Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 Read Free

big wedding. Weddings cost a lot, you know. Maybe it will be next
year, or the year after that, but we shall certainly get married. There is no
doubt about that.”
    “But I have got money in the Standard
Chartered Bank,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I could use that or I could
sell some cattle. I still have some cattle that my father left me. They have
multiplied. I have almost two hundred now.”
    “You must not
sell cattle,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “It is good to keep cattle.
We must wait.”
    He stared at her, almost reproachfully, and Mma
Ramotswe looked away. The subject was too awkward, too raw, to be discussed
openly, and so she did not pursue the matter. It seemed as if he was frightened
of marriage, which must be the reason why he was proving so slow to commit
himself. Well, there were men like that; nice men who were fond enough of women
but who were wary of getting married. If that was the case, then she would be
realistic about it and continue to be an engaged lady. It was not a bad
situation to be in, after all; indeed, there were some arguments for preferring
an engagement to a marriage. You often heard of difficult husbands, but how
often did you hear of difficult fiancés? The answer to that, thought Mma
Ramotswe, was never.
    Mr J.L.B. Matekoni left the room, and Mma Ramotswe
picked up her mug of bush tea. If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then
she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy
her free time. She would read a bit more and spend more time on her shopping.
And she might also join a club of some sort, if she could find one, or perhaps
even form one herself, perhaps something like a Cheerful Ladies’ Club, a
club for ladies in whose lives there was some sort of gap—in her case a
gap of waiting—but who were determined to make the most of their time. It
was a sentiment of which her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, would have
approved; her father, that good man who had always used his time to good effect
and who was always in her thoughts, as constantly and supportively as if he
were buried under the floor directly beneath her.

    CHAPTER TWO

    HOW TO RUN AN ORPHAN FARM
    M MA SILVIA POTOKWANE, the matron of the orphan farm, was sorting out
bits of carpeting for a jumble sale. The pieces of carpet were scattered about
the ground under a large syringa tree, and she and several of the housemothers
were busy placing them in order of desirability. The carpets were not old at
all, but were off-cuts which had been donated by a flooring firm in Gaborone.
At the end of every job, no matter how careful the carpet layers were, there
would always be odd pieces which simply did not fit. Sometimes these were quite
large, if the end of a roll had been used, or the room had been a particularly
awkward shape. But none of them was square or rectangular, and this meant that
their usefulness was limited.
    “Nobody has a room this
shape,” said one of the housemothers, drawing Mma Potokwane’s
attention to a triangular piece of flecked red carpet. “I do not know
what we can do with this.”
    Mma Potokwane bent down to examine the
carpet. It was not easy for her to bend, as she was an unusually traditional
shape. She enjoyed her food, certainly, but she was also very active, and one
might have thought that all that walking about the orphan farm, peering into
every corner just to keep everybody on their toes, would have shed the pounds,
but it had not. All the women in her family had been that build, and it had
brought them good fortune and success; there was no point, she felt, being a
thin and unhappy person when the attractions of being a comfortable person were
so evident. And men liked women like that too. It was a terrible thing that the
outside world had done to Africa, bringing in the idea that slender ladies,
some as thin as a sebokoldi, a millipede, should be considered desirable. That
was not what men really wanted. Men wanted women whose shape reminded them