The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  What was the point of all that study, Dorry, all those books? Was it to spite me? Because you guessed what my school reports must have said – ‘Slow’, ‘Could try harder’ – and you saw what a plodding brain I had, leaning over the baize table-cloth, mouthing those figures silently as I checked them with my pencil? Your own reports were so much better, but they weren’t unmixed: ‘Great promise but not always co-operative in class’, ‘First-rate work but apt to be moody’. Your form-mistress said: ‘She’s a very bright girl, but she needs to come out of herself.’ Do you remember? It was after the school play – ‘The Merchant of Venice’ – put on with the boys from John Russell. They wanted you to play Portia, the biggest part, but you wouldn’t. You played Shylock’s daughter. There were traces of stage make-up, incompletely removed, on your face, which made you look younger, not older than you were – and you overheard that remark as you came out from the side-door of the hall to where I stood with Mrs Bennet. Parents were waiting, fussily, to collect sons and daughters. You were angry with her for talking about you and ashamed of me because I stood in my grey work suit – I’d come straight from the shop to the play – my raincoat over my clasped hands; and you thought Mrs Bennet, with her spry, cultivated voice, would find me dull and stupid. You stood in the lobby by the coat-rack – I saw you over Mrs Bennet’s shoulder – pretending to read the notice-board, and did not come forward till Mrs Bennet said, sighing commiseratively: ‘But she ought to be ambitious. She’s got the world ahead of her. Oh – there you are my dear.’

  We walked, the three of us, to the car park. Trees cast long shadows in the light from the hall onto netball markings on the asphalt. Mrs Bennet said: ‘Try a bigger part next year, Dorothy’ and patted your shoulder as we said goodbye.

  In the car you asked: ‘Well, what did you think?’ ‘Oh I thought you were good.’ ‘No – the play,’ you said. And I muttered something feebly in reply. What did I know about Shakespeare, Dorry? I’d sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair after a hard day at the shop, while on the stage schoolchildren in costume played the parts of grown-ups and spoke lines I did not understand.

  You were almost sixteen. Little hillocks of breasts had grown under your school pullover, and you were aware beneath your skirt of the contours of your legs. You crossed them carefully and tucked your skirt under your knees. You tried to pretend that you weren’t attractive – though, in the play, a schoolboy lover had wooed you with long speeches. But you couldn’t do it by covering your knees, or letting your hair fall over your face, or raising arguments with us over the dinner table so as to divert attention. And besides you knew – lingering by the mirror and looking sideways at yourself as if you didn’t want to see – that it couldn’t be hidden. And you really wanted, didn’t you, though the thought of it frightened you, to live up to it?

  Down the High Street after school. It wasn’t the quickest way home. Was it to receive the darting glances of men leaning from car windows as you crossed at the zebra, looking up, turning their heads as you passed on the pavement, muttering low words? Or of boys your own age sauntering circuitously home, in restless gangs? I saw them meeting girls in Briar Street, next to the cinema adverts. Mrs Cooper tut-tutted and sometimes banged the window to shoo them off. Their breath steamed in the dusk. They wore Parka anoraks. Their hair was longer than the school approved, their trousers tighter; they carried records, with their school books, under their arms – the Rolling Stones and Donovan with text books of physics and geography. And it wasn’t Shakespeare and poetry they spoke of. Was it that, Dorry? Did you have to run that gauntlet, to test yourself? Though it made your head sit uneasily on your shoulders and you didn’t know how to reply with any naturalness to those adventurous looks.

  Nothing touches you, you touch nothing. Sixteen, in a blue school beret. You could have kept your poise and learnt the trick of it. You were beautiful and young. Wasn’t that something to rejoice over? You could have performed the trick, without fear and without needing to make your mark. For hadn’t you once – at the schools swimming gala – stood up, unafraid, high over the swimming pool, over the blue tiles wobbling beneath – that was no adventure, you knew how to keep your balance – and hadn’t you plunged, with a perfect arch, and bobbed up again, to take second prize, with a laugh?

