The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  I tried to stop myself shaking. Dawn twisted in my lap and stared up at me, the beginnings of fright puckering her tiny face.

  ‘Ada, dear—’

  ‘And I will be in fear of Master,’ I muttered.

  There it lay, beneath everything, hidden even from me. Would I ever sleep peacefully again under the same roof as Master? Would Madam, if I was there?

  ‘Ada!’ came a cheerful call from outside and Lindiwe swung through the doorway with a load of washing on her shoulder. ‘Oh, excuse me, Ma’am.’ She stared at Madam, who had risen to her feet. Lindiwe looked at me and I saw that she had already guessed who this was. She slung the load down on to her bed. I did not know what to say. I should have introduced Lindiwe straight away but my head and my heart were confused and slow.

  ‘How kind of you to be Ada’s friend,’ said Madam, seeing my distraction and holding out her hand to Lindiwe. ‘I owe you a debt I can never repay. And,’ she paused and glanced at me where I sat, ‘I want you to help persuade Ada to return to work for me.’

  ‘But Ada has a job already,’ said Lindiwe swiftly, glancing from Madam to me. ‘Ada does important work teaching. She must pass on her cleverness to others.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Madam, ‘I agree. Ada should continue to teach. But she could live at Cradock House and we would support her and the baby in return for a little light housework when she can manage.’

  I stared at Madam. Lindiwe stared at Madam. I could see Lindiwe calculating my good fortune. Wages from school, food and clothing for Dawn and myself, books to read, shelter under a roof that did not leak, water that did not need to be fetched. All for a little work on the side.

  But I did not think of those things. I thought simply of the quiet of my old room. Of the smell of jasmine as I hung out the washing. Of Madam’s companionship. Of Mama and young Master Phil who lived most strongly for me within the boundary of Cradock House. I thought of music, I thought of new melodies waiting for me inside the Zimmerman, and old familiar tunes ready to fill my heart once more.

  And I thought of temptation. And how the need to belong was a temptation so hard to resist.

  * * *

  I stood on the iron bridge today after Madam left. I stood upright, not hiding from the cars or the passers-by that might recognise me. There was no need to hide any more. I went there because it was cooler than Lindiwe’s hut and also because it seemed the right place to be. I stood in the centre, with white

  Cradock on one side and black Cradock on the other and the brown water of the Groot Vis – brown like Dawn’s skin – creeping beneath me.

  What should I do, Master Phil? I whispered. If you were here now, what would you tell me? Master Phil, who had loved me and yet touched me only with respect. Master Phil, who knew the price of skin difference long before I did …

  I could turn away now, away from the crowds, away from the women washing on the riverbank, and walk to Cradock House and back into the rest of my old life. Or I could turn the other way, and pin my chances and Dawn’s chances on a township future. With the first I would find the private belonging I sought, with the second I would continue to battle for partial acceptance. With the first I risked exposing Madam to shame and to the law, with the second her life and Master’s life would go on as before.

  Master Phil would have told me to write down all the best and worst things about each side and then choose. But some of those things could only be whispered, they could never be written down. And some that could be written down could never be decided upon until they had been tried. Would the presence of Dawn and me tear Madam and Master apart, would it poison the air in Cradock House and taint the memories of all that had gone before? Was it no longer possible for Cradock House to be home?

  Where did Master himself stand in all this?

  And while I could imagine a life ahead that drew on the best of Cradock House and the best of the township, would it be so for Dawn? Wouldn’t she be better off in the township where the turning away hopefully went no further than an insult or a jostle on the street? She would miss Lindiwe, and Jake’s sudden visits. I would miss them too. If we returned to Cradock House wouldn’t Dawn find herself – wouldn’t I find myself – isolated and perhaps at risk from the law as well?

  Lindiwe looked only on the practical side. Apartheid might be building barriers between black and white, but when it came down to survival there was only one way to go.

  ‘Such an offer!’ she cried when Madam had left, stepping carefully out of the doorway in her beautiful dress, to be escorted away by a young man from St Peter’s Church on Bree Street who had been paid by Madam to find me.

