The Sweet-Shop Owner (17 page)

Half-past four, five o’clock. Under the brightening lights, through the deepening dusk, other children were going home from school, in groups, in reckless gaggles, but you always seemed alone. Even when you came in flanked by your friends – Sally Lyle and Susan Dean – you stood apart, untouched by their boisterousness and their forwardness, watching them giggle at the counter and say, ‘Oh, Mr Chapman!’ as I slipped them free chocolates. Though anyone could see, of those three, you were the prettiest, the one who most deserved to be to the fore.

You watched me arrange the toys in the Briar Street window. For they were arriving now, picked from the wholesalers’ catalogues, in boxes that rattled and squeaked and threatened to jerk into imitation life. Meccano and Lego, Yogi Bear dolls and model kits of the Lone Ranger. There was a frown on your face as I clambered into the window with them. A man of fifty fussing over toys? But it was my job to sell them. You stood with your arms holding that satchel in front of you and your fingers tapping restlessly on the leather, for you never quite knew what to do with those long, delicate hands. You’d let them fall awkwardly by your side and sometimes one of them would reach up, just like her, to your throat, but you’d remember suddenly and let it drop quickly again. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘put that satchel down, you can help.’ And you were in two minds whether you ought to or not. I got out from the box the set of three little clockwork chimpanzees. Each wore a hat like a fez. One had a pipe, another a tambourine, another a pair of bongos, and when you turned the key in their backs their heads swivelled and their arms
moved. ‘Where should they go?’ I said. And you said, hesitating at first, and then with a little sharp decision, ‘Why not there?’ – and pointed to the display rack over the counter above my head. I hung them there, Dorry (you see, I didn’t question, didn’t hesitate). And later, when I’d sold three sets of those monkeys and people pointed to the ones above me, I said, ‘No, they’re not for sale.’ ‘There,’ I said, fixing them, ‘like that?’ But you looked away.

For you’d finished with your own toys. You thought we’d thrown them out, but I merely put them, to be kept, in the trunk in the spare bedroom. You no longer wanted to play or be thought of as a child. You’d got a place at the High School; you were going to make your mark, and it wasn’t games you looked for any more. Was that why you walked uneasily between your breezier friends? Why you buried your face behind books? And why you threw those little fits and sulks at home, picking quarrels over the dinner table – for that was a way of creating a little drama, of making your mark, without ever having to leave familiar ground?

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

You raised your head and spoke urgently, so that we stopped and looked at you, our spoons half-way between plate and lips.

‘Doesn’t it bother you – that there might be a war?’

On the leather foot-rest by her chair were the papers she’d been reading. Their headlines said: ‘Ships Move Towards Cuba’, ‘Britain Urges Removal of Missiles’.

You looked at her first and then, when her lips tightened in annoyance, to me, to see if I would move to her defence or yours.

‘There won’t be a war, nothing will happen,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t. It’s what I think.’

She resumed eating. You watched, not eating, your face trembling. I thought: thirteen, and talking of war. And then you flung down your spoon and pushed aside your plate.

‘Neither of you care! What do you read the papers for if you don’t care what happens? It’s not something you can just ignore –’

‘No – nor is it something to make a scene over when we’re eating. If you want an argument, have it with one of your fancy teachers at school, don’t be clever with us at the dinner table!’ She began suddenly to gasp for air.

Your cheeks burned. There was that little hard furrow in your brow. You looked at me, to test me.

‘Dorry, don’t upset your mother,’ I said. And I knew that would send you up out of your chair, out of the door (how many times did we hear that door slam behind you after something she’d said or I’d said, or something we hadn’t said?), up the stairs, your steps heavy on the landing, into the refuge of your bedroom.

And I knew it would make me come up to you to make my truce.

‘Why does she do it?’ she said, her gasps subsiding, ‘Why does she do it?’ She sat with her elbows on the table, her own plate pushed away. She put the napkin which you’d dropped back in its silver ring. ‘She’ll do something stupid one of these days, don’t you think Willy?’ She got up, moved to her seat by the window and looked at the headlines on the papers. Then she said at last, searching my face: ‘All right, go to her.’

There were pictures of Kennedy over your bed. Photographs out of
Time
and
Life
and the
Illustrated London News
which I got from the shop. Kennedy in Vienna. Kennedy beneath the white statue of Lincoln. Other girls pinned up the grinning faces of pop-stars: Billy Fury, Adam Faith; centre-spreads from the fan magazines
I sold. Too simple and trivial for you, Dorry?

