The Housemaid's Daughter (42 page)

When I am not on the
stoep,
I’m doing something illegal.

The kitchen door has two parts to it. The lower part is wood, but the upper part is made of small squares of glass set in wood frames. I am using my scissors to score away at the gluey material that holds one of the glass squares into its frame. I have chosen the square that sits next to the door handle.

Every day, when I come home, I check to see no one is about and then, when it gets dark, I bring my scissors and scratch at the glue. It is easiest when there is a moon. Even so, I must be careful that the scissors don’t slip and cut my fingers.

Each evening I do this.

Each evening the groove in the glue gets deeper.

* * *

Lindiwe says there is one hopeful sign in the township. A group of young men – nurtured by Rev. Calata – has sprung up. They say they want to improve the lives of township residents. One of the men is a gifted teacher called Matthew Goniwe, and I have met him. Another is Rev. Calata’s grandson. Matthew Goniwe tries to recruit me; he holds my swollen hand and fixes me with his kind eyes and says it is still my war. He is right, but I know that my head and my body are no longer fit for such work. I can only watch from a distance and pray to God that they succeed in their means to make a revolution in a different way, like I once tried. Whenever I come across such peaceful efforts, I wish that Jake might suddenly arrive in their midst, turned from violence. But he, like Phil, is forever gone from me.

Like my students, who regularly disappear.

Their frantic parents rush to the jail and wait hours on the pavement outside in the hope of hearing something, any small piece of information. Maybe they try to speak to the people who own the black hands that deliver food to the cells and collect latrine buckets. Sometimes the parents’ vigil is rewarded and the children return, but more often they’re gone for good. We’re getting used to disappearances. It is a terrible thing. Like necklacing is a terrible thing to get used to. I pray to God so often but He does not hear me any more. I think He has forgotten us.

Lindiwe transfers her worry about Jake to me. She says I should not be on my own so much, I should not be walking such long distances with my weak leg and arm. ‘Come stay with me,’ she urges as we drink tea after my unofficial lessons are over for the day. ‘It will be easier for you, not such a long way to go to school. We can read together.’

‘I can’t,’ I reply. ‘I have to take care of Cradock House.’

‘Not every day!’

‘Yes,’ I insist. ‘It must be every day. There are houses that have been broken into when they’re vacant.’

I love Lindiwe but I can’t tell her that the real reason for not taking up her offer is that the house needs my company, and that I crave my quiet
kaia
after the violence of a township day and the steady loss of some of my most vivid students.

And I can’t tell her that I intend to break into Cradock House myself.

I have spoken to Edward about Ada but he is not keen. Shades of being unwilling to consider proper schooling … I suspect he believes I am clutching at new occupations that will somehow heal the pain of losing – I can hardly bear to write the words – our beloved Phil. That may be true, but I have seen lesser talents than Ada’s succeed and go on to great things. Ada deserves the chance to try. I have been negligent in other ways, but I will not be negligent about this.

One part of me wants to sweep her off to Cape Town right now, where she can be examined and put forward as a candidate, but the other half wants to keep her here a little longer, for we need her youth and beauty in the aftermath of death, and Cradock House needs to be filled with the glorious sound she makes. There is also the matter of Rosemary, whom I will be visiting shortly in Johannesburg, and attempting to steer towards a sensible future. That may take some time.

But Ada is twenty, and if she is to find a future as a pianist, or even a teacher, then it has to be now. As soon as I return from Jo’burg, I will take this further.

Not just for her music, but also for her own heart which I know is only now realising what it has lost.

Chapter 57

T
he only time I have needed a telephone was when I was trying to reach Dawn after Mrs Cath died. But now Cradock House is closed to me, and the telephone inside it has been cut off by the lawyer’s office. This means that even if I have no need to make calls, no one else can call me.

So it was that I was pulled out of my class one day.

‘Miss Mabuse! Miss Mabuse!’ the headmaster shouted across the hall to me. ‘You have a telephone call.’

