The Sweet-Shop Owner (10 page)

12,840 helmets, 25,700 packs. When she wrote now from London she added at the foot of her letters numbers of her own. 4,000, 5,000 ration books. Was it the same code? ’43, ’44. History was drawing up its inventory. And out there, beyond the wire fencing, beyond the outspread downs, overseas, actions were being fought which would claim a special place in that inventory. Could you believe it? It was the same placid scene – chalk downs, may trees, dappled English fields – over which the bombers flew, yet it was not the same; like the ravaged, bomb-scarred streets of London – the same London yet not the same. What was the connection? What war? What action?

Yet here, in April ’44, was proof at last of action, here was official evidence.

He held in his hands a simple letter. He held it before him looking at it as if it were a code.

‘Dear Willy, Mother and Father have had a telegram from the Admiralty. Jack’s ship was sunk on the homeward convoy. There were no survivors.’

Click. What you have doesn’t belong to you.

‘Hey, what’s up?’ said Rees.

Why did he weep? Why did he put his head in his hands and feel tears smear his palms, coming back in the car from St Stephen’s church? Ahead of them (he could see if he looked through his fingers) drove Mr and Mrs Harrison in the black, shining Humber. Why had he trembled as they stood lined in the pew? Mr Harrison had
shed no tears. His face was grey and dumb and held in suspense as if he couldn’t make some connection. Even the memorial tablet – a plain slab with black lettering which they’d hurriedly had made – seemed to confound him. No flags, no marble muskets, no white tomb where the knight might lie, pure in his armour, his sword blessed and at rest. Twice he leant on Irene’s arm during the service, while she looked before her, her features demure yet griefless, like some pale heroine’s; and Mrs Harrison, on the other side, coughed and muttered once, ‘Poor Paul.’

Why did he weep? Why did he sob into his hands? And why did she look at him as she took off her black hat, her black gloves, eyeing him warily, circumspectly, as if there were something she hadn’t done for him?

‘Where’s that child?’ demanded Mrs Cooper, looking at the clock and then at Mr Chapman, though he didn’t return her urgency.

It was half-past ten. She always called Sandra, the girl Mr Chapman had taken on since the start of his heart trouble, ‘that child’; out of contempt for her seventeen years, her free looks, the way she flaunted her little body, even to customers in the shop, and out of a sneaking suspicion, perhaps, that Mr Chapman had hired her for just those things. Where was she? She was supposed to start at nine. Out all night, no doubt, with one of her hot-fingered boy-friends. Always late the next morning as if to advertise it. Up in the cinema car-park, in a back seat, long after the performance had finished, or in that place – now the weather was hot – near the sports ground, by the old allotments, where the orchard had been before the war. You could hear the couples, they said, in the grass, behind the fence, if you walked late along that footpath.
Yes, she knew what Sandra Pearce got up to. Coming in the next day, bold as brass, two hours late, and just daring you to say: ‘And where have you been?’

She rubbed her nose and straightened a crooked stack of magazines. She glanced at Mr Chapman, pressing her point, but he merely shrugged. He wasn’t bothered, oh no. He should have sacked the girl weeks ago. No wonder he couldn’t manage his own daughter.

She huffed. That child. But she remembered – taking out some new
Reveilles
from below the counter and counting them – how he had touched her, Terry Cooper, in the dark, that night. It was in the air-raid shelter. First on the arm and then on the knee. Bombs were falling outside, slithering through the sky like tiles; and a man was touching her in the dark. Mum and Grandpa feet away. His fingers were inside her blouse. That was action, that was excitement; something was happening in her life. And later he had married her, fathered two louts on her, then upped and gone. And now, the years had passed – she lifted the magazines onto the counter – and she didn’t want action any more, only peace.

