In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (14 page)

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Ramotswe looked discreetly at its contents; yes, there was cake— two large slices of fruit cake of the sort that she always hoped for when she visited the orphan farm. The absence of cake from the tray could have meant that she was for some reason in disfavour or disgrace; but fortunately that was not the case today.

Mma Potokwane reached forward and placed the larger slice of cake on her friend’s plate. Then she placed the other piece on her own plate and began to pour the tea.

“The question you have asked is a very important one, Mma,” she pronounced, picking up her slice of cake and taking a bite. “I must think about it. Maybe there are people who would say that I eat too much cake.”

“But you do not eat too much, do you?” observed Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Potokwane’s response came quickly. “No, I do not. I do not eat too much cake.” She paused, and looked wistfully at her now emptying plate. “Sometimes I would like to eat too much cake. That is certainly true. Sometimes I am tempted.”

Mma Ramotswe sighed. “We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.”

“That is true,” said Mma Potokwane sadly. “There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them.”

For a few moments neither of them said anything. Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window, at the tree outside, and beyond that at the sky, which was an empty light blue, endless, endless. A large bird, a buzzard perhaps, was circling on high on a current of air, a tiny, soaring point of black, looking for food, of course, as all of us did, in one way or another.

She looked away from the sky and back towards Mma Potokwane,

who was watching her, the faintest of smiles playing about her lips.

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“Temptation is very difficult,” said Mma Ramotswe quietly. “I do not always resist it. I am not a strong woman in that respect.”

“I am glad you said that,” said Mma Potokwane. “I am not strong either. For example, right at the moment, I am thinking of cake.”

“And so am I,” confessed Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Potokwane stood up and shouted to the girl outside. “Two more pieces of cake, please. Two big slices.”

THE CAKE FINISHED and the tray tidied away, they settled down with their mugs of tea to continue the conversation. Mma Ramotswe

thought that she would begin with the puzzle of the pumpkin,

which had been rather forgotten about in all the recent excitement, but which was still something of a mystery. So she told Mma Potokwane about the disturbing experience of finding herself in the house with an intruder, and then the even more alarming discovery that the intruder was under her bed.

Mma Potokwane shrieked with laughter when Mma Ramotswe

described how the intruder’s trousers had been caught on a bedspring.

“You might have crushed him, Mma,” she said. “You could have broken his ribs.”

Mma Ramotswe thought that the same might be said of any intruder who was unwise enough to hide under Mma Potokwane’s bed, but she did not point this out.

“But then the next morning,” she went on, “I found a beautiful

pumpkin in front of the house. Somebody had taken the trousers and left a pumpkin in the place of the trousers. What do you make of that, Mma?”

Mma Potokwane frowned. “You have decided that the pumpkin

was put there by the person who took the trousers, but are

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they connected? Might the pumpkin and the trousers be two quite separate matters? You have a pumpkin person, who brings the pumpkin—while the trousers are still there—and then you have a trousers person who takes the trousers and does not touch the pumpkin. That might be what happened.”

“But who would bring a pumpkin and leave it there without any explanation?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Would you do such a thing?”

Mma Potokwane scratched her head. “I do not think that I would leave a pumpkin at somebody’s house unless I told them why. You would leave a message with the pumpkin, or you would tell the person later: that was me who left that pumpkin there.”

“That is right,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is what most people would do.”

“Mind you,” said Mma Potokwane, “we have had people leave gifts out here at the gate. Once I found a box of food just sitting there, with no note. Some kind person had left it for the children.”

“That is good,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But then it is a bit different,

isn’t it? I am not a charity. Nobody would leave a pumpkin because they felt that I was in need of pumpkins.”

Mma Potokwane saw the reason in this and was about to make an observation to this effect when she stopped herself short. Another possibility had occurred to her. Mma Ramotswe was assuming that the pumpkin had been intended for her, but what if somebody had placed it there by mistake? It was possible that somebody had intended the pumpkin for somebody else who lived on Zebra Drive but had delivered it to the wrong house. She was about to suggest this when she was stopped by Mma Ramotswe.

“Does it matter?” mused Mma Ramotswe. “Here we are talking

about a pumpkin. There are plenty of pumpkins in this counI

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try. Is it sensible to spend one’s time talking about pumpkins when there are more important things to talk about?”

Mma Potokwane agreed with this. “You are quite right,” she said. “We have talked about this pumpkin for long enough. So let us talk about something more important.”

Mma Ramotswe did not waste time. “Well,” she said. “We have a very big problem with Charlie. I think that this problem is even bigger than the thorn that he got in the back of his trousers when he did that parachute jump.”

“It is to do with a woman?” prompted Mma Potokwane.

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Now listen to this.”

Mma Potokwane settled back in her chair. She had had a soft spot for Charlie since he had done the parachute jump for the benefit of the orphan farm. She considered him something of a character, and the prospect of hearing some juicy bit of information

about his amorous entanglements was an interesting one. But then she remembered that there was something that she had meant to mention to Mma Ramotswe. It would be important to bring this up before Mma Ramotswe got into full flow, otherwise she might forget. So she raised a hand to interrupt.

“Before you begin, Mma,” she said, “there’s something I thought I should tell you about.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at her friend expectantly. She wondered

whether Mma Potokwane perhaps already knew about Charlie’s affair and might even be able to tell her about the woman involved. Mma Potokwane knew so much about what was going on that it would not be at all surprising if she knew exactly who it was who had been at the wheel of that sleek silver Mercedes-Benz.

“You’ll never guess who I saw in town the other day,” said Mma Potokwane. “I could hardly believe it.”

“I cannot guess,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Was it somebody well-known?”

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“A bit,” said Mma Potokwane enigmatically. “Well-known in the jazz world, perhaps.”

