In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

CHAPTER TWO TROUSERS AND PUMPKINS

MMA RAMOTSWE did not consider herself to be a particularly courageous woman. There were some things of which she was frightened: curtainless windows at night, for example, because one could not see what was outside, in the darkness; and snakes, because there were snakes about which were truly dangerous—puff adders, for example, the lebolobolo, which was fat and lazy and had great curved fangs, or the mokopa, which was long and black and very poisonous and which was well-known to hate humans because of some distant wrong in snake memory. These were things about which one should be frightened; other things could be frightening if one allowed them to be so, but could be faced up to if one were only prepared to look them in the eye.

Yet there was something very strange about thinking that you were alone in the house and then discovering that you were not. Mma Ramotswe found this very frightening, and had to struggle with herself before she began her inspection, walking first through the door which led from the kitchen into the sitting room next door. She glanced about her, and quickly noticed that everything was in its normal place and that nothing seemed to have been disturbed. There was her ornamental plate with its picture of Sir Seretse Khama—a prize possession which she would have been mortified to have lost to a burglar. And there was her Queen Elizabeth II tea cup, with its picture of the Queen looking out in such a dignified way. That was another thing that she would have been very upset to have lost, because it reminded her of duty and of the traditional values in a world that seemed to have less and less time for such things. Not once had Seretse Khama faltered in his duty, nor had the Queen, who admired the Khama family and had always had a feeling for Africa. Mma Ramotswe had read that at the funeral of Sir Garfield Todd, that good man who had stood up for decency and justice in Zimbabwe, a message had been read out from the Queen. And the Queen had insisted that her High Commissioner should go to the graveside in person, to the very graveside, to read out what she had to say about that brave man. And when Lady Khama had died, the Queen had sent a message too, because she understood, and that had made Mma Ramotswe feel proud of being a Motswana, and of all that Seretse and his wife had done.

She looked quickly at the wall to see whether the photograph of her father—her Daddy, as she called him—the late Obed Ramotswe was in place, and it was. And so was the velvet picture of mountains, which they had brought over from Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s house near the old Botswana Defence Force Club. There would have been many people who would have liked to steal that, so that they could run their fingers over it and feel the texture of the velvet, but it was safe too. Mma Ramotswe was not sure about that picture, and perhaps it would not be an altogether bad thing if somebody did steal it, but she corrected herself and suppressed the thought. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni liked that picture, and she would not have wished him to be upset. So the picture would remain. And indeed, if they ever did have a real burglary, when everything was taken, she was sure that the picture would somehow be left, and she would have to look at it while she sat on cushions on the floor, all the chairs having gone.

She moved over to the door between the sitting room and the verandah and checked it. It was securely locked, just as they had left it. And the windows too, although open, had their wrought-iron bars intact. Nobody could have entered by any of those without bending or breaking the bars, and this had not been done. So the intruder, if he existed, could neither have come in nor gone out through that room.

She left the sitting room and walked slowly down the corridor to check the other rooms. There was a large walk-in cupboard a few paces along the corridor, and she stopped before this, peering gingerly past the edge of its door, which was slightly ajar. It was dark in the cupboard, but she could just make out the shapes of the items it contained: the two buckets, the sewing machine, the coats that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had brought with him and hung on the rail at the back. Nothing seemed out of place, and there was certainly no intruder hiding in the coats. So she closed the door and went on until she came to the first of the three rooms that gave off the corridor. This was Puso’s room, which was very much a boy’s room, with little in it. She opened the door cautiously, gritting her teeth as the door creaked loudly. She looked at the table, on which a home-made catapult was resting, and the floor, on which a discarded football and a pair of running shoes lay, and she realised that no intruder would come in here anyway. Motholeli’s room also was empty, although here Mma Ramotswe thought it necessary to peer into the cupboard. Again there was nothing untoward.

Now she entered the bedroom she shared with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. This was the largest of the three bedrooms, and it contained things that somebody might well wish to steal. There were her clothes, for instance, which were colourful and well-made. There would be a keen demand for these from larger ladies looking for dresses, but there was no sign that the hanging rail on which these garments were suspended had been tampered with. And nor was there any sign of disturbance on the dressing table on which Mma Ramotswe kept the few brooches and bangles that she liked to wear. None of these seemed to have gone.

Mma Ramotswe felt the tension leave her body. The house was obviously empty and the notion that somebody might be hiding in it was manifestly nonsense. There was probably some perfectly rational explanation for the open drawer and the ball of string on the dresser, and this explanation would no doubt emerge when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and the children returned that evening. One possibility was that they had set off, forgotten some-thing, and then come back to the house after Mma Ramotswe had herself left it. Perhaps they had bought a present for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s relative and had come back to wrap it up, a task for which they would have needed the string. That was a perfectly rational explanation.

