The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine Read Free Page B

thought for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he said at last.
    It was not the answer that Mma Ramotswe would have given. She was of the view that things were getting better, even if there were temporary setbacks and even if there was very little light at the end of the tunnel. But in her opinion, the last thing one should do was to bemoan the fact that things were changing. She would not slip into a position that failed to see any progress in human affairs. There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before. There were more civil liberties, more literacy, more children surviving that first critical year of infancy; there was a lot of which one could be proud. And Charlie would be a better young man eventually—all he needed was time, which was what we all required.
    Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni tried another tack. “But you deserve it, Mma. We all agree about that. We all think you deserve a holiday.”
    She smiled at the kindness, but then, as she turned back towards the pot on the stove, the implications of what he had just said sunk in.
We all think you deserve a holiday…
This meant that they had been discussing it among themselves. Why had they done this? Was it a…she hardly dared say the word to herself, but now she forced herself to face it. Was it a
plot
?
    She closed her eyes and for a moment saw Mma Makutsi lurking in the shadows somewhere with some faceless ally, her presence only betrayed by a glint of light catching the glass of her spectacles. And she heard her saying, “Well, that’s got rid of her for the time being. She’ll be off for…” And the other conspirator would say, “She’ll be off forever, not that she’ll suspect it.”
    The resentment welled up within her, but subsided very quickly when she reminded herself that she was putting these words into Mma Makutsi’s mouth and there was no evidence, not one scrap, that suggested that her colleague—or anybody else—wanted her out of the way. Even so, she saw no reason at all to take a holiday—none whatsoever. And Mma Makutsi would never betray her; she just would not. There were some people about whom one could say that sort of thing—and Mma Makutsi was one such person—but generally one had to be careful about trusting the rest of humanity; sometimes the people who were closest to you were also those who were furthest away. One should remember that, she told herself: there were no plots being hatched against her—there just were not.
But how do you know that?
asked a tiny voice, from somewhere down below.
How can you be so sure?
    She looked down at her shoes. Had they spoken? If there were any speaking shoes, then they belonged to Mma Makutsi, not to her; unless, of course, the condition, whatever it was, were an infectious one, and she had now caught it. No, that was ridiculous—patently so. She knew that any utterances that came from down below were almost certainly no more than tricks played by the mind, even if the questions they asked, or the observations they made, seemed penetrating and acute. One might hear anything, if one allowed one’s mind to wander; people said, for instance, that if you stood out under the stars above the Kalahari, under those great silver-white fields of distant light, you could hear a
tsk-tsk
sound that was the stars calling to their hunting dogs. But in reality there was no sound—or if there was, it came from somewhere closer at hand, from scurrying insects, timid creatures whose job it was to whistle and whisper in the darkness.
    “I just know,” she muttered.
    “More fool you,” said the shoes.

CHAPTER TWO
THE BIRDS HAVE THEIR WORK TO DO
    T HE EVENTS that preceded Mma Ramotswe’s holiday happened in such rapid succession that later it was difficult for her to identify the point at which she had reached the decision to take the holiday. In fact, when she came to