properly-dressed

It's not your normal way of selling a dress.

"I was looking out for you," Mai Musa says reproachfully. "Why didn't you come?"

I made the mistake a few weeks back of saying we didn't have a gardener. Mai Musa's sister's husband wants a job. She made me promise to go to ask my husband.

"I'm sorry, we just can't afford one at the moment," I admit. "My husband's doing the work in the yard now." Which is true: he wears an orange boiler suit brought out by my mother.

Disappointed, Mai Musa persuades me in to look at the new clothes in her shop. She is eyecatchingly dressed herself in a bright purple knee-length dress with a square neck and lots of buttons.

"I know you like dresses," she says. "What about these ones?" These ones are the maxi-dresses that have finally reached Zimbabwe. Mai Musa hurries past a sleeveless modele. "Not that one," she says. "I can't wear that one."

"Why?" (I thought it was me who was supposed to be looking).

"It's my father," she explains. "He's an apostolic. He won't let me wear anything that shows my shoulders. He doesn't like hair pieces either". She touches her ponytail of braids guiltily, shuffles through the rack until she picks out something suitably demure. Her father lives in Old Mutare, it turns out, so at least she gets some warning of his visits.

"I can do piecework at your place," she says eventually. "Even on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. These days, the money's not enough."