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

the source of the screaming hurled itself harmlessly down the tower, and proved to be nothing but a group of very small children, who had climbed to the top simply in order to run breathlessly and hilariously down. Down they rushed, banging into people as they came, losing their footing, falling, rolling, scrambling up again, to be met by amused indulgence from the ascendingadults. The men shook their heads and smiled, the women laughed behind their veils. It was clearly a well-established pastime, such usage of Hassan’s tower, and welcomed in the dearth of parks, fairs and playgrounds.
    When he reached the top, the sudden glare of the sun dazzled him, and he could not at first see Chloe. She was standing at one corner of the wide square block, gazing out over the estuary towards the sea: the view was, as she had foreseen, breathtaking. In silence they stared at it, and he thought that it was very beautiful but somehow depressing because totally, totally unimportant, and pointless in a way that beautiful landscapes somehow are, and yet there was Chloe staring at it in exaggerated affected passion as though it mattered, as though it meant something, staring in fact as he had stared at early-morning Tangier ten years ago, and after a moment or two he could stand the sight of her rapture no longer, and he went and sat down on one of the stone parapets, his knees weak from the climb, his breath short, and his spirits unbelievably low from some dreadful bleak sightless premonition of middle age. And as he sat there, at first seeing nothing, his eyes gradually began to take in the other people on top of the tower, who were, in their own way, astonishing enough as a view. The whole of the top of the tower was covered with people: small children were crawling about, mothers were feeding babies, young men were holding the hands of girls and indeed the hands of other young men, boys were sitting on the very edge and dangling their feet into space, and old women who would need a day to recover from the climb were lying back in the sun, for all the world as though they were grandmothers on a beach in England. And a beach in England was what the scene most of all resembled: he saw there the very groups and attitudes that he had seen years ago as a child at Mablethorpe, and as he gazed he feltgrowing within him a sense of extraordinary familiarity that was in its own way a kind of illumination, for he saw all these foreign people keenly lit with a visionary gleam of meaning, as startling and as breathtaking in its own way as Tangier had once been. He saw these people, quite suddenly, for what they were, for people, for nothing but or other than people; their clothes filled out with bodies, their faces took on expression, their relations became dazzlingly clear, as though the details of their strangeness had dropped away, as though the terms of common humanity (always before credited in principle, but never before perceived) had become facts before his eyes. It was as though he had for a few moments seen through the smoky blur of fear that convinces people that foreigners are all alike, and had focused beyond it upon the true features and distinctions of separate life: there they stood, all of them, alive and separate as people on a London street, brothers and sisters, cousins, the maiden aunt with the two small children, the pretty fast girl with nylons under her long gown and pale green lace veil, the fat woman with her many operations, the student with his Arabic Dostoyevsky. Even their garments, hitherto indistinguishably strange, took upon themselves distinctions. And with the vision, a sense of overwhelming relief settled heavily upon him, for he had been afraid, afraid for years that he had come to the end of the new and the interesting in life: he sat there and watched, watched all those people being, and took pleasure in their being, and as he watched he suddenly became aware that one of the young men at whom he was staring was