The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  The long barrack huts with their tiers of bunks, the mess hall and the echoing bath-house reminded him of school: the sweaty blasphemy of changing rooms, flaunted man-hoods, the belligerence of the football pitch and the running track. They’d wanted ‘action’ then, in ’30 and ’31, trailing home, tingling with exercise, out of the school gates. A restlessness plagued them which turned their games into something more than games. The real thing, the thing itself: let us have that. And for a moment their eyes were blind to the rows of still chestnuts, the black lines of railings. They’d sat in the history lesson and chafed at its dryness – would nothing happen? – but here suddenly was ‘History’. So Private Rees said, smacking his lips over a newspaper bearing the news of the occupation of Paris: ‘History, that’s what it is.’ As if the statement would save him, immune as a rock, from an invasion of Germans and all the outrages of war. And here suddenly was the real thing. And yet how did it express itself? In barrack huts and wire fencing, in numbers, inventories, lists? 360 capes, 360 helmets, 720 side-packs. What was the connection?

  They badgered him in the mess hall. His limp became the target for mocking jokes, and they looked in his face with the shifting looks of schoolboys for signs of injured pride, for signs that their enforced code of ‘action’ had proved its worth by delivering a sting. But he gave no sign. For over the dinner table, over the white cloth with the blue border, on the evening his final papers and his rail warrant had come, she’d looked at him, looking for the same signs, looking for ‘deeds’ and ‘action’, but she’d not found them.

  ‘Count your blessings,’ she’d said. ‘Why should you go and get yourself killed?’

  What firmness. She sat in the chintz chair listening to the wireless bulletins, scanning the papers which spoke of the war in Finland, the threat of air raids, taking note of the facts, as if the course of things was predictable and she had only to observe its fulfilment. Let bombs drop: she wouldn’t jump. And when the note-taking was done she would throw down the paper, switch off the wireless (before it burst into morale-boosting song), and, getting up, stare momentarily at the window – though not through it, for it was covered by the dark black-out curtain, and beyond it, anyway, the garden was dank and dead, under that first bleak winter of the war. But she stared. No, it wasn’t war, destruction that she feared. It almost protected her, that great ominous blackness, as if she knew where she stood with it – shielded her from sunlight; and she was saved perhaps, so long as there were bulletins and blackness (her body was like a lamp, there at the window) from bright moments which urged: No, there is beauty, we do not belong to history.

  But that was before he left for his camp in Hampshire and before she went with her mother to her Aunt Madeleine’s in Aylesbury (for her family had stepped in nobly in the hour of peril to pluck her from the rain of bombs that would fall on London). Leigh Drive stood empty. Her plates and glass were wrapped in packing cases; the pictures taken down from the wall, the wedding photos locked in a drawer. How many landmarks had passed already, swept suddenly far behind by the advent of war? Was it only in ’37 he’d been the printer’s assistant, coming home in the evening to Mother and Father, who’d never heard of Irene Harrison? And how many new landmarks had replaced them? Leigh Drive, the shop; housing his identity, but not for ever; and perhaps never really; for see, they stood empty, and, look again – the bombs were falling. Two fell in Briar Street, one stripped the lime trees outside Powell’s; and one, crashing down near the Surrey canal, flattened old Ellis’s print-works.

  What would become of the shop? What would become of the sweet jars, the ice-cream, the magazines? He pinned up one of those comic notices: Closed for the Hostilities. ‘It will keep,’ she said. ‘It must keep.’ Wars pass but sweet shops remain.

  ‘Dear Willy,’ she wrote from Aylesbury, ‘We are doing our bit. Aunt Madeleine is digging the back garden. I am collecting coat-hangers. Mother writes to Jack and Paul. Mother especially does her bit. Father is staying at Sydenham. Sticking to his post. He demands the keys to Leigh Drive. He won’t get them. Mr Smithy is keeping an eye on the shop. He says he’ll get someone to board up the windows and he’ll send on any mail.’

  He replied: ‘Am doing my bit too,’ and wrote, ‘1980 helmets.’ For that was how they told off the war, in tin helmets and letters.