‘She didn’t mean to be unkind.’

You lay with your head pressed to the pillow, to hide your tears.

‘She’s ill, remember.’

But you didn’t answer.

Then you turned at last.

‘You always take her side.’

‘It’s not like that. There aren’t “sides”. It’s not a fight.’

‘Isn’t it?’

You fell back again on the pillow. Your left leg, in a white school sock, swung over the edge of the bed; a silvery down at the knee. How still that room was, how familiar. Yet it would become soon ‘your’ room exclusively; the room of a young woman, at which I would pause and knock before entering.

I stroked your shoulder.

‘Don’t make an enemy of her, Dorry.’

You looked at me as if I’d already been defeated.

‘What does she want?’

‘I think what she wants is peace.’

The Saturday crowds in the High Street grew bigger and bigger. They bobbed like figures carried in water past the cluttered port-hole of the shop window. Eighteen, nineteen pounds a day. And was it just my imagination or were there more youngsters among those crowds, with money to spend and little looks, as they walked, of arrogance and temerity? They drew out notes from their pockets to buy clothes that were made solely for them. Blue jeans that hugged their hips; skirts that got shorter and shorter. I saw them look at me across the counter as if I’d never been young. And was there really once a William Chapman,
aged eighteen or nineteen, who’d taken the tram every morning to work, dressed in a grey waistcoat and a stiff collar, as if he were already old?

‘You’ve got competition, old man,’ said Hancock. There were creases under his eyes and his movements had lost their athlete’s jauntiness, but he still wore the air – with that crisp, thick-striped shirt, those long side-burns and the way he lit his cigar, in the shop now, not waiting till he had gone, peeling off the roll of cellophane and crushing it in his hand – of a contestant anxious to prove he can win.

‘It’s not on my books, but that site opposite Samuel Road – going to be a newsagent’s. One of those groups.’

His brown eyes gave a little dart as he crackled the cellophane.

‘Thought you should know. Not so hot for the one-man business, is it, these days?’

But as if I cared. Competition? Had I ever competed? The shop was a gift, I’d got it for nothing. Rivals didn’t bother me. (Besides, I saw it when it opened that October: a clean, functional establishment; swing glass doors, stainless steel, rubber matting by the entrance, and a staff that changed every six weeks. Magazines spread loosely to look more numerous than they were, a mere sampling of sweets: no toys. And after a year it closed.)

‘They’re the newcomers,’ I said. ‘It’s me they’ll have to compete with.’

‘That’s the style.’ Hancock’s eyes narrowed concedingly as if they’d really hoped for some expression of dismay.

‘While we’re on the subject’ – he removed the cigar, still unlit, from his mouth – ‘you might have heard already, we’re opening this new office in Lewisham. In about a month. Having a little party to celebrate. Just Joyce, Ted Schofield, a few people from the golf club. I’d, er, invite you old man, but of course, with Irene –’ he struck a match. ‘How is she?’

‘No change really. Helen?’

‘Oh fine, fine.’ He pulled the match away from the end of his cigar and waved it furiously, flapping his hand long after the flame was out. ‘Something Irene might be interested to know, by the by. Been meaning to tell you. I’ve been seeing a bit of her brother – Paul. Been a bit down on his luck recently. I’m thinking of letting him in on the firm. He needs some sort of break and we need someone new, now we’re expanding.’

‘We haven’t seen Paul for years.’

‘Really? Is that so? Well, tell Irene. She’ll remember when we used to be great buddies before the war – me, Paul and –’

He held his cigar a few inches from his mouth. ‘But I mustn’t chatter.’ One eye was cocked as if gauging an effect. ‘I’ve got business.’

He rubbed his hands together, puffing blue fumes and strode to the door. As he opened it he took the cigar from his mouth again, turned and said – was there a sly note in his voice? – ‘Was that Dorothy I saw popping in here last night? Growing up, isn’t she?’

The shoppers swirled along the High Street. I read the headlines in the mornings, under my print-stained fingers: ‘Kennedy to Tour Europe’, ‘Kennedy Acclaimed in Berlin’, ‘Kennedy Shot Dead’.

