Blue Shoes and Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You are probably wondering what happened,” said Boitelo.

  “I am, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I am not very sure where this is going. I thought I did, but now …”

  “Well, I will tell you. I shall tell you what happened. One of our patients had a stroke. It was not a serious stroke, and he recovered very well. But he had a stroke. And he was one of the ones with high blood pressure.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. “I have heard that this is a danger from high blood pressure.” She shifted in her chair. That was why that doctor had told her to lose some weight. He had talked about heart problems and strokes, and it had all made her feel most uncomfortable. What use, she wondered, was a doctor who made people feel uncomfortable? Doctors were meant to provide reassurance, which of course made people feel better. Everybody knew that.

  “Yes,” Boitelo went on. “High blood pressure can lead to strokes. And this patient ended up in hospital for a few days. I don’t think that there was any real danger, but the doctor became quite agitated about it. He asked me to get out the patient’s records and he kept them with him for a while. Then he gave them back to me for filing.”

  “And you looked?” asked Mma Makutsi.

  Boitelo smiled. “Yes, Mma. I was nosy. I looked.”

  “And did you see anything unusual?” prompted Mma Ramotswe.

  Boitelo spoke slowly, seemingly aware of the dramatic effect that her words were having. “I found that the figures for a blood pressure reading had been changed.”

  A large fly landed on the table in front of Mma Ramotswe and she watched it as it took a few steps towards the edge. It hesitated and then launched itself into the air again, its tiny buzz just audible. Boitelo had been watching it too, and she swatted ineffectively at it.

  “Rubbed out?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Were there marks on the page?”

  “No,” answered Boitelo. “There was no sign of that. It must have been done very skilfully.”

  “Then how could you tell?” challenged Mma Makutsi. “How did you know?”

  Boitelo smiled. “Because the patient was the first one whose blood pressure I had taken in the waiting room while the doctor was busy. It was the same person. And I had written down my reading on a scrap of paper which I had put away in my drawer. I remember comparing those figures with the ones which the doctor put on the card that day. They were the same. But now, that very same figure had been changed. A high reading had been changed to a low one.”

  Boitelo sat back in her chair and looked at Mma Ramotswe. “I think, Mma,” she said, “I think that this doctor is doing something very wrong. I went to see somebody in the Ministry of Health and I told him about it. But he said that I had no proof. And I don’t think that he believed me anyway. He said that from time to time they had complaints from nurses who did not like the doctor they worked for. He said that they had to be very careful, and until I could come up with something more concrete I should be careful what I said.”

  She looked at Mma Ramotswe defensively, as if she, too, would pour scorn on her story. But Mma Ramotswe did not do this. She was noting something down on a piece of paper, and she did not react in any way when Boitelo went on to explain that she had brought this matter to the attention of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency out of a sense of public duty and she hoped that in the circumstances there would be no fee, which she would be unable to pay anyway.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BLUE SHOES

  MMA RAMOTSWE KNEW that she should not have left the office that afternoon. She now had rather more to do than she wanted, and none of the problems which had landed on her desk appeared to have any answer. There was a series of issues, each of them demanding to be resolved but each curiously resistant to solution. There was Mokolodi, which she should do something about sooner or later; there was Mma Tsau and the blackmailing letter; and then there was the question of Mr Polopetsi’s mean uncle and his favouritism towards Mr Polopetsi’s brother, for whom he had bought a car. She thought about that. No, there was nothing that she could do—just now—about that. The world was imperfect, and there were just too many claims. One day, perhaps, but not now. So that came off the list, which left one remaining item, the most difficult of course: the doctor. She admired Boitelo for coming to see her; many people would just have given up in the face of a wrong which they could not right, but she had brought the issue to her. And Boitelo had been correct, Mma Ramotswe thought, about civic duty. It was her duty not to stand by in the face of evidence of medical wrongdoing; and it was Mma Ramotswe’s civic duty to do something now that the issue had been brought to her attention. But it was difficult to think what to do, and, as she often did in such circumstances, Mma Ramotswe decided that the best thing to do would be to go shopping. She often found that ideas came to her when shopping, halfway down the vegetable aisle in the supermarket, or when trying on a skirt—which would inevitably be just a little bit too tight—she would have an idea and what had previously been a log-jam would gradually begin to shift.

  “We shall go shopping, Mma Makutsi,” she announced after Boitelo had taken her leave. “We shall go downtown.”

  Mma Makutsi looked up from her desk. She was working on a rather complex matter at the moment, the pursuit of a debtor on behalf of a firm of lawyers. The debtor, a Mr Cedric Disani, had established a hotel which had gone spectacularly bankrupt. It was thought that he had extensive holdings in land, and they now had a list of properties from the land register and were trying to work out which were owned by companies in which he had an interest. It was one of the most testing cases Mma Makutsi had ever been allocated, but at least it had a fee attached to it—a generous one—and this would make up for all the public-spirited work which Mma Ramotswe seemed to be taking on.

  “Yes, yes,” urged Mma Ramotswe. “You can leave those lists for a while. It will do us both good to get downtown and do some shopping. And maybe we’ll have some ideas while we’re about it. I always find that shopping clears the head, don’t you agree, Mma?”

