Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 (2 page)

“There’s very little point in trying to talk to them,” Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni had observed when Mma Ramotswe subsequently told him of this
conversation. “There is something missing in their brains. Sometimes I
think it is a large part, as big as a carburettor maybe.”

Now Mma
Ramotswe heard the sound of voices coming from the garage. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
was saying something to the apprentices, and then there came a mumbling sound
as one of the young men answered. Another voice; this time raised; it was Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni.

Mma Ramotswe listened. They had done something again,
and he was reprimanding them, which was unusual. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was a mild
man, who did not like conflict, and always spoke politely. If he felt it
necessary to raise his voice, then it must have been something very annoying
indeed.

“Diesel fuel in an ordinary engine,” he said, as he
entered her office, wiping his hands on a large piece of lint. “Would you
believe it, Mma Ramotswe? That … that silly boy, the younger one, put
diesel fuel into the tank of a non-diesel vehicle. Now we have to drain
everything out and try to clean the thing up.”

“I’m
sorry,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But I am not surprised.” She
paused for a moment. “What will happen to them? What will happen when
they are working somewhere else—somewhere where there is no longer a kind
person like you to watch over them?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni shrugged.
“They will ruin cars left, right, and centre,” he said. “That
is what will happen to them. There will be great sadness among the cars of
Botswana.”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. Then, on a sudden
impulse, and without thinking at all why she should say this, she asked,
“And what will happen to us, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni?”

The words
were out, and Mma Ramotswe looked down at her hands on the desk, and at the
diamond ring, which looked back up at her. She had said it, and Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni had heard what she had said.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked
surprised. “Why do you ask, Mma? What do you mean when you ask what will
happen to us?”

Mma Ramotswe raised her eyes. She thought that she
might as well continue, now that she had begun. “I was wondering what
would happen to us. I was wondering whether we would ever get married, or
whether we would continue to be engaged people for the rest of our lives. I was
just wondering, that was all.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stood quite
still. “But we are engaged to be married,” he said. “That
means that we will get married. Everybody knows that.”

Mma
Ramotswe sighed. “Yes, but now they are saying: when will those two get
married? That is what they are all saying. And maybe I should say that
too.”

For a few moments Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said nothing. He
continued to wipe his hands on the lint, as if concentrating on a delicate
task, and then he spoke. “We will get married next year. That is the best
thing to do. By then we will have made all the arrangements and saved enough
money for a big wedding. Weddings cost a lot, you know. Maybe it will be next
year, or the year after that, but we shall certainly get married. There is no
doubt about that.”

“But I have got money in the Standard
Chartered Bank,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I could use that or I could
sell some cattle. I still have some cattle that my father left me. They have
multiplied. I have almost two hundred now.”

“You must not
sell cattle,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “It is good to keep cattle.
We must wait.”

He stared at her, almost reproachfully, and Mma
Ramotswe looked away. The subject was too awkward, too raw, to be discussed
openly, and so she did not pursue the matter. It seemed as if he was frightened
of marriage, which must be the reason why he was proving so slow to commit
himself. Well, there were men like that; nice men who were fond enough of women
but who were wary of getting married. If that was the case, then she would be
realistic about it and continue to be an engaged lady. It was not a bad
situation to be in, after all; indeed, there were some arguments for preferring
an engagement to a marriage. You often heard of difficult husbands, but how
often did you hear of difficult fiancés? The answer to that, thought Mma
Ramotswe, was never.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni left the room, and Mma Ramotswe
picked up her mug of bush tea. If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then
she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy
her free time. She would read a bit more and spend more time on her shopping.
And she might also join a club of some sort, if she could find one, or perhaps
even form one herself, perhaps something like a Cheerful Ladies’ Club, a
club for ladies in whose lives there was some sort of gap—in her case a
gap of waiting—but who were determined to make the most of their time. It
was a sentiment of which her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, would have
approved; her father, that good man who had always used his time to good effect
and who was always in her thoughts, as constantly and supportively as if he
were buried under the floor directly beneath her.

CHAPTER TWO

HOW TO RUN AN ORPHAN FARM

M
MA SILVIA POTOKWANE, the matron of the orphan farm, was sorting out
bits of carpeting for a jumble sale. The pieces of carpet were scattered about
the ground under a large syringa tree, and she and several of the housemothers
were busy placing them in order of desirability. The carpets were not old at
all, but were off-cuts which had been donated by a flooring firm in Gaborone.
At the end of every job, no matter how careful the carpet layers were, there
would always be odd pieces which simply did not fit. Sometimes these were quite
large, if the end of a roll had been used, or the room had been a particularly
awkward shape. But none of them was square or rectangular, and this meant that
their usefulness was limited.

“Nobody has a room this
shape,” said one of the housemothers, drawing Mma Potokwane’s
attention to a triangular piece of flecked red carpet. “I do not know
what we can do with this.”

Mma Potokwane bent down to examine the
carpet. It was not easy for her to bend, as she was an unusually traditional
shape. She enjoyed her food, certainly, but she was also very active, and one
might have thought that all that walking about the orphan farm, peering into
every corner just to keep everybody on their toes, would have shed the pounds,
but it had not. All the women in her family had been that build, and it had
brought them good fortune and success; there was no point, she felt, being a
thin and unhappy person when the attractions of being a comfortable person were
so evident. And men liked women like that too. It was a terrible thing that the
outside world had done to Africa, bringing in the idea that slender ladies,
some as thin as a sebokoldi, a millipede, should be considered desirable. That
was not what men really wanted. Men wanted women whose shape reminded them of
good things on the table.