  ‘Mother worries about Father in London. You must have read about last week’s raids. He sleeps alone at Sydenham, in the cellar. Misses Jack and Paul. He’s by himself now at the laundry. Mother suggests I go to give him some “support”, but I think it’s really Father’s idea. He says he’ll protect me from bombs. But I’d be more scared of staying at Sydenham.’

  There was this tone about her letters as if she were writing from the thick of the fighting.

  He dropped the wallet just as the sergeant came in the door and called attention. He was folding her letter inside it and then it slipped from his hand. The sergeant loured, flexed his shoulders and stooped to pick it up. ‘Your wife, Chapman?’ he said, looking at the photograph. A beach photographer had taken it in Swanage. The sun was in her face. ‘ ’Oo’s a lucky man then?’ He spoke loudly so everyone in the hut should hear. Then he tossed the wallet back and sauntered out through the far door, flicking with his baton at a pile of blankets, looking for another reason to shout.

  ‘Sod him,’ said Rees. But he glanced too at the photograph and smacked his lips.

  He wrote: ‘The sergeant passes by each day to make sure we are being good soldiers.’

  And then her next letter came from London.

  ‘They finally cajoled me down here. Bombs and all. Strange, when they were so keen to pull me out in April. Father very anxious now about the business. He’s short staffed and will have to work out quotas. He behaves oddly. It’s as if the war is something I shouldn’t have to be troubled with – really his responsibility – and he apologizes to me for it. He says the country should do this and that, we must all do our bit, but it’s all a different story when it comes to the laundry.

  ‘I’ve had a look at Leigh Drive and the shop. They are still standing.’

  He tucked each letter in his wallet behind the photograph and then when a new one arrived put the old one in an Oxo tin inside his locker. Things must be kept. On still nights you could hear the noise of anti-aircraft fire. He wrote: ‘Take care.’ But he didn’t add – perhaps that was only for the heroes, writing from the field of action – ‘I love you.’

  Should they rent out the shop, he wrote (for she wouldn’t run it herself – she’d made that quite clear). Someone might take it. Perhaps Smithy knew of someone. It was only gathering dust there, wasn’t it, with its shelves cleared and its windows shuttered up? Besides there was the question of income. You got two shillings a day as a soldier. But she wrote – it was as if he’d slighted her – No, that wouldn’t be a good plan at all. So that he found himself asking – guessing how many years the war would last – How much money did she really have?

  He picked up the grey-green helmets for the Quartermaster and stacked them in piles like dishes.

  And yet she’d been to the shop; she wrote so. She’d been to Smithy opposite to thank him for his help and sending on the mail. So she must have gone over to look inside the shop.

  Yes, though he would never learn (she had paused over her letter wondering how much to mention) how she’d stood alone by the empty counter – Father was waiting, drumming his fingers, at the office and at any moment the sirens might go – how she had run her hand over the rows of empty jars and the bare shelves and sniffed the air. It smelt of coconut.

  ‘3640 helmets.’

  ‘Back to Aylesbury, for the weekend, with Father – and it looks as though I shan’t be returning to London with him. Mother says I shouldn’t vex him. He has responsibilities and misses Jack and Paul. For the business, I wonder, or because they’ll soon be fighting for their country? Mother waits for letters from them. She prays. I have actually seen her, with her hands clasped in the be
droom. And Jack and Paul haven’t even left England. I don’t give her your news and she doesn’t ask for it. I haven’t told you, but Mother had three brothers in the army in the last war and they were all killed. I think that’s why Jack and Paul volunteered for the navy.’

  *

  The trucks with the canvas tops lumbered in past the guard house, wheeled round and stopped beside the gravel, and then the new conscripts got out. Some of them tried to vault over the tail-board and sometimes they fell.

  He wrote: ‘I never knew about your uncles.’

  ‘Letter from Paul. Mother glows. He and Jack are still at Portsmouth though they leave soon for the Mediterranean. Father up for the weekend again. He says to me, “I’m proud of those boys.” I think he might have meant this as a dig at you, because he made some sort of apology afterwards. But don’t you mind him. Be a good soldier.’

