The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘Be careful,’ said Lindiwe when it was time for her brother to leave.

  ‘Good luck, Ada,’ he said, taking my hand in the African handshake. ‘I will see you again.’ He turned to hug his sister.

  ‘Be careful,’ repeated Lindiwe, watching him as he stepped through the doorway and melted into the darkness of the township streets. Jake was always quiet like that. You never heard him arrive and you never saw him once he was beyond the door. I wonder if he was the one who taught Lindiwe how to use a sharpened bicycle spoke.

  Chapter 29

  I am the black woman with the coloured child. Everybody knows me, even in this place where I am a newcomer. Even so I am lonely. Such loneliness, I have discovered, does not yield when a future beckons. The birth of Dawn meant I was up at night to feed her, and in the dark of the hut a hollowness plucked away at me. If only I could heal my heart, if only I could tell someone about Master Phil – and what might have happened if I’d realised his love for me was not that of a brother towards his sister …

  The only time this loneliness faded was when I played for my students and let the music carry me away. But then, cruelly, it lay in wait for my return and tricked me into remembering once more. The ‘Township Bach’ narrowed into the whoop of an owl outside Master Phil’s bedroom, or the sweet soprano of Madam as she sang notes for me to find on the piano. When I walked with Dawn through the Karoo scrub I saw, instead of the crouching plants, Madam’s favourite pink roses in a vase on her dressing table and smelt their perfume as clearly as I could read the pages of her special book. Memories never fade, they simply hide, only to emerge greater in number and intensity, and fresh as when I first made them.

  I also don’t belong here yet. And those who don’t belong can find themselves used by those who do. If you have stepped out of your place in the world, if you have sinned against your fellows, you must expect to be a target. You must expect to be used by others for their own purposes, for their own causes. In this case, the protest against Passes. I myself had only ever been asked for my Pass twice on the streets of Cradock, but in Johannesburg – maybe on account of all the gold in the ground – it happened all the time. Maybe it was to do with money. Maybe white people in Johannesburg felt there was not enough gold to go around and so they wished to send some black people away and keep the riches for themselves. Maybe the business with Passes was just an excuse. Maybe riches from the ground were for a white future only.

  Whatever the case, I was very nervous of anything to do with Passes, given my lack of one in Mary Hanembe’s name, and the fact that the one in my own name had not been signed since I left Cradock House. There were more police in the new township. More police with shorter tempers and growling dogs that strained at their leashes. More police to ask to see your Pass and throw you in jail if it was missing, or unsigned.

  Silas wanted to protest against Passes.

  ‘We’ll march from the school across the Groot Vis, up Church Street to the town hall!’ he announced, waving his arms during teatime. ‘We’ll show strength in numbers! The St James teachers will join us – the choir will be there.’

  The town hall! The Karoo Gardens where I used to sit on a bench beside the aloes, warming my feet in the sun! But it was too far, there would be too many eyes watching.

  ‘And after we’re at the town hall?’ asked someone.

  ‘We hand in a petition about how we hate the dompas, then march back the same way,’ Silas said, searching through the staff with a determined eye. The jazz man waved his fist in the air like the congregation on the koppie had done. Mr Dumise frowned.

  ‘What about you, Mary?’ Silas’s smooth tone caught me. ‘Where do you belong on this?’

  The room turned to look at me.

  I wanted to say that this was not a matter of belonging, but rather a matter of singling out. Of finding another means to show that I didn’t belong at the school, and never would. And that it had less to do with a march about Passes, and more to do with punishing me for lying with a white man.

  Silas waited, as all enemies do, with a smile on his lips.

  ‘Members of staff must make their own choice,’ came the voice of Mr Dumise, quietly but clearly from his position at the teapot. ‘It is a personal matter.’

  ‘Then let’s hear Mary’s personal opinion,’ interrupted Silas on a rising note.

  I could tell some of my colleagues thought Silas had indeed pushed into a place that had nothing to do with Passes. Hold up your head, I told myself sternly, remembering Lindiwe’s words. Hold it up and maybe they will respect you for that.

