The Sweet-Shop Owner (16 page)

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He fitted the bubble-gum machine outside the shop: red, white and yellow balls of gum jostling inside the perspex cover with plastic rings and trinkets. And a cigarette vendor, next to the newspaper placards and the oblong board on the abutting wall in Briar Street on which, every week, a man would paste the coming programmes at the Odeon. John Mills and Kenneth More in cheerful re-enactments of the war. History enshrined in make-believe. Like the lurid stories in the boys’ comics he sold in the shop: grim-jawed fighter-pilots and ogreish Germans. What war? A packet of gum please, and another card in the series ‘Great Battles of World War Two’.

He hung the advertisements and the illuminated signs from the facia. ‘Craven A’, ‘Corona’, ‘Gold Flake’, ‘Players Please’, ‘Lyons Maid Sold Here’. Wired them up himself, and scanned the advertisers’ catalogues for additions and replacements. New awnings, black and white striped, and neon lighting over the door. And the windows – the windows were his own special concern. He allowed Mrs Cooper to arrange the displays only under the strictest supervision, and most often it was he alone who at slack periods or after evening closing would snake and stalk through the precarious stands, as through tangled foliage, positioning the imitation sweets – plastic chocolates and wooden toffees – the cardboard cut-outs, the silver and gold paper, and emerging afterwards onto the pavement to gauge the effect. People complimented him on his windows, their profusion, their colour. ‘Highly commended’ in the local trade gazette for window dressing. At dusk the corner of Briar Street scintillated like a fair-ground. And he was silently pleased at the effect of his labours – of something which promised real goods, real riches within, but was itself quite specious. So that he looked forward to those seasons when special occasions allowed him to heighten the trickery. Christmas, Easter.
The allure of tinsel and fake snow in the window, the enticements of chocolate boxes and gift-pack cigars. Easter eggs. Fireworks. Useless things.

Fourteen, fifteen pounds a day. He folded the papers with a flick between his thumb and forefingers and cupped his palm for the coins. Up the road they came from the station, with their briefcases and raincoats and work-weary expressions; the same faces stopping by in the evening as stopped by in the morning. ‘Evening Mr Chapman’, ‘Okay, Mr Chapman?’ ‘My usual, Mr Chapman.’

And he didn’t alter for any of them his shop-keeper’s image, his ‘much obliged’ and ‘thanking you’. It was they who bought and he who sold. That was the arrangement. Let them think of him as some cut-out figure, popping up like the sums on the till, behind the counter: Mr Chapman, the sweet shop man.

On Saturday mornings the High Street thronged. The same faces, down to the department stores and the new supermarket. Frozen food, electric mixers, long-playing records. Something new, something new in a shiny cover or a crisp cardboard box. And on the way back a call at Chapman’s, to pay the papers and buy the weekend’s tobacco. A drink in the Prince William. They had the juke-box now, and the television in the corner. Then football, a visit somewhere on Sunday. What randomness. ‘Don’t overdo it, will you Mr Chapman?’ But why should he mind? He only sold. Ceaselessly he filled his shelves and embellished his windows so their useless bounty might never fail. And when he knew what they whispered (echoes of Mrs Cooper’s gossip couldn’t escape him) – ‘He’s tied to that shop – Thinks of nothing else – Loves to rake it in’ – he didn’t mind. Let them whisper. Let them cast him in the miser’s role. He wouldn’t question it. For did they think it belonged to him, that cut-out behind the counter?

He watched himself fold the papers between his thumb and fingers; ring the till, swop pleasantries with customers, weigh up quarter-pounds and half-pounds in the scales; put the money in the safe at night, check the cash float, check the alarms, check the doors. Watched the figures mount in the maroon books. Watched himself drive home at night, briefcase and raincoat on the back seat, left at the traffic lights, up the Common Road, under the red chains of the sodium lamps. Watched himself construct his performance, as she watched herself, in the mirror, slowly being dismantled. Weakening of the lungs; a strain on the heart. That last holiday in Teignmouth – Dorry had found her solution by taking all her books with her to study. Going afterwards to Doctor Field’s. ‘She no longer has migraines, doctor.’ ‘That’s quite common, Mr Chapman, for a woman, er, at her time of life.’ He watched himself at night, listening to her laboured breathing, feeling his body temporarily recede, but seeing its daytime animation capering before him like some jerky phantom. And in the morning as he let Mrs Cooper in, drank the milky tea she brought him and heard her ask, ‘Mrs Chapman any better?’ he’d watch himself as he said: ‘No change.’

