The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  ‘They’re always passing judgement, making comment. Jack and Paul especially. Forget them Willy.’

  A breeze blew through the open window. There was pink and blue confetti in her hair.

  And what she was really saying perhaps was: ‘Don’t talk of Father and Mother, or my brothers. I don’t want to discuss them. Don’t you see? I was the only daughter, I was the odd one of the family. I was a beauty. I had no life. That is why I chose you – with no talent, no initiative – for the justice of it, the symmetry. Don’t think I will change.’

  He had put his arm out to her. ‘I’m not thinking of them,’ he said. His voice sounded odd and strident. They were in a first-class compartment with no other passengers. His hand was on one of those smooth, perfect legs. He would have slid it up her pale green skirt. But her face had turned towards the sun-brushed window, her finger-tips were at her necklace.

  ‘Not now.’

  I was the odd one of the family.

  Yet her face was exquisite, with its detachment, with its sulky pallor, as she turned back, making him hold his hand as if he were a thief caught in the act of plunder.

  Outside, the stations were passing. Woking, Farnborough, Basingstoke. London was left and the munificent house in Sydenham Hill in which they were clearing away the wine glasses, the white napkins, and discussing with satisfaction how the thing had been done. The June sun was sinking over smooth, cooling fields and willowy streams, over reddened, long-shadowed figures caught, nonchalant, by hedgerows and gates, cycling in lanes, grouped at tables outside pubs. The evening air was melting their rigour, their day-time reserve. But she wouldn’t relent, and let those features lower their guard. She only took and squeezed his hand now and then and gave him those short, quick smiles that were like small coins thrown without fuss to someone who has done a service. And she let him lead her, when she prompted, along to the dining-car, where she sat, ordered a light meal, toyed with her fork, and eyed him warily, circumspectly, as though considering an action of the utmost delicacy which could no longer be postponed, and asking herself, ‘What must I do? What must I offer that would suffice? What would be a satisfactory concession in the circumstances?’

  Then the sun had sunk, she had put on a little cream scarf and he was carrying cases. And there, suddenly, were the country cottages, and the honeymoon hotel set back from the road, seen already as if in a frame, as if in a photograph in an album opened many years after; the downs of Dorset, pillowy in the dusk, and, beyond, the sea, somewhere murmuring under cliffs. June, 1937. And already landmarks were passing, thick and fast, faster than the passage of the train across the southern counties. Already the church, the bridal dress, and the speeches under the marquee. And she wouldn’t relent.

  They unpacked clothes in a room which smelt of polished wood and lavender. What had her mother told her, of the dangers of loitering and the wolves that prowl? But how could he be a wolf? He was a pet dog to be led on a lead; he would run when you called. Oh, she did the right things. She walked with him down a lane where the trees bent like arches and rested her head in the crook of his neck, so that if one needed to demonstrate (if ever it should be a case of demonstrating) one could say, Look, sweeping one’s palm over the scene, there is the picture. But the picture was incomplete.

  Later, in their room, with the wooden beams, she undressed deliberately, slowly, as if she were unwrapping a gift, as much as to say: ‘There, see the reward you have got. And do you think such a reward will not ask certain things in return?’ Moonlight, like some theatrical trick, filtered through the lattice windows and lace curtains.

  ‘Willy,’ she said, stopping him. He was poised and trembling, ready to take his gift. ‘Willy, I’m sorry. I’m not – all I should be. Do you forgive me?’ And what should he have done? Protested, demanded explanations, with her lying blanched in the moonlight? Her face was a mask; sometimes it seemed not to be part of her body. She let him continue, without shrinking, without encouragement, as if it were only done for the form’s sake, as one of the terms of the agreement.

  Afterwards he felt he had not touched her, not touched that beauty. He sat up to light a cigarette. Her breasts pointed at him. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her face, there on the pillow, hair stuck to her brow, was like a victim’s; and yet it looked at him, for all the world, with triumph, with majesty, and as he bent to her, it smiled quickly and benignly, like a throwing of coins.

