Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

father had wanted her to
stay on, to do her Cambridge School Certificate, and to go even beyond that,
but Mma Ramotswe was bored with Mochudi. She was bored, too, with working in
the Upright Small General Dealer, where every Saturday she did the stocktaking
and spent hours ticking off items on dog-eared stock lists. She wanted to go
somewhere. She wanted her life to start.
    “You can go to my
cousin,” her father said. “That is a very different place. I think
that you will find lots of things happening in that house.”
    It
cost him a great deal of pain to say this. He wanted her to stay, to look after
him, but he knew that it would be selfish to expect her life to revolve around
his. She wanted freedom; she wanted to feel that she was doing something with
her life. And of course, at the back of his mind, was the thought of marriage.
In a very short time, he knew, there would be men wanting to marry her.
    He would never deny her that, of course. But what if the man who wanted to
marry her was a bully, or a drunkard, or a womaniser? All of this was possible;
there was any number of men like that, waiting for an attractive girl that they
could latch on to and whose life they could slowly destroy. These men were like
leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman’s heart until it was
dry and all her love had been used up. That took a long time, he knew, because
women seemed to have vast reservoirs of goodness in them.
    If one of
these men claimed Precious, then what could he, a father, do? He could warn her
of the risk, but whoever listened to warnings about somebody they loved? He had
seen it so often before; love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to
the most glaring faults. You could love a murderer, and simply not believe that
your lover would do so much as crush a tick, let alone kill somebody. There
would be no point trying to dissuade her.
    The cousin’s house
would be as safe as anywhere, even if it could not protect her from men. At
least the cousin could keep an eye on her niece, and her husband might be able
to chase the most unsuitable men away. He was a rich man now, with more than
five buses, and he would have that authority that rich men had. He might be
able to send some of the young men packing.
     
    THE COUSIN was pleased to have Precious in the house. She decorated a room
for her, hanging new curtains of a thick yellow material which she had bought
from the OK Bazaars on a shopping trip to Johannesburg. Then she filled a chest
of drawers with clothes and put on top of it a framed picture of the Pope. The
floor was covered with a simply patterned reed mat. It was a bright,
comfortable room.
    Precious settled quickly into a new routine. She was
given a job in the office of the bus company, where she added invoices and
checked the figures in the drivers’ records. She was quick at this, and
the cousin’s husband noticed that she was doing as much work as the two
older clerks put together. They sat at their tables and gossiped away the day,
occasionally moving invoices about the desk, occasionally getting up to put on
the kettle.
    It was easy for Precious, with her memory, to remember how
to do new things and to apply the knowledge faultlessly. She was also willing
to make suggestions, and scarcely a week went past in which she failed to make
some suggestion as to how the office could be more efficient.
    “You’re working too hard,” one of the clerks said to her.
“You’re trying to take our jobs.”
    Precious looked at
them blankly. She had always worked as hard as she could, at everything she
did, and she simply did not understand how anybody could do otherwise. How
could they sit there, as they did, and stare into the space in front of their
desks when they could be adding up figures or checking the drivers’
returns?
    She did her own checking, often unasked, and although
everything usually added up, now and then she found a small discrepancy. These
came from the giving of