‘Know the latest?’

Smithy, working the pedal rather laboriously, winched him up, swathed in white, on the barber’s seat and wiped his comb and scissors. His old face was pale and his eyes yellowish in the mirror, and the fingers tucking the towel in his collar were cold.

‘Friend Hancock’s branching out.’

There was a smell of cologne and Brilliantine, adverts for razors and Durex. Two young assistants clipped at the
other chairs and their faces seemed to be waiting, as Hancock and Joyce had once waited.

‘Had it from Schofield, and from the man himself.’

He bent closer to his ear. For Smithy’s art was the art of discreetly gathered and exchanged information. Didn’t they come to him, all of them, for their fortnightly clip – Simpson, Kelly from the Prince William, Ford the post-master, Schofield, Hancock? Only old Powell’s perpetually cropped hair was a mystery. And if things slipped out when they spoke, couldn’t Smithy be trusted, in return, to impart some useful snippet? But always with tact, always with disinterest. For what should Smithy care, piecing together the patterns of the High Street but going home at night to his spinster sister? Besides, he was old: his fingers were cold when they touched your neck.

‘He wants to open an office in Lewisham. The idea’s to move Joyce out there so he can rule the roost here. Head Office. Joyce won’t have any of it, and I don’t blame him – they’re supposed to be equal partners. They’re not exactly friends at the moment – I got that from Schofield. Cocky’s looking for a third partner so as to play things off.’

‘Lewisham?’

‘Empires start somewhere. He’s on the make. But he’s got wife trouble. Got this from Joyce. She does all right: everything on a plate. Schofield was describing their place. But she’s getting tired of being just one of the furnishings. Joyce says she’d do a flit on him if he didn’t buy her off.’

‘Stories.’

‘Who’s to say? Schofield says something could happen. She’s no longer exactly the belle of Sydenham Hill. We’re all getting on, pal.’

The clippers and the scissors snipped in silence. The barber’s pole twirled outside. Then Smithy said, picking up the comb, in a surer, routine voice as if the previous topic had never been raised: ‘Business all right?’ He nodded. ‘Irene?’ ‘No better.’ The fingers gripped his
head and tilted it to one side: ‘Keep still now. Don’t you worry. Those doctors’ll come up with something. And Dorothy?’

He put the comb and scissors in his breast pocket and held the wooden handled mirror up to the back of his neck.

‘There. That’s you neat and trim for your customers.’ He put the mirror back on the hook on the wall. ‘I see Mrs Cooper’s having a nice little jaw about you to one of them.’ He cocked his eye towards the Briar Street window, where, across the wet road, through the gleam and clutter of the window display, Mrs Cooper could be seen, arms folded, talking to a woman in a navy coat.

‘Better go and live up to your publicity.’

Smithy took the towel from his collar and removed the sheet, scattering hair clippings to the floor. He got up from his seat. Then Smithy threw the sheet into the bin and, taking a brush from beside the sink, began brushing his jacket, twisting him slowly round on the floor with a slight pressure from his fingers, until he slipped the brush under his arm, put both his bloodless hands on his customer’s shoulders, and the two of them stared at their reflections in the mirror.

‘Know what I heard?’

There were five suits in the wardrobe. Five suits for a man who worked six and a half days out of seven. And he might have done his work in a shirt and a pullover or an old cardigan like Powell. But she insisted, bought him suits for Christmas and birthdays – what else should he need? – chose the material herself. So he hoisted on the red braces, in the dim, early-morning bedroom, tucked in his shirt – his stomach had begun to press against the line of his buttons – and tightened the maroon tie.

‘Know what Smithy told me?’

The tray with the tea cups was on the bedside table,
next to her medicines and inhaler. The bedside lamp was on and she lay propped up against the pillows. In a little while, when he’d gone, she’d lie back; for often, after a restless night, she would only sleep in the early morning, in between his departure and Dorothy’s rising. But that was not before she’d got up, slipped on her dressing-gown and breakfasted with him at the kitchen table.

‘Hancock’s opening a new branch. In Lewisham. He’s looking for a third partner.’

‘Oh,’ she answered, as if she’d already had the information, noted it as she did those predictable columns in the newspapers. But she looked up, suddenly wary, so that he didn’t add at first, as Smithy had done, that all was not well between Hancock and Helen. Supposing she took that as a veiled allusion to themselves?

