"Well, well," he said, beaming at her, "we must discuss this further."
"I don't see why," she retorted and turned over on her stomach to tan her back.
"Speaking of playboys," added Mrs. Pollifax wickedly, "what do you do, Mr. Burke-Jones?"
"Spend my time envying playboys," he said virtuously. "Actually, since you ask, I'm in the import business. Curios and knickknacks." He lifted an arm to wave at the general, whom a nurse was helping into a chair not far away. "A shop in Brighton, another in Dover, branches here and there," he added vaguely. "And you, Miss van Roelen? You are not, I take it, a playgirl?"
Her voice was muffled against the towel on which her cheek rested. "Administrative assistant, UNESCO."
"Oh, very worthy," he murmured, and lifted a brow at Mrs. Pollifax. "Wouldn't you say so, too?"
He was really impossible, she thought, and also rather nice but he was going to have a problem with Miss van Roelen. "Extremely so," she told him, and wondered what he really did, she did not for a moment believe in his import business, and considering Marcel's warning she saw no reason why she should.
The glass doors to the garden had opened and Hafez was arriving, dressed in a fresh pair of shorts and white shirt and carrying a shiny black box, the servant appeared like a shadow behind him and took a chair under a tree. Hafez placed his box on the glass and began fiddling with knobs and a small microphone. From this distance it looked like a tape recorder.
Abruptly Court sat up and called out to a woman strolling down the graveled path. "Oh, Lady Palisbury—"
This woman too had shared Mrs. Pollifax's dining room but she had been with her husband then. Mrs. Pollifax watched her pause and her face brighten at sight of Court. "Hello, there," she called, cutting across the lawn toward them. "I've been walking in the ravine." Under a huge sun hat a pair of deep-set wise eyes smiled at them.
"I just wanted to ask, did you find your missing diamond?"
Lady Palisbury shook her head. "No, my dear, but it will turn up, I'm sure."
"I almost inquired at lunch, but your husband—"
"Quite thoughtful of you, dear. No, I don't want to worry him, his blood pressure would skyrocket. John is a very impulsive man," she added, her mouth curving humorously.
"Lady Palisbury, this is Mrs. Pollifax and Mr. Burke-Jones."
She nodded pleasantly. "But I'm not going to join you, no matter how comfortable you look. I'm on my way in to wake up my husband, he has a massage at four."
"Boom, boom, boom," shouted Hafez suddenly, streaking across the garden toward the glass doors. "Monsieur?" he shouted to a waiter. "Un Coca-Cola!"
Lady Palisbury strolled away, as she passed Hafez he held up the tiny microphone, the tape recorder cradled under his arm, and spoke to her in French. Lady Palisbury smiled, graciously took his microphone and spoke into it before she disappeared inside.
"Does his grandmother ever keep him company?" asked Mrs. Pollifax, watching Hafez fly off in another direction.
"Whose grandmother?"
"The boy's."
"Didn't know he had one," said Burke-Jones.
"It must be terribly dull for him here," Court said, sitting up and hugging her knees. "What would he be, ten, eleven?"
"He's so small it's difficult to guess, he said he was here with his grandmother, who's a patient."
"I suspect he's rather brilliant," said Court thoughtfully. "I don't know when he sleeps—he's all nerves, isn't he?— because he's one guest I met consistently at six o'clock in the morning, when I was leaving for my walks, he told me yesterday about pulsars. Stars, you know—or planets, I forget which."
"Mmm," said Mrs. Pollifax, watching the boy approach the general under the tree.
The general, too, was being kind; he spoke into the microphone and Hafez laughed, there was a shrill note to his laughter and Mrs. Pollifax studied the boy as he implored the general to say more.
Court laughed. "He has persuaded the general to say, 'Ici la police—sortez, les mains en l'air!' which means 'Come out with your hands up, this is the police speaking.' The general," she added, "was once the head of the Sûreté."
Robin looked startled. "I thought he was just a regular military general."
"He was a general during World War Two, under de Gaulle, then he became head of the Sûreté."
