The Handsome Man's Deluxe Café

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mma Ramotswe was staring at her friend. “I wondered…,” she began.

  “Yes, Mma?”

  “I wondered whether you might like to buy some of my cattle,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Maybe five.”

  The offer was met with a frown. “Me, Mma?”

  “You have some cattle, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Mma Potokwane hesitantly. “I do not have many. But there are some that my brother gave me.”

  “You could expand your herd,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But only temporarily.”

  “Temporarily? I don’t think I understand, Mma.”

  She explained her plan. “I would sell you these cows, and then, later on, I would buy them back. Two of them will have had calves by then. You keep the calves and I pay you back the money you paid for the cows in the first place.”

  Mma Potokwane looked puzzled. “But why, Mma? This sounds like … almost like a loan.”

  “You could call it that.”

  Mma Potokwane pressed for an explanation.

  “There isn’t enough money in the business to pay Charlie,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I think we have to do something for him.” She paused. “Of course, you may not have the money to do this …”

  She knew that this was unlikely. Mma Potokwane may not have been wealthy, but Mma Ramotswe knew that in the background there was a rural store of which she owned a half share, inherited from her mother. Those stores were profitable.

  “I do have a little spare cash,” said Mma Potokwane. “And the way you put it, I can’t really lose, can I?”

  “I do not think so, Mma.”

  “But I will not take both calves,” went on Mma Potokwane. “That would not be the right thing to do. You are my friend, Mma Ramotswe.”

  “And you are mine, Mma.”

  “Yes, and that is the reason why I cannot take both calves. I shall take one to pay for the grazing. You will get the other one back, with all the others—after you have paid me back the money, of course.”

  “Of course. You will get the money. And if I do not have it, then you keep the cattle.”

  They shook hands on the arrangement and Mma Ramotswe prepared herself to leave.

  “You know, Mma,” said Mma Potokwane as they walked back to the tiny white van. “There are two ways of looking at our problems in this life. One is with our head …” And here she tapped her forehead. “And the other is with our heart.” Her hand went to her bosom.

  “I know that,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I know that I am making this decision with my heart. I know it is the wrong thing to do.”

  “No,” said Mma Potokwane. “It is never the wrong thing to do. Never.” She reached out and stopped her friend. “You know something, Mma Ramotswe? Every decision I’ve made in this job—every single one—has been made with the heart rather than with the head.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled, and touched the matron’s hand gently. “I think I knew that, Mma,” she said.

  SHE WENT ROUND to Charlie’s house that evening. The young man lived with an uncle and the uncle’s girlfriend in a two-room house in Naledi, the shabbiest part of town. The local council had done its best to provide basic services for the people of this straggling suburb: there was some lighting on the streets and stand pipes had been set up to give everyone water, but some of the houses were barely better than shanties, with tin roofs patched up here and there with tarpaulin or bits of salvaged timber. The uncle’s house was one of the better ones, being constructed of unpainted breeze blocks, but it was a world away from Mma Ramotswe’s home on Zebra Drive, and even further away from the spanking new establishment built by Mma Makutsi and Phuti Radiphuti.

  Charlie shared the room at the back with two male cousins, slightly younger than he was, and a ten-year-old boy who was the son, by another man, of the uncle’s girlfriend. The room was just big enough for the two narrow beds and two sleeping mats, but when the sleeping mats were unrolled there was no space left to negotiate one’s way round the room. Clothing was hung on four pegs knocked into the wall and what few belongings the young men and the boy possessed were stored on a rough-timber shelf that ran the length of the room. There was one window, high up at the back, which afforded a small amount of natural light, and additional lighting was provided by a single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. From the cable that she saw coming into the house and then leading off into a bush, Mma Ramotswe could tell when she arrived that the electricity supply was stolen. This happened: people found the wires that the electricity board tried to bury and cut their way into the supply with crudely rigged arrangements. This theft of electricity had its dangers, and occasionally people were electrocuted or badly burned in the process; houses could be destroyed, too, by amateur wiring unequal to the load imposed on it.

  When Mma Ramotswe announced her presence with the usual Ko, ko!, the uncle and his girlfriend were sitting in the front room, along with Charlie’s two cousins. She had met the uncle before—he worked in the supermarket patronised by Mma Ramotswe—but she had not met his girlfriend. Now he introduced her and the two cousins; the polite enquiries that form dictated were made—You are keeping well, Rra? Yes, and you, Mma? There were no surprises in the answers such questions elicited—there never were—but these conversations still had to take place: it was not what was said that counted, but the fact that it was said.

  “I am looking for Charlie,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  The uncle smiled. “He is not far away, Mma.” He made a movement of his head towards the second room. “But then in another sense he is far away.”

  The girlfriend laughed. “Drowned his sorrows,” she said. “He lost his job today.”

  “I know that,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I am sorry. That’s why I’ve come to see him.”

  The girlfriend smirked. “To tell him you’re sorry for what your husband has done? There are many women who have to say sorry about what men have done.”

