The Full Cupboard of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mma Ramotswe felt a momentary irritation with Mma Seeonyana. It was discourteous, in her view, to make vague allusions in one’s conversation with another—allusions which the other could not understand. There was nothing more frustrating than trying to work out what another person was saying in the face of coyness or even deliberate obfuscation. If there was something which Mma Seeonyana wanted to say about Mr Bobologo, then she should say it directly rather than hinting at some private knowledge.

  “Well, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe in a firm tone. “Is Mr Bobologo a ladies’ man, or is he not?”

  Mma Seeonyana stared at her. She was still smiling, but she had picked up the note of irritation in her visitor’s voice and the smile was fading. “I’m sorry, Mma,” she said. “I didn’t mean to laugh like that. It’s just that … well, it’s just that you touched upon a very funny thing with that man. He is a ladies’ man, but only in a very special sense. That was what was so funny.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded encouragingly. “In what sense is he a ladies’ man then?”

  Mma Seeonyana chuckled. “He is one of those men who is worried about street ladies. These bad girls who hang about in bars. That sort of woman. He disapproves of them very strongly and he and some friends of his have been trying for years to save these girls from their bad ways. It is his hobby. He goes to the bus station and hands leaflets to young girls coming in from the villages. He warns them about what can happen in Gaborone.”

  Mma Ramotswe narrowed her eyes. This was very interesting information, but it was difficult to see what exactly it told her. Everybody was aware of the problem of bar girls, who were the scourge of Africa. It was sad to see them, dressed in their shoddy finery, flirting with older men who should know better, but who almost inevitably did not. Nobody liked this, but most people did nothing about it. At least Mr Bobologo and his friends were trying.

  “It’s a hopeless task,” Mma Seeonyana continued. “They have set up some sort of place where these girls can go and live while they try to get honest jobs. It is over there by the African Mall.” She stopped and looked at Mma Ramotswe. “But I’m sure that you didn’t come here to talk about Mr Bobologo, Mma. There are better things to talk about.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “I have been very happy to talk about him,” she replied. “But if there are other things you would like to talk about, I am happy with that.”

  Mma Seeonyana sighed. “There are so many things to talk about, Mma. I don’t really know where to start.”

  This, thought Mma Ramotswe, was a good cue, and she took it. She remembered Rose’s warning, and she could see the afternoon, her precious Sunday afternoon, disappearing before her. “Well, I could always come back to visit you, Mma …”

  “No,” said Mma Seeonyana quickly. “You must stay, Mma. I will make you some tea and then I can tell you about something that has been happening around here that is very strange.”

  “You are very kind, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe sat down on the battered chair which Mma Seeonyana had pulled out of the doorway. This was duty, she supposed, and there were more uncomfortable ways of earning a living than listening to ladies like Mma Seeonyana gossiping about neighbourhood affairs. And one never knew what one might learn from such conversations. It was her duty to keep herself informed, as one could not tell when some snippet of information gathered in such a way would prove useful; just as the information about Mr Bobologo and the bar girls might prove useful, or might not. It was difficult to tell.

  MMA MAKUTSI was also busy that Sunday, not on the affairs of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, but on the move to her new house. The simplest way of doing this would have been to ask Mma Ramotswe to bring her tiny white van to carry over her possessions, but she was unwilling to impose in this way. Mma Ramotswe was generous with her time, and would have readily agreed to help her, but Mma Makutsi was independent and decided to hire a truck and a driver for the hour or so it would take to move her effects to their new home. There was not much to move, after all: her bed, with its thin coir mattress which she would soon replace, her single chair, her black tin trunk with her clothes folded within it, and a box containing her shoes, her pot, pan, and small primus stove. These were the worldly goods of Mma Makutsi which were quickly piled up in the back of the truck by the muscular young man who drove up the bumpy track that morning.

  “You have packed this well,” he said, making conversation as they drove the short distance to her new house. “I move things for people all the time. But they often have many boxes and plastic bags full of things. Sometimes they also have a grandmother to be moved, and I have to put the old lady in the back of the truck with all the other things.”

  “That is no way to treat a grandmother,” said Mma Makutsi. “The grandmother should ride in the front.”

  “I agree, Mma,” said the young man. “Those people who put their grandmother in the back of the truck, they will feel sorry when the grandmother is late. They will remember that they put her in the back of the truck, and it will be too late to do anything about it.”

  Mma Makutsi replied to this observation civilly, and the rest of the journey was completed in silence. She had the key of the house in the pocket of her blouse and she felt for it from time to time just to reassure herself that it was really there. She was thinking, too, of how she would arrange the furniture—such as it was—and how she might see about a rug for her new bedroom. That was a previously undreamed-of luxury; she had woken every day of her life to a packed earth floor or to plain concrete. Now she might afford a rug which would feel so soft underfoot, like a covering of new grass. She closed her eyes and thought of what lay ahead—the luxury of having her own shower—with hot water!—and the pleasure, the sheer pleasure, of having an extra room in which she could entertain people if she wished. She could invite friends to have a meal with her, and nobody would have to sit on a bed or look at her tin trunk. She could buy a radio and they could listen to music together, Mma Makutsi and her friends, and they would talk about important things, and all the humiliations of the shared stand-pipe would be a thing of the past.

