The Housemaid's Daughter (6 page)

Chapter 9

W
hen I was fifteen I learnt that the war was over and that peace had arrived. We had last had peace before the war – I remember it written on some of the posters outside the newspaper office when I went to post Madam’s letters to Ireland. But it hadn’t lasted long. Before there was any time to get used to it, war had arrived.

‘Is there always peace when there is no war?’ I asked Miss Rose one day while I was folding away her clean blouses.

She looked up from the bed where she was arranging a collection of scarves – bright, thin, slippery pieces of material, softer than anything Mama and I washed in the laundry downstairs.

‘Don’t be stupid, Ada,’ she snapped. ‘Of course there is. What else would there be?’ She began to move the scarves about, holding them up against a knitted jumper or a skirt, or winding them round her neck while she watched herself in the mirror.

‘But there is still killing,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard the Master say so.’

‘There’s always killing somewhere or other, it doesn’t bother me, so I don’t see why it should bother you.’ She held up a light blue cardigan. ‘I think I prefer the blue-and-white spot rather than the plain next to this.’

‘But I want to understand the difference between peace and war,’ I said. This seemed very important. War had changed Cradock House; it had left us short of sugar and cake tins and laughter and young Master Phil. I wanted to be prepared for the next time, for the enemy-in-waiting. But Miss Rose was too far away in her own world, and she did not hear me.

Before Master Phil arrived home, my mother and the Madam talked in the kitchen with the door closed. I polished the dining-room table and strained to hear what they were saying but the door was too thick. Miss Rose returned from buying a new dress in town at Anstey’s Fashions.

‘Look, Ada!’ She spun around in it, yellow hair flying about her face. The dress was blue like the sky through the kaffirboom leaves and had a white collar with blue embroidery. It was the most beautiful dress I had ever seen.

I won’t need the fur muff or my one good silk hat, not in Cradock. Edward says the ladies wear practical clothes. And Mother, who knows about foreign parts from her brother Timothy in India, says the most important thing is to protect my complexion. Although what Uncle Tim actually wrote to say was: never dispute with the natives, it shows weakness!

So – sadly, for I love the silk even though it’s ancient – I shall leave it and the muff behind and take three plain bonnets and a spare parasol. After all, Mother says – a little harshly, I thought – South Africa isn’t India.

I didn’t know what silk was or where India was. But Miss Rose’s dress was surely as beautiful as any sort of hat.

‘Madam and Mama have been talking in the kitchen,’ I said to Miss Rose while she twirled about, blue skirt flying, ‘and they’re not cooking.’

‘Silly Ada! Why can’t they talk? This is one of the dresses I’ve got for Jo’burg. They said at the store all the girls will be wearing them now the war’s over!’

‘I think it’s about Master Phil.’

‘Have you ironed my petticoats yet? Please, Ada.’ She leant forward and put on her widest smile. ‘I’ll buy you peppermint creams!’

‘Now then, Rosemary.’ Master appeared suddenly from the study. ‘Ada can’t run after you all day. It’s high time you did some of your own ironing.’

‘Mean Daddy,’ Miss Rose said, linking her arm in his. ‘Do you like my new frock?’

Master gave a grudging smile and fiddled with the watch on a chain in his waistcoat. He couldn’t resist Miss Rose. Not many people could, especially men.

‘When is Master Phil coming back, sir?’ I ventured.

I didn’t often speak directly to the Master. And the only time he looked directly at me was at the station when young Master Phil left. There was always something fierce about Master’s face – the greying eyebrows above pale eyes, the silence in him, the stern lips that only ever softened for the Madam and Miss Rose, or when I played the piano and he didn’t know I could see him out of the corner of my eye.

He turned away from Miss Rose, now admiring herself in the hall mirror I’d cleaned that morning, and looked down at me. There was still fierceness, but also something else, something strange that I hadn’t seen before in Master’s face. It was, I realised suddenly, the look of my young Master in the garden before the war, when he’d wondered if he would be brave enough to fight. Yet what nervousness could Master possibly feel on the return of his beloved son?

‘Soon, Ada,’ he said quietly and touched my shoulder. Master had never touched me before. Perhaps he was distracted by Miss Rose. ‘Soon.’

