Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Read online

  Iris looked startled. “But Jenny’s in that pretty little skirt and blouse, and look at you in—”

  Mrs. Pollifax shook her head. “Wear them.”

  Iris sighed. “Gosh, the money I spent on all this stuff, enough to keep Vogue Boutique in business a whole year, I swear.”

  “You’ll look splendid in jeans,” said Mrs. Pollifax, paying this no attention. “Be yourself.”

  Iris considered this and sighed again. “There it is again, the hardest thing of all, don’t you think? Being yourself? But if I should blossom out in my jeans tomorrow would you stick near me?”

  “For the initial impact, yes, but after that you’re on your own.”

  Iris grinned. “You’re really nice. I thought when I first saw you, oh boy she’ll be the one to cold-shoulder me—I mean, when I first saw you, before I spoke to you. And here I end up telling you the story of my life.”

  “Stanley,” said Mrs. Pollifax, “would have told you to ‘button up’?”

  Iris laughed her joyous laugh. “You sure listened if you remember that. Oh-oh, here comes Mr. Forbes again. He’s certainly no talker, he just keeps studying that Chinese dictionary of his.”

  “Yes, but I took his seat and I’ll let him have it back now,” Mrs. Pollifax told her. “I’ll see you later, Iris.”

  As the others streamed back into the car the train lurched and then began to move, and Mr. Li appeared carrying a carton of box lunches for them. A moment later the railway station and the border were behind them, and Mrs. Pollifax thought, We’re now in Mainland China. It begins at last.

  They dined late that afternoon in the Guangzhou Restaurant, just off the train and in another world. Their number had been increased by one, the local Guangzhou, or Canton guide who explained that the hotel was so far out of town that they must have their Chinese banquet now. The man’s name was Tung, and Mrs. Pollifax began to understand now that only Mr. Li was to be permanent and theirs; the others would come and go, with names like Chu and Tung, leaving only vague impressions behind.

  In any case, Mrs. Pollifax felt that her sense of inner time was still so confused that a banquet in late afternoon could scarcely be more difficult than breakfast at night over the Pacific. They were here, very definitely in China, on the second floor of a huge old wooden building in a room filled with large round tables, only one of which was occupied by a family of Chinese who ate and talked with enthusiasm in a far corner: a wedding party, explained Mr. Li.

  With her chopsticks Mrs. Pollifax lifted a slice of sugared tomato toward her mouth and experienced triumph at its arrival. From where she sat she could look out across the restaurant’s courtyard and see a line of clothes hung on a rope stretched from eave to eave: an assortment of grays, dull blues, and greens. She decided that it was probably not someone’s laundry because the wide street outside had been lined with just such clothing too, hung like banners from every apartment above the street floor. Presumably it was an efficient solution to a lack of closet space, and remembering her own crowded closets at home she pondered the effect on her neighbors if she did this at the Hemlock Arms.

  Mr. Li, seated beside her, chose this moment to announce, “It is important there be a leader to this group. You are oldest, Mrs. Pollifax, you will please be leader?”

  Mrs. Pollifax, glancing around, said doubtfully, “I’m the oldest, yes, but I wonder if perhaps—” She stopped, aware that Iris’ eyes were growing huge with alarm at the thought of her deferring to a man and betraying The Cause. She wondered if later it would prove convenient or inconvenient to be a leader, and Carstairs’ words drifted back to her: if anything unusual happens—if anything goes wrong—get that group the hell out of China. Possibly, she decided, it might prove convenient. “Yes of course,” she said, and smiled demurely at Iris across the table.

  Mr. Li laughed merrily. “Good-okay! You can find for me out of each person what they most want to see. For the arrangements. We cannot promise them, it is the local guides who decide, but I struggle for you.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Pollifax, and decided not to mention the Drum Tower in Xian just yet.

  “For tomorrow,” said Mr. Li, “Mr. Tung has arranged—” He bent his ear to Mr. Tung and surfaced, nodding. “We visit Dr. Sun Yet-sen Memorial Hall, the panda at the zoo, various other stops, and late in afternoon departure to Xian.”

  “The beginning of the Silk Road,” pointed out Malcolm, nodding.

  George Westrum, on her left, said gruffly, “For myself, I’ll say right now that I want to see their farms, and the equipment they have. That’ll be communes, of course.”

