The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

by Alexander McCall Smith

  For the first time in the course of their meeting, Mma Botumile smiled. “It’s easier to talk to another woman about these matters,” she said. “But since your Mma Ramotswe is so busy, I suppose that I shall have to talk to you, Rra.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni waited.

  Mma Botumile lowered her voice. “Men make certain demands of ladies,” she said. “And if they stop, then it’s a very good sign. Any woman knows that.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni caught his breath.

  There was a glint of amusement in Mma Botumile’s eye. “Yes,” she said. “That is always a sign that the man has another friend.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni did not know what to say. He looked down at the table, and then at the floor. Somebody had spilled some sugar from the table, a small line of white grains, and he noticed that a troop of ants, marshalled with military precision, had arrived to carry them off, minuscule porters staggering under the weight of their trophies.

  “So that is what you need to find out, Rra,” said Mma Botumile, signalling to the waitress to bring her bill. “You will have to follow him and find out who this lady is. I can give you no help about that—that is why I have asked you. That is why you are being paid two hundred pula an hour.”

  “I’m not,” muttered Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

  HE LEFT THE PRESIDENT HOTEL uncertain what to do and unsure, he now realised, whether he wanted to carry out this investigation at all. The meeting with Mma Botumile had not been a satisfactory one. She had given him no guidance as to where he might start looking for her husband’s girlfriend, and the only suggestion that she had made was that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni might follow him after work one day and see where he went. “He certainly doesn’t come home straightaway,” she said. “He says that he’s seeing clients, but I don’t believe that, do you?” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni muttered something which could have been yes or equally could have been no. He did not like being expected to take sides like this, and yet, he told himself, this is what must be expected of people like private detectives, or lawyers, for that matter. People paid them to take their side, and this meant that you had to believe in what the client wanted. The thought made him feel very uncomfortable. What if you were to be hired by somebody whom you could not bear, or if you found out that the person who had engaged you was lying? Would you have to pretend that you believed the lies—which would be impossible, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni—or could you tell them that you would have no truck with their falsehoods?

  And then another thought struck Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as he made his way down the steps of the President Hotel. He had never met Mma Botumile’s husband and he had no idea what he was like. But it occurred to him, nonetheless, that when he eventually met him—if he eventually met him—he would probably feel sorry for him and end up rather liking him. If he were to be married to Mma Botumile, whom he considered both rude and bossy, then would he not himself seek comfort elsewhere, in the arms of a good, sympathetic woman—somebody like Mma Ramotswe in fact? Of course Mma Ramotswe would never look at another man—Mr J.L.B. Matekoni knew that. He stopped. It had never once crossed his mind that Mma Ramotswe might take up with somebody else, but then many people who were let down in this way by their spouses never thought that this would happen to them, and yet it did. So there were many people who deluded themselves.

  It was a very unwelcome thought, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt himself becoming hot and uncomfortable as he stood there in front of the President Hotel, thinking the unthinkable. He saw himself coming home one evening and discovering a man’s tie, perhaps, draped over a chair. He saw himself picking up the tie, examining it, and then dangling it in front of Mma Ramotswe and saying, How could you, Mma Ramotswe? How could you? And she would look anywhere but in his eyes and say, Well, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, it’s not as if you have been a very exciting husband, you know. It was ridiculous. Mma Ramotswe would never say a thing like that; he had done his best to be a good husband to her. He had never strayed, and he had helped around the house as modern husbands are meant to do. In fact, he had done everything in his power to be modern, even when that had not been particularly easy.

  Suddenly Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt unaccountably sad. A man might try to be modern—and succeed, to a degree—but it was very difficult to be exciting. Women these days had magazines which showed them exciting men—bright-eyed men, posed with smiling women, and everyone clearly enjoying themselves greatly. The men would perhaps be holding a car key, or even be leaning against an expensive German vehicle, and the women would be laughing at something that the exciting men had said, something exciting. Surely Mma Ramotswe would not be influenced by such artificiality, and yet she certainly did look at these magazines, which were passed on to her by Mma Makutsi. She affected to laugh at them, but then if she really found them so ridiculous, surely she would not bother to read them in the first place?

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stood at the edge of the square, looking over the traders’ stalls, deep in thought. Then he asked himself a question which, although easily posed, was rather more difficult to answer: How does a husband become more exciting?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AN ACCOUNT OF A PUZZLING CONVERSATION

  THAT EVENING, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni made his way to the address which Mma Botumile had given him as they had sat on the verandah of the President Hotel; sat tealess, in his case, because she had so selfishly dismissed the waitress. It was a modest office block, three storeys high, on Kudumatse Drive, flanked on either side by equally undistinguished buildings, a furniture warehouse and a workshop that repaired electric fans. He parked his truck on the opposite side of the road, in a position where he could see the front entrance to the offices, but sufficiently far away so as not to look suspicious to anybody who should emerge from the building. He was just a man in a truck; the sort of man, and the sort of truck, one saw all the time on the roads of Gaborone; quite unexceptional. Most of those men, and trucks, were busy going somewhere, but occasionally they stopped, as this man had done, and waited for something or other to happen. It was not an unusual sight.

