The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  She rubbed her nose and straightened a crooked stack of magazines. She glanced at Mr Chapman, pressing her point, but he merely shrugged. He wasn’t bothered, oh no. He should have sacked the girl weeks ago. No wonder he couldn’t manage his own daughter.

  She huffed. That child. But she remembered – taking out some new Reveilles from below the counter and counting them – how he had touched her, Terry Cooper, in the dark, that night. It was in the air-raid shelter. First on the arm and then on the knee. Bombs were falling outside, slithering through the sky like tiles; and a man was touching her in the dark. Mum and Grandpa feet away. His fingers were inside her blouse. That was action, that was excitement; something was happening in her life. And later he had married her, fathered two louts on her, then upped and gone. And now, the years had passed – she lifted the magazines onto the counter – and she didn’t want action any more, only peace.

  12

  Irene wrote: ‘Dear Willy, Father went again to the doctor’s today. Mother made him. His heart’s no better. He’s been told to stop work completely and rest, but of course he won’t. The laundry is losing money. I think he believes nothing will be salvaged out of it after the war unless he stays on personally. He talks of “saving the business”. Then again, he says it isn’t the money – “Money won’t bring Jack back”. It’s a matter of principle. I don’t know what he means by principle. I’ve never known him distinguish principle from money before. Anyway, he won’t stop work. He upsets Mother. He wants to make her responsible for everything. And he makes demands of me, wants me by him. Well he’s ill, it’s not like earlier in the war. I try to be patient. But I won’t have any part in the laundry – that’s his affair. I’ll stick to the Food Office. He’s not going to be penniless anyway, even if the business folds. And most of that money was never his in the first place. Perhaps this is the time to tell you. It came from Mother, and she would never have had it herself if it wasn’t for her three brothers being killed. That’s how the laundry was started. It can’t have all gone. You don’t make money in a war, but there’s not so much to spend it on either. I know for a fact he put a large sum into Government stock when the war started, in order to do his bit, and he swears he’ll never touch it again now Jack’s dead. Perhaps that’s “principle”. Well, we’ll see. It’s hard to know what his reasons are, the way he behaves. You should have seen him shout at Mother for insisting he went to the doctor’s, and later, apparently, he had a long row with the doctor himself. Then afterwards he says to me, “I’m not ill, am I Reny, my heart’s all right, isn’t it?” – as if he’d quite believe me if I agreed. I try to put up with him. He swears there’s nothing wrong with him, he won’t give up the laundry. And all the time he gets more fanatical about the war. We must win soon, he says. Jack’s killed, we must win and wipe all the Germans off the map.’

  18,000 ration books.

  The roads up over the downs were thick with traffic. Lorries, tanks, bulldozers. Troops were being moved to sealed-off training areas. Outside the American camps MPs in white helmets drove up and down in jeeps blowing whistles and waving arms at the convoys of Shermans. The skies buzzed. Something was happening.

  Then, one day in June, it was still.

  13

  What was that? Had he slept? He woke up. Only the rain falling, heavy and thunderous, on the window ledges, gurgling in the gutters, pattering on the flowers, on the lilac bush in the back garden. Nothing had changed. Light spreading behind the pale green curtains – the blackout curtains had been lifted in April; and on the dressing-table the things she’d packed away at the beginning of the war – the Derby figurines, the silver hand-mirror – all replaced unharmed. See, we endure.

  Only rain. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she whispered. Her hair was matted over her forehead. And then he remembered what day it was, the day allotted for victory, and that he ought to be glad (though something stopped him rejoicing) to be there to share it with her.

  Victory, victory. The word was uttered and re-uttered on the wireless – how slow they were to make the final announcement – until it sounded brittle and dry: Victory. Yet, outside, rain was falling, drenching the spring leaves. Already flags had been hung from windows, and in the streets on the far side of the common bunting was stretched from roof-top to roof-top, bonfires stood prepared. Would they burn with all this rain? And he too had hung a Union Jack over the front porch (it would be sodden now, wet and drooping), for one must do one’s bit; and she had watched him from the front path – momentarily alarmed when he leant too far from the upstairs window – arms folded, unsmiling.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said, as if he’d woken in needless agitation. But he wanted to lie and listen to the rain hissing and sluicing beyond the window.

