Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

CHAPTER FOUR. MMA MAKUTSI MAKES PERI-PERI CHICKEN

THAT EVENING, while Mma Ramotswe nursed the painful blister on her right heel, Mma Makutsi was busy in her kitchen, cooking dinner for her fiancé, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop and owner, too, of a large herd of fine cattle built up by his father, the older Mr. Radiphuti. Mma Makutsi knew what Phuti Radiphuti's culinary tastes were and had recently discovered that he was particularly partial to peri-peri chicken, a dish that the Portuguese had dreamed up in Mozambique and Angola. From there it had spread into other countries, including Botswana, where it was a favourite amongst those who liked their food to be scathingly hot. Phuti was one of these, she thought, and could happily chew on the most stinging of chilli peppers without the need of a glass of water.

“You'll get used to it, Grace,” he said. “You will not feel it at all. Peri-peri chicken, vindaloo curries-everything. It will all taste equally good.”

She was doubtful, but for Phuti's sake was still prepared to put up with what she thought to be excessively fiery dishes; and now she was making one of these, dropping several large pinches of flaked chilli into the marinade of oil and lemon juice that she had prepared shortly before Phuti's arrival.

She dipped a finger into the sauce and then dabbed it against her tongue. Immediately she felt an intense stinging sensation and reached for a glass of water to cool the burning. How can he do it? she asked herself. This made her reflect on how often one had to pose that question about men. They did all sorts of inexplicable things, and women were always asking themselves the same question: How can they do it?

When Phuti arrived half an hour later, the chicken was almost ready. Phuti sat at her table, which was covered with a new yellow tablecloth she had recently bought, and watched Mma Makutsi attend to the final preparations.

“I am a very lucky man to be marrying somebody who can make peri-peri chicken,” he announced. “I always wanted to meet such a lady.”

She laughed. “Would you not marry me if I could not make peri-peri chicken?”

Phuti thought this very amusing. He was not quite as quick as Mma Makutsi, and he enjoyed her ability to make light-hearted comments such as this. He would have liked to have been able to reply with some witty riposte, but what could he say? Of course he would have married her, irrespective of her ability to cook peri-peri chicken. Indeed, he had not even known about that until after he had proposed.

“I would marry you,” he said, “even if you could cook nothing-nothing at all! I would marry you even if you wore glasses, which you do, of course.”

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?”

She brushed the incident aside. “Nothing. I am fine.” But she was thinking. Eighty per cent? That was a lie, of course, as Violet had rarely achieved much more than fifty per cent in any of the examinations at the college. Indeed, Mma Makutsi could remember an occasion when Violet had not attended one of the examinations and had pleaded ill health, even producing, in class the next day, what purported to be a doctor's letter to back up her claim. “Anyone can write a letter,” one of Mma Makutsi's friends had whispered, loud enough for Violet Sephotho to hear and spin round to glare at her accusers. She had stared at the wrong person, at Mma Makutsi, and at that moment an abiding hostility, fuelled by envy, had begun.

Mma Makutsi already knew the answer to her question and so did not really need to ask it. But she had to. “You took her then?” she said. “That Violet Seph…” She could not bring herself to utter the name in its entirety, and her voice trailed away.

“Of course,” said Phuti. He looked surprised that she could have thought any other outcome was possible. Eighty per cent might not have been ninety-seven per cent, but it was still eighty per cent.

“I see.”

She looked away. Should she tell him? “I am not sure that she got eighty per cent,” she said. She tried to make her voice sound even, but it did not, and she thought that he would be able to tell that something was wrong.

“But she did,” said Phuti. “She told me. Eighty per cent.”

Mma Makutsi wanted to say, “But she is a liar, Phuti! Can you not tell? She is a very big liar.” She could not say that, though, because Phuti was a fair-minded man and would ask, even if mildly, for proof, which would be difficult to furnish. So instead she said, “Why do you think she wants to work in the shop? If she is so highly qualified, why does she not want to get a job in some big firm? A job with the diamond company, for instance?”

Phuti shrugged. “It is not always that easy to get a job with the diamond people,” he said. “There are people lining up for those jobs. And anyway, it is a well-paid post, this. There are many benefits.”

Indeed there are, thought Mma Makutsi. And she was sure that one of the benefits, at least from Violet Sephotho's perspective, was that of working closely with Phuti, who was very comfortably off, not only with his share of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, that would become a full interest once his aged father died, but also with his large herd of cattle at the Radiphuti cattle post. There could be no doubt, none at all, that Violet's real motive in seeking the job was to prise Phuti away from his lawful fiancée-Grace Makutsi, assistant detective-and guide him into her own wicked, calculating, waiting arms. Oh, it was clear enough, but there would be no point in spelling this out to Phuti, because he simply would not see it. Nor, she thought, would he react well to being warned about Violet; shortly after she had become engaged, Mma Ramotswe had told her to be careful about telling one's fiancé what to do. “Men do not like it,” she said. “You must never make a man feel that he is being told what to do. He will run away. I have seen that happen so many times.”

She served Phuti his cup of tea, and they sat together at the table. She thought that Phuti had no idea of her concern, as he chatted away about other furniture matters. There was a new type of table, he said, that could be folded up and stored under a bed.

“That is very useful,” he said. “I think that there will be many people who will want to keep a table under their bed.” Mma Makutsi was non-committal; there may be many such people, but this was not the time to think about them. This was a time to think about that scheming Violet Sephotho and what could be done about her. She could try to warn her off, Mma Makutsi thought, by telling her that she was well aware of what her real intentions were. Violet, however, was not the sort to buckle under a threat; she would simply deny that she knew what the accusation was about. Another option would be to speak to Phuti's uncles. That was always an option in Botswana, where uncles on both sides took a close interest in engagements and marriages. It would be perfectly proper for her uncles to go to see Phuti's uncles and to express their concern about the danger that Violet represented to the future marriage.

Yet there was a difficulty here: this would have been a reasonable course of action, but only if she could trust her uncles to be discreet, and she feared that she could not do that. Her senior uncle, in particular, the one with the broken nose, was noted for his lack of tact. He would insist on being involved in any negotiation, and he would be bound to make matters worse. He would make demands, possibly even threats, and a family like the Radiphuti family, which spoke quietly and with circumspection, would be offended if her uncle made too much fuss. Oh, I am miserable, thought Mma Makutsi. I am stuck and miserable like a cow on a railway line who sees the train from Mafikeng bearing down upon her and cannot bring herself to move.