  ‘You will still be able to teach, and just think,’ Lindiwe flung her powerful arms wide within the cramped hut, ‘you will have your own kaia, your own place!’

  I nodded. Yes, I would have my own place. Maybe not my old room in the house, because of the laws that stopped whites and blacks living together, but at least the kaia, where Dawn could stand in the doorway and watch the water pooling at her feet when there was rain, or listen to it beating through the bony thorn tree on to the tin roof.

  ‘There will be food!’ Lindiwe went on keenly. ‘And medicine for Dawn if she gets sick. Ada,’ she grasped my hand with her own hard one, rough from washing, ‘the revolution is for angry men like Jake. You have a child to bring up.’

  ‘But Master is the father of my child!’ I blurted out, the first time I’d said the words since I told the kind doctor and then learnt the burden of inheritance. I looked quickly across at Dawn, but she was fast asleep in her cardboard box. Dawn hadn’t even heard those words from me when I talked to her at bedtime of my inside loneliness. Master is the father of my child. I know it, Madam knows it and now Lindiwe knows it.

  ‘I know he’s the father.’ Lindiwe glanced at Dawn as well.

  ‘How do you know?’ Panic rose once more. How could she know? Who else knew? Had someone at the school found out?

  ‘I guessed it.’ Lindiwe reached for my hand and pressed it gently. ‘And I saw it in your eyes just now. Ada,’ she squeezed my hand again and spoke slowly, ‘this time it won’t be your duty.’

  I stared at her and felt the edge of tears.

  ‘Unless you wish it to be so?’

  ‘No!’

  Yet there it was, even from Lindiwe. The suspicion that I had wanted the Master’s attentions, that I had sought him out to lie with me. Did all women who were taken by force or who succumbed to duty have to bear this? Did Mama face criticism that she had thrown herself at a young man with no thought of the consequences? That it was all her fault? Had such criticism come from Master, said or unsaid, when she was expecting me?

  ‘Are you afraid he will want you again?’ Lindiwe’s voice was low, for such thoughts could indeed only be whispered.

  ‘The law will not allow it,’ I said, strangely relieved that such a law existed even though it must cause pain for those who truly loved someone of a different skin. ‘And this time I would be brave. This time I would say no.’

  I listened as the word I should have said fell into the quiet space between us. It was cool inside the hut now, but the thatch roof lost its heat silently, unlike the tin roof of Cradock House that kept you awake at night or interrupted your talk with its creaking.

  Why didn’t I say no the first time? Why did I believe that duty was my only option? Even though duty and loyalty are often on opposite sides it does not mean that one has to be sacrificed for the other. And if my duty and loyalty had been to God the Father – as it should have been – then I would not have had to make such a sacrifice, I would not have had to choose between Master and Madam. I could have chosen God’s way instead, and He would have told me to say no. Yet even without God’s way, why did it take such time and pain for me to learn that I had the right to say no for myself as well?

  Even if saying no might have meant losing my job, my home …

  I am learning, I am learning.

  I lifted the kettle off the
stove and poured tea into two cups for Lindiwe and me. We still had a small amount of milk left and I smelt it to check it was fresh before stirring it into the tea.

  ‘I think your Madam is a clever woman,’ Lindiwe murmured after a while, sipping from her cup in the gathering darkness. ‘She wouldn’t offer you a place unless she was sure your Master would leave you alone. And the only way she could know this is if they have decided so together.’

  I stared at her.

  Lindiwe’s insights always took me by surprise. She could read minds and uncover hidden desires like no one I had ever known. She had taken the measure of Madam from just one meeting.

  ‘It would have been a negotiation?’ I wondered out loud. ‘A negotiation without money … a trade, like offering free washing for flour and sugar.’ I leant forward. ‘But what would Madam use to enforce such a trade?’

  ‘Why, Ada,’ Lindiwe said with a twist to her smile as she lifted her feet and rested them on a pile of dirty linen, ‘you talked of it just now. She would threaten him with the law!’

