Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 (15 page)

“You have packed this well,” he said, making
conversation as they drove the short distance to her new house. “I move
things for people all the time. But they often have many boxes and plastic bags
full of things. Sometimes they also have a grandmother to be moved, and I have
to put the old lady in the back of the truck with all the other
things.”

“That is no way to treat a grandmother,”
said Mma Makutsi. “The grandmother should ride in the front.”

“I agree, Mma,” said the young man. “Those people who put
their grandmother in the back of the truck, they will feel sorry when the
grandmother is late. They will remember that they put her in the back of the
truck, and it will be too late to do anything about it.”

Mma
Makutsi replied to this observation civilly, and the rest of the journey was
completed in silence. She had the key of the house in the pocket of her blouse
and she felt for it from time to time just to reassure herself that it was
really there. She was thinking, too, of how she would arrange the
furniture—such as it was—and how she might see about a rug for her
new bedroom. That was a previously undreamed-of luxury; she had woken every day
of her life to a packed earth floor or to plain concrete. Now she might afford
a rug which would feel so soft underfoot, like a covering of new grass. She
closed her eyes and thought of what lay ahead—the luxury of having her
own shower—with hot water!—and the pleasure, the sheer pleasure, of
having an extra room in which she could entertain people if she wished. She
could invite friends to have a meal with her, and nobody would have to sit on a
bed or look at her tin trunk. She could buy a radio and they could listen to
music together, Mma Makutsi and her friends, and they would talk about
important things, and all the humiliations of the shared stand-pipe would be a
thing of the past.

She kept her eyes closed until they were almost
there and then opened them and saw the house, which seemed smaller now than she
had remembered it, but which was still so beautiful in her eyes, with its
sloping roof and its paw-paw trees.

“This is your place,
Mma?” asked the driver.

“It’s my house,” said
Mma Makutsi, savouring the words.

“You’re lucky,”
said the young man. “This is a good place to live. How many pula is the
rent? What do you pay?”

Mma Makutsi told him and he whistled.
“That is a lot! I could not afford a place like this. I have to live in
half a room over that way, half way to Molepolole.”

“That
cannot be easy,” said Mma Makutsi.

They drew up in front of the
gate, and Mma Makutsi walked down the short path that led to the front door.
She had that door, and the part of the house which was lived in by the other
tenants was reached by the door at the back. She felt proud that the front door
was hers, even if it looked as if it was in need of a coat of paint. That could
be dealt with later; what counted now was that she had the key to this door in
her hand, paid for by the first month’s rent, and hers by right.

It took the young man very little time to move her possessions into the
front room. She thanked him, and gave him a ten-pula tip—overly generous,
perhaps, but she was a proper householder now and these things would be
expected of her. As she handed over the money, which he took from her with a
wide smile, she reflected on the fact that she had never done this before. She
had never before been in a position where she had given largesse, and the
thought struck her forcibly. It was an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable
feeling; I am just Mma Makutsi, from Bobonong, and I am giving this young man a
ten-pula note. I have more money than he has. I have a better house. I am where
he would like to be, but isn’t.

By herself now, in the house, Mma
Makutsi moved about her two rooms. She touched the walls; they were solid. She
loosened a window latch, letting in a warm breeze for a moment, and then closed
the window again. She switched on a light, and a bulb glowed above her; she
turned on a tap, and water, fresh, cold water came out and splashed into a
stainless steel sink, so polished and shiny that she could see her face
reflected at her, the face of a person who was looking at the world with the
cautious wonder of ownership, or at least of something close to it, of
tenancy.

There was a side door to the house, and she opened this and
peered out onto the yard. The paw-paw trees had incipient fruit upon them,
which would be ready in a month or so. There were one or two other plants,
shrubs that had wilted in the heat but which had the dogged determination of
indigenous Botswana vegetation. These would survive even if never watered; they
would cling on in the dry ground, making the most of what little moisture they
could draw from the soil, tenacious because they lived here in this dry
country, and had always lived here. Mma Ramotswe had once described the
traditional plants of Botswana as loyal and yes, that was right, thought Mma
Makutsi, that is what they are—our old friends, our fellow survivors in
this brown land that I love and love so much. Not that she thought about that
love very often, but it was there, as it was in the hearts of all Batswana. And
that was surely what most people wanted, at the end of the day; to live on the
land that they love, and nowhere else; to be where their people had been before
them, as long as anybody could remember.

She drew back from the door,
and looked about her house again. She did not see the grubby finger marks on
the wall, nor the place where the floor had buckled. What she saw was a room
with bright curtains and with friends about a table, and herself at the head;
what she heard was a pot of water boiling on a stove, to the soft hissing of a
flame.

CHAPTER TWELVE

MR BOBOLOGO TALKS ON THE SUBJECT OF LOOSE WOMEN

T
HE FACT that the schools were on holiday was convenient. Had
Mr Bobologo been teaching, then Mma Ramotswe would have been obliged to wait
until half past three, when she could have accosted him on his way to the house
that he occupied in the neat row of teachers’ houses at the back of the
school. As it was, that Monday she was able to arrive at his house at ten
o’clock and find him, as Mma Seeonyana said she would, sitting on a chair
in the sun outside his back door, a Bible on his lap. She approached him
carefully, as one always should when coming across somebody reading the Bible,
and greeted him in the approved, traditional fashion. Had he slept well? Was he
well? Would he mind if she talked to him?

