Free Precious and Grace by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

keep a dog in the garage.”
    “I’m not surprised,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We couldn’t leave a dog here overnight. He would be miserable. He’d just howl.”
    “I know,” said Fanwell. “But I can’t take him home. My uncle has said that he will not have a dog about the place. He says there isn’t even enough room for the people already in the house.”
    Mma Ramotswe had seen the house that Fanwell lived in; she knew that what he said was true: it was a very small house, not much more than a shack, really, and there were at least three people in every room. She thought, too, that there was probably not much spare food in the house, and that even the few scraps that a dog needed would be hard to come by.
    She scratched her head. “I will have to think about this,” she said. “We can’t leave him here.”
    She made her way back into the office, where Mma Makutsi greeted her with an inquisitive look.
    “I’ve seen the dog,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I’m not surprised. These creatures have maps in their heads. I’m not surprised he came back.”
    Her calm acceptance caught Mma Makutsi unawares.
    “But I never thought…”
    “Well,” said Mma Ramotswe. “As I said, I’m not all that surprised.”
    She crossed the room to switch on the kettle. “Tea helps in these situations,” she said. “It clears the mind. It helps you think of possible solutions.”
    “I can see none,” said Mma Makutsi.
    Mma Ramotswe returned to her desk. She stared up at the ceiling with its criss-cross of fly tracks. For flies, the ceiling board must have been a great white Kalahari, featureless and limitless.
    “Mma Makutsi,” she began. “You have a lot of room at that new place of yours. You have a very big yard. You have that man who works in the garden for you. You have all that space.”
    Mma Makutsi looked suspicious. “Yes, Mma, all of that is true, but…”
    “I just wondered whether you wouldn’t find a dog useful. You don’t have one at the moment, do you?”
    Mma Makutsi took off her glasses and polished them energetically. “You’re not suggesting, are you, Mma, that I should take Fanwell’s dog? That it should come and live with Phuti and me?”
    “The thought had crossed my mind,” said Mma Ramotswe.
    “Well, it’s out of the question,” said Mma Makutsi firmly. “Phuti does not want another dog. He had one, and it was a lot of trouble. It bit people. He does not want history to repeat itself.”
    “So I take it that means no?”
    Mma Makutsi nodded. “I’m sorry, Mma. I’d like to help, but I can’t take Fanwell’s dog.”
    Mma Ramotswe felt that she had to correct her. “It’s not Fanwell’s dog,” she said. “Not really.”
    “It thinks it is,” said Mma Makutsi. “It has adopted him, I think. That’s what’s happened, Mma. Dogs can sometimes do that. They see somebody and think,
That’s a good person who will give me a lot to eat,
and that’s that—as far as the dog’s concerned.” She rose to her feet. The kettle was beginning to boil and she usually made the tea. As she prepared the teapot and cups, she continued: “We had a case like that in Bobonong, you know. It was a long time ago. There was a very small man—really small, Mma; about half the size of Mr. Polopetsi, although he had a very big nose—and this big dog came into the village and sat outside this small man’s house. It was a very large dog, Mma—I’m not exaggerating when I say that when people first saw it they thought it was a donkey, but then it began to bark and they realised that it was a dog.”
    Mma Ramotswe sat back in her seat. She had never visited Bobonong, and felt that her idea of the place, as depicted in Mma Makutsi’s stories, was an unlikely one; dogs as large as donkeys, very small men with outsized noses…it all sounded rather improbable.
    “Anyway,” Mma Makutsi went on, “this dog just sat outside the small man’s house, and when the man came out of the house he licked