Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

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 terribly 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 RainbowI”
    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,