  “And it clears the bank account,” joked Mma Makutsi as she closed the file in front of her. “This Mr Cedric Disani must have done a bit of shopping—you should see how much he owes.”

  “I knew a lady of that name once,” said Mma Ramotswe. “She was a very fashionable lady. You used to see her in very expensive clothes. She was a very fancy lady.”

  “That will be his wife,” said Mma Makutsi. “The lawyers told me about her. They said that Mr Disani put a lot of things in her name so that his creditors cannot touch them. They said that she still drives around in a Mercedes-Benz and wears very grand clothing.”

  Mma Ramotswe made a clucking sound of disapproval. “Those Mercedes-Benzes, Mma—have you noticed how whenever we come across them in our line of work they are driven by the same sort of people? Have you noticed that, Mma?”

  Mma Makutsi replied that she had. “I would never get a Mercedes-Benz,” she said. “Even if I had the money. They are very fine cars, but people would talk.”

  Mma Ramotswe, halfway to the door, paused and looked at Mma Makutsi. “You said Even if I had the money, Mma. Do you realise that?”

  Mma Makutsi looked blank. “Yes,” she said. “That is what I said.”

  “But, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Don’t you realise that now you could have a Mercedes-Benz if you wanted one? Remember who you’re going to marry. Phuti Radiphuti is very well off with that Double Comfort Furniture Shop of his. Yes, he is well off—not that I really like the furniture that he sells in that shop, Mma. Sorry to say that, but it’s not really to my taste.”

  Mma Makutsi looked at Mma Ramotswe for a moment, and swallowed hard. It had not occurred to her that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni might fail to inform her of his purchase of the new chair, but now it struck her that this was precisely what had happened. And when he eventually came to explain that he had bought a chair, he would reveal, no doubt, that she had taken him there and had encouraged him to make the purchase. She was uncertain as to whethe
r she should tell Mma Ramotswe herself; whether she should make a clean breast of it, or whether she should let matters take their natural course.

  “So you would never buy a chair there?” she asked innocently. “Not even if it was on sale? Say, fifty per cent off?”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “Not even ninety-seven per cent off, Mma. No. I’m sure that the furniture is very good, it’s just that it’s not for me.”

  Nor for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, thought Mma Makutsi ruefully. But what was this about a Mercedes-Benz? Why did Mma Ramotswe think that she might buy a Mercedes-Benz? It was an impossible thought … and yet, it was true that Phuti was quite a rich man; perhaps she should get used to being the wife of a man who even if not very wealthy was nonetheless comfortably off by any standards. It was a strange thought. Phuti Radiphuti was so modest and unassuming, and yet he undoubtedly had the resources to live a showier life if he chose to do so.

  “When Phuti and I get married,” said Mma Makutsi, “we will not act like rich people. We will be just the same as we always have been. That is the way we are.”

  “And that is very good,” said Mma Ramotswe. It was not the Botswana way to be showy. Here it was quietness and discretion that people admired. A great person was a quiet person. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, for instance; he was a quiet man and a great man too, like many mechanics and men who worked well with their hands. And there were many such men in Africa—men whose lives had been ones of hardship and suffering, but who were great men nonetheless.

  MMA RAMOTSWE locked the door of the office behind them and said goodbye to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He was bent over the engine of a car, explaining something to the apprentices, who stood up and stared at the two women.

  “We are going shopping,” said Mma Makutsi, taunting the young men. “That is what women like to do, you know. They much prefer shopping to going out with men. That is very well known.”

  The younger apprentice let out a howl of protest. “That is a lie!” he shouted. “Boss, listen to how that woman lies! You cannot have a detective who lies, Mma Ramotswe. You need to fire that woman. Big glasses and all. Fire her.”

  “Hush!” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “We have plenty of work to do. Let the ladies go shopping if it makes them feel better.”

  “Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe, as she let herself into the tiny white van. “It certainly makes us feel better.”

  They drove down the Tlokweng Road to the busy roundabout. There were hawkers at the side of the road selling rough-hewn stools and chairs, and a woman with a smoking brazier on which maize cobs were being grilled. The smell of the maize, the sharp-sweet smell that she knew so well and which spoke so much of the African roadside, wafted through the window of the tiny white van, and for a moment she was back in Mochudi, a child again, at the fireside, waiting for a cob to be passed over to her. And she saw herself all those years ago, standing away from the fire, but with the wood-smoke in her nostrils; and she was biting into the succulent maize, and thinking that this was the most perfect food that the earth had to offer. And she still thought that, all these years later, and her heart could still fill with love for that Africa that she once knew, our mother, she thought, our mother who is always with us, to provide for us, to nourish us, and then to take us, at the end, into her bosom.

  They passed the roundabout and drove on to the busy set of shops that had sprung up near Kgale Hill. She did not like these shops, which were ugly and noisy, but the fact of the matter was that there were many different stores there and their selection of merchandise was better than any other collection of shops in the country. So they would put up with the crowds and the noise and see what the shops had to offer. And it would not be all window-shopping. Mma Ramotswe had long promised herself a pressure cooker, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had urged her to buy one. They could look for a pressure cooker, and even if they did not buy it today it would be interesting to see what was on offer.

