The Housemaid's Daughter (15 page)

I want to report Ada’s disappearance to the police but Edward will not allow it. He says we must give it time.

He does not understand.

He does not realise what I have lost.

It is not only my family that I miss. My fingers miss the piano and my heart misses music. My eyes miss words and my head misses reading. All I have is the score for the
Raindrop
prelude but that contains only musical words to tell your hands how to play the tune. Even so, I touch it every day where it lies at the bottom of my cardboard suitcase for the feel of the paper under my fingers.

Yet if I had a book, I would need to find time to read it because we wash all day, and at night I am too tired and I would have to buy extra candles to have enough light to see the pages in Auntie’s dim hut. But I don’t want to lose my reading, so I ask the man who sells bread to pick up any thrown-away newspapers that he can find on his trips into town. This he does, and each day I fold a single page under a stone above the riverbank and whenever there is a free moment I go up and sit under one of the mimosas and prop the page on top of my growing child and read every sentence. Sometimes there are new words in the newspaper, and I struggle with them as I have no one who can help. Auntie’s language is not good and most of the women I work with cannot read.

My reading tells me a lot about what is happening across the Groot Vis. It is strange, because I realise that I am learning more about the town now than I ever knew when I lived in the middle of it. I learn about elections for the mayor – the man who wore the gold chain that I saw at the meeting in the town hall before the war – and I wonder if Master still goes to meetings and leaves Madam on her own at night. I read about the Reverend Calata from the township beyond Bree Street who begs the town council to continue giving soup once a day to hungry people in the townships and the council says no. I read about new rules that say you cannot go to certain places if you have a black skin like mine. It does not say what rules there are for coloured people with skins that are the same as my child will have.

‘What does it say, your newspaper?’ one of the women, Lindiwe, always asks when she sees me reading. Lindiwe is small and round but very strong in her smallness. She sometimes helps me lift heavy bundles of washing on to my back.

‘Today they talk about the price of wool,’ I say, pointing to the sentence I am on. ‘And if it’s a lot, they call it a boom.’

Lindiwe is young, like me, but she has lived in the township beyond Bree Street all her life. She never went to school but I think she is clever because, although she lives on her own, she knows a lot about people and why they do things. Lindiwe always makes sure to find out what other people think of a problem that she is thinking about at the same time. In this way, she is the opposite of Miss Rose.

‘Can you teach me to read like you, Ada?’ Lindiwe is saving her money to buy an iron and an ironing board so she can start a business offering perfectly ironed laundry. She whispers this to me one day, and I promise not to say a word because Lindiwe could put Auntie out of business.

‘I need to know this reading, Ada. I will pay you for the teaching of it when I am rich!’ She giggles and rubs her fingers to denote endless amounts of money. ‘I will be so slow at it that you will become a wealthy woman!’

And so we start.

Just like Madam taught me my letters, I will teach Lindiwe. Just like Master Phil told me their meanings, so I will tell Lindiwe.

‘
TomorrowIsailforAfrica.
’

We try to do one letter a day.

Slowly she begins to recognise letters and then the words that they form, just like I did. Then we start to make sentences out of the words. I show her how words can have different meanings even though they look the same. And then how those meanings change again when words gather themselves into groups.

Like me, Lindiwe is learning about a world that she thought might be there but until now could never be touched.

It makes me sad to think how much I owe Madam that I can never tell her.

Chapter 21

I still cannot understand why Ada left.

Edward says he has no idea, he says she worked so hard to get the house ready and then simply disappeared. He says: ‘That’s why you can never trust them, you can educate them and pay them well and take care of them, and they will just go off and leave without a word.’

I am not so sure. I think something must have happened. I feel I know Ada as well as Miriam did, perhaps even better, for Ada had surpassed Miriam in some respects. And yet, in others, Ada was less experienced than her mother. She’d hardly been in the outside world. I worry for her. What can have made her leave? Is she ill? How can I find her? Surely I must try. The new maid is unsatisfactory. I think I will get Mrs Pumile in for the ironing and manage the rest myself. There’s only Edward and me, after all. And I will look for Ada
…

‘
A
da! Ada!’

