Tea Time for the Traditionally Built People

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Of course not. I didn't think that you meant that.”

  During the ensuing silence Mma Makutsi drank several glasses of water. It felt to her as if a hot iron had been run across her tongue, and the water, curiously enough, seemed only to make each successive mouthful more fiery. When the chicken was finished, she served a dessert of pineapple and custard that she knew Phuti would like, and this seemed to dispel the gloom that had settled over the table.

  “My favourite too!” enthused Phuti.

  She ladled a few more spoonfuls of the custard onto his plate. “Did anything happen in the furniture store today?” she asked.

  Phuti wiped a speck of custard away from the corner of his mouth. “We took delivery of a new consignment of chairs,” he said. “They came from a factory over in Durban, and when we opened the crate we saw that the legs had fallen off a number of them. Can you believe that, Grace? Four days out of the factory and the legs have fallen off.”

  “That is very bad workmanship,” said Mma Makutsi. “What can those people be thinking about?”

  Phuti shook his head sadly. “It is happening all the time now. People do not care how they make things. A little bit of glue, and they think that a chair will hold together with that. It's very dangerous.”

  “Particularly for traditionally built people,” said Mma Makutsi. “What if somebody like Mma Ramotswe sat in one of those chairs? She could fall right down.”

  Phuti agreed. “I would not like to see Mma Ramotswe sitting on one of those chairs,” he said. “She is safer in the chair that she has, even if it is very old. Sometimes old things are best. An old chair and an old bed. They can be very good.”

  Mma Makutsi did not welcome this mention of beds. Her embarrassment over the bed she had ruined by leaving it out in the rain had not entirely disappeared, and she felt the back of her neck become warm even to think about it.

  “Chairs,” she said quickly. “Yes, old chairs can be very comfortable. Although I do not think that the chair I have in the office is very comfortable. It gives me a sore back at the end of the day, I'm afraid. It is not the same shape as I am, you see.”

  Phuti frowned. “You are a very nice shape, Grace. I have always said that. It is the chair that is wrong.”

  The compliment was appreciated, and she smiled at her fiancé. “Thank you, Phuti. Yes, the chair is very old. It has been there since the very beginning, when we had that old office over near Kgale Hill.”

  “Then I must give you a new one,” said Phuti firmly. “I will bring one round to the office tomorrow. We have a whole new section for office furniture in the shop, and there are many fine-looking chairs. I will bring you a good one.”

  She thanked him, but then thought: What about Mma Ramotswe? What would she feel if she saw her assistant getting a new chair while she was stuck with her old one? She could always raise this issue with Phuti Radiphuti, but if she did so he might feel that she was being greedy: one did not accept a present with one hand and at the same time hold out the other on behalf of somebody else. Thank you, Rra, for the nice chair you have given me, and now how about one for my friend, Mma Ramotswe? That would not do.

  While Mma Makutsi wrestled with this question of etiquette, Phuti Radiphuti was clearly warming to the subject of chairs. It was always like that when he talked about furniture, she thought-his eyes lit up. And he did enjoy talking about furniture, in the same way as so many men talked about football. That was a good thing: if one had to choose between marrying a man who talked about furniture and one who talked about football, then there was no doubt in Mma Makutsi's mind as to which she preferred. There was so little one could say about football without repeating oneself, whereas there were a lot of things to be said about furniture, or at least some things.

  “What colour?” asked Phuti. “What colour would you like your chair to be?”

  Mma Makutsi was surprised by the question. She had always assumed that office chairs were black, or possibly sometimes grey: her chair at the office was somewhere in between these two colours-it was difficult to tell now, with all the use it had seen.

  “Do you have green?” she asked. “I have always wanted a green chair.”

  “There is certainly green,” said Phuti. “There is a very good chair that comes in green.”

  It was now time for second helpings of pineapple and custard. Then, with the dessert cleared away and the tea cups set out at the ready, Mma Makutsi put on the kettle while Phuti sat back in his chair with the air of a man replete.

  “And something else happened at the shop today,” he announced. “Something else that I think you will be interested to hear about.”

