Charlie, the older apprentice, exchanged a knowing glance with his younger colleague. “That makes twenty-nine days,” he said. “What about the other two days, Boss?”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. “That is not the point,” he said, his tone level. It would be easy to lose his temper with these boys, he realised, but that was not what he intended to do. He was their apprentice-master, and that meant that he should be patient. One got nowhere if one shouted at young people. Shouting at a young person was like shouting at a wild animal—both would run away in their confusion.
“What you should do,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, “is work out how much money you need for each week. Then put all your money in the post office or somewhere safe like that and draw it out weekly.”
Charlie smiled. “There is always credit,” he said. “You can buy things on credit. It is cheaper that way.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at the young man. Where does one start? he thought. How does one make up for all the things that young people do not know? There was so much ignorance in the world—great swathes of ignorance like areas of darkness on a map. That was the job of teachers, to put this ignorance to flight, and that was why teachers were respected in Botswana—or used to be. He had noticed how people these days, even young people, treated teachers as if they were the same as anybody else. But how would people learn if they did not respect a teacher? Respect meant that they would be prepared to listen, and to learn. Young men like Charlie, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, imagined that they knew everything already. Well, he would simply have to try to teach them in spite of their arrogance.
Grace Makutsi and Mma Ramotswe knew all about the end of the month. Mma Ramotswe’s financial position had always been considerably easier than most people’s, thanks to the late Obed Ramotswe’s talent for the spotting of good cattle, but she was well aware of the enforced penny-pinching that was the daily lot of those about her. Rose, the woman who cleaned her house in Zebra Drive, was an example. She had a number of children—Mma Ramotswe had never been sure just how many—and these children had all known what it was to go to bed hungry, in spite of their mother’s best efforts. And one of the children, a small boy, had difficulties with his breathing and needed inhalers, which were expensive to buy, even with the help of the government clinic. And then there was Mma Makutsi herself, who had supported herself at the Botswana Secretarial College by doing cleaning work in a hotel in the early mornings before she went to her classes at the college. That could not have been easy, getting up at four in the morning, even in the winter, when the skies were sharp-empty (as Mma Makutsi put it) with cold and the ground hard below the feet. But she had been careful, husbanding every spare thebe, and now, at long last, had achieved some measure of comfort with her new house (or half house, to be precise), her new green shoes with sky-blue linings, and, of course, her new fiancé …
The end of the month, pay day; and now Mma Ramotswe parked her tiny white van near the kitchen building of the college and waited. She looked at her watch. It was three o’clock, and she imagined that Mma Tsau would have finished supervising the clean-up after lunch. She was not sure where the cook had her office, but it was likely to be in the same building as the kitchens, and there was no doubt which building that was; one only had to wind down the window and sniff the air to know where the kitchens were. What a lovely smell it was, the smell of food. That was one of the great pleasures of life, in Mma Ramotswe’s view—the smell of cooking drifting on the wind; the smell of maize cobs roasting on the open fire, of beef sizzling in its fat, of large chunks of pumpkin boiling in the pot. All these smells were good smells, part of the smells of Botswana, of home, that warmed the heart and made the mouth water in anticipation.
She looked towards the kitchen building. There was an open door at one end and a large window, through which she could just make out the shape of a cupboard and an overhead fan turning slowly. There were people in it too; a head moved, a hand appeared at the window, briefly, and was withdrawn. That was the office, she thought, and she could always just go up to it, knock on the door, and ask for Mma Tsau. Mma Ramotswe had always believed in the direct approach, no matter what advice Clovis Andersen gave in The Principles of Private Detection . Clovis Andersen seemed to endorse circumspection and the finding out of information by indirect means. But in Mma Ramotswe’s view, the best way of getting an answer to any question was to ask somebody face-to-face. Experience had shown her that if one suspected that there was a secret, the best thing to do was to find out who knew the secret and then ask that person to tell it to you. It nearly always worked. The whole point about secrets was that they demanded to be told, they were insistent, they burned a hole in your tongue if you kept them for too long. That was the way it worked for most people.
For her part, Mma Ramotswe knew how to keep a secret, if the secret was one which needed to be kept. She did not divulge her clients’ affairs, even if she felt that she was bursting to tell somebody, and even Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would not be told of something if it really had to be kept confidential. Only very occasionally, when she felt that the burden of some bit of knowledge was too great for one person to shoulder, would she share with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni some hidden fact which she had uncovered or which had been imparted to her. This had happened when she had heard from one client that he was planning to defraud the Botswana Eagle Insurance Company by making a false claim. He had told her this in a matter-of-fact way, as if she should not be surprised; after all, was this not the way in which practically everybody treated insurance companies? She had gone to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to discuss this with him, and he had advised her to bring her professional relationship with that client to an end, which she did, and was crudely threatened for her pains. That had resulted in a trip to the Botswana Eagle Insurance Company, which had been most grateful for the information Mma Ramotswe had provided, and had taken steps to protect its interests.
But the direct approach would not work now. If she went to the office, there was every chance that she would see Poppy, and that would lead to difficulties. She had not warned Poppy that she was coming to speak to Mma Tsau, and she would not want the cook to suspect that Poppy had consulted her. No, she would have to make sure that she spoke to Mma Tsau by herself.
A small group of students emerged from a building beside the kitchen. It was the end of a class, and they stood in groups of two or three outside the classroom, talking among themselves, laughing at shared jokes. It was the end of the month for them too, Mma Ramotswe assumed, and they would have their allowances in their pockets and thoughts of the weekend’s socialising ahead of them. What was it like, she wondered, to be one of them? Mma Ramotswe herself had gone from girlhood to the world of work without anything in between and had never known the student life. Did they know, she wondered, just how fortunate they were?
One of the students detached herself from a group and started to walk across the patch of ground that separated the van from the kitchen building. When she drew level with the van, she glanced in Mma Ramotswe’s direction.
“Excuse me, Mma,” shouted Mma Ramotswe through the open window of her van. “Excuse me, Mma!”
The young woman stopped and looked across at Mma Ramotswe, who was now getting out of the van.
“Yes, Mma,” said the student. “Are you calling me?”
Mma Ramotswe made her way over to stand before the young woman. “Yes, Mma,” she said. “Do you know the lady who works in the kitchen? Mma Tsau? Do you know that lady?”
The student smiled. “She is the cook,” she said. “Yes, I know her.”