* * *

Master Phil arrived the next day. They carried him up to his room on the top floor. All I saw of him was his face above a blanket and the face was different from the face he’d taken to the war with him. Madam told me that Master Phil was very tired and needed to sleep a lot. I could understand that. After all, Mr Churchill had required very great actions and bravery from all of his soldiers. There had been a church service at St Peter’s for the families of Cradock boys who never came back. Madam and Master went along and said prayers to God to thank Him for sparing Master Phil and bringing him home. The other boys had mostly died and been buried in the desert ‘up north’ or in another country called Italy, where Mendelssohn went to find a new symphony in a land that was said to be almost as hot as our Karoo.

‘But why,’ I asked my mother in our room after a week had gone by and Master Phil still slept, ‘why are some of the other living soldiers walking around town? Didn’t they fight as hard as Master Phil?’

My mother looked up from her crocheting. She crocheted tea cosies and bed socks for the church. They always were short of tea cosies and bed socks.

‘Master Phil is wounded, Ada,’ she said and laid the work aside.

‘Then why can’t I help you nurse him, Mama?’

My mother Miriam smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile. ‘Some of Master Phil’s wounds are inside, Ada.’

‘Under the bandages?’

‘Further inside than that. These are wounds that don’t have blood.’

I stared at her. She picked up her crocheting. The owl hooted outside in the kaffirboom. I wondered if Master Phil could still hear owls, or if the inside wounds had taken sound away from him as well.

* * *

Miss Rosemary left for Johannesburg soon after Master Phil returned. I don’t know why she went, although she seemed very happy to be going. She said that the future would be better in Jo’burg. I remember reading about the future in Madam’s book at about the time she was to leave Ireland for Cradock. It was clearly something that rich people needed in their lives. I wished I could find people who had already found the future, and then I could ask them what was so special about it.

‘Wish me luck!’ Miss Rose called from the window of the car taking her to the station. There were more cars and fewer horse carts these days since the war. Miss Rose looked very happy, waving her lace handkerchief from the car. She was wearing the new blue dress from Anstey’s and red lipstick from Austen’s the chemist. She hadn’t wanted Madam and Master to go to the station to see her off – ‘Too much fuss,’ she laughed gaily. Perhaps she wanted to spare Madam and Master the reminder of her brother leaving for war? But I don’t think so. Miss Rose was not that thoughtful. I think she just wanted to be away with as little delay as possible.

Master stared down at his shoes that I’d polished that morning, then up at Miss Rose in the car and lifted a hand to shade his eyes from the sun. The breeze fluttered Madam’s cream skirt against her legs. Upstairs in his room, Master Phil slept.

‘Take care, darling! Write every week!’ Madam blew kisses and felt for the brooch at her throat.

* * *

‘
Cathleen Moore for Union Castle Steamship
Walmer Castle,
Southampton’ – it says on the label on my trunk. Train from here, boat to England, train again to Southampton and then the
Walmer Castle
. I’ve never been further than Bannock village.

‘Well, Ada,’ Madam said, blowing her nose as we closed the garden gate behind us and went back up the path to the house, ‘you’re the daughter of the house now.’

‘Then let me help you with Master Phil,’ I said, watching the Master’s straight back climb the step up to the
stoep
and go inside, ‘like a daughter should.’ Madam stopped on the path. She bent down and nipped the dead head off a rose. Afterwards, when I told Mama what I’d said, she was angry with me. But she knew and I knew – and Madam herself knew – that Miss Rose had never been helpful, never been the sort of daughter Madam needed.

‘Perhaps you can, Ada,’ Madam said, straightening up. Her eyes looked sore, like when you’ve been standing with your face into the wind and there’s snow on the mountains. I had still not seen that snow – it lived high up, about two hours away across the Karoo. It sent hard white frosts that fell in the night, and crunched under my bare feet at sunrise when I fetched the milk.

And so I began to take care of Master Phil.

* * *

‘Remember that night I got sick, Ada?’ Master Phil turned his thin face towards me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’d eaten too many apricots from the garden.’