I jump. It is Auntie, from further down the riverbank where she is gossiping with a friend. ‘Go fetch the next lot!’

I squeeze out the sheet I am rinsing and get to my feet – the child makes this hard, he does not like to be interrupted at his rest – and find a bush to stretch it over. Then set off to Auntie’s hut to fetch the next bundle of washing. The bank is slippery with gravel and steep in places where the feet of washerwomen have worn a path between the rocks and the bush. The sun burns down directly from overhead and that means there is at least one more session of scrubbing that can be done today and be ready for folding by evening. I have started to measure the day in loads of washing.

But Auntie is fair to me. She sometimes finds a small amount of milk to give me to help strengthen the baby, like the doctor said it would. And she takes me with her on Sundays to the church by the
koppie
outside the township. The people there are welcoming to me because I am related to Auntie. Some of them are neighbours and I know their names. They ask no questions about the baby and the lack of a husband. Auntie, though, is still troubled by this lack. I think that is why she brings me with her. She prays that I will be saved despite my mislaid husband.

Even so, I like going there. Not to be saved – for I already believe in God – but for the space, and the lack of pushing people, nosing dogs, smoky fires and cooking maize meal. Also, it’s a part of the Karoo I’ve somehow always known, even if I could only see it from a distance. Beneath my feet is the hard thirsty land that I used to stare at from Master Phil’s toy box, as it stretched to the mountains where there is snow in winter. Now, though, it is the end of summer, and all about me the earth is clothed in waves of fragile grass with golden paintbrush tips. From where we stand in their yellow tickling midst, I can look straight up at the
koppie
and watch the sun wander across the brown stones and make them shine. I spot a single thorn tree at its base, like the bony tree that overhung the
kaia
at Cradock House. Wherever I go I seem to find something to remind me of Cradock House and those that I have loved there.

The minister wears a robe – better ironed than the minister in KwaZakhele – and stands on a large boulder and tells us that God the Father wants us to be brave and to show mercy to others even though they do not show mercy to us. He talks about skin difference and the word ‘apartheid’ that Mrs Pumile first told me. He says that we are being tested in a fire and that the time will come when we will be free to take our place alongside all other free people in the world. Several of the men shout out words that the congregation pick up and shout back. This church is more lively than Master and Madam’s church.

It is a war, he calls out at the end of his sermon. A war of liberation!

‘Amen!’ the congregation roars.

I will need to find a dictionary to look that up. I have heard this word ‘liberation’, but I don’t think it means the same as peace. I’ve had difficulty with the meaning of peace before, like when I asked Miss Rose why there was still fighting during peace. Perhaps liberation holds the same difficulties?

I look at the people around me. To my surprise, they are smiling and clapping. I feel a clutch at my stomach that is not the child. They surely cannot want a war like the one I remember. A war with bombs and fires that made Master wring his hands and Madam weep? A war of ghosts that took young men and wounded them like young Master Phil was wounded? Black people were not trusted enough in the matter of guns to fight in that war. They did not pay its price. They do not know the pain of it. If they did, they would not smile and clap. But if such a war does come, I tell myself as the baby turns within me and I rub my stomach to make him rest, I must be prepared. I must harden my heart, I must choose sides carefully. I must be prepared for the enemy-in-waiting.

The people chant and clap and Auntie sways against me and closes her eyes and lifts her arms. The women in their blue and white dresses send their swooping hymns up past the
koppie
and towards the horizon. I feel the same trembling that I used to from the organ in Madam and Master’s church. For the moment, there is no war, there are no enemies-in-waiting. The sun is warm and the air shakes with our voices for I, too, join the singing and it lifts me and the child up and lets us fly away.