  Every night their clothes hung over the chair by the bed, stirred by the breeze through the window. And every day the pieces of the picture fell into place: the boat trips to Weymouth, the little scenes of themselves arm in arm on the beach or at tables for two, about which the nodding onlookers might whisper, ‘honeymooners’; their ‘Mr and Mrs’ in the hotel register. But if only she would say, ‘I love you.’ No, not even that, if only she would say – sometimes it seemed she used him like an excuse – ‘I know that you love me.’ But she wouldn’t. Not even when the moment was ripe. When the evening sun burnished the sea and they walked back, in the cool, along the cliff tops. Swallows dived. Cow-parsley frothed in the hollows. Her dress was white with diagonal rows of blue flowers. No, that was not included, not part of the bargain. Wasn’t the rest enough?

  Yes, he would have said, enough, plenty. Were it not for that vision of himself flailing in the current – even in that smooth and molten sea which spread beneath them like a tribute of silk. Unless it was she that he saw – struggling in the gold water, beating her arms to be free of it, though her face was as golden as the waves. He stood there on the cliff top. He couldn’t save her. He owed her eternal service, for he couldn’t save her …

  Every morning she read the papers. She bought them at the hotel or at the little general store in the village, where she also bought post-cards, stamps, cigarettes for him. It was her holiday, her honeymoon, but she kept up with the papers. But only as a kind of safeguard; to keep abreast of the facts, so she would not be seduced by all that sun and sea air. And one day she said, sitting on the tartan rug on the beach, as if they must get up at once and start digging defences: ‘There will be a war, Willy.’

  That was only a few days before they left. They would never holiday again till Dorry was a little girl. ‘There will be a war.’ But even before that, he had noticed, she was predicting, preparing, asking herself what must be done with their future life. So that if, as they sat there on the beach, he should put his arm about her neck or nestle his head in the lap of that blue-flowered dress, she would have to humour him, mask her annoyance at the interruption of her thoughts, like a father, deep in work he has brought home from the office, having to indulge the whim of a child.

  ‘In a few years. You see.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He did not dispute her predictions. History came to meet you. ‘Stop reading the paper, Reny.’

  He lowered his head onto her skirt. Her lap smelt of salt and sunshine. But her face turned, out and away, unsmiling, to the horizon, as if warships might loom.

  So what must he do? He never planned. He could only play tricks for her, obedient tricks, as he had when he climbed that children’s slide. He would make her smile at last, with the right trick, like the sad princess in the story. She stroked his hair. He was like a cat in her lap. He would show her as he showed no one else his little stock of laughter. So he’d take the pebble from the sand and make it vanish up his sleeve; and then, twisting his wrist, return again. And he’d flip forwards and stand on his hands and walk ten yards down the beach. No one thought he could do that. Yet no one knew him. He’d been an athlete of sorts once. But she wouldn’t laugh; though he kicked his bare white heels in the sunlight and gulls took off in alarm. Her face watching him (while the blood rushed to his head and his fingers clawed the sand) was tensed and urgent. And he only knew he mustn’t topple, not for his life, topple from that fool’s posture, snapping the little wires that ran between them.

  Was it that same evening, as they clambered up the cliff path, through a little dell
with elder trees which the sun filled like a pool, that it happened? Her blue and white dress was taut as she climbed in front of him. Little marks of sweat appeared on it. She panted with the heat. They stopped to rest on the grass bank, behind the elder trees. And he meant, if nothing more, to pick a stem of grass and tickle her chin with it, for that would make her laugh. But when he turned she was gasping, her chest was heaving, long jagged breaths came from her throat, and she tore at the stem he held out to her, in panic, as if she were really drowning, clutching the straw, as if it were closing in to suffocate her, that golden summer-time.

  It was asthma, she said, stretched on the bed in the hotel. ‘I’ve had attacks before … The heat … It runs in my family.’ She had recovered her composure; her breath was quiet, her face was calm. But he knew now the picture would never be complete. Those hands flailing in the sunlight.

  4

  ‘Weekend, Mr Chapman?’ She said it, right on cue, plonking the tea down before him, her face the colour of the milky liquid in the mug. ‘As if you would know what a weekend is.’

