The Housemaid's Daughter (30 page)

Edward is much reduced in stature over all this. He finds it impossible to engage either with Ada or his daughter in any way whatsoever. He leaves it to me to provide the cohesion between the two halves of our lives – Cradock House and the
kaia
.

I do the best I can, although I, too, am reduced.

There are no dinner parties. Our friends are tentative with us.

I take pleasure in the small things: the blue flash of Dawn’s eyes, the perfume of roses, the majesty of Ada’s Beethoven.

Chapter 40

I
 know that Lindiwe is lonely. She misses her brother. Even though Jake inhabited the shadows and only appeared rarely, she still felt protected by him. I miss him too. But now he has gone. And in Johannesburg, in a place called Sharpeville, the war on skin difference has entered a dark place. Police used their guns to kill sixty people who gave themselves up for arrest for not having a Pass.

I found Mrs Cath in tears over it in the kitchen.

‘What have we done?’ she whispered. ‘Some were children – shot in the back.’

‘In the back, Mrs Cath?’

‘They were running away.’

The townships mourned, and raged. My pupils arrived at school with their pockets weighed down by stones, ready for hurling at the police vans that prowled the perimeter of the playground. Blood stained the school’s corridors once more from their skirmishes, for the truncheons were never far away and the hard Karoo earth is not kind to young arms and legs. In class, the quiet songs I’d introduced no longer satisfied. It was fighting songs they wanted, liberation songs, songs whose words cried for power and freedom – and revenge.

‘
Amandla!
’ they shouted in the school hall, drowning Mr Dumises’s pleas for calm. ‘
Amandla!
’ they shouted on the streets, in defiance of the lurking police.

Amandla ngawetu!
Power is ours!

The townships were ringed with soldiers in riot gear. They fired gas in the air that made you cry. Dawn stumbled into Cradock House one day with streaming eyes.

‘Here.’ Mrs Cath rushed on to the
stoep
where Dawn sat weeping, and set down a bowl of cold water and soft flannels. ‘Gently now.’ And together we bathed her eyes, and wiped her face.

‘I hate them!’ Dawn screamed, hands raking at her swollen face. ‘What have I done to them?’

Mrs Cath and I exchanged glances. Master was in his study, he would hear her. But he never came out.

In the township beyond Bree Street, Lindiwe’s new hut – a hut built with her own carefully hoarded money from washing – was torched the day it was finished. You would think that mud walls and a corrugated-iron roof would not burn, but burn it does if petrol is thrown upon it. The walls crumble, the carefully beaten floor melts. The iron roof tilts and its anchoring stones slide off, then it falls down and is stolen the moment it is cool enough to handle. Lindiwe does not feel targeted herself, because those that set fire to things do so randomly, but she does not like to dwell upon it. And she speaks of Jake only when asking me to check the newspapers for his name where they write about arrests and protests and the new word, terrorism.

I remember when apartheid was a new word.

It seems to me that words can give birth to other words that might never have come about on their own. This new word has been born out of apartheid. These burned huts and dead children and streaming eyes have been born out of apartheid.

* * *

Lindiwe has once again proved to be a faithful friend to me. Of her three huts that survive, one has a spare place with a bed. This, Lindiwe is prepared to give to Dawn for free so she can live in the township one day, as she is determined to do, despite my fear for her, despite the children her age that died in Sharpeville, and those that goad death on our own festering streets.

‘I can pay you when the time comes,’ I insisted to Lindiwe one afternoon when I was visiting. It was winter and the light was fading fast. Cooking fires were already burning. I would need to leave soon to make it out of the township in daylight. The dark was not just for robbers, now, it was for the police too. ‘And Dawn must help you with washing – it will occupy her outside of school.’ I was determined Dawn should contribute. There is nothing to be gained without work.

Lindiwe shook her head impatiently. ‘I don’t wash any more, Ada, I look after my huts!’ She thrust a muscular arm towards the rough streets now milling with the unemployed. Without jobs, all that was left was loitering and setting fire and robbery. Even honourable people were driven to it by the emptiness in their bellies and the lack of a place to stay. ‘After the fire, and with so many squatters looking to steal a place, I must guard my huts every day.’

