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

two brands of meanness: he hated to leave them if they were free, and he hated equally to eat them if they cost more than they ought. And he was moreover irritated by her luxurious, gratuitous hesitations: what had he married her for, but to decide about such things?
    He reached out and took one, then pushed the little plate over to her. She took one, to his annoyance, independently, almost absent-mindedly, showing no gratitude for his decisive action, her face blank as though her mind had left his trifling crisis far behind. As indeed, when she spoke, he found that she had.
    ‘I do so wish,’ she said, in her quietly strident, heavily over-inflected tones, ‘that you wouldn’t get in such a panic when people try to sell you things. I mean, that man in that souk place this afternoon. There was no need to get so worked up about it, surely?’
    ‘What do you mean, worked up?’
    ‘Well, there was no need to shout at him, was there?’
    ‘I didn’t shout,’ he said. ‘I hardly raised my voice. And anyway, if you don’t shout, they go on pestering.’
    ‘You should ignore them,’ she said.
    ‘How can I ignore them, when they’re hanging on to my coat sleeve?’
    ‘Well then,’ she said, changing her tack, ‘why don’t you just laugh? That’s what other people do, they just laugh.’
    ‘How do you know they laugh?’
    ‘Because I see them. That French couple we saw in Marrakesh, with all those children pestering them, they were just laughing.’
    ‘I don’t find it funny,’ he said. ‘I wish they’d just leave me alone, so I could look at things in peace.’
    ‘They don’t mean any harm,’ she said. ‘They’re just trying it on.’
    ‘Well, I wish they wouldn’t try it on me.’
    ‘What you would like,’ she said, ‘is a country without any people in it. With just places. And hotels.’
    ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind people, I just wish they’d stop trying to sell me things I don’t want. I just want to be left alone.’
    ‘I find them all quite amusing,’ she said, with a determined little lift of her chin: and he hated her for saying it, because he knew they didn’t amuse her at all. On the contrary, they scared the life out of her, all these foreign jugglers and mountebanks, these silent hooded robed men, and the only reason she did not like him to shout at them was that she was afraid he would provoke some reciprocal violence or offence. She wanted him to laugh in order to placate them: she was so nervous that if he left her to herself she would buy their horrible objects, their ill-stitched toy camels, their horrid little woolly caps, their rings set with fake, crude-faceted stones. And yet, if he were to buy them, she would despise him for it, as she would have despised him had he left, through fear or ignorance, the shrimps and the olives. It was just like her, to accuse him of her own fears; yet there hadbeen a time, surely, when they might have in some way shared their alarms, and a time not so far distant at that. Even during their long and grinding engagement there had been moments of unison, moments when he could sneer at her family and she could mock at his with some forgiveness, but in the last two weeks, since their wedding, their antagonism, so basic, so predictable, had found time to flower and blossom, and their honeymoon had been little more than a deliberate cultivation of its ominous growth. He had hoped that in leaving England they would have left behind some of their more evident differences, differences that should be of no importance in a foreign setting, but instead they had found themselves steadily isolated in a world of true British conflict, where his ways and hers had become monstrously exaggerated, as though they were on show, a true British couple, for all of Morocco to observe. Things which he had been able to tolerate in her at home, and which he had seen merely as part of her background, now seemed part of the girl herself: and similarly, in