  ‘But that doesn’t answer my question, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘Well, no plans actually.’ The horn rims glinted. ‘But then if you were to have something in mind – I’d be glad – you know – to look after things.’

  He lowered his face to his mug. How many times had she tried that one?

  She smiled.

  ‘Go on. Give yourself a treat for once. I’ll manage. Look at that sunshine.’ Her eyes darted to the window. Across the road the lime trees quivered. ‘Take a trip to the coast. Get some air.’

  And what she really meant was: ‘We could both have a treat, you and I. We could get the train together. Stroll arm in arm on the pier. You will put the question at last. I will no longer have to work.’

  ‘When did you last have a holiday? You’re not chained to this place you know.’

  ‘I last had a holiday, Mrs Cooper, in sixty-three. Teignmouth. Do you know Teignmouth? Devon. There are associations with the poet Keats. Know Keats, Mrs Cooper? My daughter Dorothy was fourteen.’

  She blinked and tightened her lips; though her tongue smarted of course to have its say about that good-for-nothing of a girl. All that nonsense about literature, poetry, Shakespeare (guess how he knew about the poet Keats) and underneath it was only the money. But she saw, all the same, how it hurt him, how when you said the name there was a sort of wince in his eyes; as though he pulled down a shutter: Don’t trouble me any more.

  She avoided his eyes now. She allowed a slightly wounded expression to cross her face. She’d never deserted him, in sixteen years. When Mrs Chapman died; when he phoned up that time and began, ‘Mrs Cooper, I’m afraid you must manage without me for a few days …’ – Hadn’t she offered to do all she could, to come round in the evenings to cook, to tend (‘No, Dorry’s at home,’ he’d said); and hadn’t she even wept a tear herself all alone in the shop, at this very same hour, when normally she would make his tea and say, ‘How’s Mrs Chapman, Mr Chapman?’ Not that you hadn’t seen it coming. She’d been ill for years. But to see him return to the shop again for the first time, with his face empty, a dummy going through the motions. You knew then what made him tick.

  ‘Is there nothing Mr Chapman, nothing at all?’ She would have comforted him. A fortnight after the funeral she had her hair done; bought a new corset. But it was all Dorothy then. Dorothy, Dorothy. She might have had her chance, with time, if it hadn’t been for Dorothy. So she was almost glad when the little bitch ran off like that, taking the things, demanding the money (if only he’d said just how much money). ‘Oh I’m sorry Mr Chapman, truly sorry. See how they turn out in the end. Better off without her. Is there nothing? Nothing at all?’ And he’d relent at last and see, surely, how she’d been his comfort all along.

  She ran her palms down over her hips.

  ‘Sixty-three, Mr Chapman? That’s eleven years ago.’

  ‘Yes. Eleven years.’

  She snorted, as if the stretch of time made its own comment. Her throat trembled slightly. Her horn-rimmed glasses and large, curved nose gave her the look of an ageing bird of prey. Her features were all strained and compressed with effort on the end of that loose neck. Perhaps it was her corsets.

  ‘She’s grown up since, hasn’t she? More’s the pity.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Cooper.’ She’d never been beautiful, with that bird’s face. ‘She’s grown up. She takes her own holidays now.’

  He finished his tea. She picked up the mug and held it next to her bosom. She would pour him another.

  ‘Well don’t you fret over that. She’s not worth it.’ And she could have almost reached out and touched his hand there, resting on the copy of the Daily Express. She knew what he was thinking, with those little glances of inspection. She wasn’t much to look at. She knew that. And perhaps that was what kept him there behind his shutters. For Mrs Chapman must have been beautiful, that must have been the trick of it. Though she’d no way of being sure. She’d never seen her, incredible though it was. In sixteen years Mrs Chapman had never come into the shop. But it must have been beauty – what else? – that kept him running to heel like that. And if she could do it, in an invalid chair, why not herself?

  ‘Another cup?’ She gripped his mug tightly in her fingers.

  ‘Please.’ He offered a brief, consoled expression. He knew what she was thinking (did she think he was stupid?).

  She would get her reward.

