The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

CHAPTER SEVEN HOW DOES ONE BECOME MORE EXCITING?

IF I CAN FIX A CAR, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni told himself, then I can do a simple thing like find out whether a man is seeing a woman. And yet, now that he came to start the enquiry, he was not sure whether it would be quite as straightforward as he had imagined it would be. He could have asked Mma Ramotswe’s advice, but she was preoccupied with the consequences of Mma Makutsi’s departure and he did not want to add to her burdens. As far as the garage was concerned, Charlie still had to work a week’s notice—he had spared him a longer period than that, although he would have been entitled to insist on a month. Fortunately, since it was a relatively quiet period—the school holidays, when people tended not to find fault with their cars and when thoughts of routine servicing were put aside—it would be easy for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to take a few hours off every day, should the need arise. The younger apprentice was slightly more reliable than Charlie anyway, and could now cope with many routine garage tasks, and Mr Polopetsi was also showing himself to be a natural mechanic. Of course he had aspirations to Mma Makutsi’s job, but Mr J.L.B. Matekoni doubted whether these ambitions would be satisfied. Mma Makutsi had done a lot of filing and typing, and he could not see Mr Polopetsi settling down to these mundane tasks. He wanted to be out and about, looking into things, and what Mma Ramotswe had said about his talents in this respect suggested that she might not be keen for him to do too much of that.

It was all very well being confident, but as you climbed the outside staircase of the President Hotel, on your way to meet the client for your first proper conversation with her, then you felt a certain anxiety. It was not dissimilar to the way you felt when, as an apprentice, you stripped an engine down by yourself for the very first time, decoked it and fitted new piston rings. Would everything fit together again? Would it work? He looked over his shoulder at the scene in the square below. Traders had set up stalls, no more than upturned boxes in many cases, or rugs laid out on the concrete paving, and were selling their wares to passers-by: combs, hair preparations, trinkets, carvings for visitors. In one corner, a small knot of people clustered around a seller of traditional medicines, listening carefully as the gnarled herbalist explained to them the merits of the barks and roots that he had ranged in front of him. He at least knew what he was talking about, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni; he at least was doing what he had always done, and doing it well, unlike those who suddenly decide, in mid-life, that they want to become private detectives…

He reached the top of the stairway and entered under the cool canopies of the hotel’s verandah. He looked about him; only a few of the tables were occupied, and he saw Mma Botumile immediately, sitting at the far end, a cup of coffee before her. He stood still for a moment and took a deep breath. She looked up and saw him and gestured to the empty chair at her table.

“I have been waiting, Rra,” she said, looking at her watch. “You said…”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni consulted his own watch. He had made a point of being on time and had not expected to be censured for lateness. She had said eleven o’clock, had she not? He felt a pang of doubt.

“Ten forty-five,” she said. “You said ten forty-five.”

He was flustered. “I thought I said eleven. I am sorry, Mma. I thought…”

She brushed aside his apology. “It does not matter,” she said. “Where is Mma Ramotswe?”

“She is in the office,” he said. “She has assigned me to this case.”

Mma Botumile, who had been lifting her cup of coffee to her lips, put it down sharply. A small splash of coffee spilled over the rim of the cup and fell on the table. “Why is she not dealing with this?” she asked coldly. “Does she think that I am not important enough for her? Is that it? Well, there are other detectives, I’ll have you know.”

“There aren’t,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni politely. “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is the only agency. There are no other detectives that I know of.”

Mma Botumile digested this information. She looked Mr J.L.B. Matekoni up and down before she spoke again. “I thought that you were the mechanic.”

“I am,” he said. “But I also do investigations.” He thought for a few moments. “It is useful to have an ordinary occupation while at the same time you conduct enquiries.” He had no idea why this should be so, but it seemed to him to be a reasonable thing to say.

Mma Botumile lifted up her coffee cup again. “Do you know my husband?” she asked.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. “You must tell me about him,” he said. “That is why I wanted to meet you today. I need to know something more about him before I can find out what he is doing.”

A waitress came to the table and looked expectantly at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He had not thought about what he would have, but now he felt that tea would be the right thing on a morning like this, which was getting hotter—you could feel it. He was about to order when Mma Botumile waved the waitress away. “We don’t need anything,” she said.