  “I’ll make a note of that,” she told him. “You’re a farmer, George?”

  “Have a few acres,” he said.

  Mrs. Pollifax gave him an exasperated glance. She had wrested words out of young Peter, and had witnessed Malcolm’s evasiveness, and she was bored with all this modesty. She asked bluntly, “How many?”

  “Several thousand,” he admitted.

  “Cows, horses, sheep, or grain?” she shot back.

  “Beef cattle. And oil.”

  “Aha!”

  He nodded. “A surprise to me, that oil,” he said. “Retired early from government work—”

  “Government work?”

  “Yes, and bought a ranch, expecting to raise cattle, not oil. That young lady I saw you talking to on the train,” he said casually, with a not-so-casual glance across the table at Iris. “She Miss or Mrs. Damson?”

  Mrs. Pollifax’s aha was silent this time. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” she told him cheerfully, “except that I do know she’s not married now. Is this a thousand-year-old egg?” she asked, turning to Mr. Li.

  “Oh yes, but not a thousand years old,” he said with his quick smile and another merry laugh.

  “It tastes like egg, it just looks rather odd, as if it had been left out of the refrigerator too long.”

  Jenny said, “I believe they’re soaked in brine or something, and buried in the earth.”

  “The food’s coming with frightening speed now,” pointed out Malcolm across the table as the waiter brought still another platter to the table. “Sweet and sour something,” he announced, spearing a piece between chopsticks and delivering it to his mouth before passing it on. “How many meals will be Chinese on our trip?”

  “It is good, you all using chopsticks,” said Mr. Li. “Very good. You, Mr. Fox—press fingers a little higher,” he told Peter, receiving a hostile glance in return. “The food? After tomorrow no Western food.”

  “Not even breakfast?” gasped Jenny.

  “Chinese breakfast.”

  “What fun,” cried Iris with a radiant smile.

  “I’ve been studying Chinese this last year,” Joe Forbes told him across the table. “I’d like to try it out on you now and then. For instance, would I be called a da bi zi?”

  Both Mr. Li and Mr. Tung burst out laughing. “Xiao hua,” cried Mr. Li enthusiastically.

  “Meaning what?” asked Jenny.

  Joe Forbes said, “I hope I asked if I’d be called a ‘long nose’ among the Chinese—except it’s so damn easy to get the tones wrong. Did I?”

  “You did, yes,” Mr. Tung assured him, “and Comrade Li said Xiao hua, meaning ‘a joke’!”

  “Surely we’re called round eyes, not long noses,” asked Malcolm.

  “Anyway not foreign devils anymore,” contributed Jenny.

  “Capitalist-roaders?” suggested Iris, grinning.

  Mr. Tung gave an embarrassed laugh. Mr. Li lifted his glass of pale orange soda pop and said, “Let us toast to Chinese-American friendship!”

  Mrs. Pollifax raised her own glass of soda. The others lifted their glasses of Chinese beer, which she promised herself she would try the next day, since water was advised against, the tea extremely weak, and the soda tasted rather like flavored water. In the meantime she waited to ask George Westrum just what his government service might have been. He was a silent man but he talked wel
l when he did speak; his face was expressionless, even harsh, but there was that occasional twinkle of humor that suggested other dimensions. He must certainly have retired early—as CIA men often did, Bishop had told her—because he looked to be still in his fifties, and he was obviously strong. She felt that he was noticing everyone and everything—watching and alert—and she was amused that he had especially noticed Iris.

  But there was no opportunity to question George Westrum further. Mr. Li, pleased that Forbes was learning Mandarin, at once grasped the chance to practice his English, and their exchange of words occupied the others. “Yes, I teach history,” Forbes was saying, “in a small Midwestern university.” He was smiling but Mrs. Pollifax realized that actually he did not smile all the time, it was merely an illusion caused by the arrangement of his features, but definitely smiling now, she could see the difference.

  “Professor?” said Iris, and made a startled gesture that struck a nearby bottle of beer and sent it rolling off the table. Iris turned scarlet. “Oh,” she gasped. “Oh I’m terrible sorry.” She dropped her napkin and started after it.

  Malcolm placed a firm hand on her arm. “Please,” he said with a smile. “Not again. Let me do the honors this time.”