  The clock over the door showed twenty past seven. ‘Almost time, eh?’ he said. Traffic was accumulating outside. Figures bobbed along the pavement. Every day you watched them, the same faces, through the cluttered window, and you got to know. They were office cleaners coming home; they were from the vinegar factory; they were the night staff from the telephone exchange. Across, on the opposite corner of Briar Street, was the hair-dresser’s. Sullivan’s: Styling for Men. They’d taken down the red and white barber’s pole which used to twirl endlessly upwards, so that it seemed like a rod of infinite length, for ever passing, disappearing into the bracket that held it. Smithy wouldn’t have allowed that. Smithy had shaved him in the mornings, when Dorry was young. He had sat him in the chair beside the window so he could look across and keep an eye on the shop; and Mrs Cooper, if she looked carefully, could make out his round face, rising from white sheets like a coconut at a fair, swathed in lather. It was a bargain: he got his shave, Smithy got a pinch of tobacco and free magazines for his customers. Then one day young Keith came over, with his tight trousers and a pale face: ‘Please Mr Chapman, it’s Mr Smithy …’

  Across the High Street only the café was open. The Diana. Dirty cream paint and wide windows on which the condensation trickled in winter. Who was Diana? A goddess, of something – Dorry would know. They opened every morning at seven, half an hour before him. One saw the regulars going in for their beans on toast or sausage and egg and their hot, treacly tea. Patterns. Most of the old shops over there had gone. The electrician’s had once been a baker’s, the off-licence a coal office, the do-it-yourself shop an ironmonger’s. But the estate agent’s – next to Simpson’s the chemist’s – had always been there. Hancock, Joyce and Jones. At a quarter to nine a grey-haired secretary, prim (all his secretaries were prim, proper things now) with a white handbag would come to open up, stooping with one hand still on the key as she picked up the mail. At nine-fifteen, Hancock, in his dark-blue Rover. On odd days, Joyce. And what of Jones? There were the little rows of notices in the window, all with photographs, some with prices. ‘For Sale, Freehold.’ Yes, Leigh Drive might be there, with the hydrangea bushes under the bay window. Dorry might see to that. Hancock would rub his hands and cast a meaning eye through his window to the shop and then to her. But Jones would never know. Yes, most of the shops were gone. But the Prince William still loomed up, with all that new red fancy-work, over Allandale Road; and the chemist’s shop (though it used to be Lane’s before Simpson’s). And old Powell’s was still there, with the great go
ld letters, painted to give the illusion of depth, on deep green, over the window. He hadn’t appeared yet. Round the back, stacking boxes. But at eight o’clock he would emerge, pull down his awning and start to put out his display, taking the roundest, firmest oranges, the ripest tomatoes to place outside. They were not the ones you got if you asked, you got the second best from inside. That was the trick of it. Every day in his grey, greasy cardigan; polishing the apples, setting them one by one on the blue tissue paper. A little water on the watercress, a sprinkle on the lettuces, to make them tempt. Unsubtle old shark.

  Mrs Cooper reappeared through the plastic strips with his second mug of tea. She glanced at the clock as she approached and caught his eye. Her throat strained. No, he hadn’t forgotten – today of all days. At half-past seven on Friday mornings the shop opened; at twenty-five past he paid her. That was the system.

  ‘Our usual little business,’ he would say. He would clear his throat; and she would look up, as if she’d forgotten, and instinctively rub the palms of her hands on her nylon shop coat. For this matter of money required clean, immaculate hands.

  He opened the drawer of the till. It was already there, made up, in a little brown envelope with a rubber band. And beside it another brown envelope.

  ‘There.’ She took the envelope and, as always, in one movement, without looking at it, slipped it quickly into the pocket of her shop coat. As if to show it meant nothing to her.

  And then, taking her empty hand from her pocket and clasping it with the other, she would give that little disappointed glance.

  She turned to lift up the counter-flap and move to the door. But he stopped her.

  ‘Something else, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘Something else, Mr Chapman?’

  He had the second envelope in his hand.

  ‘A little – well, call it – a bonus. As it’s summer. As –’ he couldn’t help lending his eye a sharp twinkle – ‘as it’s the time for taking holidays. There’s twenty-five.’