor, passing my hand to Poppie and turning from her questioning eyes to busy himself with hot water and cloths. The candle smoked, plunging the hut into shadow. Auntie scratched for another one in the tin under her bed.

  ‘Madam,’ I moaned as a strange feeling began to take hold of my lower body. I felt the pressure of the child moving down and wanting to be born. The doctor moved my legs and nodded to Auntie and Poppie.

  ‘The baby is coming.’

  Auntie squeezed around behind me and lifted my shoulders to rest against her. Poppie held my hand and murmured her song. The doctor knelt between my legs and I felt the pain press down through me and I found myself crying for it to end. Madam’s scales rushed like the wind from Cradock House all the way to the township, and I saw Master’s car with its lights like the eyes of night animals peering into the hut.

  ‘Go away!’ I cried.

  Auntie hissed at my shoulder. The doctor was saying things I couldn’t hear, and Poppie was fetching something more from the clean washing pile. Auntie would not be happy at this disturbance to her business.

  ‘Almost there,’ the doctor said. Poppie wiped my forehead.

  I panted with the pain and the pressure and my body seemed on fire and I felt I should be torn apart until suddenly the doctor moved his hands and the pressure eased and there was another gush and he was gathering a little red bundle from between my legs. ‘A fine girl,’ he said with a quick smile, holding the child close to me and then wrapping it in one of Auntie’s clean cloths. The pain was going away from my body, the roar of Madam’s scales was fading, the night animals were disappearing from the doorway.

  The doctor laid the baby in my arms and I looked down. Her tiny face was indeed pale, as the doctor had told me it would be, and her eyes were the colour of milky early evening sky. She opened her mouth and gave a healthy cry. I traced a finger down over her nose and her mouth and felt the little lips seeking my finger. The doctor nodded encouragingly and got to his feet. Auntie and Poppie remained where they were, mouths open, eyes wide, staring down at the newborn child in silence.

  * * *

  It was only the presence of Poppie and the doctor that stilled Auntie’s tongue on the night the child was born. She hunched at the edge of her narrow bed as the doctor packed his bag. Poppie hovered by the door, her eyes darting between Auntie, myself and the child.

  ‘Nurse often,’ the doctor said, touching me gently on the shoulder, ‘that will bring the milk to your breast soon.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, on the edge of tears. ‘Thank you for helping me.’

  He nodded, then gathered his bag and bent through the doorway. Auntie pushed herself to her feet and followed him out. I could hear the mutter of their voices. I looked at Poppie. She gave an uncertain smile. Her eyes slid down to the baby in my arms.

  ‘Will I be forgiven, Poppie?’

  She hesitated. Still the doctor and Auntie talked outside. ‘Only the Lord forgives, child. You have to ask Him.’

  The child stirred in her cloth and I lifted her closer. The eager mouth sucked at me, the velvet cheek nestled pale as tea against my breast. I prayed she would find a way to love me even though I had given her this pale skin.

  Auntie returned and began noisily to clear up the cloths that the doctor had used, her back firmly to me. Poppie crept out with a murmured goodbye.

  ‘Who did this?’ Auntie demanded, turning on me then, and thrusting the bloodstained cloths towards me as if they were to blame for this birth, this child who would belong nowhere. It was getting light and I could see her face better now than in the candelight. Her eyes blazed at me, her hands holding the cloths shook with rage.

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ I said, gathering my voice, knowing this was the first of many battles. ‘The child’s skin cannot be changed.’

  ‘Have you no shame?’ she hissed, like she had done when I cried out during the birth. Perhaps, even then, she suspected something.

  ‘I felt shame for many months. It cannot get worse.’

  She snorted and flung the last cloths together. ‘You don’t know how bad it can get. Praise the Lord Miriam never saw this day.’ She hauled the bundle over her bent shoulder and pushed out of the doorway.

  I was on my own for an hour or more as the township slowly woke around me. It was hard to know how much time was passing and I cried a little, on account of being alone and having no one to share the birth of the child with, unlike my mother who had had Madam with her when I was born. I lay w
ith my child in my arms and remembered many things from when I was growing up. Things that made sense, and some that didn’t. Master Phil pulling me to stand by him at the opening of the new bank, Miss Rose leaving for Johannesburg when she ought to have stayed behind, Madam teaching me the letters of the alphabet, Mama crocheting in her chair, head bent, eyes turned away from mine when I asked about my father …

  What would you do, Mama, if Master came to you when Madam was away? If he stood before you with faded blue eyes sore from the loss of young Master Phil and lonely from the absence of Madam? If he reached out and touched your shoulder and promised not to hurt you?