I nodded. I knew it had become so. Unless you defended your possessions in the township, they would be stolen off your back, or from under your bed, or from over your head. There is no limit to what people will do if they are desperate.

‘Now,’ Lindiwe lifted her kettle off the paraffin stove and poured hot water into her aluminium teapot, ‘what has happened that makes Dawn want to come here? Is it your Master?’ Lindiwe has always felt that it would only be Master who would break the arrangement under which Dawn and I lived at Cradock House.

‘It is not Master. It is Dawn’s skin that drives her.’

It was what I had told Dina at school years before. Dawn might be in flight from her father as well, but in the end it came down to skin. It was ordained from the moment I lay with Master. Any child with a skin that does not belong, that is neither one thing nor the other, will always rush to extremes in an effort to find a true home.

Lindiwe laid a hand on mine. ‘When the time comes, I will see she goes well. I’ll be her spare mother.’

And so it was done. And when Dawn came to me one day and said she wanted to leave, I would not weep and forbid her. I would keep my tears in check and tell her that she could go provided she stayed in the hut that had been organised for her. It wasn’t a true negotiation, but more of a trade. I will let you go, my precious brown girl, provided you stay where you will be safe. For I know that I cannot keep you here. I know that Cradock House is not the refuge for you that it is for me. You need to find your music elsewhere.

‘I’ll be fine with Lindiwe, Mama.’ Dawn sat cross-legged on the bed in the
kaia,
her books in her sack, her clothes packed into my old cardboard suitcase that had once carried my few possessions across the Groot Vis to a township future.

‘Stay away from
tsotsis
that throw stones, and come back often,’ I managed, holding on to my breaking heart. ‘To see Mrs Cath, to eat…’

‘To see you, Mama.’ She leant forward and put her young arms round me and I rested my head on her shoulder, like Phil had rested his head upon my shoulder in the darkness of his bedroom. Dawn has always had tenderness bound up within her wildness. In some ways, it is the tenderness that I fear for the most.

* * *

Since she has moved, Dawn has promised that she will meet me in the hall before assembly each morning. Sometimes she doesn’t come, and I struggle to play the march, imagining what might have happened. Every night, alone in the
kaia
with its fixed door, I worry that she may never reappear. The dead youngsters of Sharpeville haunt me.

‘Dawn! At last, child – but look at your clothes – what have you been up to?’

‘Dancing, Mama!’ She twirls around in front of me, slender brown legs flashing, hands flying. ‘How is Mrs Cath? Can I borrow your pencils? I’ve lost mine.’

It takes a year or more but slowly I get used to her disappearances and my heart lifts whenever she returns from whatever it is that she does, for it’s not always dancing.

‘Are you careful with boys, Dawn? Don’t lie with them till you’re older,’ I warn, as I have warned her since childhood about boys and the trouble they can bring, for she is beautiful now in her wildness; a pale exotic against the blackness all about her. She must not fall, she must not do what I have done or what her grandmother did. She must be clever and wait until she finds a man who will stay. A man with matching skin.

‘I know, Mama. I’m careful, I know what can happen.’ She leans down to me at the piano, gaiety melting into tenderness, and rests her cheek on mine.

But I do not ask what she does or where she goes. I do not wish to know. I think I am becoming like those white people I despise: if I don’t see something, or don’t hear something, then it has never happened.

‘How is Dawn?’ Mrs Cath asks nervously each day I return home. Mrs Cath reads about the stone-throwing youngsters, she smells the smoke rising across the Groot Vis, she has seen the tear-gassed face of Dawn. But she does not dwell on it. Neither do I. If we don’t talk about it, then maybe the stones and the smoke and the sirens will not engulf Dawn.

‘She is well, Mrs Cath,’ and Mrs Cath nods with relief and hands me a pretty handkerchief or a bottle of our homemade apricot jam and tells me to give it to her when I next see her. I cannot tell her that I don’t see Dawn every day.