  ‘I will not put my child at risk,’ I declared, forcing my voice to be firm.

  Silas hesitated, then turned away with a flash of irritation and called for a show of hands in favour. A few arms went up, but only reluctantly.

  ‘No matter,’ he said defiantly, making a fuss of slapping the back of the jazz man and the few others in favour. ‘We’ll go ahead anyway. We’ll show the marchers from St James that we’re united!’

  I met Mr Dumise’s glance across the room. Church Street and Market Square was a boundary I dared not cross.

  My lessons finished soon after the meeting. I set off for Lindiwe’s hut through the usual packed streets and then across the drift at Cross Street with the water cool on my bare feet.

  ‘Ada?’ A small man suddenly appeared at my shoulder, from the shade of the mimosas. He walked just behind me, alongside Dawn in her blanket. It was Lindiwe’s brother, Jake.

  ‘What did they decide?’ he asked into my ear. His rough jacket brushed my arm.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘At your staff meeting. What did the staff decide?’ Dawn shifted on my back at his voice. Dawn loved Jake, for he swung her over his head, or sometimes brought her a tiny toy he’d carved himself. Dawn was not the only one he treated kindly. Sometimes he brought me an apple, or the latest newspaper.

  ‘How do you know about the meeting?’ I stopped. He fell back into the hurrying masses and motioned for me to go on.

  ‘What did they decide?’ he repeated, when I had carried on walking.

  ‘There weren’t many in favour,’ I said. I looked round for him but he was gone, swallowed up. I wished he would stay for once, and talk about normal things. I liked Jake, and I think he liked me.

  I pushed on, my head filled with thoughts of Passes and divided staffrooms and Jake, who knew other people’s business before they knew it themselves. A woman who was the mother of one of my students nodded to me. I smiled back. Increasingly, there were some who were prepared to know me to my face. I’d come to value every tiny nod or half-smile even if they never went so far as to speak to me.

  It was a start. One day they would know me for what I was. One day they would see past the difference in colour between my child and me. If God the Father could not bring it about, then I would make it happen on my own.

  * * *

  Dawn became ill and stopped drinking from me. Not in the way young Master Phil was ill as a child, after eating too many apricots from the garden, but in another way where she coughed and shook in her wash basket on the floor of Lindiwe’s hut and her normally pale cheeks turned red. I held her in my arms and rushed across the drift – not bothering to take off my shoes – to the kind doctor’s tiny house. From further up the river I heard someone shout my name, and from even further away came snatches of women singing over their washing.

  ‘Please!’ I pushed past the queue and called out to him where he tended to an old man. ‘Please help me.’

  He nodded and pointed for me to sit on the floor alongside several other women with babies. I squeezed into a space. Dawn cried and coughed, her skin fiery to the touch. My shoes oozed river water. The women looked at me, and stared at Dawn’s skin but said nothing out of sympathy for the child’s condition. If only I could go somewhere and not feel I had to apologise for her. For me …

  He was gentle with her when he got to me. He used the round metal thing that I had
seen Dr Wilmott use on young Master Phil. He looked inside her mouth and I remembered the sickness that happened at the end of the drought when people’s throats turned white and they died, and I prayed that God the Father would not punish Dawn like that for my sin.

  ‘Do you have money?’ he asked, pulling her vest down gently over her chest when he had finished.

  ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘She needs special medicine,’ he said. ‘I don’t have such medicine but I can write a letter for you to get the medicine at the chemist in town. But it will cost money.’

  ‘You have no medicine for her?’

  He looked at me. ‘None of it is strong enough.’

  Dawn coughed and coughed, her tiny chest heaving, her eyes streaming. The women around me murmured and shook their heads. More patients peered through the door.

  ‘Write me the letter,’ I said, fighting tears. ‘I shall find the money.’

  He handed Dawn back to me and began to write.

  ‘Will they give me the medicine if the child and I have a difference of skin?’

  People gasped, but the doctor put a hand on my shoulder as he gave me the paper for the medicine. ‘They will give it. Be brave. Next, please.’

