The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (13) (2 page)

“I had a very unusual dream,” she said to Mma Makutsi as they attended to the morning’s mail in the office.

Mma Makutsi looked up from the envelope that she was in the process of slitting open. “Dreams are always unusual,” she said. “In fact, it is unusual to have a usual dream.”

Mma Ramotswe frowned. She thought that she understood what Mma Makutsi meant but was not quite sure. Her assistant had a habit of making enigmatic remarks, and this, she suspected, was one such remark.

“Phuti,” Mma Makutsi continued, referring to her new husband, Phuti Radiphuti, “Phuti has many dreams, every night. He tells me about them and I explain what they mean.” She paused. “He often dreams about furniture.”

“That is because he has a furniture shop,” Mma Ramotswe said. “So perhaps it is not surprising.”

“That is so, Mma,” agreed Mma Makutsi. “But he can dream about different pieces of furniture.” She paused, fixing Mma Ramotswe
on the other side of the room with the cautious look of one about to reveal sensitive information. She lowered her voice. “Some nights he dreams about beds; other nights he dreams about dining-room tables. It is very strange.”

Mma Ramotswe looked down at her desk. She did not like to discuss the intimate side of anybody’s marriage—particularly when the marriage was as recent as Mma Makutsi’s. She thought of new marriages as being rather like those shy, delicate flowers one sees on the edge of the Kalahari; so small that one might miss them altogether, so vulnerable that a careless step might crush their beauty. Of course, people talked about their dreams without too much embarrassment—most dreams, after all, sound inconsequential and silly in the cold light of day—but it was different when a wife talked about a husband’s dreams, or a husband about a wife’s. Dreams occurred in beds, and what occurred in marital beds was not a subject for debate in the office—especially if the dream
related to
beds, as it appeared that some of Phuti Radiphuti’s dreams did.

But if Mma Ramotswe was reluctant to probe Phuti’s dreams too closely, the same was not true of her assistant. The topic had now been broached, and Mma Makutsi pursued it enthusiastically.

“There is no doubt about a dream about beds,” she continued. “The meaning of that dream is very clear, Mma. It should be very obvious, even to a person who does not know much about dreams, or other things, for that matter.”

Mma Ramotswe said nothing.

“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi, “if a person says
I have been dreaming about beds
, then you know straightaway what the dream means. You can say to them,
I know what that dream means. It is very clear
.”

Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window, which was high,
and gave a view from that angle only of a slice of blue; empty blue; blue with no white of cloud; nothingness. “Is the meaning of dreams clear, Mma? Do any dreams make sense, or are they just like … like clouds in the sky, composed of nothing very much? Maybe they are clouds in our mind, Mma; maybe that is what they are.”

Mma Makutsi was having none of this. “The meaning is often clear,” she retorted. “I have no difficulty, Mma, in understanding a dream about beds.”

Mma Ramotswe sighed. “Well, they do say, don’t they, Mma, that men have such things on their minds most of the time. They say that men think only of that, all day. Listen to the way Charlie speaks when he thinks you can’t hear him. That shows you what men think about—or at least, young men. I do not think that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni has thoughts like that in his head all day. I do not think that, Mma.”

It was as if Mma Makutsi had not heard her. “Yes, Mma. The meaning of a dream about beds is very simple. It means that you are tired. It means that you need more sleep.”

Mma Ramotswe stared at her assistant for a few moments. Then, with some degree of relief, she smiled. “Well, there you have it, Mma. That must be what such a dream means.”

“On the other hand,” went on Mma Makutsi, “a dream about a dining-room table is different. That does not mean that you are tired.”

“No.”

“No, it does not mean that, Mma. A dream about a dining-room table means that you are hungry. I think that is very obvious.”

Mma Ramotswe looked first at the teapot, and then at the clock. She would wait, she decided; if one kept bringing forward the time at which one had tea, then the period after tea time would
become far too long. Tea had to be taken at the right time; if anything was clear, it was that.

She decided to steer the conversation back to her own dream. But just as she was about to do so, Mma Makutsi came up with a further observation on Phuti’s dreams. “When he said to me one morning that he had dreamed of dining-room tables, I was worried. Was I giving him enough to eat, I wondered?”

“And what did you decide, Mma?”

“I think I’m giving him enough food. I believe in demand feeding. I think that is what it’s called. I always leave some food out in the kitchen so that Phuti can pick up a snack if he feels hungry. There are other women who believe that you should only feed your husband at set times, so that he gets used to it. But I am not one of those women, Mma. I leave food out.”

Mma Ramotswe suppressed a grin at the thought of demand feeding for husbands. The conversation, although potentially sensitive, had proved to be more amusing than anything else, and she knew that it could drift on indefinitely. It was her own dream that had started it, and it was to her dream that she now returned.

“I had a very strange dream last night, Mma,” she said. “As I was saying.”

“Please tell me what it was, Mma,” said Mma Makutsi. “I cannot guarantee that I will be able to tell you what it means, but we shall see.”

“I dreamed that I was walking along a path,” Mma Ramotswe began. “And—”

Mma Makutsi interrupted her. “That means you are going on a journey, Mma. There can be no doubt about that.”

Mma Ramotswe acknowledged this. “Possibly. But then the path came to a place—”

“That is your destination,” announced Mma Makutsi. “That
place that you saw in your dream was your destination in life. That is very clear indeed. What was it like, Mma? Was it a very good place?”

“There was an acacia tree—”

Again there was an interjection. “Then that means you are going to end up under a tree, Mma. That is where you will find yourself, under a tree.” She looked at Mma Ramotswe sympathetically. “That is not too bad, Mma. There are many worse places to end up.”

“But the tree was not all that important,” said Mma Ramotswe, raising her voice slightly to prevent further interruption. “There was a man standing under the tree. It was as if he was waiting for me.”

