The Sweet-Shop Owner (6 page)

Trams were passing in the High Street, full again in the late afternoon. People were going home, faces hot, collars loosened, calling in for their papers and evening cigarettes. ‘No, sorry – sold out of ices.’ But Powell too had sold out of watercress. Trains were unloading. Homegoers were dispersing down the pavements, past the open doors of the Prince William which sent out a cool, inviting waft of beer, and up over the common. The evening sun was making them come alive, and there – was it in the breeze, in the scent of the grass over the common, in the swing perhaps of a summer dress? – a glimpse of something, slipping away, as in the depths of a forest.

He turned round the sign from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’. Checked the windows, checked the till, checked the locks. How many times, how many times? He was young then. He carried his jacket over his shoulder. He didn’t need
braces to hoist his trousers and his cheeks were not mottled with red. Only the limp to show that he was no longer all that he was. For once he’d been good at running. Over the common, up the Rise, into Leigh Drive. And there she was, opening the front door, ready to take his jacket and case and the evening paper and to give him a smile, like the scattering of coins.

‘Good day?’

This was a sort of code.

‘Four pounds. And I sold out of lemonade.’

Clomp, clomp. Who was that banging into the shop as if he owned it? It was Hancock, ducking his six feet under the door, raising one of his long, elastic arms to fish for his wallet, and leaning forward in a sinuous, confidential way as he asked for cigarettes. ‘Thought you should know. Old Jones died last night. We all knew, didn’t we? Funeral Saturday, already fixed. Shame.’ He pocketed the cigarettes and patted the wallet on his palm. ‘Mrs Chapman all right?’ He looked round the shop. There was a gleam in his eye. ‘Great friend of the Harrisons, old Jones. Poor feller didn’t want to stop work.’ He patted the wallet a second time, turning to go. ‘Thought you ought to know.’

Clomp, clomp. What was that? Another death? Yes. The noise of the earth falling on his father’s coffin. August, 1938. And again, clomp, a month later, on Mother’s. As if they’d said, All right, that’s enough – you first, I’ll follow. As if they’d done it all in time: lived to see their son come into money and marry a beautiful woman; to dance on his wedding night round the living-room. What rejoicing. She did nothing, Mother, in that final month. Only dug out the will which left it all to her – for a month – and made up her own – which left it all to him. You touch nothing. The sun shone at both their funerals, making the white graves in the cemetery sparkle like wedding cakes. Irene stood beside him with her black gloves and black
handbag and a black hat with a veil. She took his arm to steady him. And did she see, behind her veil, standing there so firm, that he was no longer all he was?

Clomp. What was that? Only the piles of morning papers, tied with string, being dumped at the door by the lad from the van. He lifted the bundles onto the counter, cut the string, and there, on the appropriate page, were the notices: Jones, Arthur Russell, August 2nd; Chapman, George William, August 16th; Chapman, Edith, September 24th. The neatness of the columns. Deaths, marriages. The black and whiteness of memorials. He hadn’t wanted it in the papers. What sham. But she’d said, it was the thing to do: do it.

Sunlight fell on the piles of papers, on his hands smudged by that same neat print. And what were the headlines then? In September, 1938?

‘WILL GERMANY MARCH?’

‘Ah! The ice-cream, Mrs Cooper.’ He looked out through the window. ‘Wouldn’t do to run out on a day like this.’

The blue and cream company’s van had pulled up at the kerb outside and the driver was emerging with his pad of pink receipts and invoices and his blue carbon paper.

‘Let me,’ she said, turning on her heel. But ‘No, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘You manage here’ (for it was not quite nine and they were coming in thick and fast on their way to work).

‘Lovely weather.’

‘Gorgeous.’

And there he went, in his grey nylon jacket, dodging an incoming customer, out onto the pavement to help the man with his smoking, hoary cartons of ice-cream. Sprightly enough, with his limp, and his heart, and his
dumb expression. But he shouldn’t do it (she thumped at the till); what would she do if something happened? Couldn’t she help?

He re-entered bearing three cartons, followed by the delivery man bearing five.

What a fool he was, bringing in the stuff himself, as if it were some sort of precious treasure, and not ice-cream to sell on a hot summer’s day; opening the black lid of the fridge, making room for the new cartons, taking out two loose choc-ices and juggling them – there, up and down – in his hands. Him and his tricks. He turned to go out for more boxes. And she gave him a stare, with the full vulture-like force of her amber spectacles. You shouldn’t: it’ll kill you. But what was he doing, staring back at her, blindly, wiping the cold moisture from the fridge off his hands? Smiling was it? Though his face never moved. Smiling though he wasn’t smiling, so that she was obliged to offer back a great, snarling flash of her teeth (which were not her own) and to feel stupid for it afterwards.

He returned and went out again. What a fool he was, prancing about on the pavement, climbing up into the back of the delivery van and hopping down again, as if he were only a kid.

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.

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 there 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.