The Housemaid's Daughter

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘I’ll be back, Mama,’ she choked, as our tears ran together.

  ‘Yes,’ I managed, ‘to see Mrs Cath, too.’ I’d said the same thing when she left Cradock House. The train blew its F sharp whistle.

  ‘Come now,’ said Lindiwe, lifting Dawn’s suitcase and opening the door of the third-class carriage. ‘One last hug.’

  Doors banged all along the train as the last passengers went on board. Dawn undid my arms from round her and climbed the steps into her carriage. She put her case and Mama’s coat down and leant out of the window. Excitement fought with the tears, for she was eager to go, eager for the good future she believed waited in Johannesburg. Lindiwe and I reached up and took her hands. One hand for Lindiwe, one hand for me.

  ‘Go well,’ shouted Lindiwe over the snorting engine. ‘Work hard and write to your mama!’

  ‘God bless, God bless!’ I tried to say, but the words stayed in my throat.

  With a massive effort, the train began to move amid clouds of steam. The pigeons took off from the roof beams. I ran alongside, not wanting to let go until the last moment. Lindiwe shouted for me to stop. Then the platform ran out and I felt her slip from my grasp.

  ‘I love you, Mama!’ She leant out of the window and waved hard. ‘Tell Mrs Cath I’m sorry not to say goodbye!’ She dashed a hand across her face to wipe the tears.

  The train began to gather pace. Dawn’s carriage curved away from us. Another blast from the whistle, this time a shade below F sharp, and the train struck out for the empty Karoo, first to the junction at De Aar and then beyond to Johannesburg where there was gold in the ground and – God protect her – all manner of trouble above it.

  Chapter 43

  ‘Come,’ said Lindiwe, taking my arm. ‘We will walk together.’

  So we walked back across the bridge. Some washing friends of Lindiwe called to her from their rocks and she waved at them. I looked back. The train was just a smudge of smoke against the vast, brightening sky. Then the sun burst over the horizon fully, glancing off the tin roofs on Church Street and washing the stone walls with peach light.

  ‘Will she ever come back?’ I found myself saying out loud.

  ‘She will come,’ replied Lindiwe comfortingly. ‘One day.’

  ‘Like you told me one day I would be proud of her?’

  ‘Just like that – and you are!’

  ‘Why,’ I asked, clearing my throat and lifting up my head to face the coming day, ‘why are you so good to me?’

  ‘Because I am your friend.’

  We stopped on the corner of Church and Dundas. Lindiwe’s place lay at the end of Bree Street. My place lay down Dundas. She gave me a fierce hug. Even now that she is a landlord, Lindiwe has lost none of her washing muscles. We agreed to meet later.

  Dundas lay cool and quiet under its pepper trees as I walked down the road. The sun hid briefly behind a koppie but would strike soon enough and then the street would waken to a sudden heat, like the blast in your face from an open oven door. Dawn used to love the cool of early morning at Cradock House, the dew beneath her toes, the first trill of the bokmakieries, the vygies opening their glossy petals as she dashed past.

  It was the car on the road that made me wonder what was wrong. Visitors usually drove up the gravel driveway. And, in any case, who would be calling before breakfast?

  I began to hurry. Then I began to run along the verge by the dry water furrow, for I could see Mrs Pumile standing in the road and she was holding her hands over her mouth. Just then, a siren began to howl. Not the dreaded police siren but a different one, a different note, a different beat – and a white ambulance with a revolving light lurched out of the driveway of Cradock House and tore along Dundas Street.

  ‘Such trouble!’ Mrs Pumile shrieked, wringing her hands. ‘I heard nothing, then the ambulance came! Your poor Madam! The Master on a stretcher – oh Ada, this is too bad, too bad after that rude Miss Rose and the young Master gone – coming, Ma’am!’ She stumbled back into the next-door garden as her Madam called with impatience.

  The back door of Cradock House was unlocked.

