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

unbelievably servile, and yet at the same time increasingly brazen: when Kenneth had declined for the tenth time to have his shoes cleaned, the boy had pointed out the fact that his shoes needed cleaning, and that they were a disgrace to any respectable, hotel-dwelling tourist. And Kenneth, gazing at his own feet, could not but admit that his shoes were dirty, as they usually were, for he disliked cleaning them, he disliked the smell of polish, he disliked getting his hands dirty. And yet he could not let this hatefully leering, intimately derisive child do them, for it was not in him to stand while another pair of hands dirtied themselves for money on his behalf. So that each time he entered or departed from the hotel, the boy at the door would chant some little jingle in French about the English miser with muddy shoes, and Chloe would stiffen coldly by his side.
    He looked at her now, as she sat there, sipping her gin, and eating idly the pricy small squares: her face, as ever, was plain in repose, a little blank and grim, and the fatigue of sightseeing let the coarse dullness of her skin show through her make-up. He was continually amazed by how plain she really was, how featureless, for when he had first known her she had seemed to him beautiful, exotic and obviously to be admired: now, knowing her better, he could see that it was animation only that lent her a certain feverish grace. The grace was real enough, but more rarely bestowed him. When still, she was nothing, and her face, which had once dazzled and frightened him, now merely touched him. One day, months ago, at the beginning of their engagement, she had shown him in a moment of confidence a photograph of herself as a schoolgirl, and the sight of her stolid, blank, fat face peering miserably at the camera from amongst her smaller-featured, more evidently acceptable schoolfriends, had filled him with despair, for she appeared to him for the first time as pathetic, and if there was anything he hated it was the onslaughts of pathos. But by then it was too late, and he was no more able to refuse the temptations of pity than he had been able, earlier, to refuse those of an envious admiration. More and more, as his first clear impressions of her dissolved into a confusing blur of complications, he found himself harking back to what others had said of her, as though their estimate of her value must be more just, as though it could not be possible that he should have married such a woman through a sense of obligation. Others found her beautiful, so beautiful she must be, and it was his fault only if he had ceased to see it.
    When she had finished the gin, and all but one of the little squares (he could not even to himself call them canapés, so deeply did the word offend his sense of style, but then therewas no word in his background for such an object, for in his background such objects did not exist, so what was one to call them but canapés?) she leant back in her chair, letting her headsquare fall to the ground, and not even acknowledging it when a hovering uniformed boy handed it back to her. She looked tired, the gin had affected her; she had a weak head. He was not surprised when she said, ‘Let’s have dinner here in the hotel tonight, I haven’t the strength to go out again. Let’s have dinner in their panoramic restaurant, shall we?’
    And he agreed, relieved that he would not have to pass once more that day the grinning familiar boot boy, and they went up to their room and changed, and then they went up to the vast glassy restaurant on the top floor, and looked out over the city as they silently ate, and she complained about her steak, and he got annoyed when the head waiter came and wrenched him from his orange, saying that he would prepare it, as though a man could not peel his own orange (and in fact he disliked peeling oranges, almost as much as he disliked cleaning his own shoes, he disliked the juice in his fingernails, and the pith that he was