She looked at her watch again, and then she looked down at her shoes. Don’t look at us, they seemed to be saying. Don’t look at us, Miss Feminist! There was clearly no help from that quarter; there never was. She would have to sort her troubles out by herself, and that meant that she would have to go right now, without any further delay, to the Double Comfort Furniture Shop and speak to Phuti before he left work. She would ask Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to drive her there; he was a kind man, and never turned down a request for a favour. And then an idea occurred. Mma Ramotswe had spoken about the need to get Mr J.L.B. Matekoni a new chair. She could go with him to the store on the pretext of helping him to choose this chair. And in that way she could speak to Phuti without giving him the impression that she had come specially to see him.

She left her desk and made her way into the garage, where she found Mr J.L.B. Matekoni standing at the entrance, staring out on to the Tlokweng Road. He was wiping his hands on an old cloth, almost absent-mindedly, as if he was thinking about something much more important than the problem of oil on the skin.

“I am glad to see that you have nothing to do, Rra,” she said, as she came up behind him. “I have had an idea.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni turned round and looked at her vacantly. “I was very far away,” he said. “I was thinking.”

“I have been thinking too,” said Mma Makutsi. “I was thinking about that new chair which Mma Ramotswe said that she wanted to buy you.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni tucked the piece of cloth into his pocket. “It would be good to be able to sit comfortably again,” he said. “I cannot find a comfortable position in any of the chairs in Zebra Drive. I don’t know what has happened to them. They are full of lumps and springs.”

Mma Makutsi knew very well what had happened to the furniture in Zebra Drive, but did not want to say as much. She had always suspected that Mma Ramotswe was hard on anything with springs—look at the way in which the tiny white van listed to one side (the driver’s side)—and then there was her office chair, which, although it had no springs, also had a marked inclination to the right, where one of the legs had buckled slightly under Mma Ramotswe’s traditional form.