Free The Housemaid's Daughter by Barbara Mutch Page B

the room. It would not do to risk more disapproval from Master, or to ask about ghosts right now. Master Phil needed to cry. And Madam needed to cry with him. Maybe they both needed the Master there as well. But grown men like the Master don’t cry. They only stand at the door and watch. My mother Miriam says men have no patience with tears.
    And yet for all Madam’s tears, and Master’s impatience, and the unsettling mention of ghosts, I found myself filled with hope. The doctor’s instruments had told Master Phil that he was cured, and so the doctor had told young Master Phil to get up. I was sure he would do so. And when he did, the world at peace would welcome him back while the memories of war and the cruel Sahara would fade. His fallen comrades would find their own place and would surely leave him to rest at night. And then he could find a job – perhaps in the Master’s office writing letters? Or perhaps in the bank, where I had still not been, on account of Mama keeping her money under the bed in a shoebox.
    This would be the start of Master Phil’s full recovery. I was sure of it. So I ran downstairs and hugged my mother in the kitchen over the lamb stew and told her that Master Phil would soon be up and about. And then I played a quick scherzo to rejoice in what would surely be.
    * * *
    The day after the doctor’s visit, I got out young Master Phil’s clothes from peacetime and laid them on the chair. They were a little big for him but still good quality on account of having no one to wear them for so long.
    ‘It’s a good day, sir,’ I said, drawing the curtains back slightly, ‘not too sunny for your eyes.’
    And he dressed himself and felt his way downstairs – holding on to the banister, so uncertain compared to the headlong rush of boyhood – and stood swaying in the kitchen as Mama clapped her hands and Madam smiled with tears in her eyes to see him up and about.
    At first he walked around the garden, hesitant, as if he’d never seen such a place before. He seemed surprised at the beetles rasping in the hedge and the bokmakieries calling to each other from one end to the other. It was as if the desert had swept away all memory of plants in bloom and grass underfoot, and all memory of sound save for the whine of bullets.
    ‘Was it always like this, Ada?’ he asked, his hand sometimes touching my arm for balance, his tall frame stooped as if to protect the inside wound. ‘This beautiful?’
    ‘Yes, sir. Even in the drought.’
    He smiled then, and reached out to pick a leaf and stroke its velvet underside.
    ‘We could walk into town, sir,’ I said, keen to cement his progress. ‘There’s no dust now the roads are tarred.’
    Adderley Street was crowded on the day Master Phil went on his first outing. If the garden had been a surprise for him, then the town was surely even more so. Much had changed since he left for the war. Motor cars now outnumbered horse carts and, as they edged along, they blared their horns and revved their engines and made exploding sounds that startled passers-by.
    ‘Ada!’ Master Phil gasped, clutching at his ears, ‘No, no—’
    ‘Come, sir, we’ll go somewhere quiet,’ I said hurriedly, taking his arm because his legs did not seem to work that well any more. ‘We can look at the bridge – at the Groot Vis.’
    We took a back road towards the iron bridge and I didn’t talk in order to give his ears a rest. It was the exploding cars, I realised; the sound of war. But if he couldn’t face the world and its noise again, how would he ever find its beauty? If he kept his curtains closed, how could he see the Karoo shimmer in the midday heat? Or spot the orange aloes glowing like candles against the scrub?
    He kept his arm in mine as we walked further, our footsteps matching. From a hidden back garden came the shouts of children playing. Purple bougainvillea tumbled over a fence by the garden gate. I picked a flower and gave it to him. He examined its papery