Of course, men were getting better—that was another fact Mma Ramotswe had pointed out to her, and with which she was strongly inclined to agree. Old-fashioned men—men who could do very little about the house and could talk about nothing but cattle and football—such men were increasingly being replaced by men who had many more interests and topics of conversation. These new men, as she had seen them referred to, were not only prepared to talk about many of the things that women liked, but they also took a strong interest in clothes. One or two of them, she had heard, even put cosmetics on their faces, which Mma Makutsi, open as she was to new developments, thought was going too far. “There’s nothing much men can do about their faces,” she once said to Mma Ramotswe. And Mma Ramotswe, immediately recognising the truth of this, had said, “No, Mma, that is quite true. Men’s faces are very unfortunate. They can do nothing.”

This remark sounded somewhat uncharitable, and Mma Ramotswe had quickly added: “Of course, that is not men’s fault. And there is something reassuring about a man’s face. It’s … it’s like the land, I think. It’s always there.”

They looked at one another doubtfully, and tacitly agreed to defer until later any further discussion of men’s faces, and indeed the broader topic of men and women; such issues were never easily resolved, and no matter how readily men’s characteristics suggested themselves for scrutiny, at the end of the day men simply were, and most, if not all, women seemed to be thankful for that.

Mma Makutsi was certainly grateful for Phuti Radiphuti. He had come into her life at an unexpected moment, when she was almost at the point of reconciling herself to the possibility that she might never find anybody suitable. That would have been a bleak conclusion for anybody to reach, and particularly somebody as young as Mma Makutsi. But one had to be realistic, and there seemed to be few men apparently interested in a woman with problematic skin and large glasses. Most men, it appeared, were more interested in the likes of Violet Sephotho, the arch-Jezebel who had graduated with barely fifty per cent from the Botswana Secretarial College. She it was who had shamelessly attempted to win Phuti from Mma Makutsi by insinuating herself into a job at the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, in the bed department, of all departments—how appropriate and inappropriate at the same time—and had, thankfully, failed. Violet would have shown not the slightest scrap of interest in Phuti had she not realised that he was a wealthy man. That changed everything in her book: How could she be indifferent to a man who was due to inherit a large furniture shop and the large herd of cattle built up by his father, the very elderly but not quite yet late Mr. Radiphuti Senior?