He watched in astonishment as the waitress walked off. “I thought that I…,” he began.

“No time,” said Mma Botumile. “This is business, remember. I am paying for your time, I take it. Two hundred pula an hour, or something like that?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni did not know what to say. There would be a fee, of course, but he had not thought about what it would be. He was accustomed to charging for mechanical work and he imagined that each case would have its mechanical equivalent. Finding out about an errant husband would be the equivalent perhaps of a full service, with oil change and attention to brakes. A more complex enquiry might be charged at the same rate as the replacement of a timing chain. He had not worked any of this out, but he would certainly not be charging two hundred pula an hour to sit and talk on the verandah of the President Hotel.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was a tolerant man, not given to animosity of any sort, but as he gazed at Mma Botumile he found himself developing a strong dislike for her. But he knew too that this was dangerous; he knew that as a professional person he should keep personal feelings strictly out of the picture. He had heard Mma Ramotswe talk about this before, and he had agreed with her. One simply could not allow one’s feelings to get in the way of one’s judgement. It was exactly the same with cars: emotion should not come into decisions about a car’s future, no matter what the bonds between the car and the owner. But then there was Mma Ramotswe’s tiny white van; if ever there were a case for not allowing emotion to cloud one’s view of a vehicle, then that was it. He had nursed and cajoled that vehicle when good sense suggested that it should be replaced by something more modern, but Mma Ramotswe would have none of that. “I cannot see myself in a new car,” she said. “I am a tiny white van person. That is what I want.”

He lowered his gaze; Mma Botumile was staring back at him and he felt uncomfortable. “You must tell me about your husband,” he said. “I must know the sort of things that he likes to do.”

Mma Botumile settled back in her chair. “My husband is not a very strong man,” she said. “He is one of those men who does not really know what he wants. I can tell, of course, what he wants, but he cannot.” She looked at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as if expecting a challenge to this, but when none came she continued. “We have been married for twenty years now, which is a long time. We met when we were both students at the University of Botswana. I am a B.Com., you see. He is an accountant with a mining company.

“We built a house out over near the Western by-pass, near where the Grand Palm Hotel is. It is a very fine house—you may have seen it from the road, Rra. It has gates which go like this—large gates. You know the place?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni did, and he had often wondered who would build gates like those; now he knew.

He nodded and waited for her to continue, but she was silent, watching him over the rim of her coffee cup.

“And was this marriage a happy one?” he asked finally. He found that the question came out in those words without his really having to think very much about it. Where had it come from? He suddenly remembered: years before, he had been in the High Court in Lobatse, waiting to give evidence in a case involving a road accident, and he had slipped into one of the courts to watch a case. He remembered the lawyer standing at his table, facing a woman who was sitting in the witness box, crying. And the lawyer suddenly spoke and said to her: “And was this marriage a happy one?” and the woman had started to cry all the more. What a ridiculous question, he had thought; what a ridiculous question to ask of a woman who was in floods of tears. Of course the marriage was not a happy one. But the question itself had sounded so impressive, that he had remembered it, little thinking that years later he would be able to use those precise words.

Unlike the witness, Mma Botumile did not burst into tears. “Of course it was happy,” she said. “And still is. Or rather, could be, if he stopped seeing that other woman.”

“Have you spoken to him about her?” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni asked.

Mma Botumile was dismissive. “Of course not! And, anyway, what could I say? I know nothing about this woman, whoever she is. That is for you to find out.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni pondered this for a moment. “But you do know that he’s seeing a woman, do you?” he asked.

“Oh, I know that all right,” said Mma Botumile. “Women know these things.”

Intuition, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. That’s what women claimed they had and men did not, or did not have enough of: intuition. He had often wondered, though, how one could know something without actually hearing it, or seeing it, or even smelling it. If one did not acquire knowledge from one’s senses, then where would one acquire it? That’s what he would have liked to ask Mma Botumile, but felt that he could not. She was not a woman, he felt, who would take well to being challenged.

“I see,” he said mildly. “But, do you mind telling me how women know these things? I’m sure they do know them, but how come?”

