The Sweet-Shop Owner (26 page)

He drove onto the crazy paving of the garage drive and stopped. The neighbours, with their clippers and hoses, would look up, seeing the cream coloured Hillman, and think, ‘He’s early’; and then continue their tasks. ‘Don’t blame him, on an evening like this.’ They would see his usual stout figure stepping from the car; but they wouldn’t see the pain swelling inside his ribs. Mr Dixon waved. He got out, the engine running, to unlock the garage. The metal handles were hot to touch and as he pulled open the heavy doors he had to gauge the effort carefully. Not now. He returned to the car, drove it into the garage, emerged again with his briefcase, and shut, laboriously, the two doors. Then he walked along the path by the bay window and the hydrangeas to the front door.

Outside, all was clear, obvious. Inside he seemed to enter a submerged, aqueous world in which the past was
embedded like sunken treasure. He’d drawn all the curtains in the morning to keep the house cool; and he moved now, slowly, like a diver with heavy boots, through a shady, flickering world, shot with eddies and swirls of light, where the sun found its way through chinks or penetrated dimly, as into the hollows of a wreck, through the rippled curtains. He hung his jacket over the post at the foot of the stairs and put his briefcase in the usual place beside the umbrella stand. The ticking barometer-clock, the photographs on the wall loomed through the ooze, and as he opened the door into the living-room, the polished cabinets, one for china, one for glass, the green baize on the oval table, the spiralling stem of the standard lamp swam into view, as if he were really discovering, let down in his diving suit, a world left long ago, miraculously preserved. ‘See, things remain.’

He crossed to the french windows and drew back the beige curtains, so that the murky relics inside were suddenly raised once more into the fresh, familiar light of the present. Should he redraw them? Was it more fitting to return to the veiled museum-world? But he kept them open. The lilac was half within the shadow of the house, but its upper leaves, where the mauve cones had already bloomed and died, fluttered in the sunshine. He opened the quarter lights of the window so that the sound of lawn-mowers, clippers, a smell of cut grass trickled in on the breeze.

She could never get enough air. Or was it that air assailed her?

He turned round again to face the room. The clock on the mantelpiece showed half-past six. Its hands might have stopped for ever at that position, like a clock rescued from some catastrophe, recording the exact moment of disaster. But not yet, not yet.

Normally, when he returned from the shop he would change his clothes, eat the meal that Mrs Pritchard left,
prepared but uncooked, in the kitchen, wash up, sit at the table and make up his books – or, on an evening like this, potter gently in the garden. But there was no need of those things now. He had been lifted clear, it seemed, of that frame of routine that had been built around him, able to see it at last like some visitor from outside. So that his feet led him to wander now, with the immunity of a ghost, round this deserted monument of a house.

He climbed the stairs. Each step cost an effort. Yet he could almost encourage the pain now. He passed into the bedroom, gloomy behind the drawn curtains; into Dorry’s room – lingering several minutes; into the spare bedroom with its long, quilt-covered trunk. He ran his eyes diligently over objects, like a curator making a final tour before the gallery is locked.

It is all here, Dorry. Locked in little mementos, fixed in little tokens of the past. As if its only purpose were to be saved for this final glance.

He opened the heavy lid of the trunk. This required concentration. His hands reached down to a red tin box, hidden beneath other boxes full of objects wrapped in tissue-paper and old newspaper.

You never delved this far when you came. Did I prevent you? These are the letters she wrote to me when I was a quartermaster’s clerk in Hampshire and she worked at the Food Office. How good we always were at minding the store. How well we’ve kept everything. Up till now.

His eyes studied the worn envelopes, with the addresses crossed out, several times, for re-use, and the red stamps with the head of George VI. But he didn’t open the folded notepaper.

Sometimes, in museums, Dorry, you think what you see isn’t real. And these (he took another batch of envelopes from the tin box), these are all your letters from college – when you would write just to me and not to her.

The china shepherd and shepherdess on the dressing-table
still anticipated their embrace. He wasn’t aware how many times he slipped from one room to another, inspecting their silent contents. Was it to make sure all was complete, secure? To summon life from those unmoving objects? To laugh at their fraudulence? Perhaps he was already sitting, motionless himself, in the armchair where he’d decided he would sit, and it was only some shadow of himself, touching but not touching these frozen items of stock, who drifted now – out of his daughter’s room – onto the landing at the top of the stairs.

I don’t believe in ghosts, Dorry. But sometimes, alone in this house, I’ve thought she’s watching me, her moist eyes stalking me still, ensuring that I keep all just as it was. Perhaps she’s watching me now. Is her face set, Dorry, in that old tenacity? Or smiling? Or torn with remorse? And what does she want now, watching over me? Is she saying: Forget her, Willy? Or is she hoping, too – you will come?

He grasped the bannister to descend. His head swam, looking down. Don’t fall. He came down, gingerly at first, then more rapidly. No more precautions. He picked up his jacket from the stair-post. He moved across the hall, not looking at the photographs on the wall. The needle in the barometer pointed to ‘Change’.

In the living-room he eyed the clock as if there were some deadline.

Twenty-past seven. You wouldn’t come till after my normal time for getting in.

