The Housemaid's Daughter by Barbara Mutch Read Free Book Online

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.

Chapter 9

    W hen I was fifteen I learnt that the war was over and that peace had arrived. We had last had peace