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at his watch. It was now almost five o’clock, the time when, according to Mma Botumile, her husband invariably left the office. He was a creature of habit, she said, even if some of these habits had become bad ones. If Mr J.L.B. Matekoni were to wait outside the office, he would see him coming out and getting into his large red car, which would be parked by the side of the building. There was no need to give a detailed description of him, she said, as he could be identified by his car.

  “What make of car is it?” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had asked politely. He would never describe a car simply by its colour, and it astonished him that people did this. He had noticed Mma Makutsi doing it, and even Mma Ramotswe, who should have known better, described cars in terms of their colour, without making any reference to make or engine capacity.

  Mma Botumile had looked at him almost with pity. “How do you expect me to know that?” she said. “You’re the mechanic.”

  He had bitten his lip at the rudeness of the response. It was unusual in Botswana, a polite country, to come across such behaviour, and when one did encounter it, it appeared all the more surprising, and unpleasant. He was at a loss as to why she should be so curt in her manner. In his experience bad behaviour came from those who were unsure of themselves, those who had some obscure point to make. Mma Botumile was a woman of position, a successful woman who had nothing to prove to anybody; certainly she had no reason to belittle Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who could hardly have been any threat to her. So why should she be so rude? Did she dislike all men, or just him; and if it was just him, then what was there about him that so offended her?

  Now, sitting in the cab of his truck, he looked over the road towards the side of the building where, he suddenly noticed, two large red cars were parked. For a moment he felt despair—this whole thing had been a mistake from the very outset—but then he thought: the odds were surely against there being two drivers of red cars who would leave the
building at exactly five o’clock. Of course not: the first man to come out after five o’clock would be Mma Botumile’s husband.

  He consulted his watch again. It was one minute to five now, and at any moment Rra Botumile might walk out of the front door. He looked up from his watch, and at that moment two men emerged from the office building, deep in conversation with one another; two men in white shirtsleeves and ties, jackets slung over their shoulders, the very picture of the office-worker at the end of the day. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni watched them as they turned the corner of the building and approached the cars, lingered for a moment to conclude their conversation, and then each got into a red car.

  For a few moments, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sat quite still. He had no way of telling which of the two men was Mma Botumile’s husband, which meant that either he would have to give up and go home, or he would have to make a very quick decision and follow one of them. It would be easy enough to drive off and abandon the enquiry, but that would involve going back to Mma Ramotswe and telling her that he had failed at his attempt at doing what he understood to be the simplest and most basic of the procedures of her profession. He had not read Clovis Andersen’s The Principles of Private Detection, of course, and he wondered whether Mma Ramotswe’s trusted vade mecum would give any instruction on what to do in circumstances like this. Presumably he would point out that you must at least have a description of the person you are interested in at the outset, which of course he had not obtained.

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni made a snap decision. He would follow the first car as it came out. There were no grounds for thinking that this was Mr Botumile, but he had to choose, and he might as well … Or should he go for the second? There was something about the second which looked suspicious. The driver of the first car was obviously acting confidently and decisively in leaving first. That showed a clear conscience, whereas the second driver, contemplating the dissemblance and the tryst that lay ahead, showed the hesitation of one with a guilty conscience. It was a slender straw of surmise, but one which Mr J.L.B. Matekoni grasped at in the absence of anything better. That would impress Clovis Andersen—and Mma Ramotswe—he thought: a decision based on a sound understanding of human psychology—and from a garage mechanic too!

  The snap decision, so confident and decisive, was reversed, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni waited while the first of the two red cars swung out into the main road and drove off. At five o’clock on this road there was a fair bit of traffic to contend with, as people, anxious to return home, drove off to Gaborone West and onto the Lobatse Road, and to other places they lived; all of them going about their legitimate business, of course, unlike the second driver, who seemed to be hesitating. He had started his engine—a mechanic could tell that at a glance, even from that distance—but he was not moving for some reason. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni wondered why he should be waiting, and decided that this was a yet further indication of guilt: he was waiting until the driver of the other red car was well on his way, as he did not want that first driver to see him, the second driver, setting off in the wrong direction. That was clearly what was happening. Again, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was astonished at the way in which these conclusions came to mind. It seemed to him that once one started to think about a problem like this, everything all fitted into place surprisingly neatly, like one of those puzzles one saw in the papers where all the numbers added up or the missing letters made sense. He had not tried his hand at those, but perhaps he should. He had read somewhere that if you used your mind like that, then you kept it in good order for a longer period of time, and you put off the day when you would be sitting in the sun, like some of the very old people, not exactly sure which day of the week it was and wondering why the world no longer made the sense that it once did. Yet such people were often happy, he reminded himself, possibly because it did not really matter what day of the week it was anyway. And if they remembered nothing of the recent past but still held on to memories of twenty years ago, then that too might not be as bad as people might think. For many of us, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, twenty years ago was a rather nice time. The world slipped away from us as we got older—of course it did—but perhaps we should not hold on too tightly.

