The Sweet-Shop Owner

1

‘In the end.’ ‘In the end’? What did she mean — in the end he would see?

Dear Father,

I have the £15,000. The bank notified me last week. Thank you for sending it at last. I’m sure this is for the best and how Mother would have wanted it. You will see in the end.

I think we can call everything settled now. Don’t bother about the rest of my things. You said I should come — do you really think that’s a good idea? After all that you say I’ve put you through, I should have thought you’d be glad to be finished with me at last.

Dorothy

He sat up, in the double bed, holding the letter before him, looking at it fixedly as if it were really a code in need of breaking. It had come four days ago. He’d read it perhaps fifty times, so that he could remember the words without needing to see them.

‘— finished with me at last.’

So he had seen her perhaps for the last time. And there was not even, before that final signature, a farewell, a ‘take care’, a ‘with love, your daughter’.

He looked at his wrist-watch on the bedside table. Four-thirty. Light spread behind the pale green curtains.

But she would come, surely. Now she had the money. She would come — she hadn’t said she wouldn’t — through the hallway (she still had her key to the front door), past the mirror, the barometer clock, the photographs of Irene and herself on the wall. Her eyes would be moist. She would find him in the armchair in the living-room, by the french windows where he always sat — where Irene had sat with her medicine — still, silent, his hands gripping the arm-rests. She would go down, weep, clasp his knees, as though she were clasping the limbs of a cold, stone statue that stares out and beyond, without seeing.

He would be history.

He folded the letter, smoothed it and switched off the bedside lamp. There was the usual pain in his chest. In the half-light everything stood as if fixed in position for ever. The dressing-table with its angled mirrors; the walnut wardrobe; the two green and white regency-striped chairs; her silver-backed hand-mirror; the china figurines, a shepherd and a shepherdess in eighteenth-century costume for ever on the point of flying into each other’s arms. Nothing had changed (you took nothing that showed, did you Dorry?). Nothing would change.

He drew back the sheets. His belly pressed clammily against his pyjama cord. You could feel already the beginnings of a hot June day.

There was always the sunshine. It had shone then — June, 1949 — through the windows of the nursing home. Trees brushed outside and bees had buzzed in and out of the open windows. Should they have allowed that, with all those babies? He had come, ushered by the nurse, laden with flowers. This might change everything. There was a little thing, wrapped like a gift in a shawl beside her. He had approached the bed with outstretched arms. But she had looked up, immovable, chestnut hair stuck to her forehead, and her eyes had said: There, I have done it, paid you: that is my side of the bargain.

‘The flowers, Willy. Give the flowers to the nurse.’

Light seeped through the folds of the eau-de-nil curtains, turning the room into a dappled pool. She had always slept nearest the window. She could never get enough air.

And would you be glad to know, child — would you understand — that you were just one side of the bargain?

No matter. You’ve got the money now. You’re paid.

And today, Dorry, is your birthday.

He could almost smile at the neatness of it.

He sat up, puffing. In the mirror he could see the reflection of his flushed face, the arc of stubble, the bluish lips, the slightly goggling eyes. Someone mimicking himself. He did not sleep. He was used to early rising. Besides, he would pass long stretches of the night awake, his body sprawled, wooden, like a toy in its box, his mind adrift in the dark. Even before, when she’d breathed laboriously beside him — her face in sleep as it was in waking, solemn, long-suffering — he’d lain like that, like a puppet. And only she had known how to make his little wired joints move, to make his body shift and jerk into action.

Do you know where that money really came from?

The dawn was gathering. Outside he could hear it: the rustle of the breeze in the lilac; the chatter of sparrows. He levered himself slowly to get out of bed. First the good leg then the bad. No exertion, no excitement. Doctor Field had said. And don’t carry on working seven days a week at that shop; take a holiday. It’ll kill you. (Doctor Field — Save my wife.) But there came a time when precautions were irrelevant.

