The Sweet-Shop Owner (25 page)

She undid the bottle and tipped out a pill onto her left palm.

‘There.’

She held out the glass in her right hand and the pill in her left, as if offering food to some unfriendly animal.

‘Thanks.’

‘What a thing to do,’ she said as he took the pill. ‘What did you do that for?’ – but still in that subdued, unscolding tone. And she added softly, before turning and walking back into the shop:

‘You know, she won’t come back.’

He sat for several minutes in the stock room, digesting Mrs Cooper’s words. They were the first words of hers in sixteen years that had actually penetrated him, pierced him with a sense that she was tuned to his secretest thoughts. But what struck him most was the manner in which they were said – as if their force applied to her; as if she herself were deserted, abandoned, and no longer pretended.

He swallowed the pill. You were supposed to melt them in the mouth, not swallow them, but it didn’t matter.

What had happened in his absence? He looked through the plastic strips to where Mrs Cooper and Sandra were dealing with a flurry of customers. They looked unnaturally busy, ignoring each other’s presence, like people who know they have done wrong.

He drained his glass of water and, after rinsing his face and arms at the sink, shuffled, still breathless, back into the shop.

‘Everything – er – all right?’ he asked, standing by the plastic strips.

‘Yes – yes,’ Mrs Cooper replied.

Sandra said nothing and scarcely turned. Why had she taken off her bra? It made her look vulnerable rather than provocative. There was a bag by her feet, a chocolate and pink carrier bag torn at the handle. As his eyes moved to it Mrs Cooper looked up helplessly. Then he understood. The whole history of the afternoon became clear to him: Sandra had bought the dress. It was in the carrier bag. Mrs Cooper had discovered, misinterpreted. There had been a fight.

Suddenly he wanted to laugh. Did Mrs Cooper see – looking at him imploringly, as if he were about to punish her – that he really wanted to laugh?

‘Mrs Cooper, Sandra,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to shut the shop.’

They looked up, lips parted.

‘I’m going to shut the shop at half-past five. You can leave early.’

And not come back, thought Sandra.

He no longer wants us, thought Mrs Cooper.

The clock over the door stood at ten-past five.

‘I’m none too well, you can see that – I’m closing early.’

They didn’t protest.

‘Sandra, before you go, would you mind doing the awning?’

He took up his position at the counter. The evening rush had begun, and he started to flick the evening papers off the pile, fold them and hold them out, his hand cupped for the coins.

‘Much obliged. Thanking you.’

You had to perform to the last. Even with a pain like an iron bolt in your chest.

He watched Sandra outside on the pavement, struggling with the High Street awning. Her body was unavoidably on show as she reached with the pole, but – unlike Phil, displaying his strength in the morning – she seemed
suddenly unnerved by the fact. When two youths, passing by, feinted a grab at her, she rounded on them almost menacingly.

She re-entered the shop, slid the pole into its resting place and then stood, rubbing her palms on her skirt.

‘Is it all right then – if I go?’

The clock showed only twenty-past – but it made no difference.

‘Yes, of course.’

No snapped interjection came from Mrs Cooper.

Sandra lifted the flap in the counter and passed into the stock room. She returned with her shoulder bag and then, hesitating momentarily and lowering her eyes, stooped to pick up the tattered carrier bag. She lifted it, crumpling the paper tight and held it protectively over her bra-less breasts.

Mrs Cooper’s hands scurried extra quickly over the piles of papers.

‘Right then –’

‘Okay Sandra. Have a good weekend.’

‘Oh – yeh.’ And she turned to the door.

After she’d left, he couldn’t resist asking Mrs Cooper, ‘What was in that bag?’ And Mrs Cooper said, without meeting his eyes, ‘Oh, nothing important, I shouldn’t think.’

They worked on in silence at the counter. He waited for her to say, true to form: ‘If you want to go home, Mr Chapman, it’s all right, I don’t mind, I’ll stay and close up.’ But she didn’t. When half-past came he said, ‘Off you go then,’ and she took off her shop coat and gathered her things without a murmur.

‘Tomorrow then, Mr Chapman.’

‘Yes. Tomorrow.’