  The blond-haired recruit made a soft thrust at Rees, which, perhaps unintendedly, flipped his glasses into his plate. ‘You’ll need them,’ the recruit said, pointing, ‘so you can see to frig yourself in the stores.’ Rees clenched his fork and held it vertically against the table. ‘Bugger off,’ he said, ‘Willy, tell them to bugger off.’ The sergeant entered with two corporals and the men in the mess hall stood up. Rees had a splash of gravy on his cheek and was without his glasses. He was slow to find his feet. ‘Getting jealous of the new boys again, Rees?’ said the sergeant, stepping close. The blond lad smirked. ‘Don’t you laugh sonny,’ the sergeant snapped, ‘you’ll be stopping bullets soon.’

  ‘We are planting the vegetables for this winter. Four rows of cabbages and four of sprouts. One of the laundries has been bombed. No casualties, just machinery. Considering there are three all within five miles of the docks this was likely to have happened sooner or later. But Father’s mad. It’ll mean re-organizing and he’ll have to send some things at the shops back to customers. I don’t want to be roped in. I’m thinking of getting a job here. They want women as insurance collectors. Mother, Father and Aunt Mad disapprove, naturally, but I say to Father, “One must do one’s bit”.’

  Rees, in the top bunk, leaned over to watch him fold up the notepaper. ‘Missis?’ he asked, knowing the answer, then slumped back, putting his nose to his magazine. He read endless magazines, propped on his elbow, turning the centre-page spread – ‘This Month’s Babe-in-Arms’, a girl in stockings and a tin helmet – through every angle. What did he do (he never said), this man who’d expressed one moment of awe at History and then slumped back to spend the war issuing kit and reading magazines?

  And on the bunk below he read the letters, looking for signs – ‘With Love, with All my Love.’ And he wondered should he write ‘I love you’ (for perhaps in this time of war –); though he knew, if he did, it would alarm her, more than war, more than bombs and blackness.

  No, she would say, that wouldn’t be a good plan.

  He wrote, ‘5520 helmets,’ meaning, ‘I love you.’

  Up above, the white curves in the sky had grown more complex, then dwindled. On the grass behind the barrack huts some conscripts, off duty, stripped to the waist, played football.

  ‘It seems as if your leave will coincide with Jack and Paul’s. They will be here briefly before they go to the Clyde. Have asthma.’

  9

  She sat opposite the window in the shadows of the living-room, and Mr Harrison, in the garden, peering in and holding a camera, was saying, first sternly then beseechingly, ‘Come out Irene. Come out. Don’t you want to be in it?’

  She held a hand to her throat and shook her head.

  *

  She’d met him at the station. Her eyes had been watery and her speech quick and breathy. And there was that other look about her, of someone sent on errands they resent.

  ‘Won’t you come out? Don’t you want to be in it?’

  Up on the lawn, where the October sun fell over the house, in front of the rockery, the michaelmas daisies and the apple trees, they were taking photographs. Figures grouped, regrouped; fussed and posed, as if it were a function or prize-giving, and they were not dressed for war, those brothers in their dark naval uniforms, but for some ‘special occasion’. Mr Harrison bore the camera like a master of ceremonies. Jack and Paul, with caps on, with caps off and held proudly over the breast, jutting their chins and giving self-conscious grins, so that the moment might be captured, manhood vindicated. This deserves a picture, this is something to be kept. And someone leafing through the pages, the school photos, the holiday snaps, would say, ‘– and there, at Aunt Mad’s in their uniforms: what fine boys.’

  Click went the camera. The figures broke up, brushed lapels, recomposed. Jack alone: Paul alone. The two with Mrs Harrison, with Mr Harrison, with Aunt Mad, with Mr and Mrs Harrison together.

  But the one they most wanted, the one they most needed to complete the picture, sat in the living-room and wouldn’t take part.

  ‘Come out Irene, come on out.’

  ‘The sun will go in.’

  As they left the station for the taxi someone eyed his uniform and his limp. Perhaps they were thinking, ‘Dunkirk?’ Her face looked excited, but it was only the illness. In the taxi he said, ‘What can be done?’ ‘I have some new pills. They help. But there’s no cure really. It’s not like that.’ And, taking his hand, she said, ‘Look,’ and pointed out of the window to an orchard where a man on a ladder was picking apples.

