The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon Read online

  Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over eighty books on a wide array of subjects. For many years he was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and served on national and international bioethics bodies. Then in 1999 he achieved global recognition for his award-winning series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and thereafter has devoted his time to the writing of fiction, including the 44 Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions series. His books have been translated into forty-six languages. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Elizabeth, a doctor.

  By Alexander McCall Smith

  THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

  Tears of the Giraffe

  Morality for Beautiful Girls

  The Kalahari Typing School for Men

  The Full Cupboard of Life

  In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

  Blue Shoes and Happiness

  The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

  The Miracle at Speedy Motors

  Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

  The Double Comfort Safari Club

  The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

  The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection

  The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

  THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE NOVELS

  The Sunday Philosophy Club

  Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

  The Right Attitude to Rain

  The Careful Use of Compliments

  The Comfort of Saturdays

  The Lost Art of Gratitude

  The Charming Quirks of Others

  The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

  The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

  44 Scotland Street

  Espresso Tales

  Love Over Scotland

  The World According to Bertie

  The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

  The Importance of Being Seven

  Bertie Plays the Blues

  Sunshine on Scotland Street

  Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers

  THE CORDUROY MANSIONS SERIES

  Corduroy Mansions

  The Dog Who Came in from the Cold

  A Conspiracy of Friends

  THE VON IGELFELD ENTERTAINMENTS

  The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom

  Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

  La’s Orchestra Saves the World

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Little, Brown

  978-1-4055-2059-1

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Alexander McCall Smith 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  LITTLE, BROWN

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By Alexander McCall Smith

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Mechanics Can Cook

  Chapter Two: Bones Never Lie

  Chapter Three: Snakes Are Very Shy

  Chapter Four: This Shall Be Botswana

  Chapter Five: The Modern Husband Course

  Chapter Six: That is My Baby, Mma

  Chapter Seven: In the Chair of a Very Great Man

  Chapter Eight: He Was the Light of Our Lives

  Chapter Nine: All Men Can Benefit

  Chapter Ten: Not a Lady With Many Enemies

  Chapter Eleven: The Nothing Vacuum Cleaner

  Chapter Twelve: Shoes Are Wasted on Men

  Chapter Thirteen: Bless You, and Your Shoes

  Chapter Fourteen: Washing the Feet of Another

  Chapter Fifteen: Like a Tiny Spark Plug

  Chapter Sixteen: That is Not How You Treat a Sausage

  Chapter Seventeen: The Best Woman in Botswana

  This book is for Professor Bill Chameides of Duke University, in admiration of the work he has done

  Chapter One

  Mechanics Can Cook

  Precious Ramotswe, creator and owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Botswana’s only detective agency for the problems of ladies, and of others, had never studied business management. She knew that it was common for people who ran their own businesses to take courses on topics such as stocktaking and cash flow, but she did not feel this was necessary in her case. Mind you, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency had never made a profit, although in recent years it had not made a loss either, for Mma Ramotswe had managed to juggle income and expenditure in such a way as to end up breaking even – provided that you practised what a book-keeper friend of hers called, with some admiration, Optimistic Accounting.

  It was not that she was averse to taking advice. A few days ago she had come across a business magazine that had been left behind in the garage by one of her husband’s customers, and had read it from cover to cover, over a pot of redbush tea and a large doughnut. This magazine had been full of helpful articles with titles such as: ‘Making the most of your human resources’ and ‘How to maximise growth in difficult economic circumstances’. There was also a column called Dr Profit’s Business Clinic, to which readers could write with their business problems and receive free advice from Dr Profit himself, a man who was pictured wearing a large square pair of glasses and a broad smile – the look of somebody, she thought, who was probably always in healthy profit.

  In the issue perused by Mma Ramotswe, one concerned reader raised a problem connected with an awkward employee – ‘Can one fire an employee who smells bad?’ Mma Ramotswe read this question with some interest – although it had no bearing on her own business (Mma Makutsi was always well turned-out and took, she believed, two baths a day) – before turning the page and seeing an article on the maximising of growth. ‘A business that isn’t expanding will actually be contracting,’ wrote the author. ‘That rule has been shown to be true time after time. How many businessmen are there who sit and contemplate the ruins of a once-profitable business simply because they forgot to expand?’

