The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  A stupid question, I know. But it made it seem as if I’d half expected you; that the fact that you were looting the house wasn’t important.

  ‘Oh don’t worry – I would have left you a note!’

  Your brow knotted. If I had fought you it would have been so much easier, wouldn’t it?

  ‘Dorry, I had no idea –’

  ‘Well you’ve caught me in the act, haven’t you? I thought you’d be at your shop.’ You hissed the last word.

  ‘I shut the shop early today. I’m not so well, you know, Dorry: I have to take things easier –’

  ‘Well if it’s all such a strain why don’t you shut that bloody shop for good! Give it up for good!’ Your fingers clawed at the box. Then you added suddenly: ‘You can now, can’t you? She’s been dead nine months, you know!’

  That was your victory cry. You stepped forward, hug-ging the box, as if you knew you could step through me. I didn’t prevent you. On the wall behind you was your photograph – you in her arms, with me looking on, at your christening. I held my side. I said, ‘Look, I’m not well. I’ve got to sit down. Come to me – when you’ve finished.’

  But I didn’t go to sit down at once. I leant against the stair-post like some dumb, helpless statue, while you passed to and fro, ignoring me, taking away her things like trophies. I thought: she gave you to me in place of what she couldn’t give herself; now you are taking from me what had been hers. Through the open door, I watched you lay her furs on the back seat of the car, carefully, lovingly – a way you never treated her.

  When you passed me for the fourth time I said, ‘I’ll be in there,’ and tottered into the living-room. I sat in the armchair, facing the windows, with my back straight, my knees square in front of me and my arms on the arm-rests as if I were made of bronze. The garden was in shade but there was sun on the lilac tree. I said to myself: I will give you the money. And when I give you the money I will give up the shop. But first you must come to me one last time.

  Upstairs you were opening and closing drawers. I thought, Mrs Pritchard will learn of it, Mrs Cooper will get wind of it. I would have to perform for her benefit, invent another legend: ‘You see, that’s what daughters do, Mrs Cooper, that’s the thanks you get for all your trouble.’ I heard you pass in the hall. You said nothing, not even ‘Goodbye’.

  36

  Bryant and Miss Fox looked up over the counter, amazed, as if they hadn’t expected to see him; then they looked doubly shocked, seeing the state he was in – gasping, sweat pouring off him.

  ‘Didn’t you come in the car?’ Bryant asked.

  He leant on the counter.

  ‘I walked. It’s all right.’

  ‘Quick, Susan – a chair for Mr Chapman.’

  Miss Fox opened the flap in the counter, brought out a wooden, round-backed chair, and he sat down in it, like an honoured customer.

  ‘And a glass of water, if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said.

  He reached for the bottle of pills in his pocket.

  ‘Why on earth did you walk?’ said Bryant, almost scoldingly. ‘In this weather. You shouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s all right. I know what I’m doing. Be fine in a moment.’

  Bryant was bald on top but with sleek growths of pale hair at the back and sides; he wore thick glasses over brown, needly eyes. Miss Fox just turned twenty, was plump and brisk.

  ‘There,’ he said, having dissolved the tablet under his tongue and drained the tumblerful of water.

  They both still looked at him as if he were some escaped convict.

  Normally on Fridays he got to Pond Street at a quarter to three. It was half-past three now. Not such a great difference. But they seemed to sense everything had changed.

  ‘Well – what’s new?’

  Bryant tried to appear unperplexed. He rubbed his chin uneasily. ‘Oh – average week. Ice-cream and soft drinks up, of course, with the weather. Sure you’re okay?’

  He felt weak, despite the effects of the pill, but he said, ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Think it will last?’

  He looked up, momentarily puzzled.

  ‘The weather.’

  ‘Oh – the forecast was good this morning.’

  Bryant ran his palm over his bald crown.

  ‘As long as it lasts for the weekend,’ said Miss Fox.

  ‘Going away somewhere?’

  ‘Broadstairs. With my sister.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  A customer entered and Bryant said in a self-conscious, impatient voice, ‘Susan, see to this gentleman will you?’