  “Oh! Oh thank you,” said Iris, her cheeks burning.

  But a waiter had rushed to the table to wipe up the spilled beer, just as another waiter arrived bearing a huge soup tureen. “Now that looks too heavy for Iris to tip over,” Jenny said, with a laugh.

  “I understand soup means the end of a meal in your country,” Joe Forbes put in. “In America we have it first, you know.”

  Mr. Tung looked appalled.

  “We feel,” explained Mr. Li gently, “that it belongs at the end. To settle the dinner.”

  “And don’t forget,” Malcolm pointed out, “the Chinese gave us silk, printing, gunpowder, and porcelain among other things.”

  “But obviously not the idea of soup to end a meal,” added Jenny.

  Mrs. Pollifax put down her chopsticks. It had been a lavish dinner—melons, rice, pork, shrimp, eggs, tomatoes, more courses than she could count—but she was glad to see it ending. It’s been a long day, she thought, and I miss Cyrus … I can’t go through China missing Cyrus, I have work to do. I haven’t managed Yoga for three days, perhaps that’s it.

  They rose from the table, descended dusty wooden stairs, and left the restaurant to be assaulted by the life outside. Mrs. Pollifax revived at once and looked around her with pleasure: at the broad street dense with people and bicycles, at children stopping to stare at them shyly and then smile. Off to one side she saw a line of stalls piled high with shirts, plastic sandals, bananas, sunflower seeds, and nuts. A woman and child sat patiently beside a very small table, waiting to sell a few bottles of garishly bright orange soda pop. Across the street small huts had been squeezed on top of the roof of a long cement building from which the paint was peeling. Flowers in pots stood on ledges, or flowed down from roof dwellings and apartments to overhang the street. The colors were muted, except for the flowers and the flash of an occasional red shirt. Even the sounds were muted: the persistent ringing of bicycle bells—there were no cars—and the shuffle of feet. It was approaching dusk, and the day’s heat had turned into a warmth that mingled pleasantly with the smells of cooking food. This is more like it, thought Mrs. Pollifax, drinking in the smells and sights, and it was with reluctance that she climbed back into the minibus.

  This time it was Malcolm Styles who took the seat next to her. As he leaned over to place his small travel kit under the seat a pocket notebook fell out of his pocket and dropped into her lap. She picked it up and handed it back to him, but a solitary sheet of paper had escaped and settled into a niche beside the window. Retrieving this she glanced at it and gasped, “But how lovely!”

  It was a sketch—a line-drawing in pen and ink—of a Chinese child, no more than a quick sketch but with lines so fluid and joyful that it staggered her with its delicacy, its aliveness. She looked at Malcolm with amazement. “You’re an artist!”

  His grin was rueful, those thick brows drawing together deprecatingly. “Of a sort.”

  “Stop being modest,” she told him sternly. “What do you do with a gift like this?”

  His eyes smiled at her. “I’m not at all modest,” he told her. “Really I’m not. I just feel very uncomfortable when people learn that I wrote and illustrated the Tiny Tot series, and am now the author of the Doctor Styles’ picture books, and—”

  “The Doctor Styles’ books!” she exclaimed. “Good heavens, my grandchild adores them, I sent him one at Christmas and—but that means you also wrote The Boy Who Walked Into a Rainbow?”

  He nodded. “That’s me.”

  She gazed at him incredulously. “I thought you were an actor or a fervent businessman,” she told him. “Or a male model—you know, distinguished gentleman who drinks only the best sherry or stands beside a Rolls-Royce smoking a briar pipe and looking owlish.”

  “With attaché case?” he asked interestedly.

  “Oh, welded to one,” she told him.

  He nodded. “Then you can understand the shock when people discover that I live in a world inhabited by rabbits that talk and mice who rescue small boys.”

  “Well—yes,” she admitted, smiling. “Yes, that could be a shock.”

  “It is,” he assured her. “Usually there’s an instinctive withdrawal, then a look of suspicion, followed by a hearty ‘By Jove that’s nice,’ and a very hasty retreat. I must say you’ve taken it rather well, though.”

  “Not a great deal surprises me,” admitted Mrs. Pollifax. “Not anymore, at least. It must surely make for a very good life?”

