The Housemaid's Daughter (26 page)

For white people, the dividing power of skin is clearly greater than the closest ties of blood.

Chapter 34

Briefly:

Ada has returned with Dawn. The first meeting with Edward was strained but we managed.

The child is tremendously appealing, and having Ada back is, for me, the return of a beloved daughter.

Will the law leave us alone? And what of our friends?

I must take each day as it comes.

I cannot write of this to Ireland.

‘
A
da! Ada!’ Mrs Pumile waved a hand through the hedge as I stepped out of the
kaia
that first morning after a sound night’s sleep for both Dawn and me. A soft bed, no unnerving shouts from nearby huts, no trek to fetch water at first light with Dawn heavy on my back.

‘Where you been? Your Madam has been so worried!’

‘I have been away,’ I began.

‘Mama?’ Dawn crawled down off the step in front of the
kaia
and ran to the hedge to see where the talking was coming from.

I waited. For once Mrs Pumile could find no further words. I could see her eyes bulging through the hedge, I could see her mouth wide open. I could see her head trying to get around what was before her eyes. I could see her throat swallow and her tongue run round the edge of her lips.

‘Is it,’ she pointed towards the house, ‘is it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Did you?’

‘I am a teacher, now, Mrs Pumile. In the township.’

She stared at Dawn, seeing the skin pale as tea and the eyes blue as early-morning Karoo sky.

‘Not Ndwe,’ called Dawn, pointing through the hedge.

‘No,’ I said, scooping her up in my arms. ‘This is Mrs Pumile.’

‘Umile,’ said Dawn, with a smile that showed two teeth.

As with every friend faced with the evidence of my shame, Mrs Pumile swung for several moments between condemnation and sympathy.

‘Your Madam asked you back?’ This I could see was causing her great difficulty. That a white Madam could be forgiving enough to welcome back the black person with whom her husband had sinned …

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She wished to give Dawn a good future.’

‘Your Madam,’ observed Mrs Pumile after a pause, ‘could teach many Madams how to be. Welcome back, Ada,’ she thrust her hand further through the hedge to grasp mine, ‘but do not parade the child about!’ She leant forward and hissed, ‘This apartheid never leaves us alone. Keep the child out of sight, away from visitors.’

A call came from her kitchen. Mrs Pumile straightened her
doek
and yelled over her shoulder, ‘Just coming, Ma’am.’ She turned back to me and wagged a finger, ‘Keep her out of sight, Ada, out of sight.’

But it was not possible to keep Dawn out of sight. Each day I walked down Church Street and across the Groot Vis to teach at school. Each day Dawn came with me, either on my hip or skipping alongside me. Yet the reaction that I feared most – arrest for my sin of lying with a white man and bearing him a child – did not happen. Policemen lounging outside their station near Market Square took no particular notice of the discrepancy in skin between my daughter and me. And whereas Dawn’s skin caused much talk and insults on the township streets, in white Cradock very little was said. People noticed but looked away quickly. I realised it was a part of a pattern I knew well: they didn’t want to see Dawn’s skin. If they didn’t see it, then it wasn’t really there. Like if they looked away from Master Phil and me walking side by side and stopping beneath the tree for him to tell me that he loved me, then it didn’t really happen.

The shopkeepers on Church Street whose signs I had read, the post office where I had posted Madam’s letters for so many years, the butcher where I collected the family’s meat – and where I still looked for Jacob Mfengu – all these saw us and turned their gaze away. They never responded when Dawn smiled and waved at them. It was as if she didn’t exist. For her part, Dawn loved to enchant strangers and must have wondered, in her baby way, why she was ignored. For Dawn had no idea that she didn’t belong. She had no idea that she fell in between, like the brown water of the Groot Vis divided black from white. Dawn, as a child, was happily colour-blind.

Master’s ignoring of Dawn within the walls of Cradock House was equally fixed. I never expected him to embrace her, but I hoped that there might be a softening, or the odd kindness. But there was not. Dawn was a constant reminder of his failure, the living expression of his disgust. An inside wound that would eat away at him, like the memories of war and ghosts had eaten away at young Master Phil until there was nothing left of him. I wonder if Master recognised this wound in himself. I wonder if he knew its hunger.