  Bryant leant forward towards him, while Miss Fox moved down the counter. Bryant liked to display his authority and to indicate to Miss Fox that he had a special, confidential relationship with Mr Chapman which allowed him to delegate tasks. It was all quite transparent. He was hoping soon the shop would be his. He was waiting for Mr Chapman to pass it on. He even hoped that the Briar Street shop, Mrs Cooper’s claims notwithstanding, might one day be his.

  ‘About those copies of the orders which I phoned about. There was only one, Jackson’s – and he came yesterday. Have you got the others?’

  ‘No.’ He patted the briefcase. ‘There’s some receipts, some wholesalers’ lists – and, the usual. I didn’t make out those orders.’

  ‘But –’ Bryant looked confused – ‘we’re getting rather low on some lines.’

  ‘Never mind. You’ll see,’ he said calmly.

  Bryant frowned, scratched his cheek, seemed to be about to ask something, but then smoothed his expression. He resented his employer’s insistence on doing so much of the paperwork himself; and the fact that that paperwork was now becoming lax and haphazard seemed further proof that the boss should step down.

  Miss Fox moved up the counter, having served the customer.

  ‘Broadstairs?’ resumed Mr Chapman, undoing the straps of his briefcase.

  ‘Yes – my sister and her husband have a holiday flat down there.’

  ‘Holidays eh?’

  The girl smiled. She had a sober, rather flat face which rippled now and then with girlishness. He half suspected that Bryant and Miss Fox didn’t get on.

  ‘Parents going down too?’

  ‘Yes – maybe.’

  ‘Good.’ He fished in his briefcase. ‘Well I’d better do what I came to do.’

  The pain in his chest had subsided and he breathed more easily. Bryant and the girl still looked perturbed, but they seemed more reassured when he produced the familiar buff envelopes. Well, they would be surprised again. Out of common propriety they wouldn’t open their packets and count their money now. They would see the usual figure on the advice slip inside the opaque envelope windows. Perhaps later, after he’d gone, they would check their money separately and not dare to tell the other their discovery, in case of jealousies, recriminations. But they would know. One hundred for Miss Fox. Five hundred for Bryant.

  Paid.

  Sandra walked into the shop, the new dress, in a smart pink and brown carrier bag, in her hand. She was late, but she didn’t care. Mr Chapman wasn’t back yet. Only the old cow, alone at the counter. She swung the carrier bag casually and met Mrs Cooper’s eyes.

  ‘You’re not going to walk back again?’ said Bryant belligerently. Then, placatingly, ‘Here, let me run you back in my car.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ And then, reshouldering his jacket and eyeing his watch, ‘You’ll be getting the rush from the school any minute.’

  ‘Get the bus back along the High Street,’ Miss Fox urged, looking confused.

  ‘Yes, maybe. You enjoy that weekend now. So long.’

  He took a last, curious glance around the shop. He’d never told them, Bryant or Miss Fox, that once he’d come here on the way home after school, for comics and liquorice sticks. Vincent was a fat, round-faced, jovial man – like some figure in a pack of ‘Happy Families’. Now his own name was over the door.

  He stepped out and up towards
the school, not down towards the High Street; and was aware of their eyes, inside, watching him helplessly, as if, as he left, he had turned the key in the door.

  ‘And what’s this then?’ said Mrs Cooper. Her hand was on the edge of the carrier bag, into which she had peered beadily, spotting the red dress.

  Down Russell Street. Steadily. The body is a machine. The sun fell on his back, sending a shadow out in front of him which gave his blunt and portly frame an air of sprightly elongation. Behind him they were coming out of school. Out through the mottoed iron gates. Blazers slung over shoulders, sleeves rolled; loose, restless limbs. They carried books and bags carelessly and had their uniforms adapted so as to keep in the fashion: wide-bottomed trousers – once it was tapered legs and sharp-toed shoes – and platform heels. They scuffed along by the railings, under the chestnut trees, loosening the blue and cream striped tie he had once worn. White shirts and blue blazers under dappled leaves. He let them pass him as if he were being overtaken in a race.

  ‘Nothing better to squander your money on?’ said Mrs Cooper.