Somehow it seemed they both knew they were pretending.

She walked briskly to the door and only then did she pause.

‘Goodbye then.’

‘Goodbye Janet.’

He had called her Janet.

Half-past five. It seemed as if he were making his escape. He had always known it would be like this. Tomorrow they would discover the fraud, the deception: the costume discarded, the things left untouched so as to make it seem nothing had changed.

He watched Mrs Cooper lug her shopping bag across Briar Street and pass out of sight round the corner where Smithy’s pole had twirled. Then he lifted up the flap in the counter. There was a timely gap in the succession of customers. The pain in his chest gave little evil prods. He moved to the door, twisted round the plastic sign to ‘Closed’, released the latch and slipped across the two bolts at the top and bottom.

There. It was done.

He moved back to the counter. Now the ‘Closed’ sign was up and the door locked it seemed he was somehow shut off from the flow of the High Street. The noise of the homeward traffic, thickening on the near side of the road, seemed muted, and the cars and pedestrians passing by the window might have been moving in some vast sun-barred aquarium.

He sat down on his stool. No need to hurry. Half-past five. They would be coming home now, in their hordes; work over, pleasure in store. Down at the station the trains would unload from Cannon Street and London Bridge; hot and crumpled commuters, sweaty and fidgety from the stifling carriages, but freed, at last. Across the road the
Prince William would open its cool saloons to receive them. The landlord would be blessing the sunshine. Thirsty weather: good weather for trade. And along the High Street the shops which kept the normal hours would be closing. Business done: life begins. Simpson would count his cash. Powell would take in his trestles. In his wood-panelled office, behind the shading blinds and with the electric fan whirring on the filing cabinet, Hancock would lock away papers, give a terse good-night to his departing staff, and even though it was a warm, careless evening in June, would make sure his jacket was buttoned, his tie in place, his shoulders straight before leaving.

He looked round at the crowded shelves of the shop. The cellophane wrappers crinkled, as ever, as under some invisible, covetous touch, and the toys dangling and perched in the Briar Street window seemed to jostle visibly, as if the plastic dolls, action-men and model knights in armour, whose promise was to be like the real thing, were actually about to come to life. He felt like a conjuror, amidst his tricks, for whom, alone, there is no illusion.

He opened the till drawer. Everything must be done as normal. He pulled back the spring-clip over the five-pound notes and started to count.

At Briar Street they would expect to call, as usual, walking up from the station, for their little trifles of tobacco and newsprint. But they would find the shop closed. Chapman – who never closed; who was always open, Sundays too, raking in the cash, which he never had time to spend; who was always there with your cigarettes or paper, as late as seven in the evening. They would rattle, annoyed, at the door and rap on the glass; and peering in they would see him, sitting in his usual place, still and unperturbed, like the statue of someone who had once been a shop-keeper. See – there was someone already, and another, looking at the ‘Closed’ sign as if it did not mean
what it said and staring in, hand held over eyes, as into the cage of some unobliging pet. He raised a hand and moved it slowly in a lazy, indifferent wave. They would gather perhaps at the corner; try to force the door. And perhaps he should let them. Fling back the bolts. Let them swarm in to plunder and grab. Gorge themselves on sweets and ice-creams, fight over the boxes of Havanas. And he would sit motionless in the midst of the looting, as if, after they had emptied the shelves, they would set to work to dismantle his effigy.

He lifted himself from the stool onto his feet. The pain seemed to rock inside him like a weight that would over-turn him. He steadied. Not now. But he wouldn’t take a pill. People were stopping now and then at the door and trying the handle but he took no notice of them. He started to count the one-pound notes, then the coins. Everything must be done as usual; everything must look the same. He carried the money in the little pink and blue bank bags and placed them inside the green cash tin inside the safe. Then he made a note of the figure inside the maroon cash book. These were actions he had carried out so many times that he could do them almost without thinking; and yet, this time, they seemed like unique operations, as if he hadn’t counted up and closed numberless times before. He shut the cash book. £92. Twenty years ago you would have been glad to take ten. He put the cash book in his briefcase and locked the safe. He had got the safe in ’49. There were scratch marks on its door and the black paint on the handle was worn away to the metal from years of opening and shutting. He went back into the shop; switched off the electric fan, checked the fridge, set the time switch for the display lights, put his hand down to the lever beneath the telephone which activated the burglar alarm – but then withdrew it. It didn’t matter now – they could break in and steal. The shop door was already fastened. He would leave by the rear door in the
stock room. It led to a narrow passage which turned at a right angle into Briar Street. For some time he had meant to fit a better lock on it. But today it could be left unlocked. Once outside he could even throw away the keys. Toss them out into the swirl of the High Street.