  Mma Ramotswe frowned. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was exactly the same size as it had been when she had founded it. It had one owner and one employee, one vehicle, a filing cabinet, a kettle, two teapots and three mugs. There was also one typewriter, which was operated by Mma Makutsi, and one box of stationery. These assets had been there more or less from the beginning, although the second teapot was certainly a later addition. Did that count as growth? Could you say that your business had expanded if it had gone from owning one teapot to two? Somehow she thought that Dr Profit would answer both those questions with a shake of his head. Of course, she herself had expanded in girth since the agency was founded, but she did not think that such a form of growth was what the author of the article had in mind.

  She thought of Mr J. L. B. Matekoni’s business, Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, with which she shared premises, and wondered how it would fare against this rather unsettling test. Again, it was difficult to see any significant expansion. Mr J. L. B. Matekoni still had his two apprentices, although one of them, Fanwell, was now a qualified me
chanic. That might count as growth of a sort, she supposed, but it was probably cancelled out by reports that Charlie, the other young man employed in the garage, had, by all accounts, become rather worse at his job. Certainly there did not seem to be any more customers than there had been in the past; indeed, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had complained only a few weeks previously that there seemed to be fewer and fewer cars being brought in for service.

  ‘People have to go to those big garages these days,’ he said. ‘They have to do that because their cars are full of computers, and ordinary mechanics don’t have all the right wires and things for these clever cars. What can you do if you look at the engine and see that it is full of electric wiring and computer chips? Where’s the carburettor? Where’s the distributor? Where’s the starter motor?’

  He had looked at Mma Ramotswe reproachfully, as if she had somehow mislaid these various parts.

  She sighed. ‘Everything is too complicated these days, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. Everything is made to be thrown away rather than fixed. It is all very wasteful.’

  She warmed to her theme. ‘When I think of what we made do with in the past, it makes me very sad. If you found a hole in a sock, you darned it. We were taught how to do that at school. And if your collar frayed, then you had it turned. If the handle came off a cup, you glued it back on.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘You never threw things away. Nowadays, if something goes wrong, you throw it out of the window, just like that.’

  ‘And people too,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘If you suddenly decide you don’t like somebody, you throw them out of the window too. That’s what wives do to their husbands these days.’

  Mr J. L. B. Matekoni looked concerned. ‘Out of the window, Mma?’

  ‘Not really out of the window,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I just use that as an expression, Rra. And it’s not just wives who throw their husbands out of the window when they get bored with them; it’s men too. In fact, there are more wives thrown out of the window than men, I think.’

  ‘Either way, it’s not very good,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘Nobody should be thrown out of the window, Mma.’

  They had lapsed into silence as they contemplated, in their individual ways, this decline in civility. Mma Ramotswe was not given to taking a gloomy view of things, but she felt nonetheless that there were respects in which she would find it very difficult to explain to her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, what had happened in the years since his death. It was true that Botswana had made great progress and remained a country to be proud of, but still, there were changes that it was hard to see in a positive light. She imagined walking with him through their home village, Mochudi, and showing him the improvements: the numerous public water taps, the improved sewage system, the new businesses that had sprung up. But what would she say when they were passed by a group of schoolchildren and not one of them greeted him, as it was polite, and customary, for children to do when they passed an old man? How would she explain to him that nowadays many children did not greet strangers? She saw him wearing his old hat – the hat that he had worn for year upon year and was so familiar to her, and so beloved. She wondered what he would say when he saw men walking about either with no hat on their heads – even under the midday sun – or with unusual new hats, or even caps with those curious visors in the front, but deliberately worn back-to-front. Where, he would ask, have all these new hats come from, and why did none of these hats seem to have experience, that indefinable quality that hats acquire after they have been worn day after day, in all weather, for year after year?

  And yet, in spite of all these rather unsettling developments, there were some things that did not change. Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had not changed in the slightest – and never would, she thought. Charlie did not change either; one might have thought that he would become more mature as the years went past, but this was not the case. At the age of sixteen, when he had first started his apprenticeship, he had spent his lunch hours sitting on an upturned oil drum, ogling girls as they walked past to catch one of the minibuses plying their trade along the Tlokweng Road. Now, at the age of twenty-whatever-it-was, he still sat on an oil drum – she believed it was exactly the same oil drum – and watched young women walk past.

