The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  ‘Because he wanted, I think, to be forgiven.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I don’t know. He always made demands of her. They never got on.’

  ‘And that money bought the shop?’

  ‘No – this was after the war. We bought the shop in ’37. She had some money when we married.’

  ‘And Grandfather’s money?’

  ‘Hers. None of it went into the shop. I think she felt it wasn’t to be touched. She made sure it kept its value. Her investments – and all these things.’

  You looked around pensively at the crystal and the china behind the glass in the cabinet. You seemed glad to be alone with me.

  ‘But after Grandfather’s death you needn’t have kept on the shop.’

  ‘No – but we did.’

  ‘And then she never saw her family again, did she, after the war? I mean, Uncle Paul and Grandmother – ?’

  So many questions, Dorry, about the past – when you had stepped so boldly into the present. I paused, peered into my cup of tea.

  ‘But how are you doing now? Things okay?’

  You lowered your eyes. You didn’t want to answer questions either.

  ‘Oh – I’ve started the special paper for Part Two.’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘The English Romantic Poets.’

  The mantelpiece clock chimed one in the morning. Late enough. But I didn’t want to go up to lie alone without her, and to think of her lying alone. Or to leave you.

  I said, ‘I’ll phone the hospital.’

  ‘No – it’s all right. They’ve got our number. If there’s any need they’ll phone you.’ You pressed me back into the armchair.

  ‘Don’t worry, Dad, she’ll be all right.’

  ‘All right now maybe.’

  You sighed reproachfully, at those despairing words.

  I said, ‘You will forgive her, won’t you? You won’t be hard on her?’ You glanced up again questioningly. ‘I know it seems she’s always been against you.’

  ‘Oh – that was only really since that business with Uncle Paul …’

  ‘No, but before, before. She always … she always found it hard to be – to give certain things.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘You know what I mean. You know.’

  You frowned.

  But I saw you knew.

  ‘What I want to say is that she was always like that. It was the same for me too.’

  ‘Even when you got married?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose even then.’

  ‘So you knew what you were doing?’ You looked at me like a woman who means to get her way.

  ‘No, Dorry. No, I never did.’

  I put my head in my hand and looked up through my fingers at your eyes.

  ‘Forgive me too.’

  28

  Sandra rocked gently on her stool. The lunch-time rush of customers had slackened and the clock was nearing two. She wasn’t bothered by Mr Chapman’s switching of the lunch-breaks – she had none of Mrs Cooper’s mania for routine. After Mrs Cooper had left she’d sighed, puffing out her cheeks and said, ‘She’s a fusser, ain’t she?’ – but he hadn’t taken up the point. And now he was looking at her again from his stool by the fridge – oh not in a way she was used to (the way old men looked at her on buses and trains), but almost disappointedly, regretfully, as if he expected her to be something she wasn’t.

  ‘And what will you be doing this weekend, Sandra?’ he suddenly said.

  ‘Oh – might go down the coast, Sunday. Or up the swimming pool.’

  Her shoe slipped from her foot beneath the counter onto the floor, but she made no effort to retrieve it. She ran her toe over the wooden panel on the inside of the counter. Her legs were sticky where they crossed. Her cheek rested on her palm which was sticky too. Still he looked. She kept her eyes to the front of the shop where, beyond the window, the sunlight flashed on car windows and, to the right, on the empty beer glasses on the low wall outside the Prince William. ‘Well, sorry,’ she said to herself, recrossing her legs and wondering simultaneously what she would do at the weekend, ‘Whatever it is, I’m not it.’ And she turned at last to Mr Chapman, whose heavy, purplish face seemed suddenly quite forlorn, like some stone figure that has inexplicably melted and lost its shape.

  ‘Well, there is no use disguising the fact,’ she said, easing herself into her seat and pursing her lips.

  She had come home that morning after two weeks in hospital; he’d left Mrs Cooper in charge of the shop. Somehow he hoped a new woman might have returned to him, but he saw by that flatness of the lips, it was not so.

  ‘A heart condition is a heart condition,’ she continued.

