Mma Ramotswe had by no means forgotten her late white van. It was true that she did not brood upon it, as some people dwell on things of the past, but it still came to mind from time to time, often at unexpected moments. Memories of that which we have lost are curious things—weeks, months, even years may pass without any recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we will think: Yes, that is what I had and I have no longer.

Her van had been her companion and friend for many years. Can a vehicle—a collection of mechanical bits and pieces, nuts and bolts and parts the names of which one has not the faintest idea of—can such a thing be a friend? Of course it can: physical objects can have personalities, at least in the eyes of their owners. To others, it may only be a van, but to the owner it may be the friend that has started loyally each morning—except sometimes; that has sat patiently during long hours of waiting outside the houses of suspected adulterers; that has carried one home in the late afternoon, tired after a day’s work at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. And just like a person, a car or a van may have likes and dislikes. A good tar road is balm to man and machine and may produce a humming sound of satisfaction in both car and driver; an unpaved road, concealing behind each bend a deep pothole or tiny mountain range of corrugations, may provoke rattles and groans of protest from even the most tolerant of vehicles. For this reason, the owners of cars may be forgiven for thinking that under the metal there lurks something not all that different from a human soul.

Mma Ramotswe’s van had served her well, and she loved it. Its life, though, had been a hard one. Not only had it been obliged to cope with dust, which, as anybody who lives in a dry country will know, can choke a vehicle to death, but its long-suffering suspension had been required to deal with persistent overloading, at least on the driver’s side. That, of course, was the side on which Mma Ramotswe sat, and she was, by her own admission and description, a traditionally built person. Such a person can wear down even the toughest suspension, and this is exactly what happened in the case of the tiny white van, which permanently listed to starboard as a result.

Mma Ramotswe’s husband, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, that excellent man, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and widely regarded as the best mechanic in all Botswana, had done his best to address the problem, but had tired of having to change the van’s shock absorbers from side to side so as to equalise the strain. Yet it went further than that. The engine itself had started to make a sinister sound, which grew in volume until eventually the big-end failed.

“I am just a mechanic, Mma Ramotswe,” he had said to his wife. “A mechanic is a man who fixes cars and other vehicles. That is what a mechanic does.”

Mma Ramotswe had listened politely, but her heart within her was a stone of fear. She knew that the fate of her van was at stake, and she would prefer not to know that. “I think I understand what a mechanic does, Rra,” she said. “And you are a very good mechanic, quite capable of fixing a—”

She did not finish. The normally mild Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had raised a finger. “A mechanic, Mma,” he pronounced, “is different from a miracle-worker. A miracle-worker is a person who … works miracles. A mechanic cannot do that. And so when the time comes for a vehicle to die—and they are mortal, Mma, I can assure you—then he cannot wave a wand and make the car new again.” He paused, looking at her with the air of a doctor imparting bad news. “And so … ”

He had done his best for her, of course, and bought her a spanking new van, blue this time, with an array of buttons on the dashboard that she had not yet dared investigate, and with an engine so quiet and unobtrusive that it was sometimes possible to believe that it was not switched on at all and that it was gravity alone, or some other mysterious force, that was propelling the van down the road. She tried to appear grateful, but it was hard. It was true that the point of a vehicle was to get you from one place to another without incident, but that, she thought, was not the only consideration. If efficiency were the only value in this life, then we would be content to eat bland but nutritious food every day—and the same food at that. That would keep us alive, but it would make for very dull mealtimes. And the same was true of transport: there was all the world of difference between travelling along a highway in an air-conditioned bus, behind tinted glass, and making the same journey by a side-road, on a cart pulled by a team of mules, with the morning air fresh against your face and the branches of the acacia trees brushing past so close that you could reach out to touch the delicate green leaves. There was all that difference.

The tiny white van had gone to a scrap dealer, and that, she thought, was the end. But then she encountered a woman who told her that a nephew of hers had acquired the van, and towed it up to his place near the Tuli Block. He loved tinkering, she said, and he might be able to do something with the parts that he could strip from the body of the van. That was all Mma Ramotswe heard, and nothing more. It was a better fate, perhaps, than that of total destruction in the jaws of some metal-crushing predator, but still she hoped that the young man who had bought the van for scrap might exercise his mechanical skills and restore it. And that possibility she kept in her mind, tucked away among the other scraps of hope of the sort that we go through life with, not thinking about them very much but unwilling to let them fade away altogether.

Now, on this crisp Botswana day, at the tail end of a winter that, for all its cold mornings, was still drenched in clear and constant sun, Mma Ramotswe was reminded of her former van by something she saw on the road. She was driving past the Ministry of Water Affairs, her mind on a case that she had been working on for some time and was no nearer resolution than when she had started. She wondered whether she should not begin afresh, abandoning all the information she had obtained, and speaking to everybody again from scratch; possibly, she thought, it might be easier if … And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw what seemed to be her tiny white van. It was not just that she saw a white van—they were common enough in a country where the most popular colour for a vehicle was white—it was the fact that the white vehicle she saw had the air of her van, a characteristic gait, so to speak, a way of moving.

Her first instinct was to stop, and this she did, pulling in to the side of the road, her wheels throwing up a cloud of dust and causing the vehicle behind her to swerve angrily. She waved an apology—that was not the sort of driving she condoned in others—before twisting round in her seat to look at the turning down which she had glimpsed the van making its way. She saw nothing, so she decided to reverse a few yards to get a better view. But no, the side-road was empty.

She frowned. Had she imagined it? She had read somewhere that those who mourn will sometimes see those they mourn—or will think they see them. But she was not really mourning her van, even if she regretted its passing; she was not the sort of woman who would allow something like that to get in the way of living. She shook her head, as if to clear it, and then, on impulse, made a sweeping U-turn, heading off on to the side-road down which she had seen the white van disappear.

A woman was sitting on a stone on the edge of the road, a small bundle of possessions on the ground beside her. Mma Ramotswe slowed down, and the woman looked at her enquiringly.

“I’m sorry, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe through her open window. “I haven’t stopped to give you a ride to wherever it is you want to go.”

“Ah,” said the woman. “I hoped you had, Mma, but I don’t mind. My son promised to come and collect me, and he will get round to it eventually.”

“Sometimes men forget these things,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“They tell us that they are too busy to do the things we want them to do, but they have plenty of time for their own concerns.” The woman laughed. “Oh, that is right, my sister! I can hear them saying that in those voices that men have!”

Mma Ramotswe joined in the laughter. Then she asked, “Did a white van come down this way, Mma? Not a big one—a small one, same size as this one I’m in but much older—and white.”

The woman frowned. “When, Mma? I have only been sitting here for half an hour.”

“Oh, not that long ago,” said Mma Ramotswe. “About two or three minutes ago. Maybe four.”

The woman shook her head. “No, Mma. Nobody has been down here for at least ten minutes, maybe more. And there have been no white vans—I would have seen one if there had been. I have been watching, you see.”

“Are you sure, Mma?”

The woman nodded vigorously. “I am very sure, Mma. I see everything. I was in the police, you see. For three years, a long time ago, I was one of those police ladies. Then I fell off a truck and they said that I could not walk well enough to stay in. They are very foolish sometimes, and that is why the criminals sit there in those bars and tell one another stories of what the police have not done. They laugh at them and drink their beer. That is what is happening today, and God will certainly punish the politicians one day for letting this happen.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. “You are right, Mma. Those criminals need to be taught a lesson. But to go back to the van, are you absolutely sure, Mma?”

“I am one hundred per cent sure,” said the woman. “If you made me stand up in the High Court in Lobatse and asked me whether I had seen a van, I would say certainly not and that is the truth.”

Mma Ramotswe thanked her. “I hope that your son comes soon, Mma,” she said.

“He will. When he has finished dancing with ladies or whatever he is doing, he will come.”

Mma Ramotswe continued with her journey, completing the tasks she had been on her way to perform. She thought no more of the sighting of the van until she returned to the office a couple of hours later and mentioned the matter to Mma Makutsi.

“I saw something very strange today, Mma,” she began as she settled herself at her desk.

“That is no surprise,” said Mma Makutsi from the other side of the room. “There are some very strange things happening in Gaborone these days.”

Mma Ramotswe would normally have agreed with this—there were very odd things happening—but she did not want Mma Makutsi to get launched on the subject of politics or the behaviour of teenagers, or any of the other subjects on which she harboured strong and sometimes unconventional views. So she went on to describe the sighting of the van and the curiously unsettling conversation she had had with the woman by the side of the road. “She was very sure that there had been no van, Mma, and I believed her. And yet I am just as sure that I saw it. I was not dreaming.”

Mma Makutsi listened attentively. “So,” she said. “You saw it, but she did not. What does that mean, Mma?”

Mma Ramotswe considered this for a moment. There was something on the issue in Clovis Andersen’s book, she seemed to remember; The Principles of Private Detection had a great deal to recommend it in all departments, but it was particularly strong on the subject of evidence and the recollection of what people see. When two or more people see something, the great authority had written, you would be astonished at how many different versions of events you will get! This is not because people are lying; it is more because we see things differently. One person sees one thing, and another sees something altogether different. Both believe that they are telling the truth.

Mma Makutsi did not wait for Mma Ramotswe to answer her question. “It means that one of you saw something that the other did not.”

Mma Ramotswe pondered this answer. It did not advance the matter very much, she thought.

“So the fact that one of you saw nothing,” Mma Makutsi continued, “does not mean that there was nothing. She saw nothing because she did not notice anything. You saw something that she did not notice because it was not there, or it was not there in the way that you thought it was there.”

“I’m not sure I follow you, Mma Makutsi … ”

Mma Makutsi drew herself up behind her desk. “That van, Mma Ramotswe, was a ghost van. It was the spirit of a late van. That’s what you must have seen.”

Mma Ramotswe was not certain whether her assistant was being serious. Mma Makutsi could make peculiar remarks, but she had never before said anything quite as ridiculous as this. That was what made her feel that perhaps she was joking and that the proper reaction for her was to laugh. But if she laughed and her assistant was in fact being serious, then offence would be taken and this could be followed by a period of huffiness. So she confined her reaction to an innocent question: “Do vans have ghosts, Mma? Do you think that likely?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Mma Makutsi. “If people have ghosts, then why shouldn’t other things have them? What makes us so special that only we can have ghosts? What makes us think that, Mma?”

“Well, I’m not so sure that there are ghosts of people anyway,” said Mma Ramotswe. “If we go to heaven when we die, then who are these ghosts that people talk about? No, it doesn’t seem likely to me.”

Mma Makutsi frowned. “Ah, but who says that everybody goes to heaven?” she asked. “There are people who will not get anywhere near heaven. I can think of many … ”

Mma Ramotswe’s curiosity was too much for her. “Such as, Mma?”

Mma Makutsi showed no hesitation in replying. “Violet Sephotho,” she said quickly. “There will be no place for her in heaven—that is well known. So she will have to stay down here in Gaborone, walking around and not being seen by anybody because she will be a ghost.” She paused, an expression of delight crossing her face.

“And, Mma, she will be a ghost in high-heeled shoes! Can you imagine that, Mma? A ghost tottering around on those silly high heels that she wears. It is a very funny thought, Mma. Even those who saw such a ghost would not be frightened but would burst out laughing. Other ghosts would laugh, Mma—they would, although we wouldn’t hear them, of course.”

“Unless we were ghosts ourselves by that stage,” interjected Mma Ramotswe. “Then we would hear them.”

This warning made Mma Makutsi fall silent. It had been an appetising picture that she had been painting, and she slightly resented Mma Ramotswe’s spoiling it like this. But her resentment did not persist, as it occurred to her that Mma Ramotswe, having possibly just seen a ghost herself—even if only a ghost van—might be in need of a restorative cup of redbush tea.

“I think it is time that I put the kettle on,” she said. “All this talk of ghosts … ”

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “There are no ghosts, Mma. No ghost people, no ghost vans. These things are just stories we make up to frighten ourselves.”

Mma Makutsi, now standing beside the kettle, looked out of the window. Yes, she thought, one can say that sort of thing in broad daylight, under this wide and sunlit Botswana sky, but would one say the same thing with equal conviction at night, when one was out in the bush, perhaps, away from the streetlights of town, and surrounded by the sounds of the night—sounds that could not be easily explained away and could be anything, things known or unknown, things friendly or unfriendly, things that it was better not to think about? She shuddered. It was not a good idea to let one’s mind dwell on these matters, and she was sure it was best to think about something quite different. And so she said to Mma Ramotswe,

“Mma, I am worried about Charlie. I am very worried.”

Mma Ramotswe looked up from her desk. “Charlie, Mma Makutsi? But we have always been worried about Charlie, right from the beginning.” She smiled at her assistant. “I’m sure that even when he was a very small boy, this high, his mother was shaking her head and saying that she was worried about Charlie. And all those girls, I’m sure that they have been saying the same thing for years. It is what people say about him.”

Mma Makutsi smiled too, but only weakly. “Yes, Mma,” she said. “But this time it’s different. I think now that we have to do something about him.”

