The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  Your face reddened. With shame, with anger? I watched the colour deepen, the more the cups chinked, the more she wheezed in her armchair, plucked at her shawl and now and then coughed into her serviette, patting her throat and saying, ‘Oh I’m very sorry, please do forgive me, please’ – and I watched it flare up as if some draught had fanned it when she brushed crumbs from her blouse and announced:

  ‘Well Michael, it’s so nice to see you. You know, Dorothy doesn’t tell us much about you. She keeps her secrets. So you’re working for a doctorate. We must think of your futures, mustn’t we?’ She lifted her cup. ‘What exactly are your arrangements?’

  I didn’t know she would have said that. Believe me, I had nothing to do with those words; and even I sat, with my slice of Dundee cake poised, in surprise, before my lips. Should I have intervened, put down my plate, and said, like a discreet husband, ‘Now really dear,’ and laughed? Made it clear it was only a game of bluff? But I wasn’t clear if it was only a game. Games turn into fights.

  ‘Well, when you say arrangements, Mrs Chapman’ – confusion and hostility suddenly upset the deftness – ‘I’m not sure that I – we – that’s to say it doesn’t – it’s a question of – what exactly do you mean by “arrangements”?’

  And I watched Irene, in her chair, almost imperceptibly, draw in her feet.

  Later, as you washed up the things together, dutifully, in the kitchen, I overheard snatches of your talk: ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?… I told you, didn’t I?… He doesn’t say much, does he?… Oh you were lucky he took time off from his precious shop to see us – he’ll be straight off again after this … this bloody china … so we know what to do now, don’t we Mike? Don’t we?…’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She didn’t come to the door. She had her excuse. She sat hunched with her shawl in the armchair.

  ‘Glad to have met you.’

  I stood in the porch like some helpless mediator. I waved. The car lights winked, moving off down Leigh Drive. That was the only time I saw him, and the last time I saw you, without its being – what shall I say? – under conditions of truce.

  He reached the end of Finch Street and passed beyond the gap in the railings.

  Mrs Bennet said the world was ahead of you. Twenty-two that summer and your final exams to sit for. A First – as Mrs Bennet might have predicted. But no celebrations or congratulatory gifts and kisses. I only said to Mrs Cooper, who didn’t understand, ‘She got a First.’ ‘It’s the best you can get,’ I explained. ‘It means she’s got her degree.’ And I told Hancock, when he asked. ‘Always was a clever girl,’ he said. But I moderated my pride, in each case, for fear of the question that would follow – ‘What will she do now?’ You’d phoned up to tell us your result, almost disdainfully (‘Oh that’s wonderful news, Dorry, that’s wonderful’). And later you announced that you’d made up your mind to try for a Ph.D. Then nothing. Not even a word to say you’d be home for the summer. You had to vacate your college room at the end of the term but we could guess, surely enough, where you’d be living. Only a brief letter at the end of July, which said, ‘I’m taking a holiday. I’m going to Greece next month with Michael.’ ‘He’ll pay for her I suppose,’ was all she said, as if she were washing her hands of something. But I sent you a cheque, secretly, and wrote on the back of it: ‘For your holiday – enjoy yourselves.’ You didn’t return it. And four or five weeks later we got the postcard – a blue sea, white houses, a beach – marked somewhere in Crete; and on the back, signed only by you, was the message: ‘Enjoying ourselves.’

  When I saw you next, that September, you still had traces of a sun-tan, but you didn’t want to discuss your holiday, and I felt jealous and thought of our meagre fortnights in Dorset.

  She was in hospital again then – nothing bad; tests, observation. I hadn’t asked you to come. But did you time that visit carefully, knowing she wouldn’t be there? We didn’t do much talking. You had your large suitcase with you and you said you had to pick up some things. Books, papers, your tape-recorder. Yet most of those things had gone already. So why were you turning out drawers, taking things we could have kept for you, your perfume bottles from the bathroom, the Devon pottery that you bought in Teignmouth? You didn’t go to visit her at the hospital, and I never told her you were at home. ‘How’s Michael?’ I asked you. ‘Oh he’s fine, fine.’ But you didn’t say, ‘How’s Mother?’

