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

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni picked up the warning. ‘Oh, I’m not doubting Mma Makutsi’s general abilities. She is a very clever lady, as we all know. It’s just that she’s a bit…’ He struggled to find the word, and Mma Ramotswe immediately felt sorry for him. Yes, Mma Makutsi was a bit… a bit… She, too, found it difficult to describe exactly what she wanted to say. There were plenty of people who were a bit… whatever it was.

‘Bossy?’ she suggested. ‘Is that what you’re trying to say, Rra?’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni frowned. He was not sure if that was exactly what he meant. Mma Potokwani was bossy – the word was exactly right for her, but she, of course, had no option but to be bossy. If you were the matron of an orphan farm, with all those children running around, then you had to be bossy. And presumably any advertisement for that job would have to specify the need for bossiness. If Mma Potokwani were to retire and a successor needed to be found, then the wording of the advertisement would have to spell things out quite clearly. Wanted: an experienced lady for the job of Matron. Only very bossy ladies need apply.

He smiled at the thought.

‘Something funny, Rra?’ asked Mma Ramotswe.

He put out of his mind the picture that had been forming of a line of bossy ladies queuing up for an interview for Mma Potokwani’s job. There would be a great deal of pushing and shoving and using of elbows, until eventually the bossiest, pushiest lady reached the head of the queue and was straight away appointed.

He returned to the subject of Mma Makutsi’s restaurant. ‘No, it’s not exactly bossiness I’m talking about, Mma. It’s more a question of strictness. Yes, maybe that’s it.’

Mma Ramotswe nodded. Strictness. That was it. Mma Makutsi could be strict.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni now found the words. ‘You will get into trouble if you don’t eat everything on your plate, you see. She will be watching through one of those kitchen hatches – you’ll just see her spectacles peering out – and she will notice if you do not finish off her food. Then she will come out from the kitchen and ask for your excuse. It will be a very strange restaurant, that one.’

As one might expect, a different conversation took place in the Radiphuti house that evening. Dinner there was always eaten a bit later, as Phuti Radiphuti’s day ran on a rather different timetable from everybody else’s. Most people were at work by eight, but Phuti had decided some years previously that he would not arrive at the Double Comfort Furniture Store until nine o’clock, and sometimes even half an hour later than that. There were several reasons for this: one was his impatience with the stop-and-start driving that was necessary in the heavier traffic of the rush hour. He had discovered that if you left the house early, you would inevitably get caught up in a long line of cars driven by people who, like you, were eager to make the journey before eight. It was, he thought, rather like trying to get through a door when hundreds of people had exactly the same idea. At least if you were on foot trying to get through a door, people would behave reasonably courteously rather than trample one another or snarl in irritation if anybody were to be too slow, or be indecisive as to whether to turn left or right. How different it was when people were behind the wheel of a car; protected by the metal and glass surrounding them, they showed all sorts of impatience with other drivers, and rarely hesitated to secure some tiny advantage by slipping through a red light or ignoring the unambiguous message of a stop or give way sign. And this was in Botswana, he thought, where everybody – or at least nearly everybody – was so polite! How much worse was it in other countries not too far away where people drove as if they were being pursued by a swarm of bees; or where they paid no attention to the twists and bends in the road.

The consequences of having such roads were worse, he reminded himself, if you had mountains as well. Botswana at least had flat roads, since there were no real mountains, but it was different in Lesotho, which was not very far away and where all there was, really, was mountain after mountain. As he thought about this he remembered what had happened some years ago to the king of that country, who had been driven to his death off the side of a mountain. Everybody knew that the roads in Lesotho were not in good condition and somebody, surely, should have been more careful with the King in the back seat. Of course you could not tell, thought Phuti. It may not have been the driver’s fault, as all sorts of things could happen on a road at night. Cattle strayed onto the tarmac, standing there practically invisible in the darkness until their eyes were suddenly caught in the headlights and it was too late; boulders tumbled down hillsides and came to rest at blind corners; rain washed away whole sections of the road, leaving great gaps into which anybody, even a king, might easily fall. No, you should never blame a driver unless you knew all the facts, and since that poor driver was late, just as the King himself was, you would never know exactly what happened. Some things were accidents, pure and simple, in the same way as had been that incident in which he himself was injured – where the delivery driver did not see him standing there. You should not go around sprinkling blame on other people, thought Phuti Radiphuti.

But it was not simply because of bad driving and traffic jams that Phuti had decided to avoid going into work early – there were good business reasons for his coming into the office slightly later than everybody else. Phuti believed that if there were any problems to be dealt with, they would make themselves known early in the day. Usually these were staff issues, with somebody not coming into work because he or she was ill, or discovering something wrong with some item of furniture, or a difficult letter arriving in the mail that one of his assistants picked up on the way to work. All of these things could very easily be dealt with by one of the three assistant managers, and letting them deal with problems rather than sorting it out himself was not only less stressful for Phuti, but was also a way of encouraging staff. If you were an assistant manager then what you really wanted was the chance to manage, and if the real manager was around you might feel inhibited from managing. By arriving late, he felt, the assistant managers would have an hour or so during which they could manage. Of course there were limits to this approach: if it were left to assistant managers, they would suggest that you arrived late in the afternoon, or even not at all, thus giving them all day to give orders and make decisions, leaving nothing for you to manage or decide yourself.

So it was because of all this that Phuti’s day ran rather later than everybody else’s. And that meant that Mma Makutsi had more time to attend to the needs of their son, Itumelang Clovis Radiphuti, who was now six months old and not inclined to go to sleep until at least eight in the evening. The three or four hours that Mma Makutsi now spent with him after she returned from work in the late afternoon was, she felt, the most valuable time in her day – and his too. The woman whom they had engaged as nurse to Itumelang was completely trustworthy and had exceeded their expectations in every respect, but Mma Makutsi believed, as did most people, that there was no substitute for the attention of a mother. And Itumelang himself seemed to share this view, as his expression always became one of complete delight when he saw his mother come home at the end of the working day. And when she picked him up and held him to her he would make a strange, gurgling sound – a sound of unconcealed pleasure that Mma Ramotswe, when she witnessed it one day, had described as being like the purring of a cat.