He saw Mma Makutsi come in with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and for a moment he did nothing. He swallowed hard. He had meant to telephone Mma Makutsi and apologise for his failure to turn up last night, but it had been a frantic day, with the visit to the hospital to see his aunt and the list of things that she had given him to do. She had been admitted to the Princess Marina Hospital the previous morning, her face drawn with pain, and they had removed the bloated appendix barely an hour later. It had been close to bursting, they explained, and that would have been perilous. As it was, she had been sitting up in bed that morning, ready to give him instructions, and he had spent much of the rest of the day performing the chores that she had set him. There had been no time to telephone Mma Makutsi, and now here she was in search of an explanation, with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni in support, and he would have to explain everything to her. As he watched her enter the showroom, he felt that familiar knot of anxiety in his stomach—the knot that he had always felt in the past when he had been faced with the need to talk and which always seemed so effectively to paralyse his tongue and vocal cords.

He turned away from the window and went down into the showroom. Mma Makutsi had not spotted him yet, although he had seen her glancing around as if to look for him. Now she was standing before a large armchair covered in black leather and was pointing it out to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who was bending down to examine the label attached to the chair. Oddly, Phuti found himself trying to remember the price. It was not expensive, that chair, covered as it was in soft leather, but it was certainly not a bargain. He wondered whether Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was the sort of man to spend a lot of money on a chair. He remembered, of course, that Mma Makutsi had said that Mma Ramotswe had a comfortable house in Zebra Drive and so there was some money there. And perhaps that garage of his on the Tlokweng Road did well, although on the few occasions that he had been there he had not seen signs of great activity.