The Housemaid's Daughter (35 page)

Jake once said there are many different ways to make a revolution.

So on a day when the Groot Vis was barely a trickle, I stood outside the town hall at eight o’ clock in the morning in my shoes with heels, waiting to see the Superintendent. Even at such an early hour, cars were already baking in the sun in their parking places, and stray dogs slunk into the shade of the building. The palms across the road in the Karoo Gardens drooped motionless over where I used to sit as a young girl, warming my bare feet in the sun and watching the long-beaked birds fussing about the orange aloes. But today the benches were empty, not because of the heat – but because their ‘Whites Only’ signs had been ripped off, and red paint splashed all over the seats. The board outside the newspaper office that had once said ‘It’s War’ in big black letters, now said in slightly smaller letters ‘Gdns Shame!’

Black women did not often try to see the Superintendent on their own. Usually they came in numbers, with placards protesting about Passes or uncollected rubbish, or with men who did the talking. The Superintendent almost always refused to see such groups, and the police hovering nearby in expectation of trouble would be quick to swoop.

‘You can wait,’ the girl behind the counter said carelessly, ‘but he might not be able to see you at all. If you tell me what it’s about—’

‘I will wait.’

‘Round the back,’ she said, shrugging. ‘This is whites only.’ She turned to a young man who’d appeared next to her and rolled her eyes. She reminded me of Miss Rose, although she was not as beautiful.

There were no benches or seats round the back so I sat on the ground under a pepper tree, grateful for the shade. My head doesn’t like direct sun any more. There was no grass to cover the earth and I worried that my skirt would look dirty when I went to see the Superintendent. People came and went, complaining to each other about the heat. Most ignored me although one man stopped and said that there were no jobs available.

‘I don’t want a job. I’m waiting to see the Superintendent.’ He opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind and hurried off. It was past midday when the woman came out of the back door and beckoned to me. I had practised the words I was to say until I knew them off by heart, but I wasn’t sure I could say them because my mouth was dry with thirst and also with nerves. This was not like trying for a job with Mr Dumise. I couldn’t rely on my music to speak for me.

‘You’ll have to be quick,’ she said over her shoulder, and pointed to a door. ‘It’s almost lunch hour.’

The door was open but I knocked before I went in.

‘Yes?’ The Superintendent was sitting behind a desk, writing. He didn’t look up. A framed photograph hung on the wall, showing a dark-haired young man smiling in a black robe while holding a roll of paper tied with a tassel. The Superintendent’s head – bald now – shone under the ceiling light. His hand moved steadily across the page. I recognised him from the meeting at St James School. This time he was alone, no councillors alongside, no police standing guard. On a table in the corner a fan droned, fluttering a pile of papers in its arc. There was a map on the wall. I made out the Groot Vis, and then a series of rectangular grids that spread across the paper from the riverbank. Lingelihle.

‘Good morning, sir, I’ve come about compensation for people being moved.’ The words came out of my parched mouth in a rush.

He flung down the pen that he’d been using to write on the paper in front of him and reached up to wipe his broad forehead. Even with a fan, the room seemed empty of air. It reminded me of the school hall the day I played the piano for a job.

‘I’ve told you people once, I’ve told you a million times, we’ll try, but I can’t guarantee – understand?
Verstaan?
’

I licked my dry lips. Remember what Phil said, I told myself. Remember about silence in a negotiation …

The Superintendent looked at me properly, running his eyes over my white shirt and my navy skirt and sighed, as if disappointed at my silence. ‘I can’t help it if you don’t understand. Just go now –
weg is jy
– I’ve got work to do.’ He waved a hand to dismiss me and turned back to his papers. I wonder why it is that important people don’t have anyone to take care of their clothes for them properly. The Superintendent’s collar needed starching.

‘I have money, sir,’ I said. ‘I will pay some of it towards the compensation.’

His head jerked up.

‘But if you don’t need my money, then I will tell the
Midland News
that you have enough already to pay for it.’

