The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

just find a place to set up their own homes and breed their own families. “People have been pushed out by those insects,” somebody once told Mma Ramotswe. “I know a woman who let one or two of them come into the house and then did not deal with them. Then two days later there were five hundred, and a few days after that all her walls were covered with them and she had to move out.”
    Mma Ramotswe did not believe that story; people exaggerated for effect, especially when it came to the creatures they encountered. If people said that they almost stepped on a snake in the bush, then that snake would always be a black mamba—it would never be one of those more numerous, but less dramatic, grass snakes. Those ordinary snakes were scared of people and would do anything to avoid an encounter, but they, for dramatic reasons, seemed never to feature in people’s stories.
    Mind you, that was no reason to be complacent about black mambas. Most people had seen one at one time or another, as black mambas were to be found now and then, along with cobras, puff adders, and other potentially lethal snakes.
    As she looked around at her kitchen that morning, Mma Ramotswe wondered whether there were any places where a black mamba might lurk if it were to decide to come into the house. It was not at all fanciful to entertain such a possibility: snakes did come into houses, especially during the hot weather when even a cold-blooded creature like a snake might find the blast of the midday sun too hot to bear. She remembered a snake coming into the house in Mochudi when she was a girl and Obed Ramotswe spotting it. He had whispered to her to stand quite still while he reached for his
sjambok,
that hide whip used to drive mules and oxen. The snake, though, had seen his movement and had raised its head, ready to strike. Fortunately, it had thought better of it, and had turned tail and shot out of the house. She had not seen a snake in the house since then, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.
    She noticed that there was a small hole between the floor and the base of one of the cupboards. She had not seen it before, and it occurred to her that the bottom of a cupboard, the dark place below, would be an ideal place for a snake to hide. Coiled up in such a refuge, cool and concealed, a snake would be well placed to take advantage of any scraps of food that might fall off the well-stocked shelves above…if snakes liked such things. Presumably they did. And of course there was nothing a snake liked more than a hen’s egg, and there were always plenty of eggs in that particular cupboard. It would be simplicity itself for a reasonably lengthy snake—and black mambas were often as long as a person is tall—to slide the upper part of its body up to the bowl of eggs, open wide its hinged jaws, and swallow one. A black mamba might find such living quarters highly congenial and might live there for months, for years indeed, before the unfortunate householder detected his presence. And that would be the point at which the uninvited guest said to his unwilling host: “I’m sorry, but now it’s time for you to go,” and those wicked little fangs would be exposed and…She shuddered.
    She crossed the kitchen to stand immediately in front of the cupboard. Very gently, she eased open the cupboard door and gazed at the shelves on which the various foodstuffs were stacked. Right at the top were the sweet things—the jars of produce she bought from the sale of work out at Kgali Junction: melon jam, cumquat spread, marmalade made out of bitter oranges from the Cape. There was the tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, with its picture of a contented lion on the label; there was the box of sugar lumps; there was the sticky cordial that she had made for the children.
    On the shelf below, she kept tinned foods: sardines from the fisheries of Namibia, bully beef from the factory down at Lobatse, tins of baked beans in tomato sauce. And then, on the shelf below,