  And after that, letters, about once a month, which said little. Irene never read them, though she recognized them from the envelope. She left them to me as if they weren’t hers to touch. She seemed to be renouncing all contact with things. I opened them in the evening, and took them to the shop the next morning, tucked in my breast pocket (like this letter now), and I kept them, first in a cash tin in the safe, then in another tin – an old Oxo tin – which I have at home.

  February, March, April ’73. Was it only last year? ‘How is she?’ was all Irene said after she knew I’d had a letter. ‘All right,’ I’d say and she’d turn and look away. ‘How is she?’ But that was more than you ever asked of her. Though she was dwindling, Dorry, in that armchair.

  Another spell in hospital, that April. When I went to see her she was wired up and connected to some machine. Little wires from her neck, from her chest, a tube in her arm and nose. And she looked up oddly from beneath all that clutter, like a child who has put on a disguise or hidden behind something but easily been discovered. When she came home she said, ‘I’m going to have Barrett round. I want things to be settled.’ Barrett was her solicitor, Dorry.

  And all this time I was working, harder than ever, in the shop. Though the face I saw in the mirror seemed to have become suddenly the face of an ageing, over-worked, livid-cheeked, corpulent man, a man who needed to ease off, take more recreation, retire. And already in my left side, though I scarcely noticed it till later, was that little pain, with its name like a rare butterfly’s.

  April, May, June ’73. Then we got your letter, in July. It was the first one I showed her, though I was afraid – no stress, no excitement.

  ‘What will they do?’ She looked up blankly. ‘What will they live on? She won’t have any money.’ Though it wasn’t the money that troubled her. She raised her face and said – she who’d always seemed able to predict things – ‘What now? What happens now?’ Though behind those words there was something else, a cry, far off, as if sounding over waves – which I knew then I’d never stopped hearing.

  I believe she would have seen Barrett again. She would have changed it, Dorry. If there’d been time.

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I’m giving up my course here. I can always finish the thesis later. Michael’s been offered a research post at Bristol and there’s a chance of a lecturership. I’m going with him to live with him.

  32

  The common littered with people. Couples fondling each other on the grass. Prams. Kids. Plastic balls. A commotion and a frenzied splashing down at the paddling pool. He made his way along the asphalt path, screwing up his eyes against the sun. He patted momentarily his breast pocket.

  You can see it all from here, Dorry. The world ahead of you. Down there on the right, the stretch of the High Street where it flanks the common. Traffic lights beyond. Then the railway bridge: green sign with a white arrow pointing to the station. Domed roof of the Town Hall, gabled roof of Gibbs’ department store. There are the shops, straight ahead, on Common Road, where she used to get all her things; Mason’s the butcher’s, Cullen’s, Henderson’s. Beyond them – you could have seen the clock-tower once, over the roof-tops – the school where my parents toiled to send me. And, far-distant, half-left, poking up from the shoulder of the hill, the grey, ill-proportioned spire of St Stephen’s.

  I met her here those first times, Dorry; here on the common. She looked as though she were lingering on some errand. And up there, at St Stephen’s, you were christened, and your grandfather, whom you never saw, was buried, near the plaqu
e to his already dead son. We never moved out of these narrow bounds. Born here, schooled here, worked here. And even when I met her I stood here on the common and thought: enough, now everything is in its place, and I in mine.

  Spire of St Stephen’s, domed roof of the Town Hall, grey paths across the green common; trams passing. The sun was warm on our necks as we leant on the railings. But I never believed you could have the real thing.

  She would have acted, Dorry; would have seen Barrett. There was that last week. She would have said, ‘Willy –’

  July ’73. Up the Common Road, past Mason’s and Cullen’s, past the evening plane trees, my briefcase, with the books, on the back seat. She was waiting for me to come. I used to let myself in, so as not to disturb her. How many times had I done these things? Past the clock and the mirror in the hall. It must have been between the time Mrs Pritchard left and I shut the shop. Her head was on one side. The cap still on her tube of pills: she hadn’t reached for them. Her lips were blue and cold and had a sickly smell when I bent to touch them.