  Soon history would be honoured. With cheers, with hymns, with jubilation. Yet how still it seemed. As the day broke, the rain eased, sparrows started under the guttering …

  He had got a special leave, on compassionate grounds. Her telegram had arrived at the camp: ‘Father very ill. Please come.’ And so he’d journeyed up to London, on the eve of victory.

  ‘There’s hope,’ said the sister with a practised smile, ‘he’s a strong man.’ But how weak he looked, lying in the ward (there were no more private beds) among flying-bomb victims in the last stages of recovery or decline – jaw dropped, lips blue, the expression, as at Jack’s memorial service, frozen, utterly taken aback. As if there were some trick; this couldn’t happen like this. Mrs Harrison sat on his left, Irene on his right. Other patients were listening to wirelesses and he wanted to know – it was the one thing for which he still seemed to rally – ‘Is there any news? Have we won?’ He might have been asking the result of a race. ‘No, not yet’ – it was Irene who spoke – ‘soon.’

  White sheets, white rows of beds; the white apron of a nurse saying, ‘I think it better if you went now.’ May 8th, 1945. An orderly was mopping the floor. She walked down the corridor, leading her mother, her lips pressed tight.

  There was a fancy-dress parade on the common, planned for after Churchill’s speech. Little children dressed in costumes made from cardboard and old blackout material would be exhibited as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Hope and Glory’. Then the parties would follow (already they were queueing in the High Street for food and beer): bonfires, dancing. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. They sat in the garden listening to the exultant wirelesses; the sun shone after the rain. But she looked up: ‘What about Father?’ ‘The hospital said there’s no change. And Aunt Madeleine’s with Mother.’ But he knew that her question was only a kind of excuse.

  Sparks flew upwards into the blue evening sky. Along the house-fronts coloured lights were arranged in Vs, candles in jam-jars perched on front walls. They were spilling in and out of the Prince William, singing ‘Shine on, Victory Moon’. Pianos in the street; kisses for anyone in uniform; children banging dustbin lids; and out on the flattened ground of a bomb-site, tables set up, drinks, tinned meat sandwiches, a Victory Pudding (bread, milk and saccharine – the feast of victors) and the bonfire (‘bomb-fire’ the children insisted), sparks flying upwards, upwards. Speech! Speech! Someone wanted to make a speech. A stout patriarch whose sons even then, perhaps, were encamped beyond the Rhine, stood up, swayed, but only got as far as ‘Three cheers for Victory!’ Victory! Victory! echoed the cry. But no one used the other word that had hissed gently in the falling rain: Peace.

  Figures danced, silhouetted by flame. Composing, recomposing, round and round the fire. Yes, better dance, better rejoice. The war is won: that is something to rejoice over. But he had a lame leg (No, no, not a wound, he explained) and that was his excuse, and hers, for not dancing.

  More fuel for the fire: don’t let it die. More fuel to make the sparks leap and the dancers whirl. Bring anything. Those old duck-boards from the shelter, those old out of date coupons, those letters stamped with the military franking from Cairo and Rome. Burn it all. Burn away the memories of five years, the ‘sacrifice’ and ‘endeavour’, th
e headlines, the photographs, the odour of barrack huts, the names of foreign battlefields, the 39,000 helmets, the 81,000 packs. But it wouldn’t burn. For, look, behind the flames, objects immune to fire, heroes of bronze and stone, too rigid and fixed ever to dance, and black names on marble, gold names on bronze, ‘undying memory’, ‘their name liveth’; and one of the names under the chestnut trees by the railings, on the white school memorial, where boys born after the war would be herded on Remembrance Day, was Harrison. No, it doesn’t burn, it doesn’t perish. Undying memories.

  ‘Irene!’

