The Sweet-Shop Owner (7 page)

Don’t move. Think of nothing.

They called in the doctor. Lie still, he said. And they sent me to a Home in Surrey where they talked to me and nodded gravely over me and finally left me sitting by myself in a chair.

They didn’t visit me at the Home. They came there once to admit me (Jack drove, in the black Humber, and they gave me discreet, do-as-you’re-told kisses) and once to discharge me. I sat in a grey easy chair by the window with my feet on a floor that was polished twice daily. I lifted my legs for the orderly to wield his mop and he swept on around me, so that I was marooned. But I didn’t
move. Outside there were lawns, a gravel drive, two rows of clipped yews, rose beds, a red brick wall with wrought iron gates. So neat, so symmetrical. It didn’t belong to me, none of it. But I watched the gardener, with the mower, and the rake, and then with the shears and ladder for the yew trees. He had baggy trousers, braces, a red face, and as he worked (I couldn’t hear, but I saw his lips draw in and his cheeks expand) he whistled. Patients in striped bath-robes and ill-fitting jackets, for whom his garden meant nothing, for whom there was fire in the rose beds, havoc in the crunching gravel, mooched by, but he worked on, asking no questions. First one yew tree then the next. Was I really ill, Willy? I was concentrating hard so that the orderly wouldn’t sink through his shiny floor and the gardener wouldn’t slip from his ladder. I was responsible. How still but determined I sat, marooned in my easy chair. The gardener had almost finished the yew trees and the orderly had swept the floor for perhaps the twentieth time when they said I could go. I had found my balance, struck my bargain. ‘You are better,’ they said. ‘Better?’ I said. My things were packed in a brown suitcase and I put on my hat, tucking my hair under the rim like a woman who means to get her way. The orderly smiled (he was fond of me), ‘Nice to see you well again, Miss’; but I didn’t smile. I looked at him coldly: for there could be no question, not now. And beyond the lawns, beyond the brick wall, they were coming – I was ready for them – in the black, shiny Humber, Jack at the wheel, Paul by his side, Mother and Father in the back, with their heads erect and their hands, clean as marble, protruding from their cuffs. Down the Surrey lane, eyes watching the flashing trees. They would be coming soon. I was a skittle, Willy, but I wouldn’t fall. The gleaming car would turn through the wrought iron gates. Its tyres would crunch on the gravel.

There, be still. You must rest your back. I’ll put on the
light; no, don’t stir. How little you know how you’ve kept my balance.

They brought me home. There were little shows of reconciliation. Father bought me a dress, my brothers perfume. They said, ‘Are you better?’ as to a child that has ceased its tantrums, and I said, ‘Yes,’ without smiling. But their verdict was firm and business-like. She has let us down once, she may let us down again; we cannot afford that embarrassment. So when you appeared, Willy, you were the perfect solution. What justice, what neatness. Let her have that little man. He’s as simple as she’s cracked and she’ll wish soon enough she’d settled for Hancock. And if
he
thinks he’s walking into money, he’ll regret it when he learns how cracked she is. They even bought me the house and gave me a settlement, half in cash, half in shares. For their own guilt in disposing of me had to be paid for, and the greater the payment the more stainless their conscience. What justice. The perfect solution. But they didn’t see how
you
would be my solution and how it was they who would lose.

How peaceful the evening is. Your head in my lap. There, look up now: see what you’ll always see if you never claim it. Only an image in a mirror, remember? What poise, what balance, Willy, this room, this moment. Nothing must be touched, nothing must be changed.

Had he slept? He woke out of a dream in which the objects in the room seemed to loom triumphantly – the chintz chairs, the clock on the mantelpiece, the pink and blue bordered cups in one of which there was tea he had forgotten to drink, the standard lamp with its spiralled stem. As if time had passed, years, and it was long after, and they seemed to be saying, those familiar objects, ‘See, we endured; things remain.’ But there she was; her face was above his, lit by the standard lamp and turned to one side. What loveliness. It was her lap in which his head
rested, her hand which lay on his hair, and she was reading the newspaper, folded on the arm-rest of the sofa. She had noticed his eyes opening and her own had turned, widened, enjoined (what jewels!), as if they did the work of a finger to her lips – Don’t stir, don’t spoil the trick. ‘You slept,’ she said, moving her gaze at once away from his, back to the paper, as though ignoring something, some mystery perhaps too delicate to probe. And later she said, her eyes still on the paper: ‘There will be a war, Willy.’