  The uncle clearly did not approve of this tone. You were not rude to visitors in Botswana; he would tell her that later, in private. “I’m sorry, Mma,” he said, rising to his feet and making towards the connecting door that led to the other room. “Charlie has drunk too much beer. Look for yourself.”

  He pushed the door open to reveal the pitiful surroundings of the second room. The woman’s young son was on his sleeping mat, naked but for a pair of briefs, his skinny arms folded back to make a pillow for his head. On the larger of the two narrow beds lay Charlie, fully clothed, but with his shirt half opened. The air was fetid with exhaled beer fumes.

  The uncle closed the door again. “You see, Mma? I don’t think you’d get much sense out of him until tomorrow morning.”

  Mma Ramotswe lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, Rra. He has been very upset.”

  “Yes,” said the uncle. “Charlie doesn’t normally drink much. Today was unusual.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. “I’m not blaming him. It is a hard thing for a young man to lose his job. Charlie is a good young man—at heart.”

  “Yes,” said the uncle, hesitating slightly. “At heart.”

  Mma Ramotswe reached into her handbag. “May I leave him a note, Rra?”

  “Of course.”

  “He can read it in the morning, when he can think straight again.”

  The uncle laughed. “His head may be a bit sore then, but I’m sure he will understand it.”

  Mma Ramotswe tore a page out of the notebook she always carried with her. She accepted the uncle’s invitation to sit down at the table and she began to write.

  Dear Charlie, I am sorry that you were sound asleep when I came to see you. I am sorry, too, that you have been so upset by what happened at the garage. I do not want to see you without a job and so I am making a special position for you at the agency. You will be an apprentice detective—if that is what you wish. You will be paid the same wage that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni paid you. The job will be for eight months, and then we shall see.

  She looked down at what she had written
. There was something that needed to be added.

  There is one condition, Charlie, and it is an important one. You will be working with me and with Mma Makutsi. That means that you will have to be polite to Mma Makutsi, and you must not be rude to her, as you sometimes have been. She is now your boss—along with me, of course—and that means that you must do as she says, with no backchat. I am sure you will be able to agree to this as I have always thought that you were a sensible young man, even if not everybody has agreed with me about that.

  And she thought: Mma Makutsi, first and foremost, but naturally she did not write that down.

  She stopped, and then signed her name: Mma Ramotswe. She read through the letter once again, pausing over the final sentence. What she had written was undoubtedly true, but there were situations, she felt, in which it was perhaps best not to tell the whole truth. This, she decided, was one of those, and so she crossed out the final words about the views of others. She hoped that her crossing-out was sufficient to obscure what she had written, but the thought occurred to her that it would not be too hard to work out what words lay beneath—and if Charlie were to be a detective, even for eight months, then he should be able to do that without much difficulty.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHERE FASHIONABLE PEOPLE GO

  TWO THINGS OF NOTE happened the next day. Both of these developments involved Mma Makutsi, and one was positive, while the other was negative. The positive thing concerned the Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café; the negative involved a disagreement between Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi. It was not the first disagreement they had had, but it was certainly one of the most serious, and although Mma Ramotswe disliked confrontations of any sort, this dispute turned on something that would have had to be settled sooner or later. As the late Obed Ramotswe had said, in one of his observations that so neatly encapsulated some truth about the world, “When you don’t talk about something, then something will talk about itself for you.” When, as a girl, she had first heard him say this, Mma Ramotswe had had no idea of what he meant; at the time, it seemed to her that this was one of those nonsensical things that people sometimes said because they liked the sound of the words, even if they had no inkling what the words meant.

  Mma Makutsi did not get into the agency before half past twelve that day—in time to take her lunch break, which started fifteen minutes after her arrival. Her day had begun much earlier than that, though, with a series of meetings at the premises of the Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café. There was still very little furniture there—no more than the table and four chairs Phuti had delivered from the Double Comfort Furniture Store—but this was enough to allow Mma Makutsi to conduct both her important meetings of the day, the first of which was with the builder who was to fit the new kitchen and decorate the whole building according to the scheme that Mma Makutsi had alighted upon. This involved the liberal use of greens and browns—the greens representing the trees of Botswana and the browns the colour of the Kalahari. “This will make people feel at home,” she said. “It will be very calming.”

  The builder nodded, but did not pay much attention to issues of decoration. “The painter will do whatever you ask him,” he said. “He will not argue with you, Mma.”

  “I should hope not,” said Mma Makutsi. “You don’t argue with the people who are paying you, do you?”

  The builder looked at her guardedly. “Not in general,” he said. “But there are some cases, Mma, where people ask you to do things that simply aren’t possible. If you did what they asked you, the building would fall down.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything like that, Rra.”

  The builder glanced at the plan that Mma Makutsi had sketched out on a piece of paper. “There’s one thing, Mma,” he said hesitantly. “If we lay things out like this, there will be no wall between the kitchen and the dining area. I’m concerned about that, Mma—just a little concerned.”