  Shakespeare, history books, volumes of poetry. Post-cards from art galleries – replacing Kennedy – on the wall; and faded ink-splotched school copies of Latin texts, Virgil and the Metamorphoses, whose contents I puzzled from the English heading before each extract: ‘Narcissus and Echo’, ‘Diana and Actaeon’. I put the mug of coffee on your desk, knocking first at your door, and treading softly over the carpet. For your head was lowered and you were intent on your reading. Your hair hung forward in the light of the anglepoise lamp and the line of your neck seemed fragile and exposed as you leant. You were doing your project on Keats and over your shoulder I read lines of verse (did you know, Dorry, how I peeped into those books when you weren’t there?) which I didn’t understand:

  Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss …

  I put the mug on your desk. You said in a quiet, unsteady voice, ‘Oh thanks,’ but you didn’t turn and smile at your father.

  23

  We bought you dresses. She would have said: She doesn’t need them, not so many – but she yielded, for my sake. Bright dresses – how they changed, Dorry, as you grew up, from wide skirts to little skimpy things next to nothing – lying over the back of a chair for you to find at Christmas or on birthdays. Dresses to make a young girl feel special, and that cost her father a pretty penny. For we had money. Thirty, forty pounds a day. I worked all day Sundays, and we no longer took holidays. And even without the shop we had money. For she still scanned the closing prices in the paper, made phone calls, and struggled out, in her weak state, to meet agents, and sign cheques for crystal and porcelain. ‘They’re beautiful,’ I said of all those things she bought. But she replied, her tired eyes somehow disinterested: ‘They will keep their value.’

  Bright dresses – deep red suited you best – that should have been worn at dances and parties. Weren’t there parties to go to? I sometimes saw them, driving home late from the shop, in Mannering Road and Clifford Rise and in Leigh Drive itself: little gaggles, sixteen and seventeen, no older than you, in short skirts and leather jackets, arriving at bay-windowed houses where the parents were out for the evening or away for the weekend, and from which record-players boomed. ‘Talkin’ ’bout my ge-en-eration …’

  But you didn’t wear those dresses. You put them on to please me – you came down the stairs and stood like a shy doll in the doorway. And you wore them on the predictable occasions (do you remember, Dorry, those drear Christmases, when we dutifully had the neighbours in for drinks and you and I walked after dinner, not talking, round dark, empty streets, where the decorations in front windows looked like shop-fronts?). But you didn’t go out in them, though you liked them and thought you deserved them – I saw that. You hung them up in your wardrobe and preferred your white school blouses and navy skirts or that shapeless brown sweater and slacks.

  No parties. No self-conscious but light-headed youths ringing at the front door to take you to dances and cinemas. Were you above that? Was it more daring excitements you wanted? Or had she spoken to you – surely not – told you of wolves that prowl? No time to go out. Books to be read, exams to be worked for, essays to be written.

  Yet you knew, nonetheless, John Schofield – Schofield’s lanky and precocious son who’d done the lighting at the school play – and you knew more than I did about what was going on up there, amongst the trees and the old villas and the new estates at Sydenham Hill. You told me it all later – that time, the first time, she was taken to hospital. That was the only time we ever really talked.

  Houses through the trees, and lights, illuminating costly furniture, in the houses. That was where your mother’s family had a house; and I remember when it was mostly all woods and fields and my father used to
walk there on Sundays. They’d built a lot up there: luxury houses for executives, tall, clean-cut flats, but with banks of turf and carefully preserved clumps of trees in the best of taste. The people inside the houses were building too. Hancock was building (you never liked him because of his businessman’s swagger – too crude a contrast to me? – but most of all because he winked at you once as you came home from school): new branches in the suburbs; bigger figures on the ‘For Sale’ signs in his window. And Helen was building. More gadgetry in the kitchen so she could lounge and entertain more. A bigger wardrobe so she could lounge more prettily; richer fare on the side-board so she could entertain more lavishly. You wouldn’t remember her from your christening; her breathy charms and her quick shrill giggle. Hancock had chosen her for her obvious looks and curving figure. For he wanted a wife to prove his merit, a prize on display other men might envy.

