‘I do not like crocodiles much,’ said Mma Ramotswe.
‘Nobody likes crocodiles,’ said Mma Molapo.
This brought a chuckle from Mma Ramotswe. ‘Except their mothers, perhaps.’
This remark seemed to have a strange effect. Liso looked at Mma Molapo, who pursed her lips together discouragingly. Mma Ramotswe was puzzled. Why, she wondered, should a remark about nobody liking crocodiles produce this reaction?
Mma Molapo changed the subject. ‘When Liso is the owner of this farm,’ she said, ‘he is going to get the fences fixed. I’m afraid that my late brother allowed them to deteriorate and now they are in a very bad state in some places.’
Liso greeted this comment enthusiastically. ‘I can do a lot of it myself,’ he said. ‘I have helped to mend the fences here before.’
Mma Ramotswe was watching him. ‘When was that, Liso?’ she asked.
He frowned. ‘Last time.’
‘Last year?’
Mma Molapo looked at her watch. ‘My goodness,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It gets late so quickly.’
Mma Ramotswe decided to ignore the intervention. ‘You helped your uncle last year?’
Liso looked away briefly, but then turned to smile at Mma Ramotswe. ‘Yes, Mma.’
‘But your uncle was very ill then, wasn’t he? Was he strong enough to work?’
Mma Molapo rose to her feet. ‘My poor brother was ill but he was able to walk until the very last day of his life. Now, Mma Ramotswe, I must go and do some work. You must excuse me.’
Mma Ramotswe replied quickly, ‘That is quite all right, Mma. You do your work and Liso can show me the outbuildings. We have to make sure that everything is correct on the inventory, you see. You can do that, can’t you, Liso?’
Had Liso not answered, Mma Molapo would probably have vetoed the suggestion. Certainly she began to say something, but the young man had already accepted. ‘I can do that, Mma. Yes, I can do that.’
It was clear that Mma Molapo was reluctant to allow the two of them to go outside together, but she had insisted that she had work to do and she could hardly go back on that. ‘Very well, Mma,’ she said. ‘He can show you. But he must not take too long. He has some work to do too, I think.’
Mma Ramotswe rose from the Seretse Khama armchair and started to make her way towards the door, followed by Liso. Once outside, she pointed to one of the sheds and asked the young man what it contained. ‘There are some ploughs in there,’ he said. ‘And there is a tractor. It is quite new, I think. It is a good one.’
They walked across to the shed to inspect the ploughs and the tractor. ‘Where were you at school in Swaziland?’ asked Mma Ramotswe.
He did not hesitate. ‘Manzini. I was at school there, Mma.’
She absorbed the information. She did not know very much about Swaziland, but she knew that the two major towns were Mbabane and Manzini.
‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to go to Mbabane?’ she asked.
He said nothing.
‘Don’t you think so?’ she pressed.
‘Why, Mma?’
‘Well, it’s closer than Manzini. Your father ran a hotel, didn’t he? Wasn’t that in the Ezulweni Valley?’
‘It was,’ he said. ‘Manzini was further away but it has a very good school. There is one down by the hospital there – you know the place? It was run by the Fathers. They are Catholic. I came top of the class for two years, Mma.’
Of course she did not know the school, but she nodded.
He opened the door of the barn. The air inside was stale and hot, and it smelled of a mixture of spilled oil – a scent she knew very well from Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors – and straw. She saw the straw – bales of it at the back, stacked almost to the ceiling like giant building bricks. She wanted to sneeze.
‘That’s the tractor,’ he said proudly. ‘I have started it to make sure that the battery doesn’t go flat, but I have not driven it yet. Driving a tractor is different, you know, Mma, from driving a car.’
‘You can drive, Liso?’
‘Yes, I can drive, Mma. I do not have a car yet, but I can drive.’
‘You passed your test in Swaziland?’
He nodded. ‘Last year.’
She stored the information away. Mma Sheba had not told her the age of the real Liso. If this Liso, whether or not he was the real one, had passed his test in Swaziland last year, he must be at least eighteen, assuming that the minimum driving age there was the same as it was in Botswana.
They left the barn, and he led her to a shed a short distance away. ‘This is where they keep the dip for the cattle, Mma,’ he said. ‘It has a very strong smell – you will not like it.’
She smiled. ‘I know that smell well,’ she said. ‘I used to count the cattle going through the dip when I was a little girl. It is a bit like tar, but different. I will never forget that smell, Liso.’
He grinned back at her. ‘I spilled some on my shirt once when I was helping my uncle. I had to throw the shirt away.’
He spoke so naturally that she knew the story was true. But then one could spill cattle dip on one’s shirt in any circumstances, and he might well have a memory of such an incident that had happened elsewhere.
‘I can show you the septic tank, if you like,’ Liso now offered. ‘It is over there, Mma.’