  Would you turn him away?

  Mama understood duty and loyalty. But in this matter, duty to Master and loyalty to Madam could never be on the same side. Allowing one meant betraying the other. Mama would have had to make a choice, like I did. But what would she choose? And if she chose to turn away, would she lose her job? Her home?

  The child of my choice slept in my arms, making snuffling sounds and pursing her tiny lips. After some time I became thirsty and inched over the mat to the stove. There was some water left in the kettle that was now cool. I drank it all. I must go and fetch water from the communal tap to make up for the water Auntie had given to the doctor during the birth of the child. Then I must learn to carry the child in a blanket on my back so I can go back to school tomorrow and face the headmaster and Dina and Sipho and Veronica and my students and, later, Lindiwe and the washerwomen from the riverbank. I will hold up my head and I will bury my shame, like I am learning to bury my days at Cradock House and my debt to Madam lest it be misunderstood. And I must hope that Mr Dumise has found me worthy enough to let me stay.

  I laid the child down and reached for my overall. My body felt stiff, as if it had been stretched in directions it was not used to. I longed for the warm water of Cradock House to clean myself and to run over my face and through my hair as I used to do after morning cleaning. And then I would change and go upstairs to read to Master Phil and imagine he was getting better …

  If I collected a full bucket of water then there would be enough left over from drinking and cooking for a simple wash. But I should go soon in case Auntie returned and threw me out before I had the chance. I put my overall on and wrapped the child in another cloth – there was no way to disguise her pale face, it shone above the covering for all to see – found my cracked shoes and took up the bucket. My body ached from where the baby had been born.

  It was still early, this first morning with my daughter. The moon hung luminous in a grey sky streaked with rising smoke. Shadowy figures moved along the streets. A rim of sunrise showed orange on the horizon. I walked along the road, holding my child in my left arm and the bucket in my right. A girl child, not a boy.

  I would call her Dawn.

  I have almost given up hope of finding Ada now. It’s been six months and still no sign of her.

  People – among them Edward – say it is foolish to feel responsible for a maid, especially one who has disappeared. And yet I do, and have done so since the day I lifted her as a newborn out of Miriam’s arms.

  After much difficulty and many letters, I have found the correct church in KwaZakhele where dear Miriam is buried. The minister wrote back to me. He remembered Ada, but said he had not heard from her since. He mentioned that he had put up a small sign on Miriam’s grave.

  Although Edward will not allow it, I would like to visit the cemetery where Miriam lies, almost as a way of paying my respects and love to Ada who was like a daughter to me.

  I shall find a way.

  Chapter 25

  What did young Master Phil see as I walked down the dirt road in the half-light? What did he think of my sin? And of the pale child I held against my chest? Would he turn away from me? And from his father? Yet this was not a question he’d ever have had to answer. For if he’d been alive, Master would not have come to me in the night, even if Madam had been away in Johannesburg. It was Master Phil’s absence, together with Madam’s absence, that led to the footsteps down the corridor, and the knock on my door, and the shame that would walk by my side forever. Yet if Master Phil had lived …

  And then there was the matter of skin. When I look back on it now, when I look back at the girl on the dusty road carrying a newborn baby and a bucket, I now realise I knew nothing about skin. Skin touched me only lightly within Cradock House. It was only beyond its walls that the world divided itself so strictly between black and white, with coloureds falling awkwardly in between. Yet I thought I understood those grades of colour. I thought I could manage even under the new word called apartheid that Mrs Pumile spat through the hedge. Only once I came to live across the river did I realise that I was wrong. For there was something deeper. Something beneath the surface division into black, white or coloured. Something that reached beyond myself and my child, for which there was no word that you could find in the dictionary. It came down to the mixing of blood within a single family.

  It grew a life of its own. It reached out to people we knew and forced disputes amongst them. It divided old friends from one another, it split families in half, it turned strangers into enemies. It would do its evil work on others however hard I tried to appease it. It had terrible power, this difference of skin between mother and child.

