He looked at Mma Ramotswe. One of the things he was ashamed of was thinking that she could ever take up with another man, that she would leave him. He had tried to put those ideas out of his head because he knew that they were both unfounded and unfair. Mma Ramotswe would never deceive him—he knew that—and yet somewhere in the back of his mind those unsettling thoughts lurked, nagging, insistent. And then there had been that photograph. He had tried not to think about it, but he found that he just could not help it; try not to think of something and see how hard it is, he thought. There was Mma Ramotswe with another man, and the man had his arm about her. The camera had recorded it and he had found it. How could he not think about that?
Mma Ramotswe was buttering a piece of bread. She cut the bread into two pieces and popped one of them into her mouth. When she looked up from her task, she saw that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was staring at her, with that look that he sometimes had, a slightly sad, confused look. She swallowed; a crumb tickled. “Is there something wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head, in false denial, and turned away, embarrassed. “No, nothing is wrong.” But then he thought, But there is something wrong. There is.
He closed his eyes. He had decided to say something because he could not keep this within him any longer. But he was unable to look at her while he spoke. “Mma Ramotswe,” he said. “Would you ever leave me?”
She had not anticipated anything like that. “Leave you?” she asked incredulously. “Leave you, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni?” And oddly, inconsequentially, she thought: Leave you to go where? To Francistown? To Mochudi? Into the Kalahari?
He kept his eyes closed. “Yes. For another man.”
He opened his eyes slightly, just to catch a glimpse of the effect of his words. What he had said surprised even himself, and he wondered what effect it would have on Mma Ramotswe.
“But of course not,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I am your wife, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. A wife does not leave her husband.” She paused. That was not true. Some wives had to leave their husbands, and she had done precisely that when she had broken up with her first husband, Note Mokoti. But that was different. “Of course I would never leave you,” she went on. “I have no interest in other men. None at all.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni opened his eyes. “None?”
“No. Only you. You are the one. There is no man like you, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. There is no man who is as good, as kind.” She stopped and reached out to take his hand. “That is well known, by the way.”
He could not meet her gaze. He felt so ashamed of himself; but he was also touched by what she had said—for a man might easily imagine himself unloved—and he did not think it was untrue. But there was still that photograph.
He rose to his feet, gently pushing away her hand, and went across the room to pick up the small canvas bag which he sometimes took with him to the garage. He took out an envelope and felt within it for the photograph.
“There is this,” he said. “There is this photograph. It was in the camera. That office camera.”
He pushed the photograph over the table towards her. Frowning, she picked it up and examined it. She looked puzzled at first—he was watching her expression closely, with anxiety, with dread—but then she smiled. Her smile struck him as callous, hurtful; that she should smile at, make light of such a thing as this. He felt doubly betrayed.
“I had forgotten about that,” she said. “But now I remember. Mma Makutsi took it shortly after we had bought the camera. It was taken outside the shop where we bought it. You know that place, just outside the Mall. Look, there is that bit of wall at the back.”
He glanced at where she was pointing. “And that man?”
“I have no idea who he was,” she said.
His voice was barely a whisper. “You do not even know his name?”
“No. And I don’t know hers either.”
“Whose?”
“Hers. The woman in the picture. The woman who looks like me. Or so Mma Makutsi told me. They ran that shop, you see, those two people. And Mma Makutsi whispered to me while we were buying the camera, Look, Mma, that lady is your double. And I suppose she did look a bit like me, and when we mentioned it, they thought so too. They laughed, and so we decided to try the camera out. We took that photograph, and forgot about it.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni reached out and took the photograph. He peered at it. The woman looked like Mma Ramotswe, it was true; but on closer examination, of course it was not her. Of course not. The eyes were different; just different. He put down the photograph. He had been blind. Jealousy, or was it fear, had made him blind.
“You were worried,” she said. “Oh, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, I can understand now. You were worried!”
“Only a little bit,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “But now I am not.”
Mma Ramotswe looked at the photograph again. “It’s interesting, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s interesting how we can look at things and think we see something, when it really isn’t there at all.”
“Our eyes deceive us,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He was feeling waves of relief, like that relief which follows a flood in a dry land after rains, sudden, complete, overwhelming; he felt that, but could not find the words for his emotions, and so he said again, “Our eyes deceive us.”
“But our hearts do not,” said Mma Ramotswe.
A silence followed this remark. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni thought, simply, Yes. But Mma Ramotswe thought: Is that really so, or does it merely sound right?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE PROPER PLACE OF MERCY
IT SEEMED TO MMA RAMOTSWE that a rather unusual, and unsettling, period had come to an end. If one believed those columns in magazines about the stars—and she had never understood how people could imagine that the stars had anything to do with our tiny, distant lives—then some heavenly bodies somewhere must have moved into a more favourable alignment. Perhaps the good planets had drifted from their normal position—which was directly above Botswana, and particularly above Zebra Drive, Gaborone, Botswana—and had now made their way back. For everything seemed to be in the process of satisfactory resolution. Mma Makutsi no longer spoke of resignation and seemed quite content with her new, vaguely defined post of associate detective; Charlie was back in the fold, the unfortunate No. 1 Ladies’ Taxi Service no longer in existence, and, as a matter of tact, no longer mentioned, even by Mma Makutsi; Mr J.L.B. Matekoni seemed to have lost interest in conducting enquiries and had had his ridiculous anxieties laid to rest. Everything, in fact, seemed to have settled down; which was exactly the way Mma Ramotswe liked it to be. The world was full of uncertainty, and if the life of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, together with the lives of those associated with those two concerns, were all on an even keel, then at least some of that uncertainty was held at bay.
The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was composed of big things and small things. The big things were written large, and one could not but be aware of them—wars, oppression, the familiar theft by the rich and the strong of those simple things that the poor needed, those scraps which would make their life more bearable; this happened, and could make even the reading of a newspaper an exercise in sorrow. There were all those unkindnesses, palpable, daily, so easily avoidable; but one could not think just of those, thought Mma Ramotswe, or one would spend one’s time in tears—and the unkindnesses would continue. So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?
Yet one had to be careful in thinking about such matters. It was easy to dream, but daily life, with its responsibilities and problems, was still there, and in Mma Ramotswe’s case at least one pressing matter was still on her mind. This was her enquiry into the affairs of the hospital at Mochudi, and those three unexplained deaths. Or were they unexplained? It seemed to Mma Ramotswe that a perfectly credible explanation had been offered in each case. Ultimately we all died from heart failure, one way or another, even if there were all sorts of conditions which precipitated this. The hearts of these three had simply stopped because they could no longer breathe—or so claimed the medical reports they had shown her. And if everybody knew why these three patients were finding it difficult to breathe, then surely that was the end of the matter? Did they know that? It was hard for Mma Ramotswe to decide, because the doctors, it seemed, could not agree. But then there would always be disputes by experts as to why one thing happened and another did not. Even mechanics did this, as Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had often demonstrated. He would shake his head over the work of other mechanics who had attended to cars before they were brought to him. How could anybody have thought that a particular problem was a transmission problem when it was so clearly to do with something quite different, some matter of rods and rings and all the other complicated bits and pieces which made up the innards of a car?