  It was almost Christmas, and cold. Outside, the garden looked damp and raw. She asked for a blanket and he got her one – the large red and brown blanket which they’d used as a picnic rug in the days of their Sunday drives. She asked for her handbag and her medicines and he put them on the trolley beside her chair, along with the inhaler, the papers, and the antique collectors’ journals which she still liked to scour, sending off for catalogues. She looked very weak. But only once, as he tucked the blanket round her and felt for a moment like a father putting a child to bed, had her expression admitted this weakness. And then it was in the form of resentment, annoyance. Her mouth twisted curiously as he leant over her.

  He stayed at home with her all that day. She spoke briefly about what the doctors said. There was a risk: no exertion; precautions must be taken. And he talked about the shop. He didn’t anticipate such large Christmas sales this year – but he’d said the same the year before.

  Then he was going to ask: ‘Should we be thinking about selling the shop?’

  But that evening she said, as if to forestall him, ‘I think we should get another shop.’ And in the new year they bought Pond Street.

  29

  ‘I’ll be off to Pond Street then, Mrs Cooper.’

  He stood in the doorway, parting the plastic strips, having exchanged his shop coat for his jacket, rinsed his hands and face, and put the wage-packets from the safe – they were made up differently this week – in his briefcase.

  Mrs Cooper had returned, puffing, from her shopping, with an air of accusation, as if she were about to discover some scandal. Sandra had slipped out, to her own lunch, pressing a new stick of chewing gum into her mouth, and as she passed Mrs Cooper in front of the counter the two women had glowered icily at each other.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Mrs Cooper asked him, and without waiting for a response she turned to rummage in her shopping bag. ‘I got a sandwich from the snack bar – chicken, you can eat that. And there’s some apples from Powell’s.’

  ‘That’s kind of you.’ He pushed the bags to one side. ‘Later, eh?’

  Magnanimously, she waved aside the coins he held out to her.

  ‘Don’t be silly. You’ll be back within the hour then? Before she comes back.’

  ‘No, Mrs Cooper. I imagine I’ll be quite a while. I thought I’d walk.’

  ‘Walk!’

  Mrs Cooper stared wildly.

  ‘It’s the other side of the common! You’ve never walked to Pond Street before, you’ve always driven.’ The lump rose and quaked in her throat. ‘Mr Chapman, be sensible! In this heat – with your leg – and when the doctor keeps telling you not to overdo it. You might –’ her voice suddenly lost all subtlety – ‘What on earth do you want to walk for?!’

  He’d predicted all this. It was almost amusing to watch it occurring just as he expected.

  ‘I have my reasons, Mrs Cooper. It is’ – he nodded to the doorway – ‘a fine day.’

  He stooped to shut the catch on his briefcase and do up the straps.

  She looked unbelievingly at him.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ she said with sudden involuntary force. Then seemed dazed by her own words.

  He raised his head.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ he said calmly.

  He did u
p the second strap on the briefcase and straightened his jacket. She stood aside, stunned, as he lifted up the flap in the counter and nodded as he said, ‘Look after things, won’t you?

  ‘Bye now.’

  ‘Bye.’ She couldn’t say anything else.

  The toy monkeys shook over the counter as he shut the shop door. She watched him turn right, then cross the road and stand poised for a while on the traffic island.

  Why had she said those words to him? A sudden panic seized her.

  But she’d meant them.

  He stepped onto the opposite kerb. There was only the dull ache in his chest. Black trickles of melted tar gleamed in the gutter, and the cars as they gusted by seemed to raise a hotter, not a cooler draught. He walked through the thick shadows of the trees on the paving-stones, as if entering some long-rehearsed scene. And as he walked they noticed him: Hobbes; Simpson, behind his cool green and blue chemist’s bottles; the secretary in Hancock’s, sitting back now from her typewriter while the boss was at lunch. And they wondered, what was he doing, Mr Chapman, who was only ever to be seen in his shop or driving to and from it, and who never walked anywhere – except to the bank?

