To the Land of Long Lost Friends

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mma Ramotswe would have been tactful in what was said next; not so, Mma Makutsi. “You’ve got no money, then. They’ll have worked that out, you know. People like that uncle of hers—whoever he is—he won’t be stupid, you know, unlike some men.”

  Charlie looked miserable. “I’ve been saving. I’ve been trying. But you know how hard it is. I have to give money to my own uncle, because I am staying in his house, and there are many children…”

  Mma Ramotswe felt a pang of sympathy for the young man. She knew how hard it was for him: sharing a room in that shack in Old Naledi, struggling to get by, counting every pula, walking long distances in the heat in order to save the minibus fare—all the humiliations of penury. “Have you managed to save anything?” she asked.

  He looked up. “I have been saving, yes. I have, Mma.”

  “How much?” asked Mma Makutsi. “How much have you got, Charlie?”

  “I have got almost six hundred pula, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi exchanged glances. That would get him nowhere. Queenie-Queenie’s uncles would be expecting a substantial amount, reckoned in head of cattle. One head of cattle cost over five thousand pula. They would be thinking of ten to twelve cattle, at the least.

  Mma Makutsi brought the discussion to a close. “I’m very sorry, Charlie, but it sounds as if your engagement is very unofficial. Maybe you should wait.”

  Charlie put down his mug. “Wait, Mma? You’re telling me to wait? So that I’m an old man by the time I get married? Fifty, maybe?”

  Mma Makutsi shook her head. “Fifty is not old, Charlie.”

  Charlie slipped off the filing cabinet and onto his feet. “Fifty is finished, Mma. Even when you’re forty, you’re finished.” He paused, and looked apologetically at Mma Ramotswe. “Except you, Mma Ramotswe. I didn’t mean you, Mma. You’re not finished.”

  “That’s good of you to say that, Charlie,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is a great relief to hear that.”

  The comment reminded Mma Makutsi of something. “You know, there was a man in Bobonong once. He was quite an old man—not too old, but quite old. One day he said to his daughter, ‘I am finished now,’ and then he lay down on his bed and became late. He had not been ill or anything—he just decided that he was finished, and that was that.”

  Mma Ramotswe and Charlie listened to this in silence. Then Mma Ramotswe said, “One should always be careful about what one says. I think that is very well known.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  MOST MEN ARE UP TO SOMETHING

  “MY HUSBAND,” Mma Ramotswe sometimes remarked, “is very good at getting the children up and sending them off to school. Many men are not so good at that, but he is.”

  She was the least boastful of women, but she felt it important to proclaim the merits of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, a man of great modesty who would never draw attention to any of his domestic achievements. She was proud of his helpfulness around the house—of his willingness to tackle the washing-up and of his diligent, if rudimentary, attempts to cook. Some men, she realised, were just not suited to cooking, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was one of them. The main problem was salt, which he added in excessive quantities to any dish he prepared, but there were other culinary shortcomings, including a tendency to fry everything, including the desserts to which he was inordinately attached. She was not sure where that came from, whether it was a widespread male failing or whether some misguided person had taught him that in the past—it was difficult to say. But there was no doubt that it was what she had once seen tactfully referred to as a “kitchen shortcoming.”

  On that morning, she was relieved when Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni offered her the chance to get into the office early. The previous day had been a frustrating one, beginning with that rather bleak conversation with Charlie over his seemingly ill-fated engagement, and then continuing with a series of interruptions and setbacks. There had been a difficult letter from a vexatious client who was refusing to pay a bill in spite of Mma Makutsi’s having sent four reminders; there had been a circular from the city authorities warning of an increase in the level of property tax to be paid by businesses; and there had been a lost file that contained important documents, the birth and marriage certificates of a woman in Mozambique who was claiming inheritance rights to a deceased estate in Botswana. The file had eventually turned up—having been inserted, back to front, in the wrong drawer. That had been the occasion of considerable relief, as a registry fire in Maputo had made the birth certificate irreplaceable, but for the most part the day seemed to have been one of damage limitation rather than achievement.

  Mma Ramotswe hoped that making an early start that morning would stamp a different tone on the day, and, as she sat at her desk at seven o’clock that morning, listening to a cock still crowing outside, it seemed to her that the day was getting off to a much better start. Everything was going smoothly. The children had been well behaved and uncomplaining of their father’s chivvying. They had got out of bed without the usual complaints of missing clothes and last-minute deadlines with homework. The bath she had taken had been just the right temperature, and when she came to clean her teeth, there was still a good amount of toothpaste in the tube, and she was not obliged to do what she seemed to have to do so often—to squeeze the last morsel out of a tube that was clearly empty. That was a good sign, as was the absence of traffic on the journey from the house to the office. She had the road more or less to herself, although there were already a few cars coming in from Tlokweng as she made her way to the office. It would get so much worse later on, with overloaded minibuses crawling their way into town, bringing people in for their day’s work.

  How different was the traffic from what it used to be, she said to herself. And then she thought: Everybody must think that, wherever they live, because gradually we are drowning ourselves in cars. That was happening everywhere. People were drowning themselves in machinery, to the point that there would be no room left for anything else. The world would be covered in cars and there would be nowhere left to go in those cars because there would already be too many vehicles at your destination.