  She kept her eyes closed until they were almost there and then opened them and saw the house, which seemed smaller now than she had remembered it, but which was still so beautiful in her eyes, with its sloping roof and its paw-paw trees.

  “This is your place, Mma?” asked the driver.

  “It’s my house,” said Mma Makutsi, savouring the words.

  “You’re lucky,” said the young man. “This is a good place to live. How many pula is the rent? What do you pay?”

  Mma Makutsi told him and he whistled. “That is a lot! I could not afford a place like this. I have to live in half a room over that way, half way to Molepolole.”

  “That cannot be easy,” said Mma Makutsi.

  They drew up in front of the gate, and Mma Makutsi walked down the short path that led to the front door. She had that door, and the part of the house which was lived in by the other tenants was reached by the door at the back. She felt proud that the front door was hers, even if it looked as if it was in need of a coat of paint. That could be dealt with later; what counted now was that she had the key to this door in her hand, paid for by the first month’s rent, and hers by right.

  It took the young man very little time to move her possessions into the front room. She thanked him, and gave him a ten-pula tip—overly generous, perhaps, but she was a proper householder now and these things would be expected of her. As she handed over the money, which he took from her with a wide smile, she reflected on the fact that she had never done this before. She had never before been in a position where she had given largesse, and the thought struck her forcibly. It was an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable feeling; I am just Mma Makutsi, from Bobonong, and I am giving this young man a ten-pula note. I have more money than he has. I have a better house. I am where he would like to be, but isn’t.

  By herself now, in the house, Mma Makutsi moved about her two rooms.
She touched the walls; they were solid. She loosened a window latch, letting in a warm breeze for a moment, and then closed the window again. She switched on a light, and a bulb glowed above her; she turned on a tap, and water, fresh, cold water came out and splashed into a stainless steel sink, so polished and shiny that she could see her face reflected at her, the face of a person who was looking at the world with the cautious wonder of ownership, or at least of something close to it, of tenancy.

  There was a side door to the house, and she opened this and peered out onto the yard. The paw-paw trees had incipient fruit upon them, which would be ready in a month or so. There were one or two other plants, shrubs that had wilted in the heat but which had the dogged determination of indigenous Botswana vegetation. These would survive even if never watered; they would cling on in the dry ground, making the most of what little moisture they could draw from the soil, tenacious because they lived here in this dry country, and had always lived here. Mma Ramotswe had once described the traditional plants of Botswana as loyal and yes, that was right, thought Mma Makutsi, that is what they are—our old friends, our fellow survivors in this brown land that I love and love so much. Not that she thought about that love very often, but it was there, as it was in the hearts of all Batswana. And that was surely what most people wanted, at the end of the day; to live on the land that they love, and nowhere else; to be where their people had been before them, as long as anybody could remember.

  She drew back from the door, and looked about her house again. She did not see the grubby finger marks on the wall, nor the place where the floor had buckled. What she saw was a room with bright curtains and with friends about a table, and herself at the head; what she heard was a pot of water boiling on a stove, to the soft hissing of a flame.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MR BOBOLOGO TALKS ON THE SUBJECT OF LOOSE WOMEN

  THE FACT that the schools were on holiday was convenient. Had Mr Bobologo been teaching, then Mma Ramotswe would have been obliged to wait until half past three, when she could have accosted him on his way to the house that he occupied in the neat row of teachers’ houses at the back of the school. As it was, that Monday she was able to arrive at his house at ten o’clock and find him, as Mma Seeonyana said she would, sitting on a chair in the sun outside his back door, a Bible on his lap. She approached him carefully, as one always should when coming across somebody reading the Bible, and greeted him in the approved, traditional fashion. Had he slept well? Was he well? Would he mind if she talked to him?

  Mr Bobologo looked up at her, squinting against the sunlight, and Mma Ramotswe saw a tall man of slim build, carefully dressed in khaki trousers and an open-necked white shirt, and wearing a pair of round, pebble-lensed glasses. Everything about him, from the carefully polished brown shoes to the powerful glasses, said teacher, and she had to make an effort to prevent herself from smiling. People were so predictable, she thought, so true to type. Bank managers dressed exactly as bank managers were expected to dress—and behaved accordingly; you could always tell a lawyer from that careful, rather watchful way they listened to what you had to say, as if they were ready to pounce on the slightest slip; and, since she had come to know Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, there was no mistaking mechanics, who looked at things as if they were ready to take them apart and make them work better. Not that this applied to all mechanics, of course; the apprentices would be mechanics before too long and yet they looked at things as if they were about to break them. So perhaps it took years before a calling began to tell on a person.

