Precious and Grace (13 page)

Mma Ramotswe put down her glass. It was obvious which way this was going—and it was clear that the story would be one of major injustice. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was a person of the utmost probity—she had known that right from the beginning. He was scrupulously honest in all his dealings, but particularly where money was involved. On one occasion he had driven twenty miles to hand over an inadvertent overpayment made by a client: a fifty-pula note had been stuck to the back of another note and had not been counted.

“I can imagine what's coming, Rra,” she said.

He sounded sad. “Yes, that's what happened. I went to open the drawer and found that exactly half the money had gone from the tin. Thieves don't always take the full amount, I believe—if they leave some, then the person they've robbed might think that he had made a mistake about how much was there in the first place. It's a common trick.

“But I knew I hadn't made a mistake,” he continued. “I knew that there had been exactly six hundred pula in that tin—I was certain of it. And so I decided that I would tell the director about it and start looking into the question of who else might have got hold of a key to the drawer.”

“That was the right thing to do,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Go straight to the relevant authorities. That's what I always advise—then you're protected.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head sadly. “I wish I had gone straightaway. I didn't. I was going to go first thing the following morning, but…”

Mma Ramotswe's heart sank. “Oh no, Rra!”

“Yes. That afternoon the accountant and the director carried out an on-the-spot check. The director asked me for the key to the drawer and before I could say anything he had opened it and discovered the shortfall. I said to him that I was just about to tell him about the missing three hundred pula, but he just looked at me as if to say, ‘That's a likely story!' I felt awful. I knew that I was telling the truth, but I also knew that if I were in the director's position I would probably think exactly the same thing. So I could do nothing but protest my innocence, knowing that I was not believed.”

Mma Ramotswe groaned. “An awful situation, Rra. A nightmare.”

“Yes. And no matter how much I tried, I could not convince him that I was telling the truth. So he said to me that I had one week to pay the money back, or he would report the matter to the police. He said that he was giving me a chance because, apart from this incident, he had been impressed with my work.”

“And did you?”

“Yes, of course, I borrowed it from my uncle and I handed it over to the director. When I did that, he looked at me sternly and said, ‘Don't ever be dishonest again. Never, ever take money that does not belong to you—even if you think you can repay it.' I felt so wronged, Mma. I felt that I was being judged to be dishonest when I was not. I felt dirtied by the whole matter.”

Mma Ramotswe wondered whether the real culprit had ever been found.

“We never found out who it was,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “But here's a thing, Mma: there were several thefts after I had left the brigade—after the end of my time there. They were the same sort of thing, and I heard that the director then realised that I had, in fact, been innocent. But do you know what? I saw him about six months after that—I met him in the street—and he did not say sorry to me. He did not say, ‘I was wrong to accuse you of theft.' He said nothing, in fact. He just asked me what I was doing and left it at that. He could have said sorry. He could have said that they had found the real thief, but he did not. What do you think of that, Mma?”

“Not very much,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But then I've noticed it, Rra: people are very slow to say sorry. I don't know why this should be, but they do not say sorry easily.”

“Perhaps it's because they think that saying sorry means that they were wrong. Perhaps it makes them feel small. Or look small.”

Mma Ramotswe was quick to propose the exact opposite. “Saying sorry does not make you look small—it makes you look big.”

“I think so too,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “But some people are small inside, and if you're small inside, you can't be big outside. It just won't come to you.”

“Perhaps not,” said Mma Ramotswe. She looked at her watch. “I think it is time for dinner. Shall we go inside, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni?”

They left the verandah and went back into the kitchen. The smell of the stew was rich on the air. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni closed his eyes in delighted anticipation of the treat ahead. It was the onions, he decided; they had to be small and sweet—they just had to be.

MR. J.L.B. MATEKONI LAY
under a sheet, there being no need for a blanket in this warm weather. He was already dead to the world when Mma Ramotswe went to bed that night; she slipped into bed, being careful not to wake him up, although she knew that he was a sound sleeper and would not be disturbed by her coming to bed, as she often did, an hour or so after him.

She settled herself, turned out the light, and composed herself for sleep. Normally this involved deliberately putting out of her mind the affairs of the office. It was always tempting to think about what had happened in the working day, but it could be fatal for the onset of sleep. What she should have done, what she had done, what she might do the following morning—these were all matters that did not belong in the bedroom. But that night, as she lay there in the dark, she found herself staring up at the darkened, all but invisible ceiling, thinking about what had been said on that curious, unsatisfactory car journey. She could no longer think of the woman as Mma Not Rosie and now thought of her as Rosie; nor could she get out of her mind the glimpse she had been afforded—in the rear-view mirror—of the expression on Rosie's face as she vented her anger.
When she cried I was there; I was the one who comforted her.
That was exactly what a nurse might say…
And when her little dog became sick and died I was the one who helped her bury it at the end of the garden and put the stones around its grave.
You would not make that up; that had the ring of the heartfelt about it.
And I was the one who nursed her when she was ill because the real mother was always working or playing tennis.
The reference to tennis did not sound like part of a prepared script; that, again, had a genuine feel.
I was the one, and you people don't know that—and you don't care, do you?
The final accusation, voiced with all the feeling of one who had been discourteously treated. By me, she thought; by me and my assistant—co-director, or whatever Mma Makutsi now was; in my husband's car…

She sat up in bed, staring directly ahead of her. Her neighbour had a jacaranda tree in his garden. What if…She swung her legs out of bed, stood up, and put on her dressing gown. She felt with her toes for her old felt house-shoes, found them, and slipped into them. A thought had come to her, and it had elbowed everything else out of her mind: her neighbour had a large jacaranda tree to the side of his house, in roughly the position that the tree in the photograph would have been. And his house was one of those old BHC houses, very similar to hers, with a verandah in the right place. It had been staring her in the face, and it had not even occurred to her that when Rosie brought them to Zebra Drive she was looking for her neighbour's house and had mistakenly identified hers. His was set back further from the road and was largely obscured by the shrubs and trees that he never bothered to control. Of course, of course…

The obvious,
wrote Clovis Andersen,
is often very obvious—not just a little bit obvious, but glaringly obvious. Yet we fail to notice it and, when we do, we are astonished that we did not see it much earlier…

She made her way along the corridor and into the kitchen. The glowing red light on the cooker flashed out the time: 12:02. It was already tomorrow, and here she was proposing to go outside into the yard at the very time that was the preserve of snakes, out hunting for rats and mice and other prey, because this hot time of the year was exactly when snakes liked to move about at night. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had seen a cobra only a few days before, when he had come home later than usual and had gone to inspect his beans. It had been curiously oblivious of his presence, and had glided across the vegetable beds with all the confidence of ownership. Snakes did that; most of the time they kept out of your way but when it was very hot and they had business to attend to, the ground over which they moved was theirs, not yours, and you had to watch out for them.

She went outside. She had with her a flashlight, but the batteries were coming to the end of their life and gave out only the faintest beam, which on the ground ahead of her was not much more than a half-hearted glow. The night was particularly dark, as there was just the faintest sliver of moon, a curved wisp of silver, and there were no lights in the surrounding houses. Only the stars shone, those constellations hanging over the Kalahari to the west, field upon field of pulsing white, the stars she had never really learned to name but one day hoped she would. But she could pick out the Southern Cross, which she saw above the dark treeline of the horizon, and felt somehow comforted by it.

There was a noise, and she gave a start before she recognised that it was, of course, Fanwell's dog, Zebra, for whom Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and the children had prepared a kennel of sorts—an old packing case upended at the end of his wire run. The children had accepted responsibility for Zebra, for the time being at least, feeding and replenishing his bowl with water. He was appreciative, and licked them from head to toe with his protruding pink tongue. “Not on your face,” she said. “Not on your face.” But the dog had ignored her, as had the children, who delighted in the dog's moist displays of affection.

She crossed the yard to where Zebra was half in his kennel and half out. In the dim light of the flashlight she noticed that one of his legs was sticking out at an awkward angle. Crouching down, she saw that the leg had become entangled in the cord that linked his collar to the running wire. She fumbled with this, trying to extricate him—he licked her hand as she did so—but the cord had wound round too tightly and had become a knot. The dog whimpered; he was not in pain, but he could not be left like this. They would have to make different arrangements and she would speak to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni about it later this morning. A pen of chicken wire could be the answer—a pen in which he could be untethered and could patrol in relative freedom.

She attempted to disentangle the cord, but failed. She would need to release the dog before she could do this, and so she began to undo his collar. He licked her as she set about the task, as if to endorse her decision.

“There,” she said, removing the thick leather collar. “Now we can—”

She did not finish. Springing to his feet, the dog gave a yelp, shook himself vigorously, and then bounded away into the darkness. Mma Ramotswe had been bending down for the task; now she stood up and felt light-headed as the blood drained from her head.

“Zebra!”

Her voice was swallowed in the night. She thought she heard a bark, but already he was far enough away for it to be almost indiscernible. She dropped the collar. There was enough to think about without having to chase after an exuberant dog. He might return, or he might not; these creatures were headstrong and unpredictable.

She sighed. The children would reproach her for losing him. She would have to reassure them that he would turn up, tail between his legs, when he became hungry. He might, or he might not; on balance, she thought that he was gone. He was a restless dog, one who was not quite sure where he lived, and he might not want to stay at Zebra Drive.

She moved away from the kennel. She had come outside with a search in mind, and she was going to carry it out, dog or no dog. She started to cross the vegetable patch, heading for the fence that ran between her neighbour's property and hers. The sticks that supported Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni's beans made a small forest in the night; she stepped round them, playing the light on the ground before her, for what it was worth. It illuminated very little, but it was something. Without it, each step would be an act of faith that there was nothing waiting for her to step on it—no scorpion or snake, none of the small, scuttling creatures that had no name but that might sting or nip those who disturbed their nocturnal business.

The fence consisted of four strands of wire, strung carelessly and sagging through neglect. Her neighbour, Mr. Vain Kwele, had declined to do anything about it when she and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had offered to bear half the cost of new posts to replace the ones that had suffered the ravages of termites. “No need,” he said. “I've got nothing to keep out or in. And we both know where the boundary is, so we do not really need a fence.”

He was mean, Vain Kwele: he owned a bottle store on the Francistown Road, and everybody knew that people who owned bottle stores made money. Although he could have afforded something newer, he drove an ancient car that he expected Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni to fix at little or no charge. In spite of the undoubted profits of a bottle store, his wife was dressed in dowdy clothes and had no help in the house. His two children, though, were clearly overindulged. They sat at the window watching Puso and Motholeli working in the vegetable garden, and as they sat there they ate fat cakes and other delicacies prepared by their dowdy mother in her dirty kitchen.

“They will explode one day,” said Motholeli. “Those fat ones next door will explode from eating too many fat cakes.”

“Bang!” said Puso. “There will be a big noise and bits of them will be all over the place. That will be the end of them.”

That will be the end of them.
She had noticed that this was an expression that Puso used quite frequently, and in all sorts of situations. Usually there was an element of justice in it: people got their just deserts, and that would be the end of them. Or they would lose an argument, and that would be the end of them too. It was catching, and she found herself using it herself, telling Mma Makutsi that somebody she suspected of dishonesty would run into trouble one day, and that would be the end of him. Mma Makutsi had agreed, and added, “And not before time, Mma.”