I could see this injury in Master, but he kept it well hidden from Madam. Most evenings she sat upright in her chair opposite him and never saw it in his face or heard it in what he said, for their talk was of ordinary things. From the crack in the door I overheard them discussing Dawn from time to time, and Master did so with detachment, as if it was young Master Phil’s ability on the cricket field they were talking about, or Miss Rose’s reluctance over piano lessons, or my schooling from many years before that might lead to trouble later on. Madam managed to respond to his control with a clamp on her own feelings. She did not ever weep, she did not ever accuse, she did not look out of the window for Ireland. The time for tears and accusations had gone. What was left between them was an emptiness. An emptiness worse than any that had gone before. An emptiness that I believe would have struck even if I’d remained in the township, and Dawn had never been before Master’s eyes each day – for a betrayal such as his can never be undone.

And afterwards Master would pick up his newspaper, and Madam would go to the piano and play safe nocturnes; quiet, deliberate pieces that stole through the house but didn’t echo in your mind the next day. Instead, matters beyond Cradock House occupied our heads, though we never spoke of them out loud.

Chapter 35

A
partheid announced itself in heavy black letters like those used during the earlier war. It filled the
Midland News,
and dominated the posters outside the newspaper office. For me, it spoke in the words of brave Rev. Calata fighting for his people, and the minister under the
koppie
calling for liberation, and the feel of a bicycle spoke under my shaking fingers. For Master it spoke in the face of a coloured child, and in the fact of breaking a law and ending up on the wrong side of a war.

Mrs Pumile was right. This apartheid would never leave us alone. We were caught up in it, all of us, whether we wished to be or not. Failures committed in the past could now rear up again, at far greater cost. Master’s inside wound was not just about disgust; it was also about fear.

* * *

‘You are lucky, Mary,’ observed Dina, leaning over the piano as I finished the morning march, ‘to find someone to give you lodging and also let you teach.’

‘Yes,’ I said, reaching for an answer that I had prepared. ‘This Madam knew my first Madam.’

There was no choice but to lie once more. One day Dawn, too, would see through such lies. One day I would have to tell her. I laid a hand on her head as she played at my feet with a toy clown of young Master Phil’s that Mrs Cath – as I now called her – had given Dawn. ‘This Madam doesn’t need much housekeeping from me.’

Dina raised an eyebrow and straightened up. ‘You seem to find the only generous whites in the world,’ she remarked.

‘Jam?’ said Dawn, grabbing on to Dina’s skirt. ‘Deen got jam?’

‘Not today, monkey.’ Dina laughed, but with an edge. ‘Ask your new Madam!’

Dina did not intend to be mean or jealous. She was simply suspicious, suspicious that I had fallen upon such good fortune. A
kaia
of my own, a Madam that supported Dawn and me and asked for very little work in return, an escape from the teeming township that Dina herself would secretly have prized, for all her contempt of Madams and servants and the grovelling she believed was required between them.

Mr Dumise, too, was suspicious.

‘You are well, Mary?’ he stopped me in the corridor one day, looking over the new skirt and blouse that Mrs Cath had laid on my bed in the
kaia
one day. The skirt was dark blue and the blouse was white – she had bought two – and they were the first truly grown-up clothes I had ever had, apart from the clothes for Master Phil’s funeral. Even Miss Rose might have been prepared to wear such clothes.

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied. ‘I have been lucky as well.’

He nodded and glanced down the passage as if checking to see it was empty. ‘You are not in further trouble?’

I stared at him for a moment, wondering whether to explain everything, the connection to Mrs Cath, the name of Mary instead of Ada. Yet how much did a name matter? It was only a small deception compared to what I had already done in hiding the colour of Dawn until she was born.

‘I am not in trouble, sir. Mrs Harrington has given me shelter.’

He looked at me, and I could tell he was reviewing all the facts that he knew about me: my arrival at school while expecting, my explanation of who taught me music, the subsequent colour of Dawn, the lack of a husband. To that he added the shock of Mrs Cath when she saw me in the hall, followed after a while by the improvement in my circumstances and dress. Everything pointed towards her family being not only my lifelong employers but also the home of Dawn’s father.

