In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (3 page)

were usually no such thing. The unexplained was unexplained

not because there was anything beyond explanation, but simply because the ordinary, day-to-day explanation had not made itself apparent. Once one began to enquire, so-called mysteries

rapidly tended to become something much more prosaic. Not that people liked this, of course. They liked to think that there were things beyond explanation—supernatural things— things like tokoloshes, for example, who roamed at night and caused fear and mischief. Nobody ever saw a tokolosh for the simple reason that there was nothing to see. What one thought was a tokolosh was usually no more than a shadow of a branch in the moonlight, or the sound of the wind in the trees, or a tiny ani1

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mal scurrying through the undergrowth. But people were not attracted by these perfectly straightforward explanations and spoke instead of all sorts of fanciful spirits. Well, she would not be like that when it came to intruders. There had been no intruder in the house at all, and Mma Ramotswe was quite alone, as she had originally thought herself to be.

She made her tea and poured herself a large cup. Then, cup in hand, she returned to her bedroom. It would be a pleasant way of spending what remained of the afternoon, resting on her bed, and falling asleep if she wished. She had a few magazines on her bedside table, and a copy of the Botswana Daily News. She would read these until her eyes began to shut and the magazine fell out of her hands. It was a very agreeable way of drifting off to sleep.

She opened wide the window to allow a cooling breeze to circulate.

Then, having placed her tea cup on the bedside table, she lowered herself onto the bed, sinking down into the mattress that had served her so well for many years and which was holding up very well with the additional weight of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. She had bought the bed and its mattress at the same time that she had moved into the house on Zebra Drive, and had resisted the temptation to buy cheaply. In her view a well-made bed was the one thing on which it was worthwhile spending as much money as one could possibly afford. A good bed produced happiness, she was sure of that; a bad, uncomfortable bed produced grumpiness and niggling pains.

She started to read the Botswana Daily News. There was a story of a politician who had made a speech urging people to take more care of their cattle. He said that it was a shocking thing to the conscience of a cattle-owning country that there should be cases of mistreated cattle. People who allowed their cattle to go thirsty while they were driving them to the railway siding should be ashamed of themselves, he said. It was well-known, he went

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on, that the quality of meat was affected by the experience of the cattle in their last days. An animal that had been stressed would always produce beef that tasted less than perfect, and perfection was what Botswana wanted for its meat. After all, Botswana beef was fine, grass-fed beef, and tasted so much better than the meat of those poor cattle which were kept cooped up or which were fed food that cattle should not eat.

Mma Ramotswe found herself agreeing with all of this. Her father had been a great judge of cattle and had always told her that cattle should be treated as members of the family. He knew the names of all his cattle, which was a considerable feat for one who had built up so large a herd, and he would never have tolerated

their suffering in any way. It was just as well, she thought, that he was no longer able to hear this news of thirsty cattle, nor to see the sort of things that she had seen that very day while having

her tea at the shopping centre.

She finished the article on cattle and had embarked on another one when she heard a sound. It was a rather peculiar sound, rather like moaning. She lowered the newspaper and stared up at the ceiling. It was very strange. The sound was apparently coming from fairly nearby—from just outside her window,

it seemed. She listened very hard and there it was again, once more emanating from somewhere not far away.

Mma Ramotswe sat up, and as she did so the sound occurred again—a soft, indistinct groaning, like the sound of a dog in pain. She got up off the bed and crossed to her window to look outside. If there was a dog in the garden, then she would have to go and chase it away. She did not like dogs to come into the garden, and in particular she did not like visits from the malodorous yellow dogs which her neighbour kept. These dogs were always moaning and whining, in a way which was very similar to the sound that she had heard while lying down.

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She looked out into the garden. The sun was well down in the sky now, and the shadows from the trees were long. She saw the paw-paw trees and their yellowing leaves; she saw the spray of bougainvillaea and the mopipi tree which grew at the edge of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s vegetable patch. And she saw the rough patch of grass in which a stray dog might like to hide. But there was no dog in sight, not under her window, nor in the grass, nor at the foot of the mopipi tree.

Mma Ramotswe turned round and went back to bed. Lying down again, her traditional frame sank deep into the mattress, which sagged down towards the floor. Immediately the moaning sound returned, louder this time, and it seemed rather closer. Mma Ramotswe frowned, and shifted her weight on the mattress.

Immediately the moaning sound made itself heard again, this time even more loudly.

It was then that she realised that the sound was coming from within the room, and her heart skipped a beat. The sound was in the room, and it seemed as if it was directly under her, under the bed. And at that point, as this frightening realisation was reached, her mattress suddenly heaved beneath her, as if a great subterranean

event had propelled it upwards. Then, with a scuffling sound, the figure of a man squirmed out from under the bed, seemed to struggle with some impediment as he emerged, and then shook himself free and dashed out of the room. It happened so quickly that Mma Ramotswe barely had time to see him before he disappeared through the bedroom door. She had no time to see his features, and she only barely took in the fact that although he was wearing a smart red shirt, he was not wearing any trousers.

She shouted out, but the man was already out of the room. And by the time that she struggled to her feet, she heard the kitchen door slamming as he made his exit from the house. She

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moved over to the window in the hope of seeing him as he ran across her yard, but he had taken another route, over to the side, and must have been heading towards the fence that ran along the side of her property.

Then she looked down at the floor and noticed, just at the side of the bed, where they were still snagged on the sharp end of a spring, a pair of khaki trousers. The man who had been hiding under her bed had become trapped and had been obliged to wriggle

out of his trousers to make his getaway. Mma Ramotswe now picked up these trousers, releasing them from the spring, and examined them: an ordinary pair of khaki trousers, in quite good condition, and now separated from their owner. She felt gingerly in the pockets—one never knew what one would find in a man’s pockets—but there was nothing other than a piece of string. There was certainly nothing that could identify this man.