  Simpson’s, Hancock’s, the Diana. On the corner, under the faded, dark-green awning, the wasps buzzed over Powell’s strawberries and plums. And there, in the shady recess of the shop, as if he really had nothing to do with the sun and the bright fruit on his stalls, in his grey, eternal cardigan which seemed to match his bloodless skin and ashen hair, old Powell himself, raising a hand, half surprised, as he passed. He would never know if it was true: that scar that was supposed to cover half his body.

  Traffic filtered out of Allandale Road. A bus, a delivery van. And there, on the opposite corner, outside the Prince William, like holiday-makers, they sat and sprawled, shirts unbuttoned, glasses shining, with ten more minutes of drinking to go.

  He turned into Allandale Road. As he did so, Hancock emerged, on the opposite side, from the back-entrance to the saloon, squaring his shoulders, raising his head but blinking in the brightness. And blinking too, as he crossed the road, at the sight of the sweet shop owner on the pavement with his briefcase.

  The same and not the same. I once joked about the Prince William, Dorry. I said to Irene: ‘The Prince Willy – they named it after me.’

  That was one evening before the war, when I was still preparing the shop for opening, and I asked her to meet me, at six, in the Prince William. There was a beer garden then, grass and wooden tables and cherry trees – where Armstrong’s garage is now – and there was a big wooden pub sign hanging at the front: Prince William himself in a bronze breastplate, sash and wig, and a smoky background suggestive of battles and storms. That was the only time the High Street regulars saw Irene. They looked at her, over their drinks, and perhaps they confided to each other later, already spreading my legend: ‘That woman with that new feller, Chapman, in the pub last night. You’ll never believe it – his wife.’

  I told her to meet me after work and to wear the blue and white dress she wore on our honeymoon, because I wanted just one perfect evening. She came. She wore the dress. She looked like someone acting under instructions. She sipped the Pimms I bought her; she smiled across the wooden table, and even laughed at my joke, because she knew this was expected of her and it wouldn’t happen again and I must have one perfect picture …

  I still keep that picture, Dorry. A mental photograph. Though the beer garden’s gone, Prince William in his breastplate’s gone … and she’s gone.

  We walked back over the grass of the common, under the trees. How green this part of London always was. And up in the bedroom, behind the green curtains, the scent of Pimms and lemon on her lips … I let you touch me but I’m not touched, I let you take me but I’m not possessed, I let you …

  That was in ’38. Two weeks later I slipped off a ladder and damaged my back. And a year after that – that was after the shop opened and Mother and Father died – the war broke out. But I didn’t fight. I wasn’t fit for active service. I only learnt to count, to number, not to touch.

  30

  ‘Something up with the car?’

  He gripped the briefcase more tightly, as if Hancock, stepping over onto his side, might have been about to snatch it.

  ‘No. No. I thought I’d walk. For a change.’

  ‘Sure you’re up to it old man?’

  Hancock’s breath smelt of drink. The face was bleary-eyed, brick red. Five years ago the voice might have held a taunt (you – with your limp and weak chest – walk to Pond Street!), but now it seemed almost to waver with sympathy.

  ‘Pay-day at Pond Street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They stared inertly at each other as if looking into mirrors. Save for Hancock’s visits to the shop, they scarcely met, and now that they came face to face in the street it was as if something needed explaining.

  ‘I – er – was going to pop in on my way back.’

  ‘That’s all right. Mrs Cooper’s there.’

  ‘Of course. Look – are you sure you should be walking over there?’

  ‘Sure enough.’

  Hancock shuffled awkwardly.

  ‘Well – mind how you go.’ He held out a hand indecisively. It was as if he were about to offer support – or needed to be steadied himself. But he changed the gesture in mid-course and pointed to the briefcase.

  ‘Hang on to the goods,’ he said drily.

  Down Allandale Road. Past Armstrong’s garage. Armstrong’s pump attendants, who no longer were issued with blue and yellow overalls, lounging in the heat in faded singlets and jeans. Up above, the garish blue canopy with the company insignia and a sign saying ‘Quadruple Stamps’ – as if to make up for the hard prices on the petrol pumps. Those Arabs had driven a tough bargain. But on the forecourt there were great glistening black patches. See, it still gets spilt, precious stuff.