He looked at his watch. Nearly five. No need of alarms. That system hadn’t changed. Getting up, getting ready, going off, seven days a week. And when he’d resisted, shirked, kicked against it (but that had seldom happened), she had been there with her command, to prompt and reprove, to goad him into life like a malingering schoolboy. Do it: play your part. Up at five-fifteen. Wash, shave in the rose-pink bathroom — when he didn’t get a shave at Smithy’s. Breakfast: two eggs, soft-boiled (then Field had said, cut out eggs and butter), tea and toast, at five-thirty. Time enough not to hurry, to dress neatly, to gather his briefcase — the leather had become soft and creased as a glove — to kiss her — her cheek was there to be kissed — to drive to Briar Street in time to collect and mark up the papers, to arrange the shelves, to open at seven-thirty. And Sundays the same, only an hour later.

No, it hadn’t changed. But, sooner or later, you do something for the last time. And then it becomes, perhaps, a kind of victory.

He put on his dressing-gown. No longer in her watchful presence. Spread the blue-bordered table cloth, laid the table, placed the blue and pink patterned china — they never ate hurried, makeshift meals (‘Let’s do it properly’) — as if she were looking still and approving (not a piece of that china had ever been broken), and as if, today of all days, there had spread over her face one of those rare, knowing smiles.

‘That’s right, Willy.’

He took from the wardrobe the dark blue suit, with the maroon braces and the maroon tie and the pale blue shirt with just the thinnest dark stripe. Today of all days he must dress the part. There, on their hangers, were the other suits. The charcoal for formality, the pale grey for sociability, the dark grey for work, the two tweeds, brown and light green, for Saturdays and Sundays.

He straightened his tie. She had chosen all his clothes. Not as gifts, not as little flatteries. She’d seldom given him things in that way. A gold tie-pin once (which she’d advised him to keep at home in a drawer); a silk Paisley scarf. And never, even years ago, had she watched him try on a new jacket before the mirror, button a new waistcoat — tilted her head, put a finger to her cheek, the way women do. She wasn’t like that. But she’d seen that what he got was proper. And always the best and most lasting materials and, always, value for money. Her judgement was firm.

‘That child. She will do something stupid one day.’

There He was ready. The last time. Jacket brushed, shoes polished, hair combed. And if she’d been standing there, in the kitchen doorway, or had settled by then (for she couldn’t stand for long) with the blanket by the french window, she would have given him that little nod, that flicker of the eyelids, as if she’d pressed a switch inside him: ‘Go on now.’ And Dorry would be upstairs still, in her cotton nightdress, asleep. He would look in to see her, as he always did. As if she might have fled already. Hair tumbled, one arm raised on the pillow, as though to touch someone.

It wasn’t a fight, we might have made peace.

Sunshine gleamed in the hall. He picked up his hat and briefcase. Only then did he remember. The keys. The keys to the house, to Briar Street, to the till, to the safe in the stock room, to Pond Street. They were on the bedside table, by Dorry’s letter. He went to fetch them. He paused by the sheet of notepaper, breathed heavily, then folded it into his breast pocket.

She’d come.

2

They pressed round in ragged fashion to take their money. Andy, Dave, Phil, Stephen, Bob. T-shirts, jeans, tennis shoes, uncombed mops of hair. By eight they would have changed into school clothes: uncomfortable figures in uniform. They held out their hands while he jingled money.

They could be slightly in awe of him. But they knew his weaknesses, his fondness for children, for childishness, his enjoyment of their laughter (for he didn’t laugh himself, no one ever saw Mr Chapman actually laugh), and his way of winking, or seeming to wink — perhaps it was only with them — at his own solemnity. So they knew he would frown at their pranks — when one of them hid behind the icecream fridge and popped up with a shriek — yet wouldn’t forbid them. And what of his own pranks? That way he made a coin disappear up his sleeve (you never saw it) or the way he slipped into their newspaper bags, when they weren’t looking, a bar of chocolate, a stick of toffee. Yes, he liked his tricks; he had a clown’s face, glum and top-heavy. Though that old bag, Mrs Cooper, would have none of it. She called them louts — she called all boys louts. ‘Don’t excite Mr Chapman, with his heart. Don’t upset Mr Chapman, with his poor wife dead.’ But who had ever seen Mr Chapman’s wife? Though Phil said he had once, passing the house on his round — she was standing at the window, looking as if she were sinking in a pool. Yet what did it matter? If they played their pranks, if he liked it, if it cheered him, if they got out of him just once at least (they knew it was there) that laugh he never actually showed; before his heart stopped ticking right there in the shop.

