She looked down at the broken shoe, now resting on her lap. It was such a sad thing, that shoe, like a body from which the life had gone. She stared at it. Almost challenging it to reproach her. But it did not, and all she heard, she thought, was a strangled voice which said, Narrow escape, Boss. You were walking in the wrong direction, you know. We shoes understand these things.
IF IT HAD BEEN a bleak morning for Mma Makutsi, it was equally bleak at the premises of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. In Mma Ramotswe’s small office the desk previously occupied by Mma Makutsi stood forlorn, bare of paper, with only a couple of pencils and an abandoned typewriter upon it. Where three cups had stood on the cabinet behind it, along with the tea-making equipment of a kettle and two tea-pots, there now were only two—Mma Ramotswe’s personal cup and the cup that was kept for the client. The absence of Mma Makutsi’s cup, a small thing in itself but a big thing in what it stood for, seemed only to confirm in Mma Ramotswe’s view that the heart had been taken out of the office. Steps could be taken, of course: Mr Polopetsi could be invited to keep his mug there rather than on the hook which it occupied beside the spanners in the garage. But it would not be the same; indeed it was impossible to imagine Mr Polopetsi occupying Mma Makutsi’s chair; much as Mma Ramotswe liked him, he was a man, and the whole ethos of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, its guiding principle really, was that it was a business in which women were in the driving seat. That was not because men could not do the job—they could, provided they were the right sort of men, observant men—it was simply because that particular business had always been run by women, and it was women who gave it its particular style. There was room in this world, Mma Ramotswe thought, for things done by men and things done by women; sometimes men could do the things done by women, sometimes not. And vice versa, of course.
She felt lonely. In spite of the sounds from the garage, in spite of the fact that immediately on the other side of the office wall was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, her husband and helpmate, she felt alone, bereft. She had once been told by an aunt in Mochudi how, shortly after being widowed, she had seen her husband in empty rooms, in places where he liked to sit in the sun, coming back down the track that he always walked down; and these were not tricks of the light, but aches of the mind, its sad longings. And now, after her assistant had been absent for so short a time, she had looked up suddenly when she thought she heard Mma Makutsi say something, or had seen something move on the other side of the room. That movement was a real trick of the light of course, but it still brought home the fact that she was on her own now.
And that was difficult. Mma Ramotswe was normally quite content with her own company. She could sit on her verandah on Zebra Drive and drink tea in perfect solitude, with her only company that of the birds outside, or of the tiny, scrambling geckos that made their way up the pillars and across the roof; that was different. In an office one needed to be able to talk to somebody, if only to make the surroundings more human. Homes, verandahs, gardens were human in their feel; offices were not. An office with only one person in it was a place unfurnished.
On the other side of the wall, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt a similar moroseness. It was perhaps not quite as acute in his case, but it was still there, a feeling that somehow things were not complete. It was as a family might feel, he thought, if it sat down to dinner on some great occasion and had one seat unoccupied. He liked Mma Makutsi; he had always admired her determination and her courage. He would not like to cross her, of course, as she could be prickly, and he was not sure whether she handled the apprentices very well. In fact she did not; he was certain of it, but he had never quite got round to suggesting to her that she should change her tone when handling those admittedly frustrating young men. And of course Charlie was going to go too, once he had finished tinkering with that old Mercedes and the taxi licence application had been approved. The garage would not be the same without him, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni thought; there would be something missing, in spite of everything.
Charlie, from the other side of the garage, where he was about to raise a car on the hydraulic ramp, glanced at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and said to the younger apprentice standing beside him, “I hope that the Boss doesn’t think that she’s gone because of me. I hope he doesn’t think that.”
The younger apprentice wiped his nose on the sleeve of his blue overalls. “Why would he think that, Charlie? What’s it got to do with you? You know what that woman’s like. Nag, nag, nag. I bet that the Boss is relieved that she’s gone.”
Charlie thought about this possibility for a moment, and then dismissed it. “He likes her. Mma Ramotswe likes her too. Maybe even you like her.” He looked at the younger man and frowned. “Do you? Do you like her?”
The younger apprentice shifted his feet. “I don’t like her glasses,” he said. “Where do you think she got those great big glasses?”
“An industrial catalogue,” said Charlie.
The younger apprentice laughed. “And those stupid shoes of hers. She thinks she looks good in those shoes of hers, but most girls I know wouldn’t be seen dead in them.”
Charlie looked thoughtful. “They take your shoes off when you’re dead, you know.”
The younger apprentice was concerned. “Why?” he asked. “What do they do with them?”
Charlie reached forward and polished the dial of the panel that controlled the hydraulic lift. “The doctors take them,” he explained. “Or the nurses in the hospital. Next time you see a doctor, look at his shoes. They all have very smart shoes. Lots of them. That’s because they get the shoes when…”
He stopped. A blue taxi had drawn up in front of the garage and the passenger door was opening.
CHAPTER TEN
A SMALL BUSINESSWOMAN
WITH MMA MAKUTSI back in her usual place, the heavy atmosphere that had prevailed that morning lifted. The emotional reunion, as demonstrative and effusive as if Mma Makutsi had been away for months, or even years, had embarrassed the men, who had exchanged glances, and then looked away, as if in guilt at an intrusion into essentially female mysteries. But when the ululating from Mma Ramotswe had died down and the tea had been made, everything returned to normal.
“Why did she bother to leave if she was going to be away five minutes?” asked the younger apprentice.
“It’s because she doesn’t think like anybody else,” said Charlie. “She thinks backwards.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who overheard this, shook his head. “It’s a sign of maturity to be able to change your mind when you realise that you’re wrong,” he explained. “It’s the same with fixing a car. If you find out that you’re going along the wrong lines, then don’t hesitate to stop and correct yourself. If, for example, you’re changing the oil seal at the back of a gearbox, you might try to save time by doing this without taking the gearbox out. But it’s always quicker to take the gearbox out. If you don’t, you end up taking the floor out and anyway you have to take the top of the gearbox off, and the prop shaft too. So it’s best to stop and admit your mistake before you go any further and damage things.”
Charlie listened to this—it was a long speech for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni—and then looked away. He wondered if this was a random example seized upon by Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, or if he knew about that seal he had tried to install in the old rear-wheel-drive Ford. Could he have found out somehow?
There was little work done in the agency that afternoon. Mma Makutsi restored her desk to the way she liked it to be: papers reappeared, pencils were resharpened and arranged in the right fashion, and files were extracted from the cabinet and placed back on the desk for further attention. Mma Ramotswe watched all this with utter satisfaction and, after she had offered to make the tea—an offer which Mma Makutsi politely declined, pointing out that she had not forgotten her role altogether—she asked her assistant if she would care to have the rest of the afternoon off.