‘Now, just hang on –
wag.
’ He rose from his chair, his face settling into half-angry yet half-amused lines. ‘You can’t come here and threaten.’ He glanced down at the telephone, then at the open door. There were policemen on duty at the front of the building. He only needed to shout …

I felt my legs tremble. I held my hands hard at my side. There was no bicycle spoke in my pocket. Only words could save me now; only the sentences I’d prepared might stop me being arrested and thrown into jail, for that is what would happen after the shout for the policemen, or the telephone call to the security guards.

‘I have also written three letters,’ I said, grasping my courage, reaching for what I’d rehearsed on the hard ground outside the back door of the town hall. ‘One is to the
Midland News,
and one is to Mrs Cathleen Harrington of Cradock House in Dundas Street.’

The man gaped at me from where he stood behind his desk, the amusement gone, the resemblance to the smiling young man on the wall behind him now lost. I forced myself to breathe deeply. I wanted to wipe my face. Sweat was starting to gather above my lip.

‘If I’m arrested then the newspaper will print my letter. If they don’t, Mrs Harrington will show it to the town council. Mrs Harrington’s late husband was a councillor—’

My voice cracked as I ran out of breath.

One thing I have learnt is that all white men fear exposure in the newspapers. And the Superintendent was no exception. He rocked forward slightly, steadying himself with his fists on the desk. Then he uncurled and flexed his fingers as if they had suddenly become stiff.

‘Your English is good,’ he said, addressing the desktop with forced care, like Master had once addressed his desk when he didn’t want to meet my eyes. ‘
Skoon.
’ He straightened up and looked at me and my clothes. His tone roughened. ‘What about the third letter?’

‘It is to a newspaper across the sea.’

‘Who are you?’ He almost leapt at me across the desk, the veins standing out in his neck, the hands balling into fists once more.

I swallowed, and called up the rest of what had to be said.

‘If you don’t need my money then the
Midland News
will say that the town council has enough to pay compensation.’ I waited a moment. ‘And they will praise you in the newspaper, sir.’

The fan whirred through the silence and he strode across the room and snapped it off.

‘You haven’t got money for such a scheme!
Nooit!
’ he shouted. A bee that had been buzzing against the flyscreen on the window fell to the floor. I reached into my pocket and laid a piece of paper on the desk. I had called in at the bank. They wrote down how much money belonged to me. Not my name, just the money.

‘It’s all I have,’ I said. ‘I want to use it to help people if you don’t have enough.’

He stared down at the paper with suspicion, then up at me. His bald head was sweaty under the light. The lady had used a rubber stamp to show the bank’s name and the date. The ink had spread a little with the heat while I sat outside on the ground, but the numbers were still clear.

The paper certainly did not show as much money as would be needed, but I think it was more money than he expected. I picked up the paper and put it back in my pocket.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. ‘I will go now.’

Chapter 47

Ada has done a foolish thing.

She has attempted to threaten the Township Superintendent, a man with a short temper that Edward was never particularly keen on.

I heard about this not from Ada herself, but from our timid Mayor, who came to see me and sat in the lounge twisting his hat between his fingers and jumping when Ada appeared with tea.

Not that he presented it as a clear threat. Instead he seemed to see it as the well-intentioned act of an earnest but untaught woman, worried about the deteriorating situation in the township and imagining she could help. Even the matter of certain letters – he was particularly vague on this – didn’t persuade him that Ada was more shrewd than the unworldly soul he imagined. I remained silent, not wishing to contradict this impression. Assumed naivety might save her.

But I suspect that the Superintendent was in no doubt as to her sharpness.

I asked the Mayor if he wished to speak to Ada himself, but it soon became clear that he thought it was I who ought to be doing the speaking, I who should be reining in this maid who, he said with apologetic emphasis, was ‘so close’ to my family.

It was only after he’d left, when I went up to my bedroom to lie down for a while, that I saw the envelope tucked into my diary on the dressing table, alongside the small vase of geraniums I picked yesterday.

Is Ada well?