Mma Ramotswe sighed. Whatever it was, Mma Makutsi was probably right. But she was not sure that it was the responsibility of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency to deal with Charlie’s problems—whatever they were. Charlie was an apprentice of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and it would have to be Mr J. L. B. Matekoni who took action.

She looked across the room at her assistant, who was frowning with concentration as she poured the boiling water into the teapot. “Very well, Mma Makutsi,” she said. “Tell me what the trouble is. What has our young friend been up to now?”

The seventh book in the series   There are drawbacks to residing in the enlightened city that is twenty-first-century Edinburgh, where every Saturday night ears burn at dinner parties across the city, and anyone requiring the investigative abilities of a philosophical soul knows where to find her. Jillian McKinlay—wife of a trustee of an illustrious […]

Matthew had read somewhere—in one of those hoary lists with which newspapers and magazines fill their columns on quiet days—that moving house was one of the most stressful of life’s experiences—even if not quite as disturbing as being the victim of an armed robbery or being elected president, nemine contradicente, of an unstable South American republic. Matthew faced no such threats, of course, but he nevertheless found the prospect of leaving India Street for the sylvan surroundings of Nine Mile Burn extremely worrying. And it made no difference that Nine Mile Burn was, as the name suggested, only nine miles from the centre of Edinburgh.

“What really worries me,” he confessed to Elspeth, “is the whole business of selling India Street. What if nobody wants to buy this flat? What then?”

He looked at her with unconcealed anxiety: he could imagine what it was like not to be able to sell one’s house. He had recently been at a party at which somebody had whispered pityingly of another guest: “He can’t sell his flat, you know.” He had looked across the room at the poor unfortunate of whom the remark was made and had seen a hodden-doon, depressed figure, visibly bent under the burden of unshiftable equity. That, he decided, was how people who couldn’t sell their house looked—shadowy figures, wraiths, as dejected and without hope as the damned in Dante’s Inferno, haunted by the absence of offers for an unmoveable property. He had shuddered at the thought and reflected on his good fortune at not being in that position himself. Yet here he was deliberately courting it …

Elspeth’s attitude was more sanguine. She had been unruffled by their previous moves—from India Street to Moray Place, and then back again to India Street. The prospect of another flit—a Scots word that implies an attempt to evade the clutches of creditors or suggests, misleadingly, that moving is an airy, inconsequential thing—did not seem to trouble her, and she had no concerns about the sale of the flat. “But of course somebody will want to buy it,” she reassured him. “Why wouldn’t they? It’s one of the nicest flats in the street. It’s got plenty of room and bags of light. Who wouldn’t want to live in the middle of the Edinburgh New Town?”

Matthew frowned. “The New Town isn’t for everybody,” he said. “Not everybody finds the Georgian aesthetic pleasing.” He paused as he tried to think of a single person he knew of whom this was true. “There are plenty of people these days who are suburban rather than urban. People who like to have … ” He paused for thought. He knew nobody like this, but they had to exist. “Who like to have garages. Homo suburbiensis. Morningside man, who is a bit like Essex man but just a touch … ”

“Superior?”

“You said it; I didn’t.”

Elspeth smiled. “You shouldn’t worry so much, Matt, darlingest. And so what if we don’t sell it? We can afford the other place anyway.”

Matthew winced. “If I dip into capital,” he said.

Elspeth shrugged. “But isn’t money for spending? And surely there’s enough there to be dipped into.”

Matthew knew that she was right; at the last valuation, his portfolio of shares in the astute care of the Adam Bank had shot up and he could have bought the new house several times over if necessary. But Matthew had been imbued by his father with exactly that sense of caution that had created the fund in the first place, and the idea of selling shares in any but the direst of emergencies was anathema to him.

In general, Elspeth did not look too closely at Matthew’s financial affairs. She had never been much interested in money, and very rarely spent any on anything but family essentials and the occasional outfit or pair of shoes. She was nonetheless aware of their good fortune and of the fact that thanks to the generosity of Matthew’s businessman father they were spared the financial anxieties that affected most people. Her capacity for moral imagination, though, was such that she could understand the distorting effect that poverty had on any life, and she had never been, nor ever would become, indifferent to the lot of those—perhaps a majority of the population of Scotland—who were left with relatively little disposable income after the payment of monthly bills. This attitude was shared by Matthew, with the result that they were tactful about their situation—and generous too, when generosity was required.

The farmhouse near Nine Mile Burn had not been cheap. Although it was far enough from Edinburgh to avoid the high prices of the capital, it was close enough to be more expensive than houses in West Linton, a village that lay only a few miles further down the road. Their house, which they had agreed to buy from no less a person than the Duke of Johannesburg, who lived at Single Malt House not far away, had been valued at seven hundred thousand pounds. For that they got six bedrooms in the main house—along with a study, a gun room (Matthew did not have a gun, of course), and a drawing room with a good view of both the Lammermuir and Moorfoot Hills to the south and east; a tractor shed, a byre, and six acres of ground.

The Duke had been pleased that Matthew was the purchaser; they had met on several occasions before, although the Duke seemed to have only the vaguest idea of who Matthew was. Matthew’s quiet demeanour, however, had been enough to endear him to the Duke.

“I must say,” the Duke had remarked to a friend, “it’s a great relief to have found somebody who’s not in the slightest bit shouty. You know what I mean? Those shouty people one meets these days—all very full of themselves and brash. We used to have very few of them in Scotland, you know; now they’re on the rise, it seems.”
The friend knew exactly what the Duke meant. “Nouveau riche,” he said. “They’re flashy—they throw their money around.”

The Duke nodded. “Whereas I’m nouveau pauvre. I’ve got barely a sou these days, you know—not that I ever had very much.”

“And you a duke,” said the friend. “Fancy that!”

“Well, a sort of duke,” conceded the Duke. “I’m not in any of the stud books, you know: Debrett’s and so on. Or I’m in one of them—just—but I gather it’s not a very reliable one. It was rather expensive to get in; you had to buy sixty copies, as I recall, and I think quite a number of people in it are a bit on the ropey side. In fact, all of them are, I believe.”

“People take you at your own evaluation, I’ve always thought,” said the friend. “Behave like a duke and they’ll swallow it.”

“True,” said the Duke. “But frankly, that’s a bit difficult for me, old man. I’m not quite sure what the form is when it comes to being a pukka duke.”

“Take a look at some of the people who are what they claim to be,” advised the friend. “Watch the way they stand; the way they walk. They’re very sure-footed, I’m told. And they look down at the ground a lot.”

“That’s because they own it,” said the Duke. “Doesn’t apply to me—or not very much. I’ve got fifty-eight acres in Midlothian and forty-one up in Lochaber, but most of it is pretty scrubby. Lots of broom and rhododenrons.”

The friend looked thoughtful. “No, you’re not quite the real thing, I suppose. And then there’s always the risk that the Lord Lyon will catch up with you.”

The mention of the Lord Lyon made the Duke blanch. This was the King of Arms, the official who supervised all matters of heraldry and succession in Scotland. He had extensive legal powers and could prosecute people for the unauthorised use of coats of arms and the like.

“Do you think Lyon would ever bother about me?” asked the Duke nervously.

His friend looked out of the window. “You never know,” he said. “But I shouldn’t like to be in your shoes if he did.”

It was not the sort of thing a friend should say—or at least not the sort of thing that a reassuring friend should say.

1. Remarkable Cousin Chloe

 
It was one of Paul Stuart’s friends who said to him, “I can’t stress this enough, you know: breathing is important. Really important.”
 
“I’d already worked that out,” Paul replied.
 
“Oh, I know it sounds obvious . . .”
 
It does, thought Paul.
 
“But people forget. And they just breathe—you know, like this.”
 
Paul waited.
 
“Whereas,” his friend continued, “you should breathe like this.”
 
In, out . . .
 
“I thought I already was,” said Paul. “In, out. Like that?”
 
“Deeper. And hold the breath in for a while. Like this.”
 
There was silence. Then the friend said, “And while you hold it in, think. That’s the important thing. Concentrate your thoughts. Think of the present, Paul. The right now. The actual.”
 
“I’m thinking.”
 
“Good. You need to be mindful, Paul. Mindful. In. Think. Out. Still thinking.”
 
And he should also close his eyes from time to time, the friend said, and think about where he was and what he was doing, rather than about where he was going to be, and what he was going to be doing. And it was for this reason then that Paul, well–known food writer, celebrated cook, and a kind but slightly accident-prone man, now closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
 
He smelled coffee, and this was, he thought, a mindful sort of smell. In front of him, in the real world, was a freshly made, piping-hot cup of Brazilian coffee, its aroma drifting up to him on little wisps of steam. He loved the smell of that; a dark smell, a chocolate smell, but without chocolate’s note of sweetness. The smell of coffee, really; that, he decided, was the way he would describe it. He opened his eyes, and gazed out of the window.
 
He thought—as he took a deep breath—Should I go? He knew that was not mindful. He needed to think again, not about what he should do in the future, but about what he was doing now. But still the same question came back. Should I go to France? Should I call Chloe right now and tell her: no France?
 
He exhaled. He could still smell the coffee, which was now.
 
***
 
It was late spring in Scotland and life was undoubtedly good—as was the view. From where he was sitting, in the kitchen of his flat, Paul could see in the distance, kissed by sunlight, the castle that dominated the city. Beneath it, the roofs and spires of the Old Town, with, here and there, those odd architectural spikes for which Edinburgh was so well known, sticking up as if to proclaim Scotland’s ancient motto Nemo me impune lacessit—Nobody challenges me with impunity. Spikes placed on the tops of buildings, prickly thistles, the sharp-tipped antlers of Highland deer: these all played a major part in the iconography of Scotland, Paul thought; but so did the hills, those gentle, feminine hills; so did the waterfalls, and the light, and the cold blue sea; so did this city, that was like an opera set, on which at any moment somebody might fling open a window and start to sing.
 
Paul lived—in a part-time way, as he put it—with his girl­friend, Gloria, who was also the editor of his books, and with her two Siamese cats. It was living with somebody in a part-time way because Gloria kept her own flat on the other side of town, and still spent much of the day there. That was where her office was, where her mail was delivered, and where most of her clothes—a disorganised wardrobe, a riot of colour—were kept. It would have been easier, of course, if they had co-habited fully, but Gloria simply could not face sorting out the detritus of the years she had spent in that particular flat. It was just all too complicated; much sim­pler to leave things as they were. Besides, the arrangement gave both of them space, and space, she felt, was what every relationship—with anyone at all—required.
 
Paul and Gloria got on well. It had never been one of those passionate affairs, in which two people, in mutual intoxication, filled their waking moments with thoughts of one another. “It’s not like that, with us,” Gloria had said to a friend. “It’s different with Paul; it really is. We’re not like two love-struck kids, gazing into one another’s eyes. We’re . . .”
 
“Mature adults?” supplied her friend.
 
“Exactly.”
 
“Oh, well,” said the friend.
 
It had its moments, though, and neither Paul or Gloria wanted or expected much more out of it. They were friends, as well as lovers, and that, they had both decided, was a good state to be in. To be a lover was easy enough; to be a friend required rather more. To be both was something not given to everyone.
 
There were disagreements, though—areas where a differ­ent view was taken of something that might not have been of great importance in itself, but was capable of disturbing the otherwise tranquil waters of their domestic relationship. Such as cats, and it was of these cats that Paul was thinking as he looked out from his kitchen window that morning.
 
Gloria was the owner of two Siamese cats, Hamish and Mrs. Macdonald. They were sleek, self-satisfied creatures, cut­tingly arrogant and effortlessly handsome in a way in which lesser cats were not. They had light blue eyes that stared at you with a somewhat off-putting intensity. They had silky coats of a shade that a Belgian chocolatier might have taken years to perfect. They were vocal in a way that only Siamese cats can be, voicing their opinion in long-drawn-out cat-sounds that seemed to demand an instant response. They had sev­eral recognisable yowls: what Paul called an asking yowl; what he described as a complaining yowl; and finally, and more seri­ously, a warning yowl. The cats lived in Gloria’s flat, among the books, papers and colourful clothing. They had cat beds hooked onto radiators, and timed, battery-operated cat feed­ers that opened at set hours to reveal supplies of salmon and tuna within. They had everything, it seemed to Paul, that any cat could possibly want. And yet they always seemed to expect more. These cats, he said to himself, would never understand the virtue of moderation. Do not want too much did not apply to cats.
 
“How fond are you of those cats of yours?” he asked Glo­ria one evening.
 
This brought a surprised response. “What a question. Really, Paul! It’s like asking a parent if she likes her children . . . or almost.”
 
Paul did his best to explain. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but those cats seem almost indifferent to you—or so it seems to me. The way they look at you . . .”
 
He now realised just how far he had strayed into sensi­tive territory. “Indifferent?” said Gloria, her tone now one of decided reproof. “Hamish and Mrs. Macdonald are not indif­ferent to me. How could you say such a thing?”
 
“I’m sorry, it’s just the way they . . . Maybe that’s the way cats are. I don’t know much about these creatures.”
 