  “Oh yes I’m very fortunate,” he said lightly. “I do only one book a year now, and that leaves six months for travel or for anything else that appeals.”

  Six months, she mused, turning this over in her mind; yes there were certain possibilities there, and his books made for wonderful cover. “Are you hoping for a book from this trip?”

  He said softly, “Oh I think not, but it will refresh me. I’m looking forward intensely to the Qin Shi Huang Tombs—”

  “Oh yes!”

  “—and the museums and temples. And sketching, of course.”

  They had been driving through darkening streets—there were no street lights—and now as night arrived there were only dim electric lights shining yellow in the apartments along the streets. Glancing up she could look into the windows and see a single feeble bulb suspended from the ceiling, see the dark silhouette of a man standing at a window peering out, glimpse a face seated at a table reading, the light etching the face in chiaroscuro. Hong Kong’s fluorescent lights had been stark clear white; here the color was a yellow that barely illuminated the dark caves of rooms.

  “Surely those can’t be more than twenty-watt bulbs?” she murmured to Malcolm, pointing.

  “Twenty-five at most,” he said.

  Huge dark China, she thought, moved by the silence, the absence of cars, and the darkness.

  The buildings thinned until the headlights of the bus picked out mud-brick walls, then lines of trees with only a solitary light to be seen at a distance—a commune, perhaps—and then at last the bus turned down a graveled road that ran through a thinly wooded area, lights gleamed ahead, and they drew up before a huge, raw, half-finished modern building.

  “I hope,” said Mrs. Pollifax with feeling, “our hotels aren’t always going to be this far out of town.”

  “The question being,” Malcolm said, extending a hand to her, “whether they’re trying to keep us from meeting the people, or the people from meeting us.”

  They walked into a huge echoing lobby that was almost a parody of contempory architecture: a few self-consciously Danish chairs, a very Art Deco cobblestone fish pond, with a fountain springing out of its base. They were the only people in the cavernous lobby except for a young woman behind a desk who passed out room keys to them.

  “Ba
gs outside rooms at half-past seven,” said Mr. Li. “We do not return here to the hotel tomorrow, remember.”

  “It would take hours to get back here anyway,” commented Iris, and received an answering smile from George Westrum.

  Mrs. Pollifax entered room 217, found it bland but comfortable, with hot water running from its sink taps, and promptly ran a bath and climbed into it. She carried with her a book on China’s history to read, but she did not read it. She was too busy wondering instead what lay ahead of her in this vast country; she wondered what the others were thinking, and who among them was thinking ahead to Xian, and then to Xinjiang Province lying to the north of them. She was remembering, too, the strange assortment of items that she’d brought into China with her, the stores of vitamin pills and dried fruit, the thermal socks, and chocolate. She remembered Carstairs saying, “It’s almost as impossible to get an agent into China as it is to get a man out of China.”

  Out of China … this was the question that had occurred and reoccurred to her before her departure; how did they plan to get X out of China? It was a question that had sent her to the very good topographical map in her encyclopedia, and the result had chilled her because Xinjiang Province, thousands of miles from the sea, bordered Tibet and Pakistan and Afghanistan, its desert running like a flat carpet to the terrible mountain ranges of the Kunluns and the Karakaroms. Thermal socks, dried fruit, chocolate … the supposition she had drawn still shocked her.

  But as she slipped into her robe and headed for bed she knew there was still another, even more shocking suspicion that she had consigned to the periphery of her thoughts, not allowing it entry, stubbornly resisting it because if she brought it out and looked at it, she would understand Bishop’s fears for her. Turning out the lights she once again refused it entry and succeeded in pushing it far enough away to fall asleep at once.

  In the morning Iris made her appearance in jeans, and after faithfully escorting her downstairs Mrs. Pollifax could see that emotional support would no longer be needed: Jenny whistled, Malcolm gave her a second calm glance, and George Westrum’s eyes rested on her with a glow that Mrs. Pollifax hoped Iris noticed, but doubted that she did; Joe Forbes murmured, “Well, now,” and even Peter Fox looked mildly appreciative. It was true that at breakfast Iris tipped a plate of peanuts into her lap, with half of them cascading to the floor, but—as Jenny cheerfully pointed out—peanuts were easier to recover than spilled beer. Iris, thought Mrs. Pollifax, was in danger of being assigned the role of comic in the group.