Phuti hesitated. “You…You sh…should…” He was beginning to stammer. Mma Makutsi frowned at the assistant. It was his fault that this misunderstanding had arisen—he should have made it clear at the outset that the bed and the headboard were separate items. And now Phuti’s stammer was starting again, which was frustrating for her, after all the efforts she had made to help him overcome it. Perhaps she should ask to speak to the manager and give him a piece of her mind about the need to make terms and conditions clear to customers. In her business practice course at the Botswana Secretarial College they had stressed that one should never try to mislead the customer. And indeed Clovis Andersen, whose book Mma Ramotswe was always going on about, said much the same thing about telling the truth to clients. Never put anything in small print and then spring it on the client. That breaks trust.

“That breaks trust,” she muttered.

The assistant only half heard her. “What was that, Mma?”

Phuti cleared his throat. “I’ll take the headboard too,” he said. The stammer had gone, replaced by a note of resignation in his voice.

“We’ll deliver them both tomorrow,” said the assistant. “To your address, Rra?”

Phuti turned to Mma Makutsi. “It can go to your house first, Grace,” he said. “You can enjoy sleeping in it until we move it to my house after the wedding.”

Mma Makutsi accepted demurely. She gave the address to the assistant, who wrote it down in his notebook. So much had changed in her life since she had become engaged to Phuti. Now, with the arrangements being made for the delivery of the bed, it seemed to her that a further, tangible improvement was about to be achieved. This bed, with its elaborate headboard, would have been an impossible self-indulgence in her earlier state. Phuti had made the decision to purchase the bed as if the expense were something that one would hardly notice, and yet it had cost so much. She wondered if that was what it would be like to have buying power—not having to worry about what one had to pay, but deciding whether or not to buy something purely on the basis of whether one wanted it. And would that apply, she asked herself, to shoes? For a moment she imagined the shoes she might have—a cupboard full of new shoes, all set out on racks. She would wear a different colour each day, depending on her mood, and perhaps take a spare pair along with her to work so that she could change them as the spirit moved her. She closed her eyes at the thought.