PHUTI RADIPHUTI had expressed reservations about the speed with which the various tradesmen claimed they would be able to prepare the premises of the Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café.
“You have to watch these people,” he said. “They always claim they can do the work in a very short time, but that’s just to get you to give them the job.” He shook his head sadly, in contemplation of the ways of the building trade. “So you accept their quote and then you discover that they have another four or five jobs on the go—all of them urgent.”
Mma Makutsi had had similar misgivings herself, and Phuti was an experienced businessman who knew about these things. But when it came to the start date for the works on her café, the tradesmen were there at seven in the morning, their various vans loaded with all the supplies they needed. Work had started by eight, and that evening when she visited the site with Phuti, they were both astonished at the speed with which the transformation was being effected.
“These men are amazing,” Phuti conceded. “Maybe it is your manner, Grace. Maybe they take you seriously.”
Mma Makutsi smiled modestly. “I told them that I’d be taking a close interest in the work,” she said. “They know that.”
Phuti touched her arm playfully. “You know how to deal with men,” he said.
She laughed. “That is something I have had to teach myself,” she said. “Perhaps they should introduce a new subject at the Botswana Secretarial College on how to cope with men and their ways—in the office, of course. ‘How to deal with a difficult boss,’ perhaps. Or ‘How to explain things so that a man can understand them.’ ”
Phuti smiled at that. “That is very funny,” he said.
Mma Makutsi took off her glasses and polished them. Then, replacing them, she said quite evenly, “No, it is not meant to be funny. There are many things that men have difficulty in understanding, Phuti. I could make a long list of them.”
Phuti gestured towards the works. “Well, it is almost ready. It will not be long now.”
The foreman came to talk to them, and the subject of men and their limitations was dropped. Then Phuti went off with one of the electricians to inspect the new power points that were being installed in the kitchen area. Mma Makutsi wandered over to a window, where a man in blue overalls was busy applying putty to the seating of a pane of glass. They greeted one another before Mma Makutsi leaned forward to examine his handiwork. “I could not do that, Rra,” she said. “I would not be as neat as you.”
The man smiled. “I am a glazier,” he said. “That is what I do. And when you do something for long enough, you learn how to do it without making a mess.”
She asked him how long he had been putting glass into windows.
“I have been doing this for twenty years.”
“That is a long time, Rra.”
“Yes, it is. And I have only broken ten panes of glass in that time.”
He spoke with pride, and Mma Makutsi made sure to show her admiration. The man beamed with pleasure.
“It is good to like your work,” she said. “I can tell that you are happy in what you do.”
The man applied a final squeeze of putty and then smoothed it elegantly with his knife. “Yes, I think that it must be sad to have to do something you hate. That is what I say to my children. Choose something that you like to do. Do not be a bus driver if you do not like driving. Do not be a nurse if you can’t stand the sight of blood. Do not be a person who fixes roofs if you get dizzy when you climb a ladder.”
“That is called vertigo,” said Mma Makutsi.
“Vertigo,” said the man. “I should not like to have that disease.”
She asked after his children.
“I have seven,” he said. “And one who is late, who did not live long—only a few days. But all the others are healthy.”
“I have one son,” said Mma Makutsi. “He is called Itumelang.”
The man stood up from his work and laid down his putty-knife. “That is the name of one of my sons. He is the second-born. The first-born is a girl called Tebogo. She is nineteen now and is at a special college.”
Mma Makutsi smiled encouragingly. “What college is that, Rra?”
The man took a cloth out of his pocket and wiped his hands. “She is at that college at the moment, but I’m afraid that we may not be able to keep her there.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, with seven children there are always many things to pay for. My wife used to work, but now she has hurt her shoulder and she cannot do the work that she did. She worked for one of the hotels, and they have said that if she cannot carry the laundry in and out of the room with her bad shoulder, then she cannot stay. So she has no job now.”
Mma Makutsi made a sympathetic noise with the tip of her tongue and her teeth. “And what is this college, Rra? What is your daughter studying?”
The glazier sighed. “She was doing something very useful. It is the Botswana Secretarial College.”
This answer was greeted with silence. The man looked at Mma Makutsi and saw himself reflected in her large round glasses.
Now she muttered the name, lingering on each word, as if to savour its power. “The Botswana Secretarial College.”
“Yes, Mma. It is a good college, I think.”
Mma Makutsi recovered. “Oh, it is a very good college indeed, Rra,” she said forcefully. “That is one of the finest colleges in the country. I was there, you know. I was at that college. I was there, at that very college.”
“Ah,” said the man. “Then you are a secretary yourself, Mma.”
