To the Land of Long Lost Friends: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (20) by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

You tell me. Think about it for a little while, and then you tell me what I would choose.”
    Charlie sat back in his seat. Mr. Potso poked his head out from the kitchen to stare at Queenie-Queenie. Then he transferred his gaze to Charlie, curling an eyebrow as if to say, Her! What’s she doing with somebody like you?
    Charlie echoed her question. “Which one would you choose?”
    “Yes, which one?”
    Charlie made a hopeless gesture. “Oh, I know that. I know that you would choose love. That is what you’ve already said. You said that money is not the big thing…”
    Queenie-Queenie raised a finger. “No. Wrong. Money.”
    Charlie could not conceal his surprise. “But you said…”
    “I didn’t. I was talking about both. I never said that I would prefer love to money. I said that if I had money, then I would also like to have love. Love is more important than money—I did say that—but you can’t live on love by itself. You need money. You have to eat. So what you do is you make sure that you have money in the first place, then love will come. You say, ‘I am ready now for love, because I have money,’ and love will come.”
    Charlie listened to this in silence. When she had finished speaking, he simply said, “Oh.”
    “So you agree with me?” asked Queenie-Queenie.
    He did not answer immediately, and so she said, “I’m glad that we agree about this important thing.”
    He opened his mouth to speak, not knowing what he intended to say, but feeling that he should at least express a view. But before he could say anything, Queenie-Queenie continued, “That is why you do not need to ask me to marry you. I know that this is what you would like to do because we both think the same way about this thing.”
    He struggled to make sense of what she was saying. He did not need to ask her to marry him: What did that mean? That he should not ask? Or that he should? Or did it mean that they did not have to talk about the matter any longer?
    He said, “Well, that is very interesting, Queenie. But are you going to order some fried chicken?”
    She looked at him reproachfully. “This is no time for fried chicken.”
    Mr. Potso was staring at them again, this time more intently. “Potso thinks it is. Look at him. He is always thinking that we should order something. All the time.”
    She did not follow his gaze. Potso was nothing to her.
    “No,” she said. “You do not need to ask me to marry you, Charlie. These days, women can ask men to marry them. So if anybody asks us when you asked me, you can just say, ‘It was not necessary—we decided to get married and that was it.’ No need for formalities—not these days.”
    “Ha!” he said. “But we didn’t decide, did we?”
    This brought a flat rebuttal. “Yes, we did.”
    “When?”
    “Just a few moments ago. I said that we agreed, and you said nothing. You didn’t say, ‘I do not agree.’ You didn’t say anything like that.”
    “I didn’t know that we had agreed. How could I tell, Queenie?”
    She brushed this aside. “That doesn’t matter any longer. We don’t need to go over the past—unlike some people. They are always saying ‘You said this thing’ or ‘You said that thing’ and disagreeing with one another all the time.”
    He looked away, summoning up the courage to tell her. He had no money. That was the issue. He could not pay what her family would be expecting. He could not even pay for two helpings of peri-peri chicken.
    “I am very keen on you, Queenie,” he said at last. “Every time you look at me, I think—here inside me, right here—I think, You are so lucky to have this lady. But then I think, How can I ever marry somebody like her when I have no money? How can I go to her relatives—to her father, to her uncles—and say all I have is a couple of hundred pula. They would laugh at me and say, ‘ Voetsek , you useless nothing man! Do not come around here unless you have at least thirty thousand pula, maybe