The Sweet-Shop Owner (22 page)

I met her here those first times, Dorry; here on the
common. She looked as though she were lingering on some errand. And up there, at St Stephen’s, you were christened, and your grandfather, whom you never saw, was buried, near the plaque to his already dead son. We never moved out of these narrow bounds. Born here, schooled here, worked here. And even when I met her I stood here on the common and thought: enough, now everything is in its place, and I in mine.

Spire of St Stephen’s, domed roof of the Town Hall, grey paths across the green common; trams passing. The sun was warm on our necks as we leant on the railings. But I never believed you could have the real thing.

She would have acted, Dorry; would have seen Barrett. There was that last week. She would have said, ‘Willy –’

July ’73. Up the Common Road, past Mason’s and Cullen’s, past the evening plane trees, my briefcase, with the books, on the back seat. She was waiting for me to come. I used to let myself in, so as not to disturb her. How many times had I done these things? Past the clock and the mirror in the hall. It must have been between the time Mrs Pritchard left and I shut the shop. Her head was on one side. The cap still on her tube of pills: she hadn’t reached for them. Her lips were blue and cold and had a sickly smell when I bent to touch them.

He always claimed he’d seen her. That morning. Though they didn’t believe him, Stephen and Bob. Don’t believe what old Phil tells you. He didn’t tell Mr Chapman. It was an honour to do the round Mr Chapman’s house was on. Leigh Drive: number thirty-three. There was dew on the garden and sparrows chirping. She must have heard him put the papers through – always three or four dailies at thirty-three. For he saw her at the front window as he propped his bike on the opposite kerb. It was the only time he’d seen her. And she stood there for a
moment, behind the window, pulling back the lace curtain – did she want to call him, to say something? – like someone trapped in a glass case.

Up that slide, Dorry – there where the kids are playing. When she said, ‘Why don’t you?’ I did, I obeyed. I clambered up that slide and slid down.

Mrs Cooper wiped her glasses. There hadn’t been a customer for nearly a quarter of an hour. Three o’clock. The mid-afternoon lull. She sat by the till. Her glasses were misty. Where was he? Half way up the Common Road? In Russell Street? Gasping, straining his poor heart. Mr Chapman – she’d do anything, anything. She rested her elbow on the counter and propped her cheek in her palm. No customers; the shop to herself. She rocked gently back and forth on two legs of her stool, crossing her legs one over the other – a slither of nylon – and feeling her shoe on her right foot, under the counter, hang just by the toes.

Sandra stood before the mirror in the changing cubicle. It was hot and oppressive down here in the basement of the shop. The electric lights, the music, the blow-ups of Mick Jagger and Paul Newman on the walls, put there to make it seem they were watching you undress. Two rows of cubicles with flimsy curtains. Though the thing was, of course, not to draw the curtains. She stood in her bra and briefs looking at herself. Yes, she was all right in the right places. She didn’t need a bra – she had a good mind to take it off and go back to the shop with only her T-shirt on, just to see that old bag’s eyes pop. She’d tried on the red dress. Yes, it looked great on her. She would buy it, with Mr Chapman’s money. But she paused, irresolutely, before the mirror. Just for a moment, it was as though
some other person looked back at her, unreachable behind the glass.

Children’s playground. Grey spire of St Stephen’s. Dome of the Town Hall. Everything in its place. He put his left thumb in his breast pocket and touched the letter.

‘You will see in the end.’

Yes, well all right. Even though she never changed the will, most of that money should have been yours. I didn’t need it. But – don’t you see? I kept it because it was all I had that was hers. It was her price, my dues from the bargain. And I would only have kept it – not touched it. So that in the end, anyway –

And supposing I’d given you the money – with indecent promptness, after the funeral? ‘Here – it’s mine, but I don’t want it.’ You’d have gone off with it, for good – to him in Bristol. Don’t you see? I kept that money to keep you too.

So I wrote you that letter in August. She’d been dead only three weeks.

Dear Dorothy,

You know that Mother made clear in her will that no money of hers should be passed on by me to you, except through a will of my own. You know my feelings about it. You know had she ever discussed it I would have persuaded her against it. But out of respect for her wishes – out of respect for your dead mother – I think we must do what she wanted.