  ‘Madam! Mrs Cath!’ I cried but my voice fell into an empty place. I rushed upstairs to her bedroom but it was empty. The bed looked as if it had not been slept in. I went across the passage and knocked on Master’s door and then went in. His bedclothes were rumpled, some of them trailing on the floor. There were the usual bottles of medicine sitting on his side table, bottles that I dusted around, like I dusted around Mrs Cath’s diary where it lay on her dressing table.

  The only thing to do was work. It was a Saturday so there was no school. Once, it might have meant Dawn’s return for the weekend and an orgy of feeding her up, but not this time. I went down to the kaia and changed my clothes, then wound a doek over my hair like Mama used to, and got out the cloths, and tried to calm my racing head. If Master was in hospital, how could he be prosecuted? Did the law take into account illness? Would the law force an ill man into jail? Would the law instead turn its full attention on me?

  I went upstairs again, this time to Phil’s bedroom, and clambered up on the toy box and peered out over the town, and into the Karoo, and searched with my eyes for a train snaking its way north, but there was nothing to see. Just the vast yellow plains, interrupted here and there by ironstone koppies and the occasional dust cloud from an approaching car.

  I did the polishing and still no one came home.

  Master lay ill, Dawn receded ever further from me. The law waited.

  By the middle of the morning I was tired and the house was too quiet so I took off my doek and sat down at the piano. I tried a little jazz, like Dawn used to dance to, but it echoed too noisily through the empty passages and too sharply in my heart. So I gave the house a Chopin nocturne instead, the one in C sharp minor that was published only after the composer died. I think it’s the best one, the one he kept aside for himself, a gem where each octave-leap surely touches heaven?

  ‘Ada!’

  I rushed from the piano. Mrs Cath was in the hallway.

  ‘Oh, Ada.’ She dropped her handbag on the hall table and subsided into the small chair we keep by the telephone. Her grey hair was half undone from its bun, her eyes were bruised like they had been when Miss Rose left, and when Phil died. Her soft cream dress had a stain on the sleeve, as if blood had been scrubbed from it without success.

  ‘I saw the ambulance,’ I cried, kneeling down.

  She leant forward and dropped her head in her hands. I got up.

  ‘Come, Ma’am,’ I said, ‘let’s get you to the sofa, and I’ll bring strong tea. Come…’

  I took her hands – I no longer feared touching Mrs Cath, we’d got past that – and eased her to her feet. She leant on me as we went into the lounge and over to the sofa. I bent down and removed her shoes and lifted her legs up so she was lying lengthways, then covered her with the red shawl she kept nearby.

  ‘Dawn?’ she murmured, pressing her eyes closed with her fingertips. ‘Is the child safe?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Cath,’ I replied. ‘She is quite safe. And I will make you tea.’

  I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle, got out the tray and laid an embroidered cloth on it, and found Mrs Cath’s special teapot-for-one that she’d brought with her from Ireland and used when she wanted a private cup of tea. I sliced homemade brown bread and buttered it and spread it with apricot jam from our tree, and cut the slices into triangles.

  ‘Oh, Ada, you are kind, so kind.’ Mrs Cath lifted herself up. ‘Please,’ she went on, noting the tray set for her, ‘fetch a cup and have tea with me.’

  I hesitated, but she smiled and gestured towards the kitchen. I brought a cup, and extra hot water, and poured tea for both of us and sat down opposite her and waited while she sipped, and forced herself to eat some of the bread.

  I waited.

  When Master came home, who would nurse him? Could I find it in myself to help take care of him? It might not be my duty – but surely God the Fathe
r would expect me to show mercy? Master’s face stared at me, the faded blue eyes, the carefully parted hair, the fierce lips that only softened for Madam, for Miss Rose. I won’t hurt you, Ada …

  ‘He’s gone, Ada.’

  I started and stared at Mrs Cath. It couldn’t be. Surely it couldn’t.

  ‘He had a heart attack. They did all they could but he died on the way to the hospital.’ She put the cup down, rattling the saucer as she did so.

  I got up from the chair and went to the window. The car that had been outside the house was gone. Perhaps it was the doctor’s. Perhaps the doctor went with Master in the ambulance and then came back later for his car. Once Master had died.

