Precious and Grace by Alexander McCall Smith

like, but it was enough for him to be concerned. Cautiously, she asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”
    He shrugged. “Not really—these break-ins, you see…It’s the one thing that will deter a burglar. You can build fences as high as you like, you can put big locks on your gates, but it is always dogs that look after your property.”
    She looked into her teacup. There had been a time when locks had been virtually unknown in Botswana, when you could leave your possessions anywhere with the confidence that they would be there when you returned, when there was no point in stealing because people would see you with some item that they knew you did not own and would draw their own conclusions. That had changed, at least in the towns; it was different in the country, where the old ways still prevailed.
    What would her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, make of high, locked gates? She gazed out into the yard; dusk was settling on the town, covering the trees and buildings with its gentle, cooling mantle; there was the smell of wood-smoke, of cooking somewhere. She could hear his voice:
What are these gates for, Precious? Why do these people want to close themselves off from their brothers and their sisters?
It would be hard to explain that people no longer thought of others as their brothers and sisters, although she did; she would never abandon the presumption that we were bound one to another in that way.
    She moved on from the subject of the dog. She had been thinking of Mr. Polopetsi and his scheme. It seemed to her that everybody to whom she had spoken knew about it and that she was the only one who had not been approached. Had Mr. Polopetsi also confided in Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni?
    “Mr. Polopetsi, Rra,” she began.
    He laughed. “Mr. Twenty-Five Per Cent, you mean.”
    For a moment she was unable to say anything.
    Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni smiled. “He will have spoken to you about it, Mma?”
    She shook her head. “No, Rra. It looks as if he’s spoken to everybody else, though.”
    She wondered whether Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had invested anything. Surely he would have told her about it—they kept most of their money in a joint account, but they both had separate savings accounts for the occasional individual treat. She did not think, though, that his savings account had more than a couple of thousand pula in it at present; there had been the new roof for the garage and a needy aunt up in Francistown—these were exactly the sorts of things that drained a bank account.
    “You didn’t…”
    His laughter cut her short. “Invest in Mr. Polopetsi’s great scheme? Certainly not. To begin with, he actually asked for ten thousand pula, Mma. Ten thousand pula? We don’t have that at the moment and, if we did, I’m afraid I would never entrust it to Polopetsi Enterprises, or whatever it’s called.”
    “The Fat Cattle Club,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That’s what he calls it.”
    “Fat Cattle indeed,” muttered Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Does Mr. Polopetsi know anything about cattle? I know that he’s very good at chemistry, but cattle…” He paused. “The trouble, Mma Ramotswe, is that everybody in this country thinks that he or she is a big cattle expert. Speak to anybody and they’ll start going on about cattle. They’ll tell you what’s best for cattle; they’ll explain to you all about the different sorts of salt licks; they’ll talk for ages about breeding and horns and diseases that cattle get in their hooves, and ticks too…There’s no limit to the knowledge that people have about cattle, Mma.”
    Mma Ramotswe knew what he meant. Cattle were at the heart of Botswana society, the ultimate unit of wealth, the form of property that people appreciated above all else. It did not matter if you had money in the bank; what really counted was the cattle, and many people measured themselves, and others, by how many they had. People were odd about cattle.
    “Well,” she said, “he’s already made his own