(2/15) Tears of the Giraffe

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The maid frowned. The situation was serious enough to merit desperate action, but it was hard to see what she could do. There was no point trying to reason with him; once a woman like that had sunk her claws into a man then there would be no turning him back. Men became quite unreasonable in such circumstances and he simply would not listen to her if she tried to tell him of the dangers that lay ahead. Even if she found out something about that woman—something about her past—he would probably pay no attention to the disclosure. She imagined confronting Mr J.L.B. Matekoni with the information that his future wife was a murderess! That woman has already killed two husbands, she might say. She put something in their food. The are both dead now because of her.

  But he would say nothing, and just smile. I do not believe you, he would retort; and he would continue to say that even if she waved the headlines from the Botswana Daily News: Mma Ramotswe murders husband with poison. Police take porridge away and do tests. Porridge found to be full of poison. No, he would not believe it.

  She spat into the dust. If there was nothing that she could do to get him to change his mind, then perhaps she had better think about some way of dealing with Mma Ramotswe. If Mma Ramotswe were simply not there, then the problem would have been solved, if she could … No, it was a terrible thing to think, and then she probably would not be able to afford to hire a witch doctor. They were very expensive when it came to removing people, and it was far too risky anyway. People talked, and the police would come round, and she could imagine nothing worse than going to prison.

  Prison! What if Mma Ramotswe were to be sent to prison for a few years? You can’t marry somebody who is in prison, and they can’t marry you. So if Mma Ramotswe were to be found to have committed a crime and be sent off for a few years, then all would stay exactly as it was. And did it really matter if she had not actually committed a crime, as long as the police thought that she had and they were able to find the evidence? She had heard once of how a man had been sent off to prison because his enemies had planted ammunition in his house and had informed the police that he was storing it for guerillas. That was back in the days of the Zimbabwe war, when Mr Nkomo had his men near Francistown and bullets and guns were coming into the country no matter how hard the police tried to stop them. The man had protested his innocence, but the police had just laughed, and the magistrate had laughed too.

  There were few bullets and guns these days, but it might still be possible to find something that could be hidden in her house. What did the police look for these days? They were very worried about drugs, she believed, and the newspapers sometimes wrote about this person or that person being arrested for trading in dagga. But they had to have a large amount before the police were interested and where would she be able to lay her hands on that? Dagga was expensive and she could probably afford no more than a few leaves. So it would have to be something else.

  The maid thought. A fly had landed on her forehead and was crawling down the ridge of her nose. Normally she would have brushed it away, but a thought had crossed her mind and it was developing deliciously. The fly was ignored: a dog barked in the neighbouring garden; a truck changed gear noisily on the road to the old airstrip. The maid smiled, and pushed her hat back. One of her men friends could help her. She knew what he did, and she knew that it was dangerous. He could deal with Mma Ramotswe, and in return she would give him those attentions which he so clearly enjoyed but which were denied him at home. Everybody would be happy. He would get what he wanted. She would save her job. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would be saved from a predatory woman, and Mma Ramotswe would get her just deserts. It was all very clear.

  THE MAID returned to the kitchen and started to peel some potatoes. Now that the threat posed by Mma Ramotswe was receding—or shortly would—she felt quite positively disposed towards her wayward employer, who was just weak, like all men. She would cook him a fine lunch today. There was meat in the fridge—meat which she had earlier planned to take home with her, but which she would now fry up for him with a couple of onions and a good helping of mashed potatoes.

  The meal was not quite ready when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni came home. She heard his truck and the sound of the gate slamming, and then the door opening. He usually called out when he came back—a simple “I’m home now” to let her know that she could put his lunch on the table. Today, though, there was no shout; instead, there was the sound of another voice. She caught her breath. The thought occurred to her that he might have come home with that woman, having asked her to lunch. In that case, she would hurriedly hide the stew and say that there was no food in the house. She could not bear the thought of Mma Ramotswe eating her food; she would rather feed it to a dog than lay it before the woman who had threatened her livelihood.

  She moved towards the kitchen door and peered down the corridor. Just inside the front door, holding it open to let somebody follow him into the house, was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

  “Careful,” he said. “This door is not very wide.”

  Another voice answered, but she did not hear what it said. It was a female voice but not, she realised with a rush of relief, the voice of that terrible woman. Who was he bringing back to the house? Another woman? That would be good, because then she could tell that Ramotswe woman that he was not faithful to her and that might put an end to the marriage before it started.

  But then the wheelchair came in and she saw the girl, pushed by her small brother, enter the house. She was at a loss what to think. What was her employer doing bringing these children into the house? They must be relatives; the children of some distant cousin. The old Botswana morality dictated that you had to provide for such people, no matter how distant the connection.

  “I am here, Rra,” she called out. “Your lunch is ready.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked up. “Ah,” he said. “There are some children with me. They will need to eat.”

  “There will be enough,” she called out. “I have made a good stew.”

