She glanced at him. Marriage was all about honesty, and being open, but she had always felt that just about every married person had something, some sorrow or secret, that was not shared, that was a private area of their lives that might not be shared with a spouse. It could be something sad or painful, or it could be something just mildly embarrassing, some tiny failing or silliness, some moment of mild shame, but it was no reflection on the marriage that this thing should be kept tucked away. We are the people we want ourselves to be, and then there are the people we actually are: sometimes it is easier to be the people we want ourselves to be if we keep at least some things to ourselves. That, thought Mma Ramotswe, is only human.

And she thought of what Note Mokoti, her first, abusive husband, had done to her. She had never told anybody—not her father, to whom she had run for protection, not her friend Mma Potokwane, not even Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. Note had beaten her; he had hurt her. She did not talk about it because she felt ashamed, and she wanted to forget it. There was a time for talking about things that distressed us, but there was also a time for not talking about them. These days people seemed to suggest that you should talk about everything, even those things that people never talked about in the past, but did this make life any easier? She was not sure. In fact, she thought there were occasions on which talking about distressing things merely kept those things alive, whereas not talking about them, consigning them to the past, forgetting them, allowed one to think about things that were positive, things that made the world a bit better.

She was unsure whether to ask him about it. But he continued anyway.

“You know I did my service in the brigades?” he said.

She nodded. The brigades had been part of the national service that Botswana had required of young people. Some of the brigades still survived as training organisations, especially in the rural areas; others were now merely a memory of the time when the country was just emerging, when Botswana was learning to walk.

“I was in a brigade that did mechanical training,” he went on. “We were based up at Serowe. I enjoyed myself—and learned a lot.”

“Many people did,” she said. “And it was good work.”

“It helped us grow up,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “We went in as teenagers—rather aimless teenagers, perhaps—and came out as adults.”

She waited. In some respects, even after years of marriage, they were strangers to one another. He had never talked about his time in the brigades before.