The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  And what do you first remember, Dorry? When do the dates begin and the shapes first emerge? When did you first see – was it from the classroom at St Stephen’s Primary where you learnt what your name meant, in Miss Hale’s lesson or Miss Shepherd’s – the patterns forming, beyond the window?

  Was it the yellow wallpaper in the room where we put your cot, or the dappled curtains – leaves and flowers round which butterflies flew? Or the cot itself, the wooden bars, the blue rattle shaped like a rabbit and the floppy doll made of knitted wool? That room became your own bedroom, the bedroom of a young lady, a single bed with a white bedspread and shelves for your books – and it’s still just as you left it. Was it those things, Dorry? Or was it the smell of soap and powder, the touch of the warm water in the little enamel bath? I always thought you would scream and struggle when I put you in. I’d dry you, dust you with talc and carry you in your flannel nightdress to your cot. The room would be warm from the electric fire. I’d say ‘Sshh’ and ‘There, there’, tucking you in; play with the woollen doll, which we called Winnie, making it dance on the rail of the cot, till your eyes began to close, and I’d kiss you and turn off the light. Do you remember that? Or was it rather the darkness: lying awake and feeling, too, as I shut the door, like an abandoned toy?

  Irene would lie awake as well. Her health was weak even before you were old enough to know it. I wouldn’t know which one of you to tend first. But she’d nod, beside me, towards the door, reach for the water and the pills and lie back as if she were glad there was a reason why I couldn’t give her all my attention. Then I’d scuffle through to you, in my pyjamas and dressing-gown, say ‘Sshh’ and ‘It’s all right now’; change your clothes. Do you remember those moments, Dorry, in the early hours? Sometimes I’d pick you up and walk you round the room. You were fascinated by the twirled red and blue tassels at the end of my dressing-gown cord. And sometimes I’d forget, and listen out, as I held you, for her breathing and wonder what she was thinking – whether, perhaps, that I’d for-saken her. I’d tiptoe back. How fragile her face was on the pillow.

  You thought she made a slave of me.

  But she was alone with you all day, with all the chores to do. She used to push you in the pram down the hill to the shops in Common Road. Do you remember the ration book in her hand and the assistant licking her pencil, taking down the order? Flour, tea, sugar in blue bags. The shop girls fussed over you. When you were older they used to sit you on the counter and give you broken biscuits; though you didn’t like that – you were afraid you’d be left in the shop – and once you screamed at the man, smiling, leaning over the bacon-slicer. But she wouldn’t have left you. And that grim look in her face, as she wheeled you home; it wasn’t what you think. It took all her breath, that push up the hill. And it would have been so much further to push, back from the High Street. I might have sat you on my counter, fetched you something from the sweet-rack, shown you off to my customers. But she never did come to the shop: my customers never saw my wife. They had to pump Mrs Cooper for gossip.

  She used to buy you instructive toys – do you remember, the coloured bricks, the wooden jig-saw with the picture of farmyard animals? – to keep you occupied. She’d sit in her chair and watch you on the carpet. But you didn’t know what to do. You took it all so seriously. You cried when the pieces wouldn’t fit, and it became a kind of system, that playing; do it right and she’d kiss you, build the bricks and you’d get your reward. It wasn’t her fault. It taxed her, looking after you while she was ill. Don’t you remember how relieved she was when I returned in the evenings? I’d walk up from the common with my briefcase and my coat over my arm and something, often, in crackly paper, in my pocket for you. You’d wait for me, your head in the corner of the bay window, pulling the curtain back. She used to come to the door holding you, as if to make sure I would take you from her. Didn’t you see how relieved she was, slipping away into the kitchen, when I picked you up? And didn’t you see how when I lifted you up in my arms and kissed you, she wouldn’t kiss me?

  Did you judge us, Dorry, even then? If the word love is never spoken, does it mean there isn’t any love? If she never kissed me in front of you …

  But she wasn’t that kind of woman. You used to look at that firm, unyielding expression of hers and wonder why I plodded year after year for her at the shop – till you stopped wondering and began to despise me instead. But you never looked closely at that face, into those blue-grey eyes, because if you had you would have seen how much more she knew than you.