  She waited a few minutes before going into the living room, busying herself with the mashing of the overcooked potatoes. When she did go though, wiping her hands industriously on a kitchen rag, she found Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sitting in his chair. On the other side of the room, looking out of the window, was a girl, with a young boy, presumably her brother, standing beside her. The maid stared at the children, taking in at a glance what sort of children they were. Basarwa, she thought: unmistakable. The girl had that colour skin, the light brown, the colour of cattle dung; the boy had those eyes that those people have, a bit like Chinese eyes, and his buttocks stuck out in a little shelf behind him.

  “These children have come to live here,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, lowering his eyes as he spoke. “They are from the orphan farm, but I am going to be looking after them.”

  The maid’s eyes widened. She had not expected this. Masarwa children being brought into an ordinary person’s house and allowed to live there was something no self-respecting person would do. These people were thieves—she never doubted that—and they should not be encouraged to come and live in respectable Batswana houses. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni may be trying to be kind, but there were limits to charity.

  She stared at her employer. “They are staying here? For how many days?”

  He did not look up at her. He was too ashamed, she thought.

  “They are staying here for a long time. I am not planning to take them back.”

  She was silent. She wondered whether this had something to do with that Ramotswe woman. She might have decided that the children could come and stay as part of her programme to take over his life. First you move in some Masarwa children, and then you move in yourself. The moving in of the children may even have been part of a plot against herself, of course. Mma Ramotswe might well have expected that she would not approve of such children coming into the house and in this way she might force her out even before she moved in altogether. Well, if that was her plan, then she would do everything in her power to thwart it. She would show her that sh
e liked these children and that she was happy to have them in the house. It would be difficult, but she could do it.

  “You will be hungry,” she said to the girl, smiling as she spoke. “I have some good stew. It is just what children like.”

  The girl returned the smile. “Thank you, Mma,” she said respectfully. “You are very kind.”

  The boy said nothing. He was looking at the maid with those disconcerting eyes, and it made her shudder inwardly. She returned to the kitchen and prepared the plates. She gave the girl a good helping, and there was plenty for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. But to the boy she gave only a small amount of stew, and covered most of that with the scrapings from the potato pot. She did not want to encourage that child, and the less he had to eat the better.

  The meal was taken in silence. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sat at the head of the table, with the girl at his right and the boy at the other end. The girl had to lean forward in her chair to eat, as the table was so constructed that the wheelchair would not fit underneath it. But she managed well enough, and soon finished her helping. The boy wolfed down his food and then sat with his hands politely clasped together, watching Mr J.LB. Matekoni.

  Afterwards, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went out to the truck and fetched the suitcase which they had brought from the orphan farm. The housemother had issued them with extra clothes and these had been placed in one of the cheap brown cardboard suitcases which the orphans were given when they went out into the world. There was a small, typed list taped to the top of the case, and this listed the clothes issued under two columns. Boy: 2 pairs boys’ pants, 2 pairs khaki shorts, 2 khaki shirts, 1 jersey, 4 socks, 1 pair shoes, 1 Setswana Bible. Girl: 3 pairs girls’ pants, 2 shirts, 1 vest, 2 skirts, 4 socks, 1 pair shoes, 1 Setswana Bible.

  He took the suitcase inside and showed the children to the room they were to occupy, the small room he had kept for the visitors who never seemed to arrive, the room with two mattresses, a small pile of dusty blankets, and a chair. He placed the suitcase on the chair and opened it. The girl wheeled herself over to the chair and looked in at the clothes, which were new. She reached forward and touched them hesitantly, lovingly, as one would who had never before possessed new clothes.

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni left them to unpack. Going out into the garden, he stood for a moment under his shade-netting by the front door. He knew that he had done something momentous in bringing the children to the house, and now the full immensity of his action came home to him. He had changed the course of the lives of two other people and now everything that happened to them would be his responsibility. For a moment he felt appalled by the thought. Not only were there two extra mouths to feed, but there were schools to think about, and a woman to look after their day-to-day needs. He would have to find a nursemaid—a man could never do all the things that children need to have done for them. Some sort of housemother, rather like the housemother who had looked after them at the orphan farm. He stopped. He had forgotten. He was almost a married man. Mma Ramotswe would be mother to these children.

  He sat down heavily on an upturned petrol drum. These children were Mma Ramotswe’s responsibility now, and he had not even asked her opinion. He had allowed himself to be bamboozled into taking them by that persuasive Mma Potokwane, and he had hardly thought out all the implications. Could he take them back? She could hardly refuse to receive them as they were still, presumably, her legal responsibility. Nothing had been signed; there were no pieces of paper which could be waved in his face. But to take them back was unthinkable. He had told the children that he would look after them, and that, in his mind, was more important than any signature on a legal document.

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had never broken his word. He had made it a rule of his business life that he would never tell a customer something and then not stick to what he had said. Sometimes this had cost him dearly. If he told a customer that a repair to a car would cost three hundred pula, then he would never charge more than that, even if he discovered that the work took far longer. And often it did take longer, with those lazy apprentices of his taking hours to do even the simplest thing. He could not understand how it would be possible to take three hours to do a simple service on a car. All you had to do was to drain the old oil and pour it into the dirty oil container. Then you put in fresh oil, changed the oil filters, checked the brake fluid level, adjusted the timing, and greased the gearbox. That was the simple service, which cost two hundred and eighty pula. It could be done in an hour and a half at the most, but the apprentices managed to take much longer.