  He sat in the deck-chair near the back porch, holding Aunt Madeleine’s ginger cat, glad to be out of his uniform. They didn’t want him in their photographs. He could sit in peace. The garden looked neat, the far end dug for vegetables. Mr Harrison stood close to the window. The lines in his face were reflected in the glass.

  ‘Come out.’

  ‘It’ll bring it on again,’ she said, her voice muffled, from within.

  Though they both knew, it wasn’t the asthma.

  ‘Just for a moment. That surely won’t do any harm.’

  Mr Harrison moved aside from the window. His hair was combed and smoothed down for the photographs but his face, unseen by the rest of the family, seemed crumpled, and it glared momentarily at him in his deck-chair, accusing. ‘Won’t she come out?’

  The cat purred in his hands.

  Up the garden the brothers conferred, shifted legs and lit each other cigarettes, like guests when there has been a hitch in the programme which someone else must correct. But they looked uneasy, as if deprived of something they’d bargained for.

  ‘The sun will go in.’

  At the end of the table Mr Harrison spoke about Churchill, about invasion, about the weakness of the French, while Aunt Madeleine, holding a cake-slice, served up ‘Patriot Pie’, an economy recipe from a magazine. Mrs Harrison sat with her fingers on her necklace. Each time Mr Harrison declaimed upon a subject he turned to him and said, ‘What do you think?’ Then,

  ‘Well, Jack and Paul should be here tomorrow,’ and ‘I dare say you envy them.’

  ‘Irene!’ Mr Harrison suddenly barked aloud, turning to the window, as if giving an order. Then he said in the voice of someone at a public meeting, ‘Don’t let your brothers down!’

  His cheeks quivered. The camera he held in his hand might have been a weapon, a missile he would have hurled through the window. Up the garden the figures stiffened, rallying. What was happening? They wanted her to come out but their gaze seemed to shut her in.

  ‘Irene!’

  Mr Harrison turned, accusing once more, the camera in his hand. ‘What’s the matter with her? You should know.’ He seemed to be really craving for information. ‘You don’t help much, do you?’ – looking with contempt at the cat.

  He leant forward in his chair. He would have said, putting down the cat: ‘Now just a minute, Mr Harrison.’ But he saw her eyes, through the window, bright and precarious in the gloom, suddenly fix and hold his, sending little threads between them, taut with warning: Don’t fall. Don’t fall.

  No, he wouldn’t enter this particular actio
n.

  ‘She isn’t well Mr Harrison, you know that.’

  The older man stood before him, flexing his shoulders, like a man waiting for his opponent to make the first move so as to crush him blamelessly. He drew breath. Sweat oozed in the crevices of his face, strands of hair fell over his forehead. The war wouldn’t be for him, as it would for many, a temporary curtain lowered over the past. It would be dropped for him for ever.

  ‘Damn you,’ he said softly.

  Paul and Jack raised their cigarettes. Mrs Harrison strode towards the house. ‘If she won’t come out,’ said Aunt Madeleine, taking off her wide straw hat, ‘then that’s the last of the photographs.’

  The sun went in. A breeze fanned out over the garden, ruffling the michaelmas daisies, flipping the black tie from Paul’s jacket, shaking the trees beyond the patch which Mrs Harrison and Aunt Mad, soiling their hands, had diligently dug. For an instant they all stood awkwardly, looking in different directions, actors waiting for a prompt.

  ‘Irene –’ began Mrs Harrison, approaching the window. But she paused. For there she was, emerging from the side of the house, tucking a handkerchief in her sleeve, and coming up to place one hand behind him on the frame of the deck-chair.

  ‘All right. Where do you want me?’

  ‘You can’t blame the French,’ he’d said, meeting Mr Harrison’s armed scrutiny, but first swallowing his mouthful of Aunt Mad’s uninspiring pie. ‘After all, they’ve been invaded many times before.’ He remembered his history lessons.

  Click. The shutter flicked, drawing its curtain over the past. Paul and Jack, with Irene between. The fair flanked by the strong. Click. ‘Smile, Irene.’ But she didn’t smile. She had come out. She stood where they told her to stand. She took her place in the picture, but she didn’t smile. She breathed heavily.