DOUBLE COMFORT SAFARI CLUB, TH(ISBN=) 英文原版

Readers will agree that this touching and dramatic new
installment in Alexander McCall Smith’s beloved and best-selling
series is the finest yet. In this story, Precious Ramotswe deals
with issues of mistaken identity and great fortune against the
beautiful backdrop of Botswana’s remote and striking Okavango
Delta.
 
Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi head to a safari camp to carry out a
delicate mission on behalf of a former guest who has left one of
the guides a large sum of money. But once they find their man,
Precious begins to sense that something is not right. To make
matters worse, shortly before their departure Mma Makutsi’s fiancé,
Phuti Radiphuti, suffers a debilitating accident, and when his aunt
moves in to take care of him, she also pushes Mma Makutsi out of
the picture. Could she be trying to break up the relationship?
Finally, a local priest and his wife independently approach Mma
Ramotswe with concerns of infidelity, creating a rather unusual and
tricky situation. Nevertheless, Precious is confident that with a
little patience, kindness and good sense things will work out for
the best, something that will delight her many fans.

From the Hardcover edition.

Alexander McCall Smith is also the author of
the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series,
and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is professor emeritus of
medical law at the University of Edinburgh and has served on many
national and international bodies concerned with bioethics. He was
born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the
University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland. Visit his website at
www.alexandermccallsmith.com.
From the Hardcover edition.

Chapter One
YOU DO NOT CHANGE PEOPLE
BY SHOUTING AT THEM

No car, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, that great mechanic, and good
man. No car . . .

He paused. It was necessary, he felt, to order the mind when one
was about to think something profound. And Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was
at that moment on the verge of an exceptionally important thought,
even though its final shape had yet to reveal itself. How much
easier it was for Mma Ramotswe—she put things so well, so
succinctly, so profoundly, and appeared to do this with such little
effort. It was very different if one was a mechanic, and therefore
not used to telling people—in the nicest possible way, of
course—how to run their lives. Then one had to think quite hard to
find just the right words that would make people sit up and say,
“But that is very true, Rra!” Or, especially if you were Mma
Ramotswe, “But surely that is well known!”

He had very few criticisms to make of Precious Ramotswe, his wife
and founder of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, but if one were
to make a list of her faults—which would be a minuscule document,
barely visible, indeed, to the naked eye—one would perhaps have to
include a tendency (only a slight tendency, of course) to claim
that things that she happened to believe were well known. This
phrase gave these beliefs a sort of unassailable authority, the
status that went with facts that all right-thinking people would
readily acknowledge—such as the fact that the sun rose in the east,
over the undulating canopy of acacia that stretched along
Botswana’s border, over the waters of the great Limpopo River
itself that now, at the height of the rainy season, flowed deep and
fast towards the ocean half a continent away. Or the fact that
Seretse Khama had been the first President of Botswana; or even the
truism that Botswana was one of the finest and most peaceful
countries in the world. All of these facts were indeed both
incontestable and well known; whereas Mma Ramotswe’s
pronouncements, to which she attributed the special status of being
well known, were often, rather, statements of opinion. There was a
difference, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, but it was not one he was
planning to point out; there were some things, after all, that it
was not helpful for a husband to say to his wife and that,
he thought, was probably one of them.

Now, his thoughts having been properly marshalled, the right words
came to him in a neat, economical expression: No car is entirely
perfect. That was what he wanted to say, and these words were
all that was needed to say it. So he said it once more. No car
is entirely perfect.

In his experience, which was considerable—as the proprietor of
Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and attending physician, therefore, to
a whole fleet of middle-ranking cars—every vehicle had its bad
points, its foibles, its rattles, its complaints; and this, he
thought, was the language of machinery, those idiosyncratic engine
sounds by which a car would strive to communicate with those with
ears to listen, usually mechanics. Every car had its good points
too: a comfortable driving seat, perhaps, moulded over the years to
the shape of the car’s owner, or an engine that started the first
time without hesitation or complaint, even on the coldest winter
morning, when the air above Botswana was dry and crisp and sharp in
the lungs. Each car, then, was an individual, and if only he could
get his apprentices to grasp that fact, their work might be a
little bit more reliable and less prone to require redoing by him.
Push, shove, twist: these were no mantras for a good
mechanic. Listen, coax, soothe: that should be the motto
inscribed above the entrance to every garage; that, or the words
which he had once seen printed on the advertisement for a garage in
Francistown: Your car is ours.

