The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  ‘Would that be tipped or plain sir?’

  The girl moved across the shop to a low, deep drawer beneath the racks of birthday cards and began rummaging unsuccessfully. Mr Chapman got up to join her.

  Well, wouldn’t you know it?

  But she didn’t have to pit herself against that girl’s foolishness. When had she ever been late for Mr Chapman, or needed to be shown where things were? And yet – she saw how when Sandra leant she leant towards Mr Chapman, and when she lolled on the counter she lolled towards Mr Chapman. And she saw how Sandra had seen (it hadn’t taken her long, for all her being a slip of seventeen) that she, Mrs Cooper, had leanings of her own (though they were leanings of a different kind, sixteen years had gone into them) towards Mr Chapman. All of which led her to little panics and to the need to hoist on her armour and trim her nails to the fight. Little bitch. What a struggle it all was. And she knew she couldn’t win; she had no answer to that girl’s ‘So what?’ But you had to soldier on, if you wanted your reward.

  ‘Matches sir? Change a five pound note? No trouble.’

  That voice spoilt it of course.

  ‘This one ’ere, Mr C.?’

  There it went, like a rusty hinge.

  ‘No, the other box, at the back.’

  Mr Chapman bent down and reached inside the drawer. His face was plum-coloured. Sandra sat back on her heels. The box was jammed so Mr Chapman had to bend closer. Sandra held out two slender, dithering arms, one with a blue plastic bracelet round the wrist, as though to grasp Mr Chapman.

  She watched them, feeling spurned. Suddenly, the box came out. Mr Chapman straightened, rose, then abruptly reached to grasp the display rack, breathing hard. Ah there! She swelled again with a sense of her own significance. The poor man. What he needed was looking after.

  ‘All right, Mr Chapman? Look what you’ve done you stupid girl! Making him bend down like that!’

  She opened the flap in the counter to step forward. ‘All right?’

  He recovered.

  ‘Yes, yes, all right.’

  But his voice didn’t seem grateful for her concern. For he bent down again – the obstinate fool – towards Sandra, who said, ‘’Ere, you wanna watch it.’ And, just for a moment, he put his hand, for support, on the girl’s shoulder. So even there, where she had the advantage, she couldn’t win. She shut the flap. Couldn’t he just have another little spasm, so she could take charge quite firmly; make him sit down, fetch him some tea, tell that girl to clear off out of it; take one of his pills from the bottle and scold him with her eyes: See, that’s what you get, not being your age. It was a nurse he needed, not some bit of fluff who showed her legs. But she felt herself grasping the counter as if it were really she who needed support.

  Sixteen years.

  Light flooded in at the window. Over the road the sun had begun to touch, on the corner site, Powell’s trestles of tomatoes and watercress; but it would be several hours before its rays probed the Diana café or lit the ‘For Sale’ notices in Hancock, Joyce and Jones. In the Prince William they would be laying out beer-mats, placing ash-trays, cutting the cheese and ham sandwiches. Before opening the door, at eleven, with a cool gust of beer.

  He breathed, rather hard, and looked, with just a hint of anxiety, at Mrs Cooper. That was what she expected. ‘How about more tea, Mrs Cooper? I’ll take one of my pills.’ You had to humour the woman. Loyalty replaced the reproachfulness in her eyes, and she disappeared obediently through the plastic strips.

  He returned to his stool at the counter and watched the girl, standing in the sunlight from the window, arrange the cards. Did she tempt and console, as Mrs Cooper imagined? Did her little provocations work on him? No. So why had he hired her? – it was after Dorry had come that last time. As a sort of cheap replacement? But there was no comparison. Dorry, at seventeen, had not known what to do with her beauty – she’d buried herself in books, as though to disown it. This girl traded so much on her attractions (no, you couldn’t call them beauty) that they sometimes seemed to him not to belong to her at all. So perhaps it amounted to the same?

  He watched the girl finish her task, run her hands over her hips and, now that Mrs Cooper was out of sight, turn to him with a pleased, half conspiratorial smile.

  The kettle whistled in the stock room. Sandra returned to the counter. He motioned quickly to her. ‘Here, before you have your tea,’ (and before Mrs Cooper could see). His hand moved, holding the ring of keys from his pocket, to the drawer under the till.