Someone else was rattling at the door, looking in and making pleading, desperate gestures. He took no notice. He looked at the counter and the shelves. Then he turned his back on the shop and passed through the plastic strips. Best to go by the back. Actors slip out by back-exits, leaving their roles on the stage. He moved to the wash basin to rinse his hands and comb his hair. He expected to see for a moment, in the mirror, the face of a young man, unchanged, with a thirties stiff collar and a waistcoat.

He put on his jacket, took up his briefcase and then opened the rear door. He walked along the passage-way, where, here and there, tufts of grass and dandelions grew in the cracks in the concrete, then out, across the wide pavement, by the cinema adverts, to the car.

The car was drawn up, half on the pavement, pointing away from the High Street. Normally he drove down Briar Street, avoiding the awkward U-turn out into the main road. But it didn’t matter now. Normally he didn’t shut at half-past five; normally he didn’t walk to Pond Street. A sudden exhilaration came over him. He took a packet of cigars from under the dashboard and lit one. The doctor had warned. Then he swung out, in a break in the traffic, into Briar Street and out into the queue of cars in the High Street.

He did not look back. Not at the front window, with his name, in blue and gold, emblazoned above; nor at the door, at which they were still tapping and rattling perhaps, trying to discern him within. No, there was no longer a sweet shop owner.

The sun shone from the direction of the town hall, dazzling on car bonnets and in the glass frontages where
Simpson’s and Hobbes’ had already shut shop. Only the Diana was open, dilatorily serving out limp salads and milk-shakes, the manager chasing flies behind the counter. The traffic moved slowly, in two lanes, down towards Allandale Road and the traffic lights by the common. Always congested at this time; both directions. Drivers were propped on elbows against open windows, holding up idle arms and drumming irritably with their fingers on car roofs. A motor-cyclist revved impatiently. And on the pavement the pedestrians walked with that peculiar agitation of people travelling home from work on a Friday evening. Why did they look so intent, so vexed, when, up above, the lime trees shone, green-gold, in the sun?

His foot rocked on the pedals as he crept forward in the line of cars. They were drinking in the Prince William as he passed. Through the open saloon doors he was half prepared to glimpse the big, ornate french windows, the beer garden.

Past the Prince William. Past the Council buildings where once the baths had been where Dorry swam. He placed his left hand on his chest as he drew up again for the lights, and blew the blue cigar smoke, painfully pleasant, out of his mouth. Common on the left, criss-crossed with paths.

What was the name of that thesis you were writing, Dorry? ‘Romantic Poetry and the Sense of History’? And now you are living with a historian. What do you learn from history, Dorry? Was it history that made you come and plunder your father’s house? Or the opposite? Did you want to escape history, to put it all behind you – me, her, those twenty-odd years in that house? To have your moment, your victory at last, with one wild gesture? But – don’t you see? – it’s the moment (framed in the doorway with your heavy box of loot) that captures you.

And have you escaped history, down there in Bristol?
Found new life? Encumbered with all those things of hers, encumbered with the money I sent you (that money, which was only converted history). Don’t you see, you’re no freer than before, no freer than I am? And the only thing that can dissolve history now is if, by a miracle, you come.

He turned into Leigh Drive. He had put on the car radio. The weather man was saying, in apologetic tones, that rain was expected for the morning. But along the curving pavements, the sycamores and rowan trees were stirring blithely in the deepening sun. Earlier homecomers were already out, in shaded front gardens, watering flowers and trimming edges. Mr Norris, in number twenty-eight, knobbly-kneed in long khaki shorts, like a dauntless colonial. Mr Dixon, in number thirty, with a pair of shears.