In the Company of Cheerful Ladies by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

places.”
    Mma Makutsi went in. It was a large room, the centre of which had been cleared and the carpet taken up. Chairs had been placed around the sides, and at the far end, on a small platform,
    the two musicians, the drummer and the guitarist, were perched on stools. The guitarist was fiddling with a lead to his instrument, while the drummer, a thin man wearing a silver-coloured waistcoat, was staring up at the ceiling, tapping his drumsticks against his knee.
    Most of the chairs were occupied, and for a moment Mma Makutsi felt awkward as the eyes of those already there fell upon her. She felt that she was being appraised, and she searched quickly for any face that she knew, for any person whom she
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    could approach and greet. But there was nobody, and under the gaze of the sixty or so people present, she crossed the floor to take a seat on one of the few chairs which were still free. Glancing around, she saw, to her relief, that she was dressed in much the same way as the other women, but none, she saw, was wearing glasses. For a moment she thought about taking hers off and putting
    them away, but the difficulty with doing that was that she really needed them and without them she would not be able to make out what was happening.
    A few minutes later Mr Fanope entered the room, followed by the woman in the red sequinned dress. He was a rather small, dapper man, wearing a white evening jacket and a bow tie. Mma Makutsi noticed that he was wearing black patent leather shoes. She had not seen a man in patent leather footwear before and she thought them most becoming. Would Mr J.L.B. Matekoni wear such shoes, she wondered? It was difficult to see him in shoes like that at the garage—the oil would spoil them so quickly—but she could hardly imagine him in shoes like that even in other circumstances.
    This was definitely not his world, nor the world of Mma Ramotswe, when one came to think about it. Would Mma Ramotswe be a good dancer? Traditionally built women could be rather good at dancing, thought Mma Makutsi, as they have the right bearing, at least for some dances. The tango would hardly suit somebody of Mma Ramotswe’s build, but she could certainly imagine her doing a waltz, perhaps, or a sedate jive. Traditional dancing presented no problems, of course, because the whole point about traditional dancing was that everybody could join in. A few weeks previously they had been at the orphan farm for Mma Potokwane’s birthday party, and the children’s traditional dancing group had performed in the matron’s honour, with all the housemothers joining in. Some of them were of a very traditional build—from all that sampling of the good food they cooked for
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    the children—and they had looked very dignified as they had joined in the line of shuffling, singing dancers. But all of that was a long way away from the world of Mr Fanope and his President Hotel dance academy.
    “Now then, bomma and borra,” said Mr Fanope into the microphone. “Welcome to the first class of the Academy of Dance and Movement. You have made a very good choice coming here tonight because this is the number-one place to learn ballroom
    dancing in Botswana. And I am the best teacher for you people. I will make dancers out of all of you, even if you have never danced before. Everybody here has a dancer inside, and I will let that dancer out. That is what I will do.”
    Somebody clapped at this point, and a number of others followed suit. Mr Fanope acknowledged the applause with a small bow.
    “We are going to start this evening with a simple dance. This is a dance that anybody can do, and it is called the quickstep. It goes slow, slow, quick; slow, slow, quick, quick. It is very simple, and Mma Betty and I are going to show you how to do it.”
    He nodded to the musicians. As they began to play, he moved away from the microphone and turned to the woman in the red sequinned dress. Mma Makutsi watched in fascination as they danced across the floor. They