The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  Mrs Cooper sniffed at the attempt at appeasement.

  But then – what did he mean? – ‘time you were used to managing by yourself’? Her feelings rose at the sudden prospect of him yielding at last to her much-repeated advice – taking care of his weary body in those plump arm-chairs at Leigh Drive – dozing under a sunshade in the garden (with a fold-up garden table and an iced drink) – where she would at last join him, but only after first staunchly conducting the day’s business at the shop. Eventually they’d sell the shop. They wouldn’t need it anyway, with all that money (she’d find out how much it really was) Mrs Chapman had left. They’d simply stop work. And they’d take, at last, that holiday. That long, long holiday …

  But it didn’t alter the fact that there was something between him and that girl.

  ‘Well –’ she drew a breath. ‘One o’clock it is then. You won’t mind if I rest my legs a while in the stock room?’

  Mr Chapman nodded, turning to a customer.

  She went into the stock room, filled a tumbler of water at the sink and pulled one of the battered easy chairs as far back as possible, opposite the doorway into the shop, so that she sat, like a hidden observer, spying on the others through the veil of the plastic strips. The strips fluttered now and then in the breeze from the electric fan. She couldn’t see Mr Chapman, only occasionally his left shoulder, but Sandra rocked on her stool before her, got up, moved to and fro along the counter and sometimes glanced sharply in at her as at an animal in a cage.

  Well, she wouldn’t budge until she absolutely had to. She’d stay here and watch them as long as she could. Spend her whole lunch hour here if need be. She strained her ears for words, but caught nothing. She looked around at the cluttered stock room – the piles of cardboard boxes, the door to the lavatory, the sink and mirror in the far corner with the collection of brooms, brushes and floor-cloths heaped beside it, the thumbed and tattered lists on the wall, the murky sky-light above with its rust-streaked glass, masking even now the brilliant sunshine – and felt something of the prisoner’s desolation. She sniffed. He never bothered about the stock room, let it get into the filthiest state. It was almost as if he relished the difference between its shabbiness and the brilliance of the shop itself. Once a fortnight she tidied it – though he never asked – swept the dust and scraps of paper from the floor, cleaned the sink and lavatory, made it as spotless as possible. But he never thanked her.

  She looked at Sandra’s back on the stool and her tumble of glossy hair, through the plastic strips. She wasn’t deceived.

  From her inner recess the shop, even the street beyond with its dazzle of traffic, seemed momentarily fanciful and intangible – a surface you could stick your hand through. How hot it was! Her neck itched. Her skin crawled and pricked. The heat made her feel soiled, abused. Going to lunch first! Upsetting the pattern!

  Lunch-time customers were crowding the counter, but, between their shoulders, she just glimpsed, out there in the street, the door of Hancock and Joyce open and Mr Hancock step out into the sunlight. Would he come to the shop first, across the road? No: along the pavement, past Powell’s, and straight – she knew without having to keep sight of him – to the Prince William. A stiff, upright figure as he strode. But she wasn’t deceived. Everyone knew: that wife of his. She was funny in the head. They’d put her away once. Eight years ago she’d run off with some other man. And someone had told her once, on good authority, that that other man was none other than Mr Chapman’s brother-in-law.

  All deceit and running away. She watched the hot faces at the counter. Look at Dorothy, his daughter, running away like that. Some man, a university lecturer – he’d said that much. And look at her own wretched desertion, twenty-seven years ago. It was a sultry, heavy afternoon – the kids, at least, were asleep – and she’d known he wasn’t coming back. He was all fixed up with that bag of tricks in Birmingham. Letter on the bedside table. She’d sat unmoving on the sofa in that room left untidy by the boys. Cushions on the floor; toys. And even later, when the boys had grown and she moved to the new flat, even now, she hadn’t shaken off from herself that sense of the world receding and that room fixing round her, with the upset toys, still and frozen. Then she’d got up and pursed her lips and begun to clear the mess. And she hadn’t stopped since.

