The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  ‘Just one please.’ Mr Harrison was no longer angry. He was apologetic. Standing looking down at the view-finder, his head bent, he had an air of penitence.

  ‘Ready?’ The brothers leaned in towards the sister. The developed photograph would show her like some captive between two vigilant sentinels.

  ‘Just once for your brothers.’

  She looked towards the camera, and beyond it, past Mr Harrison’s shoulder, to where he sat in his deck-chair. ‘You see, you see what I am doing.’ Her eyes spoke as she looked at him. She steadied her face like a performer. And she smiled.

  Click.

  Mr Harrison raised his head with a gesture of relief. As if he’d been forgiven.

  ‘There.’

  The shadow of the house had edged up the lawn. Someone suggested tea but Aunt Madeleine thought the sun might go in.

  ‘How many left?’ said Mrs Harrison.

  ‘Another two.’

  ‘One of us all,’ said Aunt Mad putting her straw hat back on her head.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘William will take it.’

  They all looked at him as if they’d forgotten he was there.

  ‘Would you mind, old chap?’ said Mr Harrison. He was buoyant again, once more the master of ceremonies.

  ‘No.’ He got up, putting down the cat. Mr Harrison eyed his limp which was always more noticeable after he raised himself from sitting.

  ‘Know how to work it?’

  Apples had fallen from the tree and were lying at the edge of the lawn. ‘You shouldn’t waste those,’ Irene said as they drank beer before lunch. Over by the rockery the bottles and glasses were still on the tray on the lawn and wasps were licking them. ‘Not with a war. You must keep them.’ ‘What war?’ Jack said, grinning, lying back on the grass, raising his beer glass so as to catch the sunlight in it. But Mrs Harrison looked away, at the fallen apples.

  The figures grouped, composed. Mr Harrison wanted to stand between Irene and the brothers with Aunt Madeleine next to Irene and Mrs Harrison beside Jack and Paul. Irene blew into her handkerchief and sat down on the low wall next to the rockery. She watched the wasps at the beer bottles. ‘Come on,’ said Mr Harrison, afraid perhaps she might succumb to asthma before the picture could be taken. He linked his arm in hers and raised her, as if shouldering a shield. It didn’t matter; it didn’t matter she was ill, that he was forcing her, that the laundry had been bombed and under the composure there was discomposure. So long as the picture was good, so long as the moment was vindicated.

  Already, perhaps, he was preparing his memorial.

  ‘Have you got us?’

  ‘You’ll have to move further in.’

  The figures shuffled. Mr Harrison, erect and pleased, casting a marshal’s eye down the line to his left, the brothers jutting their chins. Irene looked wedged in the centre.

  ‘All right? Got us?’

  In the little glass view-finder they looked as anonymous as the ranks of conscripts drawn up on the gravel.

  ‘Yes, that’s better. Don’t move.’

  ‘Wait for it,’ said Mr Harrison.

  ‘Dohn anticipate the ordaah!’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Now.’

  The shutter flicked.

  Up in the bedroom Aunt Madeleine had prepared for them she was kept awake by asthma. This was the night of his arrival, but they didn’t make love. He felt as if he still wore his army boots. Between Aunt Mad’s sheets he lay, his body sprawled, dispossessed, like a toy. As if it made no difference whether one touched skins or exchanged letters.

  ‘What’s the matter with your father?’

  ‘I think he wants to be forgiven.’

  Her body might dissolve if he touched her.

  ‘Forgiven? What for?’

  ‘That’s hard to say.’

  The figures broke up. Irene stepped back and supported herself with one arm against the wall. ‘I’m going in,’ she said and coughed. ‘There’s one more,’ said Mr Harrison; but he turned and extended an arm to his daughter. It seemed to convey at one and the same time, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Why must you spoil things?’ ‘I’m going in,’ she repeated hoarsely but firmly, disengaging herself.

  Perhaps it was time he acted.

  He walked towards her, holding the camera. As he approached, Mr Harrison wheeled round and stepped between them, as though to say, ‘She’s mine, she’s ours.’ Mrs Harrison glanced towards her husband but didn’t move from where she stood with her sons. The black peaks of their caps flashed in the sun. He shouldered the camera on its strap and made to take Irene back into the house. Mr Harrison stepped closer and changed his manner. He became solicitous. ‘Yes Irene, you’re not well.’ He gripped her arm. ‘You should go in and rest, shouldn’t you?’ ‘I’ll manage,’ Irene said, wrenching free her arm. Her father stepped back unbalanced, and glanced round, appealing, to his family. They looked on as if they were watching a competition.

