The Sweet-Shop Owner (21 page)

We walked back over the grass of the common, under the trees. How green this part of London always was. And up in the bedroom, behind the green curtains, the scent of Pimms and lemon on her lips … I let you touch me but I’m not touched, I let you take me but I’m not possessed, I let you …

That was in ’38. Two weeks later I slipped off a ladder and damaged my back. And a year after that – that was after the shop opened and Mother and Father died – the war broke out. But I didn’t fight. I wasn’t fit for active service. I only learnt to count, to number, not to touch.

‘Something up with the car?’

He gripped the briefcase more tightly, as if Hancock, stepping over onto his side, might have been about to snatch it.

‘No. No. I thought I’d walk. For a change.’

‘Sure you’re up to it old man?’

Hancock’s breath smelt of drink. The face was bleary-eyed, brick red. Five years ago the voice might have held a taunt (you – with your limp and weak chest – walk to Pond Street!), but now it seemed almost to waver with sympathy.

‘Pay-day at Pond Street?’

‘Yes.’

They stared inertly at each other as if looking into mirrors. Save for Hancock’s visits to the shop, they scarcely met, and now that they came face to face in the street it was as if something needed explaining.

‘I – er – was going to pop in on my way back.’

‘That’s all right. Mrs Cooper’s there.’

‘Of course. Look – are you sure you should be walking over there?’

‘Sure enough.’

Hancock shuffled awkwardly.

‘Well – mind how you go.’ He held out a hand indecisively. It was as if he were about to offer support – or needed to be steadied himself. But he changed the gesture in mid-course and pointed to the briefcase.

‘Hang on to the goods,’ he said drily.

Down Allandale Road. Past Armstrong’s garage. Armstrong’s pump attendants, who no longer were issued with blue and yellow overalls, lounging in the heat in faded singlets and jeans. Up above, the garish blue canopy with the company insignia and a sign saying ‘Quadruple Stamps’ – as if to make up for the hard prices on the petrol pumps. Those Arabs had driven a tough bargain. But on the forecourt there were great glistening black patches. See, it still gets spilt, precious stuff.

Across Allandale Road. Shade on this side. Breathing hard already. Pain in the chest just nudging. He would have to gauge it carefully; rest now and then.

A few shops to left and right. An electrician’s, an Asian
food shop, a betting shop; and then the rows of tall, bay-fronted Victorian houses, with basements and steps up to the door, converted into offices and dental surgeries, or knocked down to make way for new blocks. Builders’ merchant’s; a car showroom; the squat, oblong office of a firm that made light bulbs. Dairy on the left opposite Finch Street (horses once, snorting and clopping; troughs outside, yellowish at the rim). Baptist church, zebra crossing, then more shops. Follow the road where it descends and curves to the left, and you get to where Mrs Cooper lives.

He turned right, out of the shade, into Finch Street, carrying the pain in his chest as if it were something he could retain or release at will. Finch Street was a cul-de-sac. Like the other streets to the right off Allandale Road it ended in railings and the footpath which skirted the common.

I told her, Dorry. That winter she came out of hospital and we bought Pond Street. She would have found out anyway. She had a way of knowing things, of sensing them before I even guessed them, so that what she didn’t know you felt compelled to tell her. ‘I think Dorry’s got a boy-friend,’ I said. ‘At last,’ I added, as though to pass it lightly off. She was sitting in her chair where she always sat now, that Angora shawl round her shoulders, pink with a grey-blue weave in it. She didn’t answer at first, as if she were waiting to hear something else.

‘Who?’ she said quietly.

But I didn’t know who. I didn’t say it was only a father’s guess. I knew nothing precise. You came home that Christmas and you said nothing, but you knew she knew, and you looked at me accusingly. She studied you, as if you might be marked, changed. You found it hard to meet her eyes.

And as though to overcome all that, you said blandly
and indifferently one weekend in February: ‘Oh, I’ve met a man at college. A history graduate. We’ve been going out some time.’ As if you were afraid to make your voice sound glad.

‘Oh, that’s nice. Isn’t that nice, Willy? We must meet him sometime.’

You looked at her as if she were mocking you, calling the bluff of your own casualness. As if you’d expected anger, alarm.

‘You must bring him down here, Dorry.’

‘Maybe.’ You shrugged. ‘All right.’

