The Housemaid's Daughter (4 page)

I also learned, through the words of songs, about English things like woods and maypoles and grass that was always green and never brown like ours was.
Come to the Green Wood
became my favourite piece. And
Dance of the Gnomes.

I learned history from Madam’s stories of the great composers and I learned geography from the routes they travelled in search of new tunes. I hadn’t realised that the piano did more than train your fingers. I hadn’t realised it could show me a world beyond Cradock House. The first time my fingers touched the ivory keys I knew music would lift my heart, but I didn’t expect it to stretch my head as well.

The piano taught me more about numbers. I learned to count the beats in a bar up to eight. There was now a connection between the counts and the figures I saw on shop signs in town.

For a while I could not work out quite how they were related. How could ‘four’ beats in a bar of music mean the same as ‘four’ on a bolt of cloth in town when there was only one bolt? Numbers, I decided, were unreliable things.

There was no war while Madam and I made music.

As I sat beside her on the piano stool, her soft cream dress against my blue overall, her hands on either side of mine as she helped me, I began to picture the world like she did, although most times I had never seen the things she talked about.

‘A stream, the cry of seagulls, the curl and suck of the sea make a pattern over and over, one inside the other. Like the counterpoint we see in Bach…’ She floated a series of repeating melodies that wove around each other, her hands rippling over the keys.

‘What did the stream across the sea sound like on its own?’

‘Ah, if you could only hear it, Ada.’ She smiled fondly, as if the sound was echoing in her ear at that very moment. ‘Over Bannock cliffs and into the cove, it was Grieg…’ Her fingers danced across the opening chords of the piano concerto.

I nodded. Her hands stilled and she glanced away out of the window in the direction of the Groot Vis, brown and sluggish in the heat.

‘A minor,’ she turned back to the piano, ‘falling into E – remember?’

And I would feel the tune rise in my hands and join her in the tumbling cascade down the piano.

* * *

A strange thing happened just after the start of the war. The sun disappeared one day. The
koppies
changed from brown to purple, and the birds in the garden stopped singing – even our bokmakieries. A man called General Smuts that I had heard people talking about, a man who had warned about Jerry controlling the sea route, visited Cradock to look at this daytime darkness. Crowds gathered outside the town hall on Market Square to hear him speak. Red and blue streamers flew across the front of the buildings to welcome him, and he was cheered all the way down Church Street as the skies darkened.

‘It’s an eclipse, Ada,’ Madam said, on her way out to listen to him, ‘nothing to be afraid of.’

She said it was the moon that was hiding the sun from us, and that it happened from time to time. Miss Rose said everyone knew what eclipses were. Master Phil was away marching so I couldn’t ask him what he thought. Mama went to lie down in our
kaia,
so I crept upstairs and tried to see Market Square from the toy box as the light faded across the distant Karoo. Clapping reached me through the open windows. Perhaps General Smuts would call upon his powers to bring back the sun. I was sure it was the war that was to blame, just like it was to blame for the shortages we had in the kitchen. What else would cause the moon to cover the sun after all the time that I had known it to stay in the sky without trouble?

So there was Cradock House in the middle of the dry, sometimes dark, Karoo, and there was Mama and Madam and Master and Miss Rose here, and young Master Phil going away to war. There were the sinister hadeda birds that flapped and honked overhead every evening against a sky streaked with orange and pink. There was Mrs Pumile next door complaining at the extra work because of the war.

And now, instead of the occasional rain song on the
kaia
roof under the bony thorn tree, there was Mozart and Chopin and Beethoven every day – more tunes waiting inside the piano than I would ever be able to play. And more world beyond Cradock House than I had ever imagined. There was war, certainly, but there was also enough music to make you forget it.

* * *

Miriam and Ada are becoming my family, too.

No one warned me of this. They rather talked of heat, biting insects, restless natives.The possibility of finding companionship with my black housekeeper and her child was not even a remote consideration.

