Blue Shoes and Happiness tn1lda-7

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You are very kind, Mma Ramotswe,” he said. “Your late father would have been proud of you. He was a kind man too.”

  It was the most generous remark that anybody could possibly have made, and for a moment Mma Ramotswe was unable to respond. So she closed her eyes and there came to her, unbidden, the image of Obed Ramotswe, standing before her, holding his hat in his hands, and smiling. He was there for a moment, and then the image faded and was gone, leaving her alone, but not alone.

  THAT WAS NOT the only encounter Mma Ramotswe had at Mokolodi that day. From the workshop she walked up the path to the restaurant next to the office. A few visitors, clad in khaki with field guides stuffed into pockets, sat at tables set out on the platform in front of the restaurant. At one table, a woman smiled at Mma Ramotswe and waved, and she returned the greeting warmly. It pleased her to see these visitors, who came to her country and seemed to fall head over heels in love with it. And why should they not do this? The world was a sad enough place and it needed a few points of light, a few places in which people could find comfort, and if Botswana was one of these, then she was proud of that.Ifonly more people knew , thought Mma Ramotswe.If only more people knew that there was more to Africa than all the problems they saw. They could love us too, as we love them.

  The woman stood up. “Excuse me, Mma,” she said. “Would you mind?”

  She pointed to her friend, a thin woman with a camera around her neck. Such thin arms, thought Mma Ramotswe, with pity; like the arms of a praying mantis, like sticks.

  Mma Ramotswe did not mind, and gestured to the woman to stand beside her while the other woman took her camera from its case.

  “You can stand here with me, Mma,” she said to the woman.

  The woman joined her, standing close to her. Mma Ramotswe felt her arm against hers, flesh against flesh, warm and dry as the touch of human flesh so often and so surprisingly is. She had sometimes thought that this is what snakes said about people:And, do you know, when you actually touch these creatures they aren’t slimy and slippery, but warm and dry?

  She moved, so that they were now standing arm in arm: two ladies, she thought, a brown lady from Botswana and a white lady from somewhere far away, America perhaps, somewhere like that, some place of neatly cut lawns and air conditioning and shining buildings, some place where people wanted to love others if only given the chance.

  The photograph was taken, and the thin woman with the camera asked if she might hand over the camera and in turn stand beside Mma Ramotswe, to which Mma Ramotswe readily agreed. And so they stood together, and Mma Ramotswe took her arm too, but was afraid that she might break it, so fragile it seemed. This woman was wearing a heavy scent, which Mma Ramotswe found pleasant, and she wondered whether she might one day be able to wear such a perfume and leave a trail of exotic flowers behind her, as this thin woman must.

  They said goodbye to one another. Mma Ramotswe noticed that the first woman was fumbling with the camera as she gave it back to her friend. But she managed to get it back into its case, and as Mma Ramotswe walked away, this woman followed her and took her aside.

  “That was very kind of you, Mma,” she said. “We are from America, you see. We have come to your country to see it, to see animals. It is a very beautiful country.”

  “Thank you,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I am glad that …”

  The foreign woman reached out and took her hand. Again there was this feeling of dryness. “My friend is very ill,” she said, her voice lowered. “You may not have noticed it, but she is not well.”

  Mma Ramotswe cast a glance in the direction of the thin woman, who was busying herself with the pouring of orange juice from a jug on their table. She noticed that even the lifting of the jug seemed an effort.

  “You see,” went on the other woman, “this trip is a sort of farewell. We used to go everywhere together. We went to many places. This will be our last trip. So thank you for being so kind and having your photograph taken with us. Thank you, Mma.”

  For a moment Mma Ramotswe stood quite still. Then she turned and walked back to the table, to stand beside the woman, who looked up at her in surprise. Mma Ramotswe went down on her haunches, squatting beside the thin woman, and slipped an arm around her shoulder. It was bony beneath the thin blouse, and she was gentle, but she hugged her, carefully, as one might hug a child. The woman reached for her hand, and clasped it briefly in her own and pressed it, and Mma Ramotswe whispered very quietly, but loudly enough for the woman to hear, The Lord will look after you, my sister , and then she stood up and said goodbye, in Setswana, because that is the language that her heart spoke, and walked off, her face turned away now, so that they should not see her tears.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  YOU WILL BE VERY HAPPY IN THAT CHAIR

  MMA MAKUTSI LOOKED at her watch. Mma Ramotswe and Mr Polopetsi were away on their trip to Mokolodi—she had felt slightly irritated that Mma Ramotswe should have chosen him to accompany her rather than herself; but she should not begrudge him the experience, she reminded herself, particularly if he was in due course to become her own assistant, an assistant– assistant detective. With the two of them gone for the rest of the afternoon and everything in the office, filing and typing, up-to-date, there was no real reason for her to stay at her desk now that it was four o’clock. In the garage itself, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had finished the work he had been doing on a customer’s persnickety French car and had sent the apprentices home. He would probably stay for an hour or so and clear up; if the telephone went, then he could answer it and take a message. It was unlikely to ring, though, as clients very rarely got in touch in the late afternoon. The morning was the time of important telephone calls, as it was at the start of the day that people plucked up the courage to contact a private detective; for an act of courage was what it often was, an admission of a troubling possibility, something suppressed and not thought about, something fretted over and dreaded. The morning brought the strength to tackle such matters; the dying hours of the day were hours of defeat and resignation.