  Candlelight on the faces of the guests at table and on the bare arms of the hostess serving the meal; jokes about the cost of living, and an atmosphere like that before a race where each contestant smiles sportingly and wills the other to lose. It wasn’t enough, that enviable trophy. More business, more houses to sell. More adornments for wife and home so that the prize would prove the achievement. And though he strode over the High Street with that swaggering gait his restless face was never content.

  I can see his glinting eye as he offered Paul that partnership. ‘I could fix you up here, if you like, old man.’ And I can see Paul’s stiff features trying not to flinch at the condescension – ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Where had Paul been all that time? Seventeen years. Seventeen years since he returned from the war, sold up what was left of the Harrisons’ laundry and looked for openings with the money. And it was still a fight, though the war was over, finding the contacts, making one’s mark. Those failed schemes in London; a partnership, at last, in a textile business in Leeds. Irene told me all about it, Dorry. Paul wrote to her. But she never replied, and she never – this was the gist of the story – lent him a penny. And when the business folded in Leeds (and his marriage with it) Paul had no one to turn to but an estate agent friend in London. ‘Great buddies before the war.’ But Irene never went into that. She never did say much about the time before we met.

  Soft lights and expensive furniture, in the house where the two friends struck their terms, made their bargain. What did each stand to gain? Paul: a job at the expense of pride? Hancock: the satisfaction of the upper hand? ‘Take your time old man – don’t let me force you.’

  But something else was at stake in that plush house. What did Helen hope to gain; a dozen years their younger, getting up from the table, moving perhaps, so they could both watch her, over the noiseless carpet, to look out of the window at the stillness of houses, trees? A little adventure?

  Was it true, Dorry, that Hancock beat her, – when it was all over and she came back to him, – so she couldn’t show her face?

  How did you know all that? Coming home from school on the bus with John Schofield, who was bookish enough for you not to be troubled by his company. Making fun (that was the fashion amongst free-thinking teenagers) of your affluent parents. But even Schofield, who gossiped so readily with Smithy, wouldn’t have told his own son so much. Paul himself then? Your own uncle. When was it? Those evenings when you said you were rehearsing the school play? Going to Paul’s flat in Camberwell? Did his face still have a trace of those keen looks he wore at my wedding? Did he see Irene in you? Did he welcome you, Dorry? Because he had questions to ask, things to tell; and because you reminded him of a time when the picture was still complete? Under the apple tree, in a black peaked cap. The fair flanked by the strong.

  You should have been at rehearsals. You hardly went out otherwise. Mrs Bennet wanted you to play a bigger part. But was it better than drama – all those things he had to tell you?

  A little adventure. It didn’t last long. Helen came back and Hancock beat her. The bruises healed but something else didn’t. She had to go for visits to a hospital. She returns there even now on occasion. She still serves the guests at Sydenham Hill; but her giggly laugh has snapped and the faces round the table are fewer now, they say. Hancock doesn’t allow his guests too much laughter. He wears a fixed face like a statue’s – even when he comes in here for cigars – as if he wants to be regarded as beyond reproach. And when I ask, ‘How’s Helen?’ he answers, ‘How’s Dorothy?’

  Soft lights over the table. The captured moment.

  Why did I wince, Dorry, why did it shock me so, that evening after dinner? You didn’t go straight to your room, and your little head was flushed with anticipation and daring. You made an enemy of Irene that evening. No, it wasn’t what happened with Paul and the Hancocks. She even said of that, with a sort of strange approval: ‘Well – there’s justice there.’ It was that note of adventure in your voice.

  You made an enemy of her. But not of me. So why did I wince, as if I were being accused myself, why did I find myself playing the distressed father? – when you placed one hand on the table, drew up your head and blurted out those words as if they were the caption to some vivid and indelible photograph: ‘Something has happened. Mrs Hancock’s left Mr Hancock. She’s gone off with Uncle Paul. I know it’s happened because Uncle Paul told me it would.’

  Dorry. You’ll come. You’ll come back.