For the first time in the course of their meeting, Mma Botumile smiled. “It’s easier to talk to another woman about these matters,” she said. “But since your Mma Ramotswe is so busy, I suppose that I shall have to talk to you, Rra.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni waited.

Mma Botumile lowered her voice. “Men make certain demands of ladies,” she said. “And if they stop, then it’s a very good sign. Any woman knows that.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni caught his breath.

There was a glint of amusement in Mma Botumile’s eye. “Yes,” she said. “That is always a sign that the man has another friend.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni did not know what to say. He looked down at the table, and then at the floor. Somebody had spilled some sugar from the table, a small line of white grains, and he noticed that a troop of ants, marshalled with military precision, had arrived to carry them off, minuscule porters staggering under the weight of their trophies.

“So that is what you need to find out, Rra,” said Mma Botumile, signalling to the waitress to bring her bill. “You will have to follow him and find out who this lady is. I can give you no help about that—that is why I have asked you. That is why you are being paid two hundred pula an hour.”

“I’m not,” muttered Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

HE LEFT THE PRESIDENT HOTEL uncertain what to do and unsure, he now realised, whether he wanted to carry out this investigation at all. The meeting with Mma Botumile had not been a satisfactory one. She had given him no guidance as to where he might start looking for her husband’s girlfriend, and the only suggestion that she had made was that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni might follow him after work one day and see where he went. “He certainly doesn’t come home straightaway,” she said. “He says that he’s seeing clients, but I don’t believe that, do you?” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni muttered something which could have been yes or equally could have been no. He did not like being expected to take sides like this, and yet, he told himself, this is what must be expected of people like private detectives, or lawyers, for that matter. People paid them to take their side, and this meant that you had to believe in what the client wanted. The thought made him feel very uncomfortable. What if you were to be hired by somebody whom you could not bear, or if you found out that the person who had engaged you was lying? Would you have to pretend that you believed the lies—which would be impossible, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni—or could you tell them that you would have no truck with their falsehoods?

And then another thought struck Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as he made his way down the steps of the President Hotel. He had never met Mma Botumile’s husband and he had no idea what he was like. But it occurred to him, nonetheless, that when he eventually met him—if he eventually met him—he would probably feel sorry for him and end up rather liking him. If he were to be married to Mma Botumile, whom he considered both rude and bossy, then would he not himself seek comfort elsewhere, in the arms of a good, sympathetic woman—somebody like Mma Ramotswe in fact? Of course Mma Ramotswe would never look at another man—Mr J.L.B. Matekoni knew that. He stopped. It had never once crossed his mind that Mma Ramotswe might take up with somebody else, but then many people who were let down in this way by their spouses never thought that this would happen to them, and yet it did. So there were many people who deluded themselves.

It was a very unwelcome thought, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt himself becoming hot and uncomfortable as he stood there in front of the President Hotel, thinking the unthinkable. He saw himself coming home one evening and discovering a man’s tie, perhaps, draped over a chair. He saw himself picking up the tie, examining it, and then dangling it in front of Mma Ramotswe and saying, How could you, Mma Ramotswe? How could you? And she would look anywhere but in his eyes and say, Well, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, it’s not as if you have been a very exciting husband, you know. It was ridiculous. Mma Ramotswe would never say a thing like that; he had done his best to be a good husband to her. He had never strayed, and he had helped around the house as modern husbands are meant to do. In fact, he had done everything in his power to be modern, even when that had not been particularly easy.

Suddenly Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt unaccountably sad. A man might try to be modern—and succeed, to a degree—but it was very difficult to be exciting. Women these days had magazines which showed them exciting men—bright-eyed men, posed with smiling women, and everyone clearly enjoying themselves greatly. The men would perhaps be holding a car key, or even be leaning against an expensive German vehicle, and the women would be laughing at something that the exciting men had said, something exciting. Surely Mma Ramotswe would not be influenced by such artificiality, and yet she certainly did look at these magazines, which were passed on to her by Mma Makutsi. She affected to laugh at them, but then if she really found them so ridiculous, surely she would not bother to read them in the first place?

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stood at the edge of the square, looking over the traders’ stalls, deep in thought. Then he asked himself a question which, although easily posed, was rather more difficult to answer: How does a husband become more exciting?