It later appeared in his collection of short fiction, The Time of Friendship (1967), published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Mrs. Callendar is anxious at the imminent arrival of the 50-something pensioner Monsieur Royer, a seasonal patron who she considers a disreputable "cad."
The young Mr. Van Siclen is an American archeologist working on an excavation site at the village of El Menar.
Mrs. Callendar confides her hostility to Royer with the handsome Van Siclen, and he casually assures her that the villagers of El Menar would leave a child molester "behind a rock with a coil of wire around his neck."
He is escaping "prudishness he so hated" and relishes the prospect of making casual sexual conquests in Morocco.
After a moment of regret, Royer approaches the stunned urchin, and in a fit of rage, strikes him again and departs indignantly, "considering himself a particularly understanding friend of the Moslems."
Charlotte's assessment of Van Siclen is at odds with her mother's: "He summed up all the things she disliked most in men: conceit, brashness, and insensitivity."
Charlotte is favorably impressed with "the French gentleman" but her parents assure her he is a man of low character.
She finds him offensive, but when he seized her by the arm and insisted they take a ride in his jeep, she acquiesces, not wishing to appear "a whining creature - a poor sport."
Royer utterly misapprehends the purpose of her query, believing it arises from disparaging remarks made about him by the guests at the pension.
Mother and daughter engage in a protracted contretemps: Charlotte defending Royer, and Mrs. Callender assuring her that he will "ruin your life."
In desperation Mrs. Callendar enlists Van Siclen to entice Monsieur Royer to the excavation camp for several days to detach him from the pension.
She becomes hysterical when an employee informs her that she was with Van Siclen that morning, assuming her daughter is making contact with Royer.
Momentarily alarmed that his assault on Charlotte had been exposed, he recovers and informs Mrs. Callender that Monsieur Royer is missing.
A corrected transcript for "The Hours After Noon" reads 'Fez, May 14, 1949, while the version that appears in his Collected Stories, 1939-1976 reports that the work was completed in "Paris-Tangiers, 1950."
The setting for the story, the Pension Callender, was an actual residence where Bowles roomed while staying in Tangier's International Zone in the post-war period[5] The central theme of "The Hours After Noon" is derived from the relationship between Prospero and his daughter Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611): "How to introduce innocence to experience without tremendous or irreparable harm."
Bowles applies this theme to a mother-daughter relationship, where Mrs. Callender's paranoiac protectiveness of Charlotte is a reflection of her own "aching nostalgia for her own youth" and the anxiety at passing beyond middle-age, the "Hours After Noon" in the title.
The key to the protagonist's redemption is embodied in an epigraph Bowles provides by the poet Charles Baudelaire:[7] If one could awaken all the echoes of one's memory simultaneously, they would make a music, delightful or sad as the case may be, but logical and without dissonances.
[8][9]Moments before Royer is murdered, he struggles to reconstruct a passage from Andre Gide's work on the legends of Amyntas: "Time passing here is innocent of hours, yet so perfect is our inoccupation that boredom becomes impossible.