The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

by Alexander McCall Smith

  There was a flicker across the maid’s otherwise impassive face. “She is seeing two men. Two men, Mma! One is the man who is going to marry her, the other is another man altogether. I know these things; I see them.”

  Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “It is very bad.”

  “She is a bad girl,” said the maid. “It is very unfair, Mma. She has all this—she has her good parents and she has their money, their food. And all the time she is bad. It is unfair, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe reached out and took the maid’s hand. “Do not feel too sad about it, my sister,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

  The maid looked down at the floor. “Sometimes I think that God has forgotten about me,” she said.

  Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “He hasn’t, Mma,” she whispered. “You must never think that. His love is always there, Mma, always there. And it doesn’t matter who we are—if we are poor people or people who have been badly treated—we are every bit as important in God’s eyes as anybody else. Every bit.”

  The maid listened, but said nothing.

  “You heard me, did you, Mma?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

  The other woman nodded. “I heard you, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe reached into the pocket of her skirt. Fifty pula—not a small sum. “This is a present, Mma,” she said, pressing the banknote into the woman’s hand. “No, you must take it. I want you to have it.”

  The maid tucked the note away. “I have a little boy,” she said.

  “Then tonight he will have a very good meal, I think,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  For the first time, the maid smiled.

  SHE RETURNED DIRECTLY to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Parking her van under the tree, she went not into the office but into the garage, where Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s legs, together with two other sets of legs, all clad in blue overalls, protruded from under a large green truck. She called out to her husband, who answered from below the vehicle.

  “This is a very tricky repair, Mma,” he shouted out, his voice sounding distant under the truck. “I am doing my best, but it is very, very tricky.”

  “I do not want to disturb you, Rra,” she shouted back. “I need to talk to Charlie.”

  “I am watching Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, Mma,” Charlie called out.

  “You can go, Charlie,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Fanwell and I can manage all right.”

  She watched as Charlie wiggled out from under the truck. He had, she noticed, a large fresh oil stain on the bib of his overalls. She tut-tutted. “You will have to put those in the wash, Charlie. Oil is a very difficult thing. Soak them first, then put them in the wash.”

  He looked down unconcernedly at the stain. “Oil is nothing, Mma. I do not mind.” He looked at her inquisitively. “What do you want, Mma?”

  She drew him aside. “I offered to help you, Charlie. Remember?”

  He became nervous. His hands shook slightly; you would have to be looking for it, but she noticed it.

  “Yes, Mma, you did.”

  “And I have done that,” she went on. “I have been to see Prudence.”

  She saw his lip was now quivering.

  “Yes, Mma?”

  “Let me tell you this straightaway, Charlie. You are not the father of those twins. It is another man.”

  He stared at her wide-eyed. “I am not …”

  “No,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You see, that girl, Prudence, is very friendly with men. She should watch out.”

  Charlie started to smile. “I am not the father? Is this true?”

  “She thinks it is,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And what the mother thinks tends to be the most important thing, I think.”

  The news seemed to be sinking in slowly. “I do not have twins?”

  “You do not.”

  Charlie shook his head in disbelief. “I am going to be different from now on, Mma Ramotswe. You’ll see. I’m going to be different.”

  “In what way, Charlie?”

  “In every way, Mma. I am going to be a different man. More careful. Just one girlfriend. That’s all. A better mechanic too.”

  She looked at him. For all his faults—and she had to admit they were manifold—he was a well-meaning young man. And much as he could be frustrating, he could also be amusing and generous and attractive.

  “Don’t change too much,” she said gently. “We like you the way you are, Charlie.”

  He stared at her incredulously, and she realised that he might not have heard many people say that. So she repeated herself: “We like you, Charlie; you just remember that.”

  She looked down. He had clasped his hands together, his fingers interlaced. It was a gesture, she thought, of unequivocal pleasure—pleasure at hearing what all of us wanted to hear at least occasionally: that there was somebody who liked us, whatever our faults, and liked us sufficiently to say so.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A GOOD MAN, A KIND MAN

  WHAT, Mma Ramotswe asked herself, did she know about Mr. Fortitude Seleo?

  The answer to this question was brief. She knew that he had a factory that made cattle-lick; she knew that this factory was in Lobatse; and she knew that he was the neighbour of her client, Mr. Botsalo Moeti. That was all that she actually knew. The rest was all gossip and allegations from a single source—Mr. Moeti himself, who did not like Mr. Seleo, and, more significantly, did not like his cattle. That thought itself led to further surmise: if Moeti did not like Seleo’s cattle, then it was odd, was it not, that Moeti’s cattle had been attacked, rather than the other way round. There would have been a clear motive had that happened: Seleo’s cattle had a habit of trespassing on Moeti’s land; if Seleo’s cattle were attacked, then the finger of suspicion would surely point at Moeti.

  But what if the truth were rather different from the story as told by Moeti? What if Moeti’s cattle had been every bit as lawless as Seleo’s cattle and had themselves crossed over onto Seleo’s land? Then Seleo would have had a clear motive to wreak his revenge on the poor beasts. That made sense of what had happened. Seleo had been angry over the incursions and had taken action. Moeti knew why his neighbour had done this, but had kept this knowledge from Mma Ramotswe—presumably to appear more of the innocent victim.