And so you brought him, a fortnight later. To outface her challenge and to call her bluff in return? Or do I mis-judge you, Dorry? Did you come simply to oblige an ailing mother and a fond father?

Were you still, then, the good, the loyal daughter?

The tea things were laid on the trolley and on the mahogany cake stand. Salmon and egg and cress sandwiches, which she wasn’t allowed to eat; a cake, a Dundee. Mrs Pritchard had come specially to clean and help in the kitchen and I’d asked Mrs Cooper (‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘I’ll manage’) to stand in at the shop. We hadn’t had a visitor in that house for so long. She put on a cream silk blouse, unworn for years. The sleeves seemed filled only with air. But she covered them with her shawl and sat in her chair, waiting. We heard the car pull up outside. I watched from the window. A blue Mini.

You had a bunch of flowers in your hand which you gave to him as he finished locking the car door. You whispered something as you came up the path. He buttoned his jacket. You straightened your dress. A performance.

‘This is Michael. Michael, Mother and Father.’

He was tall, keen-eyed; a large, strong hand held out for mine. His robust, intelligent good looks made me think of Doctor Cunningham, so that I shrank a little, as I did under those cool questions at the hospital, having expected someone somehow less imposing. He spoke deftly and fluently, crossing his long legs on the sofa and clasping his knee, and I felt my own voice falter when I offered: ‘History. Now I’ve always been fascinated by history.’ And I felt forlorn as you looked at me reproachfully, then turned your head in embarrassment at the conversation that failed to follow. In the silences, he gazed round, curiously, at the porcelain in the cabinet and the vases on the mantelpiece. His eyes would fix on Irene, then look quickly away. And I noticed, more than once, he gave the same look to you.

Your face reddened. With shame, with anger? I watched the colour deepen, the more the cups chinked, the more she wheezed in her armchair, plucked at her shawl and now and then coughed into her serviette, patting her throat and saying, ‘Oh I’m very sorry, please do forgive me, please’ – and I watched it flare up as if some draught had fanned it when she brushed crumbs from her blouse and announced:

‘Well Michael, it’s so nice to see you. You know, Dorothy doesn’t tell us much about you. She keeps her secrets. So you’re working for a doctorate. We must think of your futures, mustn’t we?’ She lifted her cup. ‘What exactly are your arrangements?’

I didn’t know she would have said that. Believe me, I had nothing to do with those words; and even I sat, with my slice of Dundee cake poised, in surprise, before my lips. Should I have intervened, put down my plate, and said, like a discreet husband, ‘Now really dear,’ and laughed? Made it clear it was only a game of bluff? But I wasn’t clear if it was only a game. Games turn into fights.

‘Well, when you say arrangements, Mrs Chapman’ – confusion and hostility suddenly upset the deftness – ‘I’m not sure that I – we – that’s to say it doesn’t – it’s a question of – what exactly do you mean by “arrangements”?’

And I watched Irene, in her chair, almost imperceptibly, draw in her feet.

Later, as you washed up the things together, dutifully, in the kitchen, I overheard snatches of your talk: ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?… I told you, didn’t I?… 
He
doesn’t say much, does he?… Oh you were lucky he took time off from his precious shop to see us – he’ll be straight off again after this … this bloody china … so we know what to do now, don’t we Mike? Don’t we?…’

‘Bye.’

‘Goodbye.’

She didn’t come to the door. She had her excuse. She sat hunched with her shawl in the armchair.

‘Glad to have met you.’

I stood in the porch like some helpless mediator. I waved. The car lights winked, moving off down Leigh Drive. That was the only time I saw him, and the last time I saw you, without its being – what shall I say? – under conditions of truce.

He reached the end of Finch Street and passed beyond the gap in the railings.

Mrs Bennet said the world was ahead of you. Twenty-two that summer and your final exams to sit for. A First – as Mrs Bennet might have predicted. But no celebrations or congratulatory gifts and kisses. I only said to Mrs Cooper, who didn’t understand, ‘She got a First.’ ‘It’s the best you can get,’ I explained. ‘It means she’s got her degree.’ And I told Hancock, when he asked. ‘Always was
a clever girl,’ he said. But I moderated my pride, in each case, for fear of the question that would follow – ‘What will she do now?’ You’d phoned up to tell us your result, almost disdainfully (‘Oh that’s wonderful news, Dorry, that’s wonderful’). And later you announced that you’d made up your mind to try for a Ph.D. Then nothing. Not even a word to say you’d be home for the summer. You had to vacate your college room at the end of the term but we could guess, surely enough, where you’d be living. Only a brief letter at the end of July, which said, ‘I’m taking a holiday. I’m going to Greece next month with Michael.’ ‘He’ll pay for her I suppose,’ was all she said, as if she were washing her hands of something. But I sent you a cheque, secretly, and wrote on the back of it: ‘For your holiday – enjoy yourselves.’ You didn’t return it. And four or five weeks later we got the postcard – a blue sea, white houses, a beach – marked somewhere in Crete; and on the back, signed only by you, was the message: ‘Enjoying ourselves.’