  Across Allandale Road. Shade on this side. Breathing hard already. Pain in the chest just nudging. He would have to gauge it carefully; rest now and then.

  A few shops to left and right. An electrician’s, an Asian food shop, a betting shop; and then the rows of tall, bay-fronted Victorian houses, with basements and steps up to the door, converted into offices and dental surgeries, or knocked down to make way for new blocks. Builders’ merchant’s; a car showroom; the squat, oblong office of a firm that made light bulbs. Dairy on the left opposite Finch Street (horses once, snorting and clopping; troughs outside, yellowish at the rim). Baptist church, zebra crossing, then more shops. Follow the road where it descends and curves to the left, and you get to where Mrs Cooper lives.

  He turned right, out of the shade, into Finch Street, carrying the pain in his chest as if it were something he could retain or release at will. Finch Street was a cul-de-sac. Like the other streets to the right off Allandale Road it ended in railings and the footpath which skirted the common.

  I told her, Dorry. That winter she came out of hospital and we bought Pond Street. She would have found out anyway. She had a way of knowing things, of sensing them before I even guessed them, so that what she didn’t know you felt compelled to tell her. ‘I think Dorry’s got a boy-friend,’ I said. ‘At last,’ I added, as though to pass it lightly off. She was sitting in her chair where she always sat now, that Angora shawl round her shoulders, pink with a grey-blue weave in it. She didn’t answer at first, as if she were waiting to hear something else.

  ‘Who?’ she said quietly.

  But I didn’t know who. I didn’t say it was only a father’s guess. I knew nothing precise. You came home that Christmas and you said nothing, but you knew she knew, and you looked at me accusingly. She studied you, as if you might be marked, changed. You found it hard to meet her eyes.

  And as though to overcome all that, you said blandly and indifferently one weekend in February: ‘Oh, I’ve met a man at college. A history graduate. We’ve been going out some time.’ As if you were afraid to make your voice sound glad.

  ‘O
h, that’s nice. Isn’t that nice, Willy? We must meet him sometime.’

  You looked at her as if she were mocking you, calling the bluff of your own casualness. As if you’d expected anger, alarm.

  ‘You must bring him down here, Dorry.’

  ‘Maybe.’ You shrugged. ‘All right.’

  And so you brought him, a fortnight later. To outface her challenge and to call her bluff in return? Or do I mis-judge you, Dorry? Did you come simply to oblige an ailing mother and a fond father?

  Were you still, then, the good, the loyal daughter?

  31

  The tea things were laid on the trolley and on the mahogany cake stand. Salmon and egg and cress sandwiches, which she wasn’t allowed to eat; a cake, a Dundee. Mrs Pritchard had come specially to clean and help in the kitchen and I’d asked Mrs Cooper (‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘I’ll manage’) to stand in at the shop. We hadn’t had a visitor in that house for so long. She put on a cream silk blouse, unworn for years. The sleeves seemed filled only with air. But she covered them with her shawl and sat in her chair, waiting. We heard the car pull up outside. I watched from the window. A blue Mini.

  You had a bunch of flowers in your hand which you gave to him as he finished locking the car door. You whispered something as you came up the path. He buttoned his jacket. You straightened your dress. A performance.

  ‘This is Michael. Michael, Mother and Father.’

  He was tall, keen-eyed; a large, strong hand held out for mine. His robust, intelligent good looks made me think of Doctor Cunningham, so that I shrank a little, as I did under those cool questions at the hospital, having expected someone somehow less imposing. He spoke deftly and fluently, crossing his long legs on the sofa and clasping his knee, and I felt my own voice falter when I offered: ‘History. Now I’ve always been fascinated by history.’ And I felt forlorn as you looked at me reproachfully, then turned your head in embarrassment at the conversation that failed to follow. In the silences, he gazed round, curiously, at the porcelain in the cabinet and the vases on the mantelpiece. His eyes would fix on Irene, then look quickly away. And I noticed, more than once, he gave the same look to you.