The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They made their way to the shade and sat down on chairs arranged around a low wooden table. On a tray by one of the chairs was a teapot with two cups.

  ‘In case of visitors,’ said Gwithie, pointing to the extra cup.

  ‘Very wise,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Tea and cake is always…’ She had not intended to mention cake, but somehow it came out and she felt embarrassed.

  ‘Oh,’ said Gwithie. ‘Cake. Yes, well, I must do some more baking. I had one last week but we had the grandchildren in the house and cake doesn’t seem to last very long when children are in the house.’

  ‘Of course.’ Mma Ramotswe laughed, but she was disappointed. She could always bake herself a fruitcake – she had copied out Mma Potokwani’s recipe by hand into her own recipe book and she made a perfectly good version herself – but somehow the eating of one’s own cake was different from the eating of another’s.

  ‘Next time you come to see me,’ said Gwithie, ‘I promise you we shall have cake. Several slices, in fact.’

  As her friend poured the tea, Mma Ramotswe looked out over the garden. Beyond the trees at its edge, the ground rose up to make a ridge, and beyond that were the hills looking down over the game reserve. There was no other building in sight. It was a small corner of undisturbed bush – Botswana in its untouched state. This was the land that Obed Ramotswe had known: the grey-green acacia scrub that ran for hundreds of miles along the country’s border to the east and, to the west, into the great Kalahari. This was the land over which the great dome of African sky presided; the sky that would, they all hoped, soon fill with towering, rain-filled thunderclouds from somewhere far away – the annual gift of the wetter and more temperate lands beyond their borders.

  ‘Rain,’ remarked Mma Ramotswe. She did not need to say anything more.

  Gwithie shrugged. ‘Next week? I have somebody who helps me in the kitchen who has an uncanny habit of knowing when the rains will start. She’s been right year after year. It’s extraordinary.’

  ‘And she says next week?’

  Gwithie nodded. ‘Towards the end of next week, and she says the rains will be good.’

  ‘I am very happy to hear that,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘My own garden is looking very sad now. It is very thirsty. And my husband’s vegetables…’ She sighed. Mr J. L. B. Matekoni grew beans, but the plants had shrivelled under the onslaught of the sun and she found it hard to imagine that they would recover once the rains arrived. But plants did survive the harshness of even prolonged drought; they somehow kept themselves alive. The soil could be dry and dusty, parched and apparently lifeless, and yet under it there would be seeds and roots ready to spring into life within hours of the first rainfall.

  ‘Things will grow, in spite of everything.’ Gwithie paused. ‘Were you on your way somewhere?’

  ‘I was passing by,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I had to go to the Molapo Farm. You must know the place – it’s on the other side of the Lobatse Road, not far really.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Gwithie. ‘We used to see a bit of Edgar Molapo. We don’t know his sister at all well. She keeps to herself, and always has done.’

  ‘I met her for the first time this morning.’

  Gwithie was looking at her with interest. ‘You were there professionally?’

  Mma Ramotswe was careful. Even with friends, she knew the importance of confidentiality. Her clients told her things that she should not reveal and she always observed that trust, difficult though it was at times.

  ‘Nothing serious,’ she said non-committally.

  Gwithie did not press her. ‘They say that the farm is going to Edgar’s nephew from Swaziland.’

  ‘So they say,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Do you know him – the boy?’

  Gwithie shook her head. ‘He used to come over to Botswana a lot when he was younger. We never saw him then.’

  ‘He speaks very good Setswana,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘He must have spent a lot of time in this country.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gwithie. ‘I met him the other day. But we spoke in English.’

  Mma Ramotswe was interested. ‘He came here? With the aunt?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gwithie. ‘They were interested in buying cattle from a man who’s been working on one of the buildings here. Some complicated transaction, so Edgar’s sister came over to do it. She brought the boy – well, I suppose he’s a young man now – with her. He was interested in some fruit trees I’ve been trying to grow and I showed him. Nice young man.’

  ‘He is,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘He has good manners.’

  Gwithie seemed to remember something. ‘It was a bit odd, though. He said something that made him very flustered.’

