Charlie listened to this in silence. When she had finished speaking, he simply said, “Oh.”
“So you agree with me?” asked Queenie-Queenie.
He did not answer immediately, and so she said, “I’m glad that we agree about this important thing.”
He opened his mouth to speak, not knowing what he intended to say, but feeling that he should at least express a view. But before he could say anything, Queenie-Queenie continued, “That is why you do not need to ask me to marry you. I know that this is what you would like to do because we both think the same way about this thing.”
He struggled to make sense of what she was saying. He did not need to ask her to marry him: What did that mean? That he should not ask? Or that he should? Or did it mean that they did not have to talk about the matter any longer?
He said, “Well, that is very interesting, Queenie. But are you going to order some fried chicken?”
She looked at him reproachfully. “This is no time for fried chicken.”
Mr. Potso was staring at them again, this time more intently. “Potso thinks it is. Look at him. He is always thinking that we should order something. All the time.”
She did not follow his gaze. Potso was nothing to her.
“No,” she said. “You do not need to ask me to marry you, Charlie. These days, women can ask men to marry them. So if anybody asks us when you asked me, you can just say, ‘It was not necessary—we decided to get married and that was it.’ No need for formalities—not these days.”
“Ha!” he said. “But we didn’t decide, did we?”
This brought a flat rebuttal. “Yes, we did.”
“When?”
“Just a few moments ago. I said that we agreed, and you said nothing. You didn’t say, ‘I do not agree.’ You didn’t say anything like that.”
“I didn’t know that we had agreed. How could I tell, Queenie?”
She brushed this aside. “That doesn’t matter any longer. We don’t need to go over the past—unlike some people. They are always saying ‘You said this thing’ or ‘You said that thing’ and disagreeing with one another all the time.”
He looked away, summoning up the courage to tell her. He had no money. That was the issue. He could not pay what her family would be expecting. He could not even pay for two helpings of peri-peri chicken.
“I am very keen on you, Queenie,” he said at last. “Every time you look at me, I think—here inside me, right here—I think, You are so lucky to have this lady. But then I think, How can I ever marry somebody like her when I have no money? How can I go to her relatives—to her father, to her uncles—and say all I have is a couple of hundred pula. They would laugh at me and say, ‘Voetsek, you useless nothing man! Do not come around here unless you have at least thirty thousand pula, maybe forty.’ ”
Queenie-Queenie laughed. “But you don’t just have a couple of hundred pula. You must have more than that.”
Charlie shook his head. “That is the truth, Queenie. I have almost no money left.”
“What have you spent it on?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why do you say ‘left’? If you have no money left, that means you have had some and it is gone now.”
Charlie looked miserable. “It was never there. An apprentice detective does not get paid very much money.”
“But you will not be an apprentice forever, Charlie.”
He shook his head. “Sometimes I think I will. I was an apprentice mechanic for a long, long time. And I never became a fully qualified mechanic. Fanwell did, but I did not. And now I’m an apprentice detective but nobody can tell me how long that will last. Maybe forever, I think. I will be a very old man one day and still an apprentice. And then I will be dead and I will probably be an apprentice dead person too.”
Charlie had not expected Queenie-Queenie to laugh, but that is how she responded. And once her laughter died away, she said, “But Charlie—you do not have to worry about that. My brother, Hector, is always making money on deals that he does. You’ve met him. You like him. He buys things cheaply and then sells them on. He is very clever that way. He will make you a partner in one of his deals and that way you will have the money very soon. I will tell my father that you are just getting the money together and will soon be talking to my uncles about the bogadi. No problem, Charlie. No problem. We can get married soon.”
Charlie remained silent.
“You see?” said Queenie-Queenie after a few moments. “You see, Charlie? Simple.”
CHAPTER SIX
MEN ARE WEAK, MMA
MMA RAMOTSWE always fed the children early on school nights. This was to give them time to do their homework in their rooms before lights out at eight-thirty. Of course, both Puso and Motholeli protested that their bedtime was far earlier than that of any of their friends—indeed, earlier than any known bedtime of any child in all of southern Africa, but Mma Ramotswe was not one to be persuaded by such pleading. She knew it was true that some children stayed up until midnight, or even beyond, but she knew from a teacher friend what the consequences of that were.
“We have children coming to school in the morning half asleep, Mma,” said her friend. “Then they doze through their lessons and nothing goes into their heads.”
“And their parents?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “What are the parents doing?”
The teacher laughed. “They are drinking beer or dancing, maybe. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that they are not there making sure that their children go to bed at a reasonable time, as people did in the old days, Mma.”
“Because many of us didn’t have electricity,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We had paraffin lamps when I was young. Then we had electricity later on.”
“You went to bed when it got dark,” said the teacher. She paused. A look came to her face that is the look that sometimes comes to those who think of the past. “You cannot uninvent things, Mma. Electricity is a good thing, I suppose. And water that comes in a tap.”
“And pills for TB and other diseases.”
The teacher nodded. “All of that, Mma. That is all progress, and nobody would want to stop progress, would they, Mma?”
She looked at Mma Ramotswe. There was a note of wistfulness in her voice, a note suggesting that there were, perhaps, times when one might want to do just that—to stop progress. Not that one could admit it publicly, of course; progress was one of those things that everybody was expected to believe in, and if you did not, then you might be mocked and accused of living in the past. And yet, were there not things about the old Botswana that were good and valuable, just as there were things like that in every country? The habit of not being rude to people; the habit of treating old people with respect because they had seen so many things and had worked hard for so many years; the habit of keeping some things private that deserved to be kept private, and not living one’s life in a showy way, under the eyes of half the world; the habit of being charitable, and not laughing at others, or speaking ill of them. These were things that everybody respected in the old Botswana, in that time, still remembered by some, before people learned to be selfish.