But now, as he turned off the ignition and the truck’s engine coughed into silence, he considered how far he had come. He had his own business, a house, a wife, two foster children who gave him joy, and a reasonable balance in a savings account with the Standard Bank. Of these assets, there was no doubt in his mind that the one he valued most was his wife, Precious Ramotswe, daughter of the late Obed Ramotswe of Mochudi, and owner of her own, perhaps somewhat shakier business, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. He was so proud of her, and he would willingly sacrifice everything – everything – if he were ever required to choose between Mma Ramotswe and all that he possessed. Although they had been married for some years now, he could hardly believe his luck in finding somebody like her; he could hardly believe that she had agreed to marry him, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, when he felt that she could have married virtually anybody else in Botswana, had she wanted to. But somehow she had said yes to him, and as a result he had found a happiness that he had never thought was attainable on this side of the great divide that separated those of us who were still alive from those who, being late, were now in a much better place, wherever that was. It was not for him, he thought, to speculate on that location, or even to talk about it. It was somewhere above Botswana, perhaps, or even in Botswana, in those places that you found were special because they somehow felt special: places where you sensed the presence of those who had gone before; some hill with granite rock smoothed by countless rainy seasons; some place of trees and shade where the cattle liked to cluster; some place where there was human silence and you imagined, for some odd reason, that you could actually hear the air.

It was because he valued Mma Ramotswe so highly that he had now taken this step, encouraged, it must be admitted, by Mma Potokwani – who had always pushed him about for various purposes. It was because he wanted to please the wife he loved and to make her life easier that he sought this advice on how to be a modern husband. And now, looking out of his dusty truck window, he saw that there were several other husbands in need of modernisation sitting in their vehicles, all sent there, no doubt, by their wives, or by friends of their wives, all waiting the ten minutes or so before the class was due to start. It was understandable embarrassment, perhaps, that kept them sitting in their cars rather than standing outside in one of the loose groups that men like to stand about in. Going to a course of this nature was in a way an admission that one needed help, and not everybody wanted to be seen in a throng of the needy.