“What you should do,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, “is work out how much money you need for each week. Then put all your money in the post office or somewhere safe like that and draw it out weekly.”

Charlie smiled. “There is always credit,” he said. “You can buy things on credit. It is cheaper that way.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at the young man. Where does one start? he thought. How does one make up for all the things that young people do not know? There was so much ignorance in the world—great swathes of ignorance like areas of darkness on a map. That was the job of teachers, to put this ignorance to flight, and that was why teachers were respected in Botswana—or used to be. He had noticed how people these days, even young people, treated teachers as if they were the same as anybody else. But how would people learn if they did not respect a teacher? Respect meant that they would be prepared to listen, and to learn. Young men like Charlie, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, imagined that they knew everything already. Well, he would simply have to try to teach them in spite of their arrogance.

Grace Makutsi and Mma Ramotswe knew all about the end of the month. Mma Ramotswe’s financial position had always been considerably easier than most people’s, thanks to the late Obed Ramotswe’s talent for the spotting of good cattle, but she was well aware of the enforced penny-pinching that was the daily lot of those about her. Rose, the woman who cleaned her house in Zebra Drive, was an example. She had a number of children—Mma Ramotswe had never been sure just how many—and these children had all known what it was to go to bed hungry, in spite of their mother’s best efforts. And one of the children, a small boy, had difficulties with his breathing and needed inhalers, which were expensive to buy, even with the help of the government clinic. And then there was Mma Makutsi herself, who had supported herself at the Botswana Secretarial College by doing cleaning work in a hotel in the early mornings before she went to her classes at the college. That could not have been easy, getting up at four in the morning, even in the winter, when the skies were sharp-empty (as Mma Makutsi put it) with cold and the ground hard below the feet. But she had been careful, husbanding every spare thebe, and now, at long last, had achieved some measure of comfort with her new house (or half house, to be precise), her new green shoes with sky-blue linings, and, of course, her new fiancé …

The end of the month, pay day; and now Mma Ramotswe parked her tiny white van near the kitchen building of the college and waited. She looked at her watch. It was three o’clock, and she imagined that Mma Tsau would have finished supervising the clean-up after lunch. She was not sure where the cook had her office, but it was likely to be in the same building as the kitchens, and there was no doubt which building that was; one only had to wind down the window and sniff the air to know where the kitchens were. What a lovely smell it was, the smell of food. That was one of the great pleasures of life, in Mma Ramotswe’s view—the smell of cooking drifting on the wind; the smell of maize cobs roasting on the open fire, of beef sizzling in its fat, of large chunks of pumpkin boiling in the pot. All these smells were good smells, part of the smells of Botswana, of home, that warmed the heart and made the mouth water in anticipation.