Morality for Beautiful Girls

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE COOK’S TALE

MMA RAMOTSWE lay on her bed and gazed up at the whiteboards of the ceiling. Her stomach felt less disturbed now, and the worst of the dizziness had passed. But when she shut her eyes, and then opened them again fairly shortly thereafter, there was a white ring about everything, a halo of light which danced for a moment and then dimmed. In other circumstances it might have been a pleasant sensation, but here, at the mercy of a poisoner, it was alarming. What substance would produce such a result? Poisons could attack eyesight, Mma Ramotswe knew that well. As a child they had been taught about the plants which could be harvested in the bush, the shrubs that could produce sleep, the tree bark which could bring an unwanted pregnancy to a sudden end, the roots that cured itching. But there were others, plants that produced the muti used by the witch doctors, innocent-looking plants which could kill at a touch, or so they were told. It was one of these, no doubt, that had been slipped onto her plate by her host’s wife, or, more likely, put into an entire dish of food, indiscriminately, but avoided by the poisoner herself. If a person was wicked enough to poison a husband, then she would not stop at taking others with him.

Mma Ramotswe looked at her watch. It was past seven, and the windows were dark. She had slept through the sunset and now it was time for the evening meal, not that she felt like eating. They would be wondering where she was, though, and so she should tell them that she was unwell and could not join them for supper.

She sat up in her bed and blinked. The white light was still there, but was fading now. She put her feet over the edge of the bed and wriggled her toes into her shoes, hoping that no scorpions had crawled into them during her rest. She had always checked her shoes for scorpions since, as a child, she had put her foot into her school shoes one morning and had been badly stung by a large brown scorpion which had sheltered there for the night. Her entire foot had swollen up, so badly, in fact, that they had carried her to the Dutch Reformed Hospital at the foot of the hill. A nurse there had put on a dressing and given her something for the pain. Then she had warned her always to check her shoes and the warning had remained with her.

“We live up here,” said the nurse, holding her hand at chest height. “They live down there. Remember that.”

Later, it had seemed to her that this was a warning that could apply in more senses than one. Not only did it refer to scorpions and snakes—about which it was patently true—but it could apply with equal force to people. There was a world beneath the world inhabited by ordinary, law-abiding people; a world of selfishness and mistrust occupied by scheming and manipulative people. One had to check one’s shoes.

She withdrew her toes from the shoes before they had reached the end. Reaching down, she picked up the right shoe and tipped it up. There was nothing. She picked up the left shoe and did the same. Out dropped a tiny glistening creature, which danced on the floor for a moment, as if in defiance, and then scuttled off into the dark of a corner.

Mma Ramotswe made her way down the corridor. As she reached the end, where the corridor became a living room, the maid came out of a doorway and greeted her.

“I was coming to find you, Mma,” said the maid. “They have made food and it is almost ready.”

“Thank you, Mma. I have been sleeping. I have not been feeling well, although I am better now. I do not think that I could eat tonight, but I would like some tea. I’m very thirsty.”

The maid’s hands shot up to her mouth. “Aiee! That is very bad, Mma! All of the people have been ill. The old lady has been sick, sick, all the time. The man and his wife have been shouting out and holding their stomachs. Even the boy was sick, although he was not so bad. The meat must have been bad.”

MMA RAMOTSWE stared at the maid. “Everybody?”

“Yes. Everybody. The man was shouting that he would go and chase the butcher who sold that meat. He was very cross.”

“And the wife? What was she doing?”

The maid looked down at the floor. These were intimate matters of the human stomach and it embarrassed her to talk about them so openly.

“She could keep nothing down. She tried to take water—I brought it to her—but it came straight up again. Her stomach is now empty, though, and I think she is feeling better. I have been a nurse all afternoon. Here, there. I even looked in through your door to see that you were all right and I saw you sleeping peacefully. I did not know that you had been sick too.”

Mma Ramotswe was silent for a moment. The information which the maid had given her changed the situation entirely. The principal suspect, the wife, had been poisoned, as had the old woman, who was also a suspect. This meant either that there had been an accident in the distribution of the poison, or that neither of these had anything to do with it. Of the two possibilities, Mma Ramotswe thought that the second was the more likely. When she had been feeling ill she imagined that she had been deliberately poisoned, but was this likely? On sober reflection, beyond the waves of nausea that had engulfed her, it seemed ridiculous to think that a poisoner would strike so quickly, and so obviously, on the arrival of a guest. It would have been suspicious and unsubtle, and poisoners, she had read, were usually extremely subtle people.

The maid looked at Mma Ramotswe expectantly, as if she thought that the guest might now take over the running of the household.

“None of them needs a doctor, do they?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

“No. They are all getting better, I think. But I do not know what to do. They shout at me a lot and I cannot do anything when they are all shouting.”

“No,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That would not be easy for you.”

She looked at the maid. They shout at me a lot. Here was another with a motive, she reflected, but the thought was absurd. This was an honest woman. Her face was open and she smiled as she spoke. Secrets left shadows on the face, and there were none there.