Again, he was cut short. “Hamish and Mrs. Macdonald are both very fond of me,” said Gloria firmly. “In fact, they love me—actually love me.” She intercepted Paul’s look of incre­dulity. “No, don’t be cynical. I’m absolutely sure of that. In fact, I positively bask in the love of my cats.”
 
Paul had thought she might be speaking ironically, but now realised his mistake. Discretion might have prompted him to leave the matter there, but he persisted.
 
“I’m not sure that cats love humans,” he mused. “Dogs do, of course.”
 
Gloria shook her head. “Dogs . . .” she began.
 
“All right then, dogs,” Paul interjected. “How about dogs? Dogs will sacrifice their lives for their owners, if necessary. You know how it is—they’ll jump into rivers to save a drowning child—tackle an armed burglar—that sort of thing. Whereas cats . . .” He looked up at the ceiling. “Is there any recorded instance of a cat doing anything unselfish? Feline altruism?” This, he felt, was the clinching argument. “An oxymoron?”
 
Gloria stared at him reproachfully.
 
“You see,” Paul went on, “I have a theory that cats are per­fect psychopaths.” He had just thought of it, but it seemed to make sense.
 
Gloria looked doubtful. “You’re making this up, Paul.”
 
He smiled. She was right—but so, he felt, was his theory.
 
“If you want to understand the psychopathic personality, look at a cat. They never experience guilt—unlike dogs, who look so guilty if they do anything wrong.”
 
Gloria sniffed. “It might be that you don’t understand cats, Paul. Cats are not . . .” She searched for the right word. “They’re not obvious.”
 
“Obvious?”
 
“Yes. You mentioned dogs, so let’s go back to them. They wear their heart on their sleeve. All that grinning and barking and slobbering.” She gave a shudder.
 
“Whereas cats?”
 
Gloria was in no doubt. “Cats are effortlessly cool. Cats, one might say, have it.”
 
Paul knew that it existed, but was uncertain as to what it was. “I think we’re going to have to disagree,” he said. “Perhaps the world is divided into dog and cat factions, just as it is into those who like chocolate and those who like strawberries.”
 
Gloria laughed. “Really? There are many—millions, I suspect—who adore both chocolates and strawberries. There are people who eat those strawberries covered with chocolate.”
 
Paul thought about the taste wheel in one of his kitchen encyclopaedias; chocolate was earthy while strawberries were fruity, and he was sure that they were on different segments of the wheel. “Let me tell you, Gloria, strawberry and choco­late do not go together. They just don’t.”
 
“Yes, they do,” said Gloria. “I like them.”
 
“I won’t argue,” said Paul.
 
She brightened. “Which reminds me . . . Taste, aesthet­ics, philosophy . . . The offer for the new book: Have you decided yet?”
 
As Paul’s freelance editor, Gloria’s job was to edit the highly successful books that he wrote on a wide range of culinary subjects. She had nothing to do with contractual matters, but she had an obvious interest in his keeping up the sup­ply of the manuscripts she would read and knock into shape. Paul wrote well but tended to use long sentences that Gloria would have to chop into two, or sometimes even three parts. She also arranged his illustrations, consulting picture librar­ians or engaging food photographers to ensure that Paul’s reputation for lusciously presented books be preserved.
 
Paul was happy to abandon the subject of cats. He felt that he had somehow argued himself into an unwanted corner. He was not anti-cat—far from it—he was just being realistic about them. Cats were fine, but there was no getting away from their fundamental attitude. That was it, he thought: cats had attitude, whereas dogs . . . He stopped himself. It was time to address the offer for the new book.
 
He found that it was unnecessary to think for very long. Of course, he would accept. It was an extremely generous offer by any standards, the only drawback being that they wanted him to have the book ready within six months. Yet that was not impossible: he had already worked out what he wanted to say, and it would be refreshing to move away from his usual series—Paul Stewart’s Tuscan Table being the latest title—and deal with something as broad and exciting as the philosophy of food. Paul had taken a philosophy course at university, but it was an introductory course that had spent far too much time on Hume, he felt, and had left many other philosophers untouched. Yet there was a clear role for the enthusiastic amateur, presumably even in philosophy, which was, after all, about things of concern to ordinary people as much as to experts. If he were to write about the philosophy of food it would be a personal statement, written from the heart as much as from the mind. The writing of it would not be a chore; rather, it would be a celebration, a meditation, an act of homage to a subject—food and its preparation—that had engaged him from the age of twelve. Unlike some of the chefs he wrote about, Paul was modest, but he felt that this book would be a good one. All he had to do, of course, was to write it.
 

The Good Pilot is a stand alone novel, a heartwarming tale of hope and friendship set amid the turmoil of World War II. Val Eliot, a young woman working on an English farm during the war, meets Mike, a U.S. Air Force pilot stationed nearby. When Val rescues a Border Collie named Peter Woodhouse, who is […]

Scotland fell away beneath him, a stretch of green pasture, of hills, of swirling mist. Suddenly they were bathed in sunlight; fields of cloud, topped with crenulations of white, now lay beneath them as their plane pointed towards south. In his window seat he closed his eyes against the glare, imagining for a few moments their destination, as much an idea, a feeling, as a place. He saw a small tower that he had never seen before, a tower of warm red brick with a pattern of holes for doves. Down below, a man was pulling at a bell rope; as the bell rang the doves launched themselves from their holes in the brick and fluttered skywards.

He opened his eyes, and noticed that the passenger in the seat beside him, a man in perhaps his early fifties, dressed in a lightweight linen suit, was looking at him. The man smiled at him, and he returned the smile.

“What takes you to Pisa?” the man asked. His accent revealed him as Italian.

Paul hesitated, unsure as to whether he wanted to strike up a conversation that went beyond the niceties. He had brought with him a book that was just beginning to engage him and he was looking forward to getting back to it. But the man smiled at him again, and his natural politeness decided the matter.

“So parlare Italiano,” he began. “Sono … ”

The man did not allow him to finish. “Ah!” he said, and then, continuing in Italian. “What a pleasure it is for us Italians to discover somebody who speaks our language.”

“I’m sure there are many. Such a beautiful language … ”

“Yes, but what use is a beautiful language spoken just by oneself? It’s all very well for the Spaniards, because there are so many Spanish speakers—all over the world. Even Portuguese has Brazil, but we have just us—just Italy—and after a while we get fed up with speaking only to ourselves. We have heard everything there is to say in Italian.”

“Surely not … ”
“I am not entirely serious. A bit serious, perhaps, but not entirely.” Turning in his seat, he extended a hand towards Paul. “But I must introduce myself. I am Palumbieri—Silvio Palumbieri.”

“I’m Paul Stuart.”

Silvio loosened his tie. “Stuart is the name of Scottish kings, is it not? Mary Stuart … ” He made a chopping gesture across his throat. “She was most unfortunate. Queens cannot choose their neighbours, and if they find they have one who has an axe, then it is most regrettable.” He sighed, as if the execution of Mary Queen of Scots had been a recent outrage.

“It was a long time ago,” Paul said.

Silvio raised an eyebrow. “But I am an historian,” he said. “What happened in the past remains rather vivid for me and … ” He paused, and now removed the tie altogether. “That’s better. Yes I find that the past has a much bigger shadow than people believe. It’s still with us in so many ways. At our side all the time, whispering into our ear.”

“Warning us not to repeat our mistakes?”

Silvio smiled. “We repeat some. Others we’re sensible enough to avoid making more than once. But that’s not what I was thinking about. What I was thinking about was the way in which the past determines our character, not just as individuals, but as nations. A child who is treated badly grows up damaged. A people who are subjected to bad treatment will be suspicious. They will be bad allies.”

Paul, who had been holding his book, slipped it into the seat pocket in front of him. He had endured worse conversations on flights, including an attempt at religious conversion, a confession of adultery, and detailed advice on the attractions of Panama as a tax shelter. “You’re thinking of?”

Silvio waved a hand airily. “Oh, there are many examples. Russia, for one. Russia is a peasant country. It has a past of serfdom that ended only in the nineteenth century. That made for a vast, stubborn, ignorant population—one that was also very resentful. And they are resentful today—particularly of the west.”

“I see.”

“They view the west in the same light as they viewed their feudal masters. Authority.” He paused. “So western politicians who lecture Russia about human rights or their tendency to invade their neighbours will never change them. Not one bit. You’re dealing with a particular sort of bear, you see. One with a history. An abused bear with a short temper.”

Paul savoured the metaphor. He was right. “And Italy?”

“Well, that’s an interesting case. With us, the important thing to remember is that we are very young. We have lots of history, of course, but Italy itself is a teenager. The Risorgimento was really just yesterday, you’ll know. It ended in 1871. That’s yesterday. And that means that as a state, we are still very far from maturity. That’s why half the population doesn’t really believe that the Italian state exists—or, if it does, feel that they owe it nothing. We’re very disloyal to Rome, you know. We look after ourselves—our family, our city—and we don’t like paying taxes to Rome.”

“Nobody likes taxes.”

“Some like them less than others. Take the Greeks. They have a particular aversion to taxes, and this is because they haven’t forgotten that they were once part of the Ottoman Empire and they saw no reason to pay taxes to the Ottomans.”

“So you’re saying that people don’t change?”

Silvio sighed. “They don’t. Or if they do, it takes a long time. A very long time.”

The plane gave a slight jolt as it encountered a pocket of turbulent air. Paul glanced out of the window, and then returned to the conversation. “May I ask you something?” he said. “Is this what you actually do?”

Silvio shook his head. “I’m an economic historian,” he replied. “That’s something quite different, but it doesn’t stop me having views on these more general matters.”

“Economic history,” muttered Paul.

“A sobering science. That’s why I’ve been in Scotland. I’ve been at a conference.” He paused. “You didn’t tell me why you’re going to Pisa.”

“To taste food and wine,” said Paul.

Silvio looked surprised. “So that’s what you do?”

“Yes. I write about it.”

“There is a great deal to be said about Italian food.”

“Yes, I’m discovering that.”

Paul reached for his book.

“I mustn’t keep you from your reading.”

Paul had not intended to be rude. “Forgive me. I was enjoying our conversation.”

“But you must read your book, and I have some papers to attend to.” Silvio reached into his pocket. “Let me give you my card. I’m at the University of Pisa. It has all the details there. If you need help while you’re in Italy, please get in touch with me. My door is always open.”

Paul thanked him and took the card. Professor Silvio Palumbieri, it appeared, was not only Professor of Economic History at the University of Pisa, but a member of the Italian Academy of Economic Science and a cavaliere of the Republic. He slipped the card into the pocket of his jacket and opened his book.

They arrived in Pisa shortly before eleven in the morning. Paul said goodbye to Silvio in the plane, and once again as they were waiting for their luggage at the baggage carousel.

“Don’t forget,” said Silvio. “You have my card. I am at your disposal while you’re in my country.”

Paul thanked him. The first of his two suitcases had now been disgorged and he struggled to retrieve it. A few minutes later the second case appeared, and in that mood of relief and gratitude that always follows a safe reunion with luggage, he began to make his way to the a of the car hire firm with which Gloria had made the reservation of a small saloon car.

And that was the point at which the journey, so smooth until then, began to go badly wrong.

“Your name?” said the reservation clerk.

Paul handed him the booking confirmation Gloria had printed out for him. “It’s all there,” he said.
The clerk took the piece of paper. There was an air of suspicion in the way in which he held it—as if this might be a forgery of some sort. He looked down at his computer and typed in a few digits. Then he scrutinised the form again, glanced at Paul, and then looked back at his screen.

“I am afraid there is no such reservation,” he said.

Paul leant forward, trying to get a glimpse of the computer screen. The clerk shifted it slightly, to ensure that it was even less visible.

“I’m sorry, dottore, but there is nothing. This reservation has been made by one of our overseas offices, and they have not confirmed it with us. This has happened before. It is not our fault.”

Paul felt the back of his neck becoming warm. “But it says very clearly … ”

The clerk cut him short. “There is nothing here on my screen.” He gave Paul a look of reproach. “Nothing. There is no car.”

“But that print-out … ” Paul pointed at his pieced of paper, now seemingly so much more valuable than before.

“That piece of paper has the name of your firm at the top and below that it has the words Reservation Confirmed. Look. Right here. Reservation confirmed.”

The clerk shook his head. “That document is no longer valid.”

“What do you mean by that?” challenged Paul. He was being polite, but was unable to prevent a testy note from creeping into his voice.

“I mean that if a document of that type is not confirmed by an entry in the main computer, then it ceases to have any validity. That is the way these things are.” It was the voice of the patient bureaucrat, explaining how, by immutable custom, the working world ordered its affairs. But even the strictest system has room for humanity. “However, we have a spare car. It is our very last car in hand; it is a very busy time of year, you’ll understand. We can allocate that to you instead of this non-existent car you have been promised.”

“For the same rate?” asked Paul.

The clerk looked at him lugubriously, as if disappointed that Paul could even suspect that they would even consider a higher rate. “At exactly the same rate,” he confirmed. “It is much bigger than the car you claim to have booked … ”

“That I did book,” corrected Paul.