  He always claimed he’d seen her. That morning. Though they didn’t believe him, Stephen and Bob. Don’t believe what old Phil tells you. He didn’t tell Mr Chapman. It was an honour to do the round Mr Chapman’s house was on. Leigh Drive: number thirty-three. There was dew on the garden and sparrows chirping. She must have heard him put the papers through – always three or four dailies at thirty-three. For he saw her at the front window as he propped his bike on the opposite kerb. It was the only time he’d seen her. And she stood there for a moment, behind the window, pulling back the lace curtain – did she want to call him, to say something? – like someone trapped in a glass case.

  Up that slide, Dorry – there where the kids are playing. When she said, ‘Why don’t you?’ I did, I obeyed. I clambered up that slide and slid down.

  Mrs Cooper wiped her glasses. There hadn’t been a customer for nearly a quarter of an hour. Three o’clock. The mid-afternoon lull. She sat by the till. Her glasses were misty. Where was he? Half way up the Common Road? In Russell Street? Gasping, straining his poor heart. Mr Chapman – she’d do anything, anything. She rested her elbow on the counter and propped her cheek in her palm. No customers; the shop to herself. She rocked gently back and forth on two legs of her stool, crossing her legs one over the other – a slither of nylon – and feeling her shoe on her right foot, under the counter, hang just by the toes.

  Sandra stood before the mirror in the changing cubicle. It was hot and oppressive down here in the basement of the shop. The electric lights, the music, the blow-ups of Mick Jagger and Paul Newman on the walls, put there to make it seem they were watching you undress. Two rows of cubicles with flimsy curtains. Though the thing was, of course, not to draw the curtains. She stood in her bra and briefs looking at herself. Yes, she was all right in the right places. She didn’t need a bra – she had a good mind to take it off and go back to the shop with only her T-shirt on, just to see that old bag’s eyes pop. She’d tried on the red dress. Yes, it looked great on her. She would buy it, with Mr Chapman’s money. But she paused, irresolutely, before the mirror. Just for a moment, it was as though some other person looked back at her, unreachable behind the glass.

  Children’s playground. Grey spire of St Stephen’s. Dome of the Town Hall. Everything in its place. He put his left thumb in his breast pocket and touched the letter.

  ‘You will see in the end.’

  Yes, well all right. Even though she never changed the will, most of that money should have been yours. I didn’t need it. But – don’t you see? I kept it because it was all I had that was hers. It was her price, my dues from the bargain. And I would only have kept it – not touched it. So that in the end, anyway –

  And supposing I’d given you the money – with indecent promptness, after the funeral? ‘Here – it’s mine, but I don’t want it.’ You’d have gone off with it, for good – to him in Bristol. Don’t you see? I kept that money to keep you too.

  So I wrote you that letter in August. She’d been dead only three weeks.

  Dear Dorothy,

  You know that Mother made clear in her will that no money of hers should be passed on by me to you, except through a will of my own. You know my feelings about it. You know had she ever discussed it I would have persuaded her against it. But out of respect for her wishes – out of respect for your dead mother – I think we must do what she wanted.

  Where did I find those sanctimonious words? I should have added: ‘Out of respect for her wishes you ought to stay with me, be with me.’ You were her gift. And you wrote back – that was only a month after we cremated her – ‘What about the respect due to me?’

  I waited for you to come. All through last winter. I thought: if you come back, what does the money matter? But only your demanding letters came. Were we really at war?

  I waited through Christmas. I did all those things I’d done before – got up at five-fifteen, made my breakfast, sat at the table at night with my books on the green baize cloth – automatically and mechanically, as if she were still there. I touched nothing. The furniture, the china, her chair by the window. I said to Mrs Pritchard: Nothing must be changed. The same and not the same. And in the shop I felt my face, over the counter, go hard like a shell. I thought, this is what happens: you harden, you set in your mould. I worked on like a machine, counting the weekly takings I no longer needed. Though that was a winter of sudden thrift: power-cuts; no oil, no lights in the shop windows, a three-day week. And I saw on Hancock’s face as he came in for cigars a stony look like my own: it’s all over, that mad boom, now we can count the cost.

  The cost? I had these pains in my side. I knew it was my heart. I went to Doctor Field’s. And then to the hospital, where they tested me and cardiographed me and entered little notes in files. How fragile we are. Doctor Field explained and prescribed tablets. They’re the same ones as my wife took, I said, and he said, Yes. Then he told me: ‘And you must take the pressure off. Perhaps it’s time you were thinking of giving up that shop of yours.’