  Then a disturbing possibility suggested itself: she had been treating Mr. Moeti as the victim, but it was possible that he was, in fact, the perpetrator. That would mean, of course, that he had attacked his own cattle, something that no farmer would dream of doing—unless he did not know that they were his cattle.

  She pictured it. Night-time, and the herd boy, young Mpho, knocks urgently on the door of the farmhouse. “Who is it?” calls Moeti. “His cattle have broken through the fence, Rra. You must come.” Moeti comes to the door, belting his trousers, cursing under his breath. He runs to his truck; Mpho, shivering, sits in the back. They drive along the bumpy track; the stars are bright overhead, the moon nowhere to be seen; the headlamps cut into the darkness, and then there is just the dark hump of the hills in the distance. The cattle eyes are yellow points caught in the lights; they lift their heads and move off into the darkness. Two stragglers. Moeti shouts and there is bellowing. The blood cannot be seen because of the dark. He shouts at the boy again and returns to the truck and they are gone and do not hear the crying of the injured beasts.

  And in the morning he discovers that his own cattle were mixed up with the neighbour’s herd, and he has maimed his own beast, and he vents his fury on the boy, and beats him. “You are not to say anything about this, understand? Nothing!” The idea occurs to him that he should blame somebody else—his neighbour, whose fault this really was. Let old scores be settled; put somebody on to him—not the police, because he would talk his way out of that and was friendly with the local policeman, but get somebody from outside , somebody accepting Moeti’s money and answerable to him alone.

  Of course, all of this implied that Mpho’s confession was false, and of that she was simply unsure. One moment she thought that the boy was pr
obably telling the truth, the next she found herself inclined to think that he had made it up too quickly, or was lying to protect somebody else. And would a small boy, she wondered, have thought up something so devilish as to attack cattle in this way? Surely not.

  She was driving to see Fortitude Seleo when she thought this, and the train of thought was so compelling that she almost stopped her van in order to sit still and think the matter through. But then, as is often the case with good ideas, the obvious flaw appeared, and so she continued with her drive. The flaw arose from what Mr. Moeti had said to her of the events. There had been two attacks, he said—the second one just a week before their first meeting. This ruled out the possibility that he had mistakenly attacked one of his own animals: he would never have made the same mistake twice. That was unlikely, she had to admit—unless, of course, the second attack had never occurred and had simply been invented to make the situation seem more serious.

  She made an effort to stop thinking about it. Sometimes, she found, it was better to defer deliberations of that sort until the end of a case, when you had to hand all the information you were going to get and could put the jigsaw together without suddenly finding fresh pieces. And she had almost reached her destination—the premises of the not very imaginatively named Botswana Cattle Food Company, from the chimneys of which emanated wisps of steam, rising up in short-lived spouts and clouds. A large truck, painted with the name of the company, was reversing towards a loading bay and a security guard, bespectacled and officious, was approaching the van.

  The guard told her where to park before directing her to the front office. He noted her name on his clipboard and smiled at her. “You have many cattle, Mma?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I have a cattle post. My father—he is late now—was good with them. He was a fine judge of cattle.”

  “I have cattle too,” he said. “Not many. Three. Out there.” He waved a hand in the direction of the Kalahari.

  She hesitated. She did not like to miss opportunities to talk to people, as this was the way one found things out. This guard must know Mr. Seleo; if she wanted to find out about his employer, then she should chat to him. Security guards, cleaners, porters—these were the ones who often knew what people were really like.

  “I have come to see Rra Seleo,” she said.

  The guard beamed. “Yes. If you go to the office, you will find him. He is always there.”

  “You must know him well,” she said. “I have never met him.”

  “Yes. You will meet him, Mma. He will be there.”

  She tried again. “What’s he like?”

  “You will see, Mma. If you ask at the office, they will take you to him. He is over there.”

  It was not working. “Thank you, Rra. I’ll go there.”

  He began to walk with her. “So you haven’t met him, Mma?”

  “No.”

  “He is a good man. A kind man.”

  “Kind? Why do you say he’s kind, Rra? Usually these businessmen are tough, aren’t they? You do not find many kind people running businesses these days, I think.”

  The guard considered this gravely before replying. “I don’t know about that, Mma. Perhaps you are right; I am just an ordinary man and do not know about these things. But I can tell you about Mr. Seleo. He never shouts. He never fires people if they are late for work. You don’t see him chasing after the young secretaries—there is none of that here.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “I am glad to hear that, Rra. There is too much of those things going on in Gaborone. I’m glad that it is not happening here.”

  “Yes, Mma. I’m glad too.”

  They had reached the door to the office, and the guard opened it for her before he went back to his post at the gate. Mma Ramotswe thanked him and made her way over to a reception desk. A young woman took her name and lifted the telephone. She spoke briefly, and then pointed to a door on the other side of the room.

  “That is where he is,” she said. “In there.”

  MR. FORTITUDE SELEO was a tall, well-built man somewhere in his mid-fifties, or a bit beyond. His hair was greying and his face was lined about the eyes and mouth. When he stood up to greet Mma Ramotswe, she immediately saw the reason for the lines: a broad smile spread across his face.