  Mma Ramotswe leaned forward. ‘Yes?’

  ‘He referred to his aunt as his mother. He said, “I must show this to my mother.” I then asked him where his mother was, and he turned round to point at the aunt who was talking to somebody at the other end of the fruit garden. And then he stopped and he seemed dismayed by the slip. He said something like, “I mean my aunt. I mean my aunt.” I made nothing of it, but it struck me as odd.’

  Mma Ramotswe was silent.

  ‘A slip of the tongue, no doubt,’ said Gwithie.

  Mma Ramotswe put down her teacup. ‘No doubt,’ she said, while thinking: Of course, of course. Quite suddenly, seated under the tree with her friend, with the air so still and hot, with a fly buzzing about the lip of the milk jug on the tea-tray, with all Botswana yearning for rain, it became clear to her. It had not occurred to her before because there was no reason for her to suspect that there was any other relationship between Mma Molapo and the young man who claimed to be Liso. She had been acting on the assumption that he was either her nephew or he was not, and the second of these options had not included the possibility that he was even more closely related to her – that he was a son. But now it seemed so obvious. If Mma Molapo had a son, then she would undoubtedly prefer him to succeed rather than her nephew. So if the nephew proved to be hard to locate, or had vanished altogether, then all she would have to do would be to substitute her son. And if he succeeded, then she could stay exactly where she was; whereas a nephew may well have views of his own as to whether his aunt continued to live on the property. The problem, though, would be that it would not work. There must be many people who had seen the boy over the years – neighbours and people who worked on the farm – and they would know if suddenly a different young man came along and claimed to be the person they had seen over the years. So a substitution was impossible, and that meant that Liso could not be Mma Molapo’s son.

  Gwithie said a few words that Mma Ramotswe, sunk in thought, did not catch. Now she repeated them.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mmapuso,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I was thinking of… something I hadn’t been thinking about… before, that is.’

  ‘I asked whether you would like to come for a walk with me,’ said Gwithie. ‘A brief walk.’

  Mma Ramotswe knew where they would be going.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I would like to go with you, Mma. Of course I would.’

  They made their way through thick acacia bush, following a rough twin-tracked road. The earth was red here, and there was little vegetation to hide it, with only the acacia trees providing a note of green. The track curved and then dipped down towards the lake that, though diminished by the dry season, was still home to a small family of hippos and flocks of water birds.

  Neither spoke much on this walk, although Gwithie stopped at one point and drew Mma Ramotswe’s attention to a plant by the side of the track.

  ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I have a soft spot for this plant. It has quite a few Setswana names but the one I use is kgaba. Do you know it?’

  Mma Ramotswe tried to remember. Her father had shown her plants when he had walked through the bush with her, and he had taught her the Setswana names, but she had had difficulty in remembering them. The old words, people said, were slipping away, remembered only by a handful of elderly people.
The world as described in Setswana was becoming smaller and smaller with each year that passed. Gwithie, she knew, was working on a book of wild flowers and had gone out of her way to learn the old names before they were lost.

  She peered at the plant. Like everything else it was struggling, and a thin layer of red dust had coated its leaves. But she thought she knew its blade-shaped leaves, and she nodded.

  Gwithie reached down to touch the plant gently, as a doctor might touch a patient. ‘People use this for a variety of complaints,’ she said. ‘Like almost everything in the bush, it has its uses. This is good for arthritis and rheumatism, apparently. And you can also eat it as a sort of spinach.’ She straightened up, smiling as she spoke. ‘It can also be used to treat children who fail to look after their parents,’ she continued. ‘And to bind together the members of football teams.’

  Mma Ramotswe laughed. ‘It must be a very busy plant,’ she said.

  They continued on their walk. Now the track drew near the edge of the lake and she knew that this was the spot. Mma Ramotswe had been there on that sad day, and she remembered.

  They stood before the rock, a natural boulder that had been used by rhinos as a rubbing stone. She saw the smooth parts of the stone where, for generations and for centuries, the animals had rubbed their hide. These were their landmarks, the monuments of animals that had once been plentiful; now, in many places, only the stones remained. As she stood there, she recalled a fragment of a story that her father had told her a long time ago, just a line of it: Our brothers, the rhinos, who are gone now.