Irene wrote: ‘Dear Willy, Father went again to the doctor’s today. Mother made him. His heart’s no better. He’s been told to stop work completely and rest, but of course he won’t. The laundry is losing money. I think he believes nothing will be salvaged out of it after the war unless he stays on personally. He talks of “saving the business”. Then again, he says it isn’t the money – “Money won’t bring Jack back”. It’s a matter of principle. I don’t know what he means by principle. I’ve never known him distinguish principle from money before. Anyway, he won’t stop work. He upsets Mother. He wants
to make her responsible for everything. And he makes demands of me, wants me by him. Well he’s ill, it’s not like earlier in the war. I try to be patient. But I won’t have any part in the laundry – that’s his affair. I’ll stick to the Food Office. He’s not going to be penniless anyway, even if the business folds. And most of that money was never his in the first place. Perhaps this is the time to tell you. It came from Mother, and she would never have had it herself if it wasn’t for her three brothers being killed. That’s how the laundry was started. It can’t have all gone. You don’t make money in a war, but there’s not so much to spend it on either. I know for a fact he put a large sum into Government stock when the war started, in order to do his bit, and he swears he’ll never touch it again now Jack’s dead. Perhaps that’s “principle”. Well, we’ll see. It’s hard to know what his reasons are, the way he behaves. You should have seen him shout at Mother for insisting he went to the doctor’s, and later, apparently, he had a long row with the doctor himself. Then afterwards he says to me, “I’m not ill, am I Reny, my heart’s all right, isn’t it?” – as if he’d quite believe me if I agreed. I try to put up with him. He swears there’s nothing wrong with him, he won’t give up the laundry. And all the time he gets more fanatical about the war. We must win soon, he says. Jack’s killed, we must win and wipe all the Germans off the map.’

18,000 ration books.

The roads up over the downs were thick with traffic. Lorries, tanks, bulldozers. Troops were being moved to sealed-off training areas. Outside the American camps MPs in white helmets drove up and down in jeeps blowing whistles and waving arms at the convoys of Shermans. The skies buzzed. Something was happening.

Then, one day in June, it was still.

What was that? Had he slept? He woke up. Only the rain falling, heavy and thunderous, on the window ledges, gurgling in the gutters, pattering on the flowers, on the lilac bush in the back garden. Nothing had changed. Light spreading behind the pale green curtains – the blackout curtains had been lifted in April; and on the dressing-table the things she’d packed away at the beginning of the war – the Derby figurines, the silver hand-mirror – all replaced unharmed. See, we endure.

Only rain. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she whispered. Her hair was matted over her forehead. And then he remembered what day it was, the day allotted for victory, and that he ought to be glad (though something stopped him rejoicing) to be there to share it with her.

Victory, victory. The word was uttered and re-uttered on the wireless – how slow they were to make the final announcement – until it sounded brittle and dry: Victory. Yet, outside, rain was falling, drenching the spring leaves. Already flags had been hung from windows, and in the streets on the far side of the common bunting was stretched from roof-top to roof-top, bonfires stood prepared. Would they burn with all this rain? And he too had hung a Union Jack over the front porch (it would be sodden now, wet and drooping), for one must do one’s bit; and she had watched him from the front path – momentarily alarmed when he leant too far from the upstairs window – arms folded, unsmiling.

‘Go back to sleep,’ she said, as if he’d woken in needless agitation. But he wanted to lie and listen to the rain hissing and sluicing beyond the window.

Soon history would be honoured. With cheers, with
hymns, with jubilation. Yet how still it seemed. As the day broke, the rain eased, sparrows started under the guttering …

He had got a special leave, on compassionate grounds. Her telegram had arrived at the camp: ‘Father very ill. Please come.’ And so he’d journeyed up to London, on the eve of victory.

‘There’s hope,’ said the sister with a practised smile, ‘he’s a strong man.’ But how weak he looked, lying in the ward (there were no more private beds) among flying-bomb victims in the last stages of recovery or decline – jaw dropped, lips blue, the expression, as at Jack’s memorial service, frozen, utterly taken aback. As if there were some trick; this couldn’t happen like this. Mrs Harrison sat on his left, Irene on his right. Other patients were listening to wirelesses and he wanted to know – it was the one thing for which he still seemed to rally – ‘Is there any news? Have we won?’ He might have been asking the result of a race. ‘No, not yet’ – it was Irene who spoke – ‘soon.’

White sheets, white rows of beds; the white apron of a nurse saying, ‘I think it better if you went now.’ May 8th, 1945. An orderly was mopping the floor. She walked down the corridor, leading her mother, her lips pressed tight.

There was a fancy-dress parade on the common, planned for after Churchill’s speech. Little children dressed in costumes made from cardboard and old blackout material would be exhibited as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Hope and Glory’. Then the parties would follow (already they were queueing in the High Street for food and beer): bonfires, dancing. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. They sat in the garden listening to the exultant wirelesses; the sun shone after the rain. But she looked up: ‘What about Father?’ ‘The hospital said there’s no change. And Aunt Madeleine’s with Mother.’ But he knew that her question was only a kind of excuse.

