Mrs. Pollifax on Safari (3 page)

“Farrell?” gasped Mrs. Pollifax. “John Sebastian Farrell?”

“None other.”

“But what’s he doing in Zambia, and why doesn’t he work for you any longer?”

“We haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s doing in Zambia,” said Bishop, “and he isn’t working for us any more because he resigned three years ago. All we know is that his pension—”

“His what?”

“We do pay pensions,” Bishop said, amused by the look on her face, “and his payments are being sent to Farrell in care of Barclay’s Bank, Lusaka, Zambia. Better make a note of that. Carstairs suggests you look him up when you get to Lusaka and see if he’s missing us as much as we’ve missed him. He should be in the phone book if he’s settled down.”

“Farrell,” said Mrs. Pollifax, her eyes shining. “That dear man. A scoundrel, of course, but I’d trust him with my life, you know. Although not,” she added thoughtfully, “with my daughter. No, definitely not with my daughter.”

“Mothers always trust me with their daughters,” Bishop said wistfully, and then, pulling himself together, unzipped his attaché case. “There’s a lot to be done,” he said briskly. “I’ve already visited the Zambia National Tourist Bureau today, as well as the Zambian Embassy. Mercifully, the tourist bureau has room for you in next Monday’s safari. Kafue Park is opening only this week—the rainy season’s just ended, you see—so luck was with us. As for your visa, it took persuasion, but if you’ll let me carry your passport back to New York with me this afternoon they’ll issue you one immediately and return your passport to you by special delivery. That leaves your yellow-fever vaccination. Your doctor is being sent the vaccine and you’re to see him at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. You leave Saturday night for London, and
Sunday night for Lusaka, and here are your plane tickets,” he said, placing them on the table. “Here are also booklets and pamphlets and brochures about Zambia—” He placed these on the growing pile and glanced up at her. “Are you still with me? Am I forgetting something?”

“Clothes,” pointed out Mrs. Pollifax.

Bishop understood at once; it was why mothers trusted him. “Go to New York early on Saturday before your plane leaves, if you can’t make it sooner. Slacks, a bush jacket, a sweater, good walking shoes … Abercrombie’s will be just the place for you. And oh yes, here are anti-malarial tablets, good God I almost forgot them. Start taking them at
once.
” He glanced at his watch and sighed. “I hope that’s all because damn it I’m already an hour behind schedule and I’ve got to be running along.”

“Oh Bishop, so soon?”

He nodded. “It’s one of the deficiencies of my life with Carstairs that I never see anyone for more than half an hour, and always on the run. Beautiful chocolate eclairs,” he said fervently. “All five of them.” Collecting his attaché case, he arose. “Now I need your passport.”

She found it in the desk drawer and gave it to him. “I’ll send you a postcard from Zambia,” she told him.

“Better not,” he said regretfully. “Just take lots of snapshots for us—of everyone on that safari, barring no one—and have your reunion with Farrell and see if he’s bored yet. He called you the Duchess, didn’t he?”

“It seems a century ago,” admitted Mrs. Pollifax, following him to the door. “Do you remember how naïve I used to be?”

“No, really?” said Bishop, amused. “Yes … Well, I don’t find you particularly hardened even now, but there’s
always hope, isn’t there? Don’t forget that yellow-fever shot tomorrow and stay out of trouble, you hear?”

“Of course,” she told him, and watched him hurry down the hall to the elevator. When he had disappeared she closed the door, walked back into the living room, and remembering how her morning had begun, she nostalgically assumed the karate on-guard stance again. So much had changed, however—even to the slant of the sun through the windows—that as she cut the air with a horizontal slash she tried a small and daring
“Ki-ya.”
This proved unsatisfying. Drawing a deeper breath she braced herself and shouted triumphantly,
“KI-YA!”

On Saturday Mrs. Pollifax left early for New York to spend an afternoon at Abercrombie’s before her plane departure. She was already flushed with triumph at finding a new hat for traveling. It was not precisely a cork helmet but it looked so remarkably like one that she no longer felt deprived. It was a bulbous white straw with a single red feather that began in the back and ran up and across the top of the crown and down to the tiny brim in front, where it was held in place by a clip. The narrow line of scarlet relieved the hat’s austerity and added a dashing touch to her two-year-old blue-and-white-striped suit.

