The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

  ‘And your son, Rra?’ asked Mma Ramotswe. ‘Have you seen him yet? Have you held him?’

  Phuti’s eyes glowed with pride as he answered. ‘I saw him. He was in a special room for babies. There were a lot of cots and the babies were in those.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘They look after babies very well there.’

  ‘Many of the babies were crying,’ Phuti continued. ‘But my son was not one of them. He was behaving very well.’

  Mma Ramotswe reached out to pat Phuti on the shoulder. ‘He will be a very well-behaved boy, Rra. He is starting as he intends to carry on.’

  Phuti seemed pleased with the compliment, but then he frowned. ‘My aunt…’

  ‘Ah.’ Mma Ramotswe knew all about Phuti’s aunt, whom she had met on more than one occasion. This was the aunt with the reputation for jealousy and interference, the owner of that unattractive brown car with its mean-spirited windows, the aunt who had tried to come between Phuti and Mma Makutsi.

  ‘My aunt came round to the hospital. I don’t know how she knew that Grace had been taken there, but she was there half an hour after we arrived. I think she has many spies throughout the town and one of them must have phoned her and told her.’

  Mma Ramotswe summoned up as much sympathy as she could manage. ‘I suppose she was very proud of you, Rra. I think it is always nice for an aunt when her nephew’s wife has a baby. That can be a very big thing for an aunt.’

  Phuti understood this. ‘I am not saying that she should not have been there, but I do not agree with what she said. She said that Grace should go with her to her house and stay there for a month or two before they came back to my place. She said that is the traditional way and my father would have wanted it.’

  Mma Ramotswe knew the custom to which the aunt was referring – and yes, that was the way it once was. The mother and baby would be secluded with female relatives until it was thought safe to let the baby out into the world. But things were changing and fewer and fewer people followed that custom these days. Babies might be kept inside for a matter of days, but it would be rare for them to be kept out of sight for months, as happened in the past.

  ‘Simply tell her that this is not possible,’ advised Mma Ramotswe. ‘Tell her that you are not going to observe the old custom. Tell her that you and Grace are a modern couple and you are going to take the baby straight home – to your home – and that he will be taken out of the house whenever you want to do so.’

  Phuti shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘It is not always easy to tell my aunt things,’ he said. ‘She believes that she knows everything already. She does not think there is anybody who can tell her anything.’

  ‘You didn’t agree, did you?’

  Phuti’s discomfort appeared to grow. ‘Not in those actual words. I did not say yes, but…’

  There were many different ways of saying yes and no, thought Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘So the baby is going to the aunt’s place?’

  ‘Only for a very short time,’ said Phuti.

  ‘And has Mma Makutsi agreed?’ asked Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘At first she did not say anything – I think that she felt too tired or too weak. But then she said that it would be all right if that was what I wanted.’

  ‘You should have told her that it was not what you wanted,’ said Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘It is difficult to tell her something like that,’ said Phuti.

  She did not want to detract from his pleasure, and so she said nothing more on the subject. Instead, she asked about a name – had they decided?

  ‘We discussed it,’ said Phuti. ‘We discussed it many times before the baby arrived.’

  ‘It is not always easy to choose a child’s name,’ agreed Mma Ramotswe. ‘I sometimes think that we have too many names in Botswana, with people inventing all these names all the time. In other places you do not have so much choice – you only have to pick from a very small list.’

  ‘But that makes it better for us,’ argued Phuti. ‘If you have a name that nobody else has, then you feel more special. You know that there is only one of you.’ He hesitated. ‘There is no other Phuti Radiphuti in the whole world, I think.’

  ‘Nor Precious Ramotswe,’ ventured Mma Ramotswe, adding: ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘We are very fortunate,’ said Phuti.

  ‘And your son?’ asked Mma Ramotswe.

  Phuti Radiphuti looked down at the floor. ‘We were wondering about Clovis,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Clovis Radiphuti.’

  Mma Ramotswe was silent for a moment. Clovis Andersen was the author of The Principles of Private Detection, the book that had served her and Mma Makutsi so well for so many years. And then he had arrived unannounced in Botswana and introduced himself as a matter of professional courtesy. Their meeting with him had been one of the heights of her professional career – indeed, of her life.

  Phuti was waiting for her reaction.

  ‘I think it is a very good name,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘And we could tell Mr Andersen that the baby is named for him. That will make him very happy, I think.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Phuti. ‘We will only use it as his second name, of course. The first name will be a Motswana name. We haven’t decided on that one yet. There are many family names that we need to consider before we finally decide.’