  Was it her face then? Was that how you first discerned the patterns forming? Her face. Pale, and the smoothness being furrowed and the cheeks beginning to slacken. You had her looks. At the christening they saw that. ‘She’ll be beautiful too,’ murmured Smithy, and Irene looked up. Only the mouth, they said, was like mine, a little loose, a little heavy, as if the things it said would bear a tone of resentment. Was that it? Did you feel that face read your own? And did you feel: whatever I do, she will have predicted it; whatever I do, it will not be my own?

  How bright those eyes. And the hair, too, kept its lustre, even when her skin had faded. Your hair was black and glossy, but it never had the blaze of her deep chestnut. Yet you used to toss it from side to side in a way she never did, and you had that lightness and deftness of step as if you’d have liked to dance – if only someone had let you.

  Was that how you first saw? Or was it the summer holidays (how quick those years); the long ride in the train, the sea rippling out to the Isle of Wight, the yachts, and the rusty, tarry smells of the pier? We took you up to Waterloo with our suitcases and bags, and little did you know how that journey of ours was already history. That railway line. New houses in Esher and Weybridge, new signs on the stations, and cars, Prefects and Zephyrs, passing down the roads where once the army transports had rumbled. The same and not the same. And that familiar Dorset scenery, green downs and bleached cliffs, unchanged. We might have gone elsewhere, to Wales, to Norfolk, but (since we had to go) she was against anywhere new. Nothing new. Yet (how could you defy her?) everything was eternally new; the old cry of the sea-gulls, the old tingle of the breeze, the old mystery of the rock-pools – how you loved to squat and explore those delicate little worlds.

  Did you sense how she shrank from all that? And did you sense how that scene in which you stood for the first time had already been encountered before and its limits fixed? The sea air was good for her. She used to sit in the deck-chair outside the beach hut, and read the papers. Even on holiday she read the papers. And when she wasn’t reading, or leaning back, her face turned from the sun, she’d watch you and me digging holes and making walls to stop the sea, in the same way as she watched you playing on the carpet. She wore a straw sun-hat and a wide, striped cotton frock, and only now and then would she be persuaded – she who should still have been glad to show herself – to change into her swimming costume and tread down to the water. When she did so (did you notice?) it was like a kind of concession: ‘Yes, I allow you this – just so much.’ And when you watched her closely there was that look of panic in her eyes. Slowly, hesitantly, the three of us – you in the middle – into the waves.

  Other people noticed her, other people admired. Though she’d never known how to deal with their glances except by lowering her own eyes. Settling the sun-glasses more firmly, pulling the paper more closely round her. People wondered at her, and wondered even more when they saw me beside her, with my lumpish looks, the beginning of a paunch and my limp. You wouldn’t have known I was once a mile-runner. The sea air was good for her. She could sit and breathe freely on the beach. But she wouldn’t come up, in the evening, for walks on the cliffs. Peveril Point and Durlston Head. Shimmer of the sea; crickets in the long grass; the lighthouse beacon blinking in the dusk. Memories stalked those paths. And she didn’t come when I took you, in the bus, to Corfe. We clambered up the ruined castle, and had ice-cream and lemonade. Years later you would have visited such a place with studious rever
ence; devoured the guide-books; scoured the stones. Ancient monuments; churches; places of historical interest: your eyes hungry for knowledge. But your gaze hadn’t acquired that seriousness then (or had it?). Running down the turf slopes, by the frozen tumbles of masonry. It rained. The bus back smelt of wet plastic macs. When we returned she was lying in the bedroom of our holiday flat and I couldn’t tell whether she was glad or sorry we’d spent the day without her.