“No; I was at one time, but I am no longer a secretary. Now I am a partner in a detective agency—the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.” She pointed out of the window. “You may know it—it is on the Tlokweng Road.”
The man nodded. “I have seen the sign, Mma. That is the place that they say is run by that large lady.”
“Traditionally built,” corrected Mma Makutsi. “That is Mma Ramotswe. She is a traditionally built lady.”
“Of course. Traditionally built.” He looked at her admiringly. “So that is where you work. You are the first detective I have met, you know that? The very first. I have met bank people and people in the diamond trade—people like that, but never a detective, Mma. Never once.”
She made a self-deprecatory gesture. “Your daughter,” she said. “Your Tebogo—you cannot find the money for her fees?”
The man lowered his eyes. “There are nine mouths, Mma, if you count mine. Seven children, one mother and one father—nine altogether.”
“But this is her big chance.”
He looked miserable. “That is so. But then we cannot always take the chances we get. That is a hard lesson that children have to learn. Sometimes there is just no money.”
Yes, thought Mma Makutsi, it is a hard lesson. She remembered when she had been at school up in Bobonong and there had been a trip to Gaborone arranged by the pupils. The parents had been required to find the money for their children’s bus fare, and even if it was not very much, there were some who could not afford it. She had been one of those who could not go, and they had watched their classmates—the fortunate ones—pile into the bus and wave as they left; not cruelly, not to crow over their good fortune in being on the bus, but simply to wave goodbye, as children will do, without realising the disappointment of others.
“How much does she need, Rra? Can she not work part-time? There are jobs, surely.”
The man sighed. “She is already doing that. She has a job at the hospital—in the kitchen. She works there for three hours every evening. It is very hard for her, because she has her college work during the day and then the hospital.”
“So how much does she need?”
“About three thousand pula.”
Mma Makutsi frowned. “That is not all that much.”
The man made a gesture of helplessness with his hands. “When you only have a handful of pula left over each month, if that, then three thousand pula seems like a lot.”
Mma Makutsi knew, and she remembered how she had not even had a few hundred pula to spend each month, but still less; how sometimes she had had nothing at all left by the time payday arrived, and the last few days of the month had been days of scratching about for the few scraps left in the kitchen, of drinking tea without milk or sugar (and reusing the teabags), of walking rather than catching the minibus to work. She realised she should not have said that three thousand pula was not much; for many, it was a great deal of money. It was easy to forget things like that once your circumstances were more comfortable, as hers now were.
She made up her mind. “Excuse me for a moment, Rra. I’ll come back. I need to talk to my husband over there.”
“I will finish this window,” said the man. “I have to scrape the putty back a bit—just a little bit. Then the painter can paint everything.”
While the glazier applied himself, Mma Makutsi crossed the room and drew Phuti aside.
“Is everything all right, Grace? Are the windows—”
She cut him short. “Yes, everything is fine. The glazier is doing a good job.”
He looked at her expectantly. “So there are no problems?”
“Not with the windows,” she said.
“And everything else is going very well,” said Phuti. “I was talking to that carpenter and he said that—”
Again she headed him off. “The glazier was telling me about his family. He has seven children, that man.”
Phuti shrugged. “There are many big families. There is somebody in the store who says he has fifteen children.” He made a face. “Fifteen.”
Mma Makutsi glanced across the room. The glazier was still bent over his work. “He has a daughter at the Botswana Secretarial College.”
“Ah,” said Phuti. “You must have been pleased to hear that—and he must be a proud man.”
“Yes, he is proud of her. But now she has to leave.”
Phuti frowned. “She is being expelled?”
“No, she is not being expelled.” As she spoke, Mma Makutsi tried to remember whether she had ever heard of anybody being expelled from the Botswana Secretarial College. She could not think of anybody to whom this had happened, although if she were to be asked to make a list of those who deserved such a fate, there was one name that led the rest: Violet Sephotho. Now there had been a thoroughly worthy candidate for expulsion, with her constant talking in class, her sniggering, her ostentatious painting of her nails while the lecturer in accountancy—a mousy man with little self-confidence—tried to explain the principles of double-entry book-keeping. Violet Sephotho had sat there and applied nail polish to show that she was somehow above such matters as double-entry book-keeping. How dare she! And who was the one person—the only one—who declined to contribute to the birthday cake they arranged for their shorthand tutor, by far the most popular member of staff? Violet Sephotho again, who said that she had better things to spend her money on than cakes for the staff. Mma Makutsi remembered her words, her very words: “They are all too fat anyway. They take our fees and spend it on fat cakes and things like that.” It was such a calumny, but nobody had sprung to the defence of the lecturers apart from Mma Makutsi herself. She had protested that Violet had no evidence for such an accusation, only to be laughed at by Violet with the taunt, “And what do you know? What does anybody from Bobonong know about these things? You haven’t even been to Johannesburg.”
