The Double Comfort Safari Club by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

never find anybody suitable. That would have been a bleak conclusion for anybody to reach, and particularly somebody as young as Mma Makutsi. But one had to be realistic, and there seemed to be few men apparently interested in a woman with problematic skin and large glasses. Most men, it appeared, were more interested in the likes of Violet Sephotho, the arch-Jezebel who had graduated with barely fifty per cent from the Botswana Secretarial College. She it was who had shamelessly attempted to win Phuti from Mma Makutsi by insinuating herself into a job at the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, in the bed department, of all departments—how appropriate and inappropriate at the same time—and had, thankfully, failed. Violet would have shown not the slightest scrap of interest in Phuti had she not realised that he was a wealthy man. That changed everything in her book: Howcould she be indifferent to a man who was due to inherit a large furniture shop
and
the large herd of cattle built up by his father, the very elderly but not quite yet late Mr. Radiphuti Senior?
    The material comfort that Phuti offered had not been a consideration for Mma Makutsi. Indeed, when she had met him at that fateful first session of the Botswana Academy of Dance and Movement, she had been unaware of who he was and what he possessed. All she knew was that here was a man with a very bad stutter and a marked lack of dancing ability. For a few brief moments she had felt a certain irritation at the fact that he had been designated as her partner, particularly with Violet Sephotho smirking at her with her elegant, deft-of-foot partner, but her impatience had quickly been replaced by sympathy. There was something gentle about this man with his awkward ways, and that could not but appeal to a woman. Affection and friendship had grown into something else, and she had come to appreciate and love Phuti more than she had ever loved any man. Such romantic feelings as she had experienced before were mere shallow infatuations when compared with the emotions that now overcame her.
Mrs. Grace Radiphuti
, she said to herself, savouring each word and its delicious associations;
wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, Assistant Detective
. No, that was wrong; she, not Phuti, was the assistant detective.
Mrs. Grace Radiphuti, Dip. Sec., Assistant Detective, wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti
. Or even:
Mrs. Grace Radiphuti, Dip. Sec. (97), Assistant Detective, wife of Mr. Phuti Radiphuti
. The words were ripe with a sense of achievement; it was a long way from that to Bobonong, and to the days when she had had nothing, or next to nothing; when every pula, every thebe, had to be counted and made the most of. People talked of grinding poverty; well, that was exactly what poverty did—it ground.
    Yet she was determined that when she married she would notforget who she was and who her people were. She would not affect any airs. When she had gone to the Botswana Secretarial College she had been given a form to fill out, and there had been a question in it about parental occupation. She had written
Peasant
in response to that question, and she would write that again if she had occasion to answer such a question on any of the intrusive forms that various bureaucrats liked people to fill in.
I am the daughter of a peasant, and that is what I shall always be
.
    She stirred the stew, glancing at her watch. Phuti was usually punctual, but every so often there would be some crisis at the furniture shop that required him to stay late at work; this might be holding him back now—some argument over invoices or a discrepancy in the till receipts, or any one of the many minor things that could interrupt the smooth workings of a furniture shop. It did not matter too much: stew did not spoil—indeed, Mma Ramotswe had once suggested to her that the older a stew the better, although within reason, of course.
    But at seven o’clock she began to worry. Phuti had a mobile telephone, but Mma Makutsi did not. He