  The red car ahead of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went up Kudumatse Drive and continued on the road that led out to Kanye. The buildings became smaller—offices and small warehouses became houses; dirt roads went off on both sides to newly built dwellings, two-bedroomed embodiments of somebody’s ambitions, dreams, hard work, carved out of what had not all that long ago been thorn bush, grazing for cattle. He saw a car he thought he recognised, parked outside one of these; a car that he had worked on only a few weeks ago. It belonged to a teacher at Gaborone Secondary School, a man who everybody said would one day be a headmaster. His wife went to the Anglican Cathedral on Sunday mornings, Mma Ramotswe reported, and sang all the hymns lustily, although quite out of tune. “But she is doing her best,” added Mma Ramotswe.

  Suddenly the red car slowed down. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had been keeping his truck three vehicles behind it, as he did not want to be spotted by Mr Botumile, and now he was faced with a decision as to whether he should pull in—which surely would look suspicious—or overtake. Two cars ahead of him started to overtake, but Mr J.L.B. Matekoni did not follow them. Steering over to the side of the road, he watched what was happening ahead. The red car started to move more quickly, and then, with very little warning, swung round onto the other side of the road and headed back in the direction from which it had come. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni continued on his course. He had a glimpse of the driver of the red car—just a face, staring fixedly ahead, not enough to remember, or to judge—and then all he saw was the rear of the car heading back towards town. He looked in his driving mirror—the road was clear, and he turned, going some way off the edge of the tar, as his truck had a wide turning circle.

  Fortunately the traffic returning to town was lighter, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni soon found himself closing on Mr Botumile’s car. He slowed down, but not too much, as this was an unpredictable quarry, like a wild animal in the bush that will suddenly turn and dart off in an unexpected direction to elude capture. Ahead of him the rays of the sinking sun had caught the windows of the Government buildings off Khama Crescent and were flashing signals. Red. Stop, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. Stop. Go back to what you understand.

  Mr Botumile drove through the centre of town, past the Princess Marina Hospital, and on towards the Gaborone Sun Hotel. Then he stopped, parking in front of the hotel just as Mr J.L.B. Matekoni turned his truck into a different section of the hotel parking lot and turned off the engine. Then both men left their vehicles and entered the hotel, Mr Botumile going first, alone—he thought—and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni following him a discreet distance behind, his heart beating hard within him at the sheer excitement of what he was doing. This is better, he thought, infinitely better than adjusting brake pads and replacing oil filters.

  “MR GOTSO?” exclaimed Mma Ramotswe. “Mr Charlie Gotso? Him?”

  “Yes,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “I recognised him immediately—who wouldn’t? Charlie Gotso was sitting there, and when I saw him I had to look away quickly. Not that he would know who I am. He’d know who you are, Mma Ramotswe. You’ve spoken to him, haven’t you? All those years ago when …”

  “That was a long time ago,” Mma Ramotswe said. “And I was just a small person to him. Men like that don’t remember small people.”

  “You are not small, Mma,” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni found himself protesting, but stopped. Mma Ramotswe was not small.

  She looked at him with amusement. “No, I am not small, Rra. You are right. But I was thinking of how I would mean nothing to a man like that.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was quick to assent. “Of course that’s what you meant. I know men like that. They are very arrogant.”

  “He is a rich man,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Rich men sometimes forget that they are people, just like the rest of us.” She paused. “So there was Charlie Gotso, no less! And Mr Botumile went straight
up to him and sat down?”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. He and Mma Ramotswe were sitting at the kitchen table in their house on Zebra Drive. Behind them, on the stove, a pan of chopped pumpkin was on the boil, filling the air with that familiar chalky smell of the yellow pumpkin flesh. Inside the oven, a small leg of lamb was slowly roasting; it would be a good meal, when it was eventually served in half an hour or so. There was time enough, then, to talk, and for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to give Mma Ramotswe an account of the enquiry from which he had just returned.

  “This was outside,” he said. “You know that bar at the back? That place. And since there were quite a few people there, and most of the tables were occupied, I was able to sit down at the table next to theirs without it appearing odd.”

  “You did the right thing,” said Mma Ramotswe. Clovis Andersen, in The Principles of Private Detection, advised that it could look just as odd to distance oneself unnaturally from the object of one’s attention as to come too close. Neither too near nor too far, he wrote. That’s what the Ancients called the golden mean, and they were right—as always! She had wondered who these ancients were; whether they were the same people whom one called the elders in Botswana, or whether they were somebody else altogether. But the important thing was that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who had never read The Principles of Private Detection, should have done just the right thing without any specialist knowledge. This only went to show, she decided, that much of what was written in The Principles of Private Detection was simply common sense, leading to decisions at which one could have anyway arrived unaided.

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni accepted the compliment graciously. “Thank you, Mma. Well, there I was sitting at the table, so close to Charlie Gotso that I could see the place on his neck where he has a barber’s rash—rough skin, Mma, like a little ploughed field. And there were flecks on his collar from the blood.”