The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  ‘Here’ll do, Mr Chapman, thanks very much. I wouldn’t take you out of your way. You go on to – ?’

  ‘Oh – Leigh Drive.’

  ‘Leigh Drive. Oh yes, that’s nice, up there. Well –’ she said, struggling to get her knees, her handbag and a laden shopping basket from between the seat and the door-frame, ‘quarter to nine, Monday morning – I’ll be there.’ And so she was, on the dot, and always so, faithfully, tirelessly, for sixteen years – he never imagined she would become a permanent fixture – the fair hair growing crisp and grey, horn-rim glasses encircling the eyes, the neck growing gaunter, ever working and straining to lift the bony face, like some creature peering from its cage to see what it was missing.

  She stooped at the car door as he leant over to pull it shut and gave a commiserating look: ‘I do hope Mrs Chapman gets better, Mr Chapman.’

  But Mrs Chapman didn’t. No. How many times did he drive to Doctor Field’s to collect the prescriptions for isoprenaline, and thence to Knight’s or Simpson’s to have them made up? There were laurel bushes and a rowan tree by the doctor’s front path and when he entered the waiting-room the faces looked up, some with recognition, from copies of Punch and Life that came from his shop. How many times to the allergist for injections? And how many times to the gloomy hallways of the Chest Department at St Helen’s, to see Doctor Cunningham? The corridors smelt of carbolic and laundered sheets, and he sat in the out-patients’ cafeteria, sipping tea and reading the sombre notices on the wall. ‘Give Blood’, ‘Drink Milk’. She would come out through the swing doors, afterwards, to join him. How sure she looked, how undaunted, appearing behind the glass, not like a sick woman at all. Sitting down at the table, she’d shrug at the inquiring glance he gave her: ‘Oh, nothing. They can do nothing – why don’t they say so and be done with it?’ And gulping the tea he brought her, she’d look at her watch and say, ‘Well, let’s be off – you better be back to work.’ Yet once she said, coming out from her check-up – ‘He wants a word with you – in his office – I don’t know why.’ And she looked at him sharply as he got up, as if he might betray her.

  ‘These tablets and inhalers don’t cure a thing – you realize that?’

  Doctor Cunningham, tall, smooth-faced, strong-jawed, with the wholesome expression of a young, intelligent schoolmaster or games instructor, leant back, holding a fountain pen.

  ‘They merely alleviate the attacks. I’m afraid we need to know more, Mr Chapman.’

  ‘More?’

  There were papers and files scattered over his desk, which he scanned as if about to make a friendly reprimand on a student’s report.

  ‘Your wife’s condition seems to have worsened steadily since the birth of your daughter – that’s to say in the last nine years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And before that, since, at least, the end of the war, little aggravation. Intermittent, comparatively mild attacks.’

  He looked up quickly from his record sheets as if in need of corroboration.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a history of migraine … Cast your mind back, Mr Chapman.’ He suddenly put down his fountain pen and stroked his chin. ‘Would you say there has been – with your wife that’s to say – any pattern of emotional distress?’

  ‘Pattern?’ He stiffened, remembering her glance.

  ‘Anything perhaps – please be frank – in your own relations with your wife?’

  The office was warm, comfortable, with a maroon carpet and a gas fire surrounded by glossy brown tiles; but outside the view of the hospital – tall windows, fire-escapes, the black pipes of a boiler-house – lay flat and frozen in a dead November light as if projected on a screen.

  The close-shaven face smiled sympathetically.

  ‘For instance – do you know much about your wife before she met you? Does she ever speak of that period?’

  Over the gas fire was a wooden mantelpiece, and on one corner, just above Doctor Cunningham’s head, a silver cup on which he just made out the words ‘ … Seven-a-Side Competition 195 …’

  ‘No, not a lot.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’ The doctor raised his eyes a fraction and glanced at one of his buff files. Then he looked up again and half grinned, as if at his own formality.

  ‘Don’t think I’m grilling you, Mr Chapman. These questions do have a point.’ He leant forward with his arms on the desk. ‘You see, we know very little about asthma, but when there’s no definite physical cause there’s very often an emotional factor. Your wife’s a remarkable woman, Mr Chapman: unusually calm, unusually patient as far as her physical symptoms go; unusually – if you’ll forgive me – unco-operative when it comes to investigating a cure. That’s why I ask you these questions. They’re in your wife’s best interest.’

