“Then why don’t you?” he had said, but not loudly enough to be heard, for Mma Potokwane had continued as if he had not spoken.

“There is no reason to be afraid,” she said. “I think that it will be very comfortable riding down in the air like that. They might drop you over one of our fields and I will get one of the housemothers to have a cake ready for you when you land. And we have a stretcher too. We can have that close by, just in case.”

“I do not want to do it,” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had intended to say, but for some reason the words came out as, “I’ll think about it.”

And that, he realised, was where he had made his mistake. Of course it would be easy enough to undo. All that he would have to do would be to telephone Mma Potokwane and tell her, as unambiguously and as finally as he could, that he had now thought about it and he had decided that he would not do it. He would be happy to give some money to whomsoever she managed to persuade to do it for her, but that person, he was sorry to say, would not be him. This was the only way with Mma Potokwane. One had to be firm with her, just as he had been firm with her on the issue of the pump. One had to stand up to a woman like that.

The difficulty, of course, with standing up to women was that it appeared to make little difference. At the end of the day, a man was no match for a woman, especially if that woman was somebody like Mma Potokwane. The only thing to do was to try to avoid situations where women might corner you. And that was difficult, because women had a way of ensuring that you were neatly boxed in, which was exactly what had happened to him. He should have been more careful. He should have been on his guard when she offered him cake. That was her technique, he now understood; just as Eve had used an apple to trap Adam, so Mma Potokwane used fruit cake. Fruit cake, apples; it made no difference really. Oh foolish, weak men!