Read In the Company of Cheerful Ladies for Free Online

particular morning it was Mma Makutsi, carrying a brown paper parcel, who was first to arrive. She unlocked the office of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, placed the parcel on her desk, and opened the window to let in some air. It was barely seven o’clock, and it would be half an hour or so before Mma
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    Ramotswe and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni arrived. This would give her time to organise her desk, to telephone her cousin’s sister-in-law about a family matter, and to write a quick letter to her father in Bobonong. Her father was seventy-one, and he had nothing very much to do, other than to walk to the small post office in the village
    and check for mail. Usually there was nothing, but at least once a week there would be a letter from Mma Makutsi, containing
    a few snippets of news from Gaborone and sometimes a fifty-pula note. Her father could not read English very well, and so Mma Makutsi always wrote to him in Kalanga, which gave her pleasure, as she liked to keep her grasp of the language alive.
    There was much to tell him that day. She had had a busy weekend, with an invitation to a meal at the house of one of her new neighbours, who was a Malawian lady teaching at one of the schools. This lady had lived in London for a year and knew all about places that Mma Makutsi had only seen in the pages of the National Geographic magazine. Yet she carried her experience lightly, and did not make Mma Makutsi feel at all provincial or untravelled. Quite the opposite, in fact. The neighbour had asked probing questions about Bobonong and had listened attentively while Mma Makutsi had told her of Francistown and Maun, and places like that.
    “You are lucky to live in this country,” said the neighbour. “You have everything. Lots of land, as far as the eye can see, and further.
    And all those diamonds. And the cattle. There is everything here.”
    “We are very fortunate,” said Mma Makutsi. “We know that.”
    “And you now have that nice new house,” the neighbour went on, “and that interesting job of yours. People must ask you all the time: What is it like to be a private detective?”
    Mma Makutsi smiled modestly. “They think it is a very exciting
    job,” she said. “But it is not really. Most of the time we are just helping people to find out things they already know.”
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    “And this Mma Ramotswe people talk about?” asked the neighbour. “What is she like? I have seen her at the shops. She has a very kind face. You would not think she was a detective, just to look at her.”
    “She is a very kind lady,” agreed Mma Makutsi. “But she is also very clever. She can tell when people are lying, just by looking
    at them. And she also knows how to deal with men.”
    The neighbour sighed. “That is a very great talent,” she said. “I would like to be able to do that.”
    Mma Makutsi agreed with this. That would be very good; and indeed it would be good to have just one man to deal with. Mma Ramotswe now had Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and this Malawian woman had a boyfriend, whom Mma Makutsi had seen coming to the house in the evenings. She herself had not yet found a man, apart from that one she had met at the Kalahari Typing School for Men and who had not lasted very long for some reason.
    After that she had made a rule: Never become emotionally involved with one of your typing students—a rule which was a variant
    on the advice which Mma Ramotswe had quoted from Clovis Andersen: Always keep your distance from your client; hugs and kisses never solved any cases, and never paid any bills.
    Now the last part of that advice was very interesting, and Mma Makutsi had considered it at some length. She had no doubt that it was true that emotional involvement with a client would not help you to see a problem clearly, and would therefore not assist the solving of the case, but was it true to say that hugs and kisses never paid any bills? Surely one could argue the opposite
    of that. There were plenty of people who paid their way through life with hugs