  I gasped and set down my cup on the earth floor with trembling fingers. ‘Surely it would be too shameful for Madam to do such a thing? If he went to jail she would lose everything, her family, her friends, her place at tea parties—’

  ‘But she would get sympathy,’ Lindiwe interrupted, ‘whereas your Master would be disgraced forever.’

  I got up and went to the doorway. Thin clouds mixed with smoke swam across the face of the moon. From the hut opposite came the sound of a guitar being violently strummed and a voice began to sing off-key.

  ‘And if they made such an arrangement,’ I turned back, ‘what benefit would it have for Madam?’

  ‘Your return,’ said Lindiwe simply, ‘with Dawn. This Madam is a fair woman, she feels responsible, she wants to give you and Dawn a better future. And,’ she hesitated and I motioned her to go on, ‘perhaps she’s lonely, as you are.’ She gave me a gentle smile, Lindiwe always knew my heart. ‘And there can be little left between her and your Master now.’

  I gazed at Lindiwe, seeing the further loops of cleverness play out in her mind, how she’d calculated the consequences of Madam’s negotiation, how she divined its outcome despite knowing nothing for certain.

  At first Edward denied it.

  Only when I wept and said the child had his eyes – and the eyes of dear Phil – did he pass a hand over his face and admit his part. He said he would understand if I wished to ask him for a divorce. But we are both too old and settled in Cradock House to throw away what we have built here. Edward is not a bad man, merely misguided and foolish, as I have learnt men can be. And I must confess our regard for one another has always been based on fondness rather than passion, although that is no excuse for his behaviour. Maybe five years apart before marriage is not conducive to success …

  Having achieved a tentative accommodation, I allowed some time to pass before telling him my plan.

  He is deeply disturbed, but I have been insistent about his – our – responsibility.

  He said we put ourselves at risk harbouring a coloured child, and I agreed we would need the inattention of the authorities – not to mention the blind eye of friends – to get by. However, without saying as much, I led him to believe that if he refused to support Ada and her child, or if he behaved towards them in any manner other than the most honourable, then I could not guarantee that his adultery would remain secret.

  Tomorrow I go into the township with a young man from St Peter’s who says he knows where Ada and her coloured child are lodging. I pray she will agree.

  As yet, I have written nothing of this to Rosemary.

  Now that it is almost upon us, I wish I could say I am confident but it isn’t so.

  How will Edward react? Will he look upon this child as anything other than the potential agent of his downfall?

  Will Ada and Dawn find comfort here or just another form of isolation? Can I ever forgive Edward?

  Am I doing the right thing?

  Chapter 33

  I did not write down a list in favour of returning to my old home, and I did not write down a list in opposition to it. When it came to Cradock House, the temptation of food and shelter for Dawn, and music and Madam for me overcame all else. Such advantage clearly outweighed anything opposing the move. And surely God the Father would not have brought Madam to me unless it was part of His plan for me to return? But I am not used to such decisions, or the sensible way to make them, or whether God does test us in the making of such choices.

  It was another hot day when I returned. Swimming youngsters competed with the washerwomen for space down at the Groot Vis and threw stones at yellow-eyed dogs nosing in the shallows. Lindiwe had delayed her departure to see me off and she wiped Dawn’s sweaty face with a wet cloth before we left and promised that her hut – or one of the huts she planned to build as a landlord – would always be there for us if we needed to return. God was truly kind when He gave me Lindiwe as a friend. Her strength has become my strength. Even so, tremors shook my body as we said goodbye.

  ‘It is the right thing to do,’ I said, looking into Dawn’s trusting face set with the eyes of Master who would surely not want me back. I should have listened to Master Phil’s voice in my ear, I should have—

  ‘It will benefit Dawn.’ Lindiwe heaved a load of washing on to her back.

  ‘Ndwe!’ Dawn heard her name and held out her arms. Lindiwe leant down and nuzzled her nose against Dawn’s in a familiar game.

  ‘This is your chance.’ She straightened up with difficulty beneath the load and squeezed my arm hard. ‘There are many who long for such good fortune.’