  Mr Harrison turned to face him again; he might have been about to raise a fist. But her face was there too, commanding, assuring: Don’t move, keep still. So he said only, in a low voice, ‘What is it Mr Harrison?’

  ‘There’s another picture to take,’ Aunt Madeleine said. As if that might bring order, another pose, another grouping, over the threatened strife.

  ‘One more of Jack and Paul,’ said Aunt Mad. Then Mrs Harrison said, ‘Yes.’

  Mr Harrison looked at the two figures in uniform. He seemed to recall something. He pulled the white cuffs of his shirt down over his wrists.

  ‘In with you then,’ he said to Irene. ‘Give me the camera.’

  ‘Let Willy take it as he’s got it,’ Irene said. She walked into the house. The figures in the garden drew themselves up, collected themselves, as if it were better perhaps, simpler, without her. But they all looked diminished.

  ‘What war?’ Jack said, raising his beer glass, and Mrs Harrison looked away. She could never have had Irene’s looks. But there, as she turned, he saw the resemblance. The slender neck, the head just balanced on it. Then Mr Harrison said, looking at his wife, ‘Photographs! We must take photographs.’

  She was behind him, behind the window. He felt her eyes on his back. And he was looking, in the view-finder, at Jack and Paul in front of the apple tree. They were ready now. As they’d started to pose, Paul’s cap had caught in a branch of the apple tree and fallen off. Jack had laughed and, as Paul bent to pick it up, made to kick it from his hands. Paul snatched the cap and feinted at Jack. It seemed a tussle might follow. They both laughed. The commotion sent two pigeons, pecking unnoticed up the garden, clattering into the air – which caused Aunt Mad to chase after them up the path. ‘Shoo! Go on! You mustn’t eat the vegetables, there’s a war on!’ The brothers laughed. But Mrs Harrison and Mr Harrison didn’t laugh.

  And now they’d recovered. Paul had replaced his cap and their faces contrived to erase mirth. As if they remembered the gravity of their situation; or recalled who it was who eyed them through the camera – their brother-in-law, the store-keeper.

  ‘All right?’

  They straightened their backs. The sun fell on the apple tree. Jack looked at him as though he wished to stare aloofly through him, but only succeeded in looking narrowly at him. Paul blinked. The moment captured: gallant figures locked in the view-finder.

  Why did he wince holding the camera?

  ‘All right. Now!’

  10

  ‘Move along, look sharp.’ Along the counter they shuffled – you didn’t remember faces, only lists, numbers – past Rees who checked them, yawning, licking the tip of his pencil, out through the door to where they filled their kit bags on the grass worn threadbare now by the trampling of boots.

  Helmet, pack, ammunition pouches. Move along. Where to, where to? Where did they go, those carefully listed items? To Maktila, to Mersa Matruh? You read the names in the headlines – gains, losses, landmarks of war that loomed and receded into the sanctified distance in which perhaps flags bearing th
e same names would hang in cathedral aisles. Private Rees checked the list and, supine on his bunk, read magazines; and he put the letters (fresh envelopes were becoming scarce) one by one into the tin in the locker. Tobruk, Gazala. ‘Don’t forget,’ said the sergeant, ‘What you have don’t belong to you.’

  She went back to London. The bombs ceased to fall, after nine months, and she was released (that was how she put it) from Aunt Madeleine’s and the family.

  ‘The asthma is improving. I am going to get a job at the Food Office. They’ll make it compulsory for women to work soon. Father says in that case I could assist at the laundry, but I absolutely refuse.’

  So she wrote, in her forthright way. But he wondered, what did she do all alone in that blacked-out house? Unless that was what she wanted – to sit still, alone.

  On Aunt Madeleine’s mat the letters arrived, from Alexandria, long after the deeds of which they spoke. They had seen action, those brothers, the real thing at last, in the sunlit waters round Crete.

  ‘Don’t get down,’ Rees said, ‘that’s a long face you’ve got.’ But Rees’s own face was hardly bright, propped on his arms on the back of a chair in the NAAFI, pinched round a cigarette, while the endless commands – ‘By the right!’ ‘Presehnt!’ – drifted in from the parade ground.

