The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  ‘Is it all right then – if I go?’

  The clock showed only twenty-past – but it made no difference.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  No snapped interjection came from Mrs Cooper.

  Sandra lifted the flap in the counter and passed into the stock room. She returned with her shoulder bag and then, hesitating momentarily and lowering her eyes, stooped to pick up the tattered carrier bag. She lifted it, crumpling the paper tight and held it protectively over her bra-less breasts.

  Mrs Cooper’s hands scurried extra quickly over the piles of papers.

  ‘Right then –’

  ‘Okay Sandra. Have a good weekend.’

  ‘Oh – yeh.’ And she turned to the door.

  After she’d left, he couldn’t resist asking Mrs Cooper, ‘What was in that bag?’ And Mrs Cooper said, without meeting his eyes, ‘Oh, nothing important, I shouldn’t think.’

  They worked on in silence at the counter. He waited for her to say, true to form: ‘If you want to go home, Mr Chapman, it’s all right, I don’t mind, I’ll stay and close up.’ But she didn’t. When half-past came he said, ‘Off you go then,’ and she took off her shop coat and gathered her things without a murmur.

  ‘Tomorrow then, Mr Chapman.’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow.’

  Somehow it seemed they both knew they were pretending.

  She walked briskly to the door and only then did she pause.

  ‘Goodbye then.’

  ‘Goodbye Janet.’

  He had called her Janet.

  38

  Half-past five. It seemed as if he were making his escape. He had always known it would be like this. Tomorrow they would discover the fraud, the deception: the costume discarded, the things left untouched so as to make it seem nothing had changed.

  He watched Mrs Cooper lug her shopping bag across Briar Street and pass out of sight round the corner where Smithy’s pole had twirled. Then he lifted up the flap in the counter. There was a timely gap in the succession of customers. The pain in his chest gave little evil prods. He moved to the door, twisted round the plastic sign to ‘Closed’, released the latch and slipped across the two bolts at the top and bottom.

  There. It was done.

  He moved back to the counter. Now the ‘Closed’ sign was up and the door locked it seemed he was somehow shut off from the flow of the High Street. The noise of the homeward traffic, thickening on the near side of the road, seemed muted, and the cars and pedestrians passing by the window might have been moving in some vast sun-barred aquarium.

  He sat down on his stool. No need to hurry. Half-past five. They would be coming home now, in their hordes; work over, pleasure in store. Down at the station the trains would unload from Cannon Street and London Bridge; hot and crumpled commuters, sweaty and fidgety from the stifling carriages, but freed, at last. Across the road the Prince William would open its cool saloons to receive them. The landlord would be blessing the sunshine. Thirsty weather: good weather for trade. And along the High Street the shops which kept the normal hours would be closing. Business done: life begins. Simpson would count his cash. Powell would take in his trestles. In his wood-panelled office, behind the shading blinds and with the electric fan whirring on the filing cabinet, Hancock would lock away papers, give a terse good-night to his departing staff, and even though it was a warm, careless evening in June, would make sure his jacket was buttoned, his tie in place, his shoulders straight before leaving.

  He looked round at the crowded shelves of the shop. The cellophane wrappers crinkled, as ever, as under some invisible, covetous touch, and the toys dangling and perched in the Briar Street window seemed to jostle visibly, as if the plastic dolls, action-men and model knights in armour, whose promise was to be like the real thing, were actually about to come to life. He felt like a conjuror, amidst his tricks, for whom, alone, there is no illusion.

  He opened the till drawer. Everything must be done as normal. He pulled back the spring-clip over the five-pound notes and started to count.

