The Sweet-Shop Owner

by Graham Swift

  And what was he doing out there? Signing the delivery man’s pink pad and slipping him – what was that for? – a pound tip?

  He entered again, puffing, carrying the last of the treasure chests. His face was like a red balloon.

  Yes, she thought, seeking the source of that invisible smile. It must have been beauty.

  7

  Sit back Willy; drink your tea, rest your head, if you like, on my lap (he did not hear, there in the autumn evening by the french windows, but what did he ever hear of those inward commands, spoken to soothe her own nerves?). You’re tired. Think of nothing, listen to the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. All day at the shop; and two visits, twice in two months, to the grave-side. Rest your head. Sometimes I see in your face that little hidden smile, far behind it all, as if you don’t mind, as if you’ll play your part, laugh at the joke. How that pleases me. And yet sometimes, like now, when you’re tired, it goes out, that tiny flicker of laughter, as if you’d said, no, it’s not a joke, things must happen; I’ll have what is mine. How stern you look then, how earnest. How frightened you make me. There, be still. Listen to the clock. Relight the flame.

  How little you know me, Willy. How little you know of that young girl (I wasn’t yet fourteen) who looked at herself once in the bedroom mirror – the spring night was warm and I’d slipped off my cotton nightdress – and knew that she was beautiful. You think that’s what every young girl wants? Something to rejoice over? I had eyes like blue embers and little breasts that pointed at me. But it’s not like that. It’s like being chosen. It’s like being told (that other figure, in the mirror, seemed to tell me): You’re special. You must cherish your gift.

  That was in ’27. I was young. All I knew was that Father had a business and my elder brothers were going to go into it; and that my mother’s brothers (how Mother egged Father on in that business of his) had all been killed, one, two, three of them, in a war I was too young to recall. I pictured them like skittles, those would-be uncles of mine. Uncle Mark, Uncle Philip, Uncle Edward. Bright painted skittles, all suddenly knocked down (it said in the Book of Remembrance they were ‘fallen’). And later I learnt – it was a common fact so nobody mentioned it – that everywhere there had been knocking down, great gaps and holes everywhere, families with only one or two skittles left standing.

  But that was in the past. They talked of Trade and Opportunity, Recovery, the Fruits of Peace. They wanted to forget history. They wanted new life. And when in the school holidays I returned from little educational outings with my girl-friends, to Greenwich, to the Crystal Palace, I felt the eyes of men in the High Street, still standing skittles, waiting at tram queues and outside pubs, turn to look at me. Life, their eyes said, and I felt their message lap around me like waves.

  Drink your tea. Be still, think of nothing. It was like something allocated in error, that image in the mirror. When I walked down the High Street with my girl-friends, Joan Proctor, Betty Marshall, Carol Smith, all of whom had thankful little marks of plainness, little blemishes and flaws which relieved them of responsibility, I knew I couldn’t laugh out loud, giggle and squeal like them. I held my head and shoulders stiffly like a puppet. They called me ‘beautiful and proud’, sulky, hard-to-please, and they blamed me all the more because, having beauty, I should also have grace. But they didn’t see how I cowered inside my looks like a captive, how my looks didn’t belong to me, and how, when they thought me haughty and peevish (what else could they think, seeing only what I saw in the mirror?) I was really helpless and afraid.

  My family nursed my beauty like a rare plant. For it had its uses after all. They set me up into a little emblem, carried me before them like a banner, so they could say, Look, even beauty is on our side. And I knew I was responsible. Father would come home, tired and indignant-looking, in the evening. He was indignant because there was going to be a Labour government. He wore heavy coats, and a scarf wrapped tightly round his neck as if he were always cold or ill (though it was Mother who had the chest trouble) and his face was set and lined as if nothing was more weighty, more pressing than the burdens he bore. Yet he would look at me as if the sight restored him. Mother would say, ‘Look your best for Father’, and when I became a certain age she bought me new under-clothes, a little white shapeless brassière like a pair of ribbons, and spoke to me earnestly and sharply, yet never quite plainly, of girls needing to be pure, of the duty of keeping one’s purity. I never quite knew what it meant: purity. Perhaps it had something to do with the clean white sheets my family laundered – ‘Pure’ it said on the handouts given to customers and stuck in windows, ‘All your laundry fresh and pure’. Perhaps it had something to do with those dead brothers of my mother, engraved on the white war memorial. ‘Their deaths have purified them,’ somebody said of all those skittles. I only knew it was another of those things they looked to me for – pure, beautiful – and which I couldn’t provide.