  Yet here was Mma Makutsi, in the late afternoon, reaching a decision which required considerable courage. She had been putting off doing anything about Phuti Radiphuti, but now she felt that she should seek him out and see what he had to say about his failure to appear for dinner the previous night. It had suddenly occurred to her that there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for his absence. People got days mixed up; she herself had spent an entire Tuesday last week under the impression that it was a Wednesday, and if she could do that—she who was so organised in her personal life, thanks to that early, invaluable training at the Botswana Secretarial College—then how easy it would be for a man who had a whole business to run to get the days mixed up. If that had happened, then Phuti might have gone to eat at his father’s house, and his father would not have found anything amiss, even if it was the wrong day for his meal with him, as most of the time these days the old man seemed to be unaware of what day of the week it was. His memory of the distant past, of old friends, of much-loved cattle; all those memories which such people carried of the early days, of the days of the Protectorate, of Seretse Khama’s father, of times even earlier than that; that was all still there. But now the recent past, the crowded, hurried present, seemed to pass him by. She had seen this before, in others; he would not have pointed out to Phuti that this was not his day for coming to eat.

  The thought that Phuti might merely have mistaken the day cheered her, but only briefly. Phuti went to eat at his father’s house on a Sunday, and it was unlikely that he would have mistaken a Sunday for any other day, as he did not go to work on a Sunday. If, then, he had mixed the days up and gone to eat elsewhere, it could only have been because he had gone to either his sister’s or his aunt’s house, as those were the only other houses where he went to eat. Neither the aunt nor the sister would have failed to point out to him that he had come to them on the wrong day. Both were very well aware of what day of the week it was, especially the aun
t. That aunt, who had played an important role in the building up of the family furniture business, was noted for the acuity of her mind. Phuti himself had told Mma Makutsi how his aunt had an uncanny ability for remembering the details of what everything cost, and this applied not only to present-day prices, but to prices going back to the days before independence. She knew, for example, what the traders in the local store used to ask for paraffin in those silver-coloured jerry cans, and how much a large tin of Lyons golden syrup or a can of Fray Bentos bully beef cost in the late nineteen-fifties; or Lion matches, for that matter, or a Supersonic Radio imported from the radio factory in Bulawayo. Such an aunt would have informed Phuti that he was in the wrong house on the wrong day, had he come to her door unexpectedly.

  No, she realised that this was clutching at straws; Phuti Radiphuti had not come to dinner because he had gone cool on her after her feminist disclosure. He had been frightened off, he had been discouraged by the thought that he would have to live with a feminist who would nag and bully him. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it were, some men, and he must be one of them, wanted women who did not make them feel guilty for wanting the things that they wanted. And she should have sensed that, she told herself. Phuti Radiphuti so obviously had a confidence problem, with his speech impediment and his hesitant ways, and of course such a man would not want to marry a woman who would be too forceful. He would want a woman who looked up to him, just a little, and who made him feel manly. She should have understood that, she realised, and she should have built him up rather than made him feel threatened.

  She looked at her watch again, and then she looked down at her shoes. Don’t look at us, they seemed to be saying. Don’t look at us, Miss Feminist!There was clearly no help from that quarter; there never was. She would have to sort her troubles out by herself, and that meant that she would have to go right now, without any further delay, to the Double Comfort Furniture Shop and speak to Phuti before he left work. She would ask Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to drive her there; he was a kind man, and never turned down a request for a favour. And then an idea occurred. Mma Ramotswe had spoken about the need to get Mr J.L.B. Matekoni a new chair. She could go with him to the store on the pretext of helping him to choose this chair. And in that way she could speak to Phuti without giving him the impression that she had come specially to see him.

  She left her desk and made her way into the garage, where she found Mr J.L.B. Matekoni standing at the entrance, staring out on to the Tlokweng Road. He was wiping his hands on an old cloth, almost absent-mindedly, as if he was thinking about something much more important than the problem of oil on the skin.

  “I am glad to see that you have nothing to do, Rra,” she said, as she came up behind him. “I have had an idea.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni turned round and looked at her vacantly. “I was very far away,” he said. “I was thinking.”

  “I have been thinking too,” said Mma Makutsi. “I was thinking about that new chair which Mma Ramotswe said that she wanted to buy you.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni tucked the piece of cloth into his pocket. “It would be good to be able to sit comfortably again,” he said. “I cannot find a comfortable position in any of the chairs in Zebra Drive. I don’t know what has happened to them. They are full of lumps and springs.”

  Mma Makutsi knew very well what had happened to the furniture in Zebra Drive, but did not want to say as much. She had always suspected that Mma Ramotswe was hard on anything with springs—look at the way in which the tiny white van listed to one side (the driver’s side)—and then there was her office chair, which, although it had no springs, also had a marked inclination to the right, where one of the legs had buckled slightly under Mma Ramotswe’s traditional form.