  He had picked up his fountain pen and held it horizontally between his hands.

  He wanted to say: ‘How do you know what is in Irene’s best interest?’

  ‘Do think over the things I’ve asked you, Mr Chapman. And do, please, talk it over with your wife. A lot might depend – I get this impression from her – on the sort of help you’re able to give her.’ He put down the fountain pen and one of the hands pulled back the cuff from the other to expose a wrist-watch. ‘Then perhaps we can have another little chat.’ He got up. ‘You know, there are times when your wife almost seems not to want to get better. We can’t have that. I gather you and Doctor Field had some difficulty in persuading her to attend here. But unless we can be clearer about the cause, her condition’s unlikely to get any easier.’

  The smooth face eyed him as if it might be withholding some vital piece of information – or as if he were.

  And had he persuaded her to attend so that other people would determine the pattern, decide her interests? So that she would be cured and possess the thing it already pleased her to renounce? Restored to him: the bargain broken?

  And she had given him, in her place, Dorothy.

  ‘Goodbye Mr Chapman.’

  A plume of steam released itself from the boiler-house, like a white hole in the flat vista. Outside in the corridor a girl was being pushed along in a wheel-chair while a nurse walked beside her reading a clip-board chart.

  In the car, looking forward, her handbag on her knees, she said as they drove back:

  ‘Don’t talk to the doctor again, Willy.’

  No, she did not get better. How many more visits to Doctor Cunningham? Though he never spoke again, true to her command, to that suave-voiced man with his files and sheets of notes. Nor was he asked. She made sure of that. ‘They can do nothing, Willy.’ Another drug, another test; and each time her looks affirmed in advance what would be the result: no change. In between her attacks her breath wheezed continuously, her voice fluttered and rattled. Bouts of bronchitis. A scarf round her neck even in warm weather. And that face slowly being worn away; the cheeks hollow and drained from sleeplessness, the mouth stretched from the effort of breathing. Only the eyes remained, ashy-blue and steady, as if they watched in some mirror the dismantling of her other features and approved the process. As if, if she could have done so, she would have torn off that thin mask of loveliness at the very beginning. For that was never the real thing.

  The attacks were worse at night. They frightened him with their violence. Often they slept with the windows open and the pale green curtains drawn back, but there was never enough air in that room. Was it to be saved she gasped and clawed, or to be left alone? For sometimes she clutched with those flailing hands, sometimes fended. And it was never, it seemed, against the illness she struggled but against something else.

  No change. Outside the hospital, through the cafeteria window, there were railings, notices, a row of plane trees, and the dark, glossy statue of some Victorian benefactor. Out-patients, with sticks and thick coats, trailed over the asphalt, and mushroom-coloured ambulances glided in and out of the entrance gates. Any pattern of emotional distress? There was a flower-stall beyond the railings on the pavement,
and as he drank his tea he watched the woman with a red head-scarf and a faded apron pick the bunches of gold and bronze chrysanthemums, daffodils or irises and wrap them, with a twist, in the sheets of paper.

  Should he have asked, pressed, more than he did? Gone unannounced, despite her strictures, to Doctor Cunningham? Or confronted Doctor Field, hammered, flailing, on the surgery door on one of those visits when all he did was take the prescription form from the green felt board; clutched the poor man by the collar: ‘Doctor, save my wife! What is happening to my wife?’ No: that would have alarmed her more than any illness. For didn’t he know by now, didn’t he understand, the terms of the agreement? He watched the flower-lady, from the window, shaking out the wet stems, stripping the surplus leaves with a knife.

  19

  The new till thumped and rang on the counter, the change tinkled, and Mrs Cooper said, dropping in the coins, putting the pound notes under the clip, as if she herself were the cause of success, ‘Busy day, Mr Chapman. How much today?’

