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

forty.’ ”
    Queenie-Queenie laughed. “But you don’t just have a couple of hundred pula. You must have more than that.”
    Charlie shook his head. “That is the truth, Queenie. I have almost no money left.”
    “What have you spent it on?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Then why do you say ‘left’? If you have no money left, that means you have had some and it is gone now.”
    Charlie looked miserable. “It was never there. An apprentice detective does not get paid very much money.”
    “But you will not be an apprentice forever, Charlie.”
    He shook his head. “Sometimes I think I will. I was an apprentice mechanic for a long, long time. And I never became a fully qualified mechanic. Fanwell did, but I did not. And now I’m an apprentice detective but nobody can tell me how long that will last. Maybe forever, I think. I will be a very old man one day and still an apprentice. And then I will be dead and I will probably be an apprentice dead person too.”
    Charlie had not expected Queenie-Queenie to laugh, but that is how she responded. And once her laughter died away, she said, “But Charlie—you do not have to worry about that. My brother, Hector, is always making money on deals that he does. You’ve met him. You like him. He buys things cheaply and then sells them on. He is very clever that way. He will make you a partner in one of his deals and that way you will have the money very soon. I will tell my father that you are just getting the money together and will soon be talking to my uncles about the bogadi. No problem, Charlie. No problem. We can get married soon.”
    Charlie remained silent.
    “You see?” said Queenie-Queenie after a few moments. “You see, Charlie? Simple.”

CHAPTER SIX

MEN ARE WEAK, MMA
    M MA RAMOTSWE always fed the children early on school nights. This was to give them time to do their homework in their rooms before lights out at eight-thirty. Of course, both Puso and Motholeli protested that their bedtime was far earlier than that of any of their friends—indeed, earlier than any known bedtime of any child in all of southern Africa, but Mma Ramotswe was not one to be persuaded by such pleading. She knew it was true that some children stayed up until midnight, or even beyond, but she knew from a teacher friend what the consequences of that were.
    “We have children coming to school in the morning half asleep, Mma,” said her friend. “Then they doze through their lessons and nothing goes into their heads.”
    “And their parents?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “What are the parents doing?”
    The teacher laughed. “They are drinking beer or dancing, maybe. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that they are not there making sure that their children go to bed at a reasonable time, as people did in the old days, Mma.”
    “Because many of us didn’t have electricity,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We had paraffin lamps when I was young. Then we had electricity later on.”
    “You went to bed when it got dark,” said the teacher. She paused. A look came to her face that is the look that sometimes comes to those who think of the past. “You cannot uninvent things, Mma. Electricity is a good thing, I suppose. And water that comes in a tap.”
    “And pills for TB and other diseases.”
    The teacher nodded. “All of that, Mma. That is all progress, and nobody would want to stop progress, would they, Mma?”
    She looked at Mma Ramotswe. There was a note of wistfulness in her voice, a note suggesting that there were, perhaps, times when one might want to do just that—to stop progress. Not that one could admit it publicly, of course; progress was one of those things that everybody was expected to believe in, and if you did not, then you might be mocked and accused of living in the past. And yet, were there not things about the old Botswana that were good and valuable, just as there were things like that in every country? The habit of not being rude to people; the habit of treating old