I suspect Edward finds my attitude disturbing. But he can have no complaints about my devotion to my own two. Phil and Rosemary have my total attention, and where Rosemary is concerned, I take particular care to encourage her in her various pursuits. I am sure we shall find something that will capture her interest.

Chapter 6

Y
oung men like Master Phil appeared on the streets of Cradock in smart uniforms and caps with badges. When they marched, their boots beat time against the brown earth like the staccato notes I learnt to play. Older men like Master did not march, they went to meetings in the town hall opposite the Karoo Gardens where I used to sit under the palms, and talked for many hours about somewhere called ‘Up North’.

One day Madam gave me a message for Master and I stood at the back waiting to give it to him. All the important men in Cradock – or perhaps the whole Karoo – sat around a table, and talked in loud voices and sometimes banged the table with their hands like you do when you are making bread. There was a man in a gold chain, and many with long beards. They did not look at me, so I listened to what they were saying. I often listened to what people were saying when they didn’t expect me to hear them.

‘Why should our boys have to fight and they don’t?’ I heard one man say loudly.

‘Throw them in jail,’ said another. ‘It’s treason!’

I didn’t know what treason was. But it must have been bad because jail was where you were sent when you had killed or hurt someone so badly that you had to be locked away forever. There was a jail at the far end of Bree Street, and I think that was one of the reasons Mama would not let me walk to the strict St James School that lay beyond it. And jail, Mama once said, was not just for bad people. Jail could reach out and snatch you if you weren’t careful.

‘What is it, Ada?’ Master had come over to where I was standing. He was in his shirtsleeves, and I noticed that his collar was drooping. It was hard to find starch because of the war. I held out the note. He read it, passed a hand over his thinning hair and then crumpled the note up in his fist. There were small drops of sweat on his forehead.

‘Tell the Madam I will be back as soon as I can,’ he said, not looking at me and turning quickly to go back to the table of shouting men. That was the time when we found out that young Master Phil was to go to the war.

At first, Master Phil just had to wear a uniform and practise the sort of marching he used to do while Madam played the piano when he was a boy. He would come home each night after a day of marching in the veld, and have dinner and then go again in the morning while Madam’s scales swept through house. I was very proud of him and took extra care with the ironing of his khaki shirts. He even had time for the odd game of cricket with the other boys who were learning to be soldiers, although the dusty marching square where they played dirtied his cricket whites and gave me extra scrubbing that he was always sorry about.

‘What do you do in the war?’ I asked him one day when he came home early and was lying on his back in the grass watching the sky through the kaffirboom leaves. I was pegging washing on the line. ‘Is it very hard?’

He sat up on an elbow and looked at me. Master Phil and I had always talked easily, from the time he first showed me numbers and even when he seemed to be growing beyond me. Master Phil was my friend, the first friend I ever had. ‘It’s not hard yet,’ he said after a pause, ‘but it will be when I’m sent off to fight.’

I thought about this as I pegged up a pillowcase. ‘Will you be afraid?’

He looked across at the house. Madam was at tea with friends, my mother was in the laundry, and faint sounds of dance music filtered from Miss Rose’s open window.

‘I hope not, I…’ he reached for a leaf and began to tear it into neat pieces along the line of the veins. His fair hair flopped on to his forehead. ‘I don’t want to be afraid – but what if I am?’

A silence fell between us. His sleeves were rolled up and I could see where the marching had made the muscles of his arms rise in strong cords under his skin. Dear Master Phil, always so keen, always at the front of every game, always wanting to play his part. I was sure he would make a great soldier, too.

‘I don’t want to be afraid of the
tokoloshe,
’ I said, leaving the washing, and kneeling down at his side, ‘but it is God the Father’s way of teaching me to be brave.’

His hands stilled from their shredding and he stared at me.

‘But war’s about killing, Ada. Killing,’ he repeated, his voice not much more than a whisper. ‘Not ghosts or evil spirits! Does God want us to be brave for that?’