Sparks flew upwards into the blue evening sky. Along the house-fronts coloured lights were arranged in Vs, candles in jam-jars perched on front walls. They were spilling in and out of the Prince William, singing ‘Shine on, Victory Moon’. Pianos in the street; kisses for anyone in uniform; children banging dustbin lids; and out on the flattened ground of a bomb-site, tables set up, drinks, tinned meat sandwiches, a Victory Pudding (bread, milk and saccharine – the feast of victors) and the bonfire (‘bomb-fire’ the children insisted), sparks flying upwards, upwards. Speech! Speech! Someone wanted to make a speech. A stout patriarch whose sons even then, perhaps, were encamped beyond the Rhine, stood up, swayed, but only got as far as ‘Three cheers for Victory!’ Victory! Victory! echoed the cry. But no one used the other word that had hissed gently in the falling rain: Peace.

Figures danced, silhouetted by flame. Composing, recomposing, round and round the fire. Yes, better dance, better rejoice. The war is won: that is something to rejoice over. But he had a lame leg (No, no, not a wound, he explained) and that was his excuse, and hers, for not dancing.

More fuel for the fire: don’t let it die. More fuel to make the sparks leap and the dancers whirl. Bring anything. Those old duck-boards from the shelter, those old out of date coupons, those letters stamped with the military franking from Cairo and Rome. Burn it all. Burn away the memories of five years, the ‘sacrifice’ and ‘endeavour’, the headlines, the photographs, the odour of barrack huts, the names of foreign battlefields, the 39,000 helmets, the 81,000 packs. But it wouldn’t burn. For, look, behind the flames, objects immune to fire, heroes of bronze and stone, too rigid and fixed ever to dance, and black names on marble, gold names on bronze, ‘undying memory’, ‘their name liveth’; and one of the names under the chestnut trees by the railings, on the white school memorial,
where boys born after the war would be herded on Remembrance Day, was Harrison. No, it doesn’t burn, it doesn’t perish. Undying memories.

‘Irene!’

Who was that? It was Hancock. Stepping out of the shadows, in an Air Force uniform, with a beaker of beer in his hand, and a darkish, slightly curled moustache, grown since the war had started, to give the impression he was a pilot, not a ground officer.

‘Well I never. Come for the fun? Hello Willy old man.’

‘Hello Frank.’

‘Hello, helloh. Wangled some leave too?’

He rocked to and fro. Only his feet seemed to hold him to the ground, as if they were clamped with weights. One hand held his beer and the other was extended, palm forward, behind Irene’s back.

‘Fancy –’ He stood, open-mouthed, for a moment, as though embarrassed for something to say. ‘Well – there goes the war.’ He looked at the fire. He raised his beaker and brought his mouth to it by leaning his whole body.

‘Look –’ Irene said. She shifted forward.

‘Soon be out of this, eh Willy?’ Hancock tugged at his uniform. ‘Back to the shop?’ He winked, bobbed his head sideways, then stood, swaying, looking at the fire. Burning planks shifted in the blaze. He looked like a man in a train corridor watching scenes go by. ‘There it goes, there it goes. All over. Forgive and forget eh?’ When the train lurched his hand touched Irene’s waist.

‘Willy, let’s go.’

Dancers jostled by so they were hemmed in.

‘Hey, come on Irene!’

Hancock spread his arms and went springy like a tennis player.

‘Give us a dance.’ He held out a hand. ‘Don’t mind, do
you, old man? Don’t dance – with that leg of yours – do you?’

Irene stepped back. For a moment Hancock waltzed gaily with the air.

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Irene said.

‘Come on now, don’t be like that.’

‘You’ve had too much of that beer.’

Hancock looked at him. Strands of his moustache were wet and frothy. Irene seemed to look at something between them. She bit her lip. He didn’t understand any of this. They were standing in a row with people dancing round them, as in some game.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ Hancock said. ‘The bloody war’s over you know.’

Better rejoice.

He said to Hancock: ‘It’s Irene’s father, he’s –’

‘No, that’s all right, Willy.’ Why was she scared?

‘One dance.’