"So he's a French police chief," murmured Mrs. Pollifax, watching Robin's face speculatively.
He said crossly, "How do you happen to know so much about everybody, Miss van Roelen, when you don't know anything about me?"
Court actually smiled at him. "I came here last summer and liked it, you see, and the general was a patient here then, too, he's very old and very alone and he hasn't much longer to live."
But it was now their turn with Hafez, who was suddenly in front of them thrusting his microphone at each of them in turn and shrilly demanding that they say something.
"I'll volunteer, Hafez," said Mrs. Pollifax, and he came eagerly to her side, she lifted the microphone, thought a moment and then recited an old nursery rhyme.
"Edward Lear!" exclaimed Court, delighted. "Here, Hafez, take me next." And into the microphone, with a smile at Mrs. Pollifax she recited, " 'There was an Old Man with a beard, who said It is just as I feared! Two Owls, and a Hen, Four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my Beard.' "
"I prefer the general's announcements to your frivolous limericks," said Robin, and grasping the microphone he called, "Come out with your hands high—the jig is up!"
But Mrs. Pollifax's glance had returned to Hafez because there remained something puzzling about him that she could not explain to herself. His eyes were far too bright, of course, his gestures quick and nervous but there was more to it than this; she realized his gestures were curiously without meaning, he doesn't really know what he's doing, she thought, watching him; he doesn't care, either, he acts for the sake of being in motion, her gaze fell to his hands as he returned the mike to the tape recorder and she saw that they were trembling, she realized that the boy was living under an intolerable weight of tension.
"Tiresome brat," said Robin when the boy had dashed off to intercept others in the garden.
"Overactive thyroid?" suggested Court, lying down again.
"No," said Mrs. Pollifax slowly, "No, it's more than that. Much more, I think." She was remembering her own children, and a time when Roger was six and booked for a tonsillectomy, and a playmate had told him the doctor would smother him with a pillow in the operating room. Roger had lived with that terror for two days before he had entrusted it to her but even now she did not care to remember those two days.
Both heads turned to her expectantly. "I think he's frightened," she said, and was startled to hear herself say it.
"Frightened?" echoed Court doubtfully. "What could possibly frighten a child here?"
"Frankly, it's he who frightens me," said Robin with a grin.
Mrs. Pollifax only shook her head and said nothing, but now that she had identified the emotion that possessed the boy she felt that she might even have underestimated it, he was not just frightened, she decided, watching him, he was desperately, nightmarishly afraid.
Dinner that evening was something called sauté de veau marengo, which turned out to be veal, and Mrs. Pollifax began to think of buying a French dictionary. In her youth she had studied Latin and a smattering of Greek, neither of which seemed to be of much help to her in contemporary Ufe. From each she had learned something of the beauty and history of language but she had forgotten every scrap of her Latin with the exception of the phrase Fortes fortuna iuvat, or Fortune favors the bold. It was a phrase that contained a certain amount of comfort for her now, as she considered at what nocturnal hour she should begin her prowlings.
"You're new," said Lady Palisbury as the two of them sat in the library, Mrs. Pollifax over her demitasse, Lady Palisbury knitting as she waited for her husband to join her for dinner.
"This morning, yes. Ever so early. Straight fr
om the plane."
"You come so far," murmured Lady Palisbury with a curious glance at her over her knitting.
"I have an internationally minded son-in-law," Mrs. Pollifax told her with a smile.
Lady Palisbury brightened. "Oh, how nice, we have four, and all darlings, they're so soothing after a household of daughters, all of whom are darlings, too, but given to shrieks and squeals and quarrels and so forth." She had an amiable way of talking, with frequent glances into the hall. "I fervently hope Women's Lib will give my daughters what I couldn't. When one has never been afraid of frogs and mice and spiders—and begets four daughters terrified of them—one begins to question chromosomes." She glanced up anxiously. "I do wish John would come before we get involved with the yodelers."
"Yodelers?" said Mrs. Pollifax, startled.