  ‘Going to that dance Saturday?’

  He patted his leg. ‘You should know I don’t dance.’

  ’41, ’42, ’43. How monotonously, how anonymously those years passed whose events would fill the chronicles. Like the lorries, passing in and out by the guard house, loaded with pale faces. Like the trains which bore him up to London to see her (how many times did he make that journey?), click-clacking over the points, slowly over the sections of bomb-damaged embankment, past the stations whose sign-boards had been removed to confuse a non-appearing enemy, so that you sometimes forgot where you were. And yet the places hadn’t changed. Basingstoke, Farnborough, Woking. The same line had borne them, in ’37, to the white cliffs and the seagulls. And out there, beyond the window (if you could see for the bodies, kit bags and cases that crammed the corridor), the same countryside, green, threaded with streams, peaceful under the evening sunshine. ‘What war? What war?’ said the steam chunting from the engine. Nothing was changed. Save that the drinkers, there outside the pub, were uniformed and were perhaps drowning the thought of comrades killed over Germany; and that gap in the hedgerow which might perhaps have been for a gate or a hayrick was where the Dornier had crashed and the children from the village had scrambled, before the wreckage was cleared, seeking trophies and the smell of an enemy’s burnt flesh. So that it was not the same as it seemed, and he found himself, as the train window eclipsed scene after scene, counting – counting, as he counted helmets and nameless stations – captured moments, pictures over which curtains had dropped, shutters flicked, counting, where to, where to, till he slept, and someone said, awakening him (had nothing changed?), ‘Waterloo,’ and they slid into the grey platforms, under the iron girders named after a victory.

  ‘What do I do?’ she said (for she’d welcomed him, given him that quick kiss and that touch of the arm that was never really an embrace, and now she was telling him about the job she’d got at the Food Office). ‘Count ration books, coupons.’

  ‘Exciting,’ he said flatly. He was tired. His head still ached from sleeping in that crowded train.

  ‘There’s a war. Who wants excitement?’ She was bringing in the things from the kitchen for supper. Her body in the doorway was brisk and slender. But he didn’t appreciate her joke. He wanted to say: ‘I want excitement.’

  She wore an old, out-of-date dress he’d never seen. He was an imitation of a soldier on leave.

  ‘And when all this – excitement – is over,’ he said bleakly, looking to the window where the blackout curtain was now fixed permanently and you could sense the dust gathering behind it, only to be revealed when the war ended, ‘what’s left then?’

  She didn’t acknowledge his irony.

  ‘Then? Peace.’

  ‘Peace?’

  He watched her laying the table, taking care over the placing of the knives and forks, the mats, the water tumblers, even for this frugal war-time meal. What peace? To Mr Harrison and his two gallant sons peace meant beating the Germans. To old Jones, to Mother, to Father it meant the grave. But he didn’t know what it meant to her or him. Save perhaps a kind of not acting.

  What peace? he would have said, but her face, turning, as if at a signal, checked him.

  ‘There. Now I’ll dish up.’

  Heroes come home from the fighting; they meet wives, lovers. He sat restlessly on the sofa.

  ‘While I’m doing that,’ she added, taking a little packet from the sideboard, ‘Look at these.’

  They were copies of the photographs taken at Aunt Madeleine’s. He sat at the table and looked at them uneagerly, placing them back in a pile. The one of all the Harrisons in a row was on the top, and as she re-entered bearing the dinner plates she eyed it over his shoulder and said with a little twist in her voice: ‘Skittles.’

  She continued, the meal finished, her chin resting on her knuckles, on the same meagre theme.

  ‘They will ration sweets sooner or later. You hear things at the Food Office. It’s already bad enough with the sugar shortage. It would have been hard work if we’d kept the shop open. They say it’s tough for the housewife; it’s tougher still for the shop-keeper.’

  He nodded, glassy-eyed. The room was bare – with the blank curtaining and the things removed for safety. It seemed to get barer as the war progressed.

  Her breasts had grown smaller. Was that the war too?

  ‘Other things will be rationed,’ she went on. ‘But the war won’t last for ever. Three, four more years.’ She seemed to regard that prospect with complete equanimity. ‘We’ll win, yes – but of course at a cost. There’ll be rationing long after the war, higher prices. But don’t you worry, we’ll manage with that shop.’