  A second cup? Let me pour you a second cup – I’ll put it near. Lean back. I’ll stroke your brow – no, don’t look at me. Lightly, lightly. There. That’s better. You are already beginning to look again as you did on the common when I said, ‘Why don’t you?’ – and straight away, you did.

  How different you are from my family, Willy, from Jack and Paul. Their bodies are agile and eager, their faces keen and lifted, and yet they are stiffer, stiffer and hollower than you, with your woodenness and your glum expression. They have the looks of statues, trapped in immovable poses, and they already show signs of Father’s indignation. They think a lot of purity. On the wall in the office, over the laundry, someone has pinned the motto ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ and they do not see it as a joke.

  There are wicked types, said my mother. Her face was always harsh. Wicked things; better you should never know. But that didn’t stop her, or the rest of them, when the time came, from giving their encouragement to Hancock. He was a good sort, they said. He drank with Paul and Jack at the Sports Club. He was good at squash and tennis and drove a green Riley Lynx. And, what was more important, old Jones had taken him in; old Jones who’d served us well and had a sound business and couldn’t work on much longer. No, they didn’t discourage Frank Hancock. He was tall, springy-stepped, with the air of a participant in some competition. He took me out like a boy on his best behaviour, as if I should reward him in some way. And when he pulled me into the hedge on the way back from a drive to Brighton (how sickly the grass smelt and the stems of cow-parsley) I did not assume it was wickedness at first. He looked at me as if I should have expected this. He pulled up my clothes like a man unwrapping a parcel. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, now’, as if we had both been anticipating. I struggled. The sun was in my face. This was like a performance in which people were really stabbed and wounded. He needed his victory. And afterwards, in the green Riley – it was a careless evening in June with sunlight through trees – his face, watching the road, terrified me. I only knew I wasn’t prepared. Life, life.

  Lie still Willy. Don’t look up. Think of nothing.

  I spoke to Mother. I used the coy evasions she would have used. ‘He was not good to me.’ ‘What nonsense,’ she said, ‘a nice young man like Frank’ (for old Jones had just been visited by the doctor). And I knew I’d failed them. And not only them, but myself. For I couldn’t go near the grass or lounge in the sunlight without suffering. I had my first asthma that summer. I was scared I was pregnant, but I wasn’t. My eyes were red, my breath strained. Father looked displeased; how it spoilt my looks. And down at the Sports Club Paul and Jack played squash with Hancock and stood him beers (because he always won) and said what a fine fellow he was. I went out with him again in his green Riley, with preparatory handkerchiefs tucked in my sleeves. I knew what he wanted, with his lean sportsman’s body and his prize-seeker’s eyes: the figure in my bedroom mirror. But it wasn’t mine to give. I even felt sorry for him, that fine fellow who couldn’t get the thing he wanted. How innocent maybe he was. Oh, I restrained him. I learnt th
ere is a sort of command in beauty even though inside you wobble like a skittle. Lie still Willy. Though it only perhaps encouraged him all the more, that disdain. How you pay, Willy, even for the things you never own.

  ‘What nonsense.’ I had refused to see Hancock again. I lay in my room struggling for breath. ‘Ungrateful!’ they said. ‘Pull yourself together! What will Frank do? What nonsense!’ There in my bedroom mirror I saw almost with relief the red blotches on my skin, and watched my face contort as I gasped for air. I locked the door. Their voices insisted outside. Then one day I smashed the mirror.

  Don’t move. Think of nothing.

  They called in the doctor. Lie still, he said. And they sent me to a Home in Surrey where they talked to me and nodded gravely over me and finally left me sitting by myself in a chair.