They watched him as they watched all adults, as if they were life-size models at work, but with a suspicion, in this case, that that was just how Mr Chapman regarded himself.

‘One pound. One pound twenty-five. One pound fifty.’

He distributed the notes and coins. His fingers were soiled with newsprint, which made them look as though they were moulded from lead.

‘One pound fifty. One pound seventy-five.’

Once they did it for half a crown. Now it was nothing less than a pound. Their hands closed. He wouldn’t see them again.

Six-thirty. But already the sun through the plate glass window was warm. He switched on the little electric fan over the door into the stock room.

‘Which one of you’s going to pull down the awning?’

That was something he could no longer do. No exertion. And they vied, when the weather made it likely, for the honour of getting their hands on that long, murderous pole, flexing their muscles on the pavement and pulling at the catch above the name-board.

‘Phil, you do it. And don’t smash the window in the process.’

They sniggered, shouldering their bags. But he hadn’t finished.

‘Before you go —’ he hesitated, thinking of a suitable pretext. In his left hand was a black tin box labelled ‘Paper Boys’, with the lid open so they couldn’t see in. They thought he had emptied it. ‘As it’ll soon be the summer holidays —’ he fished in the box and drew out a column of fifty pence pieces which he let slip, three at a time, into each palm — ‘a little bonus. A little surprise.’ He looked severe. ‘Not a word to your Mums and Dads’ (but they weren’t stupid), ‘and if you’re late once in the next fortnight,’ he paused — they wouldn’t appreciate this prank — ‘I’ll ask for it back.’

They looked up, duly surprised, thankful, puzzled. A good bunch, a cheerful bunch. They did what he asked and they earned their money. They came every morning by six-thirty, sleepy-eyed, rising before their parents, muffled in the winter in little anoraks and scarves. And there was a sense of constancy and devotion in watching them, through the glass of the shop door, riding off with their sacks, pedalling their bikes to appointed streets; so that he would think, ‘Don’t swing like that into the main road: there are lorries,’ and ‘Don’t get caught by a policeman, cycling without lights.’ But you had to take note of that little glint in their eyes which spied out extra ten-pences; and you heard them mutter under their breath: ‘Henderson across the common pays his boys two quid.’ They were wise to it already. You had to watch out.

He scanned their faces sternly, like a commander his best men. And they knew perhaps, grinning back at him, that if he didn’t laugh it wasn’t because he couldn’t.

‘Right, now you’ve got your money. Before you go, take something each from the sweet counter. Only one thing, mind you.’ He wagged a finger. This was necessary. If you didn’t give them things they pinched them anyway.

‘Thanks Mr Chapman.’

Fifteen thousand pounds.

At a clap of his hands, as if they were performing animals, they were off, swinging their bags over their heads, chattering over their new-gained wealth, making off with it, racing each other on their bikes round the corner of Briar Street.

And they were gone, leaving only Phil on the pavement, with his flop of blond hair, locked in battle with the pole and the awning. Would he do it? There, it went. And there he was, standing grinning in his mauve T-shirt with ‘YAMAHA’ across the front, like a knight-at-arms with that pole under his arm, almost demolishing a display in the window as he bore it back through the door.

‘Bye Mr Chapman. Thanks for the money.’

‘Bye Phil.’

And Mr Chapman laughed — was that really a laugh that crossed his face? Phil would go and tell the others, speeding after them with the news: Mr Chapman laughed. But they wouldn’t believe him, Phil was always telling stories they’d say.

‘Bye. Take care now.’

They were paid.

The sunshine slanted through the glass over the door on to the counter and the piles of remaining morning papers which lay before him. He never read the papers. Years of marking them up, stacking them, and taking them, flicking them into a fold with the wrist and holding them out between two fingers, palm cupped for the coins, had blunted his curiosity for their contents. But he still glanced each morning, and kept through the day in a little catalogue at the back of his mind so that if it was mentioned he would know, items like ‘Plane Crash in Brazil’, ‘Drama at Embassy’, ‘Worst Ever Trade Figures’. And there it was, this morning, on the page his eyes scanned:

‘PEACE BID FAILS.’

