The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright © 2014 Alexander McCall Smith

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote
brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division
of Random House of Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States
by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, both Penguin
Random House Companies. Originally published in Great Britain by Little, Brown,
an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette U.K. Company, London.
Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948–, author
The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe / Alexander McCall Smith.
(No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series ; 15)

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-345-80861-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80863-9

I. Title. II. Series: McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948– . No. 1

Ladies' Detective Agency series ; 15.

PR6063.C326H35 2014    823'.914    C2014-902477-0

Jacket illustration by Iain McIntosh

v3.1

P
RECIOUS RAMOTSWE
, creator and owner of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, friend of those who needed help with the problems in their lives, and wife of that great
garagiste
Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, felt that there were, broadly speaking, two sorts of days. There were days on which nothing of any consequence took place—these were in a clear majority—and then there were those on which rather too much happened. On those uneventful days you might well wish that a bit more would happen; on days when too much occurred, you longed for life to become a bit quieter.

It had always been like that, she thought, and always would be. As her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, often said: there are always too many cattle or too few—never just the right number. As a child she had wondered what he meant by this; now she knew.

Both sorts of day started in much the same way, with the opening of her eyes to the familiar dappled pattern made by the morning sun on the ceiling above her bed, an indistinct dancing of light, faint at first, but gradually becoming stronger. This intrusion of the dawn came from the gap between the curtains—the gap that she always intended to do something about, but did not because there were more pressing domestic tasks and never enough time for everything
you had to do. And as long as curtains did their main job, which was to prevent nosy people—
unauthorised people
, as Mma Makutsi would call them—from looking into her bedroom without her permission, then she did not have to worry too much about their not meeting in the middle.

She woke up at more or less the same time each morning, thought for a while about getting up, and then rose, leaving Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni still deeply asleep on his side of the bed, dreaming about the sort of things that mechanics, and men in general, dream about. Women, she felt, should not enquire too closely as to what these things were, as they were not the sort of things that women liked very much—engines and football, and so on. A friend had once said to her that men did not dream about things like that—that this was just what women
wanted
men to dream about, while men, in reality, dreamed about things that they would never reveal. Mma Ramotswe doubted this. She had asked Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni one morning what he had dreamed about and he had replied: “the garage,” and if this were not proof enough, on another occasion, when she had woken him from the tossing and turning of a nightmare, he had replied to her question about the content of the bad dream by saying that it had all been to do with a seized-up gearbox. And then there was Puso, their foster child, who had told her that his dreams were about having a large dog that chased away the bullies at school, or about finding an old aeroplane in the back yard and fixing it so that it could fly, or about scoring a goal for Botswana in a soccer match against Zambia, with the whole stadium rising to its feet and cheering him. That, she thought, settled that. Perhaps there were some men who dreamed about other things, but she felt that this was not the case for most men.

Once up and about, clasping her cup of freshly brewed red bush tea in her hand, she took a walk around the garden, savouring the freshness of the early morning air. Some people said that the air in the morning had no smell; she thought they were wrong, for it smelled
of so many things—of the acacia leaves that had been closed for the night and were now opening at the first touch of the morning sun; of a wood fire somewhere, just a hint of it; of the wind, and the breath that the wind had, which was dry and sweet, like the breath of cattle. It was while she was standing there that she decided whether the day would be one in which things might happen; it had something to do with the way she felt when she considered the day ahead. And most of the time she was right, although sometimes, of course, she could be completely wrong.

On that particular morning as she walked past the mopipi tree she had planted at the front of the garden, she had a sudden feeling that the next few hours were going to be rather unusual. It was not a disturbing premonition—not one of those feelings that one gets when one fears that something is going to go badly wrong—it was more a feeling that something interesting and out of the ordinary lay ahead.

She remarked on the fact to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni as he sat at the kitchen table eating the brown maize porridge that he liked so much. Puso and his sister, Motholeli, had already eaten their breakfast and were in their rooms preparing to leave for school. The school run that Mma Ramotswe had become so used to was now no longer necessary, as Puso was of an age to make his own way there—the school was not far away—and he was also able to help his sister with the wheelchair. This gave the children an independence that they both enjoyed, although departing on time could be a problem when Puso had some boyish task to complete—the catching of flying ants, for instance—or Motholeli had at the last minute to find another pair of cotton socks or locate a book that needed to be returned to the school library.