  Through the doorway in front of her Mr Chapman appeared, edging towards the till – how laboriously he moved sometimes – and as he did so he seemed to lean over deliberately towards the girl.

  The plastic strips shimmered for a moment, like striped deck-chairs on a hot beach, like coloured sunshades …

  Twenty-past by the clock. Her shopping had to be done. At least she had no illusions. Let him have his little fancy and let them talk about her while she was gone. She could still act, she could still have her scene. She’d get her own back on that little bag of tricks.

  She put the empty tumbler back above the sink and drew out her handbag from the shopping basket propped against the wall. Eyeing herself in the mirror, she powdered her nose, spread the collar of her blouse a little more flatly over her shoulders and sprayed a jet of sandalwood under her chin. She entered the shop with a sudden flinging back of the plastic strips and paused for a moment, taking breath, levelling a glance at Sandra, in the doorway.

  ‘Off to the shops. Anything I can get you, Mr Chapman?’

  ‘Er, no thanks, Mrs Cooper.’

  She brushed past the girl and the man – sixty years old! – and out into the hot envelope of the street.

  Mr Chapman watched her turn right under the awning and pass by the window. How old is that woman? he thought.

  25

  1969. You were twenty that June. A student at London University. No longer a girl. Your smooth swaying stride and your softened woman’s figure – in blue jeans and a purple coloured top, now you were going to university – should have proclaimed it. Save for that uncertain way you held your head, as if you were surprised to find, so soon, you’d grown up.

  You had left school for the last time. Out of the gates, with the others, scuffling homewards, onto the noisy bus, through the High Street, warily, in your uniform; for the last time. ‘O’-levels, ‘A’-levels, your essay on Keats which won the school prize: a place at university. Did you step away from it all, as you stepped out of your uniform, as if a new life beckoned?

  Blue jeans and a purple corduroy jacket; hair long and straight and unstyled. Alone in that room the other side of London, with a gas-ring, your books and your independence. Don’t think I wasn’t proud of you, Dorry. My own daughter at university. But why didn’t you seem glad, even at your own success? And why did it seem to me (other youngsters, whom I winked at, over the counter, wore those bright, flamboyant clothes because it was fun) that you wore your student’s outfit as if it were only another uniform?

  Who was happier, Dorry. you or I, when we were twenty?

  You even came back to us that summer – tired of that gloomy bed-sitter where no one had forced you to go. You caught the train up to your lectures in the morning, and did not return, often, till late, very late. Irene would look at you when you were late as if testing you for something.

  But they found you a new room, the next autumn, in one of the halls of residence. Small and neat. There was an anglepoise lamp; a pin-up board; a bed which folded back against the wall; and scarcely enough room on the formica shelves for all your books. But you would be looked after there. There was central heating and a launderette and they would clean your room for you and give you meals in the dining hall; and it was for you they’d built those new clean-lined buildings (there were still piles of scaffolding and sand beneath your window), employing the best architects to draw the plans. See how far the milk and orange juice had gone.

  And you wouldn’t be lonely, for in that neat residence hall, like a luxurious barracks, there were fifty other girls like you, each with a room like yours with a number on the door and a slot for a name-card. I saw them, and felt embarrassed, as I helped y
ou carry in your cases and bags. They giggled or gave little aloof, intense glances. Doors were half opened and record-players competed. As we passed along the corridor I glimpsed them, sitting on beds and floors, looking serious, cradling thick coffee mugs, demonstratively smoking cigarettes.

  New, clean-lined buildings; purple bricks, glass, and wooden slats; newly-sown grass outside your room in which rows of saplings had been planted. I felt old and out of place as I left and walked round the grass to the car; so that I was relieved by the gardener, with raw-looking hands, tying up the saplings, who nodded as I passed.

  You stayed there two years – oh they moved you in your third year to another building, a bigger room, but it still had a number and a name-card. You came home in the holidays and sometimes you phoned and sometimes wrote. But it seemed as if you could never tell us clearly what you were doing or what was happening. ‘I’m working hard,’ you said. ‘My tutor says I could get a First.’ As if all that time you spent, until the beginning of that last year, were spent in waiting, waiting.

