To the Land of Long Lost Friends: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (20) (12 page)

Charlie mumbled something. It was possibly
thank you,
possibly not.

I
T WAS HIGH TIME,
thought Mma Ramotswe, to visit her old friend, Mma Potokwane, matron, stalwart defender of orphans and other poor children, and maker of fruit cake—from a famous and unfathomable recipe. It was not that fruit cake was topmost in Mma Ramotswe’s mind when she made the decision to travel out to Tlokweng—any friendship based on considerations of appetite would be a shallow friendship indeed—but one could not ignore the role that mutual enjoyment of food played in the enjoyment of human company. Mma Ramotswe was a stout defender of the idea that a family should eat together, and insisted on this in her own home, even if she and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni often had to have dinner later than the two foster children because he was late back from the garage. On such occasions, she would feed Motholeli and Puso first, yet would always sit down with them at the table, even if she would be having her own dinner a bit later. And if she treated herself to a small helping of what was being served to them, then that was done out of respect for her own rule about eating together. And there was another rule at play here—the rule that stated that food prepared for children was almost always tastier than the food cooked for oneself. It simply was. How many parents, then, found themselves hovering over their children’s plates, ready to swoop on any surplus or rejected morsel or, worse still, ready to sneak something off the plate while the child was looking in the other direction, or arguing with a brother or sister, or possibly having a tantrum. The closing of eyes that went with a tantrum could be especially useful in this respect; when the child came to his or her senses, the quantity on the plate may have been significantly reduced, thus providing the child who noticed it with a sharp lesson in the consequences of bad behaviour. Make a fuss, and your food will be eaten by somebody else: a sound proposition that Mma Ramotswe believed could be applied with equal force to many other situations.

She had not seen Mma Potokwane for some time, and as she drove along the corrugated dirt road that led to the Orphan Farm, a cloud of dust thrown up behind her white van like the vapour trail of a high-flying aircraft, she thought of the last occasion on which she and her friend had sat down together and had one of their wide-ranging conversations. They had talked about so much that a great deal of it was now forgotten, although a few topics remained in her mind.

There had been a discussion about Mma Makutsi and her latest doings. Mma Potokwane and Mma Makutsi had not always had the easiest of relationships in the past, both being women of strong personality and confirmed views. That had changed for the better, and now they enjoyed civil relations, even if they did not always see eye to eye in quite the same way as did Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane.

“Mma Makutsi has many merits,” said Mma Potokwane. “But nobody is perfect, is she, Mma?”

It was impossible to refute that. There were no perfect people, said Mma Ramotswe, even if there were one or two who were almost perfect. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, for instance, was almost without fault, but not quite. He was the kindest man in Botswana, Mma Ramotswe asserted, and one of the gentlest too, but he suffered from indecisiveness that he would undoubtedly be better off without. That had led to their long engagement and to her difficulty in pinning him down to a wedding date, an impasse eventually satisfactorily resolved by Mma Ramotswe’s taking the matter in hand. Many men needed that firm treatment, she thought: they meant well; they had plans that sounded plausible in theory, but when it came to actually doing something, then women were far more effective. One should not be too hard on the weaker brethren, though, Mma Ramotswe told herself, because they also served—in their way.

“Mma Makutsi,” she said, in response to Mma Potokwane, “is an unusual lady. She is very good at her job, and of course she did very well at the Botswana Secretarial College…”

“Oh that,” said Mma Potokwane. “We have all heard about her ninety-seven per cent. I am not one to decry that, Mma, but nonetheless there must come a point at which you forget about your marks in exams all those years ago. I do not talk about my prize for being most improved girl in Standard Three. You have never heard me mention that, have you, Mma?”

“You were most improved girl, Mma? I should not be surprised by that. You must have had many prizes in your career, Mma.”

Mma Potokwane shook her head. “Only one, Mma. That one. Since then there have been no prizes.”

“Oh well…”

“I am not criticising Mma Makutsi,” Mma Potokwane went on. “But sometimes I wonder about her shoes.”

Mma Ramotswe had heard Mma Potokwane express such reservations before. “Shoes are very important to her, Mma. She gets great pleasure from having those fashionable shoes of hers. She loves them.”

“I say that shoes are for walking in,” said Mma Potokwane. “That is what I say, Mma. Or standing about in. They should be comfortable.”

Mma Ramotswe glanced down at her friend’s feet. They were on the large side, and they reminded her at that moment of the bottom sections of the concrete pillars of that new bridge on the outskirts of town; but she did not say anything about that, of course, as it is rude to make civil engineering comparisons when talking about a friend’s personal features. “I have always thought your shoes looked very comfortable. They seem to have a lot of room in them. And they have very low heels too, which must help. And that wide shape too, Mma. We traditionally built ladies need to have wide feet for stability, Mma. That is very important, I think.”

“My feet are a bit big,” said Mma Potokwane. “My husband has small feet, but mine are generously proportioned. His shoes are too small for me.”

And so the conversation had wandered on, touching briefly on politics—but leaving that subject quickly enough, to the relief of both of them—and then moving to the difficult issue of stopping children from eating too many sweet things. That last topic had been aired at the same time as second slices of fruit cake were embarked upon, and Mma Ramotswe had been briefly aware of that irony, but had reminded herself that they were talking about children, not adults, and that was clearly very different.