  When she was a girl in Mochudi there had been very few local cars, and there was a boy in her class who knew every one of them, and their numbers too. She herself recognised the cars of all the teachers, as well as that of the doctor at the hospital, and of the hospital matron, and of the man from the Department of Water Affairs. Now such familiarity would be impossible, and cars would all be strangers to her.

  She sighed. The old world was slipping away, it seemed…or…or, a disturbing thought occurred. Was she slipping away? Perhaps the world was just carrying on as usual and we, all the people thinking about how it had changed, were really just changing ourselves. No, surely not. The world had changed—you only had to look about you to see that. And yet, many of those changes were good ones, and not things to fret over, or lament, or bemoan in the way in which people who are slipping away often complain about everything going past them.

  She rose from her desk. She had already had a cup of tea at home, before she left for the office, but that was no reason not to have one now. A cup of tea usually restored perspective on things, and that was what she needed now, rather than to sit and think about the ways in which the modern world was ordered. And she was right: a steaming cup of red bush tea was sufficient to banish thoughts of change and decay and to restore the spirits. This was going to be a good day—she was determined to make that so—and she was going to work steadily and efficiently through the list of tasks she had written out for herself.

  By the time that Mma Makutsi arrived, she had already achieved a considerable amount. Three items on the list were neatly ticked off, and she had made a good start on the fourth, a particularly sensitive letter in which she had to inform a client who was hoping to expose—and leave—her husband that the husband under suspicion was not meeting a lover, but was actually having mat
hematics lessons. The secret meetings she suspected him of having were indeed meetings, but were far from the assignations she suspected. They were visits to the teacher’s house, where he was being prepared for a forthcoming public examination in advanced mathematics.

  The letter took a long time to write, and was still unfinished by the time Mma Makutsi arrived in the office.

  “Well, Mma Ramotswe,” said Mma Makutsi. “I didn’t expect to find you hard at work so early.”

  It was an innocent remark, but Mma Ramotswe felt slightly annoyed at the inference that she was not the type to arrive early. Did Mma Makutsi think that she just sat around in the mornings?

  “I am often up very early, Mma Makutsi,” she said. “You should try it, perhaps.”

  The retort came quickly. “But I am also up early, Mma. Every day. When you have a baby, as I do, then you cannot lie about in bed. You are up early because the baby wants his breakfast. You are also up early because you have a husband to get going. There are many things for women to do in the morning.”

  Mma Makutsi peered at Mma Ramotswe’s desk. “You’re writing a letter, Mma?”

  Mma Ramotswe sat back in her chair. “It’s not an easy letter, this one. You remember that woman who came to see us about her husband?”

  Mma Makutsi frowned. There were so many women who came to see them about their husbands—husbands, it seemed, were the main reason why women went to private detectives.

  “The one we had followed by Charlie,” Mma Ramotswe prompted.

  Mma Makutsi smiled. “Of course. And Charlie saw him going to the house of that teacher. That one?”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. “I have to tell her that her husband is not seeing another woman,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But I think that she will not like to hear that news, Mma. When she spoke to me about it at the beginning, she said she was looking forward to divorcing him. I think she has her own lover, you see.”

  “Ha!” said Mma Makutsi. “She will be very disappointed then. But tell me, Mma, how can you be sure about that—about her having a lover?”

  “Because I saw her,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I saw her in the supermarket with another man. They were buying food together.”

  Mma Makutsi looked thoughtful. “But he could have been a relative, Mma. A brother, perhaps. Or a cousin. You know how many cousins there are about the place. The whole city is full of cousins. Everywhere there are cousins.” She paused. “I think there are far more cousins than lovers, Mma.”

  “That’s true enough,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But I saw him pinch her, Mma. That lady is very large from the back view, Mma. And that man pinched her there. I saw it.”

  Mma Makutsi absorbed this information. “That is not the sort of thing a cousin does,” she said at last. “Nor a brother.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Except when you are very cross with somebody,” Mma Makutsi went on. “If you are very cross, you may pinch somebody. But you do not pinch them there. That is not the place for such a pinch.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have thought it was.”

  “The place to pinch another person when you are cross with them is on the arm,” pronounced Mma Makutsi. She tapped her upper arm. “There, Mma. That is where you pinch people.”

  Mma Ramotswe went on to tell Mma Makutsi how the woman had seen her and had pretended not to have anything to do with the man. “She walked away, leaving him there,” she said. “He looked very puzzled. That made it even clearer to me that he was her boyfriend. That—and the pinch. These were two pieces of evidence.”

  “Well,” said Mma Makutsi. “She will not be able to claim that she’s the wronged party.” She leaned further over Mma Ramotswe’s desk. “May I see the letter, Mma?”

  Mma Ramotswe handed it over.

  “Dear Mma Mogorosi,” Mma Makutsi began. “In the matter of your husband, I am pleased to inform you that we have now completed our investigations and have come to a preliminary conclusion.”

