The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

she should put Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni in the path of a woman like that. But it was too late to do anything about it, and so she looked at her watch and rose to her feet. She would not think about it any more, or she would have difficulty in getting to sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

    MMA RAMOTSWE GOES TO MOCHUDI WITH MR POLOPETSI, IN THE TINY WHITE VAN
    M MA RAMOTSWE TRAVELLED to Mochudi the next day. She decided to take Mr. Polopetsi with her; there was nothing for him to do in the garage that morning and he had asked Mma Makutsi three times if there was anything that he could help her with in the office. She had tried to think of some task, and failed, and so Mma Ramotswe had invited him to accompany her on the Mochudi trip. She enjoyed his company, and it would be good to have somebody to talk to. Whether he would contribute anything to her enquiries there was another matter; Mr. Polopetsi, she feared, would never distinguish himself in the role of detective, as he tended to jump to conclusions and to act impetuously. But there was something appealing about him that made all that forgivable—an earnestness combined with a slight air of vulnerability that made people, particularly women, want to protect him. Even Mma Makutsi, who was famously short with the two apprentices and who tended to talk to men as if they were children, had been won over by Mr. Polopetsi. “There are many men for whom there does not appear to be any reason,” she once said to Mma Ramotswe. “But I don’t feel that about Mr. Polopetsi. Even when he is standing there, doing nothing, I don’t think that.”
    It had been a curious thing to say, but then Mma Makutsi often said things that surprised Mma Ramotswe and she had become used to her pronouncements. But what made this remark particularly unusual was the fact that it was made while Mr. Polopetsi was in the office, busying himself with the making of a pot of tea. Mma Makutsi must have been aware of his coming into the room, but must simply have forgotten his presence after a few moments and addressed Mma Ramotswe without thinking. And there was no doubt in Mma Ramotswe’s mind that Mr. Polopetsi had heard what was said about him, for he stopped stirring the tea for a moment, as if frozen, and then, after a few seconds, began to rattle the spoon about the pot more vigorously than before. Mma Ramotswe had felt acutely embarrassed, but had decided that the remark was hardly unflattering to Mr. Polopetsi, even if he had scurried out of the room, his mug of tea in his hand, studiously avoiding looking at the author of the remark. For Mma Makutsi’s part, she had simply raised an eyebrow when she realised that he had heard her, and shrugged, as if this was merely one of those things that happened in offices.
    They drove out to Mochudi on the old road, because that was the way that Mma Ramotswe had always travelled and because it was quieter. It was a bright morning, and there was warmth in the air; not the heat that would come in a month or so and build up over the final months of the year, but a pleasant feeling of a benign sun upon the skin. As they left Gaborone behind them, the houses and their surrounding plots gave way to the bush, to the expanses of dry grass dotted with acacia and smaller thorn bushes that were halfway between trees and shrubs. Here and there was a dry river bed, a scar of sand that would remain parched until the rainy season, when it would be covered with swift-moving dun-coloured water, a proper river for a few days until it all drained off and the bed would cake and crack in the sun.
    For a while they did not talk. Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window of her tiny white van, savouring the feeling of heading somewhere she was always happy to be going; for Mochudi was home, the place from which she had come and to which she knew that she would one day return for good. Mr. Polopetsi looked straight ahead, at the road unfolding ahead of them, lost in thoughts