It was a cutting remark, all the more wounding because it was true. Mma Makutsi had never been to Johannesburg, and it was true, too, that there were people from Bobonong who were not all that well informed about the wider world. They knew about Bobonong, of course, and, to an extent, about Francistown, but many of them did not know about much else. Yet the difference between them and the likes of Violet Sephotho was that they, unlike her, were prepared to apply themselves if given the chance. The road from Bobonong to Gaborone was a long and a hard one, but those who were able to take it took it in a spirit of humility and willingness to learn. That was the difference.
She brought herself back to where she was, speaking to Phuti. “No, there is no question of expulsion. It is all about money, Rra.”
For a moment he said nothing, but then he made a tsk sound. “Money, yes, it is often about money.”
“Three thousand pula,” said Mma Makutsi. “That’s all. Three thousand pula.”
“That’s not very much.”
She seized the cue. “That’s exactly what I thought, Phuti. Three thousand is nothing—but when you’re poor and there are so many other children …” She paused. She could see that he sympathised; some men would not, but Phuti would—she knew that. “We could help her, Rra.”
“Give her the money?”
“It could be a loan. She could pay us back when she gets a job.”
Phuti looked uncomfortable. “But we can’t go round lending money to everybody who needs it. Word would get out. We’d have people lining up outside the door—you know what it’s like in this country: people love to borrow money.”
Mma Makutsi lowered her voice. “Phuti, we are very lucky. We have that house and Itumelang, and we have so many other things. That poor girl has one thing in her life: her chance at the Botswana Secretarial College. We can afford to lend her father the money.”
She looked at him intensely. He had never refused her anything, and she realised that he would not refuse her now.
“Give it to her,” he said suddenly. “Interest free. Give it to her.”
She wanted to make sure that she understood. “You mean, she doesn’t need to pay any interest at all?”
“Yes, that is what I mean. She pays us back when she can.”
She glanced over towards the glazier. He seemed to have finished what he had been doing and was now standing back to admire his handiwork. “May I tell him now?” she asked.
“Yes, you tell him, Grace.”
She crossed the room to speak to the man. He stood quite still as she spoke, and then, without any warning, threw his hands in the air and uttered a roar of delight. The sound echoed in the unfurnished room, and the other workers turned round to see what was happening.
“I cannot believe this, Mma,” stuttered the glazier. “I cannot believe that anybody would do this. Oh, I am a happy, happy man, Mma.”
Mma Makutsi felt herself on the verge of tears. And why should I not cry? she thought. Why should I not cry at this man’s happiness?
She controlled herself. “Well, we are happy too, Rra,” she said. “You should thank my husband now—it is his money, really.”
“And the college will be pleased too,” the man continued. “She has been doing so well that they will be pleased she is staying.”
Mma Makutsi was interested. “Doing well, Rra? In all her subjects? Shorthand too?”
“All of them,” he said. “In her last examination she got a very, very high mark, Mma. The college was very pleased.”
Mma Makutsi hesitated. “A high mark, Rra? What was that?”
“It was ninety-eight per cent, Mma.”
Mma Makutsi opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it. The man stared at her: he could not understand why she should look dismayed. Did she realise how high that mark was, or did she imagine that people should get one hundred per cent?
“Ninety-eight per cent is a very high mark, Mma. It is almost impossible to get.”
Mma Makutsi made a supreme effort. “I am pleased to hear that, Rra. That is very good.”
It was bound to happen, she thought. Some day there would be somebody who would get ninety-eight per cent; there was a certain poetic inevitability to it. And people could not hope that their records would last forever; that was not what records were. They were made to be beaten by the next generation; they were made to be bettered. And for existing record-holders there was no dishonour in that process—none whatsoever.
“She must be very good at being a secretary, Rra,” she said.
“You are kind to say that, Mma. She is.” He mused for a moment. “Ninety-eight per cent, Mma! Would you believe it?”
“I do,” she said. “You see, I …” But she did not go any further. There were things that were best left unsaid, and this, she realised, was one of them.
As the man crossed the room to speak to Phuti, Mma Makutsi walked to the window he had been working on and looked out. It was while she was standing there that she heard a chirpy, rather squeaky voice from below. She glared down at her shoes.
Ninety-eight per cent, Boss! How about that? Beats ninety-seven per cent, we think! Okay, only by one per cent, but one per cent is all you need, Boss!