  ‘Ingratitude,’ we said, like an excuse.

  ‘Don’t you miss her, Mr Chapman?’ Mrs Cooper asked, stirring the morning tea.

  ‘She’s only the other side of London.’

  ‘And she’s grown up now of course, isn’t she? Old enough to lead her own life.’

  Her eyes had swivelled behind the spectacles, looking for reactions.

  ‘What is it she’s studying exactly? English? I mean, what’s it for?’

  ‘Oh – not like this’ – he glanced at the newspapers. ‘Literature. Poetry.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The gaudy colours of the toy display in the Briar Street window were reflected in the lenses of her glasses. Her sleeve brushed the magazine counter from which young faces grinned and pouted: Honey, Nineteen, Disc, Melody Maker. She looked grave, unmoved, amidst all the dazzle.

  And yet, he knew – in eleven years he’d had time to discover it – that beneath her toil and tenacity, Mrs Cooper nursed dreams of her own.

  1969. The kids were coming out of school, barging down the pavement as if the world was theirs. And stepping out, at the kerbside, from a pearl-grey Rover and having to pick his way through them, was Hancock. He walked briskly and purposefully – as well he might. For those house prices were rising, faster and faster. There would be a real boom soon: thousands added in a matter of months. He would flatter himself he’d foreseen it and watch the fees flow in (as he himself, behind his counter, watched the money fill the till – four hundred, five hundred pounds a week).

  But there was a stiffness now and an aloofness in Hancock’s bearing as he stepped, scarcely seeing them, through those waves of school-children. No swagger in those long legs; no roguishness in that once sprightly face. As if all that had stopped, years ago.

  Was it the stiffness of discretion – or of age?

  26

  Clomp, clomp. What was that? Smithy’s young assistant Keith, hastening into the shop in his new leather boots and flared trousers, and standing for a moment, open-mouthed, in the middle of the floor, not seeing him as he crouched, replacing stock behind the counter – while the little spasm in Mrs Cooper’s throat – he saw it even from where he stooped – rose in sudden alarm.

  ‘Mr Chapman!’

  For all his twenty-one years, the smart clothes, the medallion round his neck, Keith looked for a moment like a helpless schoolboy come to seek the master’s aid.

  ‘It’s Mr Smithy, Mr Chapman. I don’t think he’s breathing.’

  Wail of the ambulance up the High Street and the flash of its blue light as it passed the Prince William and Powell’s and the Diana and drew up beyond the entrance to Briar Street. It parked close to Smithy’s door. The ambulance men made an attempt at concealment, opening the rear doors ready. But people had stopped to watch – Mrs Cooper watched through the window full of toys – and they had time to see that the body on the stretcher as it was carried out was entirely draped by the red blanket.

  ‘Through here, Mr Chapman. Look.’

  And there, in the little back room of the barber shop, was Smithy, in the easy chair, his head to one side, the glass of water that he was going to drink smashed on the floor. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he said. ‘Nothing must be touched.’ Although why he said it, he didn’t know. Nor why Keith and Sullivan, Smithy’s other assistant, bowed, ditheringly, to his command, put the ‘Closed’ sign on the door when he told them, sent away the single customer stiil lingering, half-shorn, in the shop, let him deal himself with the ambulance men.

  November the sixteenth, 1969. The figures on the pavement who had stopped to look moved on and the traffic in the High Street seemed to resume a halted progress like a film jerking back into life. In the shops they returned to business, to sudden energetic talk, activity. But they had seen: old Powell behind his racks of fruit, Hancock behind his photographs of property, and the proprietor of the Diana pushing aside the plastic menu placard hanging in the window. And they’d known. It was Smithy.

  ‘Did it go all right?’ she asked as he appeared at the door in his coat and his black tie. He shrugged.

  She returned to her seat, under the standard lamp, and seemed just a little perplexed when he did not sit down immediately after entering from the hall, but stood looking out of the window at the lilac tree.