  It became for me, I suppose, a war. Maybe not the kind that had taken young Master Phil, and maybe not the kind that the minister on the koppie had talked about, but a private war that spilt over into those around us. A war with no winning side. Nothing prepared me for this. For now, though, as I tramped along the uneven gravel road to the water tap, I couldn’t help crying out to God the Father: where do You stand in the matter of skin? Do You believe that what I did with Master was a sin because our skins did not match, or was it a sin because I betrayed Madam?

  ‘Ada! Ada!’

  I looked up from Dawn’s tiny face. It was light now, and the smell of cooking maize drifted on the cool morning air. It bothered me less than it had when I was newly expecting. The water tap was just a little further, at the end of the street, but my stiff legs were finding the walking hard, like Master Phil’s legs had once struggled.

  ‘Ada!’ Lindiwe’s strong hand grasped my bucket arm and stopped me. She thrust a bundle of washing over one shoulder. ‘The baby!’ she gasped, craning to see.

  I nodded and lifted Dawn towards her and watched her face. Lindiwe’s face – her sharp, knowing eyes, her forehead creased or smooth – always told me exactly what she was thinking. When we were learning new words, Lindiwe’s face would tell me if she understood, or if I had not explained well enough. Lindiwe’s face was my first guide as to what made a good teacher.

  She stood beside me now, legs planted apart to anchor herself beneath her heavy load. As her eyes devoured every feature of the tiny baby on my arm, I both longed for and feared her reaction. Around us, the township stirred with the first cries of the day, for there was never a moment that passed without struggle or loss. Women pushed past us to queue at the tap, and in the distance came the F sharp whistle of a train leaving the station.

  ‘Oh, Ada,’ Lindiwe breathed, and her face fell into lines of fear and dismay and the fight not to step away from me and be on her way. ‘Ada,’ she searched my face, ‘why?’

  I looked around me. A man chased his goats in front of him, washerwomen headed down to the Groot Vis – I was keeping Lindiwe from a favourable scrubbing rock – and a group of boys huddled over a waning fire. At Cradock House, Madam’s new maid would be fetching the milk from the gate.

  ‘It was my duty,’ I said.

  ‘But who had such power to make it so?’ Lindiwe’s tone was suddenly fierce.

  ‘I can’t say.’

  She stared down at Dawn who slept quietly, her lips moving in her first dreams, her skin the colour of the Groot Vis.

  ‘What will you do?’ she murmured.

  ‘I will stay here and teach.’

  Lindiwe sucked in her breath and I co
uld see her mind working through the difficulties. ‘Your auntie did not know?’

  ‘No. I’ll find another place if I have to.’

  She shook her head and it was only when she dropped her hand that I realised she had been squeezing my arm all the time. ‘Go well, Ada,’ she said finally, finding a gentleness towards me, her voice sinking below the rising tide of people about us. She shifted her bundle on to her other shoulder and made to go on her way.

  ‘Are you still my friend?’ I asked.

  Lindiwe looked away from me as if there was something across the road that had caught her attention, rather like Madam used to look out of the window for Ireland when she disagreed with Master. A barefoot youngster darted past, bumping against my bucket as he went by.

  ‘Careful!’ I cried, clutching Dawn harder.

  ‘I knew there was something wrong,’ Lindiwe murmured, ‘when you never talked of a boy…’

  ‘But are you still my friend?’ I asked again.

  ‘I am still your friend.’ She turned and hurried towards the river and, after a moment, her stocky figure dissolved into my tears.

  I stood in line at the tap, holding Dawn’s face against me so others would not see her skin this first time, and filled my bucket. No one took any notice. Several women had tiny babies on their backs. When I got back to Auntie’s hut I would practise tying her into a blanket. Then I would wash as best I could and gather my few possessions together in case the money I was paying for my place on Auntie’s floor was not enough for her to overlook the colour of my child. Perhaps the doctor might know someone who would show me kindness, who would understand that what I did came out of duty, not out of spite or looseness.

  I must get into a clean overall, lift Dawn in the blanket on to my back and go to school. It would not do to be absent even for a day. But what if Mr Dumise said I was no longer welcome as a teacher? What if my attempts to prove my worthiness had failed, and skill in music was not enough to cover the discrepancy in skin between my child and me? I was surely a poor example to my students. I myself would not condemn anyone for feeling that way.