In the Company of Cheerful Ladies tn1lda-6

by Alexander McCall Smith

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE TINY WHITE VAN

  MMA RAMOTSWE did not like driving at night. She was not a timid driver, but she knew that there was one danger on the roads at night against which no amount of care could protect one—wandering cattle. Cattle liked to stand on the roadside at night and would suddenly step out into the paths of oncoming cars, almost as if they were curious to find out what lay behind the headlights. Perhaps they thought that the headlights were torches, held by their owners, and came out to see if they brought food; perhaps they were looking for warmth and thought the lights were the sun. Perhaps they thought nothing in particular, which was always possible with cattle, and with some people too, for that matter.

  Mma Ramotswe’s friend Barbara Mooketsi was just one of the many people Mma Ramotswe knew who had collided with a cow at night. She had been driving down from Francistown late one evening and had hit a cow north of Mahalapye. The un-fortunate animal, which was black, and therefore almost com-pletely invisible at night, had been scooped up by the collision and had entered the car through the windscreen. One of its horns had scraped Mma Mooketsi’s shoulder and would have killed her had she been sitting in a slightly different position. Mma Ramotswe had visited her in her hospital bed and had seen the myriad of cuts on her face and arms from the shattered glass. This was the danger of driving at night, and it had been enough to put her off. Of course, in the town it was different. There were no cattle wandering about, although sometimes they drifted into the outlying parts of Gaborone and caused accidents there.

  Now, leaving the edge of the town and peering into the darkness ahead of her, she searched the road for obstacles. It was not much of a road—a track ploughed out of the red earth and eroded into tiny canyons by the rains. Note’s people lived in the village at the end of this track, along with some twenty other families. It was the sort of place that was halfway between town and country. The young people here would work in Gaborone and walk out along this track to the main road each morning to catch a minibus into town. Others would live in town and come out for weekends, when they would slip back into the role of village people, looking after cattle and ploughing a few meagre fields.

  Mma Ramotswe hoped that she would remember the house where Note’s people lived. It was late now for village people, and there was a chance that there would be no light on in the house and she would have to turn round and go back home. It was also possible that Note would not be there—that he would be staying somewhere in the town. As she thought of these possibilities it occurred to her that the whole idea of coming out here was ridiculous. Here she was coming in search of a man who had ruined years of her life, planning to give him hard-earned money so that he could pursue some absurd plan, and all of this being done out of fear. She was a strong woman, a resourceful woman who had built up a business from scratch, and who had shown on numerous occasions in her professional life that she was prepared to take men on head to head. But not this man. This man was different; he made her feel inadequate, and had always done so. It was a curious experience, to feel so young again, and as uncertain and in awe as she had been so long ago.

  She reached the first of the houses, a brown block caught in the tiny white van’s wavering headlights. If her memory served her correctly, the Mokoti place was three houses down; and there it was, just as she remembered it—a whitewashed building of four rooms joined together, with a lean-to shed to one side and an old granary at the edge of the front yard. And there was a light on in the front room.

  She stopped the van. There was time to go back if she wished, to turn round and drive home. There was time to tear up the cheque which she had written out—the cash cheque, payable to bearer, for ten thousand pula. There was time to stand up to Note and to dare him to go to the police, after which she could go and make a clean breast of things to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who would surely understand. He was a kind man and he knew that people sometimes forgot to do important things, such as getting a divorce before they remarried.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She knew what she should do now, but something deep within her, that part of her which had survived from all those years ago, that part which just could not stand up to Note, which drew her to him like a light draws in a moth—that part propelled her to the gate and to the door beyond the gate.

  They were slow to open the door to her knocking, and when it was opened it was done in such a way that it could be quickly slammed shut. She saw a figure within which at first she could not make out, and then she recognised her mother-in-law, and she caught her breath. She was aged now, and stooped, but it was the same woman whom she had not seen for many years, and who recognised her too, after a moment’s hesitation.

  For a while neither woman spoke. There was so much that could be said, and Mma Ramotswe might have wept in the saying of it, but that was not what she had come for, and this woman did not deserve that. She had always sided with Note, of course, and had turned a blind eye to what was going on, but then what mother would admit to others, or to herself, that her own son was capable of such cruelty?

  After a minute or so, the older woman moved slowly to one side and nodded. “You should come inside, Mma,” she said.

  Mma Ramotswe stepped into the house, noticing the smell as she did so. This was the odour of poverty, of life on the edge of making do; the smell of carefully husbanded cooking fuel, of clothes that were not washed frequently enough—for lack of soap. She glanced around. They were in a room which served as a living room and kitchen. A naked bulb burned weakly above a table on which a half-empty jar of jam stood flanked by a couple of knives and a folded cloth. On a shelf at the other end of the room was stacked a small number of tin plates and several steel cooking pots. A picture, cut out of a magazine, had been pinned to the wall beside the shelves.

