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

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over eighty books on a wide array of subjects. For many years he was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and served on national and international bioethics bodies. Then in 1999 he achieved global recognition for his award-winning series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and thereafter has devoted his time to the writing of fiction, including the 44 Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions series. His books have been translated into forty-six languages. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Elizabeth, a doctor.

By Alexander McCall Smith

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Blue Shoes and Happiness

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

The Miracle at Speedy Motors

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

The Double Comfort Safari Club

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection

The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café

The Isabel Dalhousie Novels

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The Right Attitude to Rain

The Careful Use of Compliments

The Comfort of Saturdays

The Lost Art of Gratitude

The Charming Quirks of Others

The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

The 44 Scotland Street Series

44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

Love Over Scotland

The World According to Bertie

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

The Importance of Being Seven

Bertie Plays the Blues

Sunshine on Scotland Street

Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers

The Corduroy Mansions Series

Corduroy Mansions

The Dog Who Came in from the Cold

A Conspiracy of Friends

The von Igelfeld Entertainments

The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom

Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

La’s Orchestra Saves the World

The Forever Girl

COPYRIGHT

Published by Little, Brown

978-1-4055-2060-7

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Alexander McCall Smith 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

LITTLE, BROWN

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café

Table of Contents

About the Author

By Alexander McCall Smith

COPYRIGHT

Dedication

Chapter One : The Women of Botswana Now Fly Aeroplanes

Chapter Two : People with Very Long Noses

Chapter Three : The Only Purring Baby in Botswana

Chapter Four : Electric Dogs and Other Things

Chapter Five : Men Often Fail to Take Finer Points

Chapter Six : I Am Not Rude Any More

Chapter Seven : Pilates with Cake

Chapter Eight : Where Fashionable People Go

Chapter Nine : Botswana Was a Good Place

Chapter Ten : Cool Jules Is on the Case

Chapter Eleven : Ninety-eight Per Cent

Chapter Twelve : I Did Not Come About a Cat

Chapter Thirteen : The Dish of Yesterday

Chapter Fourteen : Tiny Points of Light

Chapter Fifteen : He May Sell Stationery, But He Is Really a Hero

Chapter Sixteen : You Don’t Want Handsome Men

This book is for Alan and Sally Merry

Chapter One

The Women of Botswana Now Fly Aeroplanes

Precious Ramotswe, creator and owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, friend of those who needed help with the problems in their lives, and wife of that great garagiste , Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, felt that there were broadly speaking two sorts of days. There were days on which nothing of any consequence took place – these were in a clear majority – and then there were those on which rather too much happened. On those uneventful days you might well wish that a bit more would happen; on days when too much occurred, you longed for life to become a bit quieter.

It had always been like that, she thought, and always would be. As her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, often said: there are always too many cattle or too few – never just the right number. As a child she had wondered what he meant by this; now she knew.

Both sorts of day started in much the same way, with the opening of her eyes to the familiar dappled pattern made by the morning sun on the ceiling above her bed, an indistinct dancing of light, faint at first, but gradually becoming stronger. This intrusion of the dawn came from the gap between the curtains – the gap that she always intended to do something about, but did not because there were more pressing domestic tasks and never enough time for everything you had to do. And as long as curtains did their main job, which was to prevent nosy people – unauthorised people , as Mma Makutsi would call them – from looking into her bedroom without her permission, then she did not have to worry too much about their not meeting in the middle.

She woke up at more or less the same time each morning, thought for a while about getting up, and then rose, leaving Mr J. L. B. Matekoni still deeply asleep on his side of the bed, dreaming about the sort of things that mechanics, and men in general, dream about. Women, she felt, should not enquire too closely as to what these things were, as they were not the sort of things that women liked very much – engines and football, and so on. A friend had once said to her that men did not dream about things like that – that this was just what women wanted men to dream about, while men, in reality, dreamed about things that they would never reveal. Mma Ramotswe doubted this. She had asked Mr J. L. B. Matekoni one morning what he had dreamed about and he had replied: ‘the garage’, and if this were not proof enough, on another occasion, when she had woken him from the tossing and turning of a nightmare, he had replied to her question about the content of the bad dream by saying that it had all been to do with a seized-up gearbox. And then there was Puso, their foster child, who had told her that his dreams were about having a large dog that chased away the bullies at school, or about finding an old aeroplane in the back yard and fixing it so that it could fly, or about scoring a goal for Botswana in a soccer match against Zambia, with the whole stadium rising to its feet and cheering him. That, she thought, settled that. Perhaps there were some men who dreamed about other things, but she felt that this was not the case for most men.

Once up and about, clasping her cup of freshly brewed redbush tea in her hand, she took a walk around the garden, savouring the freshness of the early-morning air. Some people said that the air in the morning had no smell; she thought they were wrong, for it smelled of so many things – of the acacia leaves that had been closed for the night and were now opening at the first touch of the morning sun; of a wood fire somewhere, just a hint of it; of the wind, and the breath that the wind had, which was dry and sweet, like the breath of cattle. It was while she was standing there that she decided whether the day would be one in which things might happen; it had something to do with the way she felt when she considered the day ahead. And most of the time she was right, although sometimes, of course, she could be completely wrong.