  A small brass plaque with the name Puso Kirby was attached towards the base of the rubbing stone. Underneath were the words: Light of Our Lives.

  Mma Ramotswe took her friend’s hand. ‘Yes, Mma,’ she said. ‘This is his place.’

  Gwithie was looking out over the waters of the lake. ‘You know, Mma,’ she said, ‘on the day that we lost him we heard a leopard nearby. We very rarely hear those creatures – they are so shy and secretive – but we heard a leopard. There is no mistaking them. And it was here when we buried him.’

  Mma Ramotswe said nothing, but she pressed her friend’s hand in sympathy.

  ‘And then,’ Gwithie continued, ‘there was an extraordinary thing. I don’t expect people to believe it, but it happened. When the children came, much later, to see their father’s grave, as we were walking down here, we saw the leopard. He was following us, but we felt no fear – not for one moment.’

  Mma Ramotswe looked at her. ‘Do you think it was him? His spirit?’

  Gwithie lowered her eyes, and her head moved slightly. Her voice was quiet. ‘Why should I not think that?’

  ‘There is no reason why you should not think that,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘It is a lovely thing to believe. He loved wild animals. They were his work, weren’t they? He loved the bush. He loved the rocks that leopards love. So that is where your son must be, Mma. He must be. We are always in the place we love, Mma. We never leave it.’

  They moved away, with Mma Ramotswe still holding Gwithie’s hand until they turned the corner, and the stone, with its heartfelt inscription, was no longer in sight. The light of our lives. Yes, thought Mma Ramotswe. That is what we should be to one another: light that shines whatever the darkness of loss. Always.

  It did not seem right to return to the Molapo case until much later, when she had left her friend and was travelling back on the final stretch of road towards Gaborone. Then she allowed herself to wonder how she would be able to prove what might be the truth. One slip of the tongue by a young man could hardly be considered evidence sufficient to unmask an imposter. And then a further thought came: what if it were simply a mistake on his part? Liso Molapo – the real Liso Molapo – had not seen his mother for a long time and might easily call his aunt by that name because he viewed her as a substitute for the mother he no longer had. That was entirely plausible and, if true, it meant that she was no further along the road to sorting out this affair.

  By the time she reached Zebra Drive it was four o’clock, and doubt had replaced the certainty of earlier. An hour later, she no longer knew what to think. She took a pumpkin out of the store cupboard and began to prepare it by splitting it with the heaviest of her kitchen knives. Pumpkin was something uncomplicated, something completely certain, and cooking a pumpkin, she felt, was a good thing to do when you did not know quite where you were.

  Chapter Nine

  All Men Can Benefit

  There had been periods – sometimes rather long ones – in Mma Ramotswe’s life, as in the lives of most of us, when nothing very much had happened. There had, for instance, been the period shortly after the foundation of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency when there had been a marked paucity of clients – there had been none, in fact – and she and Mma Makutsi had spent long days trying to find tasks to do without giving the appearance of having no real work. It had been easier, perhaps, for Mma Makutsi, as she had been able first to invent and then to refine an elaborate filing system that, she claimed, catered for all possible eventualities. Thus there was an entry in this system entitled MEN, which at one level below was subdivided into FAITHFUL MEN and UNFAITHFUL MEN. Matters relating to men could also be filed under such disparate headings as: DISHONEST MEN, GENERAL MEN and UNKNOWN MEN. Then there were files for CLIENTS WHO HAVE NOT PAID THEIR BILL – rather a larger file than Mma Ramotswe would have liked – and for CLIENTS WHO MIGHT NOT PAY THEIR BILL. The judgement on whether or not a client was likely to pay the bill was one made entirely by Mma Makutsi – on criteria that Mma Ramotswe had tried unsuccessfully to get her to clarify.

  ‘It is not only done on the way they look,’ said Mma Makutsi, in answer to Mma Ramotswe’s enquiry.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that, Mma,’ Mma Ramotswe said.