Mrs Cooper watched him, standing like a sentry, at his counter. She’d worked once before in a shop. It was a book shop. Saturdays only, before the war. She was only seventeen. She’d wanted the book-seller to make a pass at her. She’d climbed up the steps in her new silk stockings to the top shelves. But nothing had happened.

War? What war?

He had lost his balance on a pair of ladders, fallen off and damaged his back. They wouldn’t take him for a soldier. He wouldn’t have the opportunity, as they put it, to ‘see action’. Such a strange phrase and such an odd notion – as if there were no action besides wars. Strange as that other phrase which would be repeated, now, over and over again, like the little deft stroke with which a seal is stamped: fallen, fallen in action.

Left, right. They were marching over the crunching gravel, past the rows of black Nissen huts, past the wire fencing, the white flag-pole, making patterns for the sergeant, left, right. There was grass beyond the wire fencing, the tussocked downs of Hampshire, twittering skylarks, scudding spring clouds. April, 1940. And some of those khaki figures out on the gravel fitted uneasily into
the pattern making. Left, right. What did it have to do with ‘action’, this drill, this answering by numbers and naming of parts? What was the connection? And, see, one of them in the front rank as they halted, waiting to move off again, teetered forward on his toes, almost toppled, so that the sergeant could bawl – his favourite line – ‘Dohn anticipate the ordaah!’

He watched from the side window, amid the smells of webbing, waterproofing and polish. For though they hadn’t taken him for a soldier they’d given him a uniform: sent him his papers, examined him, made sly quips – ‘How did you get your back, soldier?’ – ‘Fell off some step-ladders’ – asked curt questions – ‘Civilian occupation?’ – ‘Shop-keeper’ – and by some unerring logic (they too didn’t doubt he was the shop-owner, the trader of wares) assigned him to: Royal Engineers, Carbury Camp, Stores. The others would see action – those there through the window were being prepared for action – but his duty would be Issue of Equipment – packs, blankets, pouches, helmets, all numbered, allocated, entered up in the record sheet, stamped, checked. What was the connection?

‘Squad Halt! Squad Shun! Squaaad!’ Patterns over the gravel. ‘That man! Dohn anticipate the ordaah!’

And now they must do their bit.

‘Sergeant! Have your men assemble with kit bags.’

‘Squaad!’

Right! One at a time, keep the line moving, look sharp. Blanket, ground sheet, move along, waterproof cape, back-pack, side-packs, two, steel helmet – make it fit or change yer ’ed – with netting, move along, webbing straps, bayonet sheath, water-bottle, keep it moving – that man, pick up that bleedin’ ’elmeht!

‘Thank you Sergeant, carry on.’

‘Sh-holdah kit bags! Lehf!… Lehf …’ Over the crunching gravel.

*

He didn’t mind the orders, the regimentation. He was a performer, wasn’t he? Give him the uniform, tell him what to do, he’d do it. And it was easy to pretend to be a soldier. To salute, to obey, to clomp one’s black heels, even with a limp, over the wooden barrack-hut floor. And see, he dealt as before (how consistent fate was) with items, with things stacked and piled and arranged in long rows under the curved roof of the store block; with lists, inventories (the carbon from the duplicated Army forms came off on your hands along with the blanco from old webbing), stock lists, issue lists, delivery lists. There was a counter, wooden and scoured by continual use (but the Quartermaster made them polish it every day) from behind which you watched the faces entering and passing, passing, keeping the line moving. They never seemed to stop, and you remembered them only by the numbers you recorded on the forms: 120 capes, 120 helmets, 240 side-packs.

‘There,’ said Private Rees, from Swansea, sallow-faced and listless, removing his gold-rimmed glasses and squinting at them (for that was his reason for not seeing action), ‘There’s another lot done.’

And up the road they were coming already, the next lot, in the canvas-topped lorries, past the flashing leaves, past the striped pole by the guard-house, waiting to be made into soldiers.

‘Right!’ snapped the sergeant. ‘Now lissen-a-me. Look after your kit. Remember: what you ’ave don’t belong to you. When the war’s over the army’ll want it bloody back!’

They badgered him and Rees, and the other stores clerks, because they were safe. And the rest would go and fight. They slept in their own quarters for those permanently on camp but they mixed in the mess hall with the passers-through for Issue of Kit and Basic Training. Private Rees would not be drawn. ‘Bugger off,’ he said,
‘Tell them to bugger off, Willy boy.’ But he said (did they think he was stupid?): ‘Someone has to mind the store.’

