Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (6 page)

She took the wrapped
parcel which he gave her, and felt his hand upon her shoulder, and heard him
whisper: “You are the most truthful child I have met. Well
done.”

Then the ceremony was over, and a little later they
returned to Mochudi in the Principal’s bumpy truck, a heroine returning,
a bearer of prizes.

CHAPTER
FOUR

LIVING WITH THE COUSIN AND
THE COUSIN’S
HUSBAND

A
T THE age of sixteen, Mma Ramotswe left
school (“The best girl in this school,” pronounced the Principal.
“One of the best girls in Botswana.”) Her father had wanted her to
stay on, to do her Cambridge School Certificate, and to go even beyond that,
but Mma Ramotswe was bored with Mochudi. She was bored, too, with working in
the Upright Small General Dealer, where every Saturday she did the stocktaking
and spent hours ticking off items on dog-eared stock lists. She wanted to go
somewhere. She wanted her life to start.

“You can go to my
cousin,” her father said. “That is a very different place. I think
that you will find lots of things happening in that house.”

It
cost him a great deal of pain to say this. He wanted her to stay, to look after
him, but he knew that it would be selfish to expect her life to revolve around
his. She wanted freedom; she wanted to feel that she was doing something with
her life. And of course, at the back of his mind, was the thought of marriage.
In a very short time, he knew, there would be men wanting to marry her.

He would never deny her that, of course. But what if the man who wanted to
marry her was a bully, or a drunkard, or a womaniser? All of this was possible;
there was any number of men like that, waiting for an attractive girl that they
could latch on to and whose life they could slowly destroy. These men were like
leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman’s heart until it was
dry and all her love had been used up. That took a long time, he knew, because
women seemed to have vast reservoirs of goodness in them.

If one of
these men claimed Precious, then what could he, a father, do? He could warn her
of the risk, but whoever listened to warnings about somebody they loved? He had
seen it so often before; love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to
the most glaring faults. You could love a murderer, and simply not believe that
your lover would do so much as crush a tick, let alone kill somebody. There
would be no point trying to dissuade her.

The cousin’s house
would be as safe as anywhere, even if it could not protect her from men. At
least the cousin could keep an eye on her niece, and her husband might be able
to chase the most unsuitable men away. He was a rich man now, with more than
five buses, and he would have that authority that rich men had. He might be
able to send some of the young men packing.

THE COUSIN was pleased to have Precious in the house. She decorated a room
for her, hanging new curtains of a thick yellow material which she had bought
from the OK Bazaars on a shopping trip to Johannesburg. Then she filled a chest
of drawers with clothes and put on top of it a framed picture of the Pope. The
floor was covered with a simply patterned reed mat. It was a bright,
comfortable room.

Precious settled quickly into a new routine. She was
given a job in the office of the bus company, where she added invoices and
checked the figures in the drivers’ records. She was quick at this, and
the cousin’s husband noticed that she was doing as much work as the two
older clerks put together. They sat at their tables and gossiped away the day,
occasionally moving invoices about the desk, occasionally getting up to put on
the kettle.

It was easy for Precious, with her memory, to remember how
to do new things and to apply the knowledge faultlessly. She was also willing
to make suggestions, and scarcely a week went past in which she failed to make
some suggestion as to how the office could be more efficient.

“You’re working too hard,” one of the clerks said to her.
“You’re trying to take our jobs.”

Precious looked at
them blankly. She had always worked as hard as she could, at everything she
did, and she simply did not understand how anybody could do otherwise. How
could they sit there, as they did, and stare into the space in front of their
desks when they could be adding up figures or checking the drivers’
returns?

She did her own checking, often unasked, and although
everything usually added up, now and then she found a small discrepancy. These
came from the giving of incorrect change, the cousin explained. It was easy
enough to do on a crowded bus, and as long as it was not too significant, they
just ignored it. But Precious found more than this. She found a discrepancy of
slightly over two thousand pula in the fuel bills invoices and she drew this to
the attention of her cousin’s husband.

“Are you
sure?” he asked. “How could two thousand pula go
missing?”

“Stolen?” said Precious.

The
cousin’s husband shook his head. He regarded himself as a model
employer—a paternalist, yes, but that is what the men wanted, was it not?
He could not believe that any of his employees would cheat him. How could they,
when he was so good to them and did so much for them?

Precious showed
him how the money had been taken, and they jointly pieced together how it had
been moved out of the right account into another one, and had then eventually
vanished altogether. Only one of the clerks had access to these funds, so it
must have been him; there could be no other explanation. She did not see the
confrontation, but heard it from the other room. The clerk was indignant,
shouting his denial at the top of his voice. Then there was silence for a
moment, and the slamming of a door.

This was her first case. This was
the beginning of the career of Mma Ramotswe.

The Arrival of Note
Mokoti

There were four years of working in the bus office. The
cousin and her husband became accustomed to her presence and began to call her
their daughter. She did not mind this; they were her people, and she loved
them. She loved the cousin, even if she still treated her as a child and
scolded her publicly. She loved the cousin’s husband, with his sad,
scarred face and his large, mechanic’s hands. She loved the house, and
her room with its yellow curtains. It was a good life that she had made for
herself.

Every weekend she travelled up to Mochudi on one of the
cousin’s husband’s buses and visited her father. He would be
waiting outside the house, sitting on his stool, and she would curtsey before
him, in the old way, and clap her hands.