What was the point of all that study, Dorry, all those books? Was it to spite me? Because you guessed what my school reports must have said – ‘Slow’, ‘Could try harder’ – and you saw what a plodding brain I had, leaning over the baize table-cloth, mouthing those figures silently as I checked them with my pencil? Your own reports were so much better, but they weren’t unmixed: ‘Great promise but not always co-operative in class’, ‘First-rate work but apt to be moody’. Your form-mistress
said: ‘She’s a very bright girl, but she needs to come out of herself.’ Do you remember? It was after the school play – ‘The Merchant of Venice’ – put on with the boys from John Russell. They wanted you to play Portia, the biggest part, but you wouldn’t. You played Shylock’s daughter. There were traces of stage make-up, incompletely removed, on your face, which made you look younger, not older than you were – and you overheard that remark as you came out from the side-door of the hall to where I stood with Mrs Bennet. Parents were waiting, fussily, to collect sons and daughters. You were angry with her for talking about you and ashamed of me because I stood in my grey work suit – I’d come straight from the shop to the play – my raincoat over my clasped hands; and you thought Mrs Bennet, with her spry, cultivated voice, would find me dull and stupid. You stood in the lobby by the coat-rack – I saw you over Mrs Bennet’s shoulder – pretending to read the notice-board, and did not come forward till Mrs Bennet said, sighing commiseratively: ‘But she ought to be ambitious. She’s got the world ahead of her. Oh – there you are my dear.’

We walked, the three of us, to the car park. Trees cast long shadows in the light from the hall onto netball markings on the asphalt. Mrs Bennet said: ‘Try a bigger part next year, Dorothy’ and patted your shoulder as we said goodbye.

In the car you asked: ‘Well, what did you think?’ ‘Oh I thought you were good.’ ‘No – the play,’ you said. And I muttered something feebly in reply. What did I know about Shakespeare, Dorry? I’d sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair after a hard day at the shop, while on the stage schoolchildren in costume played the parts of grown-ups and spoke lines I did not understand.

You were almost sixteen. Little hillocks of breasts had grown under your school pullover, and you were aware
beneath your skirt of the contours of your legs. You crossed them carefully and tucked your skirt under your knees. You tried to pretend that you weren’t attractive – though, in the play, a schoolboy lover had wooed you with long speeches. But you couldn’t do it by covering your knees, or letting your hair fall over your face, or raising arguments with us over the dinner table so as to divert attention. And besides you knew – lingering by the mirror and looking sideways at yourself as if you didn’t want to see – that it couldn’t be hidden. And you really wanted, didn’t you, though the thought of it frightened you, to live up to it?

Down the High Street after school. It wasn’t the quickest way home. Was it to receive the darting glances of men leaning from car windows as you crossed at the zebra, looking up, turning their heads as you passed on the pavement, muttering low words? Or of boys your own age sauntering circuitously home, in restless gangs? I saw them meeting girls in Briar Street, next to the cinema adverts. Mrs Cooper tut-tutted and sometimes banged the window to shoo them off. Their breath steamed in the dusk. They wore Parka anoraks. Their hair was longer than the school approved, their trousers tighter; they carried records, with their school books, under their arms – the Rolling Stones and Donovan with text books of physics and geography. And it wasn’t Shakespeare and poetry they spoke of. Was it that, Dorry? Did you have to run that gauntlet, to test yourself? Though it made your head sit uneasily on your shoulders and you didn’t know how to reply with any naturalness to those adventurous looks.

Nothing touches you, you touch nothing. Sixteen, in a blue school beret. You could have kept your poise and learnt the trick of it. You were beautiful and young. Wasn’t that something to rejoice over? You could have performed the trick, without fear and without needing
to make your mark. For hadn’t you once – at the schools swimming gala – stood up, unafraid, high over the swimming pool, over the blue tiles wobbling beneath – that was no adventure, you knew how to keep your balance – and hadn’t you plunged, with a perfect arch, and bobbed up again, to take second prize, with a laugh?

Shakespeare, history books, volumes of poetry. Post-cards from art galleries – replacing Kennedy – on the wall; and faded ink-splotched school copies of Latin texts, Virgil and the
Metamorphoses
, whose contents I puzzled from the English heading before each extract: ‘Narcissus and Echo’, ‘Diana and Actaeon’. I put the mug of coffee on your desk, knocking first at your door, and treading softly over the carpet. For your head was lowered and you were intent on your reading. Your hair hung forward in the light of the anglepoise lamp and the line of your neck seemed fragile and exposed as you leant. You were doing your project on Keats and over your shoulder I read lines of verse (did you know, Dorry, how I peeped into those books when you weren’t there?) which I didn’t understand: