The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (14 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MMA POTOKWANE ON THE SUBJECT OF TRUST, AMONGST OTHER THINGS

O
N THE DAY
following Charlie's accident—an accident of which nobody at the garage or the agency was yet aware—Mma Ramotswe decided not to work in her office but instead to go for a picnic. It was not a decision that was made on the spur of the moment; she had been invited almost two weeks previously by Mma Potokwane, had accepted, and then forgotten about it until a few hours before the gathering was due to take place. In some respects she would have preferred not to have remembered at all, as that would have given her a perfect excuse, even if a retrospective one, for not attending. But now it was too late: Mma Potokwane, the redoubtable matron of the orphan farm, would be expecting her and she had to go.

Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane were old friends. Mma Makutsi, who had her difficulties with Mma Potokwane, the two having crossed swords on more than one occasion, had once asked Mma Ramotswe how they had first met. Mma Ramotswe had been unable to provide an answer. Some friends, she explained, seemed always to have been part of one's life. Obviously there was a first meeting, but in the case of old friends that was usually so long ago, and so mundane at the time, that all memory of it had faded. Such friends were like favoured possessions—a cherished book, a favourite picture—how one acquired them was long forgotten, they were just there.

It had not always been the smoothest of friendships and there were some aspects of Mma Potokwane's behaviour of which Mma Ramotswe frankly disapproved. Her bossiness was one such thing, particularly when it was directed at Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who had long been incapable of refusing Mma Potokwane's requests to fix various antiquated pieces of equipment at the orphan farm. It was all very well for her to order the orphans about—that was what one expected of the matron of an orphanage, since it was undoubtedly good for the children to lead ordered lives—but it was another thing altogether for her to adopt a similar manner when it came to adults.

“I feel sorry for that woman's husband,” Mma Makutsi had once remarked, following upon a call that Mma Potokwane had made to the office. “No wonder he doesn't ever say anything. Have you watched him? He just stands there. The poor man must be afraid to open his mouth.”

Out of loyalty to her friend, Mma Ramotswe refrained from saying anything about this, but when she gave some thought to Mma Makutsi's less-than-charitable remark she had to acknowledge that it was probably true. Mma Potokwane's husband was a small man, neither as tall nor as well built as his wife, and he gave every appearance of being both physically and emotionally floundering in the wake created by his wife.

“I wonder why he married her,” Mma Makutsi went on. “Do you think that he asked her, or did she ask him?” She paused as she mulled over the possibilities. “Maybe she even ordered him to marry her. Do you think that happened, Mma?”

Mma Ramotswe pursed her lips. It was difficult not to smile when Mma Makutsi got going on remarks like this, but she knew that she should not. It was none of Mma Makutsi's business how Rra Potokwane had proposed to Mma Potokwane; such things were the private business of man and wife and people had no right to pry into such areas. Mind you, Mma Makutsi might not be far wrong; she could just imagine Mma Potokwane instructing her mild, rather timid husband to marry her or face some unnamed unpleasant consequences.

“I wonder what their bed is like,” went on Mma Makutsi. “I can just see their bedroom, can't you?—with her taking up most of the space on the bed and leaving only a few inches at the edge for him. Maybe he sleeps on the floor next to the bed. And then she wakes up and thinks: Where on earth did I put my husband? Do you think that is what happens, Mma Ramotswe?”

This was overstepping the mark. Mma Ramotswe did not like to speculate on the bedrooms, or beds, of others. That was private. “You mustn't talk like that,” she said. “It is not funny.”

“But you are smiling,” Mma Makutsi said. “I can see that you are trying not to smile, but you are.”

Mma Ramotswe had changed the subject at this point, but at home that evening she had narrated the conversation to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and he had laughed. “Those two just can't get on,” he said. “They are really the same, under the skin. In ten years' time, Mma Makutsi will be just like her. She has been ordering the apprentices around—for practice. Soon she will move on to Mr. Phuti Radiphuti. Once they are married, then the ordering about will begin.” He looked at Mma Ramotswe. “Not all men are fools, you know, Mma. We know the plans that you women have for us.”

Oh,
thought Mma Ramotswe, although she did not say
oh.
If Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought that she had plans for him, then what exactly were they? There were undoubtedly women who had plans for their husbands; they were often ambitious for them in their jobs, and urged them to apply for promotion above the husbands of other women. Then there were women who liked their men to have expensive cars, to be wealthy, to dress in flashy clothes. But she had no plans of that nature for Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. She did not want Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors to get any bigger or to make more money. Nor did she want Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni to change in any way; she liked him exactly as he was, with his old, stained veldschoen, his overalls, his kind face, his gentle manner. No, if she had any plan for him it was that they would continue to live together in the house on Zebra Drive, that they would grow old in one another's company, and maybe one day go back to Mochudi and sit in the sun there, watching other people do things, but doing nothing themselves. Those were plans of a sort, she supposed, but surely they were plans that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni would himself endorse.

Now, driving her tiny white van along the road that led to the Gaborone dam, she let her thoughts wander: Mma Potokwane, men and their little ways, the Government, next year's rains, Motholeli's homework problems: there was so much to think about, even before she started to dwell upon any of her cases. Once she started to think about that side of her life, Mochudi Hospital came to mind, with its cool corridors, and the ward where three people had died, all in the same bed. Three fingers raised, one after the other, and then lowered. Three stitches taken out of our shared blanket. She had talked to how many people now? Four, if one did not count Tati Monyena, who was really the client, even if it was the hospital administration that was paying. Those four people, the three nurses and Dr Cronje, had all endorsed the view that Tati Monyena had voiced right at the beginning—that the deaths were just an extraordinary coincidence. But if that was what everybody believed, then why had they sought to involve her in the whole business? Perhaps it was one of those cases where doubts simply refused to lie down until somebody independent, somebody from the outside, had come and put them to rest. So she was not a detective, then, but a judge brought in to make a ruling, as judges, chiefs, will do when with a few carefully chosen words they bury a cause of conflict or doubt. If that were so, then there was not much for her to do but to declare that she had looked into the situation and found nothing suspicious.

