Mma Ramotswe smiled. ‘There is nothing better for a baby than to be covered in that jelly,’ she said. ‘It helps to…’ She faltered. She was not sure what purpose was served by polishing babies with petroleum jelly, but there must have been some reason, or it would not have been done. Some people said that it was an old custom and should be given up, but she thought it harmless, even if it was difficult to think of any scientific reason to do it.

‘It helps the mother,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘If the mother sees that the baby is nice and shiny, then that makes the mother feel better, and if the mother feels better, then she looks after the baby better. There is a lot of evidence for that, I think.’

Mma Ramotswe wondered whether Mma Makutsi was going to disclose that she had learned this information at the Botswana Secretarial College, but she did not. ‘I am sure you are right, Mma,’ she said.

Mma Makutsi glanced towards the doorway through which Phuti Radiphuti and the aunt had disappeared. Then she looked at Mma Ramotswe.

‘Would you like to see him?’ she whispered.

Mma Ramotswe suppressed a giggle of glee. ‘Yes, I would love to, Mma. She needn’t know.’

Quietly, like stealthy conspirators, they crept out of the kitchen and into the small bedroom that was acting as nursery. There was a large green cot in one corner of this room, a changing table and a tall chest full of baby supplies: powder and creams and neat piles of woollen clothing. There was also that wonderful, evocative smell of a small human creature – a smell of softness, a smell of milk, a smell of life just beginning.

‘There he is,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘See him, Mma Ramotswe? See my baby?’

Mma Ramotswe leaned forward over the little figure in the cot. She reached out and very gently touched one of the tiny hands – carefully, as one might touch a butterfly or a delicate flower. The baby did not stir, not beyond the tiny movements of a sleeping infant – the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the soft blanket under which he slept, and the occasional twitch. She thought: for all he knows, he might still be in the womb, except here, in his new life, there was light and colour and the warm embrace of Africa.