The Housemaid's Daughter (16 page)

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

‘
Y
ou 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.

* * *

Ada left her clothes behind, ironed and neatly folded on her bed. The house was immaculate. She set out a full lunch for Edward and me, and even had a stew on the stove for our evening meal.

It was a departure perfectly calculated to cause us – to cause me – as little inconvenience as possible.

But why did she not say goodbye? Even in a note to me privately? Left here, on my dressing table, beside my diary?

What event can have taken place that so unnerved her as to make her unwilling to say goodbye – and yet leave the house in perfect order?

This is what I cannot understand.

While Auntie sleeps, I keep myself awake at night and practise the fingering for the march that I will play on the first day of school. Perhaps it will be a
marche militaire,
or perhaps a
military polonaise.
I call up their melodies in my head and my fingers follow where they lead. I wonder if the baby can feel my fingers over his body, I wonder if he can put together the notes that I play to make a tune in his own head?

I am excited. I fall asleep with the music and the heavy Beethoven rush of the Groot Vis in my ears.

Chapter 23

O
n the day I started as a teacher, something changed.

It was a cold day. The river was no longer angry and racing beneath the iron bridge, but rather making a mist that curled around the bluegums and dissolved into the hard blue of the sky as it rose. Our neighbours had been up since dawn to fetch water once more from the communal tap since the rain had dried up. Paraffin stoves were lit, crying children were fed their porridge. It was the same day as it was every day, and yet somehow different. Auntie left for the riverbank with the first bundle of washing. She said nothing as she went. She had said nothing to me for some time. I told myself that it was still part of negotiation and that I must not weaken.

I walked to school in my carefully smoothed overall, and the shoes I’d tried to clean with spit and a cloth. It was as I pushed through the crowded streets that I felt the newness rise up in me like when the child first touched me like a butterfly from within. I stopped for a moment against the elbowing tide, and looked about with fresh eyes, but little appeared different from what I’d come to expect. The streets still reeked of uncollected rubbish, the faces in the crowd were thin and struggling, the maize meal turned my stomach, the latrines overflowed. And yet … among the filth and the struggling was there an opening? A way past the loss that had lain on my heart since I left Cradock House? Could this rising newness, this fresh calling, in fact be the future that young Master Phil had said I would have when I grew up?

I pressed on. The ‘Township Bach’ swelled. The river ran quietly beneath it. Miss Rose said I would never have a future unless I went to school, so there. Other white people said you needed money in order to have one. But maybe my future was different. It was possible that white people were wrong when they insisted on a connection between money and a future.

* * *

‘Miss Hanembe! Miss Hanembe! Mary!’

I turned quickly. I must be careful to remember I am now Mary Hanembe. The noise and the bustle of pupils was making me dizzy and forgetful. I wanted to go away and sit down somewhere quiet but the headmaster was standing further along the passage, impatient, waiting for me. He wore the same clothes as when I had seen him before. His shirt collar still needed proper ironing.

‘Yes, good morning, Mr Dumise.’ I fought my way to his side past a surge of children in every sort of tattered clothing. I need not have worried about my overall and my scuffed shoes; I fitted right in among the pupils.

‘We’re about to begin in the hall,’ he said hurriedly. ‘You must go in and start playing. Liphi,’ he tapped the shoulder of a barefoot boy talking in a group nearby, ‘take Miss Hanembe to the hall.’ The boy broke away from his friends, looked me over, taking in the baby, pointed a thumb down the passage and headed off. I followed him. And that is how my teaching future started.

The hall was already filled with more boys and girls than I had ever seen in one place. I hesitated, but the boy Liphi disappeared and no one took any notice of me so I pushed through the crowd and went over and opened up the piano and sat down on the wobbly stool. There were some teachers talking in a group on the stage beside the drooping curtains but they also paid me no attention. The windows high up had been opened and the musty smell was gone and a cool breeze touched my neck and made me feel better. I rested my hand on my stomach for a moment to quieten the child’s kicking, and thought of Madam with her hands on either side of mine, encouraging me, and then I began.

A
marche militaire.

The piano was still tinny but I remembered which of the keys were broken so they didn’t bother me, and I used extra pedal to make up for their lack. Strangely, as soon as I started, a great silence came over the hall and the notes echoed off the walls and over the heads of the teachers on the stage. I looked up quickly, worried that they did not like what they were hearing. But I kept going and played the march a full three times through. By the third time, I could feel the floor and not just the stool shaking, as hundreds of feet jumped in time with the music. As the last chord died away, they began to clap – even the teachers on the stage – and I felt my face go hot and I knew that it would be all right.

The headmaster held up his hand for them to stop and said I was the new music teacher and they clapped and whistled once more and the headmaster joined in as well. He also said a few other things about what was to happen that day at school – I later learnt that this was what an assembly was for – and then sent them off to their first lesson. He looked down at me and nodded and I started to play again, this time a Chopin
polonaise.
The youngsters chattered and danced their way out of the hall. The teachers came down off the stage and stood around watching me play. Once I had finished, they came forward.

‘What a surprise,’ said a woman in a blue dress with long sleeves that rode up her thin arm when she reached over and shook my hand. She said her name was Mildred.

‘Well done,’ said another, a man this time, with thick glasses and a jacket with holes in the elbows. ‘Do you play jive?’

They seemed not to notice my faded overall with its weight of child, or my broken shoes, and they wished me luck and said it was the first time many of the children had ever heard a piano.

I wish I could say that it went easily from then on, that the clapping and whistling in the hall meant it was going to be a good future, that I and my child might find a place here to work and be accepted by my colleagues and stay out of trouble. But another challenge had lately arisen – the matter of birthplace. Proof would soon be required, the headmaster said wearily to his staff, to show that all teachers had the right to live and work in Cradock.