  Mma Makutsi reached for the tea caddy, an ancient round tin on which the word Mafeking had been printed underneath a picture of a street and a line of parked cars. “You have had a busy day,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Phuti. “And this other thing that happened has something to do with our being busy. We have taken on a new person.”

  Mma Makutsi ladled tea into the teapot. One spoon for each mouth, she muttered, and one for the pot. “So what will he do, this new person?” she asked.

  “She,” corrected Phuti. “She will be assistant manager in charge of beds. We have decided to start selling beds again, and we need somebody who can sell beds. It has to be the right sort of person.”

  “And what sort of person is that?” asked Mma Makutsi.

  Phuti appeared to be momentarily embarrassed. “A glamorous person,” he said, smiling apologetically. “Everybody in the furniture business says the same thing: if you want to sell expensive beds, get a very beautiful lady to do it for you.”

  Mma Makutsi laughed. “That is why advertisements for cars always have a picture of a beautiful girl,” she said. “It is so easy to see what they are trying to do.”

  “I think you are right,” said Phuti. “So we advertised a sales post and we had thirty people applying for it, Mma. Thirty. There must be many people who would like to sell beds.”

  “Lazy people, perhaps,” said Mma Makutsi. “Lazy people will like to sell beds; people who are not lazy will like to sell running shoes.”

  Phuti absorbed this insight. It was probably correct, he thought.

  “But one of them was very good,” he continued. “She is a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College. Eighty per cent in the final examinations.”

  Mma Makutsi hesitated, her hand poised above the kettle. Somewhere, in the distant reaches of her mind, unease made its presence felt.

  “Eighty per cent?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Phuti. “And she had very good references too.”

  “And her name?” asked Mma Makutsi.

  Phuti spoke evenly, obviously unaware of the explosive potential of the information he was about to reveal. “Violet Sephotho,” he said. “I believe that you know her. She said that she had been at the Botswana Secretarial College with you. She said that you had been good friends.”

  Mma Makutsi found it difficult to pour the boiling water into the teapot. Her right hand, normally so steady, was shaking now, and she had to use her other hand to come to its assistance. Violet Sephotho! Eighty per cent!

  She succeeded in filling the teapot but only at the cost of several small spillages of hot water, one of which was upon her wrist, and stung.

  “You have spilled hot water?”

  She brushed the incident aside. “Nothing. I am fine.” But she was thinking. Eighty per cent? That was a lie, of course, as Violet had rarely achieved much more than fifty per cent in any of the examinations at the college. Indeed, Mma Makutsi could remember an occasion when Violet had not attended one of the examinations and had pleaded ill health, even producing, in class the next day, what purported to be a doctor's letter to back up her claim. “Anyone can write a letter,” one of Mma Makutsi's friends had whispered, loud enough for Violet Sephotho to hear and spin round to glare at her accusers. She had stared at the wrong person, at Mma Makutsi, and at that moment an a
biding hostility, fuelled by envy, had begun.

  Mma Makutsi already knew the answer to her question and so did not really need to ask it. But she had to. “You took her then?” she said. “That Violet Seph…” She could not bring herself to utter the name in its entirety, and her voice trailed away.

  “Of course,” said Phuti. He looked surprised that she could have thought any other outcome was possible. Eighty per cent might not have been ninety-seven per cent, but it was still eighty per cent.

  “I see.”

  She looked away. Should she tell him? “I am not sure that she got eighty per cent,” she said. She tried to make her voice sound even, but it did not, and she thought that he would be able to tell that something was wrong.

  “But she did,” said Phuti. “She told me. Eighty per cent.”

  Mma Makutsi wanted to say, “But she is a liar, Phuti! Can you not tell? She is a very big liar.” She could not say that, though, because Phuti was a fair-minded man and would ask, even if mildly, for proof, which would be difficult to furnish. So instead she said, “Why do you think she wants to work in the shop? If she is so highly qualified, why does she not want to get a job in some big firm? A job with the diamond company, for instance?”

  Phuti shrugged. “It is not always that easy to get a job with the diamond people,” he said. “There are people lining up for those jobs. And anyway, it is a well-paid post, this. There are many benefits.”