  Those holidays. We rented a place where you could only glimpse the sea in the gaps between other houses. We could have afforded more but we’d become thrifty. Gulls perched on the chimney-pots opposite. The rooms smelt of bared skin and calamine lotion, and there were old magazines and crime novels, bits of dried seaweed and a torn shrimp-net left by previous tenants. In the night we could hear each other’s breathing. And what else Dorry? You couldn’t have told, could you, whether those gasps of hers were gasps of pain or joy? But you slept soundly then, full of air and exercise. Your little body was engrossed in its own adventurousness. You raced over the beach and you weren’t afraid (it always surprised me) of the water. Later you became a good swimmer. School swimming galas: winner of the back-stroke, second in the diving. Life-saving. Why did you stop all that? You scurried bravely, as if you had a challenge to make, across the sand and you only checked yourself when you caught her eyes trained upon you. Was it then? When you walked along the top of the breakwater? There were breakwaters at intervals along the beach, high and barnacled, and the uprights of some were only a yard apart and perhaps only nine inches thick. You climbed up on one, where it was low in the sand, above the water-mark, and walked out, not on the horizontal planks, but on the narrow uprights, leaping from one to the next. You knew she was watching you. I saw your head set in defiance, and your legs tremble at the risk (how you needed to run risks) you were taking. But your light limbs carried you through, gingerly, on your toes like a ballerina, over the narrow posts. ‘Dorothy!’ she yelled, getting up from her chair, taking off her glasses. People looked. The uprights were seven or eight feet high out there and the sand beneath was wet and hard. ‘She’ll fall,’ she said. But you didn’t fall, or stop, and only swung yourself down, reluctantly, when the posts became too far apart to attempt. How fragile you seemed walking back across the sand. You saw that look in her eyes, afterwards, as if she wouldn’t acknowledge your daring. And you saw that glance she gave me because I’d stood with my mouth open and done nothing myself (I knew you wouldn’t fall) to rescue you.

  How many years did we go to Dorset? ’53, ’54, ’55. We had a holiday every year, though every year she’d say, putting her hand to her throat, ‘Can we afford to leave the shop?’ Afford? Later we ventured further afield: Lyme Regis, Padstow, Teignmouth. But we had the car then. The Morris Oxford. We bought it when you were seven or eight; and only for you; so that we could take you out for rides and educational visits. Sunday outings to the country (I did only the papers on Sundays then). Picnics by the Thames and on Box Hill, on which she would come as if under constraint, sitting in the car while we got out the basket and the blanket to spread on the grass. After a while she’d sometimes say, ‘No, you go; I’ll stay here, I don’t mind.’ You saw how it hurt me to leave her, how I worried about her all day, so that it was never exactly fun we had by ourselves. And then, one day, she ceased to come out at all; and you spent your week-ends reading, timidly studying for exams, and I opened the shop all day Sundays. I only used the car to drive to work (I never did at first – I used to like that walk over the common – but it became hard, lugging my lame leg up the hill). Lyme Regis, Padstow, Teignmouth. They were the only holidays we had. And then you went – you must have been fourteen – on the school trip to Venice, and then again to Greece. History, art; guide-books from St Mark’s and the Parthenon. Neither she nor I had been abroad. Yet we paid for those trips for you. And then you holidayed by yourself (though she said you were too young), with school friends; coming back home and telling us nothing of what you’d done. But by that time she was turned fifty. How quickly. She had to visit the hospital, and the doctor said her heart, too, was weak. And I was fifty-one. And at fifteen there was already a gravity in your face.

  Holidays. Holidays.

  18

  The telephone was ringing on the little shelf next to the doorway into the stock room. Above it, on the wall, was the list of vital telephone numbers (St Helen’s Hospital had been crossed out, but it was still the same list) and next to it, fixed with Sellotape, the postcards from Mrs Cooper’s more leisured friends. Torquay and San Remo, in predominant blue. ‘I’ll get it,’ said Mrs Cooper, as he began to raise himself from his stool by the fridge. The sun had moved round so that the awning obscured it, but a shaft penetrated inwards from a corner of the window. It fell fully on her face at the phone; but her skin was pale and chill-looking. She stepped back, holding a hand over the mouth-piece, deliberately jostling Sandra at the paper counter – who, in Mrs Cooper’s view, was not worthy enough to answer the phone.