He smiled a little and shifted in the bed. His arms weren’t brown and strong like I remembered, and long bones pressed against the skin like the washing line under a wet sheet. When he walked to the bathroom, his steps were the steps of an old man. When he bent to get back into bed, the knobs of his spine showed through his pyjama top.

‘Do you want to sit up, Master Phil? Shall I open the curtains? It’s a lovely day, you could watch the clouds.’

‘No, no.’ He subsided on the pillow. ‘The light hurts my eyes.’

‘That old apricot still makes fruit,’ I said, after a while. ‘Did you see apricot trees in the war?’

Master Phil stared at me, his eyes pale as the lightest sky, like that time in the garden when he said he might be afraid. Then he began to cry, his shoulders hunching under the flannel pyjamas that Mama and I had to wash every day on account of his sweating in the night.

‘Sorry, sir,’ I said, trying not to cry myself. ‘Sorry for disturbing you.’

He didn’t turn away when he cried, like he used to do as a boy when he’d fallen and hurt himself. Now he just lay there in bed facing me, the tears going down his cheeks, his shoulders shaking. He didn’t make much noise either. Maybe soldiers learn to cry quietly in a war.

I didn’t know what to do so I took his hand. He placed his other hand on top of it.

‘Play for me, Ada,’ he muttered. ‘Play something gay.’

And so I did. I left the door open and went downstairs and played something cheerful and gay to cover his crying. Maybe a waltz, like Madam used to play when there was a dinner party before the war. Or a polonaise with its lively march up and down the keyboard. And Madam would come in and say thank you with her eyes. And Master would open the door to the study and listen as well.

I learnt about ‘Up North’. This was where Mr Churchill had sent Master Phil in the war. I wanted to learn about it, I wanted to understand what sort of place could have wounded Master Phil so deeply. Perhaps then I would understand about war.

But I also wanted to know about it because it was a new place for me. Was this wrong? Was it wrong to have such thirst for new places even though they had caused such pain?

All I knew was Cradock. All I could see from Master Phil’s toy box was the Karoo. What, I would ask myself as I peered over the veld, what lay beyond the brown
koppies
and the distant mountains with their imagined snow? Books and music could only take you so far. Words, drawn from real life, took you further. Madam’s words had taken me to Ireland and a blue stream that tumbled over cliffs to the sound of Grieg …

At first I asked him nothing. I cared for him quietly, and cut his once-bright hair, and shaved his thin face when he was too weary to do so, and held his hand while he fell asleep, and waited in the chair across from him so he wouldn’t be alone when he woke.

Then he began to talk about it. And so I discovered the desert from Master Phil, a desert that made our Karoo with its struggling bush seem rich by comparison. The Sahara he spoke of was a place where life had given up trying. Not even a bony thorn tree found the will to grow. Brown sand dunes, bare of plants or animals, smothered the land and rose higher than our
koppies.
Yet what the dunes lacked in inhabitants they made up for in movement of their own. They moved, Master Phil told me, his face for once keen. Whole dunes moved!

‘But how?’ I gasped, peering at him through the gloom of the dark bedroom, dark on account of the sun hurting his eyes.

‘Why, it’s the wind, Ada,’ he said patiently, like his patience had once explained words with strange meanings, or numbers I’d not yet understood. ‘Wind shears the top of them, you see, or shifts them sideways. Into a new place, a new shape.’

He grimaced a little, and I wondered whether the inside wounds became sore if he spoke too much. It would be a pity if the first time he’d shown some spirit was to be the cause of more pain. After the tears over the apricot trees, I’d been careful not to ask too many questions. I waited for him to tell me things while we sat together in the fading afternoons, or over the midmorning cup of tea I brought him during my daily chores. Sometimes he talked, like today, sometimes he stayed quiet for days at a time. In this respect, Master Phil was very changed for me. Gone was the laughter, the keenness, the energy he’d had as a young man, even the fear he’d been able to confess before he went away. What was left was as empty and as dry as the place he described.

‘There’s a strange beauty,’ he once said of the desert, when I risked a further question. ‘But it’s cruel, Ada.’ He stared down at his fingers in surprise as they fidgeted on the bedspread, almost as if their movement was happening outside his control, like the sands of the desert had no control over where the wind sent them.

‘What’s beautiful about it?’