  At Briar Street they would expect to call, as usual, walking up from the station, for their little trifles of tobacco and newsprint. But they would find the shop closed. Chapman – who never closed; who was always open, Sundays too, raking in the cash, which he never had time to spend; who was always there with your cigarettes or paper, as late as seven in the evening. They would rattle, annoyed, at the door and rap on the glass; and peering in they would see him, sitting in his usual place, still and unperturbed, like the statue of someone who had once been a shop-keeper. See – there was someone already, and another, looking at the ‘Closed’ sign as if it did not mean what it said and staring in, hand held over eyes, as into the cage of some unobliging pet. He raised a hand and moved it slowly in a lazy, indifferent wave. They would gather perhaps at the corner; try to force the door. And perhaps he should let them. Fling back the bolts. Let them swarm in to plunder and grab. Gorge themselves on sweets and ice-creams, fight over the boxes of Havanas. And he would sit motionless in the midst of the looting, as if, after they had emptied the shelves, they would set to work to dismantle his effigy.

  He lifted himself from the stool onto his feet. The pain seemed to rock inside him like a weight that would over-turn him. He steadied. Not now. But he wouldn’t take a pill. People were stopping now and then at the door and trying the handle but he took no notice of them. He started to count the one-pound notes, then the coins. Everything must be done as usual; everything must look the same. He carried the money in the little pink and blue bank bags and placed them inside the green cash tin inside the safe. Then he made a note of the figure inside the maroon cash book. These were actions he had carried out so many times that he could do them almost without thinking; and yet, this time, they seemed like unique operations, as if he hadn’t counted up and closed numberless times before. He shut the cash book. £92. Twenty years ago you would have been glad to take ten. He put the cash book in his briefcase and locked the safe. He had got the safe in ’49. There were scratch marks on its door and the black paint on the handle was worn away to the metal from years of opening and shutting. He went back into the shop; switched off the electric fan, checked the fridge, set the time switch for the display lights, put his hand down to the lever beneath the telephone which activated the burglar alarm – but then withdrew it. It didn’t matter now – they could break in and steal. The shop door was already fastened. He would leave by the rear door in the stock room. It led to a narrow passage which turned at a right angle into Briar Street. For some time he had meant to fit a better lock on it. But today it could be left unlocked. Once outside he could even throw away the keys. Toss them out into the swirl of the High Street.

  Someone else was rattling at the door, looking in and making pleading, desperate gestures. He took no notice. He looked at the counter and the shelves. Then he turned his back on the shop and passed through the plastic strips. Best to go by the back. Actors slip out by back-exits, leaving their roles on the stage. He moved to the wash basin to rinse his hands and comb his hair. He expected to see for a moment, in the mirror, the face of a young man, unchanged, with a thirties stiff collar and a waistcoat.

  He put on his jacket, took up his briefcase and then opened the rear door. He walked along the passage-way, where, here and there, tufts of grass and dandelions grew in the cracks in the concrete, then out, across the wide pavement, by the cinema adverts, to the car.

  The car was drawn up, half on the pavement, pointing away from the High Street. Normally he drove down Briar Street, avoiding the awkward U-turn out into the main road. But it didn’t matter now. Normally he didn’t shut at half-past five; normally he didn’t walk to Pond Street. A sudden exhilaration came over him. He took a packet of cigars from under the dashboard and lit one. The doctor had warned. Then he swung out, in a break in the traffic, into Briar Street and out into the queue of cars in the High Street.

  He did not look back. Not at the front window, with his name, in blue and
gold, emblazoned above; nor at the door, at which they were still tapping and rattling perhaps, trying to discern him within. No, there was no longer a sweet shop owner.

  The sun shone from the direction of the town hall, dazzling on car bonnets and in the glass frontages where Simpson’s and Hobbes’ had already shut shop. Only the Diana was open, dilatorily serving out limp salads and milk-shakes, the manager chasing flies behind the counter. The traffic moved slowly, in two lanes, down towards Allandale Road and the traffic lights by the common. Always congested at this time; both directions. Drivers were propped on elbows against open windows, holding up idle arms and drumming irritably with their fingers on car roofs. A motor-cyclist revved impatiently. And on the pavement the pedestrians walked with that peculiar agitation of people travelling home from work on a Friday evening. Why did they look so intent, so vexed, when, up above, the lime trees shone, green-gold, in the sun?

  His foot rocked on the pedals as he crept forward in the line of cars. They were drinking in the Prince William as he passed. Through the open saloon doors he was half prepared to glimpse the big, ornate french windows, the beer garden.