  The two women spent an enjoyable half hour browsing in a shop that sold kitchen equipment. There was a bewildering array of cooking utensils—knives and chopping boards and instruments with which to slice onions into all sorts of shapes.

  “I have never needed anything like that to cut up onions,” Mma Ramotswe observed. “I have found that a knife is usually enough.”

  Mma Makutsi agreed with her on this, but made a secret mental note of the name of the implement. When Phuti Radiphuti gave her the money to restock her kitchen—as he had promised to do—then she would undoubtedly buy one of those onion-slicers, even if Mma Ramotswe said that they were unnecessary. Mma Ramotswe was certainly a good cook, but she was not an expert on onions, and if somebody had invented an onion-slicer, then it must have been because there was a need for one.

  They left the shop having identified and priced a pressure cooker. “We shall find another shop that sells those cookers,” said Mma Ramotswe, “and then we shall compare their prices. It is not good to waste money. Seretse Khama himself said that, you know. He said that we should not waste money.”

  Mma Makutsi was non-committal. Mma Ramotswe had a habit of quoting Seretse Khama on a wide range of subjects, and she was not at all sure whether her employer was always strictly accurate in this. She had once asked Mma Ramotswe to supply chapter and verse for a particular quotation and had been fobbed off with a challenge. “Do you think I invent his words?” Mma Ramotswe had asked indignantly. “Just because people are beginning to forget what he said, that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten.”

  Mma Makutsi had left it at that, and now said very little when the late President was quoted. It was a harmless enough habit, she thought, and if it helped to keep alive the memory of that great man, then it was, all in all, a good thing. But she wished that Mma Ramotswe would be a little bit more historically accurate; just a bit. The problem was that she had not been to the Botswana Secretarial College, where the motto, proudly displayed above the front entrance to the college, was Be Accurate. Unfortunately, there was a spelling mistake, and the motto read Be Acurate. Mma Makutsi had spotted this and had pointed it out to the college, but nothing had been done about it so far.

  They walked together in the direction of another shop that Mma Ramotswe had identified as a possible stockist of pressure cookers. All about them there were well-dressed crowds, people with money in their pockets, people buying for homes that were slowly beginning to reflect Botswana’s prosperity. It had all been earned, every single pula of it, in a world in which it is hard enough to make something of one’s country, in a world of selfish and distant people who took one’s crops at rock-bottom prices and wrote the rules to suit themselves. There were plenty of fine words, of course—and lots of these came from Africa itself—but at the end of the day the poor, the people who lived in Africa, so often had nothing to show for their labours, nothing. And that was not because they did not work hard—they did, they did—but because of something that was wrong which made it so hard for them to get anywhere, no matter how hard they tried. Botswana was fortunate, because it had diamonds and good government, and Mma Ramotswe was well aware of that, but her pride did not allow her to forget the suffering of others, which was there, not far away, a suffering which made mothers see their children fade away before their eyes, their little bodies thin and rickety. One could not forget that in the middle of all this plenty. One could not forget.

  But now Mma Makutsi stopped, and took Mma Ramotswe by the arm, pointing to a shop window. A woman was peering into the window, a woman in a striped blue dress, and for a moment Mma Ramotswe thought that it was this woman who had attracted Mma Makutsi’s attention. Was she a client, perhaps, or somebody else who had come to the attention of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, one of those adulterous wives that men sometimes asked them to follow and report upon? But Mma Makutsi was not pointing at the woman, who now moved away from the window, but to the contents of the window display itself.

  “Look, Mma Ramotswe,” she said. “Look over there!”

  Mma Ramotswe looked into the
window. There was a sale of some sort on, with large reductions, the window claimed. Indeed, shouted a sign within, the sale amounted to madness on the part of the shoe shop.

  “Bargains,” said Mma Ramotswe. “There always seem to be so many bargains.”

  But it was not the bargain shoes that had made Mma Makutsi stop and look—it was the full-price offerings, all neatly arrayed along a shelf and labelled Exclusive models, as worn in London and New York.

  “You see that pair over there?” said Mma Makutsi, pointing into the window. “You see that pair? The blue pair?”

  Mma Ramotswe’s gaze followed the direction in which Mma Makutsi was pointing. There, set aside from the other exclusive models, but still in the category of the exclusive, was a pair of fashionable blue shoes, with delicate high heels and toes which came to a point, like the nose of a supersonic aircraft. It was difficult to see the linings from where they were, but by standing on her tip-toes and craning her neck Mma Makutsi was able to report on their colour.

  “Red linings,” she said with emotion. “Red linings, Mma Ramotswe!”

  Mma Ramotswe stared at the shoes. They were certainly very smart, as objects, that is, but she doubted whether they were much use as shoes. She had not been to London or New York, and it was possible that people wore very fashionable shoes in those places, but she could not believe that many people there would be able to fit into such shoes, let alone walk any distance in them.