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

beauty.
    ‘Well,’ she said, after they had stared at it in silence for some time from the safety of the road, ‘I suppose it must be very old.’
    ‘It looks old,’ he conceded.
    ‘There must be a good view from the top,’ she ventured. ‘Look, there are people on top.’
    And there were, indeed, people on top.
    ‘We could go up,’ was the next thing she said.
    ‘What?’ he exclaimed, with a violence that was only half assumed. ‘What? All the way up that thing? And I bet there isn’t even a lift. I’m not climbing all the way up there just toget my pocket picked. And I bet it’d cost us a fortune even to get in.’
    She did not answer, but wandered slowly forward onto the short scrubby turf of the surrounding open space. He followed her, watching her movements with a grudging pleasure: she was wearing a navy wool skirt and jersey, and in the bright light they had a heavy absorbent matt dull warmth that curiously suited her skin. On the turf, she stopped, without turning to him, and said, ‘I should like to go up.’
    ‘Nonsense,’ he said, but he followed her to the foot of the tower, nonetheless. He knew that she had made her mind up, and he was too alarmed by the country to let her go alone, and also ashamed that she, though afraid, had the bravado to continue. It annoyed him to know that although she was wholly impelled by timidity, her actions would belie her motives: she would climb the tower, though trembling in every limb through fear of rape, whereas he, alone, and afraid only for his pocket and his sensibilities, would probably not venture.
    There was no lift, and no doorkeeper or entrance fee either; access was free. She stepped first out of the sunlight and into the gloom of the doorway: there was just a broad, square, mounting path, without steps.
    ‘Come on,’ she said.
    ‘It’ll be a long way,’ he said, ‘and probably smelly.’
    ‘I don’t mind the smells,’ she said. ‘If you wait for me here, I’ll go up by myself. I want to see what it’s like.’
    ‘There won’t be anything to see,’ he said, but he started to follow her just the same, being genuinely unable to let her go alone; and moreover, having got so far, there was something irresistible about the idea of ascent. So, with a sense of humiliating risk, he began to climb. They had made several turns of the tower, and had already risen a good few yards aboveground level, before he became nervously aware that none of the other people either ascending or descending were tourists: they were all Arabs, and there was not a guide book in sight. It was worse than he had expected. He closed his hand tightly in his pocket over his passport and his wad of traveller’s cheques, and wondered whether he should draw Chloe’s attention to the situation, but she was a yard or two ahead of him, walking slowly and evenly, and not apparently suffering from the breathlessness that threatened him. So, not wishing to make himself conspicuous by calling out in his foreign tongue, he was obliged to follow. None of the Arabs so far, it was fair to say, seemed to be paying him much attention, and nobody had so much as offered him a packet of postcards, so he relaxed a little, as much as the rigour of climbing would allow, and concentrated on watching the glimpses of gradually increasing panorama through the arrow slits on each side of the wall. He wondered if there might, after all, be a view from the top. There were certainly enough people coming and going, and they must be coming and going for something, he assumed: they all seemed to be in a happy holiday mood. He began, gradually, to feel pleased that there had been no lift, no rich man’s way up, no European approach. His pleasure was marred at one point by sudden panic, as he heard above and ahead of him a great deal of high-pitched screaming: he looked anxiously for Chloe, but she was out of sight, round the next bend, and he started to run up the absurdly high incline after her when