  Who was that? It was Hancock. Stepping out of the shadows, in an Air Force uniform, with a beaker of beer in his hand, and a darkish, slightly curled moustache, grown since the war had started, to give the impression he was a pilot, not a ground officer.

  ‘Well I never. Come for the fun? Hello Willy old man.’

  ‘Hello Frank.’

  ‘Hello, helloh. Wangled some leave too?’

  He rocked to and fro. Only his feet seemed to hold him to the ground, as if they were clamped with weights. One hand held his beer and the other was extended, palm forward, behind Irene’s back.

  ‘Fancy –’ He stood, open-mouthed, for a moment, as though embarrassed for something to say. ‘Well – there goes the war.’ He looked at the fire. He raised his beaker and brought his mouth to it by leaning his whole body.

  ‘Look –’ Irene said. She shifted forward.

  ‘Soon be out of this, eh Willy?’ Hancock tugged at his uniform. ‘Back to the shop?’ He winked, bobbed his head sideways, then stood, swaying, looking at the fire. Burning planks shifted in the blaze. He looked like a man in a train corridor watching scenes go by. ‘There it goes, there it goes. All over. Forgive and forget eh?’ When the train lurched his hand touched Irene’s waist.

  ‘Willy, let’s go.’

  Dancers jostled by so they were hemmed in.

  ‘Hey, come on Irene!’

  Hancock spread his arms and went springy like a tennis player.

  ‘Give us a dance.’ He held out a hand. ‘Don’t mind, do you, old man? Don’t dance – with that leg of yours – do you?’

  Irene stepped back. For a moment Hancock waltzed gaily with the air.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Irene said.

  ‘Come on now, don’t be like that.’

  ‘You’ve had too much of that beer.’

  Hancock looked at him. Strands of his moustache were wet and frothy. Irene seemed to look at something between them. She bit her lip. He didn’t understand any of this. They were standing in a row with people dancing round them, as in some game.

  ‘What’s the matter with you two?’ Hancock said. ‘The bloody war’s over you know.’

  Better rejoice.

  He said to Hancock: ‘It’s Irene’s father, he’s –’

  ‘No, that’s all right, Willy.’ Why was she scared?

  ‘One dance.’

  Hancock looked spruce and forlorn in his uniform. He swung on his feet. Irene stood still. Her face was lit up like a statue’s. The piano played ‘Yours’.

  ‘All right,’ Hancock said. He shrugged ruefully, then looked swiftly at him as if he’d proved a point. Over the roof-tops searchlights were projecting great swaying Vs. ‘Just as you like.’

  He finished the rest of his beer.

  ‘Be seeing you then.’

  He made off through the swirl of dancers, palms extended, smiling now and then at other couples, his tall, agile body moving to the music, seeming to melt into the scene.

  ‘Let’s go, Willy.’

  Across the common, figures were flitting in and out of the light of yet more fires. The searchlights weaved in the sky like diagrams. Why did they walk that way? Past the paddling pool, the children’s playground – the slide and swings had been salvaged in ’41, but it was the same playground – and up, not by the quickest route but by the path by the allotments, by the houses facing the sports ground. Because they’d walked that way before? When he worked at Ellis’s, in those lunch-times, when it was all yet to come. The same but not the same. There was an orchard of apple trees adjoining the back gardens. She had said once: ‘Did you know, that belongs to one of Father’s friends?’ But the fence was broken now, the rows of trees had not been pruned since the beginning of the war.

  Victory, victory. But not for her. Along the path by the privet hedges and blossoming trees her face had tensed, as if to a vigil still to be maintained. Hancock? Was it Hancock? With his false fighter-pilot’s moustache. ‘Watch him,’ old Jones had said. But when he asked, ‘What was all that about?’ she only said, ‘That nonsense? Some day I’ll tell you.’

  Later, up in the bedroom, she said suddenly, spreading her legs: ‘All right.’