  I never thought to make the journey back again. Only the emergency of Dawn’s illness had forced me into town. Yet here I was, my pale child in my arms, the ‘Township Bach’ fading at my back, returning to what was once my home and might be yet again. Women with similar bundles and babies on their backs pushed past, wondering what luck – or cruelty – had fallen upon me to make me go this way. And then God the Father came upon me as I walked, and the newness I’d felt on my first day of teaching began to fill me and overflow into the heat of the day. It sparkled off the brown water, it rose in the song of the washerwomen. I clutched Dawn tighter with fierce hope. This must be the plan: a new future.

  Madam was sitting on the stoep of Cradock House in one of her cream day dresses, waiting for me. Nothing had changed. Jasmine twisted through the pergola above her head in thick ropes, wafting its perfume through windows left open to catch any breeze that might come by. The old house with its pale stone walls and its red tin roof watched me as I came up the path with Dawn on my hip – she was too heavy for the blanket – and my cardboard suitcase in my other hand. I wondered if the place remembered me, as I hoped in the dark township nights that it would. Whether the apricot still carried me in its sap, whether the stairs and the doorknobs remembered my polishing of them, whether the piano held special music in store for me to play. Whether the souls of Mama and young Master Phil were smiling on me as I walked up the path through the heat towards Madam. Whether I was the only part of it that was changed. Or – I trembled again – whether I was making the biggest mistake of my life since I took off my nightgown and lay down with Master. After all, I had work in the township, I had shelter with Lindiwe, I had found rhythm in the noise.

  ‘Big!’ crowed Dawn from my hip. ‘Big trees, Mama!’ I put down my suitcase.

  ‘Ada!’ Madam rose and came down the steps. ‘How wonderful!’

  She embraced me and I smelt her flowery perfume that I’d been close enough to smell for the first time on the day Mama died. She turned to Dawn with a sharp intake of breath, as if taken aback once more by the sight of the child’s family likeness. ‘Will she come to me?’

  It was strange, that first time of seeing Madam with Master’s daughter in her arms. I could sense the love in her for my child, but also an immense sadness beneath, like the crying that lay beneath laughter when soldiers
left for war. Dawn stared at her with Master’s eyes and then reached for Master Phil’s brooch that Madam wore at her throat.

  ‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘Toy for Dawn?’ I’d only ever spoken to Dawn in English, like Mama did with me unless she was angry. Good English, I had reckoned, would be Dawn’s passport out of the township.

  ‘Careful,’ murmured Madam, swaying gently and capturing Dawn’s tiny fist in her own hand. ‘Don’t prick yourself. We’ll soon find you some toys to play with, won’t we?’

  We did not move back into our bedroom in the main house on account of the laws that said whites and blacks should not mix in that way. Instead, I carried Dawn past the apricot heavy with orange fruit, past the kaffirboom guarding the washing line, past the boundary hedge where unseen beetles rasped, and set her down in the kaia at the bottom of the garden beneath the bony thorn tree.

  The kaia was newly painted and Madam had moved Mama’s old bed and rug in there, along with a cot for Dawn like I had seen for sale in newspapers for large amounts of money. Although there was no hot water – we used the downstairs bathroom in the main house for bathing – there was a basin with a cold tap. There was also a proper toilet with a chain that pulled and made Dawn’s eyes widen with excitement, and the floor was smooth concrete polished to a red shine. Madam had worked hard. She had even put up curtains for us. Dawn ran to finger them, and patted their folds and hid behind them. Dawn had never seen curtains before.

  The kaia was bigger than Lindiwe’s hut in the township. It was just for Dawn and me. It was riches such as I had never expected to see again.

  ‘Thank you, Madam,’ I said, sitting on the soft bed, letting the old harmony steal over me. I’d forgotten what it was like to have such a refuge, and such kindness given so freely. No harsh din in my ears, no smoke in my throat, no press of strangers staring at Dawn’s skin, no fear of robbery and the need for sharpened bicycle spokes.