Free Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith

come up tomorrow.”
    Fanwell smiled. “Would you like to bet on that one, Mma Ramotswe?” he asked. “Ten pula?”
    WHEN THE TIME CAME to leave the office that evening, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was out on a call, and so there was no need for discretion.
    “I am going to drive Fanwell back to his place,” Mma Ramotswe announced to Mma Makutsi. “I can drop you off first, Mma, and then go on to Old Naledi, where he lives.”
    “And what about me?” asked Charlie, who had overheard the conversation from outside the door. “Why are you taking him and not me, Mma? What is wrong with me?”
    “There is a lot wrong with you, Charlie,” interjected Mma Makutsi. “I have been making a big list these last few years, and it is now about three pages long.”
    “I was talking to Mma Ramotswe,” Charlie called out. “I was talking to the lady who is the boss. It is best to talk to the man who is selling the cow and not to the cow itself.”
    Mma Makutsi's eyes flashed in anger. “Are you calling me acow, Charlie? Did I hear you right? Are you saying that I am a cow?” She turned to Mma Ramotswe in outrage. “Did you hear that, Mma? Did you hear what he said?”
    Mma Ramotswe made a placatory gesture. “I do not think you two should fight. And you must not say things like that, Charlie. It is very rude to call another person a chicken.”
    “A chicken? I did not call her a chicken. I called her a …”
    “Well, there you are,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You've admitted it.”
    Charlie was silent.
    “And I'll drive you home some time next week. I promise you. It will be your turn then. Now it is Fanwell's.”
    They closed up the office and walked over to the tiny white van. The blister had stopped troubling her; it had burst, she thought, and walking was comfortable again. If only all our troubles were like that; and perhaps they were. Perhaps the trick was to do what was necessary to deal with them, to put a plaster on them and then forget that they were there.
    Mma Makutsi got into the passenger seat while Fanwell climbed into the back. Then, as they set off, Mma Makutsi launched into a description of what she was planning to cook for Phuti Radiphuti that evening. She would make a stew, she said, which had the best Botswana beef in it, the very best. She had been given the meat by a cousin who had slaughtered it himself and who said that he knew the parents and the grandparents of the animal in question. “And they were all delicious, he said, Mma. He said that they were a very delicious family.”
    Mma Ramotswe dropped Mma Makutsi off at her house and Fanwell came to take her place in the passenger seat. As they drove off, he listened very carefully to the engine note, frowning in concentration as Mma Ramotswe took the van up to the speed at which the noise became noticeable.
    “That is a very bad sound, Mma,” he said. “Very bad.”
    Mma Ramotswe had been expecting this verdict, but she urged him not to make up his mind before he had actually looked at the engine. “It could be a temporary noise,” she ventured. “Don't you think that it could be a temporary noise, Fanwell?”
    He did not. “It is permanent,” he said. “That is a very permanent noise, Mma Ramotswe.”
    They turned off the main road and began to travel into the heart of Old Naledi, the sprawling collection of meagre houses, some not much better than shelters, that stood cheek by jowl with the rest of well-set Gaborone. By the standards of African shanty towns elsewhere, it was princely, with standpipes for fresh water and lighting along the bumpy roads, but it was still the most deprived part of town and if one was looking for poverty in an otherwise prosperous country, then this was the place to find it.

CHAPTER SIX

FANWELL'S HOUSE
    I T WAS NOT the smallest of houses, as it had two rooms; there were smaller places nearby—single-roomed, made of baked-mud bricks and topped with slanting roofs of corrugated iron, kept standing not so much by