The Sweet-Shop Owner (2 page)

She’d come.

They pressed round in ragged fashion to take their money. Andy, Dave, Phil, Stephen, Bob. T-shirts, jeans, tennis shoes, uncombed mops of hair. By eight they would have changed into school clothes: uncomfortable figures in uniform. They held out their hands while he jingled money.

They could be slightly in awe of him. But they knew his weaknesses, his fondness for children, for childishness, his enjoyment of their laughter (for he didn’t laugh himself, no one ever saw Mr Chapman actually laugh), and his way of winking, or seeming to wink – perhaps it was only with them – at his own solemnity. So they knew he would frown at their pranks – when one of them hid behind the icecream fridge and popped up with a shriek – yet wouldn’t
forbid them. And what of his own pranks? That way he made a coin disappear up his sleeve (you never saw it) or the way he slipped into their newspaper bags, when they weren’t looking, a bar of chocolate, a stick of toffee. Yes, he liked his tricks; he had a clown’s face, glum and top-heavy. Though that old bag, Mrs Cooper, would have none of it. She called them louts – she called all boys louts. ‘Don’t excite Mr Chapman, with his heart. Don’t upset Mr Chapman, with his poor wife dead.’ But who had ever seen Mr Chapman’s wife? Though Phil said he had once, passing the house on his round – she was standing at the window, looking as if she were sinking in a pool. Yet what did it matter? If they played their pranks, if he liked it, if it cheered him, if they got out of him just once at least (they knew it was there) that laugh he never actually showed; before his heart stopped ticking right there in the shop.

They watched him as they watched all adults, as if they were life-size models at work, but with a suspicion, in this case, that that was just how Mr Chapman regarded himself.

‘One pound. One pound twenty-five. One pound fifty.’

He distributed the notes and coins. His fingers were soiled with newsprint, which made them look as though they were moulded from lead.

‘One pound fifty. One pound seventy-five.’

Once they did it for half a crown. Now it was nothing less than a pound. Their hands closed. He wouldn’t see them again.

Six-thirty. But already the sun through the plate glass window was warm. He switched on the little electric fan over the door into the stock room.

‘Which one of you’s going to pull down the awning?’

That was something he could no longer do. No exertion. And they vied, when the weather made it likely, for the honour of getting their hands on that long, murderous
pole, flexing their muscles on the pavement and pulling at the catch above the name-board.

‘Phil, you do it. And don’t smash the window in the process.’

They sniggered, shouldering their bags. But he hadn’t finished.

‘Before you go –’ he hesitated, thinking of a suitable pretext. In his left hand was a black tin box labelled ‘Paper Boys’, with the lid open so they couldn’t see in. They thought he had emptied it. ‘As it’ll soon be the summer holidays –’ he fished in the box and drew out a column of fifty pence pieces which he let slip, three at a time, into each palm – ‘a little bonus. A little surprise.’ He looked severe. ‘Not a word to your Mums and Dads’ (but they weren’t stupid), ‘and if you’re late once in the next fortnight,’ he paused – they wouldn’t appreciate this prank – ‘I’ll ask for it back.’

They looked up, duly surprised, thankful, puzzled. A good bunch, a cheerful bunch. They did what he asked and they earned their money. They came every morning by six-thirty, sleepy-eyed, rising before their parents, muffled in the winter in little anoraks and scarves. And there was a sense of constancy and devotion in watching them, through the glass of the shop door, riding off with their sacks, pedalling their bikes to appointed streets; so that he would think, ‘Don’t swing like that into the main road: there are lorries,’ and ‘Don’t get caught by a policeman, cycling without lights.’ But you had to take note of that little glint in their eyes which spied out extra ten-pences; and you heard them mutter under their breath: ‘Henderson across the common pays his boys two quid.’ They were wise to it already. You had to watch out.

He scanned their faces sternly, like a commander his best men. And they knew perhaps, grinning back at him, that if he didn’t laugh it wasn’t because he couldn’t.

‘Right, now you’ve got your money. Before you go, take
something each from the sweet counter. Only one thing, mind you.’ He wagged a finger. This was necessary. If you didn’t give them things they pinched them anyway.

‘Thanks Mr Chapman.’

Fifteen thousand pounds.

At a clap of his hands, as if they were performing animals, they were off, swinging their bags over their heads, chattering over their new-gained wealth, making off with it, racing each other on their bikes round the corner of Briar Street.