  I ran again along the dirt streets and again across the Groot Vis. Below the drift, the river narrowed into a brown channel between shallow pools. Holding Dawn’s hot body against my shoulder, I thrust past people and goats and women like Lindiwe with loads on their heads or shoulders. Some shouted at me. I listened to no one. Back at Lindiwe’s hut I laid Dawn on the floor. Then I pulled open my case and grabbed all the money that I had hidden at the bottom – money from my wages that I was saving to buy Dawn some shoes one day, or to buy a new overall, or to pay Lindiwe if her business suffered on account of me. Dawn screamed, my hands shook, my heart seized with fear of going into the chemist where someone might see me, where the man who made the medicine might refuse us after all.

  I pulled a cloth from Lindiwe’s washing to wind over my hair and forehead and partly across my cheeks, and an extra nappy to cover Dawn’s face, then ran down Bree Street past Madam and Master’s church and then to the place where Bree joined Church Street and changed its name to Dundas, where my child and I would be plain for all to see. It had been more than a year of Dawn’s life since I left Cradock House. To my left, down on the riverbank, the mimosas and the bluegums still dug for water where Master Phil and I had once walked. Further away, the iron bridge still shuddered with fine motor cars coming and going to the station, and with the quieter footsteps of black people carrying suitcases and babies on their backs as they had done more than a year ago. I kept my head down, and pressed Dawn into my shoulder. Yet her cries rang out, and people – white and black – turned to stare at me and whisper amongst themselves. Cries that must surely carry to Cradock House and give us away. Pray, I told myself fiercely, pray that no one turns round and knows who you are. Pray that Master and Madam are at home, pray that Master is seeing to his papers in the study, pray that Madam is practising on the piano and does not hear …

  The chemist was the same one where Miss Rose had bought red lipstick before she left for Johannesburg and the trouble that would find her there. There was now a separate door where black people queued and the two women already waiting hissed at the sound of Dawn’s coughing and allowed me in front of them. The separate door might save me, I realised, for it led into a room closed off from the rest of the chemist and only contained a small window into the place where the chemist mixed his medicines. A white person in the main part of the shop would not see me where I stood.

  It took some time before a man appeared in the window. He was wearing a white coat and I remembered him from a time when Madam had asked me to fetch a parcel for her. I’m sure he did not know me. He had a strong face, this man. A face that would show exactly what he thought, like Lindiwe’s face always showed intent, like Master Phil’s face showed war and love.

  ‘Yes?’

  I handed him the letter. He looked at the covered bundle that was Dawn coughing in my arms. Her face was hidden beneath the cloth and he could not have seen the difference in skin.

  ‘Do you have money to pay?’

  I felt in the pockets of my overall and pulled out all the coins that I possessed and laid them in a heap on the small counter beneath the window. Some of the coins were rubbed smooth and I wondered if coins wore out and if he would find them too old to exchange for medicine.

  ‘I hope this will be enough, sir,’ I said, trying to keep my voice and my hands steady. ‘It is all that I have.’

  He did not count it but just ran his eyes over the pile and then over me. ‘It will be enough. Sit down,’ he motioned to a low chair in the corner, ‘and I will make it for you.’

  When he returned, he brought a bottle and a spoon with him. He explained that I needed to give Dawn a spoonful of the medicine in the morning, at midday and in the evening until the bottle was finished.

  ‘If you don’t finish the medicine, the child will become sick again,’ he warned. Then he said he had another medicine that he would give Dawn now that would help her until the first medicine started working.

  ‘For the same money?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, for the same money. Now unwrap the child,’ he said.

  I stared at him. Unwrap her? Then he would see her face fully, then he would know my shame and he might refuse to give us the medicine after all.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, slowly taking the cloth off Dawn’s face and unwrapping the blanket from her hot body, ‘the child is innocent.’