* * *

It is raining, the first rain for many months. The Groot Vis has come alive. Brown water races beneath the iron bridge, carrying trees and animals and perhaps people, too, that have been caught in its path. The rocks where we scrub are hidden beneath foamy waves. The drifts are closed. Children stand on the bridge and jump up and down and throw sticks into the water and watch them carried off in the torrent and they scream at the shaking of the bridge from the force of the water. The sky pours, the township streets become rivers too, and carry their own load of rubbish and lick at the opening of Auntie’s hut. There will be no washing today. I hold a towel over my head and tell Auntie I am going to see Lindiwe.

The streets are almost empty, but on high ground outside each hut sit buckets and tins and calabashes normally used for transporting water or keeping beer or sour milk – anything to catch the spare rain and avoid a trip to the communal tap. Auntie put out hers overnight.

The school is quiet. I am relieved. I hurry across the bare playground, my feet squelching in the hard earth that has now turned to mud. No one comes to send me away. I knock on the door but there is no reply. I knock again, then push open the door and go inside and shake out my towel and wipe my feet on the linoleum floor. I have never been inside a school before. A long passage stretches ahead of me, with doors on each side. It is dark but I can make out pictures taped to the walls and there are also rough drawings scrawled on the walls and over some of the pictures. Each door has a small window at head height and I look inside but all the classrooms are empty. At the end of the passage there is a door with no window and I knock.

‘Yes?’ comes from inside. I push open the door.

‘School is closed,’ a black man says, looking up, frowning, from a laden desk. ‘You must come back tomorrow.’ The man is about Master’s age, but his hair is a dark fuzz and he wears a shirt that is grey with washing. The points of his collar curl.

‘I am sorry to disturb you, sir, but I am not a student,’ I say, clutching my towel. He waits. I take a breath and battle to remember the sentences I have been practising. I think the baby is stealing some of my memory because I don’t remember as well as I used to. ‘I play the piano. I know about music. I am looking for a job, sir.’

He looks me over, his gaze stopping on my swollen stomach before returning to my face.

‘I met a blind woman and she said that you had a piano but no one to play it, no one to teach the children about music.’ My words come out in a rush, and they are not the words that I practised.

‘Where did you study?’ the man asks.

‘I was taught by my Madam. I can play for you, sir, you will see I speak the truth.’

He gives a little smile. ‘Where have you been teaching?’

‘This is my first time to be a teacher.’

He raises his eyebrows and gets up and comes round the desk. He is tall, taller than Madam or Master or young Master Phil. ‘You will have to prove yourself…’

‘Take me to your piano, sir, and I will prove myself.’

My heart is pounding and this man must surely see it in my neck and in my throbbing temples. He must also think I am very bold. But this is my chance. This is my chance to earn a living doing something I love. This is my chance to break free. Free from the longing for Cradock House and its people, perhaps even free from the poverty I find myself in with Auntie. I once had a chance – a different sort of chance – with Jacob Mfengu from the butcher’s, but it came to nothing. This chance, this time, I must not fail.

‘We will see,’ he says, leading the way out of the door and striding quickly down the passage.

He goes through a door that leads to a second passage and then through another door and we are suddenly in a hall, not as big as the town hall on Market Square, but still bigger than any other room I have seen on this side of the river. There is a row of windows high up on one of the walls, and a small raised stage at one end. It is dark. It is also hot from the closed windows, and there is a smell that comes from when a place needs to be aired. As my eyes start to see better, I see red curtains drooping from rails on each side of the stage. They are missing curtain rings and some of their bottoms drag on the floor and some of their hems are undone.

‘There is the piano,’ he says, pointing through the gloom towards a brown upright pushed against the side wall.

I walk over to it, the child for once still within me, and open the lid. My hands come away covered in dust, and I wipe them on my towel. I look down at the piano for a moment, remembering Madam’s beautiful Zimmerman, the creaminess of its ivory keys, the satin shine of its wood. I touch a key. It feels spongy and gives off a flat tone. I pull out the stool and sit down. It wobbles on uneven legs.