  My daughter has gone too. She climbed on a train bound for Johannesburg perhaps at the moment that her father fell ill. Without knowing it, she left at the very point when she – and he – would no longer be pursued. The accusations against Master would die with him. Dawn would now be of no interest to the police. She would just be another accident, another mixed-race girl who fell in between. They would take the papers they had collected against Master and throw them away, like rubbish is thrown into a waste-paper bin, and move on to another target.

  My daughter had gone for no reason. She went to spare her father, and to spare me, and to seek a better future, a future she might have discovered here after all.

  But it may not be over. They may not throw the papers away. They may instead come for me with greater venom now that Master has eluded them.

  The floor rose up.

  Madam called ‘Ada!’ and I remember no more.

  * * *

  The funeral was delayed until I recovered from my fall. Mrs Cath had to call Dr Wilmott to the house to bandage my head where I’d struck it on the side of the chair. My arm was sore as well, where I’d fallen on it, and Mrs Cath got Mrs Pumile in to help, for Master’s linen needed to be washed and stacked at the back of the linen cupboard, and his clothing packed up for donation. The carpet had to be scrubbed of my blood, and then there was Miss Rose’s arrival to prepare for.

  Now I am at the front of the church, with a doek covering the wound, and wearing my best navy dress and my shoes with heels that I wore to the concert at Mrs Cath’s school. Perhaps some of today’s congregation were there, perhaps some of them clapped when I played. I once believed that my skill at the piano might provide the means to overcome the colour of my child – for Auntie, for my fellow teachers – but it didn’t. So I shouldn’t expect that a white congregation will shelve its disapproval, however much my playing might have inspired them. Or however much Mrs Cath might appear to forgive me. I have sinned. Even with Master in his grave, I am still a sinner in their eyes.

  But I have proved that I can live with this. God the Father has spared me so far, and no amount of white disapproval can change that. As long as I have a piano, I can survive anything. Even the departure of my daughter becomes bearable while the music soars.

  This time there is touching in the front row. Mrs Cath takes my hand and squeezes it. She is worried about me but I make light of my head and my sore arm for they will soon heal. Miss Rose ignores the movement, as she has ignored me since she arrived. She looks straight ahead, her black hat with its broad brim rigid upon her head, her skirt tight about her knees. Mrs Pumile hissed when she saw the shortness of Miss Rose’s black skirt. Helen is not with Miss Rose, she is at her boarding school in Johannesburg.

  ‘Receive, O Lord, the soul of Edward, beloved father of Rosemary, devoted husband of Cathleen.’

  I feel the intake of breath behind me.

  They know, of course they know. Or perhaps – because Dawn is not here – they will pretend that it never happened. That the coloured girl with Edward’s eyes, who once lived at Cradock House, did not exist. That the coloured girl with music in her feet and a wildness in her heart was just passing by. They can’t see her any more, so she was never there.

  Chapter 44

  The town council also believe that people who can no longer be seen might simply disappear. So they’ve decided to move the Lococamp and the Bree Street townships to a new township called Lingelihle that will be built further away on the road towards Port Elizabeth, with only a distant sight of the Dutch Reformed Church steeple. They say it is to reduce overcrowding. They say it is because of hygiene. They are right – but if such matters are the main concern, I wonder why they don’t just improve what is here already.

  This means that our rough school across the Groot Vis will be demolished. This means that Lindiwe’s well-guarded huts will have to come down. Only St James School will be spared, on account of its distance from the white end of Bree Street, and its prominence through Rev. Calata.

  They say the new houses in Lingelihle will be made of brick and that new schools will be built and that life will be better and cleaner in the new place, although it is further to walk to town, and the land is higher and the winter winds will sweep colder across it than they did over the old townships. They say it is the law.

  There are meetings in the St James School hall where the paint peels from the walls and people wonder, if there is a shortage of paint already, how will there be enough paint for new buildings? There is much talk about compensation for those who will lose their homes, however poor they may be. I know about compensation. It’s supposed to be a payment for loss, like Jake said Mrs Cath’s generosity to me was a payment for the loss of Cradock House when I left with Dawn growing inside me. But I know that payment in money can never replace what is lost from the heart. Lindiwe’s huts may have been simple but they were built from her own muscle and effort, and they sat amongst people she knew and who knew her, and their parents and grandparents before them. No compensation can replace that.