  She had been in this house many times before. That had been a long time ago, and she was now feeling the usual effect of memory, which was to diminish places, to make them more cramped and shabbier than they had once appeared. It was as though one was looking at the world from a long way away, and it was smaller. She tried to remember exactly when it was that she had last been here, but it was too many years ago, and the painful memories had been obliterated.

  “I am sorry that I have come to your house so late at night,” said Mma Ramotswe. She spoke respectfully, because this was an old woman she was addressing, and it did not matter that she was the mother of Note Mokoti—she was an old Motswana lady and that was enough.

  The woman looked down at her hands. “He is not here,” she said. “Note is not here.”

  Mma Ramotswe did not say anything. On the other side of the room two doors led off into the rest of the house, the bedrooms. These were both closed.

  Mma Mokoti saw her look at the doors. “No,” she said. “There is only my husband in one room and in the other there is a lodger, a young woman who works in a Government office. She pays us to stay here. That is all.”

  Mma Ramotswe felt embarrassed that Note’s mother had sensed her doubts. “I believe you, Mma,” she said. “Can you tell me where I can find him?”

  The old woman pointed vaguely in the direction of the town, and then dropped her hand. “Somewhere in town. He is staying somewhere in town.”

  “But you don’t know where?”

  Mma Mokoti sighed. “I do not know. He has come to see us, and he will come again. But I do not know when.” She muttered something else that Mma Ramotswe did not catch, and then looked up at her visitor, and Mma Ramotswe saw the clouded eyes, with their brown irises and their muddy, milky whites. They were not the eyes of a malevolent person, but the eyes of one who had seen a great deal and had done her best to make something of a hard life. They were the eyes of the sort that one could see anywhere, at any time, of people who had a life of difficulty and who still managed to keep their human dignity in the face of suffering and want.

  She had no idea why she should say it—certainly she had not planned it—but Mma Ra
motswe suddenly spoke. “I want you to know, Mma,” she began. “I want you to know that I do not think ill of you, or of Note. What happened was a long time ago. It was not your fault. And there are things about your son of which you can be proud. Yes. His music. That is a great gift and it makes people happy. You can be proud.”

  There was a silence. Mma Mokoti was staring at her hands again. Then she turned away and looked at the shelf with the pots. “I did not want him to marry you, you know,” she said quietly. “I argued with him. I told him that you were a young girl and that you were not ready for the life that he was leading. And there was another girl he was seeing. You didn’t know about that, did you? There was another girl, who had a baby. She was already there when he met you. He had already married that girl.”

  Mma Ramotswe stood quite still. From within one of the rooms a man coughed. She had suspected, all those years ago, that Note was seeing other women, but she had never thought that he had been married. Did this change anything, she wondered? What should I feel about this? It was another of his lies, of his concealments, but she should not feel any surprise about that. Everything he had said to her was a lie, it seemed; there was simply no truth in him.

  “Do you know who this other girl was?” she asked. She did not think about the question, nor whether she really wanted to know the answer. But she felt that she had to say something.

  Mma Mokoti turned back to face her. “I think that she is late, now,” she said. “And I never saw that baby. He is my grandchild, but I have never seen him. I feel very sad about that.”

  Mma Ramotswe took a step forward and put her arm gently about the old woman. The shoulder was hard and bony. “You must not feel too sad, Mma,” she said. “You have worked hard. You have made this home for your husband. You must not feel sad about any of that. The other things are not so important, are they?”

  The old woman said nothing for a moment, and Mma Ramotswe kept her arm about her shoulder. It was a strange feeling, she had always thought; feeling the breathing of another, a reminder of how we all share the same air, and of how fragile we are. At least there was enough air in the world for everybody to breathe; at least people did not fight with one another over that. And it would be difficult, would it not, for the rich people to take all the air away from the poor people, even if they could take so many other things? Black people, white people: same air.

  The old woman looked up at her quite suddenly. “Your father,” she said. “I remember him from the wedding. He was a good man, wasn’t he?”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “He was a very good man. He is late now, as perhaps you know. But I still go to his grave, out there at Mochudi. And I think of him every day.”

  The old woman nodded. “That is good.”

  Mma Ramotswe took her arm away, gently. “I must go now,” she said. “I must get back to my place.”

  She said goodbye to Mma Mokoti, who saw her to the door, and then she went out into the night to where the tiny white van was parked. The engine started first time, as it always did, now that it was being regularly looked after by Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and she was soon negotiating her way back up the rough dirt track, the undelivered cheque still firmly in her pocket. It will remain undelivered, she thought, because of the conversation which she had had with Mma Mokoti. So Note had been married before he met her. Well, if that were the case, then one might well ask the question: Did he get divorced?