  She spoke as if she’d already arranged for what she said to happen. He couldn’t connect her voice with her face. He wanted to say, ‘Let’s talk about something else. Let’s go to bed.’ But he said:

  ‘How much money will we have?’

  ‘Money?’

  She looked relieved, as if this were the sort of question she could readily cope with.

  ‘Money?’ She glanced away as if she didn’t have to speak. Her mouth was sly and shrewd. Between them was the photo; the Harrison family all in a row. And he half realized – so that he would ask later, How could she have known? And she saw that he realized and looked quickly, testingly at him, as though to say: ‘Be calm, the responsibility is mine.’

  ‘You’re tired.’ She leant towards him, taking his plate to put on top of hers. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ And then she added, as a kind of condition: ‘Tomorrow go and look over the shop.’

  Left, right. The patterns shifted, the figures grouped, regrouped over the gravel. ’42, ’43, ’44: while the headlines spoke (what was the connection?) of faraway action. Messina, Salerno, Monte Cassino. ‘Lord grant us victory,’ said the round-voiced Chaplain as the recruits stood, lined-up for prayers, bare-headed, looking at their feet. Corporal Rees (for they’d made him and Rees corporals now) wiped his glasses, replaced them and hummed monotonously through his nose ‘Amapola’, ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More’. The Quartermaster yawned. The sergeant prowled from the guard-room to the stores, from the stores to the mess. He was getting fat. His belly bulged over his belt, his neck over his collar. They wanted to know how he did it, with a war on. But he still barked at the conscripts, like an overweight, distempered watch-dog.

  12,840 helmets, 25,700 packs. When she wrote now from London she added at the foot of her letters numbers of her own. 4,000, 5,000 ration books. Was it the same code? ’43, ’44. History was drawing up its inventory. And out there, beyond the wire fencing, beyond the outspread downs, overseas, actions were being fought which would claim a special place
in that inventory. Could you believe it? It was the same placid scene – chalk downs, may trees, dappled English fields – over which the bombers flew, yet it was not the same; like the ravaged, bomb-scarred streets of London – the same London yet not the same. What was the connection? What war? What action?

  Yet here, in April ’44, was proof at last of action, here was official evidence.

  He held in his hands a simple letter. He held it before him looking at it as if it were a code.

  ‘Dear Willy, Mother and Father have had a telegram from the Admiralty. Jack’s ship was sunk on the homeward convoy. There were no survivors.’

  Click. What you have doesn’t belong to you.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’ said Rees.

  Why did he weep? Why did he put his head in his hands and feel tears smear his palms, coming back in the car from St Stephen’s church? Ahead of them (he could see if he looked through his fingers) drove Mr and Mrs Harrison in the black, shining Humber. Why had he trembled as they stood lined in the pew? Mr Harrison had shed no tears. His face was grey and dumb and held in suspense as if he couldn’t make some connection. Even the memorial tablet – a plain slab with black lettering which they’d hurriedly had made – seemed to confound him. No flags, no marble muskets, no white tomb where the knight might lie, pure in his armour, his sword blessed and at rest. Twice he leant on Irene’s arm during the service, while she looked before her, her features demure yet griefless, like some pale heroine’s; and Mrs Harrison, on the other side, coughed and muttered once, ‘Poor Paul.’

  Why did he weep? Why did he sob into his hands? And why did she look at him as she took off her black hat, her black gloves, eyeing him warily, circumspectly, as if there were something she hadn’t done for him?

  11

  ‘Where’s that child?’ demanded Mrs Cooper, looking at the clock and then at Mr Chapman, though he didn’t return her urgency.

  It was half-past ten. She always called Sandra, the girl Mr Chapman had taken on since the start of his heart trouble, ‘that child’; out of contempt for her seventeen years, her free looks, the way she flaunted her little body, even to customers in the shop, and out of a sneaking suspicion, perhaps, that Mr Chapman had hired her for just those things. Where was she? She was supposed to start at nine. Out all night, no doubt, with one of her hot-fingered boy-friends. Always late the next morning as if to advertise it. Up in the cinema car-park, in a back seat, long after the performance had finished, or in that place – now the weather was hot – near the sports ground, by the old allotments, where the orchard had been before the war. You could hear the couples, they said, in the grass, behind the fence, if you walked late along that footpath. Yes, she knew what Sandra Pearce got up to. Coming in the next day, bold as brass, two hours late, and just daring you to say: ‘And where have you been?’