Nothing had prepared her for Abercrombie’s, however. It was true that she had once or twice poked her head in the door out of curiosity, but she had never before
entered the store with purpose, or with a safari waiting in the wings. Now, given
carte blanche
, she lost all inhibition, especially after discovering that the five pounds she’d lost during the winter placed her unexpectedly in a pair of size 12 slacks. In only half an hour she dealt with her wardrobe: two pairs of khaki slacks went into her suitcase, a trim bush jacket, a heavy turtleneck sweater, and a long pale-blue cardigan with a sash. Her remaining creativeness she saved for Abercrombie’s accessories, which left her in a state of ecstasy. She succumbed immediately to a pair of enormous tinted round sun-goggles which gave her the look of a Martian; she found herself wondering how she could have survived for so long without them. She bought a flashlight and then a pencil flashlight. Regretfully she decided against a set of aluminum dishes that folded one inside of another until they fitted into a small pouch. She bought a dust veil because there was always the chance that she might be caught in a dust storm; she added a silk kerchief with zebras racing across it, and believed that she had concluded her purchases until she saw the umbrella.

“It’s rather large,” the clerk pointed out, watching her with a fascinated eye.

“Yes, but isn’t it beautiful?” she said in an awed voice, admiring its rainbow effect of scarlets, yellows, blues, pinks and oranges.

“I believe the rainy season has ended in Zambia.”

“True,” she said reflectively, “but then it’s really a matter of semantics, don’t you think?”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, startled by the
non sequitur.

“I mean that an umbrella could just as easily be called
a parasol, don’t you think? If the rainy season’s over there’ll be sun. A great deal of sun, I should imagine.”

“Yes,” said the young man, intrigued. “Yes, that’s certainly true. Sun and dust.”

She nodded. “And I shall have my dust veil and a parasol.”

“Yes you will,” he said, beginning to follow her line of reasoning.

“And then if one falls in love with something,” she confessed, “one is always sorry later one didn’t buy it.”

“Exactly,” he said warmly. “Of course you must have it then.”

Mrs. Pollifax agreed, and bought it, and was not even sorry when the airline classified it as a weapon and she had to watch it dropped down baggage chutes all during her trip. It was, she thought, a very minor inconvenience when it was such a glorious umbrella. Or parasol.

And so at ten o’clock that evening Mrs. Pollifax set out on her flight to London, suitably vaccinated and carrying her suitcase full of drip-dries, khaki and other small treasures. Not for her the luxury of magazines: once in flight she efficiently brought out her book on Central Africa animals and read, “The roan antelope is, in general color, a pale reddish brown, slightly darker on the hind quarters, the hair short and coarse,” and then she fell asleep. Upon waking she read, “The sable antelope is rich deep brown, the old males jet black,” and fell asleep again. At Heathrow airport she napped for a few hours in a day room, and at eight o’clock in the evening she boarded the Zambia Airways plane and resumed her trip to Lusaka.

Here she met with her first disappointment Since
Zambia was a new country, roughly a decade old and developing fast—the Third World, she thought solemnly—she had expected a few exotic companions on her flight, but instead she appeared to be surrounded by British families on holiday with babies and small children. The only bright notes provided were the lovely black stewardesses in their orange minidresses.

Mrs. Pollifax dozed and woke, determined not to miss her first glimpse of Africa. Very early in the morning, at first light, she opened her eyes and looked out over a floor of wrinkled clouds to see a bright-orange sun slip out of the dusk and trail a line of soft pink behind it. All drowsiness vanished as she sat up in anticipation. Gradually the clouds brightened and dispersed, the sun shed a warm clear light over the sky, and Mrs. Pollifax, looking down from the plane, saw Africa.

Africa at last, and not a dark continent at all, she thought exuberantly, staring at the strange world below. From this height it looked as if the earth’s skin had been peeled back and cooked into a dull-orange crust and then lightly sprinkled with green lichen. Oddest of all were the upheavals appearing here and there in the earth. Really, she thought, they looked just like bubbles in a thick stew on the stove.