"You didn't see the sign in the hall? It's Friday night, you see, and the clinic arranges"—her mouth curved— "little weekend entertainments for us. Tomorrow there will probably be a film in the dining room, Sunday, of course, is visitors' day and tonight there are yodelers from the village."
"How very neighborly," commented Mrs. Pollifax, she had been watching the hall and her attention sharpened as Hafez and his companion left the dining room.
"You're curious about the boy," said Lady Palisbury, following her glance.
"He looks tonight as if he'd been crying," explained Mrs. Pollifax. "Do you know anything about him?"
Lady Palisbury turned over the sweater she was knitting and counted stitches before she replied. "I know they're Zabyans," she said, "but don't ask me which country Zabya is, I get those Arabian countries terribly mixed up. Oil, I think—yes, it's one of the oil countries, and there's a king, he was in the news recently, something about a birthday party and giving away all the royal land to his people."
Mrs. Pollifax nodded. "I remember that, a nice little man, at least he seemed to be trying."
"Very short in stature," nodded Lady Palisbury, "but long in courage. Oh dear, the yodelers are here."
The yodelers had indeed arrived, a group of plump, embarrassed, beaming villagers, the women in brightly embroidered dirndls and the men in high socks, shorts, and feathered hats. Lady Palisbury's husband stood in their midst looking equally as embarrassed and quite helpless, he separated himself from the yodelers and presented himself to his wife. "My dear, who are they?" he whispered.
"There you are, darling," said Lady Palisbury, putting away her knitting. "This is Mrs. Pollifax, John."
"Splendid," he said absently. "But Jane—"
"Yodelers, dear," she whispered, and as they moved into the dining room the group of performers followed; seconds later the sounds of strident yodels filled the air.
"Good God, have we been invaded?" asked Burke-Jones, strolling in from the solarium.
"Only by folk culture," she told him. "I think it's rather endearing."
He shuddered. "Not to me. Look, I'm driving down to the village for cigarettes—I have my car with me here— and I'll be gone only ten or fifteen minutes. Would you care to come?" He added casually, "I thought I'd ask Court, too."
Mrs. Pollifax smiled faintly. "It's half-past eight and I'm getting sleepy after losing a night's sleep on the plane. I think she's in the dining room."
"Who?"
"Court, of course."
Barely smothering a yawn she bid him good night and went upstairs.
She had left the doors to her room closed; there were two of them, a thick one padded with quilted fabric for soundproofing and an inner conventional one that could be locked. Both stood ajar now, and seeing this Mrs. Pollifax quickened her step. It might be only a chambermaid turning down the bed, or it could be Marcel.
It was neither. It was the boy Hafez, sitting in front of the glass-topped desk and hunched over something in his lap.
"Hafez," she said indignantly, "you simply mustn't walk in and out of rooms when people aren't in them."
His hands quickly returned something to the desk; whatever it was she heard it click against the glass top before he jumped to his feet to face her. "But, madame," he said, "I have been waiting for you. You did not say if you decided to be my friend."
"I would be delighted to be your friend," she told him, "but friends always knock before they come into a room."
"But, madame, I did knock," he protested. "It's just that I received no answer."
"Because I wasn't here."
"But where else could I have waited?" he asked, a desperate note creeping into his voice. "Serafina would have been very angry, she would have taken me off to bed if she saw me in the hall."
"Do you like Serafina?"
The child shrugged; whatever troubled him it was not Serafina. "Must you tell her I came inside?"
"No, but only because we're going to be friends, except you simply mustn't come in uninvited or we can't be friends."
He considered this and nodded. "Thank you," he said, and astonished her by walking out and closing both doors behind him.
Mrs. Pollifax stood looking after him, completely baffled, and then she sat down at the desk where Hafez had been sitting. Its contents were meager: a hairbrush, a jar of cold cream, a small bottle of aspirin, an address book, a lipstick, and the magazines she had read on the plane but not yet tossed into the wastebasket, she shared Court's impression of Hafez's intelligence and she did not feel that his visit had been entirely impulsive, she wanted to know which of these objects had caught his attention and which had clicked against the glass as he put it back.
