The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

how we thought about things. Her view was the view from Mochudi, where she had been born and brought up by her late father, that great man, Obed Ramotswe. And his view had been the view from where? The view from Botswana, she decided: the view of the world that seemed essentially and naturally right, because it was a view that
understood
how things really were and how God must surely have intended them to be when He first made Botswana. She smiled to herself as she savoured the idea that God had looked at the world, seen a wide stretch of land and had said,
This shall be Botswana
. He had given it the Kalahari; He had given it the good land along the eastern border, and had added, for good measure, the Makadikadi Salt Pans. But then, just as He was about to give it wide and reliable rivers, He was distracted somehow and forgot to finish what He was doing, or found that He had already given all His rivers away and had only a few left for Botswana… It was easily done when you were making a world, especially one as demanding as this, where there were so many people who thought they should have more rivers than they actually had, and who enviously eyed the land – and the rivers – of others.
    ‘What then, Mma Ramotswe?’
    She was brought back to where she was – not in the sky, looking down on Botswana, but in a very real and immediate part of Botswana, namely the kitchen of her house on Zebra Drive, where her husband was about to leave for work and where there were still many chores to do before she herself could leave for her office.
    ‘When Mma Makutsi goes off on maternity leave,’ she answered, ‘then I shall have to get another assistant.’
    Mr J. L. B. Matekoni looked unconvinced. ‘Easier said than done, you know.’
    He was right – she knew that. No doubt she would find somebody who fancied the idea of being her secretary. And this time, she resolved, the post would be very clearly and unambiguously described as a secretarial one, with no suggestion that it was a stepping stone to being an assistant detective or, as Mma Makutsi was at pains to insist, an associate detective, whatever that was. Yes, there would be many applicants for the job, but would any of them be as well qualified and efficient as Mma Makutsi?
    It was difficult to see this happening, for the simple reason that there were presumably no secretaries with anything like Mma Makutsi’s ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College. Mma Makutsi had reported that a young woman from Mahalapye had recently managed to get eighty-three per cent in the finals – a very creditable mark but still a whole fourteen per cent shy of her own.
    ‘It was her shorthand that let her down,’ Mma Makutsi had said, adding in a resigned tone: ‘It always is, you know.’
    Mma Ramotswe had replied, ‘Yes, it always is,’ as if she knew about these things. Perhaps she should have said, ‘Yes, and I am let down too, as mine is very rusty,’ but she did not.
    Now, she too stood up from the breakfast table. If she had to get a new secretary, then that was what she would do. And even if she ended up with a secretary whose shorthand let her down – and that seemed to be something that it was simply impossible to avoid – she would make the best of it and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency would continue in whatever way it could.
    She would have to speak to Mma Makutsi that day. At least she did not have to broach the subject of pregnancy itself; at least Mma Makutsi had told her about that. It would be far more difficult for an employer if the employee had not said anything about being pregnant. That would not be easy, she thought, because if you went up to somebody and said,
Are you pregnant?
the question might be taken the wrong way. It might sound as if you had said,
Are you pregnant yet?
Or,
Are you pregnant yet again?
Both of these could be considered rude by some people, and would almost certainly be so viewed by