A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Read Online Free Page A

himself, he could feel his own defects magnified beyond all proportion, his behaviour distorted by foreign pressures into a mockery of itself. He began to see some reason for leaving sex until the honeymoon, for at least its problems would have diverted him from other more gloomy forebodings. It was a mistake to come to Morocco, but where else could they have gone, in their position, with so much money, and in so cold a month?
    It was the money, truly, that created the worst of their problems, and it was Morocco that cast so nasty a shade upon the money. He knew quite well that were he not earning what he himself daily considered to be a truly astonishingly high salary, he would never have dared to marry a girl with so much money of her own, because of what people might say: and thus between them, she with a small inherited fortune, and he withmoney earned by the sweat of his brow writing idle articles for a paper, they were really rather well off. And the subject of their finances was an endless source of bitterness. Both suffered from guilt, but hers was inherited, his acquired: when he attacked her for hers, he could not but see how much more guilty he himself was, for he had had a choice. It was no defence to say that he had not sought the money but the job itself, for there were certainly less lucrative branches of journalism than the one into which he had, however respectably and innocently, drifted. He must have wanted it, just as he had wanted her, although, like the money, she had so many connotations which he despised. But in England the money had at least seemed necessary as well as wickedly desirable: all her friends had it, all his friends, being clever, were beginning to acquire it, and in fact he sometimes found himself wondering how his own parents had so dismally failed to have it. Here in Morocco, however, things were very different. To begin with, every penny they spent was pure unnecessity (although he had hopes of recovering a little on the tax by writing a judicious article). Nobody saw them spending it, and the conditions of expense he found sickening in the extreme. He had not bargained for such poverty and squalor, and the rift between rich and poor, between hotel and medina, made his head split in efforts of comprehension. As a student, years ago, he had travelled in a different style, and almost as far afield as this: he had been to Tangier, with a few pounds in his pocket, suffering from appalling stomach disorders, hunger, filth and painful blisters, and he had sat in dirty cafés with seedy expatriates, staring at the glamour of more elegant tourists, and desiring their beds and their meals, and yet at the same time confident that he was happy, and that they were not capable of seeing, as he had seen, the city rising white in the morning out of the sea, in the odourless distance, and allthe more beautiful for the cramped and stinking night. In those days, he had been permitted to see, and because he now could not see, was it not logical to suppose that the money had ruined his vision?
    The truth was that perhaps in those old days he had been able to pretend that he too was poor, as these Arabs were poor, and he had seen that their life was possible. He had not winced at the sight of their homes, and nobody had thought it worthwhile to pester him with toy camels and fake rubies. But now, on this painful honeymoon, every time he went out of the hotel a boy at the door would leap jabbering at him, jabbering about his shoes, and could he clean the gentleman’s shoes, and please could he clean the gentleman’s shoes, and he could speak English, for listen, he could sing the songs of the Beatles. He lay there in wait, this boy, and every time Kenneth ventured through the great revolving doors – and they even swung the doors for him, they wouldn’t allow him the pleasure of revolving his own exit – this wretched, grinning, monkey-faced, hardly human creature would pounce on him. He was