Palm for Mrs. Pollifax

by Dorothy Gilman

  She saw nothing of Marcel. Apart from Hafez and the general, only one other guest looked familiar and that was the man in the wheelchair whom she’d seen in the hall opposite Hafez’s door. He wheeled himself to a solitary table nearby but facing the window so that she saw only his profile. It was not a particularly inspiring profile. His skin was dark but with a pallor that turned it to an unhealthy shade of gray. A thin black mustache decorated his lip. as if he reached for some longed-for sophistication that eluded him. His shoulders were massive and his business suit wrinkled. He looked out of place but indifferent to it; he ate quickly with concentration, and wheeled himself out before Mrs. Pollifax reached her dessert.

  Much more charming was the young girl who came in and sat opposite her across the room, and an older couple, the man with a London Times under his arm.

  “I must learn something about all of them,” she reminded herself. Marcel had mentioned the garden; she would spend the afternoon in the garden.

  Four

  The garden was bright with sun and flowers. With a professional eye Mrs. Pollifax inspected the beds of begonias along the paths and then headed for a chaise tongue and sank into it, hoping that she wouldn’t fall asleep. Just to be certain of this she climbed out of the chaise and attempted to elevate it to a sitting position.

  “You’re pushing all the wrong things,” said a voice behind her, and a young woman in a bikini, body glistening with sun oil, put down her towel and books and leaned over the chair. It sprang back and up immediately.

  Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “How efficient you are!”

  “I am, yes,” the girl said with a touch of rue in her voice. “Do you think that’s an affliction or a gift?”

  “A little bit of each, I should think,” hazarded Mrs. Pollifax. “You’re British?”

  She shook her head. “Belgian.”

  “I saw you in the dining room, you sat opposite me,” added Mrs. Pollifax by way of introduction. “I’m Mrs. Pollifax.”

  “How do you do,” the girl said, and extended a thin brown hand. “I’m Court van Roelen.” Her face was all cheekbones and angles, with a pair of eyes that blazed like blue jewels in her tanned face. It was a breathtaking combination.

  Over the girl’s head—she was surprisingly small—Mrs. Pollifax saw that her nameless male friend of the library was standing in the center of the lawn staring openmouthed at the girl. He too seemed to find her breathtaking. He was now wearing yellow slacks, an orange shirt, and a polka-dotted cravat but the effect was entirely spoiled by his gaping. Closing his mouth he strolled toward Mrs. Pollifax. “I think a spoon just dropped,” he said.

  “I could hear the reverberations,” she told him.

  He grinned. “Don’t let me interrupt anybody’s sun bath, I’ll just pull this young lady’s chair closer and we can turn this into a cozy threesome.” Beaming at Mrs. Pollifax he added, “Numerologically, you know, three is a number of great strength.” Leaving no time for a reply he drew up a third chair, into which he settled complacently. “You were about to introduce us?” he asked Mrs. Pollifax with a lift of his brow.

  “I will if you’ll tell me your name.”

  He looked startled. “Oh, sorry about that Burke-Jones is the name. Robin Burke-Jones.”

  Mrs. Pollifax gave him a quick glance; she had made a better choice than she’d realized in her first adult encounter. Performing introductions she settled back to see what would happen next.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” Burke-Jones told the girl. “You’ve just arrived?”

  “I’ve been here for ten days,” she said coolly, “but I’ve been on the mountain every day hiking.”

  “Hiking,” he echoed. “What do you mean hiking? There’s nothing restful about hiking.”

  “I don’t come here to rest,” she said. “It’s my vacation, and I prefer to avoid resorts, they’re always so full of—” For just a second her glance rested on his exquisitely arranged cravat. “So full of playboys.”

  “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 life. 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 from 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 coul
d 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 whore 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.