When I saw you next, that September, you still had traces of a sun-tan, but you didn’t want to discuss your holiday, and I felt jealous and thought of our meagre fortnights in Dorset.

She was in hospital again then – nothing bad; tests, observation. I hadn’t asked you to come. But did you time that visit carefully, knowing she wouldn’t be there? We didn’t do much talking. You had your large suitcase with you and you said you had to pick up some things. Books, papers, your tape-recorder. Yet most of those things had gone already. So why were you turning out drawers, taking things we could have kept for you, your perfume bottles from the bathroom, the Devon pottery that you bought in Teignmouth? You didn’t go to visit her at the hospital, and I never told her you were at home. ‘How’s Michael?’ I asked you. ‘Oh he’s fine, fine.’ But you didn’t say, ‘How’s Mother?’

And after that, letters, about once a month, which said little. Irene never read them, though she recognized them from the envelope. She left them to me as if they weren’t hers to touch. She seemed to be renouncing all contact with things. I opened them in the evening, and took them to the shop the next morning, tucked in my breast pocket (like this letter now), and I kept them, first in a cash tin in the safe, then in another tin – an old Oxo tin – which I have at home.

February, March, April ’73. Was it only last year? ‘How is she?’ was all Irene said after she knew I’d had a letter. ‘All right,’ I’d say and she’d turn and look away. ‘How is she?’ But that was more than you ever asked of her. Though she was dwindling, Dorry, in that armchair.

Another spell in hospital, that April. When I went to see her she was wired up and connected to some machine. Little wires from her neck, from her chest, a tube in her arm and nose. And she looked up oddly from beneath all that clutter, like a child who has put on a disguise or hidden behind something but easily been discovered. When she came home she said, ‘I’m going to have Barrett round. I want things to be settled.’ Barrett was her solicitor, Dorry.

And all this time I was working, harder than ever, in the shop. Though the face I saw in the mirror seemed to have become suddenly the face of an ageing, over-worked, livid-cheeked, corpulent man, a man who needed to ease off, take more recreation, retire. And already in my left side, though I scarcely noticed it till later, was that little pain, with its name like a rare butterfly’s.

April, May, June ’73. Then we got your letter, in July. It was the first one I showed her, though I was afraid – no stress, no excitement.

‘What will they do?’ She looked up blankly. ‘What will they live on? She won’t have any money.’ Though it wasn’t the money that troubled her. She raised her face
and said – she who’d always seemed able to predict things – ‘What now? What happens now?’ Though behind those words there was something else, a cry, far off, as if sounding over waves – which I knew then I’d never stopped hearing.

I believe she would have seen Barrett again. She would have changed it, Dorry. If there’d been time.

Dear Mother and Father,

I’m giving up my course here. I can always finish the thesis later. Michael’s been offered a research post at Bristol and there’s a chance of a lecturership. I’m going with him to live with him.

The common littered with people. Couples fondling each other on the grass. Prams. Kids. Plastic balls. A commotion and a frenzied splashing down at the paddling pool. He made his way along the asphalt path, screwing up his eyes against the sun. He patted momentarily his breast pocket.

You can see it all from here, Dorry. The world ahead of you. Down there on the right, the stretch of the High Street where it flanks the common. Traffic lights beyond. Then the railway bridge: green sign with a white arrow pointing to the station. Domed roof of the Town Hall, gabled roof of Gibbs’ department store. There are the shops, straight ahead, on Common Road, where she used to get all her things; Mason’s the butcher’s, Cullen’s, Henderson’s. Beyond them – you could have seen the clock-tower once, over the roof-tops – the school where my parents toiled to send me. And, far-distant, half-left, poking up from the shoulder of the hill, the grey, ill-proportioned spire of St Stephen’s.