She declined the offer. ‘I mustn’t hold you up, Liso,’ she said. ‘I have things to do in Gaborone and your aunt says you have some work to do too. I have seen that everything is in good order. I will tell the lawyers.’
He smiled at her. ‘That is kind, Mma. And could you ask them to hurry up? I do not want to waste too much time.’
‘I’ll do that, Liso. But you have plenty of time, don’t you think? You are still seventeen, and that is not old.’
‘Eighteen,’ he corrected.
‘Of course – eighteen. But when you’re eighteen you still have most of your life ahead of you. You will be staying on this farm for a long, long time.’
She searched his expression as she pronounced the sentence of years on the farm. She was not sure what sign she was looking for, but it had something to do with an awareness on his part that he knew that he was not going to be there for the rest of his life, a sign that he had other plans. But he showed no emotion, and appeared to accept what she said with equanimity.
As she walked back towards her van, she saw a movement at the window. She was not surprised; Mma Molapo would have been watching them. There was an innocent explanation for that. If you lived out in the bush as they did, and somebody came to see you, you would be watching. There was not much else to do out here, and a stranger was intriguing, whatever her business.
‘Thank you for showing me round,’ said Mma Ramotswe, offering Liso her hand to shake. He took it, and used the proper formalities, placing his right hand on the forearm of his left: a sign of respect. Top marks again, she thought… for what? For acting?
She started the van. The young man was standing there respectfully, waiting for her to leave. She caught his eye, and it seemed to her that there was between them a momentary exchange of fellow feeling. She felt ashamed. You should trust people, she thought, and not seek to trip them up or unmask them. Unless, of course, you were a private detective, and were paid by others to do just that. As she turned the tiny white van down the farm track, she found herself thinking something that had not occurred to her during all the years she had been running the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. And that thought was this: Should I be doing something else? Should I return to a world where there was no call to be suspicious? She wondered about that. That was how she wanted the world to be, and that, in a way, was what her work was intended to bring about. She sighed, and decided to focus on something quite different. Fruitcake came to her mind unbidden – a large fruitcake rich in sultanas and candied peel; the sort of cake that would torment and tantalise those on a diet. But Mma Ramotswe was neither dieting nor planning to do so, and she welcomed the vision wholeheartedly. She
had not had fruitcake for a long time, and the idea of a generous slice – or possibly even two slices – seemed very attractive. It meant, of course, a slight detour on her journey back. There were two ladies in Botswana who made good fruitcake, and Mma Potokwani was one of them.
Chapter Eight
He Was the Light of Our Lives
T
here were two places called Mokolodi. There was the small game reserve to the south of Gaborone, barely a mile off the Lobatse Road, and there was the farm with its large stone house, the original Mokolodi, where Mma Ramotswe’s friend Gwithie lived. They had all been one large farm in the past, until the land was given to the children of Botswana for a nature reserve. Mma Ramotswe knew the reserve well, and had some years previously helped them with an issue of superstitious staff being frightened by the presence of a ground hornbill. That bird! Now here was Mma Soleti being driven into a state of fear by a single feather. It was ridiculous, completely ridiculous, that otherwise sensible people should believe in things like that. Except that they did. People believed all sorts of things and were not easily persuaded that what they feared was really harmless. And the things they believed by day were often different from the things they believed at night. The shadows you saw on the ground at midday were just that: shadows caused by some very ordinary object that blocked out the sun. The shadows you saw by night, by contrast, could be the shapes of things with no name: things that moved silently and changed their form; things that could touch the skin with icy coldness; things that could draw the breath out of your body and leave you gasping for air. It was all very well saying that such things did not exist, but to the people who saw them and felt them they were as real as the ground beneath their feet.
The gates of Mokolodi were topped, as it happened, with an ornamental hornbill worked in iron. This was the ordinary hornbill, though – the cousin of the bird that spent much of its time grounded – and it did not have the same power to frighten. Perhaps, she thought, if you wanted gates to do the job of discouraging unwanted visitors, you might put the ground hornbill there.
She passed through the gates and drove up to the main house. Here she parked in the shadow of the house itself – a cool well of shade that would keep the cab of the van from feeling like an inferno when she returned to it. As she got out, her friend appeared from the side of the house, a gardening trowel in one hand and a basket of plant cuttings in another.
Gwithie put down the basket and walked over to the van to welcome Mma Ramotswe.
‘Mmapuso,’ said Mma Ramotswe as she got out of the car. ‘Dumela, Mmapuso.’ She used the name by which the other woman was generally known – Mmapuso, the mother of Puso. She too had a Puso, the same name as one of Mma Ramotswe’s foster children. Mmapuso had lost hers some time ago now, but the name remained.
The two old friends embraced and then Mma Ramotswe took Gwithie’s hand and pressed it, not once but several times. No words were exchanged, but the gesture of sympathy was understood. They had both lost the one thing in this life that is hardest to lose.