  SHE HAD ALMOST REACHED the end of the track when the tiny white van died. The end came suddenly, just as the end may come to those who suffer a stroke or a heart attack, without notice, when they are least expecting it. Certainly Mma Ramo-tswe was not thinking of the possibility of mechanical failure; her thoughts, rather, were on the conversation she had had with Mma Mokoti. It had been a painful visit for her, at least at the beginning. It had been hard to go back to that house, which had actually been the scene of one of Note’s assaults on her, one weekend all those years ago when they had been the only people there and he had been drunk and had turned on her with vicious suddenness. But she was glad that she had gone now, and had been able to talk to Note’s mother. Even if she had not revealed that information about her son, it had done both of them good, she thought, to talk. For the mother, it would perhaps be easier for her to know that she, Precious Ramotswe, did not hold anything against her, and had forgiven her son. That would be one less thing in a life which she suspected had been full of things to worry about. And for her part, saying to the mother what she had said had cost her very little, and had made her feel much better anyway. And then there had been the massive relief of realising that perhaps she had not committed bigamy after all. If Note had still been married when he had married her, then there was no marriage in the first place. That meant that her marriage to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was perfectly legal.

  It was while she was thinking of this that the tiny white van suddenly lost all power. She was not going at all fast when it happened, barely ten miles an hour on that pitted surface, but the drawing to a halt happened very quickly and the engine stopped.

  Mma Ramotswe’s first thought was that she had run out of fuel. She had filled the tank only a few days ago, and when she looked down, it showed that it was still half full. So that possibility was excluded. Nor had there been electrical failure, as the lights were still illuminating the track ahead. So the problem, she felt, was in the engine itself.

  With sinking heart, she switched off the ignition and then tried to turn it on again. There was the sound of the starter turning over, but nothing else happened. She tried again, with the same result.

  Mma Ramotswe switched off the headlights and opened the door of the van. There was some moonlight, if not very much, and for a moment she stood there, looking up at the sky, humbled by its sheer immensity and by the quiet of the bush. The tiny white van had been a cocoon of safety in the darkness; now it was just her, an African lady, under this great sky and with a long walk ahead of her. She would be able to reach the main road, she thought, in twenty minutes or so, and then they were about ten miles from the town. She could walk that far, of course, if she had to, but how long would that take? She knew that an average person could cover four miles in an hour, as long as there were no hills. She was not an average person, she feared; the rate for traditionally built people was probably three miles an hour. So that would mean a walk of about three hours, just to reach the outskirts of town. From there it would be at least half an hour—probably rather more—to Zebra Drive.

  Of course there was the chance that she would be able to flag down a minibus, if there was one on the prowl. The driver would probably take advantage of her need and charge much more than was normal, but she would readily pay whatever it cost to get home before midnight. Or she might be able to persuade a passing driver to stop and pick her up as an act of charity. There had been a time when people would do that, and indeed Mma Ramotswe would still let people ride in the back of the van when she went up to Mochudi. But she doubted whether people would stop at night out here to pick up a woman who for no apparent reason was standing by the roadside.

  She locked the door of the tiny white van and was about to start her walk when she heard a sound. There were many sounds in the bush at night—the screeching of insects, the scurrying of small creatures. This sound, though, was not one of those; it was the sound of liquid dripping. She stood where she was and strained her ears. For a few moments there was only silence, but then it came again and this time it was clear that it emanated from under the van itself.

  Unlike Mma Makutsi, and indeed unlike Motholeli, Mma Ramotswe was no mechanic. But it was difficult to be married to a mechanic and not to pick up some knowledge of engines, and one thing that she did know was that if an engine lost its oil it would seize up. The dripping sound which she heard from under the van must be oil, and then she remembered. Coming down the track she had certainly felt a bad bump when she hit one of the rocks which protruded from the dirt surface. She had not thought much about it, but now she
realised just what it could have done. The rock could have damaged the sump and the oil simply drained out of the van. If the crack in the sump were not too large it would have taken some time, but once it had occurred, then the engine would simply stop, just as hers had done that night. And Mma Ramotswe further knew that when an engine seized, awful damage was done. She and Mma Makutsi could survive for long periods without tea, but engines, alas, were different.

  She turned away with a heavy heart and began to trudge up the track. She was closer to the main road than she had thought and in less than fifteen minutes she was at the junction. The road to Lobatse was relatively busy, and it was not long before a set of headlights swung into view over the brow of the hill. She watched as a truck sped by, the wind from its passing brushing against her face. That had been going in the wrong direction, down towards Lobatse, but there would be vehicles going the other way. She began to walk.

  It was easy walking along the road, along the well-used tar. This was a properly maintained road, with a smooth surface, and walking along it one might make good progress. But it still felt strange to her to be so utterly isolated in the night, with darkness stretching out on either side of the road. How far away, she wondered, was the nearest creature that might wish to eat her? There were no lions this close to Gaborone, but if one went forty miles to the east, then that might be different. And what would happen if a lion decided to wander? Forty miles for a lion was nothing, and after having covered forty miles a lion might be hungry and in just the right mood to find a traditionally built meal …