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

Charlie shared the room at the back with two male cousins, slightly younger than he was, and a ten-year-old boy who was the son, by another man, of the uncle’s girlfriend. The room was just big enough for the two narrow beds and two sleeping mats, but when the sleeping mats were unrolled there was no space left to negotiate one’s way round the room. Clothing was hung on four pegs knocked into the wall and what few belongings the young men and the boy possessed were stored on a rough-timber shelf that ran the length of the room. There was one window, high up at the back, which afforded a small amount of natural light, and additional lighting was provided by a single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. From the cable that she saw coming into the house and then leading off into a bush, Mma Ramotswe could tell when she arrived that the electricity supply was stolen. This happened: people found the wires that the electricity board tried to bury and cut their way into the supply with crudely rigged arrangements. This theft of electricity had its dangers, and occasionally people were electrocuted or badly burned in the process; houses could be destroyed, too, by amateur wiring unequal to the load imposed on it.

When Mma Ramotswe announced her presence with the usual Ko, ko! , the uncle and his girlfriend were sitting in the front room, along with Charlie’s two cousins. She had met the uncle before – he worked in the supermarket patronised by Mma Ramotswe – but she had not met his girlfriend. Now he introduced her and the two cousins; the polite enquiries that form dictated were made – You are keeping well, Rra? Yes, and you, Mma? There were no surprises in the answers such questions elicited – there never were – but these conversations still had to take place: it was not what was said that counted, but the fact that it was said.

‘I am looking for Charlie,’ said Mma Ramotswe.

The uncle smiled. ‘He is not far away, Mma.’ He made a movement of his head towards the second room. ‘But then in another sense he is far away.’

The girlfriend laughed. ‘Drowned his sorrows,’ she said. ‘He lost his job today.’

‘I know that,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘And I am sorry. That’s why I’ve come to see him.’

The girlfriend smirked. ‘To tell him you’re sorry for what your husband has done? There are many women who have to say sorry about what men have done.’

The uncle clearly did not approve of this tone. You were not rude to visitors in Botswana; he would tell her that later, in private. ‘I’m sorry, Mma,’ he said, rising to his feet and making towards the connecting door that led to the other room. ‘Charlie has drunk too much beer. Look for yourself.’

He pushed the door open to reveal the pitiful surroundings of the second room. The woman’s young son was on his sleeping mat, naked but for a pair of briefs, his skinny arms folded back to make a pillow for his head. On the larger of the two narrow beds lay Charlie, fully clothed, but with his shirt half opened. The air was fetid with exhaled beer fumes.

The uncle closed the door again. ‘You see, Mma? I don’t think you’d get much sense out of him until tomorrow morning.’

Mma Ramotswe lowered her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Rra. He has been very upset.’

‘Yes,’ said the uncle. ‘Charlie doesn’t normally drink much. Today was unusual.’

Mma Ramotswe nodded. ‘I’m not blaming him. It is a hard thing for a young man to lose his job. Charlie is a good young man – at heart.’

‘Yes,’ said the uncle, hesitating slightly. ‘At heart.’

Mma Ramotswe reached into her handbag. ‘May I leave him a note, Rra?’

‘Of course.’

‘He can read it in the morning, when he can think straight again.’

The uncle laughed. ‘His head may be a bit sore then, but I’m sure he will understand it.’

Mma Ramotswe tore a page out of the notebook she always carried with her. She accepted the uncle’s invitation to sit down at the table and she began to write.

Dear Charlie, I am sorry that you were sound asleep when I came to see you. I am sorry, too, that you have been so upset by what happened at the garage. I do not want to see you without a job and so I am making a special position for you at the agency. You will be an apprentice detective – if that is what you wish. You will be paid the same wage that Mr J. L. B. Matekoni paid you. The job will be for eight months, and then we shall see.

She looked down at what she had written. There was something that needed to be added.

There is one condition, Charlie, and it is an important one. You will be working with me and with Mma Makutsi. That means that you will have to be polite to Mma Makutsi, and you must not be rude to her, as you sometimes have been. She is now your boss – along with me, of course – and that means that you must do as she says, with no backchat. I am sure you will be able to agree to this as I have always thought that you were a sensible young man, even if not everybody has agreed with me about that. And she thought: Mma Makutsi, first and foremost, but naturally she did not write that down.

She stopped, and then signed her name: Mma Ramotswe . She read through the letter once again, pausing over the final sentence. What she had written was undoubtedly true, but there were situations, she felt, in which it was perhaps best not to tell the whole truth. This, she decided, was one of those, and so she crossed out the final words about the views of others. She hoped that her crossing-out was sufficient to obscure what she had written, but the thought occurred to her that it would not be too hard to work out what words lay beneath – and if Charlie were to be a detective, even for eight months, then he should be able to do that without much difficulty.

Chapter Eight

Where Fashionable People Go

Two things of note happened the next day. Both of these developments involved Mma Makutsi, and one was positive, while the other was negative. The positive thing concerned the Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café; the negative involved a disagreement between Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi. It was not the first disagreement they had had, but it was certainly one of the most serious, and although Mma Ramotswe disliked confrontations of any sort, this dispute turned on something that would have had to be settled sooner or later. As the late Obed Ramotswe had said, in one of his observations that so neatly encapsulated some truth about the world, ‘When you don’t talk about something, then something will talk about itself for you.’ When, as a girl, she had first heard him say this, Mma Ramotswe had had no idea of what he meant; at the time, it seemed to her that this was one of those nonsensical things that people sometimes said because they liked the sound of the words, even if they had no inkling what the words meant.

Mma Makutsi did not get into the agency before half past twelve that day – in time to take her lunch break, which started fifteen minutes after her arrival. Her day had begun much earlier than that, though, with a series of meetings at the premises of the Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café. There was still very little furniture there – no more than the table and four chairs Phuti had delivered from the Double Comfort Furniture Store – but this was enough to allow Mma Makutsi to conduct both her important meetings of the day, the first of which was with the builder who was to fit the new kitchen and decorate the whole building according to the scheme that Mma Makutsi had alighted upon. This involved the liberal use of greens and browns – the greens representing the trees of Botswana and the browns the colour of the Kalahari. ‘This will make people feel at home,’ she said. ‘It will be very calming.’