She picked up the lipstick and examined it but it appeared untouched, she leaned closer to the aspirin and then she picked it up and held it to the light, she had bought it just before leaving, a small supply of twenty-five tablets in case of emergency. It looked only half-filled now, she removed the plug of cotton and poured the tablets into the palm of her hand, there were only twelve left, as she returned the bottle to the desk it clicked against the glass with a matching familiarity. Of course—glass against glass.
She shook her head. In a clinic where any nurse could supply aspirin, why did Hafez feel compelled to steal thirteen tablets, she wondered. Did he just—take things, like a kleptomaniac? She sat and frowned at the bottle, exasperated by her bewilderment; she realized that she would have to make a point of meeting Hafez's grandmother soon.
And then she found herself wondering what sort of grandmother would bring a small boy to the Clinic—a clinic of all places—when he ought to be at home playing with children of his own age, the old could be very selfish, she conceded, but it was possible the woman had no idea the child was disturbed.
I wonder, she thought idly, and glanced at her watch. It lacked a few minutes to nine and she did not have to signal with her flashlight until ten. Downstairs the yodelers were still at work, their lusty high notes penetrating the building, so obviously the social hour remained in force. I'll just pay a neighborly call, she thought. I'll make no judgments, I'll just see.
Resolutely she left her room and walked down the hall to knock on the door that Hafez had entered that morning. Hafez opened the door and a look of utter astonishment passed over his face. "Madame?" he faltered, and astonishment was followed by alarm. "Madame?" he repeated.
"Since we're friends I thought I'd pay a brief call on your grandmother," she told him cheerfully, and walked past him. "I trust she's well enough to—but where?" she asked, seeing that she was entering an obviously unoccupied room, her glance swerved to an open door on the left, and then to an open door on her right.
Hafez said, "But, madame—" His glance leaped anxiously to the left, and Mrs. Pollifax followed it.
Somewhere a man's voice called out sharply in another language, and Hafez replied, there was the sound of glass falling to the floor, and an oath, followed by movement. Mrs. Pollifax reached the threshold of the adjoining bedroom and stopped, she had time to meet the shocked glance of Serafina, and time to glimpse the occupant of the bed in the darkened corner, and then she was seized fr
om behind, a man grabbed her left elbow, another her right elbow, and lifting her off the floor she was carried, still erect, to the door. It happened so quickly that her breath was literally taken away from her, and with it her voice.
"Ukhrujee," said the one burly attendant. "Maksala-mah!"
She was shoved roughly outside, across the hall the man in the wheelchair sat and watched with narrowed eyes, she noticed that his hands gripped the arms of his chair so tightly that the knuckles were white, he muttered something, retreated and closed the door.
Mrs. Pollifax groped her way to one of the chairs lining the corridor and sank into it, shaken by the experience, after a few minutes she made her way down the hall to her room and closed the door behind her, she did not know whether to feel shocked, angry, or penitent, at the moment she felt a little of each and wondered which would triumph. "This isn't New Brunswick, New Jersey," she reminded herself, and then fiercely. "All right what could you expect, Emily? Of course they were outraged. Obviously the woman isn't well and these servants or relatives, or whoever they are, have come to see that she has the best of care and of course they're shocked to find a stranger bursting into the room without invitation."
Of course.
So much for penitence.
The woman had lain in bed, very pale and fragile in her sleep: long braided gray hair, a slightly curved nose, a good jaw, eyes closed. Serafina had been sitting near her but half out of her chair at sight of Mrs. Pollifax, the two attendants apparently stayed in the farther room, and Hafez had been given the middle one, the grandmother, in the third room, had not even known of Mrs. Pollifax's arrival—hadn't even stirred—but the man in the wheelchair across the hall had known. It had never occurred to her that he might be a member of the party.
And Hafez .., he had been astonished to see her, and then alarmed, but he had made no move to stop her and as she had been carried out of the room she had glimpsed his face and he had looked pleased. Pleased by what, her coming to pay a call, or by her ejection?
A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax Page 4