The Housemaid's Daughter (5 page)

‘Posting Madam’s letter, sir.’ I showed him the envelope with Madam’s beautiful thick and thin pen strokes. I had been hiding it in my pocket so it wouldn’t get dirty from the dust of the street, or smudged from the heat of my hand. It was a letter for Madam’s sister, Ada, who I had been named for. I wished I could write to this Ada and ask her about her life in Ireland, if it was less dusty there, and if the stream still played Grieg as it fell over the cliffs into the sea.

‘I’m leaving soon,’ said young Master Phil, standing like a soldier, feet apart, shoulders square.

I looked up at him. His pale eyes were staring down the road, where the horse and cart were heading in a brown cloud. Only his hands moved, flexing themselves against his drill trousers. ‘Where will you go, sir? To protect Madam’s country? To Ireland?’

He laughed then, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. ‘Oh no, Ada, there’s no war in Ireland. I’ll be sent up north, probably, to north Africa. Come with me.’

He began to walk up the road. I didn’t know whether to follow. He turned and looked at me. I could walk and talk with Master Phil at Cradock House, but here, on the street, in front of white people, it was different. I’m not sure why it was different, skin difference was not a matter of law at that time and there were no signs saying benches and entrances were for white people only, but already I knew it was so. Even when I was on my own, the shopkeepers shooed me away if I hung around too long reading their signs. Church Street with its line of pepper trees and its soaring Dutch Reformed Church was not meant for people like me. Walking along Church Street by the side of a young Master in the uniform of a soldier was certainly not meant for people like me.

Already someone had noticed.

A lady in a pink frilled blouse and a darker coloured skirt was coming out of N.C. Rogers General Dealers, fanning herself. I saw her look from Master Phil to me, and back to Master Phil once more.

‘Why,’ she said, turning her back to me, ‘it’s Philip Harrington, Cathleen and Edward’s boy. How smart you look!’

Young Master Phil took his gaze away from me and walked across to shake her hand politely.

‘I believe,’ she lowered her voice, ‘you lads are to leave soon.’

‘I don’t know yet, Ma’am.’ Young Master Phil’s words were steady, but I knew the fear that lived just beneath them. I had heard it in his voice in the garden at Cradock House, just as I’d seen the sun shine on the muscles he’d grown for war. I hated the lady from the General Dealers. I hated her for reminding young Master Phil that not only he, but others as well, would soon find out if he was too afraid for war.

I waited, just behind them. Master Phil’s eyes as light as water met mine over the lady’s frilled shoulder. Some men clattered out of the store and went over to check on a horse tied up nearby, its nose deep in a bag of oats.

‘Sir,’ I called, over their talk of the horse, ‘here is Madam’s letter for posting.’

The lady turned, her lips tight from the interruption.

‘Thank you, Ada,’ said Master Phil, and touched his cap to the lady. ‘Please excuse me. It was very nice to meet you. Ada,’ he turned to me, ‘we must also check if Father’s parcels have arrived.’

With a bob of the head, he began to march up the road towards Market Square. I kept my eyes away from the frilled lady and hurried after him, keeping a distance behind. Once he was alongside the Karoo Gardens, he stopped beneath the striped shade of a pepper tree and waited for me to catch up. Across the square, carts drawn up in front of the town hall wavered in the heat as if readying themselves to drive off on their own. Master Phil wiped his forehead.

‘You’ll be a good soldier, sir,’ I said, looking around to check no one was watching. I reached a hand across the space between us to touch his arm. ‘I know you will.’

* * *

Some nights during those first seasons of war, while young Master Phil trained in the veld nearby, Madam and Master would cluster about the radiogram and listen to a man with a deep voice called Mr Churchill. Mr Churchill, it seemed, was more important than General Smuts. Sometimes Madam wept at his words, and Master paced up and down, squeezing his hands, his jacket thrown aside on the chair, his normally flat hair in tufts. The radio talked about things called bombs making fires in a town called London, which must be near to Madam’s home in Ireland for her to be so worried. They talked about aeroplanes that dived to deliver the same fire from their guns and caused great ships – still I could not imagine these, nor could I imagine the endless seas on which they floated – to sink beneath the oceans forever. And Miss Rose would run upstairs and shut herself in her bedroom and cry that she was tired of the whole war and why couldn’t everything be just like it was before.

