Mma Ramotswe frowned.

“You must not do anything illegal,” she said. “I will not help you if that is what you are planning.”

Mma Selelipeng raised her hands in horror. “No, nothing like that, Mma. I would just be planning to speak to her. To warn her. That is all. Don’t you think that any woman has a right to do that?”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. She had no time for husband stealers, and no time for deceiving men. People had the right to protect what was theirs, but she was a kind woman and understood human weakness. This Mr. Bernard Selelipeng probably needed no more than a gentle reminder of his duties as a husband and a father. Looking at the photograph again, she suspected that this would suffice. It was not a strong face, she thought; it was not the face of a man who would leave his wife for good. He would go back like a naughty boy who has been caught stealing melons. She was sure of it.

MMA RAMOTSWE was driving back to Zebra Drive that evening, taking her normal route from the Tlokweng Road and turning off into Odi Drive, when the tiny white van began to pull over to the left. She wondered for a moment whether the steering was faulty, and she shifted her weight in the seat towards the right, but this made no difference. Now there was a strange sound coming from the back of the van, a grinding sound, as of metal on stone, and she realised that she had a flat tyre. This was both an annoyance and a relief at the same time, the relief coming from the fact that it was an easily tackled problem. If one had a spare wheel, that is, and she did not. She had asked one of the apprentices to take it out for inflating, and she had seen it propped up against the wall of the garage and had been on the point of putting it back when Mma Makutsi had called her inside to take a telephone call. So the spare wheel remained in Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and she was here, on the side of the road, where it was needed.

She felt a momentary irritation with herself. There was really no excuse for driving without a spare wheel; tyres were always going flat with all those sharp stones on the road and dropped nails and the like. If it had happened to somebody else, she would have had no hesitation in saying: Well, it’s not very clever, is it, to drive a car without a spare wheel; and here it had happened to her, and she richly deserved such self-reproach.

She drew over to the left, to keep the car away from the traffic, not that there was much of that along this quiet residential road. She looked about her. She was not far from Zebra Drive -about half an hour’s walk, at the most-and she could easily walk home and wait for Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni to come round for dinner. Then they could rescue the tiny white van together. Or, and this made more sense in terms of avoiding extra journeys, she could telephone him at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, where he was working late, and ask him to bring the spare wheel with him on his way to Zebra Drive.

She looked about her. There was a public telephone in the shopping centre at the end of the road, or, and this was the obvious answer, there was Dr. Moffat’s house, close to which the tiny white van was now parked. Dr. Moffat, who had helped Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni recover from his depressive illness, lived with his wife in a rambling old house, surrounded by a generous-sized garden, the gate of which Mma Ramotswe now opened tentatively, bearing in mind how careful one had to be about dogs in yards like that. But there was no dog barking defiance, only the surprised voice of Mrs. Moffat, who emerged from behind a shrub which she had been tending.

“Mma Ramotswe! You are always creeping up on people!”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. “I am not here on business,” she said. “I am here because my van out there has a flat tyre and I need to phone Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni for help. Would you mind, Mma?”

Mrs. Moffat slipped her garden secateurs into her pocket. “We can telephone straightaway,” she said. “And then we can have a cup of tea while we are waiting for Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni.”

They went into the house, where Mma Ramotswe telephoned Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, told him of her misfortune, and explained where she was. Then, invited by the doctor’s wife to join her on the verandah, they sat around a small table and talked.

There was much to talk about. Mrs. Moffat had lived in Mochudi when her husband had run the small hospital there, and she had known Obed Ramotswe and many of the families who were friendly with the Ramotswes. Mma Ramotswe liked nothing more than to talk about those days, long past now, but so important to her sense of who she was.

“Do you remember my father’s hat?” she asked, stirring sugar into her tea. “He wore the same hat for many years. It was very old.”

“I remember it,” said Mrs. Moffat. “The doctor used to describe it as a very wise hat.”

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “I suppose a hat sees many things,” she said. “It must learn something.” She paused. The memory was coming back to her of the day that her father lost his hat. He had taken it off for some reason and had forgotten where he had left it. For the best part of a day they had gone round Mochudi, trying to remember where he might have left it, asking people whether they had seen it. And at last it had been found on a wall near the kgotla, placed there by somebody who must have picked it up from the road. Would somebody in Gaborone put a hat in a safe place if it were found in the road? She thought not. We do not care about other people’s hats in the same way these days, do we? We do not.

“I miss Mochudi,” said Mrs. Moffat. “I miss those mornings when we listened to the cattle bells. I miss hearing the singing of the children from the school when the wind was in the right direction.”

“It is a good place,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I miss listening to people talking about very small things.”

“Like hats,” ventured Mrs. Moffat.

“Yes, like hats. And special cattle. And which babies have arrived and what they are called. All those things.”

Mrs. Moffat refilled the teacups, and for a few minutes they sat in easy silence, each with her own thoughts. Mma Ramotswe thought of her father, and of Mochudi, and her childhood, and of how happy it had been even without a mother. And Mrs. Moffat thought of her parents, and of her father, an artist who had become blind, and of how hard it must have been to move into a world of darkness.

“I have some photographs which may interest you,” Mrs. Moffat said after a while. “There are some photographs of Mochudi in those days. You will know the people in them.”

She went off into the living room and returned with a large cardboard box.

“I have been meaning to put these into albums,” she said, “but I have never got round to it. I shall do it one day, maybe.”

“I am the same,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I will do these things one day.”

The photographs were taken out and examined, one by one. There were many people Mma Ramotswe remembered; here was Mrs. de Kok, the wife of the missionary, standing in front of a rosebush; here was the schoolteacher from the primary school giving a prize to a small child; here was the doctor himself playing tennis. And there, in a group of men in front of the kgotla, was Obed Ramotswe himself, wearing his hat, and the sight made her catch her breath.

“There,” said Mrs. Moffat. “That’s your father, isn’t it?”

Mma Ramotswe nodded.

“You take that,” said Mrs. Moffat, handing her the photograph.

She accepted the gift gratefully and they looked at more photographs.

“Who is this?” asked Mma Ramotswe, pointing to a photograph of an elderly woman sitting at a table in a shady part of a garden, playing cards with the Moffat children.