  The chemist stood on his side of the window and I stood on mine, holding my coloured child between us. Dawn had lost weight and her pale legs, once free of the blanket, kicked only feebly. He looked with his strong face from me to the child, then picked up the spoon and filled it with red liquid from a large bottle he took down from a nearby shelf.

  ‘This will bring down her temperature.’ His voice was quiet, like young Master Phil’s used to be quiet when he talked in the darkness of his bedroom. ‘It will calm her so that the other medicine can do its work.’

  He leant forward and I held Dawn out to him. Carefully he tipped the liquid into her mouth in stages, waiting for her to swallow each dribble. I stroked her arms and whispered to her and she fixed her blue eyes on the spoon as it approached her mouth. Her chest shuddered from past crying. Then the chemist shook the first bottle with Dawn’s medicine and gave her a spoonful of that as well.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘listen carefully. The next spoon must be tonight.’

  ‘I understand, sir. And then three times each day until it is finished.’

  He tightened the cap on the bottle and turned away to rinse out the spoon in a basin. Then he put the spoon and the bottle into a brown paper bag and gave it to me.

  ‘Your English is very good,’ he said, like Mr Dumise had said when I asked for a job.

  I looked away from him and down at Dawn. I wanted no talk of where I had learnt such English. Dawn’s eyes looked back at me, calmer now, and these days no longer milky with babyhood but made of a clear, blue light. The eyes of young Master Phil. Also, I realised suddenly, the eyes of her father as a young man.

  ‘I am grateful, sir, for your help. Do you need all of this money?’ It was still lying in a heap on the counter. The chemist spread it out with his fingers and took some of it.

  ‘No,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘There is some change.’

  I stared down at what he had left. He had left some of the more valuable coins for me to take back. I looked up at him and in that moment I think he knew. Knew that this child sprang from one of his patients, someone he knew, a home where I had been taught English, a family that I had run from. Knew, also, that this was all the money I had in the world.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘The child will be fine in a few days,’ he said, watching me.

  I could feel his eyes on my neck as I left, like the eyes of the congregat
ion on me when I sat at the front of the church beside Madam and Master for young Master Phil’s funeral. But the chemist’s eyes were kinder than the eyes of the congregation. He had seen my sin but did not condemn.

  Chapter 30

  Maybe there was more to Dawn’s escape from illness, and my escape from being seen in town, than powerful medicine and good luck. The minister on the koppie always said that God the Father had a plan for each of us, however much we disappointed Him. Sometimes I thought I could see a part of it just out of reach, like the mirage I’d show Dawn as it hovered across the veld at midday. Even though I’d sinned, it seemed He still cared for me and protected me, especially where it touched Dawn. Her survival therefore required my own, and perhaps this was the plan. And so when Dawn was better, I put her on my back, waded through the drift, and gratefully returned to the piano that was my refuge, and to the demands of my students who had missed their daily ration of jive and Beethoven.

  Slowly the days began to settle into a steady, though savage, rhythm. I let the good things in, and fended off the bad as much as I could, for apartheid was closing its vice upon the township and making men on both sides do things that God the Father surely disapproved of. It was becoming a war, and like in all wars there are shortages of love and food but not of smoke and blood, and there are friends that might turn out to be enemies-in-waiting. Sometimes I thought I saw Jake near where baying youngsters threw stones at the police, or in the shadows by the beer hall, or with groups of older men around a street fire at night. I never called out to him, and he never showed that he saw me, even though he would appear at my side in daylight near the Groot Vis and pull faces to make Dawn laugh while the river rippled about our feet. This was the future: from the dangerous streets that bore me from hut to school and back again, to the ‘Township Bach’ whose clashing strains accompanied me wherever I went. It was messy, it was spirited; it must be seized if God’s plan was to work. This was His gift to me. But these words don’t tell of the unspoken need to be on guard for my child’s life throughout each hour of the day. Trouble lurked at every step, and avoiding it could only be achieved if the threat was spotted early enough. One hand on my child’s shoulder, one hand on the bicycle spoke in my pocket, both eyes alert to the unexpected move. I am ashamed to say it was not always easy to think of it as a gift.