  Did she look like a detective, she wondered? This was an intriguing question. If somebody saw her in the street, they would probably not look twice at her. She was just an ordinary Motswana lady, in the traditional mould, going about her daily business as so many other women did. Surely nobody would suspect her of watching, which is what she had to do in her job. Perhaps it was different with Mma Makutsi, with those large glasses of hers. People noticed those glasses and clearly thought about them. They might wonder, might they not, why somebody would need such large glasses and they might conclude that this was because she was interested in looking closely at things, at magnifying them. That, of course, was an absurd vision of what she and Mma Makutsi did; they very rarely had to examine any physical objects—human behaviour was what interested them, and all that this required was observation and understanding.

  Her observation of Mr Bobologo lasted only a few seconds. Now he stood up, closing the Bible with some regret, as one might close a riveting novel in which one had become immersed. Of course Mr Bobologo would know the end of the story—which was not a happy ending, if one thought about it carefully—but one might still be absorbed even in the completely familiar.

  “I am sorry to disturb you,” said Mma Ramotswe. “The school holidays must be a good time for you teachers to catch up on your reading. You will not like people coming along and disturbing you.”

  Mr Bobologo responded well to this courteous beginning. “I am happy to see you, Mma. There will be plenty of time for reading later on. You may sit on this chair and I will fetch another.”

  Mma Ramotswe sat on the teacher’s chair and waited for him to return. It was a good spot that he had chosen to sit, hidden from passers-by on the road, but with a view of the children’s playground where even now in the holidays the children of the school staff were engaged in some complicated game with a ball. It would be good to sit here, she thought, knowing that the Government was still paying one’s salary every month, and that reading, and becoming wiser and wiser, was exactly what one was expected to do.

  Mr Bobologo returned with another chair and seated himself opposite Mma Ramotswe. He looked at her through the thick lenses of his spectacles, and then dabbed gently at the side of his mouth with a white handkerchief, which he then folded neatly and placed in the pocket of his shirt.

  Mma Ramotswe looked back at him and smiled. Her initial impression of Mr Bobologo had been favourable, but she found herself wondering why it was that a successful, rather elegant person such as Mma Holonga should take up with this teacher, who, whatever his merits might be, was hardly a romantic figure. But such speculation was inevitably fruitless. The choices that people made in such circumstances were often inexplicable, and perhaps it was no more than sheer chance. If you were in the mood for falling in love, or marrying, then perhaps it did not matter very much whom you would see when you turned the corner. You were looking for somebody, and there was somebody, and you would convince yourself that this random person was what you were really looking for in the first place. We find what we are looking for in life, her father had once said to her; which was true—if you look for happiness, you will see it; if you look for distrust and envy and hatred—all those things—you will find those too.

  “So, Mma,” said Mr Bobologo. “Here I am. You have come to see me about your child, I assume. I hope I can say that this boy or this girl is doing well at school. I am sure I can. But first you must tell me what your name is, so I know which child it is that I am talking about. That is important.”

  For a few moments Mma Ramotswe was taken aback, but then she laughed. “Oh no, Rra. Do not worry. I am not some troublesome mother who has come to talk about her difficult child. I have come because I have heard of your other work.”

  Mr Bobologo took out his handkerchief and dabbed again at the side of his mouth.

  “I see,” he said. “You have heard of this work that I do.” There was a note of suspicion in his voice, Mma Ramotswe noticed, and she wondered why this should be. Perhaps he was laughed at by others, or labelled a prude, and the thought irritated her. There was nothing to be ashamed of in the work that he did, even if it seemed strange for a man to have such strong views on such a matter. At least he was trying to help address a social problem, which was more than most people did.

  “I have heard of it,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I thought that I would like to hear more about it. It is a good thing that you are doing, Rra.”

  Mr Bobol
ogo’s expression remained impassive. Mma Ramotswe thought that he was still unconvinced by what she had said, and so she continued, “The problem of these street girls is a very big one, Rra. Every time I see them going into bars, I think: That girl is somebody’s daughter, and that makes me sad. That is what I think, Rra.”

  These words had a marked effect on Mr Bobologo. While she was still speaking, he sat up in his chair, sharply, and stared intensely at Mma Ramotswe.

  “You are right, Mma,” he said. “They are all the daughters of some poor person. They are all children who have been loved by their parents, and by God himself, and now where are they? In bars! That is where. Or in the arms of some man. That is also where.” He paused, looking down at the ground. “I am sorry to use such strong language, Mma. I am not a man who uses strong language, but when it comes to this matter, then I am like a dog who has been kicked in the ribs.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. “It is something that should make us all angry.”

  “Yes,” said Mr Bobologo. “It should. It should. But what does the Government do about this? Do you see the Government going down to these bars and chasing these bad girls back to their villages? Do you see that, Mma?”

  Mma Ramotswe mused for a moment. There were many things, she thought, that one could reasonably expect the Government to do, but it had never occurred to her that chasing bar girls back to their villages was one of them. For a moment she imagined the Minister of Roads, for example, a portly man who inevitably wore a wide-brimmed hat to shade him from the sun, chasing bar girls down the road to Lobatse, followed, perhaps, by his Under-Secretary and several clerks from the Ministry. It was an intriguing picture, and one which would normally have made her smile, but there was no question of smiling now, in front of the righteous indignation of Mr Bobologo.