For a while nothing was said as both of them tried to work out the significance of the last remark. Then Phuti cleared his throat. “Of course I do not mind glasses, and yours are very pretty, Grace. That is what I think.”
Mma Makutsi stirred the peri-peri chicken rather more aggressively than perhaps was necessary. “The chicken is almost ready, Phuti,” she said. “I will serve you now.”
They ate in silence, and it was several minutes before Phuti spoke. “When I said…” he began. “I didn't mean…”
“Of course not. I didn't think that you meant that.”
During the ensuing silence Mma Makutsi drank several glasses of water. It felt to her as if a hot iron had been run across her tongue, and the water, curiously enough, seemed only to make each successive mouthful more fiery. When the chicken was finished, she served a dessert of pineapple and custard that she knew Phuti would like, and this seemed to dispel the gloom that had settled over the table.
“My favourite too!” enthused Phuti.
She ladled a few more spoonfuls of the custard onto his plate. “Did anything happen in the furniture store today?” she asked.
Phuti wiped a speck of custard away from the corner of his mouth. “We took delivery of a new consignment of chairs,” he said. “They came from a factory over in Durban, and when we opened the crate we saw that the legs had fallen off a number of them. Can you believe that, Grace? Four days out of the factory and the legs have fallen off.”
“That is very bad workmanship,” said Mma Makutsi. “What can those people be thinking about?”
Phuti shook his head sadly. “It is happening all the time now. People do not care how they make things. A little bit of glue, and they think that a chair will hold together with that. It's very dangerous.”
“Particularly for traditionally built people,” said Mma Makutsi. “What if somebody like Mma Ramotswe sat in one of those chairs? She could fall right down.”
Phuti agreed. “I would not like to see Mma Ramotswe sitting on one of those chairs,” he said. “She is safer in the chair that she has, even if it is very old. Sometimes old things are best. An old chair and an old bed. They can be very good.”
Mma Makutsi did not welcome this mention of beds. Her embarrassment over the bed she had ruined by leaving it out in the rain had not entirely disappeared, and she felt the back of her neck become warm even to think about it.
“Chairs,” she said quickly. “Yes, old chairs can be very comfortable. Although I do not think that the chair I have in the office is very comfortable. It gives me a sore back at the end of the day, I'm afraid. It is not the same shape as I am, you see.”
Phuti frowned. “You are a very nice shape, Grace. I have always said that. It is the chair that is wrong.”
The compliment was appreciated, and she smiled at her fiancé. “Thank you, Phuti. Yes, the chair is very old. It has been there since the very beginning, when we had that old office over near Kgale Hill.”
“Then I must give you a new one,” said Phuti firmly. “I will bring one round to the office tomorrow. We have a whole new section for office furniture in the shop, and there are many fine-looking chairs. I will bring you a good one.”
She thanked him, but then thought: What about Mma Ramotswe? What would she feel if she saw her assistant getting a new chair while she was stuck with her old one? She could always raise this issue with Phuti Radiphuti, but if she did so he might feel that she was being greedy: one did not accept a present with one hand and at the same time hold out the other on behalf of somebody else. Thank you, Rra, for the nice chair you have given me, and now how about one for my friend, Mma Ramotswe? That would not do.
While Mma Makutsi wrestled with this question of etiquette, Phuti Radiphuti was clearly warming to the subject of chairs. It was always like that when he talked about furniture, she thought-his eyes lit up. And he did enjoy talking about furniture, in the same way as so many men talked about football. That was a good thing: if one had to choose between marrying a man who talked about furniture and one who talked about football, then there was no doubt in Mma Makutsi's mind as to which she preferred. There was so little one could say about football without repeating oneself, whereas there were a lot of things to be said about furniture, or at least some things.
“What colour?” asked Phuti. “What colour would you like your chair to be?”
Mma Makutsi was surprised by the question. She had always assumed that office chairs were black, or possibly sometimes grey: her chair at the office was somewhere in between these two colours-it was difficult to tell now, with all the use it had seen.
“Do you have green?” she asked. “I have always wanted a green chair.”
“There is certainly green,” said Phuti. “There is a very good chair that comes in green.”
It was now time for second helpings of pineapple and custard. Then, with the dessert cleared away and the tea cups set out at the ready, Mma Makutsi put on the kettle while Phuti sat back in his chair with the air of a man replete.
“And something else happened at the shop today,” he announced. “Something else that I think you will be interested to hear about.”
Mma Makutsi reached for the tea caddy, an ancient round tin on which the word Mafeking had been printed underneath a picture of a street and a line of parked cars. “You have had a busy day,” she said.
“Yes,” said Phuti. “And this other thing that happened has something to do with our being busy. We have taken on a new person.”
Mma Makutsi ladled tea into the teapot. One spoon for each mouth, she muttered, and one for the pot. “So what will he do, this new person?” she asked.
“She,” corrected Phuti. “She will be assistant manager in charge of beds. We have decided to start selling beds again, and we need somebody who can sell beds. It has to be the right sort of person.”
“And what sort of person is that?” asked Mma Makutsi.
Phuti appeared to be momentarily embarrassed. “A glamorous person,” he said, smiling apologetically. “Everybody in the furniture business says the same thing: if you want to sell expensive beds, get a very beautiful lady to do it for you.”
Mma Makutsi laughed. “That is why advertisements for cars always have a picture of a beautiful girl,” she said. “It is so easy to see what they are trying to do.”
“I think you are right,” said Phuti. “So we advertised a sales post and we had thirty people applying for it, Mma. Thirty. There must be many people who would like to sell beds.”
“Lazy people, perhaps,” said Mma Makutsi. “Lazy people will like to sell beds; people who are not lazy will like to sell running shoes.”
Phuti absorbed this insight. It was probably correct, he thought.
“But one of them was very good,” he continued. “She is a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College. Eighty per cent in the final examinations.”
Mma Makutsi hesitated, her hand poised above the kettle. Somewhere, in the distant reaches of her mind, unease made its presence felt.
“Eighty per cent?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Phuti. “And she had very good references too.”
“And her name?” asked Mma Makutsi.
Phuti spoke evenly, obviously unaware of the explosive potential of the information he was about to reveal. “Violet Sephotho,” he said. “I believe that you know her. She said that she had been at the Botswana Secretarial College with you. She said that you had been good friends.”
Mma Makutsi found it difficult to pour the boiling water into the teapot. Her right hand, normally so steady, was shaking now, and she had to use her other hand to come to its assistance. Violet Sephotho! Eighty per cent!
She succeeded in filling the teapot but only at the cost of several small spillages of hot water, one of which was upon her wrist, and stung.
“You have spilled hot water?”