  ‘Can spend it how I like, can’t I?’ said Sandra. She bent over the fridge, took out a can of Coca-Cola, pulled off the ring-tab and, as Mrs Cooper’s lips drew tighter, said coolly, ‘It’s all right, I’ll ring it up.’

  ‘Nothing but spend!’ Mrs Cooper said. She’d put a hand inside the carrier bag and was feeling the slippery material.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Sandra added, ‘I wasn’t really spending anything. More of a present.’ She tilted her head aloofly. ‘Mr Chapman gave me an extra twenty-five quid this morning. He said to buy a new dress with it.’

  She swallowed a gulp of Coke.

  ‘What did you say?!’ Mrs Cooper’s face was pale and contorted as if she were about to scream. ‘What?!’ She clutched the carrier bag and looked suddenly, with widening eyes, at the front of Sandra’s T-shirt as if she’d spotted the signal to attack.

  Not now, not now. Wait, watch. Look at what’s fixed.

  He was leaning with one hand on the railings beside the children’s playground. Someone said, ‘You all right?’ and held out a hand, and he said, ‘Yes,’ though it was difficult to speak. The common was as crowded as when he’d passed in the opposite direction. Children on the swings in the playground and under the willow beside the paddling pool. School-kids going home. Boys from John Russell meeting girls from Allandale and St Clare’s and sprawling on the grass. But none of this belonged to him. He felt cold in the sunlight.

  Not now. Breathe. Spire of St Stephen’s, dome of the Town Hall. Look at these things. I was an athlete once.

  The grass beside the playground was worn and thin. He lowered his head to stop the giddiness. Against the foot of the railings litter had blown and wedged itself. Cigarette packets, newspapers, sweet wrappers.

  Dorry, I sent you the £15,000. You’ll come.

  37

  They watched him cross by the traffic island and then disappear for a moment as he stepped onto the near pavement. It was almost four-thirty. He was walking in a shuffling, unsteady fashion, his sleeves rolled, his jacket draped loosely over one shoulder.

  Mrs Cooper gripped the edge of the counter. All things being normal, she would have been ready now, as he staggered in through the door, with her ‘I told you so’ and her ‘What did you expect?’, ready with her taunts and then, sitting him down, fussing round him, with her un-diminished devotion. But something had happened. She had torn apart the red dress. She had pulled and Sandra had pulled; and she had felt suddenly, in pulling, that it wasn’t a dress at all but Mr Chapman she was pulling, back and forth, in the most shameless way; and when it had ripped suddenly down the seam it was as though Mr Chapman had come apart, in the same flimsy fashion, and that was all there was left of him.

  ‘He never bought you this,’ she said.

  ‘ ’Ere, give it ’ere!’

  ‘Little liar! Little bitch!’

  Then Sandra had said those words, and her eyes had stung with tears.

  All things being normal, she might even have experienced a feeling of relief, of inexplicable pride, watching his lumbering frame returning across the High Street, still breathing, still living, the fool, like some winner at the finishing line. But all that had changed. She clung to the counter, to its worn wooden surface. How well she knew, after sixteen years, every lump, crack and ridge on that counter.

  Sandra sat erectly on her stool. The dress lay, almost torn in two, in the crumpled bag at her feet. But it was worth it. What did it matter, a new dress, a bit of flimsy colour? It was worth it to be able to say at last: ‘You’ll never have him.’

  He walked in at the door. It seemed for a moment that he might have blundered mistakenly into some shop that was no longer his own – or that he might see, behind the counter, some grotesque replica of himself confronting him. He had to concentrate, not only to recover his breath, but to overcome the sense of strangeness. Then he saw that something had happened. They were standing looking at him with the distinct stillness of people after there has been action.

  ‘Mr Chapman – you look dreadful.’

  Mrs Cooper spoke. Expected words. But she uttered them in a peculiar way, with neither anxiety nor reproof, as if she were merely mouthing a part.

  ‘I’ll be all right in a minute –’ he wheezed. ‘Must admit – overdone it a bit.’