  Mrs Cooper said, ‘Well he’s right too. You could give it up now. Take a complete rest. I’d manage for you.’ She had the air of a hired nurse who has earned a share in her patient’s decisions. Along the High Street she was broad-casting, with her own embellishments, my story – our story, Dorry. ‘Went off and left him, she did. Only turned up for the funeral. Went off with some student – and him with a heart condition. Little bitch.’ Though I knew what she was thinking: ‘Poor, poor Mr Chapman – the old tight-wad.’ ‘Come, come and spend Christmas with me,’ she said, ‘You can’t spend it all on your own.’ And I knew I had to watch out.

  I waited, Dorry. The money was only a token. I never meant us to fight.

  33

  He reached the Common Road, under the shade of the plane trees. The pain in his chest was like a tight breastplate. He paused for a moment by one of the peeling tree trunks, gathering his breath; removed his jacket and hooked it over his right shoulder. A ‘Mr Whippy’ van, pink and cream, with a jangling loudspeaker that played ‘Greensleeves’, had drawn up on the pavement. Hands reaching. Good weather for business.

  He crossed over the road, breathing deeply, waiting for the gaps in the traffic, then turned up Russell Street.

  I used to walk along this same road, Russell Street, on my way to school, with a briefcase in my hand then. For Mum and Dad said, now you’ve got to the grammar school you must have a briefcase, not a satchel like the ordinary kids. I used to get the tram from where we lived, which was not far from where Mrs Cooper’s flat is, down Allandale Road, then walk over the common. At four o’clock back again, less briskly, by the same route; though not before taking the detour, with the others, down Pond Street – to Mr Vincent’s shop.

  If someone had said then: One day you will own that shop; one day you will walk along Russell Street with your briefcase containing wage-packets and order forms, I wouldn’t have been surprised. If someone had said, There, where you
walk across the common, you will meet your future wife, there she will decide to marry you, I would have replied, All right, so be it. I didn’t believe, despite being at grammar school, that the future belonged to me. I thought: things would come to you anyway, and when they did they would already be turned into history.

  Shady on this side of Russell Street. Gaunt Edwardian houses offsetting the new estate on the other side. Then the turning-off which, if you follow it, curves up past the old people’s home to St Stephen’s church. Then the brick wall – there are slogans on it in chalk and aerosol spray – ‘Russell Bootboys’, ‘Judy Freeman fucks coons’; ambitiously sketched bits of anatomy – which someone has tried to remove. Then the railings, the double row of chestnuts, their outer branches jutting over the railings and the pavement. Pause here. Breathe. The shade under chestnut trees is always dense and cool. They are one of the first trees to sprout in spring and to shed in the autumn. That was something I learnt at school, Dorry, by not paying attention; by looking from the window.

  School gates open, splitting the wrought iron motto in two. Virtus et Fortitudo. Asphalt area beneath the blocks of class-rooms – silent now. To the right of the gates, beyond the trunks of the chestnuts, in a square plot bordered with marigolds, the memorial.

  Perhaps I knew him then, perhaps I was already his memory, this old, breathless figure, the same and not the same as me, with a briefcase, walking now down Russell Street. Perhaps I knew Mr Vincent’s shop would become Mr Chapman’s; perhaps I knew when I walked home over the common that I was crossing the path I would one day take home to my wife. Life was set out like a map. Like the waxy, pastel-coloured maps that hung, that afternoon, in the History Room. ‘Europe after the Seven Years’ War’; ‘The World – Present Day’. The history master was explaining about Henry VIII. From that second-floor room you could see, if you looked one way, the playing fields with the white goal posts, and, the other way, the asphalt, the chestnut trees, the gates leading out into Russell Street. It was an icy afternoon in March but the sun was bright. Shrill cries were coming from the playing fields. History. The master said I didn’t have the right attitude. ‘Does not concentrate; poor essays’ (‘Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries because he’d have done so anyway’). Even that afternoon he tried to recall me to the present (in a history lesson, Dorry!) with his sharp ‘Are you with us Chapman? Not paying attention again!’ But I put my head to the window and the view like a map, and I saw.