She had always read her papers. He had them delivered (that had been Phil’s round, number three, Leigh Drive and Clifford Rise) and he brought home in the evening copies that weren’t sold. She’d read them, sitting in her armchair, beneath the tall standard lamp with its twisting wooden stem. Oh not because she liked news. It was only to take stock, to acquaint herself, to hold sway over the array of facts and regard them all with cold passivity. And sometimes, indeed, it was as if she didn’t read at all, her head hidden behind the outspread page, but peered through it, as through a veil, at a world which might default or run amok if it once suspected her gaze was not upon it. And he’d wait, stirring his tea, the clock ticking, not daring even to rattle his cup, until at last she would cast aside the paper in a weary gesture, her eyes moving wanly to the french windows. So predictable, these papers.

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.

3

‘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.

Her lips hovered over the rim of her cup. Her face had this way of seeming to float.

And all I ask in return for this is that there be no question of love.

She fingered the pearls at her neck, drawing in her shoulders. And only for an instant had there flickered in her eyes that other look which he could never reach, never touch, never quite rescue: ‘Save me.’

The blue and pink tea service glimmered on the table, and she cut the cake — a Dundee — with the ivory handled slicer on the cut-glass cake stand. So many presents. You ate off them, sat on them, slept between them. That lavish family of hers. Furniture, china, glass, bed-linen; not to mention the house itself, the garden, with the lilac tree and hydrangea bushes, or her furs and jewels, most of which she kept locked in cupboards and drawers and never brought out, as if condemning them. But it was all for her, the only daughter. Not for him. She liked fine, fragile, precious things, things which you couldn’t use. And he had the podgy hands of one who would let slip such things and break them. And, besides, (he’d overheard what her brothers had said, at the wedding reception) he was ‘only something to occupy her with’.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘don’t worry about the nonsense that family talks.’

They posed for photographs. June, 1937. There was a marquee in the garden, smoked salmon, turkey and champagne; and the feeling you get on a journey when some landmark looms into view, soon to be passed by. A scent of cut grass; red and white carnations. The chatter rustled like a breeze through the hats and flowers. Her brothers were there, Paul and Jack, with wing-collars, moving smoothly among the guests, as if their sister made a habit of getting married and they had done it all many, many times before. His parents sat, along the table, looking flushed and attentive. They would be dead soon, one after the other, as if by mutual arrangement, in a space of months. But tonight, when it was all over, they would have the neighbours round and, amidst bottles of gin and beer, they would dance, that quiet pair, on the worn carpet in the back room. Yes, better do it now, better rejoice; our son’s wedding night, that is something to celebrate. They had scraped every penny, in those stringent times, so as not to be outdone, to give the set of silver cutlery which stood on the damask tablecloth on the trestle table amongst the other gifts. But what they most gave, silently, generously, was their thanks.

Her parents whispered gravely to each other, as if the event were for them the completion of some shrewd act of diplomacy. And should he cast his eyes a moment their way, they would break off their discussion, in deference to his place of honour, and give him wide, immaculate, approving smiles. They had made their money out of immaculacy; out of little laundries dotted about the streets of south-east London. They had contracts with hotels, shipping lines. And they’d won their custom on the promise of whiteness: white sheets and white shirts, white pillow-slips; as white as the white wedding cake that rose in icy tiers before them. And the brothers, who had partnerships, investments, interests of their own, smiled too, the same smile, approving, not friendly. Yes, he’d do. He’d do for a bride-groom. To have a wedding you needed a bride-groom.

He felt like someone borrowed for the occasion.

But he didn’t mind. That condescension. Not when, with his head growing lighter, he’d stood up to make his speech and said simply, gawping: ‘Thank you, thank you … thank you really, thank you all.’ That was all that was expected of him, and they’d clapped and cheered as at masterly oratory. Nor when, after more champagne and words with relatives he didn’t know and wouldn’t meet again, he had wandered through the house like a stranger, and heard her mother say to another — he caught no more — ‘a difficult girl’, and had glimpsed afterwards, upstairs, through the half open door, Paul on the bed and Jack in a chair, their waistcoats undone and their grey ties pulled loose from their collars, like weary gamblers, and eavesdropped on those words that passed between them. No, he didn’t mind. Landmarks were like that. They slipped by. They did not belong to you. And if you put out your hand to touch them, they parted and dissolved and grew flimsy like the world after champagne. And he didn’t care. For in the night now, his body sprawled like a toy’s, the world receded, he could reach out and touch her.

