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 aunt. 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?