Александр Макколл Смит - The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café

On that particular morning as she walked past the mopipi tree she had planted at the front of the garden, she had a sudden feeling that the next few hours were going to be rather unusual. It was not a disturbing premonition – not one of those feelings that one gets when one fears that something is going to go badly wrong – it was more a feeling that something interesting and out of the ordinary lay ahead.

She remarked on the fact to Mr J. L. B. Matekoni as he sat at the kitchen table eating the brown maize porridge that he liked so much. Puso and his sister Motholeli had already eaten their breakfast and were in their rooms preparing to leave for school. The school run that Mma Ramotswe had become so used to was now no longer necessary, as Puso was of an age to make his own way there – the school was not far away – and he was also able to help his sister with the wheelchair. This gave the children an independence that they both enjoyed, although departing on time could be a problem when Puso had some boyish task to complete – the catching of flying ants, for instance – or Motholeli had at the last minute to find another pair of cotton socks or locate a book that needed to be returned to the school library.

‘I have a feeling,’ announced Mma Ramotswe, ‘that this is going to be a busy day.’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni glanced up from his porridge. ‘Lots of letters to write? Bills to send out?’

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. ‘No, we’re up to date on all of those things, Rra. Mma Makutsi has been busy with her filing, too, and everything is put away.’

‘Lots of clients to see, then?’ He thought of his own day, and imagined a line of driverless, impatient cars, each eager for his attention, their horns honking to attract his notice: cars, in his view, were quite capable of all the human emotions and failings, including a lack of patience or restraint.

Mma Ramotswe had looked at her diary just before leaving the office the previous day, and had seen that it was largely empty. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘There are no appointments with clients. Nothing this morning and nothing this afternoon, I think.’

He looked puzzled. ‘And yet it’s going to be a busy day?’

‘I have that feeling. It’s difficult to say why, but I am sure that this will not be a quiet day.’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni smiled. People talked about the intuition of women, but he was not sure that he believed in it. How could women possibly know things that men did not know? Was their hearing more acute than men’s, so that they heard things that men missed – as dogs or cats might pick up frequencies audible only to them? He thought not. Or was their eyesight more acute, so that they saw clear details where men saw only indistinct blurs? Again, he thought not. What we knew, we knew from our senses, and the senses of women were no different from the senses of men.

And yet, and yet… As he returned to his porridge, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni reflected on how there had been so many instances in which Mma Ramotswe had shown a quite uncanny ability to notice things that he himself had simply missed, or to know things about others that most people – most ordinary people, or men, to be specific – would not be expected to know. He remembered how, while out shopping with her a few weeks earlier, she had whispered to him that a woman walking towards them was probably one of Mma Potokwani’s cousins. He had cast an eye discreetly over the woman and wondered whether he had ever met her in the company of Mma Potokwani, but decided that he had not. How, then, could Mma Ramotswe tell?

‘She was carrying one of those bags that the orphans make in Mma Potokani’s craft workshop,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘That’s the first thing I noticed. Then I saw the shoes that she was wearing. They were very unusual shoes, and I had seen them before – when they belonged to Mma Potokwani. She must have passed them on.’

He had dismissed this as fanciful, but several days later, when he had gone out to the Orphan Farm to attend to one of the vans, on a pro bono basis of course, he had remembered the incident and asked Mma Potokwani whether she had any cousins visiting her. She did. And had she passed on an unusual pair of shoes to this cousin? ‘As it happens,’ said Mma Potokwani, ‘I did. But let’s not waste time talking about these small things, Rra. Now there is something wrong with the spare van too, and I was hoping that you would have the time to look at that one as well.’

He had sighed. ‘I am always happy to help you, Mma Potokwani,’ he said. ‘But there are places called garages, you know, and they are there to fix vehicles. That is their job. Perhaps you might try in future to —’

Mma Potokwani did not let him finish. ‘Oh, I know all about garages,’ she said lightly. ‘But I would never go to one of them – your own garage excluded, of course, Rra. Ow, those garages are expensive! You drive onto their forecourt and straight away that’s two hundred pula. You get out of the car – that’s another fifty pula. They say, “Good morning, Mma, and what can we do for you?” That costs seventy-five pula to say, and so it goes on. No, Rra, I will not go near those places; not me.’

Now, as he finished the last of his porridge, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni reminded himself that the one thing he felt certain about when it came to women was that you could never be sure. If Mma Ramotswe said she had a feeling about something, then it was perfectly possible that her instinct was correct. So rather than say, ‘We shall see, Mma,’ he muttered, ‘Well, you’re probably right, Mma.’ And then he added, very much as an afterthought – and a hesitant afterthought at that – ‘Who knows, Mma, what will happen? Who knows?’

When Mma Ramotswe arrived at the office that morning, Mma Makutsi was already there. Grace Makutsi, wife of Mr Phuti Radiphuti and mother of Itumelang Clovis Radiphuti, had recently been made a full partner in the business. It had been a long road, one that stretched from her first appointment as secretary in the fledgling agency, to assistant detective, to the vague, rather unsatisfactory status of associate detective, and finally to partnership. It had been a road that started in distant Bobonong, in the north of the country, in a home that housed six people in two cramped rooms, and from there had led, through much scrimping and saving by Mma Makutsi’s family, to the Botswana Secretarial College. At the end of her course the road had climbed sharply uphill to the glorious mark of ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations – a result never before achieved at the college, and never since then equalled. But even that distinction provided in itself no guarantee of a life free of struggle, and for some years Mma Makutsi had been obliged to endure an existence of parsimony and want. Mma Ramotswe would have paid her more had she been able, but the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency made no money at all, and there was a limit to how generous a loss-making business could be. There would have been no point, she thought, in giving Mma Makutsi a bigger salary and then having to close the business down after a month or two when it went bankrupt.

Mma Makutsi understood all this. She was grateful to Mma Ramotswe for all she did for her, and so when her fortunes changed dramatically on her marriage to Mr Phuti Radiphuti, she made it clear that she would not give up her job, but would continue to work at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. As a partner in the business, her devotion to the enterprise became even more intense – hence her new habit of arriving earlier than Mma Ramotswe on most mornings.

To begin with, her baby son, Itumelang, accompanied his mother into the office, sleeping contentedly in his carrycot while she got on with her work. Now, however, he had become more wakeful, and consequently more demanding, and this meant that he was left at home with the woman from Bobonong who had been employed as a nursemaid.