And they were gone, leaving only Phil on the pavement, with his flop of blond hair, locked in battle with the pole and the awning. Would he do it? There, it went. And there he was, standing grinning in his mauve T-shirt with ‘YAMAHA’ across the front, like a knight-at-arms with that pole under his arm, almost demolishing a display in the window as he bore it back through the door.

‘Bye Mr Chapman. Thanks for the money.’

‘Bye Phil.’

And Mr Chapman laughed – was that really a laugh that crossed his face? Phil would go and tell the others, speeding after them with the news: Mr Chapman laughed. But they wouldn’t believe him, Phil was always telling stories they’d say.

‘Bye. Take care now.’

They were paid.

The sunshine slanted through the glass over the door on to the counter and the piles of remaining morning papers which lay before him. He never read the papers. Years of marking them up, stacking them, and taking them, flicking them into a fold with the wrist and holding them out between two fingers, palm cupped for the coins, had blunted his curiosity for their contents. But he still glanced each morning, and kept through the day in a little catalogue at the back of his mind so that if it was mentioned he would
know, items like ‘Plane Crash in Brazil’, ‘Drama at Embassy’, ‘Worst Ever Trade Figures’. And there it was, this morning, on the page his eyes scanned:

‘PEACE BID FAILS.’

She had always read her papers. He had them delivered (that had been Phil’s round, number three, Leigh Drive and Clifford Rise) and he brought home in the evening copies that weren’t sold. She’d read them, sitting in her armchair, beneath the tall standard lamp with its twisting wooden stem. Oh not because she liked news. It was only to take stock, to acquaint herself, to hold sway over the array of facts and regard them all with cold passivity. And sometimes, indeed, it was as if she didn’t read at all, her head hidden behind the outspread page, but peered through it, as through a veil, at a world which might default or run amok if it once suspected her gaze was not upon it. And he’d wait, stirring his tea, the clock ticking, not daring even to rattle his cup, until at last she would cast aside the paper in a weary gesture, her eyes moving wanly to the french windows. So predictable, these papers.

He didn’t read them, but he liked them. Their columns, captions and neat gradations of print. The world’s events were gathered into those patterns.

Dorothy had read them, read them with a will, wanting to discuss and argue over the dinner table, her little brows taut with the desire to make her mark. And Irene had sat on the other side, holding her knife and fork tightly so that they snicked at her plate like scissors, and refused to be drawn. All this excitement, this nonsense. I won’t have it. I won’t suffer it. You deal with her. And she would look at him: she is
yours
, don’t forget; I gave her to you.

The floor-boards creaked under the weight of his stool and a faint rustle, like crumpled paper outspreading, came from the lines of shelves behind him. Sometimes, in the
early morning, the shop seemed to speak, as if it wouldn’t let pass the association of years without a whisper, a breath of friendship.

It was cram full – not one of those shops where there was plenty of space and an air of fluorescent-lit efficiency. Behind him, stacked in columns, rose cigarettes; tipped, plain; above, cigars, below, loose tobacco. To the right, along the polished, uneven shelves towards the Briar Street window, were the jars – drops, lumps, fruits, toffees, jellies, mixtures – and the boxes, milk and plain, hard and soft centres, with on the top shelf, bordered with ribbons and embellished with puppy-dogs, waterfalls, sunset har-bours, the luxury two- and three-pound boxes. On the counter in front, and beneath, behind sliding glass doors, were the bars and sticks, chews and tubes, sherbet dabs and banana-splits – the things the kids chose coming home at four – wrapped in sickly colour. And to his right – beyond the till, along the remaining counter towards the ice-cream fridge and the crates of lemonade and Coca-Cola – the magazines and papers, spread, overlapping like roof tiles: tense headlines, pop-stars, orchids in flower, fashion, footballers, naked girls.

It thronged, it bulged.

And none of it – that was the beauty of it – was either useful or permanent.

Beyond the sweet counter, taking up most of the Briar Street window, was his own addition. Toys. Dolls, teddy-bears, jigsaw puzzles, model cars, rockets, cowboy hats, plastic soldiers, and, hanging from the framework over his head, three clockwork monkeys each with a fez and a musical instrument which played if you wound it up: a drum, a pipe, a pair of cymbals.