  Past the Prince William. Past the Council buildings where once the baths had been where Dorry swam. He placed his left hand on his chest as he drew up again for the lights, and blew the blue cigar smoke, painfully pleasant, out of his mouth. Common on the left, criss-crossed with paths.

  What was the name of that thesis you were writing, Dorry? ‘Romantic Poetry and the Sense of History’? And now you are living with a historian. What do you learn from history, Dorry? Was it history that made you come and plunder your father’s house? Or the opposite? Did you want to escape history, to put it all behind you – me, her, those twenty-odd years in that house? To have your moment, your victory at last, with one wild gesture? But – don’t you see? – it’s the moment (framed in the doorway with your heavy box of loot) that captures you.

  And have you escaped history, down there in Bristol? Found new life? Encumbered with all those things of hers, encumbered with the money I sent you (that money, which was only converted history). Don’t you see, you’re no freer than before, no freer than I am? And the only thing that can dissolve history now is if, by a miracle, you come.

  39

  He turned into Leigh Drive. He had put on the car radio. The weather man was saying, in apologetic tones, that rain was expected for the morning. But along the curving pavements, the sycamores and rowan trees were stirring blithely in the deepening sun. Earlier homecomers were already out, in shaded front gardens, watering flowers and trimming edges. Mr Norris, in number twenty-eight, knobbly-kneed in long khaki shorts, like a dauntless colonial. Mr Dixon, in number thirty, with a pair of shears.

  He drove onto the crazy paving of the garage drive and stopped. The neighbours, with their clippers and hoses, would look up, seeing the cream coloured Hillman, and think, ‘He’s early’; and then continue their tasks. ‘Don’t blame him, on an evening like this.’ They would see his usual stout figure stepping from the car; but they wouldn’t see the pain swelling inside his ribs. Mr Dixon waved. He got out, the engine running, to unlock the garage. The metal handles were hot to touch and as he pulled open the heavy doors he had to gauge the effort carefully. Not now. He returned to the car, drove it into the garage, emerged again with his briefcase, and shut, laboriously, the two doors. Then he walked along the path by the bay window and the hydrangeas to the front door.

  Outside, all was clear, obvious. Inside he seemed to enter a submerged, aqueous world in which the past was embedded like sunken treasure. He’d drawn all the curtains in the morning to keep the house cool; and he moved now, slowly, like a diver with heavy boots, through a shady, flickering world, shot with eddies and swirls of light, where the sun found its way through chinks or penetrated dimly, as into the hollows of a wreck, through the rippled curtains. He hung his jacket over the post at the foot of the stairs and put his briefcase in the usual place beside the umbrella stand. The ticking barometer-clock, the photographs on the wall loomed through the ooze, and as he opened the door into the living-room, the polished cabinets, one for china, one for glass, the green baize on the oval table, the spiralling stem of the standard lamp swam into view, as if he were really discovering, let down in his diving suit, a world left long ago, miraculously preserved. ‘See, things remain.’

  He crossed to the french windows and drew back the beige curtains, so that the murky relics inside were suddenly raised once more into the fresh, familiar light of the present. Should he redraw them? Was it more fitting to return to the veiled museum-world? But he kept them open. The lilac was half within the shadow of the house, but its upper leaves, where the mauve cones had already bloomed and died, fluttered in the sunshine. He opened the quarter lights of the window so that the sound of lawn-mowers, clippers, a smell of cut grass trickled in on the breeze.

  She could never get enough air. Or was it that air assailed her?

  He turned round again to face the room. The clock on the mantelpiece showed half-past six. Its hands might have stopped for ever at that position, like a clock rescued from some catastrophe, recording the exact moment of disaster. But not yet, not yet.

  Normally, when he returned from the shop he would change his clothes, eat the meal that Mrs Pritchard left, prepared but uncooked, in the kitchen, wash up, sit at the table and make up his books – or, on an evening like this, potter gently in the garden. But there was no need of those things now. He had been lifted clear, it seemed, of that frame of routine that had been built around him, able to see it at last like some visitor from outside. So that his feet led him to wander now, with the immunity of a ghost, round this deserted monument of a house.