“That will be Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni.”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “It was not him. It was a man I had never seen before. And he did not come from here. He was a stranger.”

Mma Makutsi’s glasses flashed in a slanting band of sunlight. “Not from Gaborone?” she asked. “Not from Botswana?”

“No. He was from somewhere else. He was not an African at all.”

Mma Makutsi was silent. Then she delivered her judgement. “You are going to meet a stranger,” she said, with an air of gravity. “You are going to meet a stranger under an acacia tree.”

“I thought it might mean something like that,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But then I thought that it probably didn’t mean anything at all. That it was just a dream, and I would forget about it by this afternoon.”

Mma Makutsi looked doubtful. “I don’t think you should forget it, Mma Ramotswe. I think that you should remember it, so that when it happens, when you meet that stranger under the acacia tree, you will be prepared.”

She said nothing more, but gave Mma Ramotswe an oblique look; a look that Mma Ramotswe interpreted as a warning. But she had not understood—for all her claims to understanding dreams, Mma Makutsi had missed the point. This stranger was not threatening; this stranger, for whom Mma Makutsi said she should be prepared, was not somebody to be dreaded or guarded against. On the contrary, this stranger was a good man, a kind man, and his arrival—if he were ever to come, which was highly unlikely—was something to be welcomed, something to be celebrated. And there was something else—something that was hard to put into words. The man in the dream might have been a stranger in that she had never seen him before, but somehow she felt that she knew him.
She knew him but did not know him
.

She glanced at her watch again. Resolve can be weakened by time, and by talk about dreams and by heat.

“I know it’s a bit early, but I think that we should have tea now,” she said to Mma Makutsi. And Mma Makutsi, who had removed her glasses to clean them, looked up, finished her task of polishing the lenses, and said that she completely agreed.

“On a hot day,” she said, “we dream of tea.”

I
T WAS SHORTLY
after this conversation about dreams, or after the tea that followed this conversation, that an unknown car drew up outside the offices of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and parked beneath the acacia tree. Had this been followed by the emergence of a tall man similar in appearance to the one who had appeared in Mma Ramotswe’s dream, then Mma Makutsi’s belief in the prescience of dreams would have been dramatically confirmed. But this did not happen, as the person who opened the car door and stepped out—watched with bated breath by Mma Makutsi—was none other than Mma Silvia Potokwane, matron not only of the orphan farm but also, in a sense, of all she surveyed.

Mma Makutsi let her disappointment be known. “It’s nobody,” she said. “Just her.”

Mma Ramotswe, who had not been looking out of the window, now did so. “But it’s Mma Potokwane, Mma. She is not nobody.” The reproach in her voice was evident and was picked up by Mma Makutsi.

“I’m sorry, Mma,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude about
Mma Potokwane. It’s just that I thought that it might be the man you saw in your dream. One never knows.”

Mma Ramotswe let it pass. Mma Makutsi had never enjoyed a particularly good relationship with Mma Potokwane—the natural rivalry, Mma Ramotswe thought, that results from the juxtaposition of two strong personalities. That had changed more recently, though, and in particular there had been what amounted to a cordial truce when Mma Potokwane had offered to apply her undoubted organisational skills to the planning of Mma Makutsi’s wedding. This offer of help had been gratefully accepted, and had relieved Mma Makutsi of much of the anxiety that accompanies a wedding. Mma Ramotswe hoped that this cordiality would persist: she did not like conflict in any form, and it pleased her to think that these two women, who had so much to offer, might now cooperate rather than seek to undermine each other. Perhaps Mma Makutsi might help the orphan farm in its fund-raising activities, now that she was Mrs. Phuti Radiphuti and the occupant, therefore, of a reasonably elevated position in the town. Phuti was a man of substance, with the resources of the Double Comfort Furniture Store behind him and a large herd of cattle at the Radiphuti cattle post off to the west of Mahalapye. The size of that herd could only be guessed at—“A very large number of cattle, all of them quite fat,” was all that Mma Makutsi had said on the subject—but whatever its dimensions, it meant that Mma Makutsi would now surely have the resources to help the orphan farm in some way.

Mma Potokwane herself was not unaware of the change in Mma Makutsi’s fortunes, and it was possible, Mma Ramotswe thought, that this visit was connected with precisely that awareness. The matron of the orphan farm was famous for the vigour of her support for her charges, with every meeting, every encounter being seen as an opportunity to solicit support for the orphan
cause. But as Mma Potokwane settled herself into the client’s chair in the office that morning, it became clear that it was business of a very different sort that was on the matron’s mind. Immediately after the normal greetings, Mma Potokwane cleared her throat and fixed first Mma Ramotswe and then Mma Makutsi with a baleful stare.

“I have come to see you about a very difficult matter,” she said. “In all my years as a matron, I have never come across something as difficult as this.”

“You must have seen many things,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“Many very heartbreaking things,” added Mma Makutsi from the other side of the room.

Mma Potokwane turned her head to glance briefly at Mma Makutsi. “You’re right about that, Mma Makutsi,” she said. “Or should I be calling you Mma Radiphuti now?”

Mma Makutsi beamed with pleasure at the recognition. “That is very kind of you, Mma Potokwane. I shall be Mma Radiphuti when I am in my house—and when I go to the shops.” That last qualification was important, as Mma Potokwane and Mma Ramotswe were quick to acknowledge. The Radiphuti name would certainly bring respect—and all necessary credit—when bandied about in shops.

“However,” went on Mma Makutsi, “my professional name remains Makutsi. That is quite common these days, you know. Professional people—doctors and lawyers and detectives—often keep their maiden name when they marry. That is because their clients and patients, and so on, all know them by that name.”