The Housemaid's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

mine as she helped me, I began to picture the world like she did, although most times I had never seen the things she talked about.
    ‘A stream, the cry of seagulls, the curl and suck of the sea make a pattern over and over, one inside the other. Like the counterpoint we see in Bach…’ She floated a series of repeating melodies that wove around each other, her hands rippling over the keys.
    ‘What did the stream across the sea sound like on its own?’
    ‘Ah, if you could only hear it, Ada.’ She smiled fondly, as if the sound was echoing in her ear at that very moment. ‘Over Bannock cliffs and into the cove, it was Grieg…’ Her fingers danced across the opening chords of the piano concerto.
    I nodded. Her hands stilled and she glanced away out of the window in the direction of the Groot Vis, brown and sluggish in the heat.
    ‘A minor,’ she turned back to the piano, ‘falling into E – remember?’
    And I would feel the tune rise in my hands and join her in the tumbling cascade down the piano.
    * * *
    A strange thing happened just after the start of the war. The sun disappeared one day. The koppies changed from brown to purple, and the birds in the garden stopped singing – even our bokmakieries. A man called General Smuts that I had heard people talking about, a man who had warned about Jerry controlling the sea route, visited Cradock to look at this daytime darkness. Crowds gathered outside the town hall on Market Square to hear him speak. Red and blue streamers flew across the front of the buildings to welcome him, and he was cheered all the way down Church Street as the skies darkened.
    ‘It’s an eclipse, Ada,’ Madam said, on her way out to listen to him, ‘nothing to be afraid of.’
    She said it was the moon that was hiding the sun from us, and that it happened from time to time. Miss Rose said everyone knew what eclipses were. Master Phil was away marching so I couldn’t ask him what he thought. Mama went to lie down in our kaia, so I crept upstairs and tried to see Market Square from the toy box as the light faded across the distant Karoo. Clapping reached me through the open windows. Perhaps General Smuts would call upon his powers to bring back the sun. I was sure it was the war that was to blame, just like it was to blame for the shortages we had in the kitchen. What else would cause the moon to cover the sun after all the time that I had known it to stay in the sky without trouble?
    So there was Cradock House in the middle of the dry, sometimes dark, Karoo, and there was Mama and Madam and Master and Miss Rose here, and young Master Phil going away to war. There were the sinister hadeda birds that flapped and honked overhead every evening against a sky streaked with orange and pink. There was Mrs Pumile next door complaining at the extra work because of the war.
    And now, instead of the occasional rain song on the kaia roof under the bony thorn tree, there was Mozart and Chopin and Beethoven every day – more tunes waiting inside the piano than I would ever be able to play. And more world beyond Cradock House than I had ever imagined. There was war, certainly, but there was also enough music to make you forget it.
    * * *
    Miriam and Ada are becoming my family, too.
    No one warned me of this. They rather talked of heat, biting insects, restless natives.The possibility of finding companionship with my black housekeeper and her child was not even a remote consideration.
    I suspect Edward finds my attitude disturbing. But he can have no complaints about my devotion to my own two. Phil and Rosemary have my total attention, and where Rosemary is concerned, I take particular care to encourage her in her various pursuits. I am sure we shall find something that will capture her interest.

Chapter 6

    Y oung men like Master Phil appeared on the streets of Cradock in smart uniforms and caps with badges. When they marched, their boots beat time against the brown earth like the staccato notes I learnt