“It is bigger than that car,” repeated the clerk. “It is a Mercedes Benz. I can prepare the documents for you.”
Paul relaxed. He was not yet in Montalcino, but the prospect of arriving there before dinner was beginning to seem more real. “You’re very kind,” he said to the clerk.

The clerk bowed his head. Tapping out details on his keyboard, he printed two sheets of paper for Paul to sign before reaching for a set of keys.

“You’ll find the car outside,” he said, and told him the row in the car park where it would be parked. “Show your copy to the woman at the barrier, and she will let you through.”

It was now midday, and the sun was at its zenith. When he left the cool of the car rental office, with its sharp, air-conditioned air, Paul felt it press down on him like a warm hand; it was humid, and his shirt clung to him uncomfortably, the damp patches showing dark through the fabric. He wiped his brow. It would be cooler in Montalcino, several hundred feet higher than Pisa.

He looked about him. The form gave the colour of the car and the number, and he started to make his way slowly along the lines of vehicles in the relevant row. By the time he reached the end, he had failed to find it. He looked along the line of vehicles in the neighbouring row; perhaps they had made a mistake and parked it in the wrong place. Slowly he worked his way along that row too, checking the number of each Mercedes Benz. It was not there—nor was it in the row beyond that. That left only one possible line of cars, and he now checked this carefully, with the same lack of result.

He felt hot and frustrated. He had heard that car hire in Italy could be an arcane, rather trying process, but he had hoped that Gloria’s arrangements would somehow avoid any difficulties. Obviously not, he said to himself.
The relatively short time he had spent in the sun was enough to make him thirsty. Looking around, he saw on the far side of the car park, separated from it by only a modest fence, a small café. He would find himself something to drink there—something cool and refreshing—before going back to the car rental office. There must be other car parks, he decided; perhaps an employee had put it in the wrong car park altogether; airports were complicated places, with all their roads and buildings, and that sort of mistake could be made only too easily.

He sat in the café for fifteen minutes or so, enjoying the air-conditioning and the bottle of chilled mineral water he had ordered. Then he returned to the terminal building, where the office of Personal-Drive Italia was located. The clerk for some reason pretended not to recognize him, and solemnly noted down his details afresh.

“So you say the car isn’t there,” he said once Paul had finished with his story.

“That’s so,” said Paul. “I have looked very carefully and it isn’t there.”

The clerk stared at him. “Yet you signed for it.”

Paul frowned. “I signed the rental agreement.”

The clerk shook his head. “No, you signed for the car itself. Look … ” He took the form from Paul. “Here—you see—here and here. That says, I have received the above-mentioned car in good condition. That is your signature, I take it.”

“Of course it is. You were here when I signed it. You gave it to me. You.”

The clerk looked away. “Under this agreement,” he intoned, “you are liable for the car once it comes into your possession.”

“But it never did!” exploded Paul. “I never found the car. I’ve just tried to tell you that.”

“That is not what the document says,” retorted the clerk.

For a few moments Paul was speechless. Then he spoke coldly and decisively. “I must speak to the manager,” he said. “Please call him.”

The clerk’s eyes narrowed. “The manager is away.”

“Where?”

“He is at the funeral of his mother. In Ravenna.”

Paul tried to decide whether this was a lie. It was difficult to tell.

“In that case I want to see the assistant manager,” he said.

The clerk replied quickly. “I am the assistant manager.”

Paul looked up at the ceiling. “I suggest we shall forget the whole business, then.”

The clerk shrugged. “When are you going to bring the car back? I can’t cancel the contract until the car has been returned.”

Paul gasped. “I have never seen this car,” he said, chiselling out each word for emphasis. “How can I return something I’ve never had?”

“Then you will be liable for the whole cost of the car.”

Paul closed his eyes. “I’m going to call the police,” he said.

The clerk shrugged again. “There is a policeman standing over there,” he said. “You see him? You can call him if you like.”

Paul strode across the arrivals hall and approached the policeman. The officer was talking to a woman running a small luggage stall, but he broke away when Paul addressed him.

“I am having a bit of trouble over there,” said Paul, nodding in the direction of the car rental desk. “I am being falsely accused of taking a car that I have never so much as seen. I believe this is an attempt at extorting money from me.”

The policeman adjusted his belt. “I shall accompany you, sir,” he said. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

Paul felt relieved that here was somebody who might penetrate the fog of obfuscation into which it seemed he had wandered. But once at the desk, his relief proved to be short-lived.

“This gentleman,” said the clerk, rising to greet the policeman, “has disposed of one of our vehicles. He refuses to return it, and I have simply informed him of the consequences.”

The policeman frowned, and turned to face Paul. “This is a very serious matter,” he said. “Where is this car?”

Paul drew in his breath. “There is no car,” he said. “I have never touched it.”

This was the signal for the clerk to pass a copy of the rental document to the policeman. “Here is the proof that he took it,” he said. “You’ll see his signature down at the bottom there. That establishes that he took possession of the car—the same car that he now refuses to hand back.”

The policeman studied the piece of paper. “Is this your signature, sir? Is your name … ” He stumbled over the pronunciation. “Paul Stuart?”

“That’s me,” said Paul. “And that’s my signature too.”

“In that case,” said the policeman, “you must accompany me to the police station.”

“Oh, this is absurd,” said Paul, his voice rising markedly.

The policeman reached out to touch him on the arm. “You must control yourself, sir. It doesn’t help to shout.”

“But I have never even seen this car,” Paul protested. “I have had nothing to do with it. Nothing.”

The policeman looked at him guardedly. “But you have signed this document.”

“I signed it before I went to look for the car,” said Paul.

“But that’s not what it says here,” said the policeman.

Paul glared at the clerk, who simply stared at his screen, as if waiting for a troublesome client to go away so as to allow him to get back to his work. He looked at his watch. If he had to go to the police station he would do it, so that he could get on with the task of finding another car. And at the police station, he imagined that he might find somebody who would be able to take a more intelligent view of the situation than this junior officer.

“I’m ready to accompany you to the police station,” Paul said. “Although I shall have to come in your car, as I don’t have one myself.”

The policeman smiled. “You mustn’t make light of these things,” he said in a not unfriendly tone. “Car theft is a serious charge, you know.”

Paul opened his mouth to say something, but found that he had no words. His Italian, his English, his French all seemed to have deserted him. Kafka, he thought, and then, more appropriately he felt, Lewis Carroll.

Mma Ramotswe looked down at her desk. She did not like to discuss the intimate side of anybody’s marriage—particularly when the marriage was as recent as Mma Makutsi’s. She thought of new marriages as being rather like those shy, delicate flowers one sees on the edge of the Kalahari; so small that one might miss them altogether, so vulnerable that a careless step might crush their beauty. Of course, people talked about their dreams without too much embarrassment—most dreams, after all, sound inconsequential and silly in the cold light of day—but it was different when a wife talked about a husband’s dreams, or a husband about a wife’s. Dreams occurred in beds, and what occurred in marital beds was not a subject for debate in the office—especially if the dream related to beds, as it appeared that some of Phuti Radiphuti’s dreams did.

But if Mma Ramotswe was reluctant to probe Phuti’s dreams too closely, the same was not true of her assistant. The topic had now been broached, and Mma Makutsi pursued it enthusiastically.

“There is no doubt about a dream about beds,” she continued. “The meaning of that dream is very clear, Mma. It should be very obvious, even to a person who does not know much about dreams, or other things, for that matter.”

Mma Ramotswe said nothing.

“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi, “if a person says I have been dreaming about beds, then you know straight away what the dream means. You can say to them, I know what that dream means. It is very clear.”

Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window, which was high, and gave a view from that angle only of a slice of blue; empty blue; blue with no white of cloud; nothingness. “Is the meaning of dreams clear, Mma? Do any dreams make sense, or are they just like … like clouds in the sky, composed of nothing very much? Maybe they are clouds in our mind, Mma; maybe that is what they are.”

Mma Makutsi was having none of this. “The meaning is often clear,” she retorted. “I have no difficulty, Mma, in understanding a dream about beds.”

Mma Ramotswe sighed. “Well, they do say, don’t they, Mma, that men have such things on their minds most of the time. They say that men think only of that, all day. Listen to the way Charlie speaks when he thinks you can’t hear him. That shows you what men think about—or at least, young men. I do not think that Mr J. L. B. Matekoni has thoughts like that in his head all day. I do not think that, Mma.”

It was as if Mma Makutsi had not heard her. “Yes, Mma. The meaning of a dream about beds is very simple. It means that you are tired. It means that you need more sleep.”

Mma Ramotswe stared at her assistant for a few moments. Then, with some degree of relief, she smiled. “Well, there you have it, Mma. That must be what such a dream means.”

Of course, Mma Ramotswe and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had discussed the issue many times themselves, as they did that evening some months previously when he had first raised it with her. They were sitting on their veranda in that companionable manner that may come upon a married couple at the end of a day’s work, when they are together again and watching the sun sink behind the acacia trees and the untidy telephone wires of their neighbour’s garden. They had been talking about nothing in particular, with few matters that were likely to disturb the peace of this quiet half-hour before supper.

“I wonder when our neighbour is going to tidy up those wires,” mused Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. “You’d think that he’d get in touch with the telephone people and get them to come round and sort things out. I shouldn’t be surprised to find out that half those wires are dead—just ancient wires from the past.”

Mma Ramotswe glanced over the fence at the untidy cluster of wires attached to the wooden telephone pole. She felt that Mr J. L. B. Matekoni was probably right; the country was full of wires that might have done something important in the past but had long since stopped being used. She imagined somehow listening in to one of these wires and hearing the echoes of some forgotten exchange between people that had taken place many years before but still echoed through those old abandoned wires. One might hear a conversation that took place in 1962, perhaps, when Botswana was still the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and when cattle were the main industry and there were no diamonds. It might be a conversation between somebody in Lobatse driving up to see somebody in Gaborone and not requiring any directions because there were only a couple of roads. “You take the right-hand road. You know the right-hand road?”

Silence, empty silence, and then a faint, tinny voice ringing down the line. “I know that road, Rra. That is the road my grandfather lives on.”

The voice of the dead—you could hear them still, if you listened hard enough. Late people still talking, like children talking after lights-out: the faint, distant voices of our ancestors.

And then, as if he had already forgotten about the telephone wires, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni suddenly said, “Mma Makutsi?”

It was a question rather than a pronouncement, and Mma Ramotswe waited a moment or two before answering, in case the point of the question might be expanded upon. But it was not.

“Yes,” she said. “Mma Makutsi: what of her, Rra?”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni shrugged. “Nothing, Mma.” But it was not nothing. “I just happened to be wondering whether there was anything … different about her?” He paused. “Now that she’s married, you see.”

She looked at him, and he turned away, embarrassed. “No, I don’t mean … ”

“Of course not. But it is true, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni: marriage changes people. For some people it can be quite a surprise.”

“Yes, I know that, but there is something about Mma Makutsi I would like to raise, Mma—if you don’t mind.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at him expectantly. “Please do, Rra. We have all the time in the world.”

He frowned. “But we don’t have all the time in the world, Mma Ramotswe … ”

She gently encouraged him. “No, of course we don’t, but we certainly have enough time for you to say something.”

He looked out over the garden, out towards the mopipi tree of which Mma Ramotswe was so proud. Not everyone had a mopipi tree in the garden and she had been solicitous of its welfare, giving it more water than a tree might otherwise expect.

“A question,” he said. “When did Mma Makutsi get married? Was it seven months ago? Eight?”

Mma Ramotswe did a quick calculation. “It was just after the first rains, wasn’t it? Which makes it about ten or eleven months ago.”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni looked thoughtful. “Then that is the answer,” he said.

“The answer to what? To when she got married?”

He shook his head. “Pregnant, Mma. Mma Makutsi must be pregnant.”

Precious Ramotswe, creator and owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, friend of those who needed help with the problems in their lives, and wife of that great garagiste, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, felt that there were broadly speaking two sorts of days. There were days on which nothing of any consequence took place—these were in a clear majority—and then there were those on which rather too much happened. On those uneventful days you might well wish that a bit more would happen; on days when too much occurred, you longed for life to become a bit quieter.

It had always been like that, she thought, and always would be. As her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, often said: there are always too many cattle or too few—never just the right number. As a child she had wondered what he meant by this; now she knew.

Both sorts of day started in much the same way, with the opening of her eyes to the familiar dappled pattern made by the morning sun on the ceiling above her bed, an indistinct dancing of light, faint at first, but gradually becoming stronger. This intrusion of the dawn came from the gap between the curtains—the gap that she always intended to do something about, but did not because there were more pressing domestic tasks and never enough time for everything you had to do. And as long as curtains did their main job, which was to prevent nosy people—unauthorised people, as Mma Makutsi would call them—from looking into her bedroom without her permission, then she did not have to worry too much about their not meeting in the middle.