‘Shelter?’ he repeated back to me.

Mr Dumise was a good man. He wanted to make sure I had not been forced into a relationship with Dawn’s father once again. He wanted to make sure that the clothes and the
kaia
were not a bribe.

‘You are kind, sir,’ I said, holding my head up and feeling a hotness in my face, ‘but there is no longer anything for me to fear.’

‘Then take your luck, Mary,’ he said quietly, ‘and hold on to it. Such advantage comes rarely.’

Lindiwe said I should give no explanation to the staff about my change of circumstances.

‘Why do they need to know?’ she asked, shrugging. ‘They turned away from you over Dawn, they have no right to say what is right or wrong.’

Jake, coming upon me suddenly on the iron bridge over the Groot Vis one day, surprisingly gave no opinion of my move. Perhaps he had been warned by Lindiwe not to. I was relieved, I had worried he might disapprove of my new life. I didn’t want to lose Jake. But he did say that going back to live at Cradock House was one way of getting something he called ‘compensation’ for what had happened.

Later, I looked this up in the dictionary and found it meant payment for a loss or an injury. If this was so, then the return to Cradock House was all the payment I needed, although nothing can ever compensate Dawn for a father who does not see her and a skin that is neither black nor white.

‘But there are risks,’ Jake said, lifting Dawn on to his shoulders where she squealed with delight.

‘Higher, higher!’ she insisted, grabbing his hair. ‘Dawn can reach the sky?’

Passers-by hissed at us. A man spat on the ground as he hurried past.

‘I know about the laws,’ I said to Jake, relieved that I could talk to someone instead of hiding behind my tangle of lies. ‘I could go to jail. Master could go to jail. But Mrs Cath said if we were discreet that wouldn’t happen.’

I had already thought of the possibility of imprisonment. It was something I considered before leaving the township. If I was ever arrested, then the best place for Dawn would indeed be with Mrs Cath at Cradock House, where she would be taken care of.

He touched my arm. ‘More chance of him than you.’

I stopped. He stopped as well.

‘Look, Mama! Look how high I am!’ Dawn bounced on his shoulders, calling and waving to people all about us who ignored her. Beneath our feet the Groot Vis trickled in the summer heat and the washerwomen keened a low accompaniment.

‘But why?’ I asked. Surely the risk would be equal or perhaps even greater for me? The law might assume I had tricked Master into lying with me.

‘Ada, dear Ada,’ Jake murmured, ‘the white man’s sin is greater because it is more public. The white man falls further than the black woman.’ He grimaced. ‘The newspapers make more of his fall.’

I had not thought of it like that. I thought that if the law struck, it did so evenly. Both Master and I would be punished. Mrs Cath would escape. It did not occur to me that Master might be the only one to suffer. The compensation that Jake spoke of and that I had accepted could turn round and send Master to jail and leave me untouched.

Had Mrs Cath truly understood that when she offered me a home again?

* * *

The past is never enough if you are searching for a future. I now needed to graft the best of the township – my lively students, the music I taught them, Lindiwe and my few friends – on to the refuge that was Cradock House. And it was music that bridged the two parts of my life, as it has always done. The singing and dancing of my wild students, and the ‘Township Bach’ that enveloped me each time I crossed the Groot Vis, nudged alongside classical pieces that challenged my fingers and wandered around in my head for days afterwards as if rejoicing in their own homecoming. I began to shift the boundaries, to play jive at home, and more Debussy – despite the piano’s defects – at school. Mrs Cath put her head round the door and smiled at me with her eyes and laughed at Dawn who clapped her hands and boogied in time with the beat.

Dawn’s love of music was not expressed through any instrument – she showed no interest in the piano – but through her pliable body and dancing feet. The township became her stage. Whilst I returned to Cradock House each day with gratitude, my child looked back over her shoulder at what she was leaving behind. However much she enjoyed her new home, Dawn danced to the beat of ‘Township Bach’ as if it was her essence, rather than simply half of her inheritance. But there can be no regrets, as Mrs Cath often says to her book. God’s plan for me was to keep Dawn safe until the evils of apartheid were swept away. I did what I thought was right. I have learnt that the only thing to be gained from past wrongs is the wisdom not to travel the same route again.