  “You will be very comfortable in a new chair,” she said. “And I think we should go off to the store right now to take a look. Not to buy anything, of course—that can wait until Mma Ramotswe has the time to get out there. But at least we could go and take a look and put your name on something comfortable.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni glanced at his watch. “It would mean closing the garage early.”

  “Why not?” said Mma Makutsi. “The apprentices have gone home. Mma Ramotswe and Mr Polopetsi are out at Mokolodi. There is nothing for us to do here.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni hesitated, but only briefly. “Very well,” he said. “We can go out there and then I can drop you at your place afterwards. That will save you a walk.”

  Mma Makutsi thanked him and went to fetch her things from the office. It would be easy to find a suitable chair for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, she thought, but how easy would it be to talk to Phuti Radiphuti now that she had frightened him off? And what would he say to her? Would he simply say that he was sorry, but it was now time to end their engagement? Would he find the words to do that, or would he simply stare at her, as he used to do, while his tongue tried desperately to find the words that simply would not come?

  AT THE DOUBLE COMFORT FURNITURE SHOP Phuti Radiphuti was standing at the window of his office, looking out over the barn-like showroom. The lay-out had been designed with just that in mind: from where he stood the manager could look down and signal to the staff below. If customers brought children who bounced on the chairs, or if people came to try out the beds and showed signs of lying too long on the comfortable mattresses—which they sometimes did, even those who had no intention at all of buying a bed but who merely wanted a few minutes of comfort before continuing with their shopping tasks elsewhere — he could draw the attention of his assistants to the problem and tell them what to do with a quick hand signal. A finger pointed in the direction of the door meant out; the clenching of a fist meant tell them to keep their children under control; and the shaking of a finger directed at a member of staff meant there are customers waiting to be served and you are sitting there talking to your friends.

  He saw Mma Makutsi come in with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and for a moment he did nothing. He swallowed hard. He had meant to telephone Mma Makutsi and apologise for his failure to turn up last night, but it had been a frantic day, with the visit to the hospital to see his aunt and the list of things that she had given him to do. She had been admitted to the Princess Marina Hospital the previous morning, her face drawn with pain, and they had removed the bloated appendix barely an hour later. It had been close to bursting, they explained, and that would have been perilous. As it was, she had been sitting up in bed that morning, ready to give him instructions, and he had spent much of the rest of the day performing the chores that she had set him. There had been no time to telephone Mma Makutsi, and now here she was in search of an explanation, with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni in support, and he would have to explain everything to her. As he watched her enter the showroom, he felt that familiar knot of anxiety in his stomach—the knot that he had always felt in the past when he had been faced with the need to talk and which always seemed so effectively to paralyse his tongue and vocal cords.

  He turned away from the window and went down into the showroom. Mma Makutsi had not spotted him yet, although he had seen her glancing around as if to look for him. Now she was standing before a large armchair covered in black leather and was pointing it out to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who was bending down to examine the label attached to the chair. Oddly, Phuti found himself trying to remember the price. It was not expensive, that chair, covered as it was in soft leather, but it was certainly not a bargain. He wondered whether Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was the sort of man to spend a lot of money on a chair. He remembered, of course, that Mma Makutsi had said that Mma Ramotswe had a comfortable house in Zebra Drive and so there was some money there. And perhaps that garage of his on the Tlokweng Road did well, although on the few occasions that he had been there he had not seen signs of great activity.

  He made his way past a display of dining-room tables, noting with irritation that somebody had placed a sticky hand print on one of them, the finest in the room, with its highly polished black surface. It would be somebody’s child, he thought; a child
had reached out and touched the furniture with a hand that had been used to push sweets into his mouth. And the same hand would have been placed on the light red velvet of the sofas on the other side of the table, and they would have to get some of that cleaning fluid … He sighed. There was no point getting exercised over this; the country was full of dust and children with sticky hands, and termites that liked nothing better than to eat people’s furniture; that was just how it was, and if one worried about it, then it simply made one stammer all the more and feel hot at the back of the neck. Mma Makutsi had told him that he should stop worrying, and he had made a real effort to do so, with the result that he stammered less and felt less hot. He was a fortunate man, he thought, to be engaged to a woman like that. Many women made life worse for their husbands with their nagging and hectoring; one saw such men in the store, defeated men, men with all the cares of the world on their shoulders, looking at the furniture as if it was just one more thing to worry about in lives already full of anxieties.

  “That is a very g … goo … ,” said Phuti Radiphuti as he approached Mma Makutsi and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

  He closed his eyes. There was that sensation of heat at the back of his neck and the familiar, cramping feeling in the muscles of the tongue. He saw the wordgood written down on an imaginary piece of paper; he had only to read it out, as she had told him to do, but he could not. She had read a book about this problem and she had helped him, but now he could not say that this chair was good.

  “A ve …” He tried again, but it would not come. He should have telephoned her, and told her, and now she would be angry with him and might be having second thoughts about their marriage.

  “It looks very comfortable,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, reaching out to touch the leather on one of the armrests. “This leather …”