  He took the brown envelope with Sandra’s pay and handed it to her.

  ‘Expect you’re waiting for this.’

  The girl’s face came close to his. Her sticky, spearmint-scented mouth moved up and down.

  ‘Going dancing tonight, Sandra?’ he asked. (For Sandra had told him once, she went dancing every Friday night, at a disco called Vibes. It was an excitement that had become a routine).

  ‘P’raps.’ She gave a little frown. ‘What about it?’

  He had taken out the second envelope.

  ‘Here – don’t ask any questions. Buy yourself a new dress.’

  He indicated the edges of five five-pound notes pro-truding from the envelope. She widened her eyes, stopped, for once, her endless chewing. Then actually blushed. As if Mr Chapman really did have some old man’s fancy for her.

  ‘Oo – ’ere – ta Mr Chapman. But – ?’

  But his face showed nothing. He looked at her coolly (Sandra thought he had never looked so distant).

  ‘There. A dress, mind you. Nothing else. Don’t ask any questions.’

  Mrs Cooper appeared with two mugs. The light reflected crisply off her glasses. She passed the girl as if she wasn’t there and gave him one of the mugs. ‘There. And here’s your pills. Now you take it easy awhile. Don’t argue.’ She put her own mug on the counter. Then she turned to Sandra, with another flash of her spectacles, taking in her slim picture of health. ‘Yours is in there,’ she said. And added with venom, ‘I’ve sugared it!’

  15

  ‘It will keep,’ she said, ‘It must keep.’

  And so it had. Though along the High Street there were the little pits in walls where the fragments had struck, and here and there a window missing, and in Briar Street, not far from the infants’ school, sudden gaps of flattened rubble; so that you seemed to walk (but perhaps you always had) through a world in which holes might open, surfaces prove unsolid – like the paving-stones over which the children picked their way, returning to re-opened classrooms, dodging the fatal cracks. Yet it had kept. Intact. He had only to remove the boarding from the windows, retouch the paint-work, clear away the dust, and then – that was the most difficult part in that time of scarcity – refill the shelves with stock. And yet she knew all about that (it was almost as if she’d planned it), having worked all those months in the Food Office.

  It must keep. Though things were scarce. Fewer coupons for clothes; units for bread; and those who said the ration books would go after a year or two were wrong. Prices rose. Half a crown for the cigarettes that in ’39 cost a shilling. And trailing round the streets of London in grey demob suits, trailing with them, like their former kit bags, the bundled stock of what they called their ‘experiences’, were thousands, looking for jobs and homes. There was much trading in ‘experiences’ but very little in homes. Little to buy, little to spend. And yet they’d said, Victory was ours, ours the reward, and some had spoken cheerily of the Fruits of Peace. And now they’d invented a new term to cloak the facts with an air of virtue: Austerity. But at least those children there, treading gingerly over the paving-stones, were assured of schooling, and of milk and orange juice. They were all numbered in a new system so they shouldn’t want. Smithy, who was childless, said that was a good thing. And you could count your blessings, with the news the servicemen brought home on Christmas leave from Germany: ‘They’re starving over there.’

  He took down the ‘Closed’ notice, which five years had faded, from the door; se
nt off his forms to the Ministry and renewed his tobacco licence. Old Smithy, crossing the road, his barber’s jacket frayed and stained (you needed coupons for new ones), greeted his return. ‘So, come to mind your own store.’ There was a fondness in his eyes. His red and white barber’s pole twisted upward again, like a twirl of sea-side rock. And, see, along the damaged High Street they were returning again, like birds to their roosts, resuming their old ploys as if history could be circumvented and the war (what war?) veiled by the allurements of their windows: the thin assistant in Simpson’s replacing the tall flasks of coloured water high on their shelf; Hancock, in his office, scratching with a pencil that fraudulent moustache; and Powell – but they whispered, respectfully, about Powell. There were burn marks all down his back and his left arm – which is why he wore that grey, greasy cardigan and had acquired an ogreish expression. Yet he put out the vivid fruit, such as you could get then, doggedly enough.

  Someone had to mind the store. Thrift was what victory cast up, after the cheering ebbed. And he saw what things would be needed, in this time of peace and parsi-mony. Sweets, cigarettes. Useless things.

