Mma Ramotswe asked a final question. “And you know nothing else about her, Mma?”

Mma Soleti appeared to consider this for a few moments. “The only thing my sister said is that she is one of those women who are always looking out for men. You know the type? She is not interested in talking to women.”

Mma Ramotswe knew exactly what Mma Soleti meant. There was a certain sort of woman who was always aware of which men were in the vicinity and was always very attentive to them, but who would neither notice women nor bother to speak to them. Women like Violet Sephotho, for instance …

CHAPTER TEN

SHE WAS LIKE A DEFLATED BALLOON

MMA POTOKWANE was not in her office when Mma Ramotswe arrived at the orphan farm. This was not unusual: the matron was often to be found in one of the outlying buildings, attending to one of the numerous minor, or sometimes major, problems that might be expected to crop up in the day-to-day life of an orphanage. Most of these she resolved herself, dispensing advice, fixing something, or simply wiping away tears; all of which she did with the same brisk confidence that she applied to any task that confronted her. Not for nothing had Mma Potokwane previously been appointed as matron of a small but well-run hospital, and the skills she had learned in the wards there—dealing with unhappy or nervous patients, keeping nurses and others on their toes—she now applied in the rather different circumstances of the orphan farm.

Mma Ramotswe, still thinking of her conversation with her new acquaintance, Mma Soleti, parked her tiny white van under the tree that always shaded it on her visits: a towering jacaranda tree on the lower limbs of which the children had climbed, rubbing the bark bare with their legs. We should all have a tree in our childhood, she thought—a tree one might explore, a tree from which one might learn how to fall. She had fallen out of just such a tree as a girl and winded herself, while the children who were with her stood in a circle about her and laughed; they were boys, of course, and found misfortune funny in a way in which girls did not. She had never forgotten the sensation of being winded: of having all the breath knocked out of you and waiting for your lungs to draw it back in—but it was as if your lungs were stunned and were waiting for instructions from you …