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.