‘Empire building,’ he said and twanged the red elastic of his braces, like a clown, against his shirt. ‘Only a story, I expect.’

Every morning the tea, the hard light of the bedside lamp which showed the lines in her face; the electric fire in winter. Every morning he would dress and go down to prepare the breakfast – the shadowy forms of the garden would stare at him beyond the kitchen window – and he would scarcely need to glance at a clock or his watch to know whether he was on time. Up at five-thirty; out at six-fifteen. Put the cash books in the briefcase; polish shoes; warm the car engine. ‘Smithy says Hancock and Helen aren’t so hand in glove.’ And if he’d faltered once – sat down on the edge of the bed, torn the maroon tie from his neck that he’d tied so diligently – ? But such mutinies could never have occurred, for her glance would have caught him before he slipped and fell: ‘Play your part.’ In the mirror his hair was thinning above the brow, it ran in black streaks over the scalp, and his face had assumed the moulded fleshiness of men – you saw them in the shop, asking for cigarettes, and lingering outside the
Prince William – who carry their bodies around like so much ballast.

‘Only a story,’ he said, twanging his braces like catapults – and was that a smile at the corners of her lips?

He took the toast from the grill and the boiled egg from the bubbling pan. She did not eat breakfast, only drank the tea, but the table was laid, the blue and white crockery, the pale blue napkins – even at six in the morning. Darkness pressed against the window-pane, where in summer they could see the dewy lawn, the lilac tree, its stem grown thick after twenty-five years. The house was still, save for the tap-tap of his spoon against the egg and the ‘heee … heee’ of her breath, and you would scarcely have known that in the room above Dorothy lay asleep, books on the shelf over the bed where once they had propped the striped woollen doll and the jig-saws. Every morning as he went down to make the tea he paused to listen at her door – why did he listen? – and sometimes he heard her stir, wakened by his own movements. But stillness usually. Stillness: so that sometimes, far from complaining, he pitied the seven and eight o’clock risers who did not know the early morning calm, before the traffic began, before the world jerked into action. Her breath hissed in the chair opposite his. There were wrinkles in the cleft of her breasts. But she drank her tea deliberately, holding the cup between her hands, dipping her head forward rhythmically to sip; and as she drank she seemed to be saying too: ‘Yes, this is the best hour. You will go, to your old place, and return. Dorothy is still in bed. And I can sleep now. The day is poised; for an hour or so there is peace.’

He checked his pocket for the keys, his wallet, picked up his briefcase. She helped him on with his oatmeal scarf. It might have been he who commanded, as he drew the dressing-gown about that wheezing throat and said, ‘Stay in the warm’; were it not for her answering eyes:
‘Go on, go on.’ Past the hall mirror, the umbrella-stand and out into the dark morning – a frosty ring as his feet struck the front path – where sometimes it seemed he was quite alone in a world which had suspended its activity. Under the amber sodium lamps. And even in the shop, after he had sent off the paper boys (they were a different bunch then but their careless loyalty was the same) there was still a calm. Those minutes before he opened. A few cars in the High Street, footsteps, scuttling on the pavement. Soon they would be coming in their droves, summoned by trains, clocks, streaming to their work, bustling in at the shop door for their daily purchases. And he would be there, bobbing at the counter to receive them. ‘Morning Mr Casey, morning Mr Saville, Mr King.’ All was ready. But he would listen, for a few minutes, to the crinkling of the shelves, the hum and tick of the fridge, and sniff – it was still there but no one but he perhaps could smell it – that faint whiff of coconut he had first sniffed when the shelves were bare and dust lay on the counter and old Jones had stood in his black coat. Stillness. And while he waited, hands resting on the morning’s headlines, he laughed inwardly, not the old laugh – a dry laugh, thin like her breath, which didn’t change the look on his face. But a laugh.

And that same year, when he was fifty and the shop twenty-five years old, he said to her one night, closing the maroon books – her smile had lit her face then – ‘Toys, I will sell toys.’

Dorothy. Why did you have to come into the shop? To disturb those patterns? To see my look of disguised excitement, faint apology, as I greeted you from behind the counter? To hear the catch in my voice as I said, ‘Mrs
Cooper, my daughter Dorothy’? You could have got the bus as far as the Common Road, but you got off in the High Street, in your blue uniform and your blue beret, a satchel under your arm, and walked down to the corner of Briar Street. To see me without Irene? To see if I was any different without her?