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from the kitchen and ask for your excuse. It will be a very strange restaurant, that one.”
    AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT , a different conversation took place in the Radiphuti house that evening. Dinner there was always eaten a bit later, as Phuti Radiphuti’s day ran on a rather different timetable from everybody else’s. Most people were at work by eight, but Phuti had decided some years previously that he would not arrive at theDouble Comfort Furniture Store until nine o’clock, and sometimes even half an hour later than that. There were several reasons for this: one was his impatience with the stop-and-start driving that was necessary in the heavier traffic of the rush hour. He had discovered that if you left the house early, you would inevitably get caught up in a long line of cars driven by people who, like you, were eager to make the journey before eight. It was, he thought, rather like trying to get through a door when hundreds of people had exactly the same idea. At least if you were on foot trying to get through a door, people would behave reasonably courteously rather than trample one another or snarl in irritation if anybody were to be too slow, or be indecisive as to whether to turn left or right. How different it was when people were behind the wheel of a car; protected by the metal and glass surrounding them, they showed all sorts of impatience with other drivers, and rarely hesitated to secure some tiny advantage by slipping through a red light or ignoring the unambiguous message of a stop or give way sign. And this was in Botswana, he thought, where everybody—or at least nearly everybody—was so polite! How much worse was it in other countries not too far away where people drove as if they were being pursued by a swarm of bees; or where they paid no attention to the twists and bends in the road.
    The consequences of having such roads were worse, he reminded himself, if you had mountains as well. Botswana at least had flat roads, since there were no real mountains, but it was different in Lesotho, which was not very far away and where all there was, really, was mountain after mountain. As he thought about this he remembered what had happened some years ago to the king of that country, who had been driven to his death off the side of a mountain. Everybody knew that the roads in Lesotho were not in good condition, and somebody, surely, should have been more careful with the king in the back seat. Of course you could not tell, thought Phuti. It may not have been the driver’s fault, as all sorts of things could happen on a road at night. Cattle strayed onto the tarmac, standing therepractically invisible in the darkness until their eyes were suddenly caught in the headlights and it was too late; boulders tumbled down hillsides and came to rest at blind corners; rain washed away whole sections of the road, leaving great gaps into which anybody, even a king, might easily fall. No, you should never blame a driver unless you knew all the facts, and since that poor driver was late, just as the king himself was, you would never know exactly what happened. Some things were accidents, pure and simple, in the same way as had been that incident in which he himself was injured—where the delivery driver did not see him standing there. You should not go around sprinkling blame on other people, thought Phuti Radiphuti.
    But it was not simply because of bad driving and traffic jams that Phuti had decided to avoid going into work early—there were good business reasons for his coming into the office slightly later than everybody else. Phuti believed that if there were any problems to be dealt with, they would make themselves known early in the day. Usually these were staff issues, with somebody not coming into work because he or she was ill, or discovering something wrong with some item of furniture, or a difficult letter arriving in the mail that one of his assistants picked up on the way to work.