‘Don’t listen to all that nonsense, Willy.’

‘Something to occupy her with.’

So why then? Why him?

He watched the cigar smoke drifting through the beams of sunlight over the counter.

He had planned nothing. Not for himself. And yet he knew: plans emerged. You stepped into them.

That was why he liked it at Ellis’s. The print-works. Setting up the type so that there was correctness of spacing, the letter size graded according to the importance of the words; an overall effect of regularity and order. The content was unimportant. It was the layout that mattered. And just to show it was not a mere exercise, a playing with shapes, you had to roll up your sleeves and get your fingers covered in ink or machine grease. There was always a little mess, if there were patterns. Old Ellis called him ‘my lad’. He had a bald head and a thick, drooping, melan-choly moustache. They were disappointed, of course, Mother and Father. Had they got him to grammar school just for that? (‘Lacks talent and initiative,’ his reports had said.) Where was the return for their scrimping and pushing? But he liked the daily routine, the taking of orders, the clattering machine room at the back with the grille-like window overlooking the Surrey canal, and almost jaunted to work, on and off the tram, with a concealed laugh inside him.

He planned nothing, though every day had its pattern and was spent in making patterns. Until she came in that day — Mr Ellis was at lunch and he had temporary charge — to place her order.

‘Laundry lists,’ she said. ‘The laundry lists and other material for our new branch. Mr Ellis was phoned, and I’d hoped …’

She looked peeved at not being able to see the proprietor; annoyed at the grubby little print-works and him in his shirt sleeves with inky fingers; and annoyed too at having been sent out like an errand girl on this mission. For that showed. Someone who might have sent an assistant, an office boy, had deliberately sent her and she didn’t like it. She was meant to command, not obey.

‘You had better attend to it.’ And she did command, and he obliged. ‘This is what we want.’

He took the typed-out sheets and scanned them through, his pencil poised. It was only the simplest of things, a laundry list, but as if to show, since she was to command, that he was slow, had no initiative, he read aloud the words in front of him:

‘… Waistcoats, Men’s Shirts, Collars (stiff), Collars (semi-stiff), Vests (long-sleeved) —’

But she stopped him. ‘That’s a fine little rag-doll.’ It was meant to be peremptory. Her lips drew inwards. But he grinned as though at a quite good-humoured remark. And no, he wouldn’t be bothered by her cuttingness. It wasn’t what it seemed.

He took the papers and showed her the samples of lettering and layout, explaining slowly, for that was his way. And she listened, never for one moment losing that air of authority, yet held, perhaps, by his simpleton’s manner, by his ungrudging deference. Her hand drew in her collar. ‘Yes,’ she said curtly, ‘Yes, yes.’ And through his labouring words, as through a little mesh of visible dull print, he looked at her beauty.

When he saw her a second time, three days later, walking on the common, it was different. Twice. That was pattern, that had the feel about it of something meant to be. She was leaning on the railings overlooking the space where the children played on swings, roundabouts and see-saws, and she had the same look of someone sent unwillingly on an errand, loitering resentfully. So he must stop (a plan would emerge) and say, ‘Miss Harrison? How do you do?’ and, as she looked up, half in annoyance, half with the look of a girl caught playing truant, continue in his dumb way, ‘Passing by … er, lunch-time … couldn’t help … laundry lists are ready.’ And she, recognizing who he was, recovering that old command, must nod, say, ‘Ah yes,’ and turn her head away to look over the railings. She would let him linger, if he must, but she wouldn’t welcome him.

She wore a straw-coloured outfit; heavy, unnecessary make-up, as if to mask her face.

‘Cheerful bunch,’ he’d said, eyeing the children, mouthing the words in the blunt, crass way he’d read the items on the laundry list. Her face didn’t move. ‘Hey, look at that!’ — as a boy swung higher and higher till it seemed he would either fly off or turn full circle. And he’d pulled from his pocket, in a greaseproof bag, four cheese sandwiches which he extended to her in a gesture at once bluff and chivalrous, like a knight laying down arms.