  Money. It was mounting in the little piles in the till, and on the shelves of the safe in the stock room where he locked it overnight. Twelve, thirteen pounds a day. Prices were up, but people were buying. Bigger orders, new lines; and already, so they said, his paper deliveries were exceeding Henderson’s across the common. They smiled when they saw him come in, twice a week, to bank his cash. And at night, after checking the lights, the locks, the burglar alarm, he bore home in his briefcase the figures (Cash, Petty Cash, Shop Takings, Stock Book, Trading Account, Profit and Loss); neat, symmetrical columns, which now and then she would want to see. ‘Good, Willy,’ she’d approve. The maroon-covered books and the file of accounts would be open on the baize table-cloth. He was a slow calculator – hadn’t he always been slow, brainless at school? – and Dorry, whose arithmetic, even then, was deft, might have helped him, sitting by his side, totting the figures. But Irene wouldn’t have it. She would not let Dorry even glance at those books. So that when she crept in from her bedroom, where she did her homework, he would only say, with a joking sigh, ‘Doing my homework too, Dorry.’ But it wasn’t a joke; it was more an apology. And he saw the look of criticism in her eyes.

  ‘Good, Willy, good,’ as he closed the books. ‘Now you rest. I’ll make a cup of tea.’ And she would raise herself up, with an air of relief and fresh purpose, clatter in the kitchen, as if it were better than any medicine, better than any of Doctor Cunningham’s treatments.

  Across the road Powell, puffing a little, brought out his crates of oranges and lemons and stacked them on the trestles. Better produce, and more of it. Oranges from Morocco, lemons from Cyprus. Do you remember when you never saw a banana? Longer queues through his shop door. But still he put the best goods on the table outside, polishing the apples on his sleeve, arranging the tomatoes and creamy sticks of celery on the carpets of imitation grass. And still he wore the same grey cardigans over his scars. The home-decorating shop was thriving. In the Calypso coffee-bar (for so it had become) surly youths with swept-back hair were sitting at the tables; Mrs Cooper frowned on them and their juke-box music, but the bluff proprietor, pumping the coffee machine, welcomed them paternally. The attendants in Armstrong’s garage, in blue overalls with yellow collars, waltzed on the long arms of the petrol pumps. And in Hancock, Joyce and Jones, Hancock was congratulating himself on the surges in the property market. A slight taunt showed under the peppery moustache as he dropped in for his cigars or his evening paper, and said, watching him rattle the pennies in the till, ‘Coming on is it?’; and the same taunt would remain, just visible, as he added, ‘Irene any better?’ The Sunbeam exchanged for a Wolseley, and the raffishness of bachelordom for the suavities of success. Leather gloves and camel coats. Golf on Sundays with architects and property dealers. Dinner parties at which the lovely Mrs Hancock would shine as hostess. And everyone agreed (the guests would finger their glasses beside importunate or jealous wives) that Helen Hancock was the perfect foil to his success. Old ’Cock had picked a peach.

  *

  He fitted the bubble-gum machine outside the shop: red, white and yellow balls of gum jostling inside the perspex cover with plastic rings and trinkets. And a cigarette vendor, next to the newspaper placards and the oblong board on the abutting wall in Briar Street on which, every week, a man would paste the coming programmes at the Odeon. John Mills and Kenneth More in cheerful re-enactments of the war. History enshrined in make-believe. Like the lurid stories in the boys’ comics he sold in the shop: grim-jawed fighter-pilots and ogreish Germans. What war? A packet of gum please, and another card in the series ‘Great Battles of World War Two’.

  He hung the advertisements and the illuminated signs from the facia. ‘Craven A’, ‘Corona’, ‘Gold Flake’, ‘Players Please’, ‘Lyons Maid Sold Here’. Wired them up himself, and scanned the advertisers’ catalogues for additions and replacements. New awnings, black and white striped, and neon lighting over the door. And the windows – the windows were his own special concern. He allowed Mrs Cooper to arrange the displays only under the strictest supervision, and most often it was he alone who at slack periods or after evening closing would snake and stalk through the precarious stands, as through tangled foliage, positioning the imitation sweets – plastic chocolates and wooden toffees – the cardboard cut-outs, the silver and gold paper, and emerging afterwards onto the pavement to gauge the effect. People complimented him on his windows, their profusion, their colour. ‘Highly commended’ in the local trade gazette for window dressing. At dusk the corner of Briar Street scintillated like a fair-ground. And he was silently pleased at the effect of his labours – of something which promised real goods, real riches within, but was itself quite specious. So that he looked forward to those seasons when special occasions allowed him to heighten the trickery. Christmas, Easter. The allure of tinsel and fake snow in the window, the enticements of chocolate boxes and gift-pack cigars. Easter eggs. Fireworks. Useless things.