‘When will it end?’ Madam would whisper. ‘So many boys lost. Ada,’ raising her voice, looking about for me in the corridor, ‘come and play for us.’

And I would play quiet nocturnes, or a prelude like Chopin’s
Raindrop,
its single notes falling into the anxious, pressing silence. Master would return to his newspaper, smoothing down his grey hair. Madam would sit pale in the lamplight, hands clasped in her lap, for once not keeping time with the music.

Phil has received his orders.

We try to be cheerful.

Miriam makes his favourite jam sponge, Ada plays marches, even Rosemary rouses herself to be agreeable. But Edward and I remember too much about the Great War to be swept up in any sort of euphoria.

Ada has ironed his khakis obsessively. She wants everything to be perfect when he leaves.

Mr Churchill sent young Master Phil ‘up north’. There was no ocean or great ships there, but a desert more vast and more dry even than our Karoo.

* * *

I asked to go to the station to see young Master Phil off. The station was across the Groot Vis, on high ground some distance from Auntie’s small township. My mother Miriam said later that it was not my place to ask such a thing, but seeing as I asked Madam when Mama was busy in the kitchen, it was done before she could forbid me.

‘Why, Ada,’ said Madam, with a quick glance at Master behind his newspaper in his chair opposite her, ‘of course you can come.’

It was the busiest I had ever seen the station. Young men stood about with kitbags over their shoulders and talked in high voices and punched each other with their free arms. A train waited for them, its dark red carriages dusty even before the journey had begun. With an explosion that shook the air, the train’s engine began to work up steam into white clouds, forcing smart ladies on the platform to turn their faces away from the blasts of grit. A conductor in a blue uniform and cap paced up and down the platform and then, at some signal that I did not see, began to blow hard on his whistle to get all of the excited soldiers on to the train in time.

‘Darling,’ Madam hugged Master Phil who towered over her from all the growing he had done, ‘come back soon!’ She stepped away from him and clasped her fingers together.

‘Philip.’ Master offered his hand, although some of the other fathers were hugging their boys. ‘Keep your head down, son. Rosemary,’ he turned quickly to gather Miss Rose who was making eyes at a young man nearby, ‘come now, say your goodbyes.’

Miss Rose flung herself at young Master Phil and then raced off to be with her school friends. I waited a little way behind Master. I was the only black person standing with a white family.

The station entrance was behind me, I could slip out, no one would know. I could say that I went back to help my mother Miriam with tea. Yet it felt good to be part of such a crowd, even though I was an outsider. There was laughter and crying all about, and children waving little flags. I wondered what it was about war that made people laugh and cry at the same time. Perhaps crying always lies behind laughter but only shows its face when we say goodbye.

Three soldiers with bugles lined up in front of a carriage and began to play a short tune – Madam told me later it was called a fanfare – that made the crowd cheer. ‘Ada?’ Young Master Phil was looking for me, and I went and stood in front of him.

‘I will miss you, sir,’ I said, raising my voice over the noise, and offering him my hand. ‘Good luck to you, sir.’

And then young Master Phil did a strange thing. He opened his arms and he leant down and hugged me. For a moment I felt his cheek against mine and the prickle of his beard where he had forgotten to shave, and then he was gone, shouldering his bag and leaping up the steps to the carriage.

I felt Madam’s hand on my shoulder. I stole a look at Master. He was staring at Master Phil on the train, and frowning.

‘All aboard,’ shouted the conductor and blew a further blast.