  Indeed there are, thought Mma Makutsi. And she was sure that one of the benefits, at least from Violet Sephotho's perspective, was that of working closely with Phuti, who was very comfortably off, not only with his share of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, that would become a full interest once his aged father died, but also with his large herd of cattle at the Radiphuti cattle post. There could be no doubt, none at all, that Violet's real motive in seeking the job was to prise Phuti away from his lawful fiancée-Grace Makutsi, assistant detective-and guide him into her own wicked, calculating, waiting arms. Oh, it was clear enough, but there would be no point in spelling this out to Phuti, because he simply would not see it. Nor, she thought, would he react well to being warned about Violet; shortly after she had become engaged, Mma Ramotswe had told her to be careful about telling one's fiancé what to do. “Men do not like it,” she said. “You must never make a man feel that he is being told what to do. He will run away. I have seen that happen so many times.”

  She served Phuti his cup of tea, and they sat together at the table. She thought that Phuti had no idea of her concern, as he chatted away about other furniture matters. There was a new type of table, he said, that could be folded up and stored under a bed.

  “That is very useful,” he said. “I think that there will be many people who will want to keep a table under their bed.” Mma Makutsi was non-committal; there may be many such people, but this was not the time to think about them. This was a time to think about that scheming Violet Sephotho and what could be done about her. She could try to warn her off, Mma Makutsi thought, by telling her that she was well aware of what her real intentions were. Violet, however, was not the sort to buckle under a threat; she would simply deny that she knew what the accusation was about. Another option would be to speak to Phuti's uncles. That was always an option in Botswana, where uncles on both sides took a close interest in engagements and marriages. It would be perfectly proper for her uncles to go to see Phuti's uncles and to express their concern about the danger that Violet represented to the future marriage.

  Yet there was a difficulty here: this would have been a reasonable course of action, but only if she could trust her uncles to be discreet, and she feared that she could not do that. Her senior uncle, in particular, the one with the broken nose, was noted for his lack of tact. He would insist on being involved in any negotiation, and he would be bound to make matters worse. He would make demands, possibly even threats, and a family like the Radiphuti family, which spoke quietly and with circumspection, would be offended if her uncle made too much fuss. Oh, I am miserable, thought Mma Makutsi. I am stuck and miserable like a cow on a railway line who sees the train from Mafikeng bearing down upon her and cannot bring herself to move.

  CHAPTER FIVE. THERE IS PLENTY OF WORK FOR LOVE TO DO

  THERE WAS NO QUESTION the next morning of Mma Ramotswe's being able to make the journey into the office by foot. It was difficult enough, in fact, for her to walk to the bathroom without limping when she got out of bed shortly before six o'clock, such was the discomfort of the blister on her right foot. The plaster that Dr. Moffat had put on the day before had peeled off during the night, leaving the angry skin uncovered. That could be remedied, of course: she kept a supply of plasters in the bathroom cupboard, mainly for Puso, who was always scratching himself on thorns and nails and other things that lay in wait for passing boys. At least he had not broken anything, unlike his friend at school, an appealing boy with a wide smile, who was always appearing with an arm in a sling or an ankle in plaster. That boy fell from trees, Puso explained. “He is always climbing, Mma, and then he falls down and breaks when he hits the ground. He does not mind, though. He is a very brave boy and he will join the Botswana Defence Force when he is twelve, I think.”

  Mma Ramotswe laughed. “You cannot join the Botswana Defence Force when you are twelve,” she said. “You have to be much older. Eighteen, I think. Something like that. And being a soldier is not just a matter of climbing trees.”

  “It helps, though, doesn't it?” argued Puso. “If you can climb trees, you can hide when you see the enemy coming.”