That afternoon, she parked her van in its accustomed position, under the tree that she liked to think somebody had planted many years ago with her in mind, as if that person knew—although of course he could not have known—that she, Mma Ramotswe, would in the fullness of time arrive and find it the ideal place for her. The world was not like that, she knew; we had to fit in with the world rather than the world fit in with us, but every so often it was nice to imagine that it was the other way round. And there was no doubt, she thought, that Botswana fitted her to perfection. It was the right size; it was the right shape on the map; the people who lived in it and the cattle they kept were just as she would want them to be; it was so perfect that she imagined that God himself had thought: I shall invent a country that is just right for Mma Ramotswe when she comes along, and I shall call it Botswana, and it will be a good place.

And as she stepped out of the van and closed its door behind her, she looked up and drank in the air and the blue and the emptiness that was the sky; a draught more satisfying than the sweetest water; and filled, at that moment, with the song of some bird that she did not know the name of, but that she had heard oh so many times, as a girl, as a young woman, as the person she now was. That bird continued to sing that same song, learned from its mother and father, to be passed on to the next generation of birds, small creatures even now sheltering in a hidden nest somewhere, ready for their moment of launch and the beginning of the dance about the skies of Botswana that would be their brief life. And she thought: Oh, I am so fortunate to be here in this land, to be standing under this sky, ready to see my old friend Mma Potokwane, and to drink tea with her and to talk about the things that we always talk about.

Unknown to Mma Ramotswe, that same old friend was looking out of her window, having heard the sound of the approaching van. She had watched Mma Ramotswe’s manoeuvres under the habitual tree, and she had remembered how that morning she had told the farm manager, who looked after the vegetable patches and the fields, to move the tractor that he had parked under the shade of that particular acacia. She had explained that Mma Ramotswe would be arriving before too long and that it was important that her parking place be kept free, because she would expect it. The farm manager had readily agreed; the tractor would be moved. “The tractor can go anywhere; it is only a tractor,” he had said. “Mma Ramotswe is a very good woman, and she is also the cousin of my brother’s wife’s sister.”

Mma Potokwane watched as Mma Ramotswe made her way towards her office. Why had she suddenly stopped, as if she had forgotten something and had now remembered it? Why was she standing there, looking up at the sky? Of course, she did just that, she remembered; Mma Ramotswe would often stop and look at the sky; and this just went to show how wise she was, because looking at the sky was something that we all should do more often. Or so Mma Potokwane had read somewhere. People who looked at the sky, she had learned, are less likely to die than those who do not look at the sky. That was interesting and must have something to do with inner calmness and the way in which that calmness protects you from things that afflict those who are not calm—nervous conditions of one sort or another, and other illnesses too. Nerves were involved with everything, Mma Potokwane believed.

The water for the tea was already boiling when she welcomed her visitor into her office.

“It is still hot outside,” said Mma Potokwane, as Mma Ramotswe sank into the chair in which she always sat.

“The heat will bring the rain,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is what I am hoping, Mma Potokwane.”

“We are all hoping that, Mma.”

Tea was served and the cake was wordlessly taken from its tin, given admiring looks by Mma Ramotswe, and served on Mma Potokwane’s best plates, used only on occasions such as this—the visit of particular friends or members of the Orphan Farm Board of Management; or of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, for that matter, when he called in after performing some helpful task of machinery management, coaxing life out of a water pump that had lost the will to go on, or servicing one of the farm vehicles or the ancient minibus—too ancient, he said—that was used to transport the children. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s ultimate reward for such acts of kindness, Mma Potokwane wryly observed, might be in heaven, but on this earth, in the here and now, it would take the form of an excessively generous slice of fruit cake. He would eat it with relish, and would demur, but only briefly, when a second slice was pressed upon him, and even a third. “My wife would not approve,” he would say, through a mouthful of cake. “She says I must have only one slice if my trousers are still to fit. You know how it is, Mma Potokwane.”

And Mma Potokwane would laugh, and reassure him that eating fruit cake was one of the things that a husband was entitled to keep from his wife when the fruit cake in question was
deserved,
as this undoubtedly was. “Deserved calories do not count, Rra,” she said. “You can count up all the calories you have had and then take away the ones that were deserved. That is the total that you must look at.”

He had laughed too, and said, “That is good to know, Mma Potokwane, because they are taking the fun out of everything these days, and there is nothing left for many of us, I think. The government says we must not do any of the things we like to do.”

Now, Mma Potokwane blew across the top of her tea to cool it down while Mma Ramotswe began to tell her about her latest investigations. This was all done under an understanding of confidentiality: Mma Ramotswe understood the need for confidence in her work—that lay at the heart of the relationship with the client, as Clovis Andersen stressed at so many points in
The Principles of Private Detection
—but you had to be able to talk to
somebody
if your work was not to get you down. It was also true that discussing a case with another person served to illuminate certain aspects of it that might otherwise not be spotted. How many times had Mma Potokwane asked a question or made an observation that changed Mma Ramotswe’s view of a situation; that suggested an explanation that had been eluding her simply because she had been looking at things from the wrong angle?

So she told her first about Nametso and her inexplicable coolness towards her mother. That behaviour was not uncommon, said Mma Potokwane, and it usually arose when a son or daughter was wanting to cut the apron-strings of an over-possessive mother. “People need to be able to breathe,” said Mma Potokwane. “And parents sometimes stand in the way of that.”

That was possible, said Mma Ramotswe. But what about the Mercedes-Benz?

“That,” said Mma Potokwane, “sounds like shame. That is not an honest Mercedes-Benz.”

“No,” agreed Mma Ramotswe, “I do not think it is.”

They moved on to Poppy, and to the loss of her money. Mma Potokwane rolled her eyes at the mention of the Reverend Flat Ponto. “I have heard of that man,” she said. “One of the housemothers went to a meeting he held and she came back all fired up. She was gabbling away about this man and how he could change sinners into saints. She was so excited she was hardly making any sense.”