In the Company of Cheerful Ladies Read Free Page B

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.
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    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 something,
    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 ani1
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    mal 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 the Botswana 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