The Double Comfort Safari Club - By Alexander McCall Smith Page 0,16

back, he would not have been able to do so.

The minutes passed slowly. She moved the pot to the side of the stove, where it could simmer peacefully, and untied the strings of the apron she was wearing. Then she opened the kitchen door and stepped out into her small yard. Her pawpaw tree, which had never grown straight, was outlined at its drunken angle, a dark shadow against the glow of the night sky. The light from her neighbour’s uncurtained window spilled out onto the bare ground of the yard, a square of yellow; and through the window itself, a glimpse of a family seated around a table—the father, who was something in the Ministry of Telecommunications, an engineer, she thought; the mother, who worked in some lowly capacity at the diamond sorting office; and the three children, whose heads bobbed up and down above the level of the windowsill. They were never still, those children; they were always running about and throwing things and behaving as children should behave.

The lights of a car came up the road. She felt a surge of relief: she knew it was Phuti’s car because one of the lights shone at a slightly different angle to the other, casting its beam more upwards than downwards. My car needs glasses, he had joked, and she had laughed, not because she felt that she had to, but because her fiancé said some very amusing things sometimes, and this was one of them.

The car drew to a halt outside her yard. Mma Makutsi went forward and began to open the gate, and to say, “I thought that you must be busy …” But then she stopped; it was not Phuti in his car but his assistant manager, Mr. Gaethele, a man with a damaged left ear.

“Phuti?” Mma Makutsi’s voice was low.

Mr. Gaethele looked down. He held his hands palm outwards; a curious gesture, apologetic more than anything else; the gesture of one who has broken something, or brings news of breakage. “There has been an accident, Mma.”

She stood quite still.

“He is all right, but he is in the Princess Marina. His leg is bad. You must not worry too much, Mma.”

She waited for him to say something more. She could not speak. Where? How? When? There were so many questions to be asked, but she could give voice to none of them; not now, here under the pawpaw tree, to this man whom she did not know very well, who was trying to be sympathetic but was awkward in his attempt.

“I want to go and see him,” she said at last, moving towards the car.

He shook his head. “No. The doctor said that we can see him tomorrow, but not until four o’clock. There is going to be an operation on his leg. His aunt is waiting at the hospital. She says that nobody else must come yet.”

She stared at him, struggling to take in what had happened. She dug her fingernails into her palms, a trick she had learned at school; one pain might cancel out another, might make the world different.

“How did this thing …”

Mr. Gaethele shook his head. “It was one of the delivery drivers. He reversed the truck into Mr. Radiphuti. He was standing in front of small wall, and it caught his leg against the wall. Like this.” He made a crushing movement with his hands.

Mma Makutsi held her hands up to her face. There would be tears, but not until she was ready to cry.

MMA RAMOTSWE did not hear about the incident at the Double Comfort Furniture Shop until the following morning. When she arrived at the office, Mma Makutsi was already there, sitting at her desk, sorting papers. As her employer entered, she did not look up, as she normally would. She was preoccupied with her work, Mma Ramotswe thought; there was nobody who could become quite as absorbed in filing papers as Mma Makutsi. Filing, she had once pronounced, is the greatest of the secretarial arts. And then she had said …

But something seemed not quite right, and Mma Ramotswe, about to open the window, turned round. “There is something wrong, isn’t there?”

Mma Makutsi shook her head—vigorously; so vigorously, in fact, that Mma Ramotswe’s suspicions were immediately confirmed.

“There is nothing wrong. Nothing.”

Mma Ramotswe left the window and crossed the room to Mma Makutsi’s desk. She laid her hand on the other woman’s shoulder, gently. “Mma, you can tell me.”

It must be Phuti, she thought, something to do with