‘Oh — no thanks,’ she said, slightly ruffled — for it was not like her to be lingering in parks, to be watching children on swings, to be speaking with strangers. Yet she was.

They stood in silence, thinking of things to say.

‘You like watching children …?’ Her tone seemed to say: ‘You’re a child yourself.’

‘Yes. Don’t you?’ His cheek was full of cheese sandwich.

She didn’t answer; only looked at the swings with anxiety.

‘I sometimes wish,’ he said, trying hard to empty his mouth, ‘I could join in myself.’

‘But you wouldn’t?’

‘Why not?’

He saw the sudden challenge in her eyes. And was that a smile somewhere in that held-aloft face?

‘Well, if you feel that way …?’

‘It’s Chapman. Willy Chapman.’

‘— why don’t you?’

‘Why don’t I?’

Her head seemed to wobble on her neck.

And he hadn’t hesitated. He gave back her look (did she think he was stupid?). He knew it was a test. He crushed up the grease-proof bag with the remainder of his sandwiches inside and stuffed it in his pocket. He walked to the end of the railings and across the patch of asphalt. Children stared at him. And looking back at her, very straight, defensive, he knew that was how it would be. She would stay, always, behind the railings, watching his readiness, his simplicity, his taking things at face value. She wouldn’t join in. She would watch; he would do. For he did it now, went up and did it, the man from the audience taking the stage. He climbed the steps of the kiddies’ slide, hitched up his jacket and slid down. And as he did so he knew he was hers.

*

Yes, that was pattern. That was not adventuring. She had said, Why don’t you? And he did. And afterwards it was precisely the predictable formula that pleased him: meeting in parks, sitting on benches, his being the humble suitor, buffing his shoes, scrubbing his nails before seeing her, being spruced and set-to by obsequious parents who saw the chance of a fortune.

And there it was — a fortune — duly made over to him by the proper forms and ceremonies, in the corner of a railway compartment, bound for Dorset, while the golden light of a late June afternoon flickered through the gaps in passing roof-tops. And it was saying, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry, Willy, about all that nonsense.’

‘They’re always passing judgement, making comment. Jack and Paul especially. Forget them Willy.’

A breeze blew through the open window. There was pink and blue confetti in her hair.

And what she was really saying perhaps was: ‘Don’t talk of Father and Mother, or my brothers. I don’t want to discuss them. Don’t you see? I was the only daughter, I was the odd one of the family. I was a beauty. I had no life. That is why I chose you — with no talent, no initiative — for the justice of it, the symmetry. Don’t think I will change.’

He had put his arm out to her. ‘I’m not thinking of them,’ he said. His voice sounded odd and strident. They were in a first-class compartment with no other passengers. His hand was on one of those smooth, perfect legs. He would have slid it up her pale green skirt. But her face had turned towards the sun-brushed window, her finger-tips were at her necklace.

‘Not now.’

I was the odd one of the family.

Yet her face was exquisite, with its detachment, with its sulky pallor, as she turned back, making him hold his hand as if he were a thief caught in the act of plunder.

Outside, the stations were passing. Woking, Farnborough, Basingstoke. London was left and the munificent house in Sydenham Hill in which they were clearing away the wine glasses, the white napkins, and discussing with satisfaction how the thing had been done. The June sun was sinking over smooth, cooling fields and willowy streams, over reddened, long-shadowed figures caught, nonchalant, by hedgerows and gates, cycling in lanes, grouped at tables outside pubs. The evening air was melting their rigour, their day-time reserve. But she wouldn’t relent, and let those features lower their guard. She only took and squeezed his hand now and then and gave him those short, quick smiles that were like small coins thrown without fuss to someone who has done a service. And she let him lead her, when she prompted, along to the dining-car, where she sat, ordered a light meal, toyed with her fork, and eyed him warily, circumspectly, as though considering an action of the utmost delicacy which could no longer be postponed, and asking herself, ‘What must I do? What must I offer that would suffice? What would be a satisfactory concession in the circumstances?’

