But at seven o’clock she began to worry. Phuti had a mobile telephone, but Mma Makutsi did not. He had offered to buy her one, but she had declined the offer on the grounds that she did not want to impose too much, and if she had a mobile phone, she would get no peace from various relatives who had one and who would pester her with requests. So even if he had wanted to let her know that he was going to be late back, he would not have been able to do so.

The minutes passed slowly. She moved the pot to the side of the stove, where it could simmer peacefully, and untied the strings of the apron she was wearing. Then she opened the kitchen door and stepped out into her small yard. Her pawpaw tree, which had never grown straight, was outlined at its drunken angle, a dark shadow against the glow of the night sky. The light from her neighbour’s uncurtained window spilled out onto the bare ground of the yard, a square of yellow; and through the window itself, a glimpse of a family seated around a table—the father, who was something in the Ministry of Telecommunications, an engineer, she thought; the mother, who worked in some lowly capacity at the diamond sorting office; and the three children, whose heads bobbed up and down above the level of the windowsill. They were never still, those children; they were always running about and throwing things and behaving as children should behave.

The lights of a car came up the road. She felt a surge of relief: she knew it was Phuti’s car because one of the lights shone at a slightly different angle to the other, casting its beam more upwards than downwards. My car needs glasses, he had joked, and she had laughed, not because she felt that she had to, but because her fiancé said some very amusing things sometimes, and this was one of them.

The car drew to a halt outside her yard. Mma Makutsi went forward and began to open the gate, and to say, “I thought that you must be busy …” But then she stopped; it was not Phuti in his car but his assistant manager, Mr. Gaethele, a man with a damaged left ear.

“Phuti?” Mma Makutsi’s voice was low.

Mr. Gaethele looked down. He held his hands palm outwards; a curious gesture, apologetic more than anything else; the gesture of one who has broken something, or brings news of breakage. “There has been an accident, Mma.”

She stood quite still.

“He is all right, but he is in the Princess Marina. His leg is bad. You must not worry too much, Mma.”