Mma Makutsi nodded. “I think that is probably true. They are busy. They forget.”

“Yes,” said Mma Potokwane. “They probably think: This is just another woman talking to me. And now your poor Phuti has had this terrible injury. I am so sorry, Mma.”

“Thank you, Mma.”

Mma Potokwane sat down. “He is a lucky man to have you, Mma. When he comes out of hospital you can nurse him back to health. He will soon be up and about.”

Mma Ramotswe now got up from her desk to pour tea for their visitor. “Actually, he is already out, Mma. He has made very good progress.”

Mma Potokwane clapped her hands together. “That is very good news! So you are already looking after him. Give him plenty of meat, Mma. Breakfast, lunch, supper—good Botswana beef. That will make him strong. And vegetables. Also at breakfast, lunch and supper. Vegetables. Vitamin C.” She paused. “You’ve got somebody at your house to help you?”

It was Mma Ramotswe who answered. She looked round and saw Mma Makutsi staring down at her hands, clasped together on the desk. “Well, Mma, it is rather difficult. You see, Mma Makutsi would like to look after Phuti, but he has an aunt, and this aunt has somehow managed to—”

Mma Potokwane stopped her. “Oh, I have met that woman. I cannot remember her name, but she has a …”

“Big head,” Mma Makutsi supplied. “A big head, a bit like a melon.” She sketched the dimensions of the head with her hands.

“Yes, that is her,” said Mma Potokwane. “She is a very difficult woman. She was very rude to one of the house mothers once, at church, I think. She said that she was not putting enough money in the collection basket. I heard about that. The house mother had been crying. She said, Some woman with a very big head made me very embarrassed. I remember it.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled, picturing the scene. The people who volunteered to take the collection at church were often of a rather stern type, she thought. “That is the woman who is now looking after Phuti,” she said. “And she is trying to stop Mma Makutsi from seeing him.”

Mma Potokwane put down her teacup with a clatter. “What? What is this?”

“She turns me away when I go to the house,” explained Mma Makutsi. “She won’t let me see Phuti, my own fiancé.”

Mma Potokwane made a strange sound—a sort of eruption that came from deep within her, a small sound, perhaps, at its origin somewhere within her chest, but magnified tenfold as it came up through her matronly air passages, to emerge from her lips as an unmistakably disapproving snort. It was very like the sound, thought Mma Ramotswe, not without admiration, that a she-elephant makes when warning an intruder off her young.