“I say that shoes are for walking in,” said Mma Potokwane. “That is what I say, Mma. Or standing about in. They should be comfortable.”
Mma Ramotswe glanced down at her friend’s feet. They were on the large side, and they reminded her at that moment of the bottom sections of the concrete pillars of that new bridge on the outskirts of town; but she did not say anything about that, of course, as it is rude to make civil engineering comparisons when talking about a friend’s personal features. “I have always thought your shoes looked very comfortable. They seem to have a lot of room in them. And they have very low heels too, which must help. And that wide shape too, Mma. We traditionally built ladies need to have wide feet for stability, Mma. That is very important, I think.”
“My feet are a bit big,” said Mma Potokwane. “My husband has small feet, but mine are generously proportioned. His shoes are too small for me.”
And so the conversation had wandered on, touching briefly on politics—but leaving that subject quickly enough, to the relief of both of them—and then moving to the difficult issue of stopping children from eating too many sweet things. That last topic had been aired at the same time as second slices of fruit cake were embarked upon, and Mma Ramotswe had been briefly aware of that irony, but had reminded herself that they were talking about children, not adults, and that was clearly very different.
That afternoon, she parked her van in its accustomed position, under the tree that she liked to think somebody had planted many years ago with her in mind, as if that person knew—although of course he could not have known—that she, Mma Ramotswe, would in the fullness of time arrive and find it the ideal place for her. The world was not like that, she knew; we had to fit in with the world rather than the world fit in with us, but every so often it was nice to imagine that it was the other way round. And there was no doubt, she thought, that Botswana fitted her to perfection. It was the right size; it was the right shape on the map; the people who lived in it and the cattle they kept were just as she would want them to be; it was so perfect that she imagined that God himself had thought: I shall invent a country that is just right for Mma Ramotswe when she comes along, and I shall call it Botswana, and it will be a good place.
And as she stepped out of the van and closed its door behind her, she looked up and drank in the air and the blue and the emptiness that was the sky; a draught more satisfying than the sweetest water; and filled, at that moment, with the song of some bird that she did not know the name of, but that she had heard oh so many times, as a girl, as a young woman, as the person she now was. That bird continued to sing that same song, learned from its mother and father, to be passed on to the next generation of birds, small creatures even now sheltering in a hidden nest somewhere, ready for their moment of launch and the beginning of the dance about the skies of Botswana that would be their brief life. And she thought: Oh, I am so fortunate to be here in this land, to be standing under this sky, ready to see my old friend Mma Potokwane, and to drink tea with her and to talk about the things that we always talk about.
Unknown to Mma Ramotswe, that same old friend was looking out of her window, having heard the sound of the approaching van. She had watched Mma Ramotswe’s manoeuvres under the habitual tree, and she had remembered how that morning she had told the farm manager, who looked after the vegetable patches and the fields, to move the tractor that he had parked under the shade of that particular acacia. She had explained that Mma Ramotswe would be arriving before too long and that it was important that her parking place be kept free, because she would expect it. The farm manager had readily agreed; the tractor would be moved. “The tractor can go anywhere; it is only a tractor,” he had said. “Mma Ramotswe is a very good woman, and she is also the cousin of my brother’s wife’s sister.”
Mma Potokwane watched as Mma Ramotswe made her way towards her office. Why had she suddenly stopped, as if she had forgotten something and had now remembered it? Why was she standing there, looking up at the sky? Of course, she did just that, she remembered; Mma Ramotswe would often stop and look at the sky; and this just went to show how wise she was, because looking at the sky was something that we all should do more often. Or so Mma Potokwane had read somewhere. People who looked at the sky, she had learned, are less likely to die than those who do not look at the sky. That was interesting and must have something to do with inner calmness and the way in which that calmness protects you from things that afflict those who are not calm—nervous conditions of one sort or another, and other illnesses too. Nerves were involved with everything, Mma Potokwane believed.
The water for the tea was already boiling when she welcomed her visitor into her office.
“It is still hot outside,” said Mma Potokwane, as Mma Ramotswe sank into the chair in which she always sat.
“The heat will bring the rain,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is what I am hoping, Mma Potokwane.”
“We are all hoping that, Mma.”
Tea was served and the cake was wordlessly taken from its tin, given admiring looks by Mma Ramotswe, and served on Mma Potokwane’s best plates, used only on occasions such as this—the visit of particular friends or members of the Orphan Farm Board of Management; or of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, for that matter, when he called in after performing some helpful task of machinery management, coaxing life out of a water pump that had lost the will to go on, or servicing one of the farm vehicles or the ancient minibus—too ancient, he said—that was used to transport the children. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s ultimate reward for such acts of kindness, Mma Potokwane wryly observed, might be in heaven, but on this earth, in the here and now, it would take the form of an excessively generous slice of fruit cake. He would eat it with relish, and would demur, but only briefly, when a second slice was pressed upon him, and even a third. “My wife would not approve,” he would say, through a mouthful of cake. “She says I must have only one slice if my trousers are still to fit. You know how it is, Mma Potokwane.”
And Mma Potokwane would laugh, and reassure him that eating fruit cake was one of the things that a husband was entitled to keep from his wife when the fruit cake in question was deserved, as this undoubtedly was. “Deserved calories do not count, Rra,” she said. “You can count up all the calories you have had and then take away the ones that were deserved. That is the total that you must look at.”
He had laughed too, and said, “That is good to know, Mma Potokwane, because they are taking the fun out of everything these days, and there is nothing left for many of us, I think. The government says we must not do any of the things we like to do.”
Now, Mma Potokwane blew across the top of her tea to cool it down while Mma Ramotswe began to tell her about her latest investigations. This was all done under an understanding of confidentiality: Mma Ramotswe understood the need for confidence in her work—that lay at the heart of the relationship with the client, as Clovis Andersen stressed at so many points in The Principles of Private Detection—but you had to be able to talk to somebody if your work was not to get you down. It was also true that discussing a case with another person served to illuminate certain aspects of it that might otherwise not be spotted. How many times had Mma Potokwane asked a question or made an observation that changed Mma Ramotswe’s view of a situation; that suggested an explanation that had been eluding her simply because she had been looking at things from the wrong angle?