Then the sun had sunk, she had put on a little cream scarf and he was carrying cases. And there, suddenly, were the country cottages, and the honeymoon hotel set back from the road, seen already as if in a frame, as if in a photograph in an album opened many years after; the downs of Dorset, pillowy in the dusk, and, beyond, the sea, somewhere murmuring under cliffs. June, 1937. And already landmarks were passing, thick and fast, faster than the passage of the train across the southern counties. Already the church, the bridal dress, and the speeches under the marquee. And she wouldn’t relent.

They unpacked clothes in a room which smelt of polished wood and lavender. What had her mother told her, of the dangers of loitering and the wolves that prowl? But how could he be a wolf? He was a pet dog to be led on a lead; he would run when you called. Oh, she did the right things. She walked with him down a lane where the trees bent like arches and rested her head in the crook of his neck, so that if one needed to demonstrate (if ever it should be a case of demonstrating) one could say, Look, sweeping one’s palm over the scene, there is the picture. But the picture was incomplete.

Later, in their room, with the wooden beams, she undressed deliberately, slowly, as if she were unwrapping a gift, as much as to say: ‘There, see the reward you have got. And do you think such a reward will not ask certain things in return?’ Moonlight, like some theatrical trick, filtered through the lattice windows and lace curtains.

‘Willy,’ she said, stopping him. He was poised and trembling, ready to take his gift. ‘Willy, I’m sorry. I’m not — all I should be. Do you forgive me?’ And what should he have done? Protested, demanded explanations, with her lying blanched in the moonlight? Her face was a mask; sometimes it seemed not to be part of her body. She let him continue, without shrinking, without encouragement, as if it were only done for the form’s sake, as one of the terms of the agreement.

Afterwards he felt he had not touched her, not touched that beauty. He sat up to light a cigarette. Her breasts pointed at him. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her face, there on the pillow, hair stuck to her brow, was like a victim’s; and yet it looked at him, for all the world, with triumph, with majesty, and as he bent to her, it smiled quickly and benignly, like a throwing of coins.

Every night their clothes hung over the chair by the bed, stirred by the breeze through the window. And every day the pieces of the picture fell into place: the boat trips to Weymouth, the little scenes of themselves arm in arm on the beach or at tables for two, about which the nodding onlookers might whisper, ‘honeymooners’; their ‘Mr and Mrs’ in the hotel register. But if only she would say, ‘I love you.’ No, not even that, if only she would say — sometimes it seemed she used him like an excuse — ‘I know that you love me.’ But she wouldn’t. Not even when the moment was ripe. When the evening sun burnished the sea and they walked back, in the cool, along the cliff tops. Swallows dived. Cow-parsley frothed in the hollows. Her dress was white with diagonal rows of blue flowers. No, that was not included, not part of the bargain. Wasn’t the rest enough?

Yes, he would have said, enough, plenty. Were it not for that vision of himself flailing in the current — even in that smooth and molten sea which spread beneath them like a tribute of silk. Unless it was she that he saw — struggling in the gold water, beating her arms to be free of it, though her face was as golden as the waves. He stood there on the cliff top. He couldn’t save her. He owed her eternal service, for he couldn’t save her …

Every morning she read the papers. She bought them at the hotel or at the little general store in the village, where she also bought post-cards, stamps, cigarettes for him. It was her holiday, her honeymoon, but she kept up with the papers. But only as a kind of safeguard; to keep abreast of the facts, so she would not be seduced by all that sun and sea air. And one day she said, sitting on the tartan rug on the beach, as if they must get up at once and start digging defences: ‘There will be a war, Willy.’

That was only a few days before they left. They would never holiday again till Dorry was a little girl. ‘There will be a war.’ But even before that, he had noticed, she was predicting, preparing, asking herself what must be done with their future life. So that if, as they sat there on the beach, he should put his arm about her neck or nestle his head in the lap of that blue-flowered dress, she would have to humour him, mask her annoyance at the interruption of her thoughts, like a father, deep in work he has brought home from the office, having to indulge the whim of a child.

‘In a few years. You see.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He did not dispute her predictions. History came to meet you. ‘Stop reading the paper, Reny.’

He lowered his head onto her skirt. Her lap smelt of salt and sunshine. But her face turned, out and away, unsmiling, to the horizon, as if warships might loom.