  They didn’t visit me at the Home. They came there once to admit me (Jack drove, in the black Humber, and they gave me discreet, do-as-you’re-told kisses) and once to discharge me. I sat in a grey easy chair by the window with my feet on a floor that was polished twice daily. I lifted my legs for the orderly to wield his mop and he swept on around me, so that I was marooned. But I didn’t move. Outside there were lawns, a gravel drive, two rows of clipped yews, rose beds, a red brick wall with wrought iron gates. So neat, so symmetrical. It didn’t belong to me, none of it. But I watched the gardener, with the mower, and the rake, and then with the shears and ladder for the yew trees. He had baggy trousers, braces, a red face, and as he worked (I couldn’t hear, but I saw his lips draw in and his cheeks expand) he whistled. Patients in striped bath-robes and ill-fitting jackets, for whom his garden meant nothing, for whom there was fire in the rose beds, havoc in the crunching gravel, mooched by, but he worked on, asking no questions. First one yew tree then the next. Was I really ill, Willy? I was concentrating hard so that the orderly wouldn’t sink through his shiny floor and the gardener wouldn’t slip from his ladder. I was responsible. How still but determined I sat, marooned in my easy chair. The gardener had almost finished the yew trees and the orderly had swept the floor for perhaps the twentieth time when they said I could go. I had found my balance, struck my bargain. ‘You are better,’ they said. ‘Better?’ I said. My things were packed in a brown suitcase and I put on my hat, tucking my hair under the rim like a woman who means to get her way. The orderly smiled (he was fond of me), ‘Nice to see you well again, Miss’; but I didn’t smile. I looked at him coldly: for there could be no question, not now. And beyond the lawns, beyond the brick wall, they were coming – I was ready for them – in the black, shiny Humber, Jack at the wheel, Paul by his side, Mother and Father in the back, with their heads erect and their hands, clean as marble, protruding from their cuffs. Down the Surrey lane, eyes watching the flashing trees. They would be coming soon. I was a skittle, Willy, but I wouldn’t fall. The gleaming car would turn through the wrought iron gates. Its tyres would crunch on the gravel.

  There, be still. You must rest your back. I’ll put on the light; no, don’t stir. How little you know how you’ve kept my balance.

  They brought me home. There were little shows of reconciliation. Father bought me a dress, my brothers perfume. They said, ‘Are you better?’ as to a child that has ceased its tantrums, and I said, ‘Yes,’ without smiling. But their verdict was firm and business-like. She has let us down once, she may let us down again; we cannot afford that embarrassment. So when you appeared, Willy, you were the perfect solution. What justice, what neatness. Let her have that little man. He’s as simple as she’s cracked and she’ll wish soon enough she’d settled for Hancock. And if he thinks he’s walking into money, he’ll regret it when he learns how cracked she is. They even bought me the house and gave me a settlement, half in cash, half in shares. For their own guilt in disposing of me had to be paid for, and the greater the payment the more stainless their conscience. What justice. The perfect solution. But they didn’t see how you would be my solution and how it was they who would lose.

  How peaceful the evening is. Your head in my lap. There, look up now: see what you’ll always see if you never claim it. Only an image in a mirror, remember? What poise, what balance, Willy, this room, this moment. Nothing must be touched, nothing must be changed.

  Had he slept? He woke out of a dream in which the objects in the room seemed to loom triumphantly – the chintz chairs, the clock on the mantelpiece, the pink and blue bordered cups in one of which there was tea he had forgotten to drink, the standard lamp with its spiralled stem. As if time had passed, years, and it was long after, and they seemed to be saying, those familiar objects, ‘See, we endured; things remain.’ But there she was; her face was above his, lit by the standard lamp and turned to one side. What loveliness. It was her lap in which his head rested, her hand which lay on his hair, and she was reading the newspaper, folded on the arm-rest of the sofa. She had noticed his eyes opening and her own had turned, widened, enjoined (what jewels!), as if they did the work of a finger to her lips – Don’t stir, don’t spoil the trick. ‘You slept,’ she said, moving her gaze at once away from his, back to the paper, as though ignoring something, some mystery perhaps too delicate to probe. And later she said, her eyes still on the paper: ‘There will be a war, Willy.’

  Mrs Cooper watched him, standing like a sentry, at his counter. She’d worked once before in a shop. It was a book shop. Saturdays only, before the war. She was only seventeen. She’d wanted the book-seller to make a pass at her. She’d climbed up the steps in her new silk stockings to the top shelves. But nothing had happened.

  8

  War? What war?

