The Double Comfort Safari Club - By Alexander McCall Smith Page 0,24

Refresher Course in the Old Botswana Culture; that’s what it could be called. Or they could call it How to Love Your Country Again. And Mma Makutsi could be an instructor too, in the old typing skills, perhaps, keeping alive the memory of typewriters when people had thrown them out in favour of computers. And shorthand, a skill that her assistant said was being learned by fewer and fewer people, even at the Botswana Secretarial College itself; she was sure that Mma Makutsi would not want that to be lost.

THAT WAS SATURDAY. On Sunday she went to the Anglican cathedral with the children, leaving Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni lying in bed, enjoying his one long sleep of the week. When she returned she would make him his Sunday breakfast, which consisted of boerewors and eggs and wedges of bread. “A man’s breakfast,” he would say, smiling. And Mma Ramotswe would nod in agreement, but with the unexpressed mental reservation that there were plenty of traditionally built women who would relish a breakfast exactly like that, if it were not for the guilt they would feel afterwards.

Puso went off with the younger children to the Sunday school run in the general-purpose room of the cathedral; Motholeli, too old to be taught with the younger ones, had been enrolled as a helper. She helped to hand out the books, and to assist the small children in drawing their pictures of biblical stories. “No,” she said, “the sea in this story is not coloured blue. That is ordinary sea. This is the Red Sea.” And a red crayon would be selected and used to give a vivid shade to the parted waves, tiny hands fumbling with the strokes.

In the place that she always occupied, halfway down and at the end of a pew, a good spot from which to observe, Mma Ramotswe cast an eye over the congregation. There were no surprises, although she did not recognise one couple sitting towards the back, the man heavy-jowled, the woman wearing a blue hat and a shawl in a clashing pink colour—not a good combination, thought Mma Ramotswe, even if well intentioned. The Mma Makutsi School of Fashion, she thought wryly, and then immediately took back the uncharitable observation, remembering where she was. But it was true: Mma Makutsi did not have good colour sense, and should not wear spots. Mma Ramotswe had been thinking for some years of saying something to her about that, but it was difficult. You could not say, A lady who has a blotchy skin, Mma, should not wear spotted blouses. You could not. And even if you were more tactful, saying something like, Spots are nice, Mma, but I think that in your case stripes might be better, there would still be the chance that the person to whom the advice was offered might ask why. Then, if you were truthful, you would have to explain. If you were truthful …

Mma Ramotswe did not believe in lying, but she did believe that there were occasions when one had to say things that were not completely true. We all do that, she thought, looking up at the cathedral roof: we all have to say things that are not strictly true in order to protect others from hurt. So she had to tell Mma Makutsi that she thought Phuti Radiphuti handsome, even when others would not; that, of course, had been in response to a direct question from her assistant, who suddenly said to her one morning, “Don’t you think that Phuti is a very handsome man, Mma?” What could she do? So she said, “Of course he is, Mma; he is so kind too.” The remark about his kindness was completely true, but that was not what Mma Makutsi was talking about, and she persisted. “Yes, he’s very kind, Mma Ramotswe, but he is also very handsome. It is unusual, I think, to find people who are both handsome and kind. Don’t you agree?”

Mma Ramotswe had been slightly irritated by this line of questioning. What about Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni? she might have asked. What about him? Phuti was not the only kind man in Botswana; Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was widely known for his generosity, and was often taken advantage of for precisely that reason. Mma Potokwane, for instance, was always asking him to fix things at the orphan farm—old vehicles, a tractor, the boilers, the water pump—the list seemed endless. And so too was the list of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s good