  But then Mma Makutsi went on firmly, ‘Although that is a very important factor. You see, dishonest people look dishonest, Mma. There is never any question about that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mma Ramotswe, ‘I’m not at all —’

  ‘I never have any difficulty,’ Mma Makutsi cut in. ‘There are many ways of telling, Mma. There is the way their eyes look, for instance – if they are too close together.’

  Mma Ramotswe frowned. ‘I don’t think so, Mma. There are many —’ She was not allowed to finish.

  ‘Oh, make no mistake about it, Mma. If the eyes are close together, that person is going to be trouble. I’ve always said that, Mma. And the same goes for those whose eyes are too far apart – the same thing there. They will be up to no good.’

  Mma Makutsi stared intently at Mma Ramotswe, the light flashing off her large round spectacles. It was as if she were challenging her employer to contradict a fundamental scientific truth. Mma Ramotswe said nothing at first; she was at this time discovering that Mma Makutsi in full flight was not to be interrupted lightly. But when no further assertions came, she very gently ventured a question as to where Mma Makutsi had learned to discern character in this way.

  ‘Life experience,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘There are some things you cannot learn from books. You cannot be taught instinct.’

  Mma Ramotswe absorbed this. ‘But surely you must be careful, Mma. People cannot help the way they look. A person who is good inside may look bad outside. I am sure there are many cases of that.’

  Mma Makutsi’s glasses flashed a danger signal. ‘Really, Mma? Name one, please. Name one person who looks bad outside but who is good inside.’ She paused, before adding, ‘I am waiting.’

  Mma Ramotswe looked up at the ceiling. She was sure that there were such people, but she found it difficult to bring anybody to mind. ‘Violet Sephotho?’ she suggested. ‘What about her? She looks all right on the outside but is definitely bad on the inside.’

  Mma Makutsi let out a hoot of laughter. ‘Violet Sephotho, Mma? You say that she looks good on the outside? She does not, Mma! She does not! That woman looks on the outside exactly as she is on the inside. And that, I must say, is bad, very bad.’

>   Mma Ramotswe was kind. Surely even Violet Sephotho, for all her manifest faults, had her better moments. ‘I’m not sure that she looks bad absolutely one hundred per cent of the time, Mma,’ she said. She had almost said ninety-seven per cent of the time, but managed to stop herself. ‘I have seen her smiling sometimes.’

  This was as a red rag to Mma Makutsi. ‘Smiling, Mma? A smile is the most dangerous disguise of all. Many people smile to disguise what they are thinking inside.’

  There had been no further debate on the issue, and Mma Ramotswe had learned to steer clear of certain topics – such as that one – that could be guaranteed to elicit an extreme response from her somewhat prickly assistant. Mma Makutsi had many merits, she came to realise, and these easily outweighed her occasional faults. And now, with Mma Makutsi on maternity leave and the office seeming strangely quiet as a result, there was something else that she came to realise: she missed her assistant in a way and to a degree that she had never anticipated. She missed her occasional outbursts; she missed her comments on what was in the newspapers; she even missed the way in which she would intervene in the conversation Mma Ramotswe was having with clients, dropping in observations from her position to the rear and making them stop and turn their heads to reply to somebody over their shoulder – not an easy thing to do. All of that she missed, just as she missed Mma Makutsi’s knack of putting her teacup down on the desk in a manner that so completely revealed her thinking on the subject under discussion. There was nobody else she knew who could put a cup down on a desk to quite the same effect. It was, she decided, one of the many respects in which Mma Makutsi was – and here she could think of only one word to express it – irreplaceable. There simply could never be another Mma Makutsi. There could never be another woman from Bobonong, of all places, with flashing round glasses and ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College. There could never be another person who was even remotely capable of standing up to somebody like Mma Potokwani, or putting Charlie in his place when, with all the confidence and ignorance of the young male, he made some outrageous comment. If Mma Makutsi decided not to return from maternity leave then Mma Ramotswe thought that the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency would never be the same again, and might not be worth continuing with.