“It is a very strange shape,”
agreed Mma Potokwane. “But if you put together two triangles, then do you
not get a square, or something quite close to a square? Do you not think that
is true, Mma?”

The housemother looked blank for a moment, but
then the wisdom of Mma Potokwane’s suggestion dawned upon her and she
smiled broadly. There were other triangular pieces, and she now reached for one
of these, and held it in position alongside the awkward red piece. The result
was an almost perfect square, even if the two pieces of carpet were a different
colour.

Mma Potokwane was pleased with the result. Once they had sorted
out the carpets, they would put up a notice in the Tlokweng Community Centre
and invite people to a carpet sale. They would have no difficulty in selling
everything, she thought, and the money would go into the fund that they were
building up for book prizes for the children. At the end of each term, those
who had done well would receive a prize for their efforts; an atlas, perhaps,
or a Setswana Bible, or some other book which would be useful at school.
Although she was not a great reader, Mma Potokwane was a firm believer in the
power of the book. The more books that Botswana had, in her view, the better.
It would be on books that the future would be based; books and the people who
knew how to use them.

It would be wonderful, she thought, to write a
book which would help other people. In her case, she would never have the time
to do it, and even if she had the time, then she very much doubted whether she
would have the necessary ability. But if she were to write a book, then the
title would undoubtedly be
How to Run an Orphan Farm
. That would be a
useful book for whomever took over from her when she retired, or indeed for the
many other ladies who ran orphan farms elsewhere. Mma Potokwane had spent some
time thinking about the contents of such a work. There would be a great deal
about the ordinary day-to-day business of an orphan farm: the arranging of
meals, the sorting out of duties and so on. But there would also be a chapter
on the psychology which went into running an orphan farm. Mma Potokwane knew a
great deal about that. She could tell you, for example, of the importance of
keeping brothers and sisters together, if at all possible, and of how to deal
with behavioural problems. These were almost always due to insecurity and had
one cure and one cure alone: love. That, at least, had been her experience, and
even if the message was a simple one, it was, in her view, utterly true.

Another chapter—a very important one—would be on fund raising.
Every orphan farm needed to raise money, and this was a task which was always
there in the background. Even when you had successfully performed every other
task, the problem of money always remained, a persistent, nagging worry at the
back of one’s mind. Mma Potokwane prided herself on her competence in
this. If something was needed—a new set of pots for one of the houses, or
a pair of shoes for a child whose shoes were wearing thin—she would find
a donor who could be persuaded to come up with the money. Few people could
resist Mma Potokwane, and there had been an occasion when the Vice-President of
Botswana himself, a generous man who prided himself on his open door policy,
had thought ruefully of those countries where it was inconceivable that any
citizen could claim the right to see the second most important person in the
country. Mma Potokwane had made him promise to find somebody to sell her
building materials, and he had agreed before he had thought much about it. The
building materials had been purchased from a firm which was prepared to sell
them cheaply, but it had taken up a great deal of time.

At the very
head of Mma Potokwane’s list of supporters was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. She
had relied on him for years to take care of various bits of machinery on the
orphan farm, including the water pump, which he had now insisted on being
replaced, and the minivan in which the orphans were driven into town. This was
an old vehicle, exhausted by years of bumping along on the dusty road to the
orphanage, and had it not been for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s expert hand, it
would have long since come to the end of its life. But it was a van which he
understood, and it was blessed with a Bedford engine that had been built to
last and last, like a strong old mule that pulls a cart. The orphan farm could
probably afford a new van, but Mma Potokwane saw no reason to spend money on
something new when you had something old which was still working.

That
Saturday morning, as they sorted out the carpet pieces for the sale, Mma
Potokwane suddenly looked at her watch and saw that it was almost time for Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni to arrive. She had asked him whether he could come out to look
at a ladder which was broken and needed welding. A new ladder would not have
cost a great deal, and would probably have been safer, but why buy a new
ladder, Mma Potokwane had asked herself. A new ladder might be shiny, but would
hardly have the strength of their old metal ladder, which had belonged to the
railways and had been given to them almost ten years ago.

She left the
housemothers discussing a round piece of green carpet and returned to her
office. She had baked a cake for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, as she usually did, but
this time she had taken particular care to make it sweet and rich. She knew
that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni liked fruit cake, and particularly liked raisins, and
she had thrown several extra handfuls of these into the mixture, just for him.
The broken ladder might have been the ostensible reason for his invitation, but
she had other business in mind and there was nothing better than a cake to
facilitate agreement.

When Mr J.L.B. Matekoni eventually did arrive,
she was ready for him, sitting directly in front of the fan in her office,
feeling the benefit of the blast of air from the revolving blades, looking out
of the window at the lushness of the trees outside. Although Botswana was a dry
country, at the end of the rainy season it was always green, and there were
pockets of shade at every turn. It was only at the beginning of the summer,
before the rains arrived, that everything was desiccated and brown. That was
when the cattle became thin, sometimes painfully so, and it broke the heart of
a cattle-owning people to see the herds nibbling at the few dry shreds of grass
that remained, their heads lowered in lassitude and in weakness. And it would
be like that until the purple clouds stacked up to the east and the wind
brought the smell of rain—rain which would fall in silver sheets over the
land.