They went into the garden at the side of the house, crossing an expanse of grass that was dominated by a large jacaranda tree whose umbrella branches stretched out to provide an enticing circle of shade. In spite of the late dry season, the beds around the edge of the grass still had colour, surviving on the tiny amounts of water doled out to them by a drip-feed system of irrigation. The husbandry of water was well understood here: the using of every precious drop, the giving of water to those plants that needed it while the waxy desert plants like cacti were left to wait until the rain eventually brought them relief.
They made their way to the shade and sat down on chairs arranged around a low wooden table. On a tray by one of the chairs was a teapot with two cups.
‘In case of visitors,’ said Gwithie, pointing to the extra cup.
‘Very wise,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Tea and cake is always…’ She had not intended to mention cake, but somehow it came out and she felt embarrassed.
‘Oh,’ said Gwithie. ‘Cake. Yes, well, I must do some more baking. I had one last week but we had the grandchildren in the house and cake doesn’t seem to last very long when children are in the house.’
‘Of course.’ Mma Ramotswe laughed, but she was disappointed. She could always bake herself a fruitcake – she had copied out Mma Potokwani’s recipe by hand into her own recipe book and she made a perfectly good version herself – but somehow the eating of one’s own cake was different from the eating of another’s.
‘Next time you come to see me,’ said Gwithie, ‘I promise you we shall have cake. Several slices, in fact.’
As her friend poured the tea, Mma Ramotswe looked out over the garden. Beyond the trees at its edge, the ground rose up to make a ridge, and beyond that were the hills looking down over the game reserve. There was no other building in sight. It was a small corner of undisturbed bush – Botswana in its untouched state. This was the land that Obed Ramotswe had known: the grey-green acacia scrub that ran for hundreds of miles along the country’s border to the east and, to the west, into the great Kalahari. This was the land over which the great dome of African sky presided; the sky that would, they all hoped, soon fill with towering, rain-filled thunderclouds from somewhere far away – the annual gift of the wetter and more temperate lands beyond their borders.
‘Rain,’ remarked Mma Ramotswe. She did not need to say anything more.
Gwithie shrugged. ‘Next week? I have somebody who helps me in the kitchen who has an uncanny habit of knowing when the rains will start. She’s been right year after year. It’s extraordinary.’
‘And she says next week?’
Gwithie nodded. ‘Towards the end of next week, and she says the rains will be good.’
‘I am very happy to hear that,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘My own garden is looking very sad now. It is very thirsty. And my husband’s vegetables…’ She sighed. Mr J. L. B. Matekoni grew beans, but the plants had shrivelled under the onslaught of the sun and she found it hard to imagine that they would recover once the rains arrived. But plants did survive the harshness of even prolonged drought; they somehow kept themselves alive. The soil could be dry and dusty, parched and apparently lifeless, and yet under it there would be seeds and roots ready to spring into life within hours of the first rainfall.
‘Things will grow, in spite of everything.’ Gwithie paused. ‘Were you on your way somewhere?’
‘I was passing by,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I had to go to the Molapo Farm. You must know the place – it’s on the other side of the Lobatse Road, not far really.’
‘I know it,’ said Gwithie. ‘We used to see a bit of Edgar Molapo. We don’t know his sister at all well. She keeps to herself, and always has done.’
‘I met her for the first time this morning.’
Gwithie was looking at her with interest. ‘You were there professionally?’
Mma Ramotswe was careful. Even with friends, she knew the importance of confidentiality. Her clients told her things that she should not reveal and she always observed that trust, difficult though it was at times.
‘Nothing serious,’ she said non-committally.
Gwithie did not press her. ‘They say that the farm is going to Edgar’s nephew from Swaziland.’
‘So they say,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Do you know him – the boy?’
Gwithie shook her head. ‘He used to come over to Botswana a lot when he was younger. We never saw him then.’
‘He speaks very good Setswana,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘He must have spent a lot of time in this country.’
‘Yes,’ said Gwithie. ‘I met him the other day. But we spoke in English.’
Mma Ramotswe was interested. ‘He came here? With the aunt?’
‘Yes,’ said Gwithie. ‘They were interested in buying cattle from a man who’s been working on one of the buildings here. Some complicated transaction, so Edgar’s sister came over to do it. She brought the boy – well, I suppose he’s a young
man now – with her. He was interested in some fruit trees I’ve been trying to grow and I showed him. Nice young man.’
‘He is,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘He has good manners.’
Gwithie seemed to remember something. ‘It was a bit odd, though. He said something that made him very flustered.’
Mma Ramotswe leaned forward. ‘Yes?’
‘He referred to his aunt as his mother. He said, “I must show this to my mother.” I then asked him where his mother was, and he turned round to point at the aunt who was talking to somebody at the other end of the fruit garden. And then he stopped and he seemed dismayed by the slip. He said something like, “I mean my aunt. I mean my aunt.” I made nothing of it, but it struck me as odd.’
Mma Ramotswe was silent.