She woke up at more or less the same time each morning, thought for a while about getting up, and then rose, leaving Mr J. L. B. Matekoni still deeply asleep on his side of the bed, dreaming about the sort of things that mechanics, and men in general, dream about. Women, she felt, should not enquire too closely as to what these things were, as they were not the sort of things that women liked very much—engines and football, and so on. A friend had once said to her that men did not dream about things like that—that this was just what women wanted men to dream about, while men, in reality, dreamed about things that they would never reveal. Mma Ramotswe doubted this. She had asked Mr J. L. B. Matekoni one morning what he had dreamed about and he had replied: ‘the garage’, and if this were not proof enough, on another occasion, when she had woken him from the tossing and turning of a nightmare, he had replied to her question about the content of the bad dream by saying that it had all been to do with a seized-up gearbox. And then there was Puso, their foster child, who had told her that his dreams were about having a large dog that chased away the bullies at school, or about finding an old aeroplane in the back yard and fixing it so that it could fly, or about scoring a goal for Botswana in a soccer match against Zambia, with the whole stadium rising to its feet and cheering him. That, she thought, settled that. Perhaps there were some men who dreamed about other things, but she felt that this was not the case for most men.

Once up and about, clasping her cup of freshly brewed red- bush tea in her hand, she took a walk around the garden, savouring the freshness of the early-morning air. Some people said that the air in the morning had no smell; she thought they were wrong, for it smelled of so many things—of the acacia leaves that had been closed for the night and were now opening at the first touch of the morning sun; of a wood fire somewhere, just a hint of it; of the wind, and the breath that the wind had, which was dry and sweet, like the breath of cattle. It was while she was standing there that she decided whether the day would be one in which things might happen; it had something to do with the way she felt when she considered the day ahead. And most of the time she was right, although sometimes, of course, she could be completely wrong.

On that particular morning as she walked past the mopipi tree she had planted at the front of the garden, she had a sudden feeling that the next few hours were going to be rather unusual. It was not a disturbing premonition—not one of those feelings that one gets when one fears that something is going to go badly wrong—it was more a feeling that something interesting and out of the ordinary lay ahead.

She remarked on the fact to Mr J. L. B. Matekoni as he sat at the kitchen table eating the brown maize porridge that he liked so much. Puso and his sister Motholeli had already eaten their breakfast and were in their rooms preparing to leave for school. The school run that Mma Ramotswe had become so used to was now no longer necessary, as Puso was of an age to make his own way there—the school was not far away—and he was also able to help his sister with the wheelchair. This gave the children an inde- pendence that they both enjoyed, although departing on time could be a problem when Puso had some boyish task to complete—the catching of flying ants, for instance—or Motholeli had at the last minute to find another pair of cotton socks or locate a book that needed to be returned to the school library.

“I have a feeling,” announced Mma Ramotswe, “that this is going to be a busy day.”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni glanced up from his porridge. “Lots of letters to write? Bills to send out?”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “No, we’re up to date on all of those things, Rra. Mma Makutsi has been busy with her filing, too, and everything is put away.”

“Lots of clients to see, then?” He thought of his own day, and imagined a line of driverless, impatient cars, each eager for his attention, their horns honking to attract his notice: cars, in his view, were quite capable of all the human emotions and failings, including a lack of patience or restraint.

Mma Ramotswe had looked at her diary just before leaving the office the previous day, and had seen that it was largely empty.

“No,” she answered. “There are no appointments with clients. Nothing this morning and nothing this afternoon, I think.”

He looked puzzled. “And yet it’s going to be a busy day?”

“I have that feeling. It’s difficult to say why, but I am sure that this will not be a quiet day.”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni smiled. People talked about the intuition of women, but he was not sure that he believed in it. How could women possibly know things that men did not know? Was their hearing more acute than men’s, so that they heard things that men missed—as dogs or cats might pick up frequencies audible only to them? He thought not. Or was their eyesight more acute, so that they saw clear details where men saw only indistinct blurs? Again, he thought not. What we knew, we knew from our senses, and the senses of women were no different from the senses of men.

And yet, and yet … As he returned to his porridge, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni reflected on how there had been so many instances in which Mma Ramotswe had shown a quite uncanny ability to notice things that he himself had simply missed, or to know things about others that most people—most ordinary people, or men, to be specific—would not be expected to know. He remembered how, while out shopping with her a few weeks earlier, she had whispered to him that a woman walking towards them was probably one of Mma Potokwani’s cousins. He had cast an eye discreetly over the woman and wondered whether he had ever met her in the company of Mma Potokwani, but decided that he had not. How, then, could Mma Ramotswe tell?

“She was carrying one of those bags that the orphans make in Mma Potokani’s craft workshop,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That’s the first thing I noticed. Then I saw the shoes that she was wearing. They were very unusual shoes, and I had seen them before—when they belonged to Mma Potokwani. She must have passed them on.”

He had dismissed this as fanciful, but several days later, when he had gone out to the Orphan Farm to attend to one of the vans, on a pro bono basis of course, he had remembered the incident and asked Mma Potokwani whether she had any cousins visiting her. She did. And had she passed on an unusual pair of shoes to this cousin? “As it happens,” said Mma Potokwani, “I did. But let’s not waste time talking about these small things, Rra. Now there is something wrong with the spare van too, and I was hoping that you would have the time to look at that one as well.”

He had sighed. “I am always happy to help you, Mma Potokwani,” he said. “But there are places called garages, you know, and they are there to fix vehicles. That is their job. Perhaps you might try in future to—”

Mma Potokwani did not let him finish. “Oh, I know all about garages,” she said lightly. “But I would never go to one of them—your own garage excluded, of course, Rra. Ow, those garages are expensive! You drive onto their forecourt and straight away that’s two hundred pula. You get out of the car—that’s another fifty pula. They say, ‘Good morning, Mma, and what can we do for you?’ That costs seventy-five pula to say, and so it goes on. No, Rra, I will not go near those places; not me.”

Now, as he finished the last of his porridge, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni reminded himself that the one thing he felt certain about when it came to women was that you could never be sure. If Mma Ramotswe said she had a feeling about something, then it was perfectly possible that her instinct was correct. So rather than say, “We shall see, Mma,” he muttered, “Well, you’re probably right, Mma.” And then he added, very much as an afterthought—and a hesitant afterthought at that—“Who knows, Mma, what will happen? Who knows?”

When Mma Ramotswe arrived at the office that morning, Mma Makutsi was already there. Grace Makutsi, wife of Mr Phuti Radiphuti and mother of Itumelang Clovis Radiphuti, had recently been made a full partner in the business. It had been a long road, one that stretched from her first appointment as secretary in the fledgling agency, to assistant detective, to the vague, rather unsatisfactory status of associate detective, and finally to partnership. It had been a road that started in distant Bobonong, in the north of the country, in a home that housed six people in two cramped rooms, and from there had led, through much scrimping and saving by Mma Makutsi’s family, to the Botswana Secretarial College. At the end of her course the road had climbed sharply uphill to the glorious mark of ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations—a result never before achieved at the college, and never since then equalled. But even that distinction provided in itself no guarantee of a life free of struggle, and for some years Mma Makutsi had been obliged to endure an existence of parsimony and want. Mma Ramotswe would have paid her more had she been able, but the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency made no money at all, and there was a limit to how generous a loss-making business could be. There would have been no point, she thought, in giving Mma Makutsi a bigger salary and then having to close the business down after a month or two when it went bankrupt.

Mma Makutsi understood all this. She was grateful to Mma Ramotswe for all she did for her, and so when her fortunes changed dramatically on her marriage to Mr Phuti Radiphuti, she made it clear that she would not give up her job, but would continue to work at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. As a partner in the business, her devotion to the enterprise became even more intense—hence her new habit of arriving earlier than Mma Ramotswe on most mornings.

To begin with, her baby son, Itumelang, accompanied his mother into the office, sleeping contentedly in his carrycot while she got on with her work. Now, however, he had become more wakeful, and consequently more demanding, and this meant that he was left at home with the woman from Bobonong who had been employed as a nursemaid.

“I am very happy with my life,” said Mma Makutsi. “I find professional satisfaction in my work, and at the same time I have all the pleasure of running a home. It is a very good thing when a woman can do both of these things.”

“Yes, we women are doing very well in Botswana,” agreed Mma Ramotswe. “We don’t have to sit out in the lands all day. We are running businesses now. We are building roads. We are flying aeroplanes. We are doing all the things that men used to think were not for us.”

For a moment, Mma Makutsi pictured Mma Ramotswe at the controls of a plane. It would be hard for her to keep the aircraft level, she thought, as her traditional build would make it far heavier on the side on which she was sitting. It would be possible, she felt, to adjust the controls so that the wing on her side came up a bit, but she still imagined that landings would be a bit heavy, and bumpy. Of course it would be quite a shock if one were to get into a plane and see that Mma Ramotswe was in the pilot’s seat. It would be rude to refuse to board the plane in such circumstances, and one would simply have to put a brave face on it and hope for the best. Perhaps one could hide one’s surprise by saying something like, “Oh, Mma Ramotswe, I did not know that you had taken up flying. This is good news, Mma. This is a big victory for women.”

Coming into the office first, Mma Makutsi took it upon herself to have the early-morning cup of tea—as distinct from the mid-morning and late-morning cups—ready for when Mma Ramotswe arrived. This cup was an important one, as it enabled the two women to consider their plans for the day ahead. There might have been no scientific connection between drinking tea and getting one’s thoughts in order, but that was the way it seemed, at least in Mma Ramotswe’s opinion. Tea brought about focus, and that helped.

“So,” said Mma Ramotswe. “What have we today, Mma Makutsi?”

“We have tea to begin with,” said Mma Makutsi.

“That is very good.”

“And then … well, we have nothing, as far as I can see, Mma.” Mma Makutsi paused. “Unless, of course, something turns up. And it might. Sometimes there is nothing at eight o’clock and then at ten o’clock there is something.”

“I have a feeling there’ll be something,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“When I was in my garden this morning I had a feeling about that.”

Mma Makutsi, looking down at the surface of her desk, moved a pencil from one place to another. “Yes,” she said pensively.

“There might be something. Later on.”

“You think so, Mma?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Makutsi waited some time before answering. Then at last she said, “I am expecting some news, Mma. It might come today.”

Mma Ramotswe knew better than to ask exactly what this news might be. Mma Makutsi sometimes liked to shroud her affairs in mystery, and did not always respond well to direct questioning. So she simply said, “I hope that you get your news, Mma.”

“Thank you, Mma. When you are waiting for news, it is better to get it. It is not easy not to get news that you’re waiting for. Then you think: what has happened about the thing that I’m waiting to hear about? Has it happened, or has it not happened?” Mma Makutsi stared at Mma Ramotswe as she made these remarks. The light caught her large glasses and danced, in shards of gold, across the ceiling.

“And if you don’t hear anything,” she continued, “then you can spend the whole day worrying about it.”

“This news of yours,” said Mma Ramotswe, trying to sound as if the matter under discussion was barely of any interest at all, “will it come in a letter, or … ”

“No,” said Mma Makutsi, shaking her head. “It will not be in a letter.”

“Or a telephone call?”

“Yes, it will be a telephone call. It will be a telephone call from my lawyer.”

This could hardly be ignored. “Your lawyer, Mma?”

Mma Makutsi waved a hand with the air of one who is accustomed to having a lawyer. Of course she might have a lawyer now, thought Mma Ramotswe, but she would not have had one all that long ago. Yet she did not begrudge Mma Makutsi the satisfaction of having a lawyer after having lived so many years without one, even if she had no lawyer herself, now that she came to think of it.

“It is nothing very important, Mma Ramotswe. Just a little … ” Mma Ramotswe waited.

“A little personal matter.”

“I see.”

Mma Makutsi rose from her desk. “But we should not be talking about these things. We should perhaps be going over that business plan I drew up, Mma.”

“Ah, yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “The business plan.”

Mma Makutsi had drawn up a business plan when she had seen one that Phuti Radiphuti had prepared for the Double Comfort Furniture Store. Of course the two businesses were as chalk and cheese in terms of turnover and profit, but Phuti had told her that every concern should have a plan and she had volunteered to do the necessary work.
Mma Ramotswe took the sheet of paper passed to her by Mma Makutsi. The heading at the top read The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: Challenges Ahead and Options for the Future.

“That is a very good title,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Challenges and options. I think you are right to mention those, Mma: they are both there.”

Back in her seat, Mma Makutsi accepted the compliment gracefully. “It is forward-looking, Mma. You’ll have noticed that.” Mma Ramotswe glanced down the page. “And there is this paragraph here that talks about enhanced profit. That is good, Mma.”

Mma Makutsi inclined her head. “That is the objective of every business, Mma. Enhanced profit is what counts. If we were a company, that would drive the share price up.”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe, knowing even as she spoke that she sounded rather vague. She had no head for finance, especially when it came to companies and share prices and so on, although she understood the basics and was particularly good at counting. This she had learned from her father, who had been able to count a herd of cattle with astonishing accuracy, even as the animals moved around and mingled with one another. She frowned. Enhanced profit had to come from somewhere. “But where do these bigger profits come from, Mma?”