  Fourteen, fifteen pounds a day. He folded the papers with a flick between his thumb and forefingers and cupped his palm for the coins. Up the road they came from the station, with their briefcases and raincoats and work-weary expressions; the same faces stopping by in the evening as stopped by in the morning. ‘Evening Mr Chapman’, ‘Okay, Mr Chapman?’ ‘My usual, Mr Chapman.’

  And he didn’t alter for any of them his shop-keeper’s image, his ‘much obliged’ and ‘thanking you’. It was they who bought and he who sold. That was the arrangement. Let them think of him as some cut-out figure, popping up like the sums on the till, behind the counter: Mr Chapman, the sweet shop man.

  On Saturday mornings the High Street thronged. The same faces, down to the department stores and the new supermarket. Frozen food, electric mixers, long-playing records. Something new, something new in a shiny cover or a crisp cardboard box. And on the way back a call at Chapman’s, to pay the papers and buy the weekend’s tobacco. A drink in the Prince William. They had the juke-box now, and the television in the corner. Then football, a visit somewhere on Sunday. What randomness. ‘Don’t overdo it, will you Mr Chapman?’ But why should he mind? He only sold. Ceaselessly he filled his shelves and embellished his windows so their useless bounty might never fail. And when he knew what they whispered (echoes of Mrs Cooper’s gossip couldn’t escape him) – ‘He’s tied to that shop – Thinks of nothing else – Loves to rake it in’ – he didn’t mind. Let them whisper. Let them cast him in the miser’s role. He wouldn’t question it. For did they think it belonged to him, that cut-out behind the counter?

  He watched himself fold the papers between his thumb and fingers; ring the till, swop pleasantries with customers, weigh up quarter-pounds and half-pounds in the scales; put the money in the safe at night, check the cash float, check the alarms, check the doors. Watched the figures mount in the maroon books. Watched himself drive home at night, briefcase and raincoat on the back seat, left at the traffic lights, up the Common Road, under the red chains of the sodium lamps. Watche
d himself construct his performance, as she watched herself, in the mirror, slowly being dismantled. Weakening of the lungs; a strain on the heart. That last holiday in Teignmouth – Dorry had found her solution by taking all her books with her to study. Going afterwards to Doctor Field’s. ‘She no longer has migraines, doctor.’ ‘That’s quite common, Mr Chapman, for a woman, er, at her time of life.’ He watched himself at night, listening to her laboured breathing, feeling his body temporarily recede, but seeing its daytime animation capering before him like some jerky phantom. And in the morning as he let Mrs Cooper in, drank the milky tea she brought him and heard her ask, ‘Mrs Chapman any better?’ he’d watch himself as he said: ‘No change.’

  20

  ‘Know the latest?’

  Smithy, working the pedal rather laboriously, winched him up, swathed in white, on the barber’s seat and wiped his comb and scissors. His old face was pale and his eyes yellowish in the mirror, and the fingers tucking the towel in his collar were cold.

  ‘Friend Hancock’s branching out.’

  There was a smell of cologne and Brilliantine, adverts for razors and Durex. Two young assistants clipped at the other chairs and their faces seemed to be waiting, as Hancock and Joyce had once waited.

  ‘Had it from Schofield, and from the man himself.’

  He bent closer to his ear. For Smithy’s art was the art of discreetly gathered and exchanged information. Didn’t they come to him, all of them, for their fortnightly clip – Simpson, Kelly from the Prince William, Ford the post-master, Schofield, Hancock? Only old Powell’s perpetually cropped hair was a mystery. And if things slipped out when they spoke, couldn’t Smithy be trusted, in return, to impart some useful snippet? But always with tact, always with disinterest. For what should Smithy care, piecing together the patterns of the High Street but going home at night to his spinster sister? Besides, he was old: his fingers were cold when they touched your neck.