Mma Ramotswe said nothing, waiting for Mma Potokwane to continue.

“Note,” she said simply. “Note Mokoti, your first husband. Remember him?”

MMA MAKUTSI FINDS OUT MORE ABOUT

MR PHUTI RADIPHUTI

WHILE MMA RAMOTSWE was embarking on her second slice of cake with Mma Potokwane, Mma Makutsi was still at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, tidying up. Mma Ramotswe had given her permission to close early that day since she herself was effectively taking the entire afternoon off. They were still busy with the affairs of a number of clients, but there was nothing that could not wait, and Mma Ramotswe knew that Mma Makutsi would like to have adequate time to get ready for her dancing class, the second one, which would be held that evening.

Mma Makutsi had finished the day’s filing—a task which, as had been drummed into her at the Botswana Secretarial College, should never be left to lie over for the following day. This message had come from no less a person than the Principal herself, a tall, imposing woman who had brought the highest standards to the secretarial profession in Botswana.

“Don’t let paper lie about, girls,” she had admonished them. “Let each paper cross your desk once, and once only. That is a very good rule. Put everything away. Imagine that at night there are big paper rats that will come out and eat all the paper on your desk!”

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That had been a very clever way of putting it, thought Mma Makutsi. The idea of the paper rat coming out at night to eat unfiled letters was a vivid one, and she had thought that it was not helpful of those silly, glamorous girls in the back row to laugh like that at what the Principal had said. The trouble with those girls had been that they were not committed secretaries. Everybody

knew that most of them came to the Botswana Secretarial College simply because they had worked out that the best way of marrying a man with a good job and a lot of money was to become a secretary to such a man. So they went through the College course looking bored and making very little effort. It would have been different, it occurred to Mma Makutsi, had there been a part of the curriculum entitled: How to Marry Your Boss. That would have been very popular with those girls, and they would have paid very close attention to such a course.

In an idle moment, Mma Makutsi had speculated as to the possible contents of a course of this name. Some of the time would be devoted to psychology and this part would include lessons

on how men think. That was very important if one was the sort of girl who planned to trap a man. You had to know what attracted men and what frightened them. Mma Makutsi thought about this. What attracted men? Good looks? Certainly if a girl was pretty then she tended to get the attention of men; that was beyond any doubt at all. But it was not just prettiness that mattered,

because there were many girls who did not look anything special but who seemed to find no difficulty in making men notice them. These girls dressed in a very careful way; they knew which colours appealed to men (red, and other bright colours; men were like cattle in that respect), and they knew how to walk and sit down in a way which would make men sit up and take notice. The walk was important: it should not be a simple walk, with one leg going forward, to be followed by the other; no, the

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legs had to bend and twist a bit, almost as if one was thinking of walking in a circle. And then there was the delicate issue of what to do with one’s bottom while one was walking. Some people thought that one could just leave one’s bottom to follow one when one was walking. Not so. A mere glance at any glamorous girl would show that the bottom had to be more involved.

Mma Makutsi thought about all this as she tidied the office that afternoon. It was all very dispiriting. She had been dismayed to see that woman at the dance class—the woman whose name she had forgotten but who had been one of the worst, the very worst, of the glamorous girls at the Botswana Secretarial College. The sight of that woman dancing with such a handsome man, while she, Mma Makutsi, stumbled about the floor with poor Phuti Radiphuti, struggling to make out what he was trying to say; that sight had been immensely depressing. And then there was the question of her glasses, so large that people saw themselves

reflected and did not even bother to see the person behind the lenses. What could she do about those? Glasses were very expensive, and although she was better off now, she had so many other costs to meet—higher rent for her new house, new clothes to be bought, and more money needed by those at home in Bobonong.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the arrival at the door of Mr Polopetsi. He had been working at the garage for several days now and had made a very good impression on all of them. Mr

J.L.B. Matekoni had been particularly pleased with the way inwhich he had tidied the store cupboards. Cans of oil had been placed on shelves according to size, and parts had been organised according to make.

“You need a system,” Mr Polopetsi had announced. “Then you will know when it is time to order more spark plugs and the like. This is called stock control.”

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He had also scrubbed the garage floor, removing several large patches of oil which the apprentices had never bothered to do anything about.

“Somebody might slip,” said Mr Polopetsi. “You have to be very careful.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was delighted with this pronouncement, and drew it to the attention of the remaining apprentice.

“Did you hear that, young man?” he said. “Did you hear what Polopetsi said? Carefulness. Have you heard that word before? Do you know what it means?”

The younger apprentice said nothing, but stared at Mr Polopetsi

in a surly way. He had been suspicious of this new employee ever since he had arrived, although Mr Polopetsi had been polite to him and had made every effort to win him over. Observing this, it had been clear to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni that their assumption that Charlie would soon hear that his place had been usurped was perfectly

correct. But he was not sure that Charlie would respond in quite the way Mma Ramotswe had anticipated. However, they would see in due course, and for the time being the important thing was that the work in the garage was getting done.

Mr Polopetsi, in fact, had shown considerable talent for the simpler mechanical tasks which Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had given him. Watching the way he changed an air filter, or examined the oil on an engine’s dip stick, made Mr J.L.B. Matekoni realise that this man had a feeling for cars, something which some mechanics

never developed but which was a necessity if one was to become really good at the job.

“You like engines, don’t you?” he said to Mr Polopetsi at the end of his first day. “I can tell that you understand them. Have you worked with them before?”

“Never,” admitted Mr Polopetsi. “I do not know the names of all the parts or what they do. This bit here, for example, what does it do?”

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Mr J.L.B. Matekoni peered at the engine. “That,” he said, “is a very interesting bit. That is the distributor. It is the bit which sends the electric current in the right direction.”