  Mma Ramotswe agreed that a child’s name should be chosen with some care, and only after carefully imagining how the child himself or herself might be expected to feel about it. There was a distressing habit in Botswana of calling people by names that might have amused the parents but would dog the child for the rest of his life. She remembered a boy at school in Mochudi whose name, when translated from Setswana, meant: One who cries at the top of his lungs. That might have seemed appropriate to the parents of a crying baby, but it would require a lot of explaining, and acceptance, on the part of the child in later life.

  Phuti now moved on from names. ‘Grace said that she had not discussed maternity leave with you yet,’ he said. ‘She was going to talk to you about it today, but then… Well, I am talking on her behalf.’

  Mma Ramotswe made light of this. ‘Sometimes people don’t want to talk about these things too early,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Phuti. ‘But I think that it might have been better if she had discussed it with you a little earlier. She will need some maternity leave, you see.’

  Mma Ramotswe said that she had assumed this would be the case. ‘I shall be able to get somebody in,’ she assured him. ‘There are always people coming out of the Botswana Secretarial College. We get letters asking for a job almost every day. We have a big file of them.’

  Phuti seemed relieved. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘But you will only need that maternity leave person for a very short time. Grace does not want to sit about the house. She wants to get back to work.’

  Mma Ramotswe was relieved. ‘I’m very glad, Rra. It would be difficult to train somebody up to be an assist – an associate detective. How many months does she want?’

  ‘Days, Mma. She said a few days.’

  Mma Ramotswe let out a gasp of astonishment. ‘That is not long at all, Rra.’

  ‘It is the modern thing,’ said Phuti. ‘We shall have a girl to feed the baby. There is already somebody there.’

  ‘A wet nurse?’ asked Mma Ramotswe. She was surprised, and wondered why this would be necessary. Phuti meanwhile looked puzzled, and it occurred to Mma Ramotswe that he might not have understood what she meant.

  ‘Wet nursing is where some other woman feeds the baby,’ said Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘That is what we are going to do,’ he said. ‘We already have a girl working in the kitchen. She will be feeding me too.’

  Mma Ramotswe tried to keep a straight face. ‘I think we are talking about different things, Rra. A wet nurse is a woman who feeds the baby with her own milk.’

  Phuti frowned. ‘From her fridge?’

  Mma Ramotswe lost the b
attle against laughter. She chuckled, and then went on. ‘No, from herself. Mother’s milk, not cow’s milk.’

  Phuti shook his head. ‘You mean one woman – a different woman – gives another woman’s baby the milk that her own baby…’

  ‘That is exactly what I mean,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘It is unusual, but it happens. It may be a sister or a cousin who helps in this way if the woman herself cannot manage to feed the baby. It is a kindness, you see.’ She paused. ‘There is usually a reason.’

  He looked at her with interest, and she thought, This is a man who needs to go to those classes they have for new fathers.

  ‘What is the reason?’ he asked.

  ‘It may be uncomfortable for the mother,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘That is a good reason. But I believe that there are some places where the mother just doesn’t have time to feed the baby. Maybe she is too important.’

  ‘But feeding a baby is very important,’ said Phuti.

  Mma Ramotswe was inclined to agree. You passed on more than mere sustenance in feeding a baby – you passed on love, and tenderness, and a bit of Botswana too, she thought. A bit of what it was to come from this place and be born into this nation.

  ‘So the young woman in the kitchen —’

  He interrupted her. ‘No, she will not be doing that – certainly not. She will make the baby’s food and give it to him if Grace is busy at the office.’ He paused. ‘Grace also thought that it would be all right to bring the baby to the office. Not every day, of course, but from time to time.’

  Mma Ramotswe was on the point of saying that she would be delighted to have the baby in the office, but then she thought, Will I? She was very fond of babies, and sometimes when she went to see Mma Potokwani at the orphan farm she would spend hours playing with the babies they had there. But offices were different. One had to work in an office, and babies sometimes did not realise that – indeed, they never realised it. And what would happen if an important client were to arrive at the office for a meeting and the baby should choose that moment to protest about any one of the numerous things that babies tended to protest about? What then? Or if the baby needed changing and, in the middle of a meeting at which a prospective client needed to be impressed, Mma Makutsi started to change him in full sight of the client? Of course, she could take him through to the garage, but somehow Mma Ramotswe hardly dared to imagine a baby being changed in a garage alongside a lot of cars that were having their oil changed.

  Her answer was cautious. ‘Well, I’m sure that it will be nice to see him – from time to time. But I don’t think we really have suitable facilities for him to come too often. Poor baby! What baby wants to sit about in an office? No babies I know would like that.’

  Phuti appeared to weigh her response. ‘Our baby will probably sleep a lot of the time. I don’t think he will make a noise.’