As Mma Ramotswe made her way back to the kitchen to make her tea, she thought of how things that appeared to be mysteries were usually no such thing. The unexplained was unexplained not because there was anything beyond explanation, but simply because the ordinary, day-to-day explanation had not made itself apparent. Once one began to enquire, so-called mysteries rapidly tended to become something much more prosaic. Not that people liked this, of course. They liked to think that there were things beyond explanation—supernatural things—things like tokoloshes, for example, who roamed at night and caused fear and mischief. Nobody ever saw a tokolosh for the simple reason that there was nothing to see. What one thought was a tokolosh was usually no more than a shadow of a branch in the moonlight, or the sound of the wind in the trees, or a tiny animal scurrying through the undergrowth. But people were not attracted by these perfectly straightforward explanations and spoke instead of all sorts of fanciful spirits. Well, she would not be like that when it came to intruders. There had been no intruder in the house at all, and Mma Ramotswe was quite alone, as she had originally thought herself to be.

She made her tea and poured herself a large cup. Then, cup in hand, she returned to her bedroom. It would be a pleasant way of spending what remained of the afternoon, resting on her bed, and falling asleep if she wished. She had a few magazines on her bedside table, and a copy of theBotswana Daily News. She would read these until her eyes began to shut and the magazine fell out of her hands. It was a very agreeable way of drifting off to sleep.

She opened wide the window to allow a cooling breeze to circulate. Then, having placed her tea cup on the bedside table, she lowered herself onto the bed, sinking down into the mattress that had served her so well for many years and which was holding up very well with the additional weight of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. She had bought the bed and its mattress at the same time that she had moved into the house on Zebra Drive, and had resisted the temptation to buy cheaply. In her view a well-made bed was the one thing on which it was worthwhile spending as much money as one could possibly afford. A good bed produced happiness, she was sure of that; a bad, uncomfortable bed produced grumpiness and niggling pains.

She started to read theBotswana Daily News. There was a story of a politician who had made a speech urging people to take more care of their cattle. He said that it was a shocking thing to the conscience of a cattle-owning country that there should be cases of mistreated cattle. People who allowed their cattle to go thirsty while they were driving them to the railway siding should be ashamed of themselves, he said. It was well-known, he went on, that the quality of meat was affected by the experience of the cattle in their last days. An animal that had been stressed would always produce beef that tasted less than perfect, and perfection was what Botswana wanted for its meat. After all, Botswana beef was fine, grass-fed beef, and tasted so much better than the meat of those poor cattle which were kept cooped up or which were fed food that cattle should not eat.

Mma Ramotswe found herself agreeing with all of this. Her father had been a great judge of cattle and had always told her that cattle should be treated as members of the family. He knew the names of all his cattle, which was a considerable feat for one who had built up so large a herd, and he would never have tolerated their suffering in any way. It was just as well, she thought, that he was no longer able to hear this news of thirsty cattle, nor to see the sort of things that she had seen that very day while having her tea at the shopping centre.

She finished the article on cattle and had embarked on another one when she heard a sound. It was a rather peculiar sound, rather like moaning. She lowered the newspaper and stared up at the ceiling. It was very strange. The sound was apparently coming from fairly nearby—from just outside her window, it seemed. She listened very hard and there it was again, once more emanating from somewhere not far away.

Mma Ramotswe sat up, and as she did so the sound occurred again—a soft, indistinct groaning, like the sound of a dog in pain. She got up off the bed and crossed to her window to look outside. If there was a dog in the garden, then she would have to go and chase it away. She did not like dogs to come into the garden, and in particular she did not like visits from the malodorous yellow dogs which her neighbour kept. These dogs were always moaning and whining, in a way which was very similar to the sound that she had heard while lying down.

She looked out into the garden. The sun was well down in the sky now, and the shadows from the trees were long. She saw the paw-paw trees and their yellowing leaves; she saw the spray of bougainvillaea and the mopipi tree which grew at the edge of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s vegetable patch. And she saw the rough patch of grass in which a stray dog might like to hide. But there was no dog in sight, not under her window, nor in the grass, nor at the foot of the mopipi tree.

Mma Ramotswe turned round and went back to bed. Lying down again, her traditional frame sank deep into the mattress, which sagged down towards the floor. Immediately the moaning sound returned, louder this time, and it seemed rather closer. Mma Ramotswe frowned, and shifted her weight on the mattress. Immediately the moaning sound made itself heard again, this time even more loudly.