Then they would eat together,
sitting in the shade of the lean-to verandah which he had erected to the side
of the house. She would tell him about the week’s activity in the bus
office and he would take in every detail, asking for names, which he would link
into elaborate genealogies. Everybody was related in some way; there was nobody
who could not be fitted into the far-flung corners of family.

It was
the same with cattle. Cattle had their families, and after she had finished
speaking, he would tell her the cattle news. Although he rarely went out to the
cattle post, he had reports every week and he could run the lives of the cattle
through the herd-boys. He had an eye for cattle, an uncanny ability to detect
traits in calves that would blossom in maturity. He could tell, at a glance,
whether a calf which seemed puny, and which was therefore cheap, could be
brought on and fattened. And he backed this judgement, and bought such animals,
and made them into fine, butterfat cattle (if the rains were good).

He
said that people were like their cattle. Thin, wretched cattle had thin,
wretched owners. Listless cattle—cattle which wandered
aimlessly—had owners whose lives lacked focus. And dishonest people, he
maintained, had dishonest cattle—cattle which would cheat other cattle of
food or which would try to insinuate themselves into the herds of others.

Obed Ramotswe was a severe judge—of men and cattle—and she
found herself thinking: what will he say when he finds out about Note
Mokoti?

SHE HAD met Note Mokoti on a bus on
the way back from Mochudi. He was travelling down from Francistown and was
sitting in the front, his trumpet case on the seat beside him. She could not
help but notice him in his red shirt and seersucker trousers; nor fail to see
the high cheekbones and the arched eyebrows. It was a proud face, the face of a
man used to being looked at and appreciated, and she dropped her eyes
immediately. She would not want him to think she was looking at him, even if
she continued to glance at him from her seat. Who was this man? A musician,
with that case beside him; a clever person from the University perhaps?

The bus stopped in Gaborone before going south on the road to Lobatse. She
stayed in her seat, and saw him get up. He stood up, straightened the crease of
his trousers, and then turned and looked down the bus. She felt her heart jump;
he had looked at her; no, he had not, he was looking out of the window.

Suddenly, without thinking, she got to her feet and took her bag down from
the rack. She would get off, not because she had anything to do in Gaborone,
but because she wanted to see what he did. He had left the bus now and she
hurried, muttering a quick explanation to the driver, one of her cousin’s
husband’s men. Out in the crowd, out in the late afternoon sunlight,
redolent of dust and hot travellers, she looked about her and saw him, standing
not far away. He had bought a roast mealie from a hawker, and was eating it
now, making lines down the cob. She felt that unsettling sensation again and
she stopped where she stood, as if she were a stranger who was uncertain where
to go.

He was looking at her, and she turned away flustered. Had he
seen her watching him? Perhaps. She looked up again, quickly glancing in his
direction, and he smiled at her this time and raised his eyebrows. Then,
tossing the mealie cob away, he picked up the trumpet case and walked over
towards her. She was frozen, unable to walk away, mesmerised like prey before a
snake.

“I saw you on that bus,” he said. “I thought I
had seen you before. But I haven’t.”

She looked down at the
ground.

“I have never seen you,” she said.
“Ever.”

He smiled. He was not frightening, she thought, and
some of her awkwardness left her.

“You see most people in this
country once or twice,” he said. “There are no
strangers.”

She nodded. “That is true.”

There
was a silence. Then he pointed to the case at his feet.

“This is
a trumpet, you know. I am a musician.”

She looked at the case. It
had a sticker on it; a picture of a man playing a guitar.

“Do you
like music?” he asked. “Jazz? Quella?”

She looked up,
and saw that he was still smiling at her.

“Yes. I like
music.”

“I play in a band,” he said. “We play
in the bar at the President Hotel. You could come and listen. I am going there
now.”

They walked to the bar, which was only ten minutes or so
from the bus stop. He bought her a drink and sat her at a table at the back, a
table with one seat at it to discourage others. Then he played, and she
listened, overcome by the sliding, slippery music, and proud that she knew this
man, that she was his guest. The drink was strange and bitter; she did not like
the taste of alcohol, but drinking was what you did in bars and she was
concerned that she would seem out of place or too young and people would notice
her.

Afterwards, when the band had its break, he came to join her, and
she saw that his brow was glistening with the effort of playing.

“I’m not playing well today,” he said. “There are
some days when you can and some days when you can’t.”

“I thought you were very good. You played well.”

“I don’t think so. I can play better. There are days when the
trumpet just talks to me. I don’t have to do anything then.”

She saw that people were looking at them, and that one or two women were
staring at her critically. They wanted to be where she was, she could tell.
They wanted to be with Note.

He put her on the late bus after they had
left the bar, and stood and waved to her as the bus drew away. She waved back
and closed her eyes. She had a boyfriend now, a jazz musician, and she would be
seeing him again, at his request, the following Friday night, when they were
playing at a braaivleis at the Gaborone Club. Members of the band, he said,
always took their girlfriends, and she would meet some interesting people
there, good-quality people, people she would not normally meet.

And
that is where Note Mokoti proposed to Precious Ramotswe and where she accepted
him, in a curious sort of way, without saying anything. It was after the band
had finished and they were sitting in the darkness, away from the noise of the
drinkers in the bar. He said: “I want to get married soon and I want to
get married to you. You are a nice girl who will do very well for a
wife.”