  He climbed the stairs. Each step cost an effort. Yet he could almost encourage the pain now. He passed into the bedroom, gloomy behind the drawn curtains; into Dorry’s room – lingering several minutes; into the spare bedroom with its long, quilt-covered trunk. He ran his eyes diligently over objects, like a curator making a final tour before the gallery is locked.

  It is all here, Dorry. Locked in little mementos, fixed in little tokens of the past. As if its only purpose were to be saved for this final glance.

  He opened the heavy lid of the trunk. This required concentration. His hands reached down to a red tin box, hidden beneath other boxes full of objects wrapped in tissue-paper and old newspaper.

  You never delved this far when you came. Did I prevent you? These are the letters she wrote to me when I was a quartermaster’s clerk in Hampshire and she worked at the Food Office. How good we always were at minding the store. How well we’ve kept everything. Up till now.

  His eyes studied the worn envelopes, with the addresses crossed out, several times, for re-use, and the red stamps with the head of George VI. But he didn’t open the folded notepaper.

  Sometimes, in museums, Dorry, you think what you see isn’t real. And these (he took another batch of envelopes from the tin box), these are all your letters from college – when you would write just to me and not to her.

  The china shepherd and shepherdess on the dressing-table still anticipated their embrace. He wasn’t aware how many times he slipped from one room to another, inspecting their silent contents. Was it to make sure all was complete, secure? To summon life from those unmoving objects? To laugh at their fraudulence? Perhaps he was already sitting, motionless himself, in the armchair where he’d decided he would sit, and it was only some shadow of himself, touching but not touching these frozen items of stock, who drifted now – out of his daughter’s room – onto the landing at the top of the stairs.

  I don’t believe in ghosts, Dorry. But sometimes, alone in this house, I’ve thought she’s watching me, her moist eyes stalking me still, ensuring that I keep all just as it was. Perhaps she’s watching me now. Is her face set, Dorry, in that old tenacity? Or smiling? Or torn with remorse? And what does she want now, watching over me? Is she saying: Forget her, Willy? Or is she hoping, too – you will co
me?

  He grasped the bannister to descend. His head swam, looking down. Don’t fall. He came down, gingerly at first, then more rapidly. No more precautions. He picked up his jacket from the stair-post. He moved across the hall, not looking at the photographs on the wall. The needle in the barometer pointed to ‘Change’.

  In the living-room he eyed the clock as if there were some deadline.

  Twenty-past seven. You wouldn’t come till after my normal time for getting in.

  The shadow had crept further up the lilac tree. Bryant would have closed, an hour ago, at Pond Street. Miss Fox would be on her way to Broadstairs. Sandra would be home – trying on again that new dress? Mrs Cooper would have opened her pay-packet at last, and discovered, beside her normal wage, the five hundred pounds.

  He moved to the armchair by the standard lamp, turning it to face the window, and sat down. Though he sat, the pain didn’t diminish. Her shawl was draped where it had always been, over the head-rest. He held his jacket in his lap. When she died she was waiting for me to come.

  He looked out at the lilac and the sun-flecked garden.

  I always liked gardening, Dorry. If I hadn’t been a shop-keeper I’d have been a gardener. Arranging the flower beds was like arranging the sweets in the shop window. I never knew if she liked gardens too. She wouldn’t come outside, because of her asthma. Though she used to sit watching me intently, from the window, mowing the grass, tending the flowers. But perhaps she preferred all those lifeless, lasting things: cut glass, willow-pattern plates, vases with pictures of flowers, not real flowers, on them. And she left them to me, as you can’t leave real flowers, as her memorial.

  The clock chimed half-past seven. The pain rose in his chest so that his face, always so wooden, so expressionless, might have been convulsed and torn.

  Memorials. They don’t matter. They don’t belong to us. They are only things we leave behind so we can vanish safely. Disguises to set us free. That’s why I built my own memorial so compliantly – the one she allotted me, down there in the High Street. A memorial of trifles, useless things. And what will you do with my memorial, Dorry?