  ‘I don’t want to leave my father’s house,’ said Veronica, my fellow teacher who kept chickens and was nervous of Pass-burning. ‘Then the ancestors won’t know where I am.’

  And then there was the matter of rent.

  ‘You’ll be in better houses than you have now,’ insisted the Superintendent at one such meeting. And he goes everywhere with a police escort. Today they stand legs astride, arms behind their backs, truncheons clasped in their fists. Two town councillors sit by the side of the Superintendent. They look frightened, they reach for books in their briefcases and page through them often.

  ‘Tell us what the rents are,’ a man calls.

  The Superintendent consults his notes. ‘Three rand sixty-eight for two-roomed houses, four rand thirty-nine for four roomed.’

  There are gasps, and then muttering around the hall. The muttering grows to a rumble.

  ‘But we pay one rand fifty-five now, so why should we move?’ shout several voices over the uproar.

  ‘What about compensation?’ someone else yells.

  People glance at one another and then turn round to watch the police at the back of the hall. How far will they let this go? I see there are two more policemen now, they’ve come in quietly. They don’t wear uniforms but they carry cameras. They are photographing the audience, especially those that call out. My head is still sore. It aches when I’m anxious.

  ‘The houses will be better than what you have. And we will try for compensation.’

  ‘There must be compensation.’ Lindiwe gets to her feet. Lindiwe’s English is very good now. Lindiwe knows about compensation. The cameras click, I lower my face.

  ‘No move!’ come shouts from a wilder section of the audience, taken up by the rest. ‘No move, no move!’ Feet drum on the floor, but not in the way of applause. Several elderly residents get up and leave, covering their faces with their hands. The Superintendent looks towards the uniformed policemen, who begin to patrol across the back of the hall, swinging their truncheons lightly.

  It is the edge of chaos.

  If Rev. Calata had been at the meeting, he would have found a way to calm the crowd and get what they wanted by quieter means. Rev. Calata believes in negotiation. And there is indeed a negotiation to be made. Af
ter all, if the town council wants blacks out of sight then it must pay them or reward them in some way to bring this about. But Rev. Calata has been banned, which means he can’t attend public meetings and he can’t leave his house without a policeman watching him. This is the way it is. Even his picture has been removed from its place near the stage, leaving a pale square on the wall where it once hung. So it is up to people like Lindiwe to stand up for what they believe is right.

  And me?

  I glance about. Some people recognise me but some will not do so, for I am the woman who sinned with a white man, and the white man is the enemy. I’m a target, particularly as I don’t live in the township. People get beaten for not showing solidarity. It’s called black-on-black violence. And I’m also easy prey for the white police. They know who I am, they know my sin, they can arrest me whenever they wish. Be careful, I say to myself. There is no right side in this sort of war.

  Yet I’m ashamed of myself for not standing up, I have good enough English and a good enough brain to handle such a negotiation.

  ‘They promised compensation,’ Lindiwe insisted later, as we pushed back to her hut through the bad-tempered crowd. I felt for the sharpened bicycle spoke in my pocket. Sirens blared. Impatient young men shouted ‘Amandla!’ and reached for missiles among the rubbish on the side of the road. Bricks began to whizz over our heads towards an approaching police van. The crowd surged, dust flew up and choked our throats. My head pounded. Lindiwe grabbed my hand. From behind us rose the frenzied barking of police dogs. We began to run.

  ‘I worked hard for my huts,’ Lindiwe panted. ‘I won’t move till I get it!’

  All night the crowds rampaged through the streets, pursued by the police and their crazed dogs. All night Lindiwe and I lay awake in the darkness of her hut, flinching when the chase came close … and the shouts, heavy boots and barking dogs thundered by in a wild staccato. Lindiwe kept one hand on her buckets of water, kept full since her first hut was burnt down. Only when the gold of sunrise quivered on the horizon did the madness abate.