“Well,” said Mma Ramotswe, “you could make me some tea, perhaps. Then, after that, I think you should go off to your room and leave them to get better. Perhaps they will shout less in the morning.”

The maid smiled appreciatively. “I will do that, Mma. I will bring you your tea in your room. Then you can go back to sleep.”

SHE SLEPT, but fitfully. From time to time she awoke, and heard voices from within the house, or the sounds of movement, a door slamming, a window being opened, the creaking noises of an old house by night. Shortly before dawn, when she realised that she would not fall asleep, she arose, slipped on her housecoat, and made her way out of the house. A dog at the back door rose to its feet, still groggy with sleep, and sniffed suspiciously at her feet; a large bird, which had been perched on the roof, launched itself with an effort and flew away.

Mma Ramotswe looked about her. The sun would not be up for half an hour or so, but there was enough light to make things out and it grew stronger and clearer every moment. The trees were still indistinct, dark shapes, but the branches and the leaves would soon appear in detail, like a painting revealed. It was a time of day that she loved, and here, in this lonely spot, away from roads and people and the noise they made, the loveliness of her land appeared distilled. The sun would come before too long and coarsen the world; for the moment, though, the bush, the sky, the earth itself, seemed modest and understated.

Mma Ramotswe took a deep breath. The smell of the bush, the smell of the dust and the grass, caught at her heart, as it always did; and now there was added a whiff of wood smoke, that marvellous, acrid smell that insinuates itself through the still air of morning as people make their breakfast and warm their hands at the flames. She turned around. There was a fire nearby; the morning fire to heat the hot water boiler, or the fire, perhaps, of a watchman who had spent the night hours around a few burning embers.

She walked round to the back of the house, following a small path which had been marked out with whitewashed stones, a habit picked up from the colonial administrators who had whitewashed the stones surrounding their encampments and quarters. They had done this throughout Africa, even whitewashing the lower trunks of the trees they had planted in long avenues. Why? Because of Africa.

She turned the corner of the house and saw the man crouched before the old brick-encased boiler. Such boilers were common features of older houses, which had no electricity, and of course they were still necessary out here, where there was no power apart from that provided by the generator. It would be far cheaper to heat the household’s water in such a boiler than to use the diesel-generated current. And here was the boiler being stoked up with wood to make hot water for the morning baths.

The man saw her approaching and stood up, wiping his khaki trousers as he did so. Mma Ramotswe greeted him in the traditional way and he replied courteously. He was a tall man in his early forties, well-built, and he had strong, good-looking features.

“You are making a good fire there, Rra,” she observed, pointing to the glow that came from the front of the boiler.

“The trees here are good for burning,” he said simply. “There are many of them. We never lack for firewood.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. “So this is your job?”

He frowned. “That and other things.”

“Oh?” The tone of his remark intrigued her. These “other things” were clearly unwelcome. “What other things, Rra?”

“I am the cook,” he said. “I am in charge of the kitchen and I make the food.”

He looked at her defensively, as if expecting a response.

“That is good,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is a good thing to be able to cook. They have got some very fine men cooks down in Gaborone. They call them chefs and they wear peculiar white hats.”

The man nodded. “I used to work in a hotel in Gaborone,” he said. “I was a cook there. Not the head cook, but one of the junior ones. That was a few years ago.”

“Why did you come here?” asked Mma Ramotswe. It seemed an extraordinary thing to have done. Cooks like that in Gaborone would have been paid far more, she assumed, than cooks in the farmhouses.

The cook stretched out a leg and pushed a piece of wood back into the fire with his foot.

“I never liked it,” he said. “I did not like being a cook then, and I do not like it now.”

“Then why do it, Rra?”

He sighed. “It is a difficult story, Mma. To tell it would take a long time, and I have to get back to work when the sun comes up. But I can tell you some of it now, if you like. You sit down there, Mma, on that log. Yes. That is fine. I shall tell you since you ask me.

“I come from over that way, by that hill, over there, but behind it, ten miles behind it. There is a village there which nobody knows because it is not important and nothing ever happens there. Nobody pays attention to it because the people there are very quiet. They never shout and they never make a fuss. So nothing ever happens.

“There was a school in the village with a very wise teacher. He had two other teachers to help him, but he was the main one, and everybody listened to him rather than the other teachers. He said to me one day, ‘Samuel, you are a very clever boy. You can remember the names of all the cattle and who the mothers and fathers of the cattle were. You are better than anybody else at that. A boy like you could go to Gaborone and get a job.’

“I did not find it strange that I should remember cattle as I loved cattle more than anything else. I wanted to work with cattle one day, but there was no work with cattle where we were and so I had to think of something else. I did not believe that I was good enough to go to Gaborone, but when I was sixteen the teacher gave me some money which the Government had given him and I used it to buy a bus ticket to Gaborone. My father had no money, but he gave me a watch which he had found one day lying beside the edge of the tarred road. It was his prize possession, but he gave it to me and told me to sell it for money to buy food once I reached Gaborone.

