“I have never needed anything like that to cut up onions,” Mma Ramotswe observed. “I have found that a knife is usually enough.”
Mma Makutsi agreed with her on this, but made a secret mental note of the name of the implement. When Phuti Radiphuti gave her the money to restock her kitchen—as he had promised to do—then she would undoubtedly buy one of those onion-slicers, even if Mma Ramotswe said that they were unnecessary. Mma Ramotswe was certainly a good cook, but she was not an expert on onions, and if somebody had invented an onion-slicer, then it must have been because there was a need for one.
They left the shop having identified and priced a pressure cooker. “We shall find another shop that sells those cookers,” said Mma Ramotswe, “and then we shall compare their prices. It is not good to waste money. Seretse Khama himself said that, you know. He said that we should not waste money.”
Mma Makutsi was non-committal. Mma Ramotswe had a habit of quoting Seretse Khama on a wide range of subjects, and she was not at all sure whether her employer was always strictly accurate in this. She had once asked Mma Ramotswe to supply chapter and verse for a particular quotation and had been fobbed off with a challenge. “Do you think I invent his words?” Mma Ramotswe had asked indignantly. “Just because people are beginning to forget what he said, that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten.”
Mma Makutsi had left it at that, and now said very little when the late President was quoted. It was a harmless enough habit, she thought, and if it helped to keep alive the memory of that great man, then it was, all in all, a good thing. But she wished that Mma Ramotswe would be a little bit morehistorically accurate; just a bit. The problem was that she had not been to the Botswana Secretarial College, where the motto, proudly displayed above the front entrance to the college, wasBe Accurate. Unfortunately, there was a spelling mistake, and the motto readBe Acurate . Mma Makutsi had spotted this and had pointed it out to the college, but nothing had been done about it so far.
They walked together in the direction of another shop that Mma Ramotswe had identified as a possible stockist of pressure cookers. All about them there were well-dressed crowds, people with money in their pockets, people buying for homes that were slowly beginning to reflect Botswana’s prosperity. It had all been earned, every single pula of it, in a world in which it is hard enough to make something of one’s country, in a world of selfish and distant people who took one’s crops at rock-bottom prices and wrote the rules to suit themselves. There were plenty of fine words, of course—and lots of these came from Africa itself—but at the end of the day the poor, the people who lived in Africa, so often had nothing to show for their labours, nothing. And that was not because they did not work hard—they did, they did—but because of something that was wrong which made it so hard for them to get anywhere, no matter how hard they tried. Botswana was fortunate, because it had diamonds and good government, and Mma Ramotswe was well aware of that, but her pride did not allow her to forget the suffering of others, which was there, not far away, a suffering which made mothers see their children fade away before their eyes, their little bodies thin and rickety. One could not forget that in the middle of all this plenty. One could not forget.
But now Mma Makutsi stopped, and took Mma Ramotswe by the arm, pointing to a shop window. A woman was peering into the window, a woman in a striped blue dress, and for a moment Mma Ramotswe thought that it was this woman who had attracted Mma Makutsi’s attention. Was she a client, perhaps, or somebody else who had come to the attention of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, one of those adulterous wives that men sometimes asked them to follow and report upon? But Mma Makutsi was not pointing at the woman, who now moved away from the window, but to the contents of the window display itself.
“Look, Mma Ramotswe,” she said. “Look over there!”
Mma Ramotswe looked into the window. There was a sale of some sort on, with large reductions, the window claimed. Indeed, shouted a sign within, the sale amounted to madness on the part of the shoe shop.
“Bargains,” said Mma Ramotswe. “There always seem to be so many bargains.”
But it was not the bargain shoes that had made Mma Makutsi stop and look—it was the full-price offerings, all neatly arrayed along a shelf and labelled Exclusive models, as worn in London and New York .
“You see that pair over there?” said Mma Makutsi, pointing into the window. “You see that pair? The blue pair?”
Mma Ramotswe’s gaze followed the direction in which Mma Makutsi was pointing. There, set aside from the other exclusive models, but still in the category of the exclusive, was a pair of fashionable blue shoes, with delicate high heels and toes which came to a point, like the nose of a supersonic aircraft. It was difficult to see the linings from where they were, but by standing on her tip-toes and craning her neck Mma Makutsi was able to report on their colour.
“Red linings,” she said with emotion. “Red linings, Mma Ramotswe!”
Mma Ramotswe stared at the shoes. They were certainly very smart, as objects, that is, but she doubted whether they were much use as shoes. She had not been to London or New York, and it was possible that people wore very fashionable shoes in those places, but she could not believe that many people there would be able to fit into such shoes, let alone walk any distance in them.
She glanced at Mma Makutsi, who was staring at the shoes in what seemed to be a state of near-rapture. She was aware of the fact that Mma Makutsi had an interest in shoes, and she had witnessed the pleasure that she had derived from her new pair of green shoes with sky-blue linings. She had entertained her doubts about the suitability of those particular shoes, but now, beside this pair that she was staring at in the window, those green shoes seemed practicality itself. She drew a breath. Mma Makutsi was a grown woman and could look after herself, but she felt, as her employer and as the person who had inducted her into the profession of private detection, that she had at least some degree of responsibility to ensure that Mma Makutsi did not make too many demonstrably bad decisions. And any decision to buy these shoes would be unambiguously bad—the sort of decision that one would not want a friend to make.
“They are very pretty shoes,” Mma Ramotswe said cautiously. “They are a very fine colour, that is certainly true, and …”
“And the toes!” interrupted Mma Makutsi. “Look at how pointed those toes are. Look at them.” And, as she herself looked, she let out a whistle of admiration.
“But nobody is that shape,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I have never met anybody with pointed feet. If your feet were pointed like that, then you would have only one toe.” She paused, uncertain as to how her comments were being received; it was difficult to tell. “Perhaps those are shoes for one-toed people. Perhaps they are specialist shoes.”
She laughed at her own comment, but Mma Makutsi did not.
“They are not for one-toed people, Mma,” she said disapprovingly. “They are very fine shoes.”
Mma Ramotswe was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Mma. I know that you do not like to joke about shoes.” She looked at her watch. “I think that we should move on now. There is much to do.”
Mma Makutsi was still gazing intently at the shoes. “I did not think we had all that much to do,” she said. “There is plenty of time to look at pots and pans.”
It seemed to Mma Ramotswe that looking at pots and pans, as Mma Makutsi put it, was a rather more useful activity than looking at blue shoes in shop windows, but she did not say this. If Mma Makutsi wished to admire shoes in a window, then she would not spoil her fun. It was an innocent enough activity, after all; like looking at the sky, perhaps, when the sun was going down and had made the clouds copper-red, or looking at a herd of fine cattle moving slowly over the land when rains had brought on the sweet green grass. These were pleasures which the soul needed from time to time, and she would wait for Mma Makutsi until she had examined the shoes from all angles. But a word of caution, perhaps, would not go amiss, and so Mma Ramotswe cleared her throat and said, “Of course, Mma, we must remember that if we have traditionally shaped feet, then we should stick to traditionally shaped shoes.”