  He lurched towards the counter. The little still tableau seemed suddenly to start into life again, as if by clockwork. Sandra, who was by the flap, lifted it for him but said nothing. He noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  ‘Be with you in a moment – just get my breath back.’

  He put a hand out to part the veil of plastic strips.

  Mrs Cooper, like some attentive valet, followed him mechanically into the stock room. He stood for a moment by the cardboard boxes, clutching the briefcase.

  ‘Here, let me. You sit down,’ Mrs Cooper said. The same old predictable phrases, but they no longer had that wheedling, abrasive tone. They were spoken almost with meekness.

  She took the briefcase and put it in its regular place, on top of the safe. Then she hung his jacket on the wooden hanger on the peg by the sink. She filled a glass of water from the tap. She seemed to be going through these simple motions in order to hide something.

  ‘Pill?’

  ‘Breast pocket,’ he said, not thinking – and then remembered, and looked on aghast. Standing by the sink, Mrs Cooper reached inside the pocket and pulled out, with the little phial of pills, the folded piece of light-blue notepaper. At any other time obsequiousness would not have prevented her, even in his presence, from opening it and quickly scanning the contents. But now she simply glanced at it incuriously without unfolding it and put it back where it had come from.

  She undid the bottle and tipped out a pill onto her left palm.

  ‘There.’

  She held out the glass in her right hand and the pill in her left, as if offering food to some unfriendly animal.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What a thing to do,’ she said as he took the pill. ‘What did you do that for?’ – but still in that subdued, unscolding tone. And she added softly, before turning and walking back into the shop:

  ‘You know, she won’t come back.’

  He sat for several minutes in the stock room, digesting Mrs Cooper’s words. They were the first words of hers in sixteen years that had actually penetrated him, pierced him with a sense that she was tuned to his secretest thoughts. But what struck him most was the manner in which they were said – as if their force applied to her; as if she herself were deserted, abandoned, and no longer pretended.

  He swallowed the pill. You were supposed to melt them in the mouth, not swallow them, but it didn’t matter.

  What had happened in his absence? He looked through the plastic strips to where Mrs Cooper and Sandra were dealing with a flurry of customers. They looked unnaturally busy, ignoring each other’s presence, like people who know they have d
one wrong.

  He drained his glass of water and, after rinsing his face and arms at the sink, shuffled, still breathless, back into the shop.

  ‘Everything – er – all right?’ he asked, standing by the plastic strips.

  ‘Yes – yes,’ Mrs Cooper replied.

  Sandra said nothing and scarcely turned. Why had she taken off her bra? It made her look vulnerable rather than provocative. There was a bag by her feet, a chocolate and pink carrier bag torn at the handle. As his eyes moved to it Mrs Cooper looked up helplessly. Then he understood. The whole history of the afternoon became clear to him: Sandra had bought the dress. It was in the carrier bag. Mrs Cooper had discovered, misinterpreted. There had been a fight.

  Suddenly he wanted to laugh. Did Mrs Cooper see – looking at him imploringly, as if he were about to punish her – that he really wanted to laugh?

  ‘Mrs Cooper, Sandra,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to shut the shop.’

  They looked up, lips parted.

  ‘I’m going to shut the shop at half-past five. You can leave early.’

  And not come back, thought Sandra.

  He no longer wants us, thought Mrs Cooper.

  The clock over the door stood at ten-past five.

  ‘I’m none too well, you can see that – I’m closing early.’

  They didn’t protest.

  ‘Sandra, before you go, would you mind doing the awning?’

  He took up his position at the counter. The evening rush had begun, and he started to flick the evening papers off the pile, fold them and hold them out, his hand cupped for the coins.

  ‘Much obliged. Thanking you.’

  You had to perform to the last. Even with a pain like an iron bolt in your chest.

  He watched Sandra outside on the pavement, struggling with the High Street awning. Her body was unavoidably on show as she reached with the pole, but – unlike Phil, displaying his strength in the morning – she seemed suddenly unnerved by the fact. When two youths, passing by, feinted a grab at her, she rounded on them almost menacingly.

  She re-entered the shop, slid the pole into its resting place and then stood, rubbing her palms on her skirt.