  Mma Ramotswe shook a finger in mock disapproval. “I do not think that is what a brave soldier is meant to do, Puso.” She paused. He had said when you see the enemy coming. But Botswana had no enemies, a fact which was a source of both relief-who would want enemies?-and pride. Her country had never been aggressive, had never espoused violence, had never taken sides in the squabbles of others. She wondered how people could sleep if they knew that somebody, in their name, was dropping bombs on other people or breaking into their homes and taking them away somewhere. Why did they do it? Why was it necessary to kill and maim other people when the other people would be just the same as yourself-people who wanted to live with their families and go to work in the morning and have enough to eat at the end of the day? That was not much to ask of the world, even if for many the world could not grant even that small request.

  The contemplation of the greater suffering of the world, though, did not stop one's own small blister from hurting, and Mma Ramotswe's right foot now throbbed painfully as she lifted it onto the edge of the bath. She looked at the site of the pain, touching the skin gently, as one might touch the branch of a thorny acacia. The skin felt hot and was taut as a drum where fluid had built up underneath. She wondered whether she should take a needle to the tiny bubble and burst it, releasing the pressure and easing the pain. But she had always been taught to leave the body to sort itself out, to absorb or expel according to its own moods, its own timetable of recovery. So she simply applied another plaster, which seemed to help, and went down the corridor to make her morning cup of red bush tea.

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was still asleep. Mma Ramotswe was always the first to arise in the morning, and she enjoyed the brief private time before the others would get up and start making demands of her. There would be breakfast to prepare, children's clothes to find, husband's clothes to find too; there would be a hundred things to do. But that lay half an hour or so ahead; for the time being she could be alone in her garden, as the sun came up over the border to the east, beyond Tlokweng, hovering over the horizon like a floating ball of fire. There was no finer time of day than this, she thought, when the air was cool and when, amidst the lower branches of the trees, there was still a hint, just the merest hint, of translucent white mist.

  She looked past her vegetable garden, her poor, struggling vegetable garden, to the house itself. That building, she thought, contains my people; under that roof are the two foster children,
Motholeli and Puso, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, my husband. And, parked outside the kitchen, to complete her world, was her tiny white van, still there but not necessarily forever. She took a sip of her tea. Nothing was forever; not her, not Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, not the house, not even Botswana. She had recently read that scientists could work out exactly when everything would come to an end and the earth would be swallowed up by the sun-or was it by some other planet?-and there would be nothing left of any of us. That had made her think, and she had raised the issue with her friend, Bishop Trevor Mwamba, over tea outside the Anglican Cathedral, one Sunday morning after the seven thirty service in English and just before the nine thirty service in Setswana. “Is it true,” she had asked, “that the sun will swallow up the earth and that will be that?”

  Trevor had smiled. “I do not think that this is going to happen in the near future, Mma Ramotswe,” he had replied. “Certainly not by next Tuesday, when the Botswana Mothers' Union meets. And, frankly, I don't think that we should worry too much about that. Our concern should be what is happening right now. There is plenty of work for love to do, you know.”

  There is plenty of work for love to do. That was a wonderful way of putting it, and she had told him that this could be the best possible motto for anybody to have.

  She finished her tea and began to walk back into the house. There is plenty of work for love to do. Yes. There was breakfast to be made, and letters to be answered, and the problems in clients' lives to be sorted out. There was quite enough to do without worrying about the sun consuming the earth. Yes, one should not worry too much, but then she looked at her van and thought: How long will I be able to keep you going? One more day? One more week? And then how are we going to say goodbye, after so many years? It would be like losing a best friend, a faithful companion- it would be every bit as hard as that.

  Mma Ramotswe had an anxious moment when she turned the key in the van's ignition that morning, but it was an anxious moment that lasted just that-a moment. Obediently, and without making any suspicious noise, the engine started, and she began to drive off slowly. She breathed a sigh of relief; perhaps the problem really had been temporary-no more, as she had previously considered, than some piece of grit in the cogs that made up the gearbox or the… she could not think of the name of any of the other moving parts, but she knew that there were levers and springs and things that went up and down; any of those could have been half stuck. But as she began to drive down Zebra Drive, taking great care not to go too fast, the van resumed its protests. There was what sounded like a hiccup, and then the loud blast of a backfire, and following hard on that there was the familiar knocking sound. Her heart sank. The tiny white van was dying.