Mma Makutsi answered with authority. “They come from greater turnover, Mma. That is where profits come from: turnover.”

Mma Ramotswe muttered the words greater turnover. There was a comforting, mantra-like ring to them, yes, but … “Turnover is the same thing as fees?” she asked.

“It is,” said Mma Makutsi. “Turnover is money going through the books.” She made a curious gesture with her right hand, rep- resenting, Mma Ramotswe assumed, the progress of money through the books. It all looked so effortless, but Mma Ramotswe was not convinced.

“More money going through the books, Mma Makutsi, must mean … ” She hesitated. “More fees?”

“Yes. In a sense.”

“In a sense?”

“Yes.”

Mma Ramotswe looked down at the business plan. “So, unless I misunderstand all this, Mma, more fees means more clients, or, I suppose, higher charges to the clients we already have.”

Mma Makutsi stared at her. Her large glasses, thought Mma Ramotswe, reflected the world back at itself. People looked at Mma Makutsi and saw themselves.

“You could say that,” said Mma Makutsi. “That is one way of putting it.”

Mma Ramotswe’s tone was gentle. “And how are we going to get more clients, Mma?”

Mma Makutsi opened her mouth to answer, but then closed it again. She shifted her head slightly, to look past Mma Ramotswe, through the window behind her.

“There is one arriving right now,” she said.

Mma Ramotswe slipped the business plan into a drawer. The trouble with plans, she thought, was that they tended to be expressions of hope. Everybody, it seemed, felt that they should have a plan, but for most people the plan merely said what they would like to happen rather than what they would actually achieve. Most people did what they wanted to do, whether or not that was what their plan said they should do. So plans were useful only in revealing what people wished for. If you wanted to know what they would actually do, then the only way of finding out was by watching them and seeing what they did. Then you would know what they might do in the future—because most people did what they had always done. That, thought Mma Ramotswe, was well known—in fact, it was one of the best-known things there was.

“We can talk about plans some other time,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We would not want this client to think that we sit about making plans all the time.”

Mma Makutsi felt rather relieved. She was aware that her business plan was optimistic, but she had found it difficult to write anything that took a bleak view. After all, what did it matter? The important thing was that they were perfectly all right as they were. She had Phuti Radiphuti and her baby and her new house. Mma Ramotswe had Mr J. L. B. Matekoni and her white van and Puso and Motholeli. She had her garden, too, with her mopipi tree and the runner beans. And they both had the land about them; the sky that went on for ever, it seemed, and was filled with sun and with the air that they all needed, that the cattle needed, that the animals in the Kalahari needed—there was plenty of that; they had Botswana. So everybody had the things that mattered, when you came to think of it, and if you had that, did you really need a business plan?

Those were the thoughts in Mma Makutsi’s mind as she watched the car being parked beside Mma Ramotswe’s white van under the acacia tree. Two people got out—two clients, not one: as in the business plan.

Mma Ramotswe remembered exactly how it was that the subject of taking a holiday arose. It was Mma Makutsi who started the discussion, with one of her inconsequential observations—those remarks she made à propos of nothing—remarks that had little to do with what had gone before. She often said such things, quite suddenly making a pronouncement that seemed to come from nowhere, her words dropping into the stillness of the afternoon air like stones tossed into a pool.

It was mid-afternoon in the offices of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, in late October, one of the hottest months in what was proving to be one of the warmest years in living memory.
“It is very hot, Mma Ramotswe,” observed Mma Makutsi, as she leaned back in her chair, fanning herself with a wilting copy of the Botswana Daily News. “When it is this hot, it is very difficult to work.”

From her side of the room, where, if anything, it was slightly hotter because of the pool of sunlight that penetrated the window and fell directly across her desk, the begetter and owner of Botswana’s only detective agency cast a glance in the direction of her erstwhile secretary, later assistant, and now, by dint of the latter’s sheer tenacity and perseverance, her colleague. In normal circumstances, if a member of staff said that it was too hot to work, an employer would interpret this as a strong hint that it was time to close the office and go home. When it came to Mma Makutsi’s utterances, though, one could quite easily be wrong, and so Mma Ramotswe merely said, “Yes, it is very hot, Mma—very hot indeed.” She knew that there was no reason for Mma Makutsi to stay at work if she felt inclined to go home. Following her marriage to Mr Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Store and owner of a substantial herd of cattle, Mma Makutsi had no need of the modest salary Mma Ramotswe paid her; indeed, had that salary stopped for whatever reason, she probably would not even have noticed it. Nor was she technically obliged to keep certain hours: her contract of employment with the agency was a very informal one—so informal, in fact, that there was even some doubt as to whether it existed at all.

“People who trust one another do not need to put things in writing,” Mma Ramotswe had once said. “It is enough that they should have given their word.”

Mma Makutsi had been quick to agree. “That is very true, Mma,” she said. But then, as she began to think about the proposition, she started to discern the problems that might come from a failure to reduce understandings to writing, no matter how well understood they might have been. “Except sometimes,” she added cautiously. “You can rely on somebody’s word in many cases, but not in all. That is why it is safer to have everything in writing.”

“I’m not so sure … ” began Mma Ramotswe.

But Mma Makutsi was just getting into her stride. “No, you must almost always put things in writing. This is because people forget what they said and then they start to rewrite history and end up blaming you for not doing something they think you said you’d do, but haven’t done. They never accept that they may be remembering things incorrectly.” She looked at Mma Ramotswe reproachfully, as if the other woman were widely known to be one of the very worst offenders in this respect. “That is why you should have everything in writing—preferably in duplicate, in case you lose the original.” She paused, still looking at Mma Ramotswe, as if now challenging her to disagree. “They always taught us at the Botswana Secretarial College to put everything in writing. That is what they said, Mma. They said: ‘What’s written down on paper is written down in stone.’”

Mma Ramotswe frowned. “Stone and paper are very different, Mma. I’m not sure—”

Mma Makutsi cut her off. “You see, Mma, when something is written in stone it means that it cannot be changed. They do not mean to say that you have to copy everything down from paper and then carve it in stone. That would take a very long time.”

“Very long,” muttered Mma Ramotswe. “And every business would have to have a secretary and a stonemason. That would not be practical.”

The joke passed unnoticed, and now, on that hot October afternoon, the conversation suddenly took an unexpected slant.

“I met Mr Polopetsi the other day,” Mma Makutsi remarked.

“He was walking along when I saw him. You remember how he used to walk? Those small steps of his—like an anteater. You remember how he walked, Mma?”

Mma Ramotswe looked up with interest. She had never thought of Mr Polopetsi as resembling an anteater, but now that Mma Makutsi had mentioned it … “Mr Polopetsi? Now there’s a good man, Mma.”

Mma Makutsi agreed. Mr Polopetsi had worked in the agency a few years ago and had been as popular with clients as he had been with those with whom he worked. He had been recruited by chance after Mma Ramotswe had knocked him off his bicycle while driving her white van. When she heard the story he had to tell, she had been moved to offer him a temporary job to make up for what she saw as the shocking injustice of his undeserved conviction for an offence of negligence. Mr Polopetsi had been a hospital pharmacist who had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment for a dispensing mistake made by somebody else—a grossly disproportionate punishment, thought Mma Ramotswe, even if he were to have been negligent.

He had survived the unwarranted sojourn in prison, and although his dispensing licence had been taken from him, after he left the agency he had been able to find work in a chemist’s shop. That job had not lasted long, as the business had run into financial difficulties. Fortunately his wife had recently been promoted in her civil service post and her increased salary meant that the family was comfortably enough off. Mr Polopetsi, Mma Makutsi revealed, had found a part-time position that suited him very well—teaching chemistry in a high school. The regular chemistry teacher there, a man of great indolence, was only too pleased to have an energetic and popular assistant to take over on those afternoons when he wanted to watch football matches on television. The full-time teacher never bothered to enquire as to the reasons for Mr Polopetsi’s popularity with his pupils; had he done so, he would have discovered that there was nothing Mr Polopetsi liked more than to end a chemistry lesson with as loud and as spectacular an explosion as he could get away with, given the resources—and fragility—of the school laboratory. The inner pyromaniac that lurks in most boys was present in him as much as it was in the male pupils, just as it was, perhaps to a slightly lesser degree, in the girls, who enjoyed any experiment that generated coloured smoke in any quantity.

“He was very happy,” said Mma Makutsi. “You remember how he liked to smile? Just like a nervous rabbit? Well, he was smiling like that when I saw him the other day. He was walking along with that strange walk of his, smiling just like a rabbit.”

“I’m glad that he’s happy,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He deserves to be happy after what happened to him, poor man.”

Mma Makutsi looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure if we get the happiness we actually deserve,” she said. “There are some people who look very happy but certainly do not deserve it. Look at that woman … ”

Mma Ramotswe knew exactly whom Mma Makutsi meant.

“Violet Sephotho?”

Mma Makutsi nodded. As she did so, a small ray of sunshine caught the lens of her large round glasses, sending a flash of dancing light across the ceiling. “Yes, that is the lady I was thinking of,” she said. “If you look at her, she seems to be very happy. She is always smiling and … ”

“ … and looking at men,” supplied Mma Ramotswe. “You know that look that some ladies give men. You know that look, Mma?”

Mma Makutsi did. “It is a very encouraging look,” she said. “It is a look that says, If you are thinking of doing anything, then do not hesitate to do it. It is that sort of look.” She paused. “And yet she’s happy. All that smiling and laughing looks very happy, I would have thought.”

They both fell into silence as they contemplated the sheer injustice of Violet Sephotho’s apparent happiness. Mma Makutsi opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it, and closed it again. She had been about to say, “But God will surely punish her, Mma,” but had decided that this was not the sort of thing that people said any more, even if it was what they were thinking. The trouble was, she thought, that God had so many people to punish these days that he might just not find the time to get round to dealing with Violet Sephotho. It was a disappointing thought—a lost opportunity, in a sense: she would very willingly have volunteered her ser vices to assist in divine punishment, perhaps through something she would call Mma Makutsi’s League of Justice that would, strictly but fairly, punish people like Violet.

Mma Ramotswe’s own thoughts were far from retribution, divine or otherwise. She returned to the subject of Mr Polopetsi.

“So what did our friend have to say for himself?”

Mma Makutsi shrugged. “He said that he likes being a part-time teacher. He works three afternoons a week, at the most. He said that he was teaching the children how to make a battery and they were enjoying it.”

“That is a very useful skill,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is important for children to learn about electricity.”

“Yes, Mma, it is. But then he said that he had just been on a week’s holiday. He said that he was still feeling the benefit of that.”

Mma Ramotswe was interested to hear this. But even as she pictured Mr Polopetsi on holiday—she had no idea what he would do—she began to ask herself whether she knew anybody else who had been on a holiday. Had anybody she knew been away, or even stopped working and stayed at home? Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had certainly never had a holiday, at least not as long as she had known him. She was certain, too, that Mma Potokwani, the indefatigable matron of the Orphan Farm, had never taken a break from her post, with the exception of the few days when she had gone away following a dispute with the Orphan Farm’s management board. That had not been a holiday, of course—it was more of a retirement, even if a very short-lived one.

“What did Mr Polopetsi do on this holiday of his?” she asked.

“He said that he did nothing,” answered Mma Makutsi. “He said that he just stayed at home and lay down on his bed for much of the day. He said that it slowed his heart down and that was a good thing because it had been beating too fast for many years. He said that you cannot make a truck go at sixty miles an hour for too long. Eventually, he said, it gets tired and stops.”

That was very true, observed Mma Ramotswe. “But was that all he did? Stay at home and lie down on his bed?”

Mma Makutsi did not answer the question. “He also said to me that people who take holidays live much longer than people who do not.”

“Well, that sounds very interesting,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But what about people who are running their own business? What do they do about holidays?”

There was a brief silence as Mma Makutsi considered the question. Then, rather tentatively, she gave her reply. “Somebody else in the office takes over,” she said. “Most businesses have more than one person working in them, you know, and so when the owner goes off on holiday, one of the others takes over.”

“I see,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“So,” Mma Makutsi continued, “if there is, say, a manager at the top and he—or she, of course—needs to go off on holiday, then it will be the deputy manager who takes over. It is usually a very smooth process—no bumps or hiccups—and the customers never know that it is the deputy manager in charge.”

Mma Ramotswe looked up at the ceiling, her occasional resort when Mma Makutsi was in full flow. “I am sure they don’t,” she muttered.

Mma Makutsi’s spectacles flashed again—a shard of steely light. “And I believe that this is sometimes how deputy managers become managers.” There was a long, meaning-laden pause at this point, and then she continued, “It is because they do the job so well when they are given the chance. Then somebody says, ‘Oh, that person—that deputy manager—could just as well be a full manager.’ That sometimes happens, I believe.”