  ‘It’s Pond Street, Mr Chapman. They say they don’t have the usual orders for Callard’s and Fry’s. Have you forgotten them’ (she hesitated – Mr Chapman never forgot) – ‘or have you got them here?’

  ‘No, that’s fine Mrs Cooper. I didn’t make those orders.’

  ‘Didn’t – ?’ She looked momentarily flummoxed at this unprecedented lapse. ‘Didn’t – But what shall I – ? Here, are you all right, Mr Chapman?’

  He was looking straight at her, but as if he didn’t see her. His fingers gripped the rim of the fridge.

  ‘Tell them,’ he said, as if forcing aside a distraction, ‘I’ll explain when I bring their money round. And tell them that might be a little later this afternoon.’

  She paused, raised a puzzled eyebrow, but turned back to the phone. As she spoke she glanced at him, then at the blue postcards above the shelf.

  *

  ‘Please come in, Mrs Cooper.’ He twisted the sign from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’ and bolted the door on the inside, on a damp September evening in 1958. And there she was in a blue twin-set, putting a face to the letter she’d written, sitting behind the counter, brushing imaginary specks from her knee.

  ‘I’m sorry it had to be this late, but I couldn’t show you the ropes with customers coming in.’

  ‘Oh, no trouble Mr Chapman.’

  Her hair was fair, still thick, and the beak-like nose and straining throat less prominent amidst a general plumpness.

  ‘Now let me show you what’s what …’

  And so he’d explained, extending an outspread hand to the four corners of the shop, with an air, perhaps, of proprietorial pride. For they’d swelled and multiplied, those items to which he gestured. The coloured wrappers had thickened and brightened, like synthetic fruit on the wooden shelves; the trellis-work of racks and cardboard displays flourished. A new till and scales stood on the counter. And, outside, bright new blue paint, a large new name-board and a clutter of signs, some of them lit at night, adhering to or projecting from the walls, made it seem that the treasures within had spilled out onto the pavement.

  And yet it wasn’t pride, now that he addressed his first ever employee, so much as an urge not to waver from the role expected of him, that made him sweep his hands so grandly.

  She followed him, assessing him behind her smile.

  ‘Up till now, Mrs Cooper, I’ve managed pretty well by myself. But it’s my wife. Er, she’s not well, she has to visit the hospital, and there may be times when I’ll need to be able to leave the shop. This’ll mean, of course, that now and then you’ll be left in charge yourself.’

  ‘Oh’ – a warmer glint came into her eyes – ‘I’ll manage. It’s nothing serious I hope?’

  ‘Asthma. With complications.’

  Her gaze drifted over the shelves and the counter with the new till. There were none of the gobbling vulture looks in that rounder profile, and yet there was something un-nerving about her dcsire to please.

  He showed her the
stock room, his system of stock lists and how to use the till and scales.

  She bent closer with little blinks and nods, as if being admitted to intimate secrets.

  ‘Well, if you’ve nothing further to ask, perhaps I can give you a lift home. I expect you’ve a husband and family to look after.’

  ‘Family yes, husband no. I’ve divorced my husband,’ she said deliberately.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, withdrawing tactfully.

  But she went on: ‘Yes – some time ago now. I’m left with his kids of course. I call them “his” because I wouldn’t own to them myself. Is that your car then?’ She nodded towards the Morris, just visible from the Briar Street window.

  She brushed more specks from her skirt and looked up, satisfied by the confusion in his face and the expression of sympathy, which she waved aside.

  ‘Not to worry, Mr Chapman. I’ll get by.’

  She crossed her legs, sitting on the wooden stool. Her nylons made slithering noises.

  In the car she motioned to him to pull up at the corner of a road in which lights were already lit in the tunnel-like entrances of a squat block of flats.