M
rs Cath came to sit on my bed yesterday evening. ‘No, don’t get up,’ she said as I made to rise, wondering if she was ill, if there was something she wanted, as I’d wondered what Master wanted …

‘Dear Ada,’ she murmured, smoothing Mama’s blue shawl that lay across the bottom of the bed. ‘Why did you do it? To threaten the Superintendent – it’s close to blackmail.’

I hadn’t met the word blackmail before. I thought I’d started a negotiation, although negotations usually try to let both sides succeed in some way, so perhaps it was not a negotiation after all because I had no intention of letting the Superintendent succeed even in part. Later, after Mrs Cath left, I looked up blackmail in the dictionary and it said it was an attempt to get money by threat. And I realised that this was exactly what I wanted, except that the money would go not to me, but to those on whose behalf I had stepped into the town hall that morning.

‘I left you a letter,’ I said to Mrs Cath.

‘I know, I read it – it’s very good,’ she admitted with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘I taught you too well, perhaps.’

‘I decided this on my own, Ma’am,’ the old word slipped out, ‘I never wanted to make trouble for you.’

‘I know.’ Her eyes roamed about the room, taking in the sheet music on the table, my Bible alongside, and Dawn’s dressing gown hanging behind the door in the hope of her return one day. ‘Would you have done it if Dawn had still been here?’

‘No.’ I shook my head, then gasped as a new thought struck me. ‘Is the Mayor blaming you because of me?’ For mayors were surely like Superintendents, with just as much, if not more, power. I should have realised they would try to attack me through those I love – with Dawn gone, Mrs Cath was next in line.

‘I will go back,’ I said urgently. ‘I’ll tell them it has nothing to do with you. I’ll—’

‘No, Ada,’ Mrs Cath held up a hand. ‘No. You’ve done a brave thing. Too few people have conviction these days.’ She looked down and I caught a glimpse of Phil in her face, for although Phil mostly resembled Master, there were moments when he appeared in his mother’s eyes and in her lips – and always in the words she spoke. ‘And,’ she went on, ‘with Edward gone and Dawn away, there’s no reason not to.’

She stood up and walked to the table, bent over one of the music sheets, and nodded at its familiarity.

‘Are you quite well after that fall?’ She glanced across at me, her green eyes settling on the scar at the side of my face.

‘Yes, Mrs Cath.’ It did not do to complain. And the body takes its own time. I have learnt that.

She turned back and touched a page with long fingers. She was more stooped now, and she needed special glasses to see the piano keys.

‘Who would have guessed…’

‘Guessed what, Mrs Cath?’

‘My sister Ada, you know the one you’re named for in Ireland? She would have done something like this.’

She closed the door quietly behind her.

Chapter 48

T
hey were waiting for me at the Groot Vis, where Church Street mounts the bridge over the river and then aims for the station and the vast Karoo beyond. They did not come for me at Cradock House – where Mrs Cath might have intervened – or at school, where my students might have proved obstructive. They chose, instead, to wait for me by the river in the cool shade of a pepper tree, as if taking their ease, with the weavers chattering noisily nearby, and the lazy slip of brown water over rocks below.

‘Pass!’ one of them demanded as I went by. His partner slouched on the far side of the van, chewing something and eyeing the crowd who shied away from the van, heads down. This was an everyday business. I myself had hurried past many such vans, many such inspections for Passes. I fumbled for my document, hampered by my arm which was stiff in the mornings until I’d played the piano. The man barely looked at it.

‘Get in,’ he said, thrusting the Pass back at me and nodding to the other man to open up the back of the van.

‘Why?’ I asked, seizing courage, standing my ground. ‘My Pass is in order. My Madam signs it for me.’

‘It’s not about the Pass,’ he said. ‘Get in.’

This was no random check. They knew enough about my movements between school and Cradock House to know where to position themselves. They’d been watching me, and then they’d lain in wait. It was an ambush, like when Phil had been ambushed by tanks in the desert at Sidi Rezegh. Like when leopards stalk and then pounce on their prey in the veld.

I had broken the law. I had lain with a man who did not share the same colour as me. I had also stepped into the Superintendent’s office and tried to trade letters I’d written for the compensation that my fellow blacks deserved. They were right. It wasn’t about the Pass.