The long barrack huts with their tiers of bunks, the mess hall and the echoing bath-house reminded him of school: the sweaty blasphemy of changing rooms, flaunted man-hoods, the belligerence of the football pitch and the running track. They’d wanted ‘action’ then, in ’30 and ’31, trailing home, tingling with exercise, out of the school gates. A restlessness plagued them which turned their games into something more than games. The real thing, the thing itself: let us have that. And for a moment their eyes were blind to the rows of still chestnuts, the black lines of railings. They’d sat in the history lesson and chafed at its dryness – would nothing happen? – but here suddenly was ‘History’. So Private Rees said, smacking his lips over a newspaper bearing the news of the occupation of Paris: ‘History, that’s what it is.’ As if the statement would save him, immune as a rock, from an invasion of Germans and all the outrages of war. And here suddenly was the real thing. And yet how did it express itself? In barrack huts and wire fencing, in numbers, inventories, lists? 360 capes, 360 helmets, 720 side-packs. What was the connection?

They badgered him in the mess hall. His limp became the target for mocking jokes, and they looked in his face with the shifting looks of schoolboys for signs of injured pride, for signs that their enforced code of ‘action’ had proved its worth by delivering a sting. But he gave no sign. For over the dinner table, over the white cloth with the blue border, on the evening his final papers and his rail warrant had come, she’d looked at him, looking for the same signs, looking for ‘deeds’ and ‘action’, but she’d not found them.

‘Count your blessings,’ she’d said. ‘Why should you go and get yourself killed?’

What firmness. She sat in the chintz chair listening to
the wireless bulletins, scanning the papers which spoke of the war in Finland, the threat of air raids, taking note of the facts, as if the course of things was predictable and she had only to observe its fulfilment. Let bombs drop: she wouldn’t jump. And when the note-taking was done she would throw down the paper, switch off the wireless (before it burst into morale-boosting song), and, getting up, stare momentarily at the window – though not through it, for it was covered by the dark black-out curtain, and beyond it, anyway, the garden was dank and dead, under that first bleak winter of the war. But she stared. No, it wasn’t war, destruction that she feared. It almost protected her, that great ominous blackness, as if she knew where she stood with it – shielded her from sunlight; and she was saved perhaps, so long as there were bulletins and blackness (her body was like a lamp, there at the window) from bright moments which urged: No, there is beauty, we do not belong to history.

But that was before he left for his camp in Hampshire and before she went with her mother to her Aunt Madeleine’s in Aylesbury (for her family had stepped in nobly in the hour of peril to pluck her from the rain of bombs that would fall on London). Leigh Drive stood empty. Her plates and glass were wrapped in packing cases; the pictures taken down from the wall, the wedding photos locked in a drawer. How many landmarks had passed already, swept suddenly far behind by the advent of war? Was it only in ’37 he’d been the printer’s assistant, coming home in the evening to Mother and Father, who’d never heard of Irene Harrison? And how many new landmarks had replaced them? Leigh Drive, the shop; housing his identity, but not for ever; and perhaps never really; for see, they stood empty, and, look again – the bombs were falling. Two fell in Briar Street, one stripped the lime trees outside Powell’s; and one, crashing down near the Surrey canal, flattened old Ellis’s print-works.

What would become of the shop? What would become of the sweet jars, the ice-cream, the magazines? He pinned up one of those comic notices: Closed for the Hostilities. ‘It will keep,’ she said. ‘It must keep.’ Wars pass but sweet shops remain.

‘Dear Willy,’ she wrote from Aylesbury, ‘We are doing our bit. Aunt Madeleine is digging the back garden. I am collecting coat-hangers. Mother writes to Jack and Paul. Mother especially does her bit. Father is staying at Sydenham. Sticking to his post. He demands the keys to Leigh Drive. He won’t get them. Mr Smithy is keeping an eye on the shop. He says he’ll get someone to board up the windows and he’ll send on any mail.’

He replied: ‘Am doing my bit too,’ and wrote, ‘1980 helmets.’ For that was how they told off the war, in tin helmets and letters.

‘Mother worries about Father in London. You must have read about last week’s raids. He sleeps alone at Sydenham, in the cellar. Misses Jack and Paul. He’s by himself now at the laundry. Mother suggests I go to give him some “support”, but I think it’s really Father’s idea. He says he’ll protect me from bombs. But I’d be more scared of staying at Sydenham.’