“I did not want to sell that watch, but eventually, when my stomach was so empty that it was sore, I had to do so. I was given one hundred pula for it, because it was a good watch, and I spent that on food to make me strong.

“It took me many days to find work, and my money for food would not last forever. At last I found work in a hotel, where they made me carry things and open doors for guests. Sometimes these guests came from very far away, and they were very rich. Their pockets were full of money. They gave me tips sometimes, and I saved the money in the post office. I wish I still had that money.

“After a while, they transferred me to the kitchen, where I helped the chefs. They found out that I was a good cook and they gave me a uniform. I cooked there for ten years, although I hated it. I did not like those hot kitchens and all those smells of food, but it was my job, and I had to do it. And it was while I was doing that, working in that hotel, that I met the brother of the man who lives here. You may know the one I am talking about—he is the important one who lives in Gaborone. He said that he would give me a job up here, as Assistant Manager of the farm, and I was very happy. I told him that I knew all about cattle, and that I would look after the farm well.

“I came up here with my wife. She is from this part, and she was very happy to be back. They gave us a nice place to live, and my wife is now very contented. You will know, Mma, how important it is to have a wife or a husband who is contented. If you do not, then you will never have any peace. Never. I also have a contented mother-in-law. She moved in and lives at the back of the house. She is always singing because she is so happy that she has her daughter and my children there.

“I was looking forward to working with the cattle, but as soon as I met the brother who lives up here, he asked me what I had done and I said that I had been a cook. He was very pleased to hear this and he said that I should be the cook in the house. They were always having big, important people up from Gaborone and it would impress them if there was a real cook in the house. I said that I did not want to do this, but he forced me. He spoke to my wife and she took his side. She said that this was such a good place to be that only a fool would not do what these people wanted me to do. My mother-in-law started to wail. She said that she was an old woman and she would die if we had to move. My wife said to me: ‘Do you want to kill my mother? Is that what you are wanting to do?’

“So I have had to be the cook in this place, and I am still surrounded by cooking smells when I would rather be out with the cattle. That is why I am not contented, Mma, when all my family is very contented. It is a strange story, do you not think?”

HE FINISHED the story and looked mournfully at Mma Ramotswe. She met his gaze, and then looked away. She was thinking, her mind racing ahead of itself, the possibilities jostling one another until a hypothesis emerged, was examined, and a conclusion reached.

She looked at him again. He had risen to his feet and was closing the door of the boiler. Within the water tank, an old petrol drum converted for the purpose, she heard the bubbling of heating water. Should she speak, or should she remain silent? If she spoke, she could be wrong and he could take violent exception to what she said. But if she held back, then she would have lost the moment. So she decided.

“There’s something that I’ve been wanting to ask you, Rra,” she said.

“Yes?” He glanced up at her briefly, and then busied himself again with the tidying of the wood stack.

“I saw you putting something into the food yesterday. You didn’t see me, but I saw you. Why did you do it?”

He froze. He was on the point of lifting up a large log, his hands stretched around it, his back bent, ready to take the weight. Then, quite slowly, his hands unclasped and he straightened himself up.

“You saw me?” His voice was strained, almost inaudible.

Mma Ramotswe swallowed. “Yes. I saw you. You put something in the food. Something bad.”

He looked at her now, and she saw that the eyes had dulled. The face, animated before, was devoid of expression.

“You are not trying to kill them, are you?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came.

Mma Ramotswe felt emboldened. She had made the right decision and now she had to finish what she had begun.

“You just wanted them to stop using you as a cook, didn’t you? If they felt that your food tasted bad, then they would just give up on you as a cook and you could get back to the work that you really wanted to do. That’s right, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“You were very foolish, Rra,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You could have harmed somebody.”

“Not with what I used,” he said. “It was perfectly safe.”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “It is never safe.”

The cook looked down at his hands.

“I am not a murderer,” he said. “I am not that sort of man.”

Mma Ramotswe snorted. “You are very lucky that I worked out what you were doing,” she said. “I didn’t see you, of course, but your story gave you away.”

“And now?” said the cook. “You will tell them and they will call the police. Please, Mma, remember that I have a family. If I cannot work for these people it will be hard for me to find another job now. I am getting older. I cannot …”

Mma Ramotswe raised a hand to stop him. “I am not that sort of person,” she said. “I am going to tell them that the food you used was bad, but that you could not tell it. I am going to tell the brother that he should give you another job.”

“He will not do that,” said the cook. “I have asked him.”

“But I am a woman,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I know how to make men do things.”

The cook smiled. “You are very kind, Mma.”

“Too kind,” said Mma Ramotswe, turning to go back towards the house. The sun was beginning to come up and the trees and the hills and the very earth were golden. It was a beautiful place to be, and she would have liked to have stayed. But now there was nothing more to do. She knew what she had to tell the Government Man and she might as well return to Gaborone to do it.