“Really?” said Mma Ramotswe.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni was late home that evening, having had to attend a meeting of the Motor Trades Benevolent Association, on the committee of which he served as treasurer. Mma Ramotswe had fed Motholeli and Puso early, and had then run them both to their cub scout and guide meetings in the hall of the Anglican Cathedral; they would not be ready to be collected until nine, by which time she would have served dinner for her husband and herself, washed the dishes, ironed Puso’s shirt for the following day, and performed a number of the other chores that went with running a household and that never seemed to be finished no matter how methodical and hard-working one was. She did not resent these tasks, of course—to iron the shirt of a little boy like Puso, or to make a packed lunch for one’s good husband whom one loved so much, was no great hardship; she merely wished that there would be some break between them, some brief moment when one might recover one’s breath and one’s energy before embarking on the next round of domestic duties.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni’s meeting had not been an easy one. “The members of the Benevolent Association are always complaining,” he said as he sat down at the kitchen table. “They expect the committee to deal with all their problems—not just one or two problems, but all of them.”

“Some people can be like that,” said Mma Ramotswe, as she mashed the potatoes for their shepherd’s pie. “Perhaps it is because we have become spoiled. We have so much these days that we think it is our due.”

“And I am just the treasurer,” said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. “I have about twenty-seven thousand pula in the common good fund at the moment, and so I can’t do everything. But they are always asking me to pay for their grandfather’s funeral, or to cover the school fees of the children of a late mechanic, or even to fund people’s weddings. They expect all that, Mma! That is what they ask for.”

“You cannot do it, Rra,” said Mma Ramotswe. “There is not enough money in Botswana to pay for half the things people want paid for. It just isn’t possible.”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni sighed. “Sometimes I feel like throwing everything in, you know. I feel like getting all the papers together—all the accounts and receipts and so on—and passing it over to the members and saying: ‘Here you are. You do it now.’”

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “Maybe you should do just that, Rra. That would show them.” She paused. “Maybe … maybe you could take a break.”

“From being treasurer?”

“From everything,” she said. “You could take a break from being treasurer and … ” She turned round from the stove to look directly at her husband. “And you could take a break from the garage too. A holiday, in fact.”

He stared at her, puzzled. “Me?” he said. “Me?”

“Yes, why not? Everybody needs a holiday at some time. We’re not meant to go on working until … until we drop.”
She uttered the words ‘until we drop’ with her heart in her mouth. Men did drop—they dropped rather often and with very little notice—and no woman with a husband should tempt Providence by talking lightly about such things. She knew many men who had dropped, often without the chance to say goodbye to their wives; they just dropped, more or less where they stood.

“But some of us have to go on working,” said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. “Some of us have to carry on because if we did not, then everything would come to a stop. What would happen at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors if I said that I had had enough and was going to stop working? It would come to a grinding halt, Mma, and that would be that. It would be Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors (Now Late), Mma, that is what it would be.”

She took a moment to think about this. What Mr J. L. B. Matekoni said was probably true. There was Fanwell, of course, who was now a qualified mechanic even if she—and others—still called him an apprentice. And there was Charlie, who had recently been seconded to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency because there was not enough work for him in the garage. But could either of these—or indeed both together—manage the business in the absence of Mr J. L. B. Matekoni? She thought not. Charlie had always needed close supervision or he would lose his temper with an engine and start hitting it with a hammer; he would be no use. Fanwell was a much better, much more patient mechanic but he was reticent in his manner and it was difficult to see him coping with some of the more assertive customers, particularly those who objected to the size of the bills that had to be issued for servicing or repairing a car. Cars were expensive things and anything to do with their maintenance was correspondingly costly, even if a garage was modest in its charges. Fanwell was too gentle, she thought, to fight that particular corner.

Mma Ramotswe returned to her task, but she had planted a seed in Mr J. L. B. Matekoni’s mind. He sat in his chair, looking up at the ceiling, drumming his fingers lightly on the table. Then he stood up, crossed to the window, and looked out into the yard. It was dark outside, and the light in the kitchen prevented his seeing the stars that hung, in great draperies of silver, above the land.

Turning away from the window, he addressed Mma Ramotswe.

“Of course, you could, you know. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”

She stirred the pot with the wooden spoon she had owned since the age of eight—an artefact of her childhood that still reminded her of the aunt who had given it to her. It was another world, the world of childhood and of Mochudi—a world of openness and innocence, a world in which the old Botswana ways were not just the customs that people remembered with fondness but the precepts and habits by which people led their day-to-day lives. We have lost so much, she thought. Our dear country has lost so much. But everybody had lost something—it was not just Botswana, which had perhaps lost less than others. So many people had lost that sense of identification with the land that gave meaning to life; that fixed one firmly to a place one loved. At least we still have that, she thought; at least we still have land that we can call our place; acacia trees that are our acacia trees; a sky that is our sky because it watched over our mothers and fathers and took them up into it, embraced them, when they became late. We still have that, no matter how big and frightening the world becomes.

The thoughts inspired by the simple wooden spoon gave way to his question. What had he suggested she do? Or not do, perhaps?

“Me? Do what, Rra?”

“Take a holiday, Mma. You work so hard—”

She cut him short. “A holiday? No, I was not talking about myself, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. I was talking about other people taking a holiday—maybe even you.”

He shook his head. “And I told you I cannot, Mma, but then I thought: Why doesn’t Mma Ramotswe take a holiday herself? That’s what I thought, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “But I can’t possibly take a holiday, Rra. Who would look after the agency?”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni did not hesitate. “Mma Makutsi.”

Mma Ramotswe laid down the wooden spoon. Mma Makutsi had many virtues—she was the first to admit that—but the thought of leaving her in sole charge of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was absurd. Judgement was needed to run something like a detective agency, and she was not at all sure that Mma Makutsi had that. Yes, she was keen and hard-working, and yes, her filing was probably second to none in all Botswana, but the agency dealt with some very delicate matters and Mma Makutsi had never been renowned for her tact. If she were left in charge, there was bound to be a point at which she would say something ill-considered or even downright confrontational. Look at how she always succeeded in riling Charlie when anybody with any real sense would know that a young man like that has to be handled with circumspection. If you criticised somebody like Charlie or, worse still, shouted at him, you would be guaranteed to get nowhere; in fact, you could more or less be assured of going backwards. No, she could not countenance leaving Mma Makutsi in charge of the agency, and she explained to Mr J. L. B. Matekoni why this should be so.

He listened courteously, as he always did when she—or anybody else, for that matter—addressed him. Once she had finished, he smiled. “Everything you say may be true, Mma,” he conceded.

“It is true that Mma Makutsi can be a little bit difficult from time to time, but in spite of that she is still very good at her job. And remember that she got ninety-seven per cent in the—”

“Oh, I know all about that,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We have all heard about that ninety-seven per cent. But that was for things like filing and shorthand. I’m talking about ordinary human skills now.”

“Well, I think she has those too,” said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni.

“And even if she doesn’t have them at the moment, how is she going to develop them if you never give her a chance? How does somebody who is down at the bottom … ”—and here he gestured with one hand to demonstrate the lowest rung on the ladder—“ … how can somebody who is down there get up here?” His hand was raised to above his head—a social and professional elevation separated from the starting point by an ascent beyond scaling.

He waited for her to respond, but she did not. She realised that he was right: people had to be given their chance.

“Well, Mma?” pressed Mr J. L. B. Matekoni.

“I still don’t think I need a holiday,” she said. “Everything is going very well at the moment, and I don’t want to put a spanner in the works.”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni’s eyes lit up at the use of the mechanical metaphor. “Talking of putting spanners in the works,’ he said, smiling in pleasure at the recollection, “one of our clients brought his car in today. We had serviced it only six months ago and so I wasn’t expecting it.”

“And?”

“He said that the engine was making a strange noise.”

“Ah.”

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni’s tone changed. He was now the concerned doctor, conveying to the family of a patient some item of bad news. “So I drove it round the block and listened. And yes, the engine was making a very discouraging noise – a sort of clanking sound that meant that all was very definitely not going well. So I took the vehicle back to the garage and opened up the engine compartment. And you know what I found?”

Mma Ramotswe could not resist answering. “A spanner? There was a spanner in the works?”

He looked crestfallen. “Well, yes, that’s exactly what I found. It had been left there by Charlie when he serviced the car some months earlier, and it had become entangled with all sorts of bits and pieces.” Mma Ramotswe rolled her eyes heavenwards. “Charlie is very slow to learn, isn’t he?”

“He is, I’m afraid,” said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. “But remember that he is still very young and things could get better.”

“Do you think they will?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni thought for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he said at last.

It was not the answer that Mma Ramotswe would have given. She was of the view that things were getting better, even if there were temporary setbacks and even if there was very little light at the end of the tunnel. But in her opinion, the last thing one should do was to bemoan the fact that things were changing. She would not slip into a position that failed to see any progress in human affairs. There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before. There were more civil liberties, more literacy, more children surviving that first critical year of infancy; there was a lot of which one could be proud. And Charlie would be a better young man eventually—all he needed was time, which was what we all required.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni tried another tack. “But you deserve it, Mma. We all agree about that. We all think you deserve a holiday.” She smiled at the kindness but then, as she turned back towards the pot on the stove, the implications of what he had just said sunk in. We all think you deserve a holiday … This meant that they had been discussing it amongst themselves. Why had they done this? Was it a … she hardly dared say the word to herself, but now she forced herself to face it. Was it a plot?

She closed her eyes and for a moment saw Mma Makutsi lurking in the shadows somewhere with some faceless ally, her presence only betrayed by a glint of light catching the glass of her spectacles. And she heard her saying, “Well, that’s got rid of her for the time being. She’ll be off for … ” And the other conspirator would say
“She’ll be off for ever, not that she’ll suspect it.”

The resentment welled up within her, but subsided very quickly when she reminded herself that she was putting these words into Mma Makutsi’s mouth and there was no evidence—not one scrap—that suggested that her colleague—or anybody else—wanted her out of the way. Even so, she saw no reason at all to take a holiday—none whatsoever. And Mma Makutsi would never betray her; she just would not. There were some people about whom one could say that sort of thing—and Mma Makutsi was one such person—but generally one had to be careful about trusting the rest of humanity; sometimes the people who were closest to you were also those who were furthest away. One should remember that, she told herself: there were no plots being hatched against her—there just were not. But how do you know that? asked a tiny voice, from somewhere down below. How can you be so sure?

She looked down at her shoes. Had they spoken? If there were any speaking shoes, then they belonged to Mma Makutsi, not to her; unless, of course, the condition, whatever it was, were an infectious one, and she had now caught it. No, that was ridiculous—patently so. She knew that any utterances that came from down below were almost certainly no more than tricks played by the mind, even if the questions they asked, or the observations they made, seemed penetrating and acute. One might hear anything, if one allowed one’s mind to wander; people said, for instance, that if you stood out under the stars above the Kalahari, under those great silver-white fields of distant light, you could hear a tsk-tsk sound that was the stars calling to their hunting dogs. But in reality there was no sound—or if there was, it came from somewhere closer at hand, from scurrying insects, timid creatures whose job it was to whistle and whisper in the darkness.

“I just know,” she muttered.

“More fool you,” said the shoes.

The seventeenth book in the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. One bright morning, Precious Ramotswe—head of Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency—receives a visitor: a woman from Australia. This woman asks Precious to take on a case: to find the nursemaid who raised her during her childhood in Botswana. The woman wants to thank her […]

CHAPTER ONE
THE CLOTHES OF OTHERS

MMA RAMOTSWE, owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (as featured in a two-page article in the Botswana Daily News, under the headline: A Lady Who Definitely Knows How to Find Things Out), had strong views on the things that she owned. Personal pos­sessions, she thought, should be simple, well made and not too expensive. Mma Ramotswe was generous in all those circumstances where generosity was required—but she was never keen to pay one hundred pula for something that could be obtained elsewhere for eighty pula, or to get rid of any item that, although getting on a bit, still served its purpose well enough. And that, she thought, was the most important consideration of all—whether something worked. A possession did not have to be fashionable; it did not have to be the very latest thing; what mattered was that it did what it was supposed to do, and did this in the way expected of it. In that respect, there was not much difference between things and people: what she looked for in people was the quality of doing what they were meant to do, and doing it without too much fuss, noise or complaint. She also felt that if something was doing its job then you should hold on to it and cherish it, rather than discarding it in favour of something new. Her white van, for instance, was now rather old and inclined to rattle, but it never failed to start—except after a rain storm, which was rare enough in a dry country like Botswana—and it got her from place to place—except when she ran out of fuel, or when it broke down, which it did from time to time, but not too often.

She applied the same philosophy to her shoes and clothing. It was true that she was always trying to persuade her husband, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, to get rid of his old shirts and jackets, but that was because he, like all men, or certainly the majority of men, tended to hold on to his clothes for far too long. His shoes were an example of that failing: he usually extracted at least four years’ service out of his oil- stained working boots, his veldschoen. He recognised her dis­taste for these shoes by removing them when he came back from the garage each evening, but he was adamant that any other footwear, including the new waterproof oil- resistant work boots he had seen featured in a mail order catalogue, would be a pointless extravagance.

“There is no point in having fancy boots if you’re a mechanic,” he said. “What you need is boots that you know will always be there.”