  Of course, she thought that Charlie might try to justify this if she were to reproach him, and to argue that there was nothing wrong in spending his time in this way. She could just imagine the conversation…

  ‘So, Mma? What’s wrong with taking a rest over the lunch hour? I work hard all morning and then I sit and recover my energy. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she would say. ‘There is nothing wrong with taking a break. But what’s the point of watching girls for hour after hour?’

  He would defend himself: ‘But, Mma, I didn’t ask them to walk along the Tlokweng Road. I didn’t ask them to wear those dresses and walk like that. They are the ones you should be criticising, Mma, not me.’

  It would be hopeless, and even if she turned her attention to the drum, and suggested that he sit somewhere else for a change, she would get nowhere.

  ‘But, Mma, why change your drum if you find one that’s comfortable? Why not stick to the one you like?’

  No, in a world of flux and rearrangement, both Charlie and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni were as fixed in their positions as the stars in the night sky. And the same might have been said of Mma Makutsi… But now there was an air of uncertainty surrounding Mma Makutsi and her plans, and Mma Ramotswe was unsure how to resolve it. The problem was that Mma Makutsi was pregnant, but seemed to be quite unwilling to talk about the implications of this for the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Naturally Mma Ramotswe was pleased that her assistant was expecting a baby, but how much greater would this pleasure have been if she had plans in place for the inevitable maternity leave. But no such plans had been mentioned – not one.

  Of course, Mma Ramotswe and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had discussed the issue many times themselves, as they did that evening some months previously when he had first raised it with her. They were sitting on their veranda in that companionable manner that may come upon a married couple at the end of a day’s work, when they are together again and watching the sun sink behind the acacia trees and the untidy telephone wires of their neighbour’s garden. They had been talking about nothing in particular, with few matters that were likely to disturb the peace of this quiet half-hour before supper.

  ‘I wonder when our neighbour is going to tidy up those wires,’ mused Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘You’d think that he’d get in touch with the telephone people and get them to come round and sort things out. I shouldn’t be surprised to find out that half those wires are dead – just ancient wires from the past.’

  Mma Ramotswe glanced over the fence at the untidy cluster of wires attached to the wooden telephone pole. She felt that Mr J. L. B. Matekoni was probably right; the country was full of wires that might have done something important in the past but had long since stopped being used. She imagined somehow listening in to one of these wires and hearing the echoes of some forgotten exchange between people that had taken place many years before but still echoed through those old abandoned wires. One might hear a conversation that took place in 1962, perhaps, when Botswana was still the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and when cattle were the main industry and there were no diamonds. It might be a conversation between somebody in Lobatse driving up to see somebody in Gaborone and not requiring any directions because there were only a couple of roads. ‘You take the right-hand road. You know the right-hand road?’

  Silence, empty silence, and then a faint, tinny voice ringing down the line. ‘I know that road, Rra. That is the road my grandfather lives on.’

  The voice of the dead – you could hear them still, if you listened hard enough. Late people still talking, like children after lights-out: the faint, distant voices of our ancestors.

  And then, as if he had already forgotten about the telephone wires, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni suddenly said, �
�Mma Makutsi?’

  It was a question rather than a pronouncement, and Mma Ramotswe waited a moment or two before answering, in case the point of the question might be expanded upon. But it was not.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mma Makutsi: what of her, Rra?’

  Mr J. L. B. Matekoni shrugged. ‘Nothing, Mma.’ But it was not nothing. ‘I just happened to be wondering whether there was anything… different about her?’ He paused. ‘Now that she’s married, you see.’

  She looked at him, and he turned away, embarrassed. ‘No, I don’t mean…’

  ‘Of course not. But it is true, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni: marriage changes people. For some people it can be quite a surprise.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, but there is something about Mma Makutsi I would like to raise, Mma – if you don’t mind.’

  Mma Ramotswe looked at him expectantly. ‘Please do, Rra. We have all the time in the world.’

  He frowned. ‘But we don’t have all the time in the world, Mma Ramotswe…’

  She gently encouraged him. ‘No, of course we don’t, but we certainly have enough time for you to say something.’

  He looked out over the garden, out towards the mopipi tree of which Mma Ramotswe was so proud. Not everyone had a mopipi tree in the garden and she had been solicitous of its welfare, giving it more water than a tree might otherwise expect.

  ‘A question,’ he said. ‘When did Mma Makutsi get married? Was it seven months ago? Eight?’