‘Sophie,’ I gestured to one of my piano students, over the terror in my heart. No one but Dawn would need to phone me. No one but Dawn in an emergency. ‘You play the accompaniment. Listen to Sophie,’ I raised my voice to the rest of the class. ‘She is better than me these days.’

‘Ada,’ the headmaster said with pursed lips, ‘the telephone is not for private calls.’

‘I understand, sir. It won’t happen again.’

Dawn, my heart whispered. Dawn …

The headmaster pointed at the phone on his desk, then closed the door behind him. He has spoken to her, he knows something already that I don’t …

‘Hello?’

‘Mama? Mama – is that you?’

‘Yes, child. How are you?’

‘I don’t have much money left for the phone. Mama, I’m not well—’ She broke into a fit of coughing at the other end.

‘Dawn! Come home, child!’ I cried into the phone. ‘I’ll make you better!’

‘Mama,’ her voice steadied, ‘I’ll write and tell you when – I wanted you to know—’

‘Have faith, child. All will be well. Dawn? Dawn?’

But there was only the hard middle C in my ear.

* * *

The small pane of glass in the back door is loose. I have been scraping away at its fixing for many days, and now it is loose. This is where I must be careful.

I chose a windy night. It was winter and the Karoo was preparing to deliver frost. The kaffirboom creaked in the gale, the apricot tree rustled, I stood at the kitchen door and stared about me in the dark. No human sound. The
kaia
was in darkness. The scrape and fall of the glass would not be heard. Even so, I must try to protect it, I must try not to let it smash. I need the glass to remain intact. I need to be able to slide it out, without breaking.

Using my good arm, I pressed the points of the scissors into the grooves that had taken me so long to carve. The glass shifted. I lifted the scissors and pressed them against the grove on the left side. Then swapped over to the right side. The two sides of the glass were loose. The upper and lower part still held.

Now, I thought as I rubbed my swollen hand, if I can loosen one side completely …

I scraped further and felt the glass begin to give. I passed the scissors to my bad hand and pressed my fingers against the loose side. It swivelled slightly and I tried to lodge a fingernail around its edge to pull it towards me and prevent it falling into the kitchen. Then attacked the opposite side, scraping and scraping until that side gave way and pushed out the part I was holding. It crushed my fingernail but I held on. Then gradually worked the rest of the fixing loose. Then lifted the glass out of its frame. Then sank down on to the step with the square of glass in my shaking hand. Even though it was cold, sweat ran off my forehead into my eyes. No one reared out of the darkness. No headlights like the eyes of night animals captured me in their glare. Soon I’d be able to look after Cradock House as it deserved. It needed dusting and polishing. It needed to be kept clean for Miss Helen. This is why I have done what I have done. And maybe – if I was quiet – I could even play some music into its dark corridors.

And with Dawn coming back, I could put her to bed and care for her in our old room. I know Mrs Cath, or Helen, wouldn’t mind. It will be warmer in the house than in the
kaia.
She will get better sooner. But I haven’t had a letter from her. Not for some weeks since the telephone call …

I laid the glass down carefully and then reached into the kitchen through the hole in the door and felt for the lock. Twisted it open, and then turned the handle. The door needed shaking because the wood in the door frame had swollen since it had last been opened, but after a while, the door opened. Cradock House lay before me, dark, musty, mine once more.

I only go in at night.

At first I was afraid of the darkness. It seemed to me that the ghosts that used to torment Phil in his sleep were all about me. I felt their passing in the breaths of air that suddenly touched my neck, or lifted the curtains even though the windows were closed. Mama and Mrs Cath and Phil himself did not come to me as they used to during the day. They were silent, their reassurance suspended. The night belonged to restless spirits, to evil thoughts, to the possibility of discovery, even to the men that had lain in wait in the shadows when I stumbled home from jail … Every looming cupboard, every creak of the roof made me jerk in panic.

It took me several visits before I began to understand that the house bore me no evil intent. It just required me to learn its new geography. Stairs hid their treads, surprising me at the top with an extra one, or making me stumble at the bottom on one that was missing. Furniture that I walked past in the day had to be relearned as a particular shape at night. The light that struck through the windows and lit the lounge one moment, then plunged it into shadow the next, came not from the stabbing beam I’d suffered in jail but from the natural passage of the moon between clouds.