  Mma Makutsi looked down at her sketch. “That is so, Rra. And there is a reason for that.”

  The builder raised an eyebrow. “Really, Mma?”

  “Yes. I have read all about this in a South African magazine. It had pictures of very important restaurants down in Cape Town. These are restaurants where very fashionable people go. There are many fashionable people who go to Cape Town, you know.”

  “I’ve heard that,” said the builder.

  “They go to drink wine and show off their clothes,” said Mma Makutsi.

  The builder shook his head in wonderment at the ways of the world. “There is no end to what people will do,” he said. “They are always thinking of new things to get up to.”

  “Yes,” said Mma Makutsi forcefully. “They are.” She paused. “Of course I’m not expecting to get the same people here who go to those places in Cape Town. They are very busy going out for meals and to fashion shows and such things. They will not have time to come up to Botswana.”

  “No,” agreed the builder. “They are all down there.”

  “But we have our own fashionable people,” continued Mma Makutsi. “They are here too.”

  The builder frowned. He was not sure that he had met them, but he did not move in such circles, and it was possible that they were there. Certainly there were enough Mercedes-Benzes in town to cope with the transport needs of fashionable people. “They will come to your restaurant, Mma—I’m sure of it. All those people—they’ll be there.”

  Mma Makutsi spoke in the tone of one explaining something extremely obvious. “And that is why I do not want to have a wall to hide the kitchen,” she said. “These people are very interested in food. They like to watch what is going on in the kitchen. They can see the chef working. They like that sort of thing.”

  “Oh,” said the builder. “So they like to see what the chef is putting into the pot? Is that it, Mma?”

  Mma Makutsi smiled. Builders were practical people, she thought; they were not the sort to have a great deal of imagination. Which was just as well, she decided, as they were concerned with the construction of pillars and walls and one did not want too many imaginative questions if one were erecting pillars and walls. “I do not think they will be paying too much attention to that, Rra,” she said. “It will help to create atmosphere if people can see the chef and his helpers in the kitchen.” She dwelt for a moment on what she had said; yes, atmosphere was what people wanted when they went out for a meal. “It’s all about creating a buzz, Rra.”

  The builder stared at her. “A buzz?”

  “Yes.”

  “A noise, Mma? The noise that a power saw makes?”

  Mma Makutsi laughed. “Not that sort of buzz, Rra—a feeling that something is about to happen, or is even already happening.”

  “What will be happening?” said the builder, puzzled.

  Mma Makutsi closed her eyes briefly. Really, it was impossible to discuss anything with a man like this. The problem was that he was uneducated, or not educated enough, and she, with her ninety-seven per cent from the Botswana Secretarial College was just … well, there was no point in thinking about all of that. Some people understood, and some people did not. It was not the fault of those who did not understand; they could not help their limitations, but it could be very frustrating for those who had the benefit of great understanding to try to explain things to them.

  “Let’s not think about it any more, Rra,” she said finally, pointing at her sketch. “This is what I want.”

  “You’re the customer,” said the builder. “But before we get a draftsman to do the drawings, I’m going to have to run this past an engineer, Mma. They can tell whether something will stand up or fall down.” He looked at her earnestly; none of the buildings he had built had fallen down—not one—and he did not want that to happen now. “The problem with having no walls is that the roof can fall down. And if there are people eating in your restaurant at the time, they will find the roof coming down on their heads. They will not like that, Mma, however much atmosphere there is. In fact, I think that sort of thin
g can definitely spoil the atmosphere.” He jabbed at the air for emphasis. “This is not an idle warning, Mma. This is very serious.”

  Mma Makutsi nodded. “You ask an engineer, Rra. He will tell us.”

  The builder left, and Mma Makutsi watched his truck trundle down the short driveway in front of the restaurant. She was pleased with the result of their meeting; in her mind’s eye she could see how her restaurant would look, and she liked what she saw. She was pleased, too, by the builder’s assurance that the work would be completed in the extraordinarily short time of two weeks—as he would have several crews working on the project at the same time. The most substantial work would be the removal of the current partition wall between what would become the dining area and what would become the new kitchen; that, he said, would take a week to do, but could be done at the same time that the electrician was rewiring and putting in the new lighting. Once all that was done, and the kitchen units installed, it would be a question of completing a bit of plastering and painting. “Nothing much,” said the builder. “And then, Mma, all will be ready for these hungry people who will be coming in the door.”

  She was thinking about this when the chef arrived for his interview. Two weeks was impossible—anybody with any experience of builders knew that—but even if she multiplied the estimate by two, the premises would still be ready much earlier than she had anticipated. And if she were looking for an omen for the success of the new business, then surely that would be a positive one; just as it was a good omen, she felt, that the chef recommended by her lawyer should arrive, as he did, ten minutes early.

  “I am called Thomas,” he announced as he greeted her. “I think you’re expecting me, Mma.”