  III

  24

  The sun blazed in the High Street, but it had lost its morning freshness, and inside the shop, despite the electric fan and the door opened to the street, the air was close and heavy. It made Mrs Cooper itch and prickle beneath her nylon shop coat and grow irritable, so that she glanced more accusingly at Sandra and muttered when the girl got in her way or took her time at the till: ‘Confound you!’ She wiped her glasses. Flies buzzed round the shelves; the counter was sticky; the coins and notes customers handed her were hot and damp with sweat. These things gave her a feeling of distaste – which was quite unlike the feeling she had had as she left home at seven, patting her hair, the dew still bright on the patch of grass by the entrance to the flats, and the word ‘Holiday’ ringing in her mind as something to put before Mr Chapman.

  ‘Confound you!’

  ‘Temper!’ said Sandra.

  The clock over the door showed ten to one. Sandra went to lunch first, from one to two. Mrs Cooper’s own lunch break was officially one-thirty to two-thirty, but in practice she usually took less. Loyalty to Mr Chapman – and un-willingness to leave him alone for long with Sandra – made her scurry back from her sallies to the supermarket as early as two. Sometimes she took no lunch-break at all, merely sat for a while in the stock room. Mr Chapman never took a break – despite her warnings. Just sat on his stool with a cup of coffee and a sandwich – a cheese sandwich – which he would put down, circular bites out of it, whenever a customer needed serving. Since his wife’s death she herself had begun to cut his sandwich (‘Cottage cheese only Mrs Cooper – doctor’s orders’) or fetch him things from the baker’s. That was a valued privilege. And yet she wished, rather, he’d take a proper lunch. Go over, perhaps, to the Prince William, and leave her solely in charge. Hadn’t he said, on that wet evening sixteen years ago, that there’d be times when she’d have to mind the shop herself? And yet it seemed that, except for those visits to the hospital, which were over now, he’d never yet trusted her to be alone regularly at the counter.

  Fridays had their consolations, it was true. She and Sandra took their lunch as usual, but at two-thirty Mr Chapman would leave, taking in his briefcase some packages from the safe in the stock room, and drive over to Pond Street. There were the two to be paid over there – Bryant and Miss Fox – and the odd order to discuss. He would be gone perhaps three quarters of an hour, and she would relish that time as an opportunity to hold sway over Sandra.

  She took her eyes from the clock. Five to one. Sandra fidgeted by the till. Oh yes, she’d be ready to dash off on the stroke. Flitting down the High Street, ready to fritter away he
r pay-packet. She thought of setting the girl some task that would cut into her lunch time.

  ‘Sandra,’ she said commandingly, ‘before you go to lunch –’

  But then Mr Chapman surprised her.

  ‘That’s all right, Mrs Cooper. I’d like you to go to lunch first today.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘If that’s all right.’ Mr Chapman edged forward from the refrigerator. ‘Sandra was late. I think you should go first, for a change. Let her cope with the lunch-time rush.’

  She stiffened.

  Change? She always went to lunch second; the pattern had never changed.

  ‘But I always –’ she began. But Mr Chapman’s glassy look made her falter.

  ‘Today,’ he said, in oddly final tones, ‘is different.’

  It must be because he wanted to be alone with the girl. He wanted her to go so they could talk about her behind her back.

  She raised her neck and swallowed the little upsurge in her throat.

  ‘Besides,’ Mr Chapman stared more waterily, ‘in this heat – I expect you’re ready for a breather.’

  Breather indeed!

  ‘I’ve my shopping to do,’ she said, rebutting the suggestion she had time to relax.

  She looked at Sandra as if it was she who had directly contrived all this. And Sandra, seeing Mrs Cooper for once genuinely at bay, gave a look of out-and-out ferocity.

  ‘Good then,’ Mr Chapman said. ‘You go off till two, and Sandra, you take from two to three.’ (Mrs Cooper’s eyebrows shot up at the whole hour he would be alone with Sandra.) ‘I’ll go to Pond Street when you come back. It’ll mean of course, Mrs Cooper,’ Mr Chapman paused and his eyes seemed to take on a distinctly tender gaze, ‘that you’ll be alone in the shop while I’m gone. But,’ he paused again, ‘perhaps it’s time you were used to managing by yourself.’