Free Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 by The Full Cupboard of Life

Matekoni, bent almost double. She
half turned to Mma Ramotswe. “There is a man here,” she said.
“There is a man here listening.”
    Mma Ramotswe shot Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni a warning glance. “He has hurt his back, I think, Mma.
That is why he is standing like that. And anyway, it’s only Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni, who owns the garage. He is entitled to be standing there. He is quite
harmless.”
    Mma Holonga looked again at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who,
feeling that he had to authenticate Mma Ramotswe’s explanation, put a
hand to his back and tried to look uncomfortable.
    “I thought that
he was trying to listen to us,” said Mma Holonga. “That’s
what I thought, Mma.”
    “No, he would not do that,”
said Mma Ramotswe. “Sometimes men just stand around. I think that is what
he was doing.”
    “I see,” said Mma Holonga, making her
way past Mr J.L.B. Matekoni with a sideways glance. “I shall go now, Mma.
But I shall wait to hear from you.”
    “Well, well!”
said Mma Ramotswe as they watched Mma Holonga get into her car. “That was
very awkward. What were you doing listening in at the keyhole?”
    Mr J.L.B. Matekoni laughed. “I was not listening. Or I was not
listening, but just trying to hear …” He trailed off. He was not
explaining it well.
    “You wanted to see if I was busy,”
prompted Mma Ramotswe. “Is that it?”
    Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
nodded. “That was all I was doing.”
    Mma Ramotswe smiled.
“You could always knock and say Ko, Ko. That is how we normally do
things, is it not?”
    Mr J.L.B. Matekoni took the reproach in
silence. He did not wish to argue with Mma Ramotswe over this; he was keen to
tell her about the butcher’s car and he looked eagerly at the tea-pot.
They could sit over a cup of bush tea and he would tell her about the awful
thing that he had discovered quite by chance and she would tell him what to do.
So he made a remark about being thirsty, as it was such a hot day, and Mma
Ramotswe immediately suggested a cup of tea. She could sense that there was
something on his mind and it was surely the function of a wife to listen to her
husband when there was something troubling him. Not that I’m actually a
wife, she told herself; I’m only a fiancée. But even then,
fiancées should listen too, and could give exactly the same sort of
advice as wives gave. So she put on the kettle and they had bush tea together,
sitting in the shade of the acacia tree, beside Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s
parked truck. And in the tree above them, an African grey dove watched them
from its branch, silently, before it flew off in search of the mate which it
had lost.
     
    MMA RAMOTSWE’S reaction to Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni’s story was exactly as he had thought it would be. She was
angry; not angry in the loud way in which some people were angry, but quietly,
with only pursed lips and a particular look in her eye to show what she was
feeling. She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought
threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not
count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they
would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could
trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.
Everything was based on trust, even day-to-day things like crossing the
road—which required trust that the drivers of cars would be paying
attention—to buying the food from a roadside vendor, whom you trusted not
to poison you. It was a lesson that we learned as children, when our parents
threw us up into the sky and thrilled us by letting us drop into their waiting
arms. We trusted those arms to be there, and they were.
    Mma Ramotswe
was silent for a while after Mr J.L.B. Matekoni finished speaking. “I
know that garage,” she said. “A long time ago, when I first had my
white van, I used to go there. That was before I started coming to Tlokweng
Road Speedy Motors of course.”
    Mr J.L.B. Matekoni