He made his way past a display of dining-room tables, noting with irritation that somebody had placed a sticky hand print on one of them, the finest in the room, with its highly polished black surface. It would be somebody’s child, he thought; a child had reached out and touched the furniture with a hand that had been used to push sweets into his mouth. And the same hand would have been placed on the light red velvet of the sofas on the other side of the table, and they would have to get some of that cleaning fluid … He sighed. There was no point getting exercised over this; the country was full of dust and children with sticky hands, and termites that liked nothing better than to eat people’s furniture; that was just how it was, and if one worried about it, then it simply made one stammer all the more and feel hot at the back of the neck. Mma Makutsi had told him that he should stop worrying, and he had made a real effort to do so, with the result that he stammered less and felt less hot. He was a fortunate man, he thought, to be engaged to a woman like that. Many women made life worse for their husbands with their nagging and hectoring; one saw such men in the store, defeated men, men with all the cares of the world on their shoulders, looking at the furniture as if it was just one more thing to worry about in lives already full of anxieties.

“That is a very g … goo … ,” said Phuti Radiphuti as he approached Mma Makutsi and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

He closed his eyes. There was that sensation of heat at the back of his neck and the familiar, cramping feeling in the muscles of the tongue. He saw the word good written down on an imaginary piece of paper; he had only to read it out, as she had told him to do, but he could not. She had read a book about this problem and she had helped him, but now he could not say that this chair was good.

“A ve …” He tried again, but it would not come. He should have telephoned her, and told her, and now she would be angry with him and might be having second thoughts about their marriage.

“It looks very comfortable,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, reaching out to touch the leather on one of the armrests. “This leather …”

“So soft,” said Mma Makutsi quietly. “Some of these leather chairs you see are very hard. They are from old, old cows.”

“Chairs like that are called cowches,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and laughed.