  No, he could not go back on the assurance he had given those children. They were his children, come what may. He would talk to Mma Ramotswe and explain to her that children were good for Botswana and that they should do what they could to help these poor children who had no people of their own. She was a good woman, he knew, and he was sure that she would understand and agree with him. Yes, he would do it, but perhaps not just yet.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE GLASS CEILING

  MMA MAKUTSI, Secretary of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and cum laude graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College, sat at her desk, staring out through the open door. She preferred to leave the door open when there was nothing happening in the agency (which was most of the time), but it had its drawbacks, as the chickens would sometimes wander in and strut about as if they were in a henhouse. She did not like these chickens, for a number of very sound reasons. To begin with, there was something unprofessional about having chickens in a detective agency, and then, quite apart from that, the chickens themselves irritated her profoundly. It was always the same group of chickens: four hens and a dispirited and, she imagined, impotent rooster, who was kept on by the hens out of charity. The rooster was lame and had lost a large proportion of the feathers on one of his wings. He looked defeated, as if he were only too well aware of his loss of status, and he always walked several steps behind the hens themselves, like a royal consort relegated by protocol into a permanent second place.

  The hens seemed equally irritated by Mma Makutsi’s presence. It was as if she, rather than they, were the intruder. By rights, this tiny building with its two small windows and its creaky door should be a henhouse, not a detective agency. If they outstared her, perhaps, she would go, and they would be left to perch on the chairs and make their nests in the filing cabinets. That is what the chickens wanted.

  “Get out,” said Mma Makutsi, waving a folded-up newspaper at them. “No chickens here! Get out!”

  The largest of the hens turned and glared at her, while the rooster merely looked shifty.

  “I mean you!” shouted Mma Makutsi. “This is not a chicken farm. Out!”

  The hens uttered an indignant clucking and seemed to hesitate for a moment. But when Mma Makutsi pushed her chair back and made to get up, they turned and began to move towards the door, the rooster in the lead this time, limping awkwardly.

  The chickens dealt with, Mma Makutsi resumed her staring out of the door. She resented the indignity of having to shoo chickens out of one’s office. How many first-class graduates of the Botswana Secretarial College had to do that? she wondered. There were offices in town—large buildings with wide windows and air-conditioning units where the secretaries sat at polished desks with chrome handles. She had seen these offices when the college had taken them for work-experience visits. She had seen them sitting there, smiling, wearing expensive earrings and waiting for a well-paid husband to step forward and ask them to marry him. She had thought at the time that she would like a job like that, although she herself would be more interested in the work than in the husband. She had assumed, in fact, that such a job would be hers, but when the course had finished and they had all gone off for interviews, she had received no offers. She could not understand why this should be so. Some of the other women who got very much worse marks than she did—sometimes as low as 51 percent (the barest of passes) received good offers whereas she (who had achieved the almost inconceivable mark of 97 percent) received not
hing. How could this be?

  It was one of the other unsuccessful girls who explained it to her. She, too, had gone to interviews and been unlucky.

  “It is men who give out these jobs, am I right?” she had said.

  “I suppose so,” said Mma Makutsi. “Men run these businesses. They choose the secretaries.”

  “So how do you think men choose who should get the job and who shouldn’t? Do you think they choose by the marks we got? Is that how you think they do it?”

  Mma Makutsi was silent. It had never occurred to her that decisions of this nature would be made on any other basis. Everything that she had been taught at school had conveyed the message that hard work helped you to get a good job.

  “Well,” said her friend, smiling wryly, “I can tell that you do think that. And you’re wrong. Men choose women for jobs on the basis of their looks. They choose the beautiful ones and give them jobs. To the others, they say: We are very sorry. All the jobs have gone. We are very sorry. There is a world recession, and in a world recession there are only enough jobs for beautiful girls. That is the effect of a world recession. It is all economics.”

  Mma Makutsi had listened in astonishment. But she knew, even as the bitter remarks were uttered, that they were true. Perhaps she had known all along, at a subconscious level, and had simply not faced up to the fact. Good-looking women got what they wanted and women like her, who were perhaps not so elegant as the others, were left with nothing.

  That evening she looked in the mirror. She had tried to do something about her hair, but had failed. She had applied hair-straightener and had pulled and tugged at it, but it had remained completely uncooperative. And her skin, too, had resisted the creams that she had applied to it, with the result that her complexion was far darker than that of almost every other girl at the college. She felt a flush of resentment at her fate. It was hopeless. Even with those large round glasses she had bought herself, at such crippling expense, she could not disguise the fact that she was a dark girl in a world where light-coloured girls with heavily applied red lipstick had everything at their disposal. That was the ultimate, inescapable truth that no amount of wishful thinking, no amount of expensive creams and lotions, could change. The fun in this life, the good jobs, the rich husbands, were not a matter of merit and hard work, but were a matter of brute, unshifting biology.