He sighed. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? If I went to anybody and said, ‘Do you realise that my wife is having an affair?’ they would be very surprised. They would say, ‘But she is a very respectable lady, Rra. She is that well-known midwife. And you are a part-time reverend.’ And so on. That is what they would say.”

Mma Ramotswe asked him why he thought Mma Mateleke was seeing somebody. Did he have any proof? She was trying to remember what Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had told her. Something about a car and the Lobatse Road. The Lobatse Road was not a good place to conduct an affair; it was far too busy. Now some small, out-of-the-way road, some road that wandered away to a distant cattle post, or off into the Kalahari until it disappeared in the sand, that road would be the place for a lovers’ meeting.

He shook his head. “I have no proof. I have no letters filled with kisses and things like that. But I have seen her talking to a man. I saw her outside the Botswana Book Centre one day. She was talking to a man.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. “But that is nothing, Rra! Many women talk to men. They may know a man from work, or something like that. Yes, maybe she knew him from work.”

Herbert Mateleke shook his head. “She is a midwife, Mma, as you know. Men do not have babies. Yet.” He hesitated. “Although there are many men these days who want to have babies, I think.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled at that. There were so many different sorts of men these days, that was true, and she wondered whether she might have to change her views of men, which were based, she had to admit, on the idea of traditional men; there were plenty of men today who seemed to be interested in things like clothing and hairstyles, even here in Botswana. And there was a whole generation, she had to acknowledge—reluctantly—who knew very little about cattle, and, shockingly, were not interested in learning. If there was one thing that would upset her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, were he by some miracle to come back and see Botswana today, it would be that. He could take the rudeness of the day—not that Botswana was nearly as bad as many places—and he could take the materialism of the day, but she did not think that he would understand this lack of interest in the land and in the cattle. “But this is Botswana!” he would say to these young people. “You are Batswana and you have no interest in cattle? How can that be!”