Master never asks after his daughter, but then he never saw her when she was living here, so there is no difference to be made of the fact that she is gone. I always said to myself that I would speak to him about the not-seeing, I always said I wouldn’t let it lie. But when Dawn and I were in the
kaia,
I never wished to risk him throwing us both out. Now that she is gone, there is no reason not to speak. And the words have grown stronger within me rather than fading with the passing years. They want to be said. They are like an inside wound borne for too long, eating away at me, demanding to be released.

I took courage one morning when Mrs Cath was out and Master was in his study with the door open, listening to my piano. Elgar.
Chanson de Matin
– song of the morning. It was early summer, and in the back garden the hedge beetles waited for the full force of midday heat to start their rasping chorus. The
koppies
on the edge of town glistened in the yellow sunlight. It was too beautiful a day to have a confrontation, but it wasn’t often that I was alone in the house with Master. I left a sonata unfinished and appeared in his doorway before he could close the door.

‘You never ask after Dawn, sir. Even after the tear gas.’

He still wore a chain in his waistcoat and he still did not meet my eyes.

‘I am sure she is well,’ he said distantly.

He bent over his papers. Still he did not look up. He should be made to face what he did. It was too late for apologies, but I needed some release from the feeling that it was all somehow my fault. I’d waited a long time to say these words. I’d prepared them many years ago, and practised in the night until I knew them off by heart so there was no danger that I would forget them, or say more or less than I intended. Maybe God the Father might disapprove, but I could not help myself. I had been quiet for too long.

‘She is well enough, but her skin gives her no rest. It will always be this way.’

He said nothing.

‘I did what I thought was my duty, but you knew about inheritance.’

Still he said nothing.

‘You knew about the law. I did not.’

My words struck him like stones flung on the township streets. He flinched. I felt a trembling in me, like I had trembled at Phil’s funeral when the white congregation watched the back of my neck. But this was not a trembling born of fear or sorrow; this was a trembling born of many years of waiting, and many years of stored injury. It was, I’m ashamed to say, a kind of revenge. I waited. The space between us grew cold.

‘I made a mistake.’ He looked up briefly. ‘You were—’ Something flickered in his washed-out eyes for a moment, then shut down.

‘You have never greeted Dawn or me since.’

‘I supported you instead!’ He was suddenly possessed of rage and slammed his hands flat down on the desk. I felt myself take a backward step.

‘I let you come back for Cathleen’s sake. God Almighty! The police could return any day.’ He clutched his head, disturbing the white hair where it lay carefully combed from its side parting. ‘Don’t you understand, Ada?’ He looked at me fully now. His hands were shaking. ‘We could go to jail if they decide she’s mine. It’ll be all over the papers.’

I thought of Jake.

‘They make more of the white man’s fall,’ I murmured to myself. Master did not hear me. An F sharp whistle sounded from the station. Once upon a time, Phil hugged me there in front of white crowds and Master saw it, and hated it, but when Phil was gone he took me for himself anyway.

‘Please leave me.’ Master stared down at his papers once more, the rage spent. ‘Please leave me alone.’

I watched him and I tried to be angry, but all that was left in me was pity.

‘I think she left Cradock House to spare you from the law,’ I said softly, wondering if it might indeed be true. Dawn has never said so, but maybe she knows, maybe she has always known. Maybe I am the ignorant one.

‘What?’ I heard him gasp as I turned away.

Maybe she left Cradock House to spare me, too.

Chapter 41

I have been asked to arrange a concert.

It’s become known there is a young teacher at the school across the river who is a brilliant pianist. Because of my fund-raising connection with the school – and of course my music – I have been asked to contact her and invite her to play. It’s an attempt, in these fraught times, to defuse tension.

No one, it seems, knows that the teacher concerned is Ada.

Where in the past I have been so assiduous in my championing of our black community, now I’m afraid of what I have unleashed. What will happen when I reveal Ada as the teacher, our Ada, with her coloured daughter who has Edward’s eyes?

So far, within our circle, there has been a tacit, though awkward, accommodation. No one has ever mentioned the fact of the coloured child under our roof. And the police have left us alone after that one horrific night. But this public exposure may well precipitate what Ada was afraid of when I visited her in that desperate, cramped hut: that we will be ostracised. And the police may choose to act once more.