  ‘Grace all right?’

  ‘She’s not taking it badly. She’s going to her cousin’s.’

  That afternoon at the crematorium he’d stood with the little group of mourners and helped Smithy’s sister in and out of the car and apologized because Irene was too ill to come. And Grace had said, ‘Look after that wife of yours’; and he’d said with a wan smile, ‘Oh, it’s she who looks after me.’

  She watched him sit down and not volunteer further comment.

  ‘Shall I tell you something?’ she said. ‘I once went into Smithy’s shop. It was in the war when I was in London with Father. I went to see the shop was all right; and then Smithy gave me a cup of tea, in his back room.’

  ‘You went into our shop?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Her face was hollow and thin, but the gaze was firm, as if she’d known at the time she would store up those past moments to recall them now.

  ‘That was nearly thirty years ago,’ he said.

  It wouldn’t last. Outside the hospital the flower-lady trimmed and cut her bunches of flowers. Doctor Marsh replaced Doctor Cunningham on her appointment card, but Doctor Marsh could do no more than Doctor Cunningham, save to send her to Doctor Fletcher at St Thomas’s. But that was not for the asthma; that was for her heart.

  ‘Brrring! Brrring!’ The telephone rang on the shelf next to the cigarette racks and Mrs Cooper answered. Over a year since Smithy’s death; and Sullivan had taken over the barber shop and the red and white pole no longer twisted over the corner of Briar Street – ‘The wrong image for today,’ Sullivan said.

  ‘It’s Mrs Pritchard.’

  Mrs Cooper held out the receiver, and as he took it, placed it to his ear, and watched the expression of peculiar anticipation on Mrs Cooper’s face, it seemed to him he had already heard the terse message, had already thrown his coat on and was driving, dry-mouthed, to the hospital; had enacted that scene, many times, before, though he never believed it was real – so that the thin, frightened voice of Mrs Pritchard (the woman they’d hired to do the housework) sounded like some voice from inside him:

  ‘It’s Mrs Chapman. They’ve taken her to the hospital.’

  27

  How strangely untroubled you looked, appearing there at the swing door which the nurse, raising a finger and pointing, opened for you. You had come at once, taking a taxi at each end, so that it seemed you arrived only minutes after I phoned. You wore a long, dark-red dress under your coat, and black boots, and you walked with a sure and steady stride, so that I thought: Yes, she too seemed to look her best in times of trouble – against the dark-green blackout curtain; walking down a corridor in that same hospital,
where her father died.

  We hugged. Your cheek was cold from the wintry air outside but your breath was warm. We had never embraced like that before. You squeezed my wrist, and went to speak, purposefully, to the sister, and you didn’t seem the same girl as I’d left in that neat room with its number and its slot for a name-card.

  ‘Listen Dad, it wasn’t a severe attack. She’ll be all right. The same as they told you. She’s been sedated. There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s go home.’

  How untroubled you looked. You sat me by the fire, made tea and cooked a supper which I didn’t want, but which you made me eat. I ate slowly, in silence. And then we talked. That was the only time we ever really talked. I told you about old Harrison. Why did I dwell on old Harrison? He lay in a coma in that same hospital in 1945, while outside they danced and sang and celebrated victory with bonfires. And you told me – that was the time you chose to tell – about Hancock and those meetings with Paul. I never knew you knew so much about her family. And you spoke with a commiserative and tentative look, as if you were telling me something that ought to be kept from me.

  For there was one thing you didn’t tell me that night, wasn’t there? Though I knew. Don’t ask me how. Call it a father’s instinct. You sat in the armchair opposite, leaning forward, your face like a torch in my eyes, and now and then your hand pulled smooth that red dress over your knees. But that movement wasn’t like it used to be. There was something new in your voice and in your eye, and I knew: it had happened at last; you were no longer waiting, waiting. When, Dorry? It must have been sometime that term. Where? In that neat room with its number on the door and its rows of books?

  ‘So Grandfather gave her the money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why her, why not Uncle Paul or Grandmother?’