  Mma Ramotswe looked at Phuti incredulously. ‘I’m sorry, Rra, but I’m not sure I’d agree with you there. Babies are very noisy things. That is well known.’ She paused, before adding, ‘At least to some.’

  ‘Oh, I know a lot about babies,’ said Phuti.

  ‘That is very good, Rra. That is definitely a good thing.’

  Phuti smiled. ‘I asked them at the hospital if babies came with instruction books – you know, like fridges do, or cookers, or any electrical appliance. You get those instruction books, sometimes with pictures, telling you what to do.’

  ‘That would be very funny,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘But on a serious note, Rra, you can get books. There are many books on babies.’

  He seemed surprised. ‘Whole books, Mma?’

  She nodded. She had recently read about a new one in one of the magazines. It was a book that told you how to raise very intelligent babies. You had to read to the baby all the time and show it how to add and so on. It would not be very much fun being one of those babies, thought Mma Ramotswe. Babies – ordinary babies – liked to look at the sky, or watch chickens, or suck on blankets. They did not want to add.

  ‘I think it is mostly common sense,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Give babies lots of love and keep them warm and don’t let flies settle on their noses. Those are all matters of common sense, and if you do things like that, the baby will be happy.’

  Phuti nodded. ‘I agree with you, Mma. Everybody can raise a baby.’ He hesitated. ‘Of course, it is best to learn a few special things, and I have been told all those by Grace. She has given me lists of things I should know about, and she has made up a few small tests for me. It has been very helpful in making me an expert.’

  Once again, Mma Ramotswe reached out to take his hand. She pressed it in congratulation and empathy. ‘Your baby will make you very happy, Phuti. That is something that babies are very good at.’

  He nodded. ‘I am already happy. I have Grace, and a furniture store, and now a baby. Three big things in my life.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘It is a very good idea to make a list like that – to remind yourself of what you have.’

  ‘And you, Mma,’ said Phuti quietly. ‘You have many things in your life too. You have…’ He nodded in the direction of the garage. ‘You have a very fine husband. You have your own business. You have that white van of yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I am lucky. But I have the two children I look after – Motholeli and Puso. They are the most important things I have, I think.’

  ‘Yes, they are very important.’

  ‘And I have a very good assistant.’

  Phuti beamed with pleasure. ‘Yes, her too.’

  ‘And the assistant’s husband and the assistant’s baby. All of these are good things in my life.’ She paused. ‘And this country, of course. I have this country too.’

  She gazed out of the window, towards the acacia tree. The birds that had been nesting in its branches – the two Cape doves – were not there, but they would return at some point in the day. For a moment she imagined what, if birds could think about these things, they might think they had, and what their list would be. It would be a simple list, but the few things on it would be good: the shelter of an acacia tree, sky, air, Africa.

  Chapter Five

  The Modern Husband Course

  O

  f course, she had to buy a present for Mma Makutsi’s baby, which she would take with her when she went to see him for the first time. Following his early morning visit to her office, Phuti rang her up later the same day and told her that his wife would be coming out of hospital after two or three days and Mma Ramotswe was welcome to visit any time after the weekend. Grace and the baby were not going to the aunt’s house after all; he had spoken to his aunt about that and had stood his ground, as Mma Ramotswe suggested he should.

  ‘Grace is looking forward to seeing you,’ said Phuti.

  ‘I would not like to bother her too soon,’ Mma Ramotswe said. ‘Perhaps I should wait until she has been at home for three or four days. Then I should come.’

  ‘No, Mma Ramotswe, that is not what Grace wants. She said to me in the hospital that she was looking forward to showing you her baby as soon as she came home. She said that it would be good for the baby to meet people like you right at the beginning.’

  ‘I doubt if the baby will take much notice of me,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Babies are busy enough sleeping and… doing the other things that babies do. They don’t really notice us very much.’

  Phuti disagreed. ‘Babies are like blotting paper. They soak up everything they see. They start learning Setswana more or less from the first day, or so I’m told.’

  Mma Ramotswe doubted that, but did not wish to disillusion him. New fathers were famous for attributing all sorts of abilities to their first-born, and it was harmless enough. Indeed, it was a good thing; a parent who did not believe in a child was not much of a parent. Most parents – mothers, in particular – believed the best of their children, come what may. A boy, or even a man, would always be forgiven by his mother, even if he did something unspeakable.
She remembered Note Mokoti’s mother who had thought her son incapable of wrong, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. She had heard her say, ‘My son is a very good man – one of the best men in the country. He is so kind.’

  So kind! She closed her eyes. She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating.