The Double Comfort Safari Club (5 page)

“But what if he isn’t?” asked Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni.

The question took Mma Ramotswe by surprise. “But what if who isn’t what?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked out over the garden. “What if this guide—whatever his name turns out to be—what if he isn’t a good man at all? He said—this Mr. Oliver J. Maxwell—that we will find that this man deserves the money. But what if he doesn’t?”

Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment. It was not unlike Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni to come up with a seemingly simple observation that could turn quite quickly into a profound and complicated
question. It was, she conceded, perfectly possible that the guide was not what Mma Grant thought he was: people who look after visitors—hotel people, waiters, and the like—can appear charming on the surface, but only because their job requires that of them. She herself had seen this with one of the waitresses at the café that she frequented at the Riverview shopping centre. It was a good place to sit, affording a ringside seat of all the comings and goings that took place in the car park and around the small craft market that had sprung up, and she had got to know all the waitresses by now. She had found them very helpful and pleasant, but then she had seen one of them mocking a customer behind her back. The episode had not lasted for long, but she had spotted it and then looked away, out of shame for the young woman who was making fun of the customer. Mma Ramotswe had felt outraged. It was the sort of thing that would never have happened in her father’s Botswana, that Botswana in which young people had shown respect for older people, not out of fear or for any other craven reason, but simply because they had lived longer and had acquired something that could only be described as wisdom. Yes, wisdom: that was something that came to everybody, although it came in varying quantities and at different times. Wisdom, which was an understanding of the feelings of others and of what would work and what would not work; which stood by one’s shoulder and said this is right or this is wrong, or this person is lying or this person is telling the truth. And now here was this waitress, who was seventeen, perhaps, pulling a face and imitating the expression of that harmless woman who, admittedly, was wearing a dress that was quite unsuitable for one of her figure—such legs should not be displayed, even in modern Botswana—and what if that poor woman heard the giggling and turned round and saw herself being parodied?

Wildlife guides, of course, were in a different class from
seventeen-year-old waitresses; they were experienced people who had undergone rigorous training and passed the Wildlife Department’s legendarily difficult examinations. They had to know the names of all the plants and which animals ate them and which ones could be used for medicines. They had to be able to read the ground and tell from among the myriad markings in the sand which creature had passed that way, and when. Here the S-shaped trail of a snake; here the tiny footprint of a dassie; here the place where the elephant had snapped the half-grown acacia as if it were matchwood. And they had to know the history of Botswana too, in case they were asked by their clients to explain something.
Where was Bechuanaland? Who was Seretse Khama? When did they first discover diamonds in Botswana? And, tell me, who was Robert Moffat?
There was so much to know, and anybody who knew all that surely would have more than his fair share of wisdom, and would hardly be one to be dismissive or insincere in his dealings with visitors.

“I think that we shall find that he is a good man, this guide,” she said.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked doubtful. He did not think that the mere fact that one was a qualified guide meant that one would be worthy of a gift of three thousand dollars. “Well,” he said, “you may be right or you may be wrong. But just think for a moment: What happens if you find that you are wrong, and that he is not a good man? What then?”

“We give him the money,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Or, rather, we send his name and address to the lawyer and he sends him three thousand dollars. I am not a court of law, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and it is not for me to make a judgement on whether anybody deserves anything. In this matter I am really only a …” She searched for the right metaphor. “I am really only a postman. That is what I am.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. “I see. And I suppose you’re right, Mma. I do not sit in judgement on my clients’ cars—every car receives the same consideration.”

“Well, there you are,” she said. “I have finished my drink now, and the children will have done their homework. They will be getting hungry, I think.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni lifted his glass and drained the last of his beer. “Before you start cooking,” he said, “I have something to tell you. I did not get a letter today, but I did see something rather strange. Your friend, Mma Mateleke—well, her car broke down on the Lobatse Road and I went off to deal with it, and …”

T
HAT SAME EVENING
, while Mma Ramotswe was cooking dinner in her house on Zebra Drive, Mma Makutsi was preparing a special stew for her fiancé, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, owner of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop. Phuti Radiphuti had shown himself to be a creature of habit, eating with senior relatives on certain fixed nights of the week, and then with Mma Makutsi on others. Mma Makutsi did not mind this too much—she would have preferred for him to have had dinner at her house every night, but she knew that it was only a matter of time before they were married and then this would happen anyway. Of course, there was always a chance that he would expect to continue with his peripatetic meal habits, but she would deal with that tactfully if the situation arose. She would be prepared to receive his senior aunt for the occasional meal, no more frequently than would be expected of a duteous wife, but she was not having that woman claiming more than her fair share of Phuti’s company. There was no doubt in Mma Makutsi’s mind that when a man married, his obligations to his female relatives, particularly those owed to distant female relatives, were eclipsed by the claims of his wife. But
there would be opportunity enough to sort that out once the marriage had taken place. For the time being, the existing routine could be observed and, for her part, tolerated.

Men were strange, thought Mma Makutsi. There were plenty of people who held that there was no material difference between men and women, but such people, she believed, were simply wrong. Of course men and women were different, and women were, on the whole, different in a better way. That was not to put men down—Mma Makutsi did not believe in doing that—it was simply a realistic recognition of the fact that women were capable of doing rather more than men. In fact, thought Mma Makutsi, there was a lot of truth in Mma Ramotswe’s insight that while men still claimed so many of the top jobs, it was actually women who were running everything in the background. Men needed those top jobs to make them feel good, so that they could imagine they were in control, while all the time it was women who were in the driving seat.