  “Mma Ramotswe,” he said. “I am very happy to meet you, Mma. You are well, I hope.”

  It was an effusive greeting, and it took Mma Ramotswe slightly aback. But she recovered quickly and returned the smile.

  “I am very well, Rra. Thank you. And you are well?”

  “Very well too, Mma Ramotswe. Very well. And glad that winter is over.”

  “I am glad too, Rra.”

  He indicated the chair in front of his desk, and she sat down.

  “So, Mma, you are the great detective, aren’t you? I have heard about you—even down here.”

  Mma Ramotswe’s embarrassment was unfeigned. “I didn’t think that people knew about me, Rra. I am not famous.”

  “No, perhaps not famous, Mma. But people driving along the Tlokweng Road see your sign. What is it, Mma? The No Ladies Detective Agency? That makes them think: Who are these no ladies?”

  “It is the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Rra.”

  Mr. Seleo laughed. “Oh, I see. But that is how people know about you.” He paused, watching her, his smile still broad. “So why have you come to see me, Mma? Is it something to do with my friend Botsalo Moeti? Something to do with a dead cow?”

  Clovis Andersen was quite clear on this: do not let your reactions show. Control your feelings. Do not look excessively surprised or dismayed.

  Mma Ramotswe felt both of these emotions. “Oh,” she said lamely. “So, you know.”

  He seemed concerned about the effect of his words. “I’m sorry, Mma,” he said quickly, his smile fading. “I did not mean to take you by surprise.”

  “I did not think that you knew,” Mma Ramotswe said.

  “Knew what?”

  “That you knew that I was interested in this affair.”

  Mr. Seleo leaned back in his chair. The smile and jovial manner had both returned. “Oh, I knew all right,” he said. “In the country we all know what’s going on, Mma. I heard about your visit. The bush has eyes, you know.”

  “And those eyes were watching me,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  “They were.”

  He looked at her with complete affability and equability; the security guard, she thought, must be absolutely right.

  “I’m afraid,” continued Mr. Seleo, “that relations between me and my neighbour are not all that I would wish them to be. It is so important, Mma, to get on with your neighbours—as I’m sure you are very well aware.”

  “It is very important indeed,” agreed Mma Ramotswe. “A fight with a neighbour is like a fight in your own home. Almost as bad.”

  He considered this. “Yes, I think I’d agree. And for this reason I did my best to get on with Botsalo Moeti. I really did. But his cattle kept coming onto my land, and I had to take the matter up with him. I did so as gently as possible—I invited him round for a meal, and my wife made a great big stew and lots of trimmings. I raised the issue as tactfully as I could, but he flew off the handle, Mma. He went off like a firework.”

  It was exactly as she had imagined in the car; or at least this part of it was. And there was no question in her mind now as to whom she believed and as to whose cattle had wandered.

  “There has been a whole lot of things since then,” Mr. Seleo explained. “It seems that he’s a man who just has to settle scores. If he thinks that you’ve done something to him, then he will attempt to get back at you. It’s quite extraordinary, Mma Ramotswe. So along comes this business with the cow—somebody does something nasty to one of his cows and he gets the idea that this is his chance to even things up with me. I’m not at all surprised that he’s trying to pin the attack on me—that’s the way he is, I’m afraid.”

  She sat in silence once he had finished. Mma Ramotswe was us
ually positive in her outlook, but now she felt somewhat bleak. There were some people who would never change—they seemed irredeemably malevolent. Fortunately there were few of these, but you did come across them from time to time, and then you felt strangely dirtied by the contact.

  After a while she spoke. “I am very sorry, Rra,” she said. “I am very sorry that I even thought that you might be responsible for such a thing.”

  Mr. Seleo shrugged. “You were only doing your job, Mma. I don’t hold anything against you.”

  “So what do we do about Mr. Moeti?”

  The smile did not slip. “We have to live with him, Mma. What else can we do?”

  She could not think of anything else to say, so she brought the conversation round to cattle-lick. She had used his lick and her cattle loved it. They could not say thank you, of course, but she could on their behalf. This made Mr. Seleo burst into peals of laughter.

  “Oh, Mma,” he said, “that is extremely amusing. You are the spokesman for the cattle of Botswana! And have the cattle got anything further to say? Are they happy with conditions in general?”

  She thought for a moment. Were the cattle of Botswana happy? “I think they are,” she said. And then she became more definite. “Yes, they certainly are.” She hesitated. “Or most of them.”

  An idea had occurred to her. It was not the most obvious idea, and she was not sure whether it would work. Happiness, she thought, is a healer, and could sometimes shift a log-jam in the most seemingly impossible circumstances. In every human heart, even the most forbidding, there was a place that could be touched. The difficulty was finding it; there were people who concealed that place with dogged determination. Sometimes, though, their guard slipped for a moment or two, and the way to a heart lay open.

  Mr. Seleo showed her out, saying that he would walk her to her van.

  “Tell me, Rra,” she said. “Would you do something to end this dispute with your neighbour?”