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

obliged through laziness to devour) and she got annoyed with him for getting annoyed with the head waiter, and they silently left the restaurant and went silently to bed, disturbed only by the uncontrollable whine of the air-conditioning, which neither of them had been able to subdue. In Marrakesh, oranges had hung upon the trees by the roadside, and thudded warmly from time to time at their feet, and the walls and buildings had been orange too, and beautiful against the distant icy snows of the Atlas mountains, where lions walk, but not beautiful to him, and they had quarrelled there, quarrelled bitterly, because they could not find the Bahia Palace, and because he would not take, not trusting any, a guide, and because they had both been frightened of the mobbing children.
    In the morning they went to Rabat. They did not particularly want to go to Rabat, but it was necessary to go somewhere, and they had heard that Rabat was worth a visit. When they got there, they did not know what to see, so they looked at the tediously modern-looking palace, and wondered at the vast numbers of local sightseers, until they bought a paper and discovered, though imperfectly, that there was some day of national holiday in progress. They sat in a French café, and looked at the paper, and wondered where to have lunch, and he thought once more that money, instead of enlarging prospects, confined them and made choice pointless. There seemed to be an expensive enough restaurant called after something called the Tower of Hassan, so they went and had lunch there and he was foolishly taken in yet again by the charm of the idea of eating horrible semolina, which remained horrible however cooked, and then they wondered what to do next, and she said, ‘Well, let’s go and see Hassan’s tower.’
    ‘Do you really want to go and see Hassan’s tower?’ he asked irritably. ‘You know what it’ll be like, just some crumbly great incomprehensible lump of brickwork, crawling with guides and postcard sellers and pick-pockets. And on a festival too. It’ll be even more horrid than usual.’
    ‘It might be nice,’ she said, ‘you never know, it might be nice.’ Though he could see that she took his point, and that she too quailed.
    ‘It won’t be nice,’ he said, ‘and anyway we’ll never find it.’
    ‘It must be on the map,’ she said, and produced from her handbag the little chart which the hotel had given her, on which all the streets were misnamed, and which was so badly drawn that it was impossible to follow. And it was not on the map.
    ‘Oh Lord,’ she said, ‘if we just drive around a little we’re sure to see it. I mean to say, it must be important, or it wouldn’t have restaurants named after it.’
    ‘That’s what you said about the Bahia Palace,’ he said.
    ‘But this is different,’ she said. ‘It’s a tower. It must, well, it must kind of stick up. One ought to be able to see it over the top of things.’
    ‘What do you expect me to do, then?’ he asked. ‘Just get in the car and drive around until I see something that might be the Tower of Hassan? Eh?’
    This, it turned out, was just what she did expect, so, with a suspension of disbelief, of much the same order as when he would embark, at home, so continually to drive through the London rush hour, he got into the car and they started to drive around looking for a tower. Driving was hazardous, because he had not grasped the principle that those making right-hand turns have the right of way, and consequently his estimate of the Moroccan character could not but be lowered by his experiences at junctions. However, somewhat to his surprise, they did very shortly locate something that could only be the tower after which their restaurant had been named, and so they parked the car and got out to look at it. It was, as he had foretold, incomprehensible: a square red block, decorated in some system which they did not understand, and baffling in its solid lack of