Master Phil’s eyes were very light, much lighter than the sky, much lighter than Miss Rose’s steely blue, you could look almost all the way through them as if they were water. They were searching me now, and I had no answer for them.

He picked up another leaf and began to break it into pieces once more.

I got up and fetched the next shirt from the washing basket. Silence stretched between us. What could I say to reassure him? I ought to help, as he had helped me in the past. But I knew nothing of war and what it demanded. Then another thought came to me and I tried to turn it away but it kept coming back. Was it possible that Master Phil, despite his energy and his good heart, was not meant to be a soldier?

And what would Madam have said to his question if he’d asked her? Was there a lesson on God and war to be taken from Madam’s book in her dressing room?

‘I will pray for you, sir,’ I said, holding the damp shirt against my chest and feeling the cold on my body, and hoped my praying would be enough. ‘And Madam and Master will, too.’

He smiled up at me with his mouth. Then flung off the torn leaves, jumped to his feet and strode back inside.

* * *

While young Master Phil marched, my mother Miriam and I saved food in the kitchen and Madam collected spare cake tins and knitted socks for some of the young men who might get cold in boats – strange machines that I had never seen but seemed to be necessary for war and for taking pianos across seas. In the town square there were rallies with important people coming to tell us to ‘support our lads and smash the enemy’.

During the war, some of the men in uniform were coloured people, a lighter colour than Mama and I. They lived in a part of the township that I had never been to, above a drift in the Groot Vis where it was possible to get over the river when the water was low. The coloured soldiers were very proud of their khaki kit and marched around the edge of Market Square, kicking up puffs of dust to dirty their new boots. This I could see when they stopped in front of the town hall for some saluting. Then they started off again down Church Street and across the bridge to the railway station to go away to war. One handsome boy winked at me as he stamped by and my mother pulled me away from the front of the crowd. ‘Cheeky,’ she muttered. ‘Just because they got uniforms like whites.’

The whole town came out and cheered them and waved little flags.

There were no black soldiers the same colour as Mama and I; they stayed in the crowded township beyond Bree Street or worked on the farms. I don’t know why they didn’t go to the war. I asked my mother but she said it was because they hadn’t been asked to go, and that it had something to do with not being trusted with guns.

A few white men didn’t want to fight and were put in jail – I heard this from the corridor one night when Master leant over the piano as Madam finished playing. They’d be left to rot there, he said, sounding satisfied.

I remembered the meeting in the town hall and the shouting of the word treason and Mama’s fear of jails and what they could do to you even if you had never hurt anyone badly enough to be put there.

But I couldn’t understand about the men being rotten as well. Only fruit like apricots went rotten when they fell from the tree on to the ground. Not people. Maybe the white men didn’t want to fight because they were already frightened, like young Master Phil had said he might be?

‘They see no reason to fight for England,’ Madam said sadly. Master patted her shoulder. He touched Madam a lot more since the war started. And Madam walked away to the piano a lot less than she did before the war. Maybe war makes you value things and people more than you did when there was Peace and you knew there would never be a shortage?

I wondered about the black men who hadn’t been asked to go to war. If ways could be found to trust them with guns, then they could take the place of the white men who didn’t want to go. And no one would have to go to jail. I wanted to say this to Madam, but my mother Miriam said it was not my place to question Madam and Master about such things.

I didn’t understand about the sides in this war either. Especially as I remembered Madam saying that our piano came from Germany. This must mean that the clever people who had made our piano were now our enemies. It seemed to me that this might be the worst thing about war: that friends could be enemies-in-waiting.

Chapter 7

‘
A
da!’

I looked about. No one ever shouted to me on Church Street. The town streets were mainly for white people to shout on, black people did their shouting in the township alleys where Auntie lived. As if, Auntie used to say with a sniff, they lived on opposite hills instead of just across a dirt road from one another.

‘Ada!’ Young Master Phil in his khaki uniform marched across the gravel, avoiding a horse and cart coming along at a trot. ‘What are you doing here?’