That slogan, persuasive though it might have sounded, had given him
pause. It was a little ambiguous, he decided: on the one hand, it
might be taken to suggest that the garage was in the business of
taking people’s cars away from them—an unfortunate choice of words
if read that way. On the other, it could mean that the garage staff
treated clients’ cars with the same care that they treated their
own. That, he thought, is what they meant, and it would have been
preferable if they had said it. It is always better to say what
you mean—it was his wife, Mma Ramotswe, who said that, and he
had always assumed that she meant it.

No, he mused: there is no such thing as a perfect car, and if every
car had its good and bad points, it was the same with people. Just
as every person had his or her little ways—habits that niggled or
irritated others, annoying mannerisms, vices and failings, moments
of selfishness—so too did they have their good points: a winning
smile, an infectious sense of humour, the ability to cook a
favourite dish just the way you wanted it.

That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost
perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who
generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends
and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones
(our enemies and opponents). Most people fell into that middle
group—those who did their best—and the last group was, thankfully,
very small and not much in evidence in places like Botswana, where
he was fortunate enough to live.

These reflections came to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni while he was driving
his tow-truck down the Lobatse Road. He was on what Mma Ramotswe
described as one of his errands of mercy. In this case he was
setting out to rescue the car of one Mma Constance Mateleke, a
senior and highly regarded midwife and, as it happened, a
long-standing friend of Mma Ramotswe. She had called him from the
roadside. “Quite dead,” said Mma Mateleke through the faint,
crackling line of her mobile phone. “Stopped. Plenty of petrol.
Just stopped like that, Mr. Matekoni. Dead.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni smiled to himself. “No car dies for ever,” he
consoled her. “When a car seems to die, it is sometimes just
sleeping. Like Lazarus, you know.” He was not quite sure of the
analogy. As a boy he had heard the story of Lazarus at Sunday
School in Molepolole, but his recollection was now hazy. It was
many years ago, and the stories of that time, the real, the
made-up, the long-winded tales of the old people—all of these had a
tendency to get mixed up and become one. There were seven lean cows
in somebody’s dream, or was it five lean cows and seven fat
ones?

“So you are calling yourself Jesus Christ now, are you, Mr.
Matekoni? No more Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, is it? Jesus Christ
Motors now?” retorted Mma Mateleke. “You say that you can raise
cars from the dead. Is that what you’re saying?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni chuckled. “Certainly not. No, I am just a
mechanic, but I know how to wake cars up. That is not a special
thing. Any mechanic can wake a car.” Not apprentices, though, he
thought.

“We’ll see,” she said. “I have great faith in you, Mr. Matekoni,
but this car seems very sick now. And time is running away. Perhaps
we should stop talking on the phone and you should be getting into
your truck to come and help me.”

So it was that he came to be travelling down the Lobatse Road, on a
pleasantly fresh morning, allowing his thoughts to wander on the
broad subject of perfection and flaws. On either side of the road
the country rolled out in a grey-green carpet of thorn bush,
stretching off into the distance, to where the rocky outcrops of
the hills marked the end of the land and the beginning of the sky.
The rains had brought thick new grass sprouting up between the
trees; this was good, as the cattle would soon become fat on the
abundant sweet forage it provided. And it was good for Botswana
too, as fat cattle meant fat people—not too fat, of course, but
well-fed and prosperous-looking; people who were happy to be who
they were and where they were.

Yes, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, even if no country was absolutely
perfect, Botswana, surely, came as close as one could get. He
closed his eyes in contentment, and then quickly remembered that he
was driving, and opened them again. A car behind him—not a car that
he recognised—had driven to within a few feet of the rear of his
tow-truck, and was aggressively looking for an opportunity to pass.
The problem, though, was that the Lobatse Road was busy with
traffic coming the other way, and there was a vehicle in front of
Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni that was in no hurry to get anywhere; it was a
driver like Mma Potokwane, he imagined, who ambled along and
frequently knocked the gear-stick out of gear as she waved her hand
to emphasise some point she was making to a passenger. Yet Mma
Potokwane, and this slow driver ahead of him, he reminded himself,
had a right to take things gently if they wished. Lobatse would not
go away, and whether one reached it at eleven in the morning or
half past eleven would surely matter very little.

He looked in his rear-view mirror. He could not make out the face
of the driver, who was sitting well back in his seat, and he could
not therefore engage in eye contact with him. He should calm down,
thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, rather than . . . His line of thought
was interrupted by the sudden swerving of the other vehicle as it
pulled over sharply to the left. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, well versed
as he was in the ways of every sort of driver, gripped his steering
wheel hard and muttered under his breath. What was being attempted
was that most dangerous of manoeuvres—overtaking on the wrong
side.

He steered a steady course, carefully applying his brakes so as to
allow the other driver ample opportunity to effect his passing as
quickly as possible. Not that he deserved the consideration,
of…