And yet she was not sure if she could honestly say that. It was true that she had looked into the situation, and while she had been unable to come up with any idea as to why the patients had died, she could not truthfully say that she had no suspicions. In fact, she had felt quite uncomfortable after her conversations with the nurses and with Dr Cronje; she had sensed an awkwardness, an unhappiness. Of course, that could have been nothing to do with the matter she was investigating—Dr Cronje was an unhappy man because he was in self-imposed exile; and as for the nurses, for all she knew they might have some cause for resentment, some work issue, some unresolved humiliation that gnawed away; such things were common and could consume every waking moment of those who allowed them to do so.

She reached the point at which the public road, untarred and dusty, a track really, entered the confines of the dam area. Now the road turned to the east and followed the base of the dam wall until it swung round in the direction of the Notwane River and Otse beyond. It was a rough road, scraped flat now and then by the Water Department grader but given to potholes and corrugated ridges. She did not push the tiny white van on such roads, and stuck to a steady fifteen miles per hour, which would give her time to stop should she see too deep a hole in the road or should some wild animal dash out of cover and run across her path. And there were many animals here; she spotted a large kudu bull standing under an acacia tree, its horns spiralling up a good four feet. She saw duiker too, and a family of warthogs scuttling off into the inadequate cover of the sparse thorn bush. There were dassies, rock hyrax, surprised in the open and running frantically for the shelter of their familiar rocks; as a girl, she had possessed a kaross made of the skins of these small creatures sewn together end to end, little patches of silky-smooth fur that had been draped across her sleeping mat and into which she had snuggled on cold nights. She wondered where that kaross was now; worn to the very leather, perhaps, abandoned, surviving as a few scraps of something, traces of a childhood which was so long ago.

Halfway along the dam, the road opened out onto a large clearing where somebody, a few years earlier, had tried to set up a public picnic ground. The attempt had been abandoned, but the signs of the effort were still there—a small breeze-block structure with
Ladies
painted on one end and
Gentlemen
on the other, the lettering still just discernible; now, with the roof off and half the walls down, the two sexes were jumbled up together in democratic ruin. And beyond that, over a token wall, now toppling over in places and never more than a couple of feet high, was a children's playground. The ants had eaten the wooden support posts of the swings and these had fallen and been encased in crumbling termite casts; a piece of flat metal, which could have been the surface of a slide, lay rusted in a clump of blackjack weeds; there was an old braaivleis site, now just a pile of broken bricks, picked clean by human scavengers of anything that could be used to make a shack somewhere.

Mma Ramotswe arrived half an hour early, and after she had found a shady spot for the van, she decided to walk down to the edge of the water, some fifty yards away. It was very peaceful. Above her was an empty sky; endowed with so much room, so much light; on the other side of the dam, set back a bit, was Kgale Hill, rock upon rock. You could see the town on the other side of the wall, and you knew it was there, but if you turned your head the other way there was just Africa, or that bit of it, of acacia trees like small umbrellas, and dry grass, and red-brown earth, and termite mounds like miniature Babel towers. Paths led criss-cross to nowhere very much; paths created by the movement of game to the water, and she followed one of these down towards the edge of the dam. The water was light green, mirror flat, becoming blue in its further reaches. Reeds grew at its edge, not in clumps, but sparsely, individual needles projecting from the surface of the water.

Mma Ramotswe was cautious. There were crocodiles in the Notwane—everybody knew that—and they would be in the dam too, although some people denied it. But of course they would be here, because crocodiles could travel long distances over land, with that ungainly walk of theirs, seeking out fresh bodies of water. If they were in the Notwane, then they would be here too, waiting beneath the water, just at the edge, where an incautious warthog or duiker might venture. And then the crocodile would lunge out and seize its prey and drag it back into deeper water. And after that followed the roll, the twisting and churning, when the crocodile turned its prey round and round under water. That was how the end came, they said, if one was unfortunate enough to be taken by a crocodile.

There had been a bad crocodile attack at the end of the last rainy season, on the Limpopo, and Mma Ramotswe had discussed it with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. He had known the victim, who was a friend of a cousin of his, a man who had a small farm up on the banks of the river and who had crossed the water in his boat to drive some cattle back. The cattle had somehow managed to cross the river to the wrong bank, onto somebody else's land, in spite of the fact that the water was high.

The Limpopo was not very wide at that point, but the central channel was deep, a place for a predator. The man was halfway across, seated in his boat with its small outboard motor, when a large crocodile had reared up out of the water and snatched him by the shoulder, dragging him into the river. The herd boy, who was with him in the boat, watched as it happened. At first he was not believed, as crocodiles very rarely attacked a boat, but he stuck to the story. They found what remained of the farmer eventually, and the herd boy was shown to be right.

She looked at the water. It was easy for a crocodile to conceal itself close to the edge, where there were rocks, clumps of half-submerged vegetation and lumps of mud breaking the surface. Any one of these could be the tip of a crocodile's snout, protruding from the water just enough to allow him to breathe; and, a short way away, two further tiny islands of mud were really his eyes, fixed on potential prey, watching. We are so used to being the predator, thought Mma Ramotswe. We are the ones to be feared, but here, at the edge of our natural element, were those who preyed on us.