Soon the view grew softer, and the pale dusty green turned into rich chenille, defined by narrow red-clay roads like seams in a garment stretching to the horizon. Once she leaned forward, certain that she saw a village of huts below, and it thrilled her to think of natives waking to the dawn without realizing that she saw them from the sky. She began to grow excited about landing on this earth spread out below her, she began to consider
what lay ahead … In her purse she carried vouchers sent her by the tourist bureau in New York, and she recalled that she was to be met at the airport by a tourist guide and whisked off to the hotel (“Transfer from Lusaka International Airport to Hotel Intercontinental: $6.60”), and she would remain in Lusaka for roughly six hours (“1430 departure Hotel Intercontinental to Chunga Safari Village, KT/3”). But before she left for Kafue Park at half-past two this afternoon she had every hope of contacting Farrell, and this gave an added fillip to her arrival.

Ever since leaving New York she had found herself wondering what Farrell might be doing in Zambia, and now she tried once again to fit what she knew of him into the rust-colored terrain below her. She remembered that when she’d first met Farrell he’d been running an art gallery in Mexico City, but he’d also been a bona fide painter himself. He’d mentioned smuggling guns to Castro in the early days of the revolution, and she knew that at one time he’d operated a charter boat out of Acapulco, and somewhere in there he’d also begun to work for Carstairs. Now he was retired.

Zambia was a land-locked country, so there would be no charter boats; its revolution had ended in 1964, so there were no guns to smuggle. What would Farrell have found here? “Perhaps an art gallery,” she thought, and as she turned this over in her mind she began to like it very much. He would collect Zambian art, she decided, specializing in wood carvings, thumb-pianos and spears, which he would sell to tourists; but of course he would paint his own pictures, too, and she would buy one. Definitely she would buy one and carry it home and hang it
in her apartment. She continued weaving pleasant little fantasies about his new life in Zambia, adding a beautiful wife because he would, she felt, make an excellent husband—retired rakes so often did—and perhaps there was a child by now.

She realized the
No Smoking-Fasten Seatbelts
sign had been blinking at her for some time, and now a voice interrupted her speculations to announce their imminent landing. Mrs. Pollifax tucked away her book, fastened her seatbelt and tried to discipline her excitement. This was not easy, because after two nights spent on planes the effect of her arrival on a new continent was rather like an overdose of adrenalin laced by large amounts of caffeine.

The 707 descended, taxied past a line of Zambia Airways DC-8s and came to a stop before a handsome modern terminal building. Mrs. Pollifax disembarked and immediately learned that African mornings could be cold. Shivering, she moved through Passport Controls, where she filled out a tiresome number of forms in a room hung with signs that read
PRACTISE HUMANISM
, and
HUMANISM MUNTU UZYI BANTUTVYINA ULALEMEKA BACEMBELE
. She then walked out into the waiting room to a wall of people waiting behind ropes. One of these people detached himself and moved toward her, a smiling young black man in a blue zip-up jacket tossed over a plaid shirt. “Mrs. Pollifax?”

“Yes,” she said in relief.

“I’m Homer Kulumbala. Welcome to Lusaka.”

“How do you do,” she said, beaming at him.

They waited for her suitcase, and then for her umbrella, which appeared to startle Homer. After one look at it he said sternly, “This could be easily stolen. You
must guard it carefully while in the city. It is very beautiful.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” she agreed happily.

A few minutes later they were speeding toward town in a VW bus emblazoned with the tourist bureau insignia. Mrs. Pollifax’s first impressions were of space and newness, and a great deal of bougainvillea, and when they drew up to the hotel—which was also spacious, new and surrounded by bougainvillea—Homer told her that it was he who would be driving her to Chunga camp at half-past two, and that she would see more of the capital later, on the trip out of town. She thanked him and gave her suitcase to the porter, but the umbrella she carried herself.

As soon as Mrs. Pollifax reached her hotel room she did not stop to relax; she paused only long enough to extract her striped flannel pajamas from her suitcase and then she reached for the telephone directory on the shelf under the phone. Sitting down on the bed with the book on her lap—she was surprised to see by its cover that it encompassed the entire country—she eagerly turned the pages until she found Lusaka.

“A … B … C … D … E … F,” she murmured, and running a finger down the list of F’s she ticked off Farmer’s Co-operative Society of Zambia Ltd., Farmers Prime Butchery, Farmers Produce Association, Fashion Mart Ltd.… the name of Farrell was conspicuously missing.