The shadow had crept further up the lilac tree. Bryant would have closed, an hour ago, at Pond Street. Miss Fox would be on her way to Broadstairs. Sandra would be home – trying on again that new dress? Mrs Cooper would have opened her pay-packet at last, and discovered, beside her normal wage, the five hundred pounds.

He moved to the armchair by the standard lamp, turning it to face the window, and sat down. Though he sat,
the pain didn’t diminish. Her shawl was draped where it had always been, over the head-rest. He held his jacket in his lap. When she died she was waiting for me to come.

He looked out at the lilac and the sun-flecked garden.

I always liked gardening, Dorry. If I hadn’t been a shop-keeper I’d have been a gardener. Arranging the flower beds was like arranging the sweets in the shop window. I never knew if she liked gardens too. She wouldn’t come outside, because of her asthma. Though she used to sit watching me intently, from the window, mowing the grass, tending the flowers. But perhaps she preferred all those lifeless, lasting things: cut glass, willow-pattern plates, vases with pictures of flowers, not real flowers, on them. And she left them to me, as you can’t leave real flowers, as her memorial.

The clock chimed half-past seven. The pain rose in his chest so that his face, always so wooden, so expressionless, might have been convulsed and torn.

Memorials. They don’t matter. They don’t belong to us. They are only things we leave behind so we can vanish safely. Disguises to set us free. That’s why I built my own memorial so compliantly – the one she allotted me, down there in the High Street. A memorial of trifles, useless things. And what will you do with my memorial, Dorry?

Something caught in his throat like a stuck laugh. Not yet.

Spit on my memorial, Dorry, sell it up, forget it. That’s what memorials are for. You might have had the real thing. You got the money. And you didn’t have to extort it, for it would have been yours, anyway, in the end. That money was always meant to be passed on. It was never hers; it was only the token of something. She used it to buy useless bits of glass and china. And do you know where it really came from? It belonged to her uncles, your great-uncles; three of them. They were knocked down like pins in the First War, and now they have their own, bronze
memorial, outside the town hall. That was long before I met her. She never talked about the past, but she told me about that money, in one of those letters, up there in the Oxo tin in the trunk. It never belonged to her. It belonged to the bronze soldiers. And what will you buy with it, Dorry? History?

He gripped the arm-rests. Metal pain was filling his limbs and welding him to the chair. Was all this happening in an instant or was it the effect of years, an age? Be still, look at the things that are fixed. Sunlight cascaded over the lilac and the flower beds. The garden beckoned, as things do which cannot be touched. She will not come. She will come. He clutched the jacket with the letter in it. Today is your birthday. The lilac swayed. Tomorrow rain would fall on it – the weather-man had said on the radio – patter through the dawn light onto the leaves. There would be a victory, but not his. She would come: he would be a cold statue. Can you capture the moment without it capturing you? His chest was transfixed. You stood on the edge of the diving-board. It seemed you might be poised there for ever. He couldn’t move. He was a powerless skittle towards which was hurtling an invisible ball. Not yet. You stood on your toes, raised your arms. She will not come. The lilac shimmered. The garden framed in the window was like a photograph.

All right. All right – now.

Making an Elephant
Tomorrow
The Light of Day
Last Orders
Ever After
Out of This World
Waterland
Learning to Swim
Shuttlecock
The Sweet-Shop Owner

G
RAHAM
S
WIFT
was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels:
The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock
, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize;
Waterland
, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour;
Out of This World; Ever After
, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger;
Last Orders
, which was awarded the Booker Prize;
The Light of Day;
and, most recently,
Tomorrow
. He is also the author of
Learning to Swim
, a collection of short stories, and
Making an Elephant
, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

On the anniversary of a life-shattering event, George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, revisits the catastrophes of his past and reaffirms the extraordinary direction of his future. Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, but this routine job left George a transformed man. Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other,
The Light of Day
is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery.

Fiction/Literature

Four men—friends, most of them, for half a lifetime—gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive toward the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men’s voices—and that of Jack’s mysteriously absent widow—into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.

Fiction/Literature

This flawlessly constructed and deeply compassionate novel is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented and redeemed him for forty years.

Fiction/Literature

Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force,
Ever After
spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautiful wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of
Ever After
is nothing less than the eternal question, “Why should things matter?” as pondered by both Bill Unwin and his Victorian ancestor, whose private notebooks reveal a quest for truth that bears eerie—and ultimately heartbreaking—parallels to Unwin’s own.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74026-1

Out of This World
interweaves the history of a blighted family with the tragic and ludicrous history of the twentieth century. Its alternating narrators are a father and daughter—each obsessed with the other and irrevocably estranged—surveying their losses and grievances on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their voices are unforgettable, their hurts terribly moving, and their vision of our era, like Swift’s itself, shocking and terribly persuasive.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74032-2

Prentis, the narrator of this nightmarish masterpiece, catalogs “dead crimes” for a branch of the London Police Department and suspects that he is going crazy. His files keep vanishing. His boss subjects him to cryptic taunts. His family despises him. And as Prentis desperately tries to hold on to the scraps of his sanity, he uncovers a conspiracy of blackmail and betrayal that extends from his department and into the buried past of his father, a war hero codenamed “Shuttlecock”—and, lately, a resident of a hospital for the insane. At once a fiendishly devious mystery and a profound reckoning of the debts that bind sons to fathers,
Shuttlecock
is a brilliantly accomplished work of fiction.