  He had lost his balance on a pair of ladders, fallen off and damaged his back. They wouldn’t take him for a soldier. He wouldn’t have the opportunity, as they put it, to ‘see action’. Such a strange phrase and such an odd notion – as if there were no action besides wars. Strange as that other phrase which would be repeated, now, over and over again, like the little deft stroke with which a seal is stamped: fallen, fallen in action.

  Left, right. They were marching over the crunching gravel, past the rows of black Nissen huts, past the wire fencing, the white flag-pole, making patterns for the sergeant, left, right. There was grass beyond the wire fencing, the tussocked downs of Hampshire, twittering skylarks, scudding spring clouds. April, 1940. And some of those khaki figures out on the gravel fitted uneasily into the pattern making. Left, right. What did it have to do with ‘action’, this drill, this answering by numbers and naming of parts? What was the connection? And, see, one of them in the front rank as they halted, waiting to move off again, teetered forward on his toes, almost toppled, so that the sergeant could bawl – his favourite line – ‘Dohn anticipate the ordaah!’

  He watched from the side window, amid the smells of webbing, waterproofing and polish. For though they hadn’t taken him for a soldier they’d given him a uniform: sent him his papers, examined him, made sly quips – ‘How did you get your back, soldier?’ – ‘Fell off some step-ladders’ – asked curt questions – ‘Civilian occupation?’ – ‘Shop-keeper’ – and by some unerring logic (they too didn’t doubt he was the shop-owner, the trader of wares) assigned him to: Royal Engineers, Carbury Camp, Stores. The others would see action – those there through the window were being prepared for action – but his duty would be Issue of Equipment – packs, blankets, pouches, helmets, all numbered, allocated, entered up in the record sheet, stamped, checked. What was the connection?

  ‘Squad Halt! Squad Shun! Squaaad!’ Patterns over the gravel. ‘That man! Dohn anticipate the ordaah!’

  And now they must do their bit.

  ‘Sergeant! Have your men assemble with kit bags.’

  ‘Squaad!’

  Right! One at a time, keep the line moving, look sharp. Blanket, ground sheet, move along, waterproof cape, back-pack, side-packs, two, steel helmet – make it fit or change yer ’ed – with netting, move along, webbing straps, bayonet sheath, water-bottle, keep it moving – that man, pick up that bleedin’ ’elmeht! />
  ‘Thank you Sergeant, carry on.’

  ‘Sh-holdah kit bags! Lehf!… Lehf …’ Over the crunching gravel.

  *

  He didn’t mind the orders, the regimentation. He was a performer, wasn’t he? Give him the uniform, tell him what to do, he’d do it. And it was easy to pretend to be a soldier. To salute, to obey, to clomp one’s black heels, even with a limp, over the wooden barrack-hut floor. And see, he dealt as before (how consistent fate was) with items, with things stacked and piled and arranged in long rows under the curved roof of the store block; with lists, inventories (the carbon from the duplicated Army forms came off on your hands along with the blanco from old webbing), stock lists, issue lists, delivery lists. There was a counter, wooden and scoured by continual use (but the Quartermaster made them polish it every day) from behind which you watched the faces entering and passing, passing, keeping the line moving. They never seemed to stop, and you remembered them only by the numbers you recorded on the forms: 120 capes, 120 helmets, 240 side-packs.

  ‘There,’ said Private Rees, from Swansea, sallow-faced and listless, removing his gold-rimmed glasses and squinting at them (for that was his reason for not seeing action), ‘There’s another lot done.’

  And up the road they were coming already, the next lot, in the canvas-topped lorries, past the flashing leaves, past the striped pole by the guard-house, waiting to be made into soldiers.

  ‘Right!’ snapped the sergeant. ‘Now lissen-a-me. Look after your kit. Remember: what you ’ave don’t belong to you. When the war’s over the army’ll want it bloody back!’

  They badgered him and Rees, and the other stores clerks, because they were safe. And the rest would go and fight. They slept in their own quarters for those permanently on camp but they mixed in the mess hall with the passers-through for Issue of Kit and Basic Training. Private Rees would not be drawn. ‘Bugger off,’ he said, ‘Tell them to bugger off, Willy boy.’ But he said (did they think he was stupid?): ‘Someone has to mind the store.’