It was then that she realised that the sound was coming from within the room, and her heart skipped a beat. The sound was in the room, and it seemed as if it was directly under her, under the bed. And at that point, as this frightening realisation was reached, her mattress suddenly heaved beneath her, as if a great subterranean event had propelled it upwards. Then, with a scuffling sound, the figure of a man squirmed out from under the bed, seemed to struggle with some impediment as he emerged, and then shook himself free and dashed out of the room. It happened so quickly that Mma Ramotswe barely had time to see him before he disappeared through the bedroom door. She had no time to see his features, and she only barely took in the fact that although he was wearing a smart red shirt, he was not wearing any trousers.

She shouted out, but the man was already out of the room. And by the time that she struggled to her feet, she heard the kitchen door slamming as he made his exit from the house. She moved over to the window in the hope of seeing him as he ran across her yard, but he had taken another route, over to the side, and must have been heading towards the fence that ran along the side of her property.

Then she looked down at the floor and noticed, just at the side of the bed, where they were still snagged on the sharp end of a spring, a pair of khaki trousers. The man who had been hiding under her bed had become trapped and had been obliged to wriggle out of his trousers to make his getaway. Mma Ramotswe now picked up these trousers, releasing them from the spring, and examined them: an ordinary pair of khaki trousers, in quite good condition, and now separated from their owner. She felt gingerly in the pockets—one never knew what one would find in a man’s pockets—but there was nothing other than a piece of string. There was certainly nothing that could identify this man.

Mma Ramotswe carried the trousers through to the kitchen. She had been shocked by what had happened, but the thought of the intruder having to run off without his trousers made her smile. How on earth would he be able to get home, wherever that might be, clad only in a shirt and socks, and without any trousers? The police would probably pick him up if they saw him, and then he would have some explaining to do. Would he say that he had simply forgotten to put on his trousers before he went out? That would be one way of explaining himself, but would anybody ever forget to put on his trousers before he ventured forth? Surely not. Or might he say that his trousers had been stolen? But how could one’s trousers possibly be stolen while one was wearing them? It seemed rather difficult to see how this might happen, and she could not imagine the police being convinced by such an explanation.

She poured herself another cup of tea in the kitchen, the cup she had taken through to the bedroom having been knocked over while the man made his escape from under her bed. Then she took this cup of tea, and the trousers, out onto the verandah. She draped the trousers over the rail and sat down on her chair. This was really rather funny, she thought. It had been alarming to discover that there was a man under her bed, but it must have been much more alarming for him, especially when she lay down on the bed and he had been crushed underneath the sagging mattress. That explained the moaning; the poor man was having the breath crushed out of him. Well, that’s what came of hiding where one had no business to hide. He would not hide under a bed again, she suspected, which meant that he had perhaps learned a bit of a lesson. However, there were obviously other lessons for that man to learn, and if she ever found out who he was, unlikely though that was, she would have something to say to him and would say it in no uncertain terms.

When Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and the children returned in the evening, Mma Ramotswe said nothing about the incident until both Puso and Motholeli had been settled in bed and were safely off to sleep. Puso had a tendency to nightmares, and she did not want him to start worrying about intruders, and so she would make sure that he did not hear about what had happened. Motholeli was less nervous, and seemed not to be scared of the dark, as her brother was. But if she were to be told, then she might tell him in an unguarded moment, and so it would be better for neither of them to know.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni listened intently. When she described the man running out of the room without his trousers, he gasped, and put his hand to his mouth.

“That is very bad,” he said. “I do not like the thought that there was this strange man in our bedroom without any trousers.”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But you must remember that he did not take them off himself. They came off when he was trying to escape. That is different.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked doubtful. “I still don’t like it. Why was he there? What mischief was he planning?”

“I suspect that he was just a thief who passed by and saw that nobody was in,” suggested Mma Ramotswe. “Then he was disturbed when I came back and he had no way of getting out. I suspect that he was a very frightened man.”

They did not discuss the matter further. The trousers were left out on the verandah, where Mma Ramotswe had hung them. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had suggested that they might fit one of the apprentices and he could give them to him. If they did not, then he would pass them on to one of the second-hand clothes traders who would surely find a good pair of legs to fit into them; honest legs this time.

But the next morning, when Mma Ramotswe went out onto the verandah for her morning cup of bush tea, the trousers had gone. And directly below the place where they had been left, there was a large, yellow pumpkin, luscious and ready to eat.