  Victory. But not for Mr Harrison, sinking slowly, surely in his coma, till he died in the small hours the following morning. ‘Peacefully,’ said the hospital. ‘Peace’, said the gravestone in St Stephen’s churchyard. That was Irene’s word: Peace. And had he found it, old Harrison, while his daughter stood, on the eve of victory, by his deathbed? For he’d leave the house to Mrs Harrison (she wouldn’t want it – a month after the funeral she’d go to live with Aunt Mad) and the flagging laundry to Paul (far away, in the Far East, where victory was yet to come); but the money, most of the money would be hers.

  The searchlight Vs waved over the apple boughs. And what was that, from behind the fence? Voices in the grass.

  II

  14

  As the clock showed half-past ten she opened the shop door. She stood for a moment in her white T-shirt, with buttons at the front, and blue skirt that barely hid her bottom, flipping back her brown hair, glancing at them with that look that said (in answer to everything): ‘So what?’

  Well now we would see, thought Mrs Cooper, looking along the counter, whether he’d give her what she deserved or not.

  Though she knew, of course, he wouldn’t. He indulged her, this brazen little seventeen-year-old. Pretended not to notice her idleness and impudence; treated her cheek almost with kindness, while her own long devotion he met merely with civility. ‘Thank you Mrs Cooper. That’s kind Mrs Cooper.’ ‘Mrs Cooper’ indeed! And he’d called that child ‘Sandra’ after only a week.

  She watched him. He was counting out change but he had one eye on the girl.

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’ The girl grinned, unapologetically, and spoke in that slack, rubbery way which seemed to go with the chewing gum she continually worked and tugged around her mouth, making little sticky noises. ‘Got held up.’

  She lifted the flap in the counter and passed through the gap, holding her stomach in and making small, sideways movements with her feet – an unnecessary performance, only designed to demonstrate her slimness.

  ‘You’ll get held up one of these days,’ Mrs Cooper said.

  ‘Yeh?’

  Then she went into the stock room, slipping off her shoulder bag, to fetch her shop coat. Which she hardly needed, of course. Hers was pink, in contrast to Mrs Cooper’s dark blue. When she’d first got it she’d taken it home and raised the hem six inches. And once – it was a hot day three weeks ago, just like today – she’d stripped to her underwear to wear only the shop coat on top. Mrs Cooper had gone into the stock room and there she was in her knickers. It might have been Mr Chapman who’d walked in.

  Held up indeed.

  And still he said nothing. Soft as they come. Only now, with the girl out of sight, pretending to busy himself at the counter, did he say, in the most unsevere way: ‘You’re getting held up rather too often Sandra.’ Mrs Cooper caught his eye, pursing her lips. Sack the girl, tell her to beat it. But he looked back with that dim, imperturbable gaze. What was up with him today? She blinked. It ought to be easy to tell a man like him what to do. But it wasn’t.

  Sandra emerged from the stock room fastening the buttons of her shop coat.

  ‘Morning Mrs Cooper.’ She overcame a yawn.

  Mrs Cooper stiffened. (Mr Chapman, looking o
n, anticipated the reply):

  ‘I suppose it is still morning.’

  The girl hoisted herself onto a stool. She crossed her legs, baring her thighs, and slouched carelessly forward. One shoe dangled under the counter from the tip of her toe. It was a slack mid-morning period, which extenuated her lateness. She leant against the counter, unconcerned with explanations, resting on her elbow and propping her chin on her red fingernails.

  ‘Well don’t just sit there,’ Mrs Cooper said. ‘Tidy up those shelves.’

  ‘Get out some new birthday cards Sandra, would you, and put them on the racks.’ Mr Chapman spoke at last.

  ‘Yeh.’

  The girl got up slowly.

  Yes, without her own little prompts, Mrs Cooper thought, he wouldn’t get her to do anything. Let her lollop like that all day next to him. You could tell why, too. You could tell why he never sent her packing like he should, never had a harsh word. At his age. And with a heart condition. Mrs Cooper’s thoughts grew wild and tried to check themselves, as they always did when she was forced to consider Mr Chapman capable of lust. She straightened her shop coat and turned to a customer.