Mma Ramotswe carried the trousers through to the kitchen. She had been shocked by what had happened, but the thought of the intruder having to run off without his trousers made her smile. How on earth would he be able to get home, wherever that might be, clad only in a shirt and socks, and without any trousers? The police would probably pick him up if they saw him, and then he would have some explaining to do. Would he say that he had simply

forgotten to put on his trousers before he went out? That would be one way of explaining himself, but would anybody ever forget to put on his trousers before he ventured forth? Surely not. Or might he say that his trousers had been stolen? But how could one’s trousers possibly be stolen while one was wearing them? It seemed rather difficult to see how this might happen, and she could not imagine the police being convinced by such an explanation.

She poured herself another cup of tea in the kitchen, the cup she had taken through to the bedroom having been knocked over while the man made his escape from under her bed. Then she

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took this cup of tea, and the trousers, out onto the verandah. She draped the trousers over the rail and sat down on her chair. This was really rather funny, she thought. It had been alarming to discover

that there was a man under her bed, but it must have been much more alarming for him, especially when she lay down on the bed and he had been crushed underneath the sagging mattress.

That explained the moaning; the poor man was having the breath crushed out of him. Well, that’s what came of hiding where one had no business to hide. He would not hide under a bed again, she suspected, which meant that he had perhaps learned a bit of a lesson. However, there were obviously other lessons

for that man to learn, and if she ever found out who he was, unlikely though that was, she would have something to say to him and would say it in no uncertain terms.

When Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and the children returned in the evening, Mma Ramotswe said nothing about the incident until both Puso and Motholeli had been settled in bed and were safely off to sleep. Puso had a tendency to nightmares, and she did not want him to start worrying about intruders, and so she would make sure that he did not hear about what had happened. Motholeli

was less nervous, and seemed not to be scared of the dark, as her brother was. But if she were to be told, then she might tell him in an unguarded moment, and so it would be better for neither

of them to know.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni listened intently. When she described the man running out of the room without his trousers, he gasped, and put his hand to his mouth.

“That is very bad,” he said. “I do not like the thought that there was this strange man in our bedroom without any trousers.”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But you must remember that he did not take them off himself. They came off when he was trying to escape. That is different.”

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Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked doubtful. “I still don’t like it. Why was he there? What mischief was he planning?”

“I suspect that he was just a thief who passed by and saw that nobody was in,” suggested Mma Ramotswe. “Then he was disturbed

when I came back and he had no way of getting out. I suspect

that he was a very frightened man.”

They did not discuss the matter further. The trousers were left out on the verandah, where Mma Ramotswe had hung them. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had suggested that they might fit one of the apprentices and he could give them to him. If they did not, then he would pass them on to one of the second-hand clothes traders who would surely find a good pair of legs to fit into them; honest legs this time.

But the next morning, when Mma Ramotswe went out onto the verandah for her morning cup of bush tea, the trousers had gone. And directly below the place where they had been left, there was a large, yellow pumpkin, luscious and ready to eat.

MMA RAMOTSWE inspected the pumpkin from all angles. There was nothing about pumpkins in Clovis Andersen’s Principles

of Private Detection, but Mma Ramotswe was perfectly capable

of investigating a pumpkin herself without the need of guidance from others. She did not touch it at first, but peered at the pumpkin itself, and then at the ground around it. The pumpkin

had been placed in what was nominally a flower bed, but which had not been cultivated very much since Mma Ramotswe had moved into the house. She devoted herself to vegetables and shrubs, holding the view that flowers required too much effort and gave too little reward. In the hot air of Botswana flowers tended to open briefly and then shut and wilt away, as if surprised,

unless, of course, one protected them with shade netting and coaxed them daily with precious water. It was far better, thought Mma Ramotswe, to allow native plants to establish themselves. These plants knew the soil of Botswana and could cope with the sun. They knew when it was time to blossom and when it was time to hide away; they knew how to make the most of every little drop of moisture that came their way.

The bed in which the pumpkin sat ran along the low front wall of the verandah. It was mostly sand, but there were a few

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plants, small aloes and the like, which had taken root, and it was alongside one of these that the pumpkin had been deposited. Mma Ramotswe looked at the sand around the pumpkin: for the most part it was undisturbed, save for the tiny tracks made by ants, but there, clearly visible, a few feet away from the pumpkin was the print of a shoe—that was all; just the indentations of a shoe-sole, which told one nothing, other than that the person who put the pumpkin there was a man, judging from the size, and that he possessed a pair of shoes.

She stood above the pumpkin and contemplated its promising

roundness. This would do for three meals, she thought, with perhaps a little left over to make some soup afterwards. It was exactly ready—with just that degree of ripeness which gives the flesh some sweetness without making it too soft. This was a fine pumpkin, and the person who had left it there must have been a good judge of pumpkins.

Mma Ramotswe bent forward and began to lift the pumpkin, gingerly at first but then more firmly. With the large yellow burden

up against her chest, she smelled the sweet pumpkin smell, and she closed her eyes for a moment, imagining how it would be once it was cut up, cooked and gracing the plates on her table. Grasping the pumpkin, which was heavy, she made her way back to the kitchen and deposited it on the table.

“That is a very fine pumpkin,” observed Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as he entered the kitchen a few minutes later.

Mma Ramotswe was about to tell him what had happened when she noticed that the children were directly behind him— Motholeli in her wheelchair and Puso neatly dressed in freshly ironed khaki shorts (Rose’s ironing) and a short-sleeved white shirt.