“But new boots would also always be there,” she pointed out. “It’s not as if they would march off by themselves.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni laughed. “Oh, I don’t think shoes would be that disobedient,” he said. “What I mean is that you want shoes that you know—that you trust. I have always liked those boots. They are the ones I’ve always worn. I know my way around them.”

Mma Ramotswe looked puzzled. “But surely there’s not much to know about shoes,” she argued. “All you have to know is which way round they go. You wouldn’t want to put them on back to front, nor put the left shoe on the right foot. But is there much to know beyond that?”

The conversation went nowhere, as it always did when this subject was raised, and Mma Ramotswe had come to accept that men’s clothing was a lost cause. There might be a small number of men who were conscious of their apparel and did not hold on to old shoes and clothes for too long, but if there were, then she certainly was not married to one of them. Her own clothes were a quite different matter, of course. She did not spend an excessive amount on dresses, or on shoes for that matter, but she believed in quality and would never buy cheap clothes for the sake of saving a few pula. What she wanted from her clothes was the ability to stand up to the normal demands of the working day, easy laundering, and, if at all possible, light ironing qualities. If clothes had that, then it did not matter if they were not of the latest style or were of a colour that had ceased to be fashionable. If Mma Ramotswe was comfortable in them, and if they responded to the structural challenges posed by the tradition­ally built figure, then she embraced them enthusiastically, and they, in their way, reciprocated—particularly with those parts of her figure that needed support.

Given this attitude to the functionality of clothes, it was no sur­prise that she and her erstwhile assistant, now her co- director, Mma Grace Makutsi, wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti of the Double Comfort Furniture Store, should not see eye to eye on fashion matters. When she had first started at the agency, Mma Makutsi had not been in a position to spend much money on clothing. In fact, she could spend no money on clothes, for the simple reason that she had none. What savings Mma Makutsi and her family had were committed almost entirely to the fees she had to pay the Botswana Secretarial College, leaving very little for anything else. Then, when she was given the job at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe had been unable to pay her much of a salary, as the truth of the matter was that the agency’s minuscule profits did not really justify the employment of any staff.

But Mma Makutsi had talked herself into the job and had been prepared to accept the tiny salary on the grounds that in the fullness of time things would surely look up. They did, and when she found she had a bit of money in her pocket—although not all that much—she spent at least some of it on replacements for her two increasingly worn dresses. She also splashed out on some new shoes—a hand­some pair of court shoes with green leather on the outside and blue lining within. She had never seen anything more beautiful than that pair of shoes, and they had imparted a spring to her step that Mma Ramotswe, and all others dealing with Mma Makutsi, had noticed, even if they did not know to attribute it to new footwear.

Following her marriage to Phuti Radiphuti, Mma Makutsi’s ward­robe expanded. Phuti was well off, and although he did not believe in flaunting wealth, he was strongly of the view that the wife of a man of his standing, with his herd of over six hundred cattle, should be dressed in a way that was commensurate with her station in life.

Mma Ramotswe had helped Mma Makutsi on that first big spending spree, when they had gone to the Riverwalk shops and pur­chased a dozen dresses, several petticoats, a rail of blouses and, of course, several pairs of new shoes.

“It’s not that I’d buy all these things,” Mma Makutsi had observed apologetically. “You know that I am not one of these people who like to wear a different outfit every day—you know that, don’t you, Mma Ramotswe?”

It had seemed to Mma Ramotswe that Mma Makutsi needed reassurance, as we all do from time to time, and she gave it. “Nobody would accuse you of being that sort of lady, Mma,” she said, as they staggered through under the weight of numerous boxes and bags to Mma Ramotswe’s tiny white van. “I certainly wouldn’t.”

“It’s Phuti, you see,” explained Mma Makutsi. “He wants me to look smart.”

“That’s very good,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is better to have a husband who knows what you are wearing than to have one who doesn’t even notice. Some men never notice, you know. They have no idea what women are wearing.”

“That is a great pity for their wives and girlfriends,” said Mma Makutsi. “It must be very discouraging to dress up all the time only to find that your husband doesn’t even see what you have on.”

The taste of the two women was similar in some respects—but different in others. Their views diverged on shoes, but they both agreed that women should dress modestly and should not wear skirts that were too short. This view was probably shared by the vast major­ity of women in Botswana, even if not by absolutely all of them. Some young women, they had noticed, seemed to have picked up the idea that the more leg a skirt displayed, the more fashionable it was.

“I do not understand that,” said Mma Makutsi. “Men know that women have legs—that is one of the things that they learn at an early age. So why do you have to show them that you have legs, when they are already well aware of that?”

Mma Ramotswe agreed. She might not have put it exactly that way herself, but she shared the general sentiment.

Mma Makutsi was warming to her theme. “Of course, I remem­ber the first time I saw really short skirts,” she went on. “It was when I came down from Bobonong and I went to enrol at the Botswana Secretarial College. I remember that day very well, Mma.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It must have been very different for you, coming from Bobonong and then finding yourself in Gaborone.”

Mma Makutsi stiffened. “Why, Mma? Why do you think that?”

Mma Ramotswe quickly corrected herself. Mma Makutsi was proud of Bobonong and she would not wish to offend her. One of the things she had learned about human nature was that people tended to be inordinately proud of the place they came from, and that any disparaging remark about that place was hurtful—even if it hap­pened to be true. There were some towns—indeed some countries—that were, by all accounts, difficult places to live; and yet even if everything that was said about them was true, you could not say as much to people who came from such places. What they wanted to hear was that you had heard good reports of their home town or their country, and that one day you hoped you would be able to visit it. That brought smiles of satisfaction and assurances that half of what was said or written about the place in question being difficult—or downright dangerous—was exaggeration and lies.

“What I mean,” Mma Ramotswe said, “is that Bobonong is not as big as Gaborone. That is all. I was thinking of how it must feel to come from a small place to a big place. There is nothing wrong with Bobonong, Mma. It is a very fine place.”

Mollified by this explanation, Mma Makutsi pointed out that Mma Ramotswe had herself made a similar transition. “Of course, you came from Mochudi, Mma,” she said. “That is just a village, after all.”

“Well, there we are,” said Mma Ramotswe, relieved at the defus­ing of the discussion. “We are both village girls at heart.” She paused, and then added, “But coping very well in the city—both of us.”

They returned to Mma Makutsi’s first day at the Botswana Sec­retarial College and to the topic of short skirts.

“There I was,” Mma Makutsi continued. “I was, I admit it, a bit nervous about being at college. There were thirty- two girls in my year and they all seemed to be so much more confident than I was. They knew Gaborone well, and talked about places I had never even heard of—about which shop sold what, and where you could get your hair or nails done. These were things I’d never even thought about, let alone explored, and I was very much out of it, Mma. I had no idea what to say.”

“We’ve all had that sort of experience,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Every one of us, Mma. We’ve all had a first day at school, or a first day in a new job. We’ve all been unsure what to do.”

Mma Makutsi gazed out of the window. “I just sat there, Mma. I sat at the back of the class with all these other girls talking to one another as if they had been friends for many years. I knew nobody, Mma—not a single soul. And then . . .”

Mma Ramotswe waited. She could picture Mma Makutsi in those early days at the Botswana Secretarial College—earnest and attentive, desperate to make a success of this great chance she had been given, trying hard not to worry about where the next pula or thebe was coming from; hungry, no doubt, because she would have had to choose between food and textbooks, and would have chosen the latter.

Mma Makutsi took off her large round spectacles and began to polish them. Mma Ramotswe had noticed that this was an action that preceded the recollection of something painful, and so she was not too surprised by what followed.

“And then,” she continued, “at the end of that very first lecture—it was a lecture on the importance of high standards, Mma, and it was delivered by the principal herself—at the end of that first lecture we went outside for a short break. Because I was sitting at the back, I was the last out, and the others were all standing in groups, all chatting in the same way as they had been earlier on. I did not know where to go and so I was pleased when one of the girls called me over to join her group. She said, ‘Why don’t you come and talk to us?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll come.’ ”

Mma Makutsi replaced her spectacles. “And do you know who that was, Mma Ramotswe? That was Violet Sephotho.”

“Ah,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“Yes,” Mma Makutsi said. “It was her.”

“And was that the first time you had seen her, Mma?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Makutsi nodded. “I must have seen her in the lecture room, but I had not really noticed her. Now I noticed her, because nobody could miss what she was wearing.”

“Oh, I can imagine it,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“Can you, Mma? I think it may have been even worse than what you think. A very short skirt, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe did not find that surprising.

“The skirt was red, Mma, and then there was a blouse that was hardly a blouse. In fact, you might even have thought that her blouse was made from that stuff they make curtains out of—you know those curtains you can sort of see out of—not proper curtains. What do they call that material, Mma?”

“That’s it. Phuti’s aunt has curtains like that in her bathroom. I am sure people in the street can look right through them, and so when we go to visit her I always hang a towel over the window, just in case.”

“That is very wise, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “People have no business looking into the bathrooms of other people.”

“They certainly do not, Mma. Or through any other windows for that matter.”

Mma Ramotswe pursed her lips. She was about to agree, but realised that she herself occasionally—and only very occasionally—glanced through the windows of others if she was passing by. She would never go up to the window and peer inside—that was very wrong—but if you were walking along a street and you walked past a window, then surely it was permissible to have a quick glance, just to see the sort of furniture that they liked, or the pictures on the wall, or possibly to see who was sitting in the room. If people did not want anybody to see what was going on in the room, then they should pull down a blind or something of that sort—an open window was an indication, surely, that they did not mind if passers- by looked in.

And, of course, as a private detective you had to know what was going on. If you kept your eyes fixed straight ahead of you, then you would be unable to gather the sort of everyday intelligence that was part and parcel of your job, and without that intelligence your ability to help others would be limited. So, looking through an open window was not so much an act of idle curiosity, it was an act of consider­ation for others . . . But this was not the time to have that debate with Mma Makutsi, and so she waited to hear more about this early encounter with Violet Sephotho.

“So, she called you over, Mma?” prompted Mma Ramotswe.

“Yes, she called me over. And then she said, in a loud voice, ‘Mma, tell me: are you going to a funeral today?’ ”

Mma Ramotswe drew in her breath; she thought she could tell what was coming.

“She asked me that, Mma Ramotswe,” Mma Makutsi continued. “And I did not know why she should say that. So I told her that I was not going to a funeral, and why did she think I was? She did not reply immediately, but looked at the others and then said, ‘Because you’re dressed as if you are.’ ”

Mma Ramotswe expelled air through her teeth. It was the most dismissive, disapproving gesture she knew, and this was precisely the sort of situation that called for it.

“The other girls all burst out laughing,” Mma Makutsi said. “And Violet was very pleased with herself. She smiled and said that she hoped I had not taken offence, but being a secretary was different from being an undertaker, and so were the clothes you should wear for the job.

“The others thought this very funny, and they all laughed. Have you noticed, Mma Ramotswe, how people love to join in when one person is laughing at another? We like to do things together, it seems, even if the thing everybody is doing is cruel or unkind.”

Mma Ramotswe thought about this. Mma Makutsi was right. “Especially if the thing is cruel or unkind,” she said. But then she added, “But that is only a certain sort of person we’re talking about there, Mma. And I think that most people are not like that. Most people do not want others to suffer. Most people are kind enough right deep down in their hearts.”

“Not Violet Sephotho,” said Mma Makutsi.

“Perhaps not,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Although even Violet might change one day, Mma. Nobody is so bad that there is no chance of change.”

Mma Makutsi looked doubtful. “You’re too kind sometimes, Mma,” she said.

“Perhaps,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But you’d think the college would have told her to dress more modestly.”

“I think they did,” said Mma Makutsi. “Not directly, of course—they gave us all a lecture on the importance of high standards in the way in which we presented ourselves. They told us that when we dressed for the office each day we should dress as if we believed that the President was going to call in and inspect us.”

“And what did Violet Sephotho make of that?”

“She just smiled,” said Mma Makutsi. “She smiled and then later on she said to the others that she knew what the President would like to see if he came to inspect an office. It would not be formal clothes but rather the sort of clothes that she wore—bright and optimistic clothes, she called them.”

“Nonsense,” said Mma Ramotswe. “The President does not want to see that sort of thing. Look at what he wears himself. He wears sober dark suits. He wears khaki when he has to go out into the country.”

“That is for camouflage,” said Mma Makutsi. “It is so that he can­not be seen by lions and wildebeest and such things.”

Mma Ramotswe looked doubtful. “I’m not sure about that, Mma. But anyway, I don’t think we shall ever get a visit from the President.”

The mention of camouflage made her think. It could be unnerv­ing if a very important visitor were to come into the office wearing camouflage. He might be there for some time before anybody noticed him, lurking by the filing cabinet, perhaps, or in a corner, watching, waiting.

“Stranger things have happened,” said Mma Makutsi. “You never know.”

That, thought Mma Ramotswe, was true: you never knew.
 
Excerpted from The House of Unexpected Sisters by Alexander McCall Smith. Copyright © 2017 by Alexander McCall Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.