Mma Ramotswe took a sip of her tea. It was cold. She looked at her watch. She had told her neighbour about Susan and her quest, and he had agreed to stay in to show them round the house; she did not want to keep him.

“We must go, Mma,” she said. “I have my van parked nearby. We can go to see…your house.”

Susan looked at her in a way that Mma Ramotswe found slightly disconcerting. It seemed to her that it was almost as if she was reluctant to go; and yet this was what she had come all this way for. Of course there were some people who did not want to find what they were looking for; she had observed that before. It was very strange, but it did happen. And why? Was it because what they were looking for was not what they were really looking for…so to speak?

—

MMA RAMOTSWE GOT ON well enough with Mr. Vain Kwele and his wife, Daffodil, even if they did not see a great deal of one another. Daffodil was listless in her housekeeping, and showed no pride in the place. She spent much of her time sitting on her verandah, paging through old copies of magazines, while Vain, whose lucrative bottle store had a competent and conscientious manager, spent much of his time on his private pursuits, one of which was collecting maps. One room of his house was devoted to his map collection, stored on roughly constructed shelves and in stacked boxes. This room, which Mma Ramotswe had glimpsed only briefly on a couple of occasions, was more than usually dusty. “It’s the Kalahari’s fault,” Vain had said to Mma Ramotswe. “What can anybody do if they live so close to that place. That’s where all this dust comes from, you know.”

Mma Ramotswe had offered to lend them her powerful vacuum cleaner, but had been politely rebuffed. “That is very kind of you, Mma,” he said. “But vacuum cleaners and maps do not mix. What if it attached itself to one of my maps? What if it sucked one up entirely? What then?” He spoke as if he feared that entire regions, entire countries could be lost in this way; whole swathes of territory would be siphoned up, lost to view and to memory.

“I don’t want to press you, Rra,” she said. “I was just trying to help.”

“You are very good, Mma.”

Of course she knew it would take more than a vacuum cleaner to bring order to that house; what was required was a change of attitude by Daffodil. But she could not say anything about that, and had resigned herself to the fact that her neighbouring property would be ill-kempt indefinitely.