Mr Bobologo looked up at
her, squinting against the sunlight, and Mma Ramotswe saw a tall man of slim
build, carefully dressed in khaki trousers and an open-necked white shirt, and
wearing a pair of round, pebble-lensed glasses. Everything about him, from the
carefully polished brown shoes to the powerful glasses, said
teacher
,
and she had to make an effort to prevent herself from smiling. People were so
predictable, she thought, so true to type. Bank managers dressed exactly as
bank managers were expected to dress—and behaved accordingly; you could
always tell a lawyer from that careful, rather watchful way they listened to
what you had to say, as if they were ready to pounce on the slightest slip;
and, since she had come to know Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, there was no mistaking
mechanics, who looked at things as if they were ready to take them apart and
make them work better. Not that this applied to all mechanics, of course; the
apprentices would be mechanics before too long and yet they looked at things as
if they were about to break them. So perhaps it took years before a calling
began to tell on a person.

Did she look like a detective, she
wondered? This was an intriguing question. If somebody saw her in the street,
they would probably not look twice at her. She was just an ordinary Motswana
lady, in the traditional mould, going about her daily business as so many other
women did. Surely nobody would suspect her of
watching
, which is what
she had to do in her job. Perhaps it was different with Mma Makutsi, with those
large glasses of hers. People noticed those glasses and clearly thought about
them. They might wonder, might they not, why somebody would need such large
glasses and they might conclude that this was because she was interested in
looking closely at things, at magnifying them. That, of course, was an absurd
vision of what she and Mma Makutsi did; they very rarely had to examine any
physical objects—human behaviour was what interested them, and all that
this required was observation and understanding.

Her observation of Mr
Bobologo lasted only a few seconds. Now he stood up, closing the Bible with
some regret, as one might close a riveting novel in which one had become
immersed. Of course Mr Bobologo would know the end of the story—which was
not a happy ending, if one thought about it carefully—but one might still
be absorbed even in the completely familiar.

“I am sorry to
disturb you,” said Mma Ramotswe. “The school holidays must be a
good time for you teachers to catch up on your reading. You will not like
people coming along and disturbing you.”

Mr Bobologo responded
well to this courteous beginning. “I am happy to see you, Mma. There will
be plenty of time for reading later on. You may sit on this chair and I will
fetch another.”

Mma Ramotswe sat on the teacher’s chair
and waited for him to return. It was a good spot that he had chosen to sit,
hidden from passers-by on the road, but with a view of the children’s
playground where even now in the holidays the children of the school staff were
engaged in some complicated game with a ball. It would be good to sit here, she
thought, knowing that the Government was still paying one’s salary every
month, and that reading, and becoming wiser and wiser, was exactly what one was
expected to do.

Mr Bobologo returned with another chair and seated
himself opposite Mma Ramotswe. He looked at her through the thick lenses of his
spectacles, and then dabbed gently at the side of his mouth with a white
handkerchief, which he then folded neatly and placed in the pocket of his
shirt.

Mma Ramotswe looked back at him and smiled. Her initial
impression of Mr Bobologo had been favourable, but she found herself wondering
why it was that a successful, rather elegant person such as Mma Holonga should
take up with this teacher, who, whatever his merits might be, was hardly a
romantic figure. But such speculation was inevitably fruitless. The choices
that people made in such circumstances were often inexplicable, and perhaps it
was no more than sheer chance. If you were in the mood for falling in love, or
marrying, then perhaps it did not matter very much whom you would see when you
turned the corner. You were looking for somebody, and there was somebody, and
you would convince yourself that this random person was what you were really
looking for in the first place.
We find what we are looking for in
life
, her father had once said to her; which was true—if you look
for happiness, you will see it; if you look for distrust and envy and
hatred—all those things—you will find those too.

“So,
Mma,” said Mr Bobologo. “Here I am. You have come to see me about
your child, I assume. I hope I can say that this boy or this girl is doing well
at school. I am sure I can. But first you must tell me what your name is, so I
know which child it is that I am talking about. That is important.”

For a few moments Mma Ramotswe was taken aback, but then she laughed.
“Oh no, Rra. Do not worry. I am not some troublesome mother who has come
to talk about her difficult child. I have come because I have heard of your
other work.”

Mr Bobologo took out his handkerchief and dabbed
again at the side of his mouth.

“I see,” he said.
“You have heard of this work that I do.” There was a note of
suspicion in his voice, Mma Ramotswe noticed, and she wondered why this should
be. Perhaps he was laughed at by others, or labelled a prude, and the thought
irritated her. There was nothing to be ashamed of in the work that he did, even
if it seemed strange for a man to have such strong views on such a matter. At
least he was trying to help address a social problem, which was more than most
people did.

“I have heard of it,” said Mma Ramotswe.
“And I thought that I would like to hear more about it. It is a good
thing that you are doing, Rra.”

Mr Bobologo’s expression
remained impassive. Mma Ramotswe thought that he was still unconvinced by what
she had said, and so she continued, “The problem of these street girls is
a very big one, Rra. Every time I see them going into bars, I think:
That
girl is somebody’s daughter
, and that makes me sad. That is what I
think, Rra.”

These words had a marked effect on Mr Bobologo.
While she was still speaking, he sat up in his chair, sharply, and stared
intensely at Mma Ramotswe.