All that was his work. Coming home, twelve years ago, he’d said to her, ‘I have a plan.’ And her face had pricked up, beside the french window, as at some rumour of rebellion. ‘Toys. I will sell toys in the shop.’ She had
looked, and repeated slowly the word – ‘Toys’ – as if rolling round her mouth a morsel of something whose taste she hadn’t fixed. And then – the identification was made – the wry smile touched her lips. He’d known it would please her. Her eyes widened (matchless, grey-blue eyes) and had looked into him, through him, as if they sent out swift, invisible cords to seize and sweep him up. ‘Yes. Why not?’

And then she’d added: ‘You will make sure, won’t you, there’s a profit in this?’

He looked at his smudged hands clasped on the counter. He must wash. It was ten past seven. Traffic was building up on the High Street, making the shop windows vibrate gently.

As he twisted himself from the stool he felt the pain grip suddenly his left side and shoulder. It was always there, but sometimes it attacked in earnest.
Angina pectoris.
It sounded like the name of a flower or a rare species of butterfly. Dorry had read Latin. He knew what to do. There were trinitrin tablets in his breast pocket, next to her letter, and there were more in a drawer beneath the till. Mrs Cooper knew and was instructed. Irene had used them too, along with all her other pills. With both of them it was heart trouble.

He paused. No stress, no excitement. No, he wouldn’t reach for the tablets – it would mean pulling out her letter. He hung on. Not now. The body is a machine, Doctor Field had said. And there – it went.

He padded, slowly, through the doorway hung like an oriental arch with coloured strips of plastic, into the stock room to wash his hands and slick his hair with water.

Mrs Cooper was due at any moment – with her basket, her amber horn-rims, her hair permed rigid as wire and her look of steely dedication. Sixteen years his assistant. She had been a plump blonde once. Besides himself, only she had a key. And she said, ‘I’ll get it,’ thrusting out her
bosom, when there was something to be fetched: ‘You mustn’t strain yourself.’ And she said, ‘I’ll manage,’ that time when he had to go off and leave the shop, chasms opening beneath him, because
she
was in hospital, stricken but unfrightened, tubes and wires plugged into her. Dorry had come – that time.

‘You don’t have to begin so early, Mrs Cooper,’ he’d said. And she’d said, ‘Oh, call me Janet.’ But he didn’t.

Mrs Cooper would come. She’d put her basket with her handbag against the wall in the stock room; take off her cardigan, pat her hair, put on her blue nylon shop coat, pick up the kettle with one hand while she did up her buttons with the other, and ask, as if every time it were a novel suggestion, ‘Tea, Mr Chapman?’ She’d make the tea and bring it to him, vigorously stirring in the sugar. He’d sip it as she filled up spaces on the counter with fresh stock, and he’d say, glancing out of the window, ‘Warm, Mrs Cooper, warm. Any plans for the weekend?’ And she’d say, as she always did, ‘Weekend, Mr Chapman? I’m surprised
you
know what a weekend is.’

But, sooner or later, there’s a last time.

He dried his hands, drew the comb through his thin hair. Passing back into the shop, he took from a box on one of the shelves a fat, half-corona cigar, undid the cellophane and lit it.

And Mrs Cooper would say, coming in and seeing him puffing smoke, ‘Mr Chapman! You know you shouldn’t smoke them.’ And he would say, laconically enough, ‘But I sell ’em.’

He perched himself on his stool and puffed hard. So Mrs Cooper would view him, peering in for a moment through the shop door as she rummaged for her key – behind glass, behind the undergrowth of display stands, wrappers and dangling toys – peering back at her, lastly, from behind blue fumes, his face red, swollen, like an overripe fruit, his eyes wide, impenetrable.

‘There is a place on the corner of Briar Street. It’s a good site. I’ve already seen Joyce and we have the first option.’

She put down the cup and saucer on the table – the blue cup and saucer with the thin scrolls and the pink moss-roses. A wedding present. Her lips drew inward; they were shrewd, circumspect, even then. And he thought, Yes, of course – seeing it fall into place – I will be a shop-owner.

‘Do you approve?’ And she waited. For she wouldn’t overbear, insist – that wasn’t her way. She would let him consider and judge and say ‘I approve’ – that was the man’s role and the husband’s, and she wouldn’t deny it him.

‘Why not?’ he said, with a cautious grin. ‘Well why not?’

‘You will need to look it over,’ she nodded, ‘and see Joyce yourself. And you will have to know the prospects and get to learn the business. My brothers can help you there.’