The buglers tucked their bugles under their arms, grabbed their bags and rushed on board as the train began to edge forward under a balloon of smoke. All around us, people on the platform called out to their boys who leant out of the windows and sang and banged the sides of the carriages in time to a song I had heard on the radiogram at Cradock House. ‘
We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when
…’

Ladies who had turned their faces away from the smoke now looked back, and wiped their eyes with lace handkerchiefs and waved gloved hands. The train blew its own whistle in a high screech, higher pitched than the conductor’s whistle. A group of children nearby squealed and clapped their hands over their ears. Dark blue pigeons took off from the beams under the station roof.

I turned to look at Master again, to see if he was sad he had not hugged his son like the other fathers had, and found that instead of watching the packed train carry Master Phil to where Mr Churchill was sending him, Master was staring at me.

* * *

I have no father.

Well, perhaps that is not right. I have no father that I have ever seen. He must be somewhere, living at his home or with the ancestors, but I have never known him. Mama does not talk about him, and he has no face for me. Madam and Master don’t talk about him and young Master Phil and Miss Rose have their own father and do not seem to think it strange that I can’t show them a father of my own.

The day that young Master Phil left made me think of my father again. Madam was a second mother to me, but Master was too busy to notice me enough to be a father. I didn’t expect his attention, and I didn’t receive it. I never felt that he didn’t like me; it was just that he didn’t notice me.

Except for today.

His look across the heaving platform carried as much attention as I’d ever seen him give Miss Rose or Master Phil. Yet it was not kindly attention. Master looked at me with no particular sympathy. Instead his look was one of dismay.

Chapter 8

‘
W
ho is my father?’ I used to ask Mama after I had realised that it was in fact necessary to have a father in order to have a baby.

‘Just a man I knew once,’ Mama would reply, turning away so I could not see her face.

‘Did you marry him? Like Master married Madam?’

‘He was gone before you were born.’

I would pull up the blanket and stare at her. I always started these talks when I was in bed at night, after Madam had finished her evening playing and the house was quiet except for the creaking of the tin roof as it cooled down after the heat of the day. Mama used to crochet in the chair by the window, her feet in slippers, her hair freed from its usual
doek.
She would wrap a blue shawl she’d made around her shoulders and I would fall asleep to the sound of the roof, and the owl in the kaffirboom, and the rhythmic movement of Mama’s crochet hook through her wool.

‘Master never went away when young Master Phil and Miss Rose were born,’ I persisted, the last time that we talked about the father I never knew. ‘Why did my father go away?’

My mother didn’t often get really cross with me, especially at the end of the day when she was tired, but now was one of those times. She pushed aside her crocheting and came to stand over me, as if what she had to say must be for my ears only and never escape from the room. ‘
Tula!
’ she hissed. ‘I will not speak of these things. You have the best of growing up here, you have no need for a father that does not return! Be grateful to the Lord and go to sleep!’

But I couldn’t sleep. I watched her as she picked up the shawl where it had fallen to the floor, and bent back over her work. Mama was not one to give her heart away easily. She was devoted to Madam and Master and the children, so what sort of man could have won her love? Surely only someone fine and kind, who promised to marry her. I knew Mama disapproved of Mrs Pumile with her many, unreliable callers, so she would never have taken up with a man who was not prepared to stay. But a man she looked up to, a man prepared to stay could have won her heart and been a fine father for me. I wish I had known such a father.

And yet all around Cradock – all around the Karoo? All around the world? – it seemed to me that very few black families lived together. It could be, I reasoned, because men and women worked in different places. Men wanting to dig gold out of the ground needed to be in faraway places like Johannesburg while their women remained at home working for white families like Mama and I did. Or was it because black men liked to have many wives and many children to keep them wealthy in their old age? And so staying with one particular wife would be seen as a cruelty to the others?

In Mama’s case, the other possibility was that my father was not a man to be looked up to, or a man who worked far away, or a man with other families that claimed his time, but a man who had deceived my mother, who had tricked her into believing that he was a good man when he was not. A man who had talked of marriage but run away before it could happen. A man who probably never knew he had a daughter.

I never spoke about my father after that. Or fathers in general. Even when I wanted to, on the day that young Master Phil left.

I wanted to know what made fathers angry. I wanted to know why Master looked at me the way he did. But I never asked Mama, so she never knew what began that day.