  Half-forgotten customers from before the war would shut the noise of the street behind them and linger, pick up old threads. The stories would be told – the bombs, the deeds of neighbours, the good or ill luck of husbands and sons – moments captured, sifted out of the actual long privations which did not seem to have ended with the war – stories which grew more unreal, more pensive, the nearer the teller got to the end of them, till he or she would stop, slip onto the counter the coupons and ask, as six years before, for a quarter of mints, a bag of rum and butters. ‘And you, Mr Chapman? What about your experiences?’

  Experiences? But he had no experiences. Only the 81,000 packs and the 39,000 helmets.

  In the evenings they counted the fiddly sweet coupons, threading them on strings at the dining table. And, more than once, he was tempted to sweep aside the carefully collected squares, like some card game that has proved inane.

  ‘We don’t have to make money,’ he said, losing count. ‘We have money – now – don’t we? So the shop –’

  He eyed her over the green baize table-cloth.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said in a lucid tone. ‘Exactly. Don’t you see?’

  She held her gaze on him. Her face, fretted already by her illnesses, was as frail as paper. It might crumble away completely.

  And he knew: the shop was useless; its contents as flimsy as these interminable coupons they were counting. He was the shop-keeper.

  The laughter leapt suddenly from her throat and skipped round the room. Then stopped, like something flung away and lost.

  Would he hear her laugh again? Never so freely, or so wildly. But she didn’t break her bargain. She finished work at the Food Office. She went out on little necessary errands with shopping bag and ration book, or on more secret, private excursions, to bankers, brokers, dealers – though never (what were the traps awaiting her there?) to the High Street. But mostly she lurked, like some shy animal hidden in undergrowth, at Leigh Drive. At night he parted the leaves. Her body glimmered, received but did not yield. In the morning it was only a bedroom with pale green curtains. And yet she was preparing something. Down at the shop where she wouldn’t venture, he twisted up the little bags of sweets, rang the till, counted change, folded the newspapers (they spoke of the air lift to Berlin), and presented more expertly to his customers his shop-keeper’s camouflage. They didn’t realize (they only took their purchases and gave their money) how he’d perfected it; how it was only a disguise that faced them over the counter. Nor how she too sheltered behind that same disguise. For he saw how her preparations exposed her. She was less hidden, perhaps, by that undergrowth, than threatened by its rampancy, its sticky scents of growth; and only his own daily performance reassured her. He waited. In the evening he tended the garden while she watched from the window. Once, when he came home he found her unpacking cases of china. Pastel bowls and vases with white scrolls and tendrils and scenes from mythology on the side. ‘Wedgwood,’ she explained, without saying where she’d bought them. ‘Things like this will go up in value.’ And after examining them she packed them away again. ‘It wouldn’t do to break them.’

  He felt afraid when she said, ‘I am going to have a child.’ Her own voice trembled slightly, though her eyes were bright with the knowledge of a promise fulfilled. As if she had proved a point, and now could be left alone.

  That was November, 1948. The blue-rimmed tea cups had rattled on the kitchen table, the kettle hissed. For it was at breakfast she announced the news. So as to give no time, perhaps, for excessive reactions. She eyed the clock. She even led him, in her usual way, into the hall, taking his hat from the peg, ignoring his protest that for such a reason the shop might open late. Those unvarying habits had already formed – the keys, the briefcase by the umbrella stand, the dark grey suit for working – and that day was no exception. ‘Your hat Willy.’ Yet she let him kiss her and clasp her tight – was he afraid now she might slip away? – before she opened the front door.

  A child. Something to rejoice over. Yet was it pure joy that made his steps seem light on that crisp November morning? Along Leigh Drive, down Brooke Close, over the common, past the swings and the paddling pool with its flotsam of dead leaves. As if the world slid heedlessly under his feet rather than submitted to his tread.

  Smithy would be the first to know. Smithy who had neither wife nor child. When the barber came in for his tobacco, he said, tilting his head confidentially: ‘I am going to be a father.’ Solemn, monumental words which didn’t hide the quiver in his voice. Smithy’s doughy face had creased. ‘Boy or girl?’ And he said – only realizing then he’d never assumed it would be otherwise – ‘Girl.’

