Graham Swift: The Sweet-Shop Owner

He didn’t read them, but he liked them. Their columns, captions and neat gradations of print. The world’s events were gathered into those patterns.

Dorothy had read them, read them with a will, wanting to discuss and argue over the dinner table, her little brows taut with the desire to make her mark. And Irene had sat on the other side, holding her knife and fork tightly so that they snicked at her plate like scissors, and refused to be drawn. All this excitement, this nonsense. I won’t have it. I won’t suffer it. You deal with her. And she would look at him: she is yours , don’t forget; I gave her to you.

The floor-boards creaked under the weight of his stool and a faint rustle, like crumpled paper outspreading, came from the lines of shelves behind him. Sometimes, in the early morning, the shop seemed to speak, as if it wouldn’t let pass the association of years without a whisper, a breath of friendship.

It was cram full — not one of those shops where there was plenty of space and an air of fluorescent-lit efficiency. Behind him, stacked in columns, rose cigarettes; tipped, plain; above, cigars, below, loose tobacco. To the right, along the polished, uneven shelves towards the Briar Street window, were the jars — drops, lumps, fruits, toffees, jellies, mixtures — and the boxes, milk and plain, hard and soft centres, with on the top shelf, bordered with ribbons and embellished with puppy-dogs, waterfalls, sunset har-bours, the luxury two- and three-pound boxes. On the counter in front, and beneath, behind sliding glass doors, were the bars and sticks, chews and tubes, sherbet dabs and banana-splits — the things the kids chose coming home at four — wrapped in sickly colour. And to his right — beyond the till, along the remaining counter towards the ice-cream fridge and the crates of lemonade and Coca-Cola — the magazines and papers, spread, overlapping like roof tiles: tense headlines, pop-stars, orchids in flower, fashion, footballers, naked girls.

It thronged, it bulged.

And none of it — that was the beauty of it — was either useful or permanent.

Beyond the sweet counter, taking up most of the Briar Street window, was his own addition. Toys. Dolls, teddy-bears, jigsaw puzzles, model cars, rockets, cowboy hats, plastic soldiers, and, hanging from the framework over his head, three clockwork monkeys each with a fez and a musical instrument which played if you wound it up: a drum, a pipe, a pair of cymbals.

All that was his work. Coming home, twelve years ago, he’d said to her, ‘I have a plan.’ And her face had pricked up, beside the french window, as at some rumour of rebellion. ‘Toys. I will sell toys in the shop.’ She had looked, and repeated slowly the word — ‘Toys’ — as if rolling round her mouth a morsel of something whose taste she hadn’t fixed. And then — the identification was made — the wry smile touched her lips. He’d known it would please her. Her eyes widened (matchless, grey-blue eyes) and had looked into him, through him, as if they sent out swift, invisible cords to seize and sweep him up. ‘Yes. Why not?’

And then she’d added: ‘You will make sure, won’t you, there’s a profit in this?’

He looked at his smudged hands clasped on the counter. He must wash. It was ten past seven. Traffic was building up on the High Street, making the shop windows vibrate gently.

As he twisted himself from the stool he felt the pain grip suddenly his left side and shoulder. It was always there, but sometimes it attacked in earnest. Angina pectoris. It sounded like the name of a flower or a rare species of butterfly. Dorry had read Latin. He knew what to do. There were trinitrin tablets in his breast pocket, next to her letter, and there were more in a drawer beneath the till. Mrs Cooper knew and was instructed. Irene had used them too, along with all her other pills. With both of them it was heart trouble.

He paused. No stress, no excitement. No, he wouldn’t reach for the tablets — it would mean pulling out her letter. He hung on. Not now. The body is a machine, Doctor Field had said. And there — it went.

He padded, slowly, through the doorway hung like an oriental arch with coloured strips of plastic, into the stock room to wash his hands and slick his hair with water.

Mrs Cooper was due at any moment — with her basket, her amber horn-rims, her hair permed rigid as wire and her look of steely dedication. Sixteen years his assistant. She had been a plump blonde once. Besides himself, only she had a key. And she said, ‘I’ll get it,’ thrusting out her bosom, when there was something to be fetched: ‘You mustn’t strain yourself.’ And she said, ‘I’ll manage,’ that time when he had to go off and leave the shop, chasms opening beneath him, because she was in hospital, stricken but unfrightened, tubes and wires plugged into her. Dorry had come — that time.

‘You don’t have to begin so early, Mrs Cooper,’ he’d said. And she’d said, ‘Oh, call me Janet.’ But he didn’t.

Mrs Cooper would come. She’d put her basket with her handbag against the wall in the stock room; take off her cardigan, pat her hair, put on her blue nylon shop coat, pick up the kettle with one hand while she did up her buttons with the other, and ask, as if every time it were a novel suggestion, ‘Tea, Mr Chapman?’ She’d make the tea and bring it to him, vigorously stirring in the sugar. He’d sip it as she filled up spaces on the counter with fresh stock, and he’d say, glancing out of the window, ‘Warm, Mrs Cooper, warm. Any plans for the weekend?’ And she’d say, as she always did, ‘Weekend, Mr Chapman? I’m surprised you know what a weekend is.’

But, sooner or later, there’s a last time.

He dried his hands, drew the comb through his thin hair. Passing back into the shop, he took from a box on one of the shelves a fat, half-corona cigar, undid the cellophane and lit it.

And Mrs Cooper would say, coming in and seeing him puffing smoke, ‘Mr Chapman! You know you shouldn’t smoke them.’ And he would say, laconically enough, ‘But I sell ’em.’

He perched himself on his stool and puffed hard. So Mrs Cooper would view him, peering in for a moment through the shop door as she rummaged for her key — behind glass, behind the undergrowth of display stands, wrappers and dangling toys — peering back at her, lastly, from behind blue fumes, his face red, swollen, like an overripe fruit, his eyes wide, impenetrable.

‘There is a place on the corner of Briar Street. It’s a good site. I’ve already seen Joyce and we have the first option.’

She put down the cup and saucer on the table — the blue cup and saucer with the thin scrolls and the pink moss-roses. A wedding present. Her lips drew inward; they were shrewd, circumspect, even then. And he thought, Yes, of course — seeing it fall into place — I will be a shop-owner.

‘Do you approve?’ And she waited. For she wouldn’t overbear, insist — that wasn’t her way. She would let him consider and judge and say ‘I approve’ — that was the man’s role and the husband’s, and she wouldn’t deny it him.

‘Why not?’ he said, with a cautious grin. ‘Well why not?’

‘You will need to look it over,’ she nodded, ‘and see Joyce yourself. And you will have to know the prospects and get to learn the business. My brothers can help you there.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Good. Then it’s settled.’

She smiled. A lovely smile, like a shining seal upon a contract.

And what she really meant, reaching again for her cup, sitting back and crossing her legs, smooth, perfect legs, under her beige skirt, was: I will buy you a shop, I’ll get you a shop. I will install you in it and see that you have all you need. Then I’ll watch. I’ll see what you can do. That will content me. I’ll send you out each morning and watch you come home each night and I shall want to know how you are doing. I shall want return for my investment. But I shan’t interfere, only watch. You will be free, absolved; for the responsibility — don’t you see? — will be mine.