Where did I find those sanctimonious words? I should have added: ‘Out of respect for her wishes you ought to stay with me, be with me.’ You were her gift. And you wrote back – that was only a month after we cremated her – ‘What about the respect due to me?’

I waited for you to come. All through last winter. I
thought: if you come back, what does the money matter? But only your demanding letters came. Were we really at war?

I waited through Christmas. I did all those things I’d done before – got up at five-fifteen, made my breakfast, sat at the table at night with my books on the green baize cloth – automatically and mechanically, as if she were still there. I touched nothing. The furniture, the china, her chair by the window. I said to Mrs Pritchard: Nothing must be changed. The same and not the same. And in the shop I felt my face, over the counter, go hard like a shell. I thought, this is what happens: you harden, you set in your mould. I worked on like a machine, counting the weekly takings I no longer needed. Though that was a winter of sudden thrift: power-cuts; no oil, no lights in the shop windows, a three-day week. And I saw on Hancock’s face as he came in for cigars a stony look like my own: it’s all over, that mad boom, now we can count the cost.

The cost? I had these pains in my side. I knew it was my heart. I went to Doctor Field’s. And then to the hospital, where they tested me and cardiographed me and entered little notes in files. How fragile we are. Doctor Field explained and prescribed tablets. They’re the same ones as my wife took, I said, and he said, Yes. Then he told me: ‘And you must take the pressure off. Perhaps it’s time you were thinking of giving up that shop of yours.’

Mrs Cooper said, ‘Well he’s right too. You could give it up now. Take a complete rest. I’d manage for you.’ She had the air of a hired nurse who has earned a share in her patient’s decisions. Along the High Street she was broad-casting, with her own embellishments, my story – our story, Dorry. ‘Went off and left him, she did. Only turned up for the funeral. Went off with some student – and him with a heart condition. Little bitch.’ Though I knew what she was thinking: ‘Poor, poor Mr Chapman – the old
tight-wad.’ ‘Come, come and spend Christmas with me,’ she said, ‘You can’t spend it all on your own.’ And I knew I had to watch out.

I waited, Dorry. The money was only a token. I never meant us to fight.

He reached the Common Road, under the shade of the plane trees. The pain in his chest was like a tight breastplate. He paused for a moment by one of the peeling tree trunks, gathering his breath; removed his jacket and hooked it over his right shoulder. A ‘Mr Whippy’ van, pink and cream, with a jangling loudspeaker that played ‘Greensleeves’, had drawn up on the pavement. Hands reaching. Good weather for business.

He crossed over the road, breathing deeply, waiting for the gaps in the traffic, then turned up Russell Street.

I used to walk along this same road, Russell Street, on my way to school, with a briefcase in my hand then. For Mum and Dad said, now you’ve got to the grammar school you must have a briefcase, not a satchel like the ordinary kids. I used to get the tram from where we lived, which was not far from where Mrs Cooper’s flat is, down Allandale Road, then walk over the common. At four o’clock back again, less briskly, by the same route; though not before taking the detour, with the others, down Pond Street – to Mr Vincent’s shop.

If someone had said then: One day you will own that shop; one day you will walk along Russell Street with your briefcase containing wage-packets and order forms, I wouldn’t have been surprised. If someone had said, There, where you walk across the common, you will meet your future wife, there she will decide to marry you, I
would have replied, All right, so be it. I didn’t believe, despite being at grammar school, that the future belonged to me. I thought: things would come to you anyway, and when they did they would already be turned into history.

Shady on this side of Russell Street. Gaunt Edwardian houses offsetting the new estate on the other side. Then the turning-off which, if you follow it, curves up past the old people’s home to St Stephen’s church. Then the brick wall – there are slogans on it in chalk and aerosol spray – ‘Russell Bootboys’, ‘Judy Freeman fucks coons’; ambitiously sketched bits of anatomy – which someone has tried to remove. Then the railings, the double row of chestnuts, their outer branches jutting over the railings and the pavement. Pause here. Breathe. The shade under chestnut trees is always dense and cool. They are one of the first trees to sprout in spring and to shed in the autumn. That was something I learnt at school, Dorry, by not paying attention; by looking from the window.

