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

were the perishables—the packets of flour, the container into which she decanted the maize meal, and the bowl of eggs. She bought these eggs from a man who called round on his bicycle every week, a man who wore a crumpled hat not unlike the hat that her late father had worn; she could never turn down a man in a hat like that. He told her that they came from his hens at Mochudi, and she had bought them on the grounds that Mochudi eggs would have been the eggs she ate as a child, but then one day she discovered a supermarket stamp on one of them and her faith in the egg-man had been dented. His prices were still competitive, though, and she liked him in spite of his unreliability on that point.
    She looked at the eggs. Suddenly she noticed that one of them had two small holes—two puncture holes—on its top. It was, she thought, exactly the sort of mark a snake would make if it had tried, and failed, to swallow an egg. She looked more closely, nestling the egg in the palm of her hand while she peered at the tiny punctures. The shell was slightly speckled at that point, with fragments of white mixed with the brown, and she decided, with a surge of relief, that these were not holes at all but imperfections in the surface: the egg itself was quite intact.
    She replaced the egg and gazed at the food cupboard, trying to remember when it was that she had last tidied it. Never, she thought; I have never tidied the food cupboard. The thought made her smile. How many women were there in Botswana walking about with the guilty knowledge that they
had never tidied the food cupboard
? Everybody had some secret or other—something they had never confessed to another, even to those who were closest to them. In her work, Mma Ramotswe had learned this and had discovered, too, that even the most inconsequential of secrets could weigh heavily on a person’s soul. An act of selfishness, some small unkindness, could seem every bit as grave as a dreadful crime; an entirely human failing, a weakness in the face of temptation, could be as burdensome as a major character flaw: the size of the secret said nothing about its weight on the soul.
    She tried to think of any other secrets she might have, but she could think of nothing. She had a weakness for fat cakes, but then that was hardly a secret to anybody who knew her, and indeed half the population of Botswana—no, more than that—almost the entire population had that weakness. Perhaps further secrets would surface. And as for her friends, what about them? What secrets did Mma Makutsi have? The answer to that came to her quickly: Mma Makutsi had more shoes than she would own up to having. She had claimed the other day she possessed only six pairs, but Mma Ramotswe was sure that this was not true. And Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni: What were his secrets? None, she thought—apart, perhaps, from the subject of at least some of his dreams. He was quite happy to tell her when he had had a dream about gearboxes and engines—which was almost every night, as far as she could work out—but there were some mornings when he said he did not remember what he had been dreaming. She was not convinced, but never pressed him on the matter.
    And then there was Puso. He was such an odd little boy, with such an active imagination; one might suppose that his was a life filled with secrets, but she knew that this was far from true. Puso still had the honesty of childhood and tended to reveal without hesitation what was in his mind. But there was a secret—and now she remembered it.
Puso drank the bathwater when he was still in it.
She had seen him doing it, and had been about to admonish him when she stopped herself. Children needed at least some corners in their lives where there was no adult footfall. That might be one.
    She reached out to the top shelf of the cupboard for a packet of spices. The date by which the contents were to be consumed was printed on the packaging. It was more or less exactly three years