She had considered this observation. “Perhaps,” she had said to Mma Ramotswe, “perhaps …”

Of course, men were getting better—that was another fact Mma Ramotswe had pointed out to her, and with which she was strongly inclined to agree. Old-fashioned men—men who could do very little about the house and could talk about nothing but cattle and football—such men were increasingly being replaced by men who had many more interests and topics of conversation. These
new men
, as she had seen them referred to, were not only prepared to talk about many of the things that women liked, but they also took a strong interest in clothes. One or two of them, she had heard, even put cosmetics on their faces, which Mma Makutsi, open as she was to new developments, thought was going too far. “There’s nothing much men can do about their
faces,” she once said to Mma Ramotswe. And Mma Ramotswe, immediately recognising the truth of this, had said, “No, Mma, that is quite true. Men’s faces are very unfortunate. They can do nothing.”

This remark sounded somewhat uncharitable, and Mma Ramotswe had quickly added: “Of course, that is not men’s fault. And there is something reassuring about a man’s face. It’s … it’s like the land, I think. It’s always there.”

They looked at one another doubtfully, and tacitly agreed to defer until later any further discussion of men’s faces, and indeed the broader topic of men and women; such issues were never easily resolved, and no matter how readily men’s characteristics suggested themselves for scrutiny, at the end of the day men simply
were
, and most, if not all, women seemed to be thankful for that.

Mma Makutsi was certainly grateful for Phuti Radiphuti. He had come into her life at an unexpected moment, when she was almost at the point of reconciling herself to the possibility that she might never find anybody suitable. That would have been a bleak conclusion for anybody to reach, and particularly somebody as young as Mma Makutsi. But one had to be realistic, and there seemed to be few men apparently interested in a woman with problematic skin and large glasses. Most men, it appeared, were more interested in the likes of Violet Sephotho, the arch-Jezebel who had graduated with barely fifty per cent from the Botswana Secretarial College. She it was who had shamelessly attempted to win Phuti from Mma Makutsi by insinuating herself into a job at the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, in the bed department, of all departments—how appropriate and inappropriate at the same time—and had, thankfully, failed. Violet would have shown not the slightest scrap of interest in Phuti had she not realised that he was a wealthy man. That changed everything in her book: How
could she be indifferent to a man who was due to inherit a large furniture shop
and
the large herd of cattle built up by his father, the very elderly but not quite yet late Mr. Radiphuti Senior?

The material comfort that Phuti offered had not been a consideration for Mma Makutsi. Indeed, when she had met him at that fateful first session of the Botswana Academy of Dance and Movement, she had been unaware of who he was and what he possessed. All she knew was that here was a man with a very bad stutter and a marked lack of dancing ability. For a few brief moments she had felt a certain irritation at the fact that he had been designated as her partner, particularly with Violet Sephotho smirking at her with her elegant, deft-of-foot partner, but her impatience had quickly been replaced by sympathy. There was something gentle about this man with his awkward ways, and that could not but appeal to a woman. Affection and friendship had grown into something else, and she had come to appreciate and love Phuti more than she had ever loved any man. Such romantic feelings as she had experienced before were mere shallow infatuations when compared with the emotions that now overcame her.
Mrs. Grace Radiphuti
, she said to herself, savouring each word and its delicious associations;
wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, Assistant Detective
. No, that was wrong; she, not Phuti, was the assistant detective.
Mrs. Grace Radiphuti, Dip. Sec., Assistant Detective, wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti
. Or even:
Mrs. Grace Radiphuti, Dip. Sec. (97), Assistant Detective, wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti
. The words were ripe with a sense of achievement; it was a long way from that to Bobonong, and to the days when she had had nothing, or next to nothing; when every pula, every thebe, had to be counted and made the most of. People talked of grinding poverty; well, that was exactly what poverty did—it ground.

Yet she was determined that when she married she would not
forget who she was and who her people were. She would not affect any airs. When she had gone to the Botswana Secretarial College she had been given a form to fill out, and there had been a question in it about parental occupation. She had written
Peasant
in response to that question, and she would write that again if she had occasion to answer such a question on any of the intrusive forms that various bureaucrats liked people to fill in.
I am the daughter of a peasant, and that is what I shall always be
.

She stirred the stew, glancing at her watch. Phuti was usually punctual, but every so often there would be some crisis at the furniture shop that required him to stay late at work; this might be holding him back now—some argument over invoices or a discrepancy in the till receipts, or any one of the many minor things that could interrupt the smooth workings of a furniture shop. It did not matter too much: stew did not spoil—indeed, Mma Ramotswe had once suggested to her that the older a stew the better, although within reason, of course.

But at seven o’clock she began to worry. Phuti had a mobile telephone, but Mma Makutsi did not. He had offered to buy her one, but she had declined the offer on the grounds that she did not want to impose too much, and if she had a mobile phone, she would get no peace from various relatives who had one and who would pester her with requests. So even if he had wanted to let her know that he was going to be late back, he would not have been able to do so.