Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

with it?” he
asked.
    Oh, very hostile, she
thought. ”I was also wondering how old you are,” she told him with a smile. ”A
second impertinent question for you.”
    ”Twenty-two,” he said dryly.
    In the seat ahead of them Malcolm Styles turned and said, ”I heard that,
and I’m sitting with Jenny here, who’s twenty-five. Shall we change seats and
let the infants have a go at each other?”
    Jenny’s piquant face surfaced beside his. ”Infants!” she protested. ”Why
don’t we just turn the seats and face each other?”
    ”You’ll miss the scenery.”
    ”We can see it backwards for a while. Where was your grandmother born in China ,
Peter?”
    He reached into his duffle bag and brought out a small wrinkled map. ”We
go near it toward the end of the tour. I was told the guide could arrange a
side trip so I can take pictures. A little village outside Datong ,” he said, handing her the map and pointing.
”Not too far from Beijing.”
    Malcolm said gently, ”I hope we can all see it. What was it like in
those days?”
    ”Warlords,” said Peter, and nodded. ”Yeah, I guess it’ll be interesting
to see what’s happened since then; it sure beats reading about it. Her father
was a doctor-missionary, and I guess they saw terrible things while they were
there. Droughts. Famine. Confiscatory taxes. Disease.”
    ”I hear even flies have been eliminated now,” said Malcolm, ”although
not the occasional drought, flood, and earthquake, unfortunately. What about
you, Jenny?” he asked. ”Why China?”
    Jenny beamed at him. ”Well, I’d done enough backpacking through
Europe—sorry, Peter,” she said, laughing at him, ”and China it had to be, even
if I had to borrow half the money to get here, which I did, because
second-grade teachers aren’t exactly rich. Which is what I am,” she explained
with a lively gesture. ”Not rich but a second-grade teacher. There’s such a
strong pull in me toward China that I just have to have been Chinese in a past life.”
    ”The Empress of course,” said Peter, and suddenly grinned at her, those
relentless black brows lifting to wipe away several years and make him a
believable twenty-two-year-old.
    ”A smile!” exclaimed Malcolm, with a humorous glance at Mrs. Pollifax.
    ”I see it,” she said, smiling back at him. ”Beautiful.”
    With the arrival of Peter’s first smile came the young woman with mop
and pail again, to walk up and down and leave glistening streaks of water
behind her. Mrs. Pollifax’s gaze moved beyond her to the window: to rice
paddies with tender green shoots springing out of the water, a water buffalo
plodding along a path behind an old woman, piles of mud-and-straw bricks and
trimmed logs, and a house on stilts. She heard Jenny say, ”Mr. Styles—”
    ”Malcolm, please.”
    ”Okay. Malcolm, you haven’t said what you do when you’re not traveling.”
    Mrs. Pollifax watched the black guardsman’s moustache tilt down as the
brows rose humorously. ”Now that will have to wait,” he told her lightly,
”because it’s time for me to check out the men’s room—if my walking up the
aisle doesn’t bring out that mop again.”
    Mrs. Pollifax gave him a thoughtful glance as he left, thinking how
adroitly he’d sidestepped answering Jenny when it would have needed only a
second to say I’m in business,
theater, or advertising. She’d not expected him to be evasive; his
voice had been quietly dismissing, and there was no overlooking his well-timed
retreat. She wondered what he wanted to conceal and why he wasn’t ready for
that question. Perhaps, she speculated, he was taking refuge in the men’s room
to decide just what he did do when he was not traveling.
    Or perhaps she was looking much too hard for her coagent, except that
she felt it ridiculous that she not know.
    The train was slowing. Joe Forbes strolled up the aisle and called out
to them, ”Mr. Li says we’re reaching the border now, and box lunches for us in
half an hour.”
    At once cameras were unfurled and the buffs sprang to their feet,
everyone except Mrs. Pollifax and Iris, who remained seated up front. Gazing
out the window she thought again, So
many people! They stood in queues, waiting to board the rear cars
that George Westrum had called hard seats, and the lines were serpentine: men
and women in simple cotton clothes holding bundles and waiting, among them
soldiers in khaki with red stars on their caps, and behind them a series of
shabby