School gates open, splitting the wrought iron motto in two.
Virtus et Fortitudo.
Asphalt area beneath the blocks of class-rooms – silent now. To the right of the gates, beyond the trunks of the chestnuts, in a square plot bordered with marigolds, the memorial.

Perhaps I knew him then, perhaps I was already his memory, this old, breathless figure, the same and not the same as me, with a briefcase, walking now down Russell Street. Perhaps I knew Mr Vincent’s shop would become Mr Chapman’s; perhaps I knew when I walked home over the common that I was crossing the path I would one day take home to my wife. Life was set out like a map. Like the waxy, pastel-coloured maps that hung, that afternoon, in the History Room. ‘Europe after the Seven Years’ War’; ‘The World – Present Day’. The history master was explaining about Henry VIII. From that second-floor room you could see, if you looked one way, the playing fields with the white goal posts, and, the other
way, the asphalt, the chestnut trees, the gates leading out into Russell Street. It was an icy afternoon in March but the sun was bright. Shrill cries were coming from the playing fields. History. The master said I didn’t have the right attitude. ‘Does not concentrate; poor essays’ (‘Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries because he’d have done so anyway’). Even that afternoon he tried to recall me to the present (in a history lesson, Dorry!) with his sharp ‘Are you with us Chapman? Not paying attention again!’ But I put my head to the window and the view like a map, and I saw.

That was the day before the school sports. I was the favourite for the mile. I’d won it the year before and equalled the school record, and I was seldom beaten in house matches. I was sixteen, not athletic-looking, but I had strong legs and stamina. I was hopeless at schoolwork but I had this one talent for distance running. I’d win again they said – and even the history master had to concede (the class laughed) as he caught me gazing out of the window – ‘All right, Chapman, you’ll have your moment tomorrow, but would you mind telling us now why Thomas Cromwell was executed?’

He moved on past the school gates, put the briefcase down, paused again, held his left side, waited.

‘Right, let’s be having you!’

The voice of Mr Hill, the games master – veteran of Great War drill halls and still apt to let his sergeant’s voice rap and chafe them as if they were troops departing for the front – rang out over the track. His black starter’s pistol lay on the grass and he strode now up and down in front of them, his stop-watch dangling from his neck,
calling out their names, which he knew perfectly well, and ticking them off on his list, as if, at this moment of action, it were all the more necessary to keep precise records.

‘Right, up to the line when I tell you.’

In front of them the black cinder track, already churned and pitted by the afternoon’s events, stretched away to the finishing line and the judge’s table, then curved to the left. The mile; the culminating event of the day. Ahead, beyond the hawthorn hedge and the cricket sight-screens, the playing fields. On the inside, the high jump and long jump pits; on the outside, the spectators. Boys in blue uniforms; exhorting parents. To the left, across the track, the elm trees and wooden fence marking the school boundary. Tops of the houses in Woodruff Road beyond; the spire of St Stephen’s.

A fresh wind stirred the branches of the elm trees and the sun sailed out and then was shuttered again behind swift clouds. The day was bright, but colder than one expected for late March, and the watching parents stamped their feet and rubbed gloved hands, partly from chilliness and partly to prove their heartiness as spectators.

‘He’s the one to watch.’

Thompson was speaking to him as they waited, jogging and limbering behind the starting line. He was nodding towards a tall, muscular boy, built like a sprinter rather than a distance runner, with dark hair and clean features, whose face, at that moment, looked tense and severe.

‘He’s won the 440. If he wins this he’ll get the
Victor Ludorum
, as well as the Mile Cup.’

‘If we let him win.’

He smiled; and for the first time heard his voice sound as if he were playing a part.

Thompson grinned. Thompson was captain of his house, a senior prefect and one of the honoured of the school. He would stand by the track one day, vigorously shouting-on his own son.

‘You’ll let me take up the running at first as usual?’ he said, deferring graciously. The parting in his sandy hair was clean and straight, even now at the end of a day’s athletics.

‘Why? Won’t you try yourself? This isn’t a house match.’

Thompson shook his head protestingly. His duties were to his house, the school, to fair play and credit where due. There was nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice for these things.