  November 10th, 1948. There was a red poppy in Smithy’s barber’s jacket and red poppies on the lapels of customers. Hancock would be wearing his Air Force tie and would comb with extra care his tawny moustache. And round the white memorial by the school railings, solemn, pink faces would reverently assemble. He bought a poppy from the seller outside the Post Office, but kept it in his pocket. Better rejoice. While there is time. Real flowers, not paper poppies. Red roses which he bought at the florist’s and carried home as a token.

  But she didn’t seem glad. Her face showed only the pinched looks of someone labouring to pay a debt. So that he felt, through that lean winter of ’48, while her womb swelled, that he’d inflicted some penalty upon her for which he, in turn, must make amends by never showing gladness; taking her hint, leaving the house at six, standing obediently behind his counter: counting, counting the endless change so as to pay his own debt.

  She took the roses and placed them, meticulously, in a vase, kissing him coolly on the forehead.

  Yet her womb did swell. He put his hand on it and felt it, alive, inside. How palpable, how undeniable. But none of his pride suffused her. As if she were saying, as he laid his podgy, shop-stained fingers on her bigness, ‘Enough, don’t touch, don’t touch any more.’ ‘I can manage,’ she insisted, forcing a grin, as he rushed, playing to perfection his own part of anxious father-to-be, to take the shopping bag, the coal scuttle; ‘I’m not an invalid.’ But she carried around that weight inside her like something crippling, longing for but dreading the moment of release. March, April, May 1949. Visits to the doctor. With every month she seemed more the victim. So that when the moment came, precipitately – pink on the sheets, and him sitting on the edge of the bed, summoning the nerve to call a car – not even the words which he was forbidden to speak, which broke the terms of the bargain, could stop that drowning expression or the silent cry on her lips – Save me, save me.

  ‘I love you – keep still – I love you.’

  It was her he looked at first; her and not the baby. Though he knew, as he stood there holding the flowers, that that little thing in a shawl in what looked like a wicker basket on a trolley beside the bed was their child. But he barely took in the fact,
to look first at her. Expecting, perhaps, to see her changed, irrecoverable – or else restored completely. For this surely would be the moment: her or the child. But she was neither lost nor, it seemed, redeemed. She lay sleepily in the bed. Her face was soft, tired, but the lips firm. And there was that look, as she became aware of his presence: See, I have done it. See, I am a woman after all. That is my side of the bargain.

  How warm it was. But should that window be open? A bee had flown in and was buzzing and tapping on the glass. With all those babies. Had nobody noticed? Sunlight was streaming in between the half-drawn curtains. There were pools of it on the parquet floor and on the white sheets of unoccupied beds. And, in between, wobbling with little unseen movements, these wicker baskets, like the fruits of some bizarre shopping trip.

  ‘The flowers. Give the flowers to the nurse.’

  He stooped to kiss her but her eyes directed him to the baby. Before his lips could touch hers she had turned herself to where the rim of the wicker basket lay level with the bed, moved her mouth into a smile – it seemed she’d rehearsed with care that melting, motherly expression – and blown a kiss towards the little head in the shawl.

  ‘There. Look.’ She sank back.

  A squashed-up, wrinkled face. Strands of dark, wet-looking hair. A mouth and tiny hands that seemed to protest feebly at some unpardonable imposition. But the eyes, when they opened, clear, grey-blue, were her eyes.

  How simple to be the delirious father. To tickle the little body through the shawl, to chortle unlearnt baby-talk: ‘Hello. Goo, goo. Yes, yes.’ He didn’t look up at her – hadn’t her eyes said ‘The baby, not me’ – but he was aware of her, as she watched his antics, settling more firmly on the pillow, relieved, perhaps, by his simple glee, his compliancy, so that she could turn at last, having acquitted herself, to her old pose. She gripped the bed-clothes. Was she counting the violations of that pose? June 1949, in a delivery ward. June ’37 in a honeymoon hotel. Captured moments. And did she know to what she turned, there, in the hospital bed, steeling herself to the way the world looked from in there? Yes, I have made my forfeit, paid my price. But I will take the responsibility. And you will see, you will see it is for the best in the end.