  Mma Makutsi looked over her spectacles at Mma Ramotswe. “I wouldn’t write pleased, Mma. You are not pleased about this, and nor will be, if what you say is correct. And as for calling the conclusion preliminary, that suggests that you might change your mind. But I do not think you will. You have decided, and so you should call it a firm conclusion.” She paused, fixing Mma Ramotswe with a slightly reproachful stare. The inference, thought Mma Ramotswe, was that if she, like Mma Makutsi, had been to the Botswana Secretarial College then she would have understood these things and not misused the word preliminary and been altogether more decisive and concise.

  Mma Ramotswe said nothing. Mma Makutsi had firm views on the wording of letters.

  “I would say something like this,” Mma Makutsi continued. “I would say: I am sorry to say that we have come to a firm conclusion about your husband.”

  “But I am not sorry, Mma Makutsi.”

  “Yet you haven’t found out what the client wants you to find out,” countered Mma Makutsi. “So she will hope that you are feeling sorry.”

  “Just continue,” said Mma Ramotswe. “These small things about which word to use are not always that important.”

  “We have had one of our detectives observe your husband over time…”

  Mma Makutsi stared again at Mma Ramotswe. “Detective?” she said. “Charlie is not a qualified detective, Mma. It is wrong to mislead the client like that.”

  “Oh, really, Mma Makutsi. Does it matter what we call Charlie?”

  “It does matter, Mma,” said Mma Makutsi, her voice now full of reproach. “All over the place, people are falsely claiming to be something they aren’t. All over the place there are people telling lies about this, that and the next thing. It is very important to be accurate.”

  This was not a battle that Mma Ramotswe chose to fight. “Very well, Mma. Change that. Say assistant, if you think that better.”

  “It’s more accurate,” said Mma Makutsi.

  Mma Ramotswe waited while Mma Makutsi scribbled her correction on the page, uttering the words as she wrote. “This assistant has now filed his report.”

  Mma Makutsi stopped again. “I do not wish to be obstructive, Mma.”

  “No, of course not, Mma Makutsi.”

  “It’s just that I do the filing. All the filing—that’s me, not this…this mysterious assistant we mention.” Mma Ramotswe sighed. “Filing a report just means putting a report in. It doesn’t mean actually filing it in the filing cabinet.”

  “Submitting would be better, Mma.”

  There were some battles simply not worth fighting, thought Mma Ramotswe. And then there were battles that should not be battles anyway; this, she thought, was one of those.

  “Submitting, then, Mma Makutsi.”

  “Good,” said Mma Makutsi. “Now then. Let’s see.” She returned to the letter. “The report indicates…That’s very good wording, Mma. It is very professional. The report indicates that your husband is not seeing a lover but is seeing another woman—” She broke off. “No, Mma, you cannot say that. That will give quite the wrong impression.”

  “Read on, Mma Makutsi.”

  “Seeing another woman who is a teacher. Oh, I see, Mma. I see what you’re saying. We could investigate further, but we think that any man who is studying for a mathematics examination is unlikely to be having an affair at the same time. For this reason, we do not recommend further surveillance.”

  Mma Makutsi put down the letter. “That is a very good letter, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe reached out to recover the piece of paper. “I’m glad you approve of it, Mma,” she said.

  “But why is he studying mathematics?” asked Mma Makutsi.

  “People do, Mma. They are always studying things. You can never tell what people will get up to.” People took up entirely innocent pursuits, she pointed out. She remembered a similar case, where
a husband suspected of conducting an affair was in fact receiving instruction in the Roman Catholic faith. She now reminded Mma Makutsi of that case. “Remember that man who lived near the hospital, Mma? He was not having an affair at all but was thinking of becoming a Roman Catholic.”

  Mma Makutsi remembered the case. “People are always joining churches,” she said. “This church, that church. They like the singing in one place and they go there. Then they hear there is better singing in another place, and off they go to that one. Or there is a better preacher—one with a louder voice—and they say, ‘He is the one now.’ And off they go to listen to him. That’s how it works, Mma.”

  Mma Makutsi could see the wisdom of all that. Phuti had a cousin who was a good example of that, having been, in the space of a single year, a Baptist as well as an Anglican, and had now joined a small congregation of people who believed not that the end was coming—as some people did—but that it had actually come, and we had simply failed to notice it. But this situation had a particular smell to it, she thought. It was the smell, and that was something that was sometimes difficult to put into words. “There’s one thing worrying me here, Mma,” she mused. “Why has he not told his wife? She obviously doesn’t know where he is going—he can’t have told her, Mma.”

  “Perhaps he wants her to think he’s going somewhere else,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But does it matter? It’s nothing to do with us why he should want to study mathematics.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Mma Makutsi. “It’s just that I think there’s something odd going on, Mma Ramotswe. We’re not seeing everything there is to be seen. Something else is happening.”

  Mma Ramotswe raised an eyebrow. “Possibly. But I don’t see what it has to do with us.”

  Mma Makutsi went to her desk and sat down, and at that moment, from down at floor level, almost inaudible, but just to be made out, came a tiny voice. Mathematics, Mma? Do you believe that?