She had grown up in Worcester: her parents were both dead and of the six daughters the eldest was married, while the youngest lived with her to help with the children; two lived in town and worked as seamstresses, and the remaining two became governesses, and that was how Miss Le Roux came to us in her dusty black dress, with her travelling-case and her trunk, recommended to Father by old Dominee himself, as she often stated emphatically, as if it gave her special standing. She could not have been much older than twenty, a stout, giggling young woman in a black mourning frock, with her effusiveness and excitability and her hiccuping laugh, with her nerves and swoons and sudden tears, her eau de cologne and her vial of smelling salts.
She returned to the Roggeveld with us and the big bed in my room was given to her, while I shared the narrow cot in the corner with Maans; she unpacked her things and hung her black dresses, her black caps and her black cape on the nails in the wall. We spent all day together, she and I, and at night in the dark I listened to her regular breathing in the big bed. She brought along writing paper and quill pens and a knife to sharpen the points and readers in Dutch and English: I knew how to read and write after a fashion, but she made me practise anew and taught me to spell, she read me poems and made me recite them, I learned arithmetic and she told me Bible stories — it was probably all she knew, but it was more than most people in our parts did in those days. I was a quick learner, she said in generous moments, and assured Father that I was a clever girl. Only with sewing and other needlecraft she had no success, in spite of her patience and perseverance, for I was an awkward child and no matter how often she made me unpick the uneven stitches and start over, it only resulted in the cloth becoming even more crumpled. I learned what she could teach me and listened to the lengthy accounts about her sisters and the house where she grew up, and at night I listened to her regular breathing in the dark, but she remained a stranger whose presence I endured silently as she hovered over me, gushing and breathless.
Of course she must have been lonely. Had anyone warned her of the remoteness of the Roggeveld; could she have guessed how isolated our lives were? But even if she had been warned, what alternative did she have? Her parents were dead and somehow she had to make a living, and she was probably only too grateful for the old Dominee’s recommendation. Father was kind, as he was to everyone, but it was Mother who determined the course of events in the house, and to Mother Miss Le Roux was a hireling who had to remain aware of her inferior station and her dependency. Could this young woman’s education have unsettled her, and was that why she treated her so dismissively? Who will ever know what went on in Mother’s thoughts? Mother reacted to the long stories, the nerves and the fainting spells with a disdainful silence, and it was only Miss Le Roux’s skill with the needle that gave her a certain status. Thus, after our lessons she hemmed the innumerable sheets and pillowcases that would be used by our family for many years to come, on the farm as well as later in the town house: Mother died in a bed made up with sheets Miss Le Roux had sewed and after Maans got married, Stienie still used that linen for a long time. In the kist where our linen was stored, the bedding piled up without explanation, just as the land and the sheep flocks were accumulated silently and steadily during those years, in preparation for an unknown yet alluring future.
How could she have been happy with us? On a board across her knees she wrote long letters to her family in the Boland, but how often could she send off those letters? I do not know. And what passerby ever brought along a reply? But sometimes a letter did arrive somehow, and I remember the tears and the excitement, and the long stories she told me about this one or that one, and about the births and deaths in the distant world beyond the mountains where she came from. When a rare visitor arrived, she was always excited too and, giggling and breathless, she presented herself in the voorhuis uninvited, to join the company. It was usually a young man from one of the neighbouring farms who had ridden over with notice of a funeral or a visit from the Dominee, and the way she hovered and fussed made him uncomfortable, and long after the visitor had left, after the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away and the familiar silence had taken hold of the farm once more, she remained restless and agitated. The young men in our parts were unfamiliar with the Boland girls and their ways; she frightened them away with her unbecoming eagerness when they called on us, and when we attended church services in the district, it was clear that they were avoiding her. But what other future was there for her?
I see that emptiness now, I recognise that loneliness, though I still do not quite understand it, but at the time I was only aware that she was making herself ridiculous with her fluttering and her airs in the company of the young men who were invited into the house for a bowl of coffee, and with all her questions and insinuations after their departure. Over the untidy, irregular stitches of my sewing, I studied her in silence, as deprecating and scornful of her weakness as Mother herself, and I decided that I would never behave like that; that I would never be like her.
What did I mean by that resolution, the silent disapproval of a mere child who knew nothing about other people or about life? Even today I am not quite sure. I would never be as dependent as she, I thought — on her brother-in-law, on the Dominee, on Mother’s goodwill and Father’s wages, on the favour of any random young man; I would never deliver myself into the power of others the way she did, fluttering around an embarrassed young caller in the voorhuis who was trying his best to escape. I was already learning to be silent and to hide my feelings; in due course I learned not to feel at all, and with practice and experience my skills improved. I was a quick and intelligent girl, and I learned fast.
For a year life continued in this way. Perhaps Miss Le Roux had been hired for a year, or perhaps there was simply no chance for her to leave the Roggeveld until the end of autumn when we moved down to the Karoo again. When the time came, she was very excitable and high-spirited for a while and she spoke of the Boland and her people and her friends more than ever, while preparing and packing for her departure. Down in the Karoo she embraced me tearfully and told me never to forget her, and I stood there with Maans’s hand in mine and watched as she and Father left in the cart for the place where she would be fetched. It was over, I thought impassively; but it was not. One day before the end of winter Father fetched her again and Miss Le Roux returned to us with her trunk and her travelling-case; she came back to the Roggeveld with us, and unpacked her things again in the room she had left a few months earlier, and hung her black dresses on the nails in the wall. She was quieter and more subdued, the moments of excitement rarer, and after each outburst she withdrew into herself again; she did not speak of the Boland as often as before and did not write so many letters. Our lessons were resumed where we had left off and nothing was said, only Mother was cooler and more distant than ever. She was not free to choose what she wanted to do with her life, and it probably turned out to be the only possibility for her, to return for another year to the solitary farm, the lonely house, and the company, all day long, of a silent, critical girl and a toddler.
She did her work thoroughly and dutifully, I must admit, and however restless and moody she may have been at times, in her lessons she was painfully precise: what she taught me I retained, and remember to this day. “Remember, your late father paid dearly for your education!” old Oom Flippie Marais chided once, years later when I was a grown woman, in the hallway of our town house one late afternoon shortly after Father’s death. “He paid a lot of money for your education,” he snapped, “with governesses from the Boland and what not! Who else in these parts had as much?” He must have come to visit Mother that afternoon, for he was an elder in the church and they lived in town, but what was the reprimand about, and why was the old man so upset, a spiteful, envious old man who came upon me in the half-light of the hallway where I was not expecting him? But he was right: who among the people of that generation was as educated as I, a mere girl? Father paid her in gold coins, I remember, and she locked away the money in a tin box in her trunk; and what she taught me I retained all my life, everything except the sewing and the handicrafts.