Once I started to dust and to polish, the shapes I feared formed themselves back into those that I knew and had cared for all my life. They became chairs and tables and banisters again, and they rewarded my work with the familiar smell of linseed oil and soap.

And still Dawn did not come.

* * *

The telegram arrived at school. I tore open the orange envelope with shaking fingers. Dina stood at my side, ready to comfort me. But comfort was not necessary.

‘Look!’ I gasped, thrusting the flimsy paper at her.

‘Meet Dawn Friday train,’ Dina read, then flung her arms around me. ‘She’s well – she’s coming back! Oh Ada!’

Lindiwe is joyful too. She knows how my heart has been desperate for news of my child. I have forced myself to school every day so that the piano can drive away my fears of Dawn alone, Dawn ill, Dawn unable to call me …

‘She can stay with me,’ Lindiwe said, ‘if you can’t manage.’ Lindiwe knows my weakness; she knows my head and my body sometimes fail to work together properly. Yet somehow I can still play, somehow the piano gives strength to my arms, to my fingers.

‘Thank you.’ I took her hand and pressed it to my cheek. ‘But first let me see how she is.’

Many years ago, Mrs Cath returned to Cradock on the same morning train. Master left the house early to meet her. I, too, leave the house early to meet Dawn. The station is not as busy as it used to be now that people prefer to fly to Port Elizabeth and then drive up to Cradock. Now it seems that the railways are for poor people only.

There is no one else waiting to meet the train from Johannesburg, via De Aar. I remember Dawn’s last visit; her triumphal walk across the bridge with her shoes in her hands, and the eyes of all passers-by drawn to her. Perhaps she will be weak, I must prepare myself for that. Perhap she has picked up a disease that is only found where there is gold in the ground, and it will be cured once she is away from such unhealthiness.

I heard the whistle as the train rounded the
koppie.
Soon! Soon she would be here! And perhaps she might never leave again.

The man from the ticket office leant out of his door. Clouds of dust rose up around the approaching train and dissolved into the sheer Karoo light. The pigeons on the roof beams scattered, as if expecting steam and explosions, but these days the engines use electricity so there was just a sigh and a jerk as the carriages drew in and settled beneath the station roof. A man and a woman stepped off and hurried away. The guard at the far end jumped down, stretched, and then began to unload boxes from the goods carriage. The ticket man wandered over to the engine and stood talking to the train driver up in his seat. No other carriage doors opened.

Maybe she was on the next day’s train?

Then the guard came down the platform. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand.

‘You waiting for someone?’

‘Yes,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘My daughter, Dawn. She has been ill.’

He looked at me. ‘Come this way.’ He set off for the end of the platform.

No, I thought, my steps slowing. No, it can’t be. Not like Mama …

I stopped.

He turned round. ‘He’s fine,’ he said to me. ‘Come along.’

He?

I stumbled after him. Amongst the boxes sat a small boy. He had a label round his neck, on a string. He was very pale. He wore tattered shorts and a shirt that was clean, but too big for him. His one hand was curled in his lap. The other hand clutched a cardboard suitcase. Mama’s suitcase. My suitcase. Dawn’s suitcase.

‘Here,’ said the guard, fishing into his pocket and handing over an envelope. ‘They gave me this letter for you. Asked me to look after the
klonkie.
Said you’d take him, but he looks white to me.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll get the other things.’ He turned away and climbed back into the goods carriage.

I stared at the boy.

Then went closer and knelt down in front of him. He drew back a little.

‘What’s your name, child?’

He looked at me with eyes blue as the morning sky, and fair hair that flopped over his forehead.

‘Thebo,’ he whispered.

‘Where is your mama, Thebo?’

His eyes filled. He turned back to the carriage and pointed with the hand that was not holding his suitcase. ‘There.’

The guard was levering a plain, brown coffin on to the platform. The boy stood up on spindly legs, abandoned his case, and ran to it and tried to put his arms round it.