So what must he do? He never planned. He could only play tricks for her, obedient tricks, as he had when he climbed that children’s slide. He would make her smile at last, with the right trick, like the sad princess in the story. She stroked his hair. He was like a cat in her lap. He would show her as he showed no one else his little stock of laughter. So he’d take the pebble from the sand and make it vanish up his sleeve; and then, twisting his wrist, return again. And he’d flip forwards and stand on his hands and walk ten yards down the beach. No one thought he could do that. Yet no one knew him. He’d been an athlete of sorts once. But she wouldn’t laugh; though he kicked his bare white heels in the sunlight and gulls took off in alarm. Her face watching him (while the blood rushed to his head and his fingers clawed the sand) was tensed and urgent. And he only knew he mustn’t topple, not for his life, topple from that fool’s posture, snapping the little wires that ran between them.

Was it that same evening, as they clambered up the cliff path, through a little dell with elder trees which the sun filled like a pool, that it happened? Her blue and white dress was taut as she climbed in front of him. Little marks of sweat appeared on it. She panted with the heat. They stopped to rest on the grass bank, behind the elder trees. And he meant, if nothing more, to pick a stem of grass and tickle her chin with it, for that would make her laugh. But when he turned she was gasping, her chest was heaving, long jagged breaths came from her throat, and she tore at the stem he held out to her, in panic, as if she were really drowning, clutching the straw, as if it were closing in to suffocate her, that golden summer-time.

It was asthma, she said, stretched on the bed in the hotel. ‘I’ve had attacks before … The heat … It runs in my family.’ She had recovered her composure; her breath was quiet, her face was calm. But he knew now the picture would never be complete. Those hands flailing in the sunlight.

4

‘Weekend, Mr Chapman?’ She said it, right on cue, plonking the tea down before him, her face the colour of the milky liquid in the mug. ‘As if you would know what a weekend is.’

‘But that doesn’t answer my question, Mrs Cooper.’

‘Well, no plans actually.’ The horn rims glinted. ‘But then if you were to have something in mind — I’d be glad — you know — to look after things.’

He lowered his face to his mug. How many times had she tried that one?

She smiled.

‘Go on. Give yourself a treat for once. I’ll manage. Look at that sunshine.’ Her eyes darted to the window. Across the road the lime trees quivered. ‘Take a trip to the coast. Get some air.’

And what she really meant was: ‘We could both have a treat, you and I. We could get the train together. Stroll arm in arm on the pier. You will put the question at last. I will no longer have to work.’

‘When did you last have a holiday? You’re not chained to this place you know.’

‘I last had a holiday, Mrs Cooper, in sixty-three. Teignmouth. Do you know Teignmouth? Devon. There are associations with the poet Keats. Know Keats, Mrs Cooper? My daughter Dorothy was fourteen.’

She blinked and tightened her lips; though her tongue smarted of course to have its say about that good-for-nothing of a girl. All that nonsense about literature, poetry, Shakespeare (guess how he knew about the poet Keats) and underneath it was only the money. But she saw, all the same, how it hurt him, how when you said the name there was a sort of wince in his eyes; as though he pulled down a shutter: Don’t trouble me any more.

She avoided his eyes now. She allowed a slightly wounded expression to cross her face. She’d never deserted him, in sixteen years. When Mrs Chapman died; when he phoned up that time and began, ‘Mrs Cooper, I’m afraid you must manage without me for a few days …’ — Hadn’t she offered to do all she could, to come round in the evenings to cook, to tend (‘No, Dorry’s at home,’ he’d said); and hadn’t she even wept a tear herself all alone in the shop, at this very same hour, when normally she would make his tea and say, ‘How’s Mrs Chapman, Mr Chapman?’ Not that you hadn’t seen it coming. She’d been ill for years. But to see him return to the shop again for the first time, with his face empty, a dummy going through the motions. You knew then what made him tick.

‘Is there nothing Mr Chapman, nothing at all?’ She would have comforted him. A fortnight after the funeral she had her hair done; bought a new corset. But it was all Dorothy then. Dorothy, Dorothy. She might have had her chance, with time, if it hadn’t been for Dorothy. So she was almost glad when the little bitch ran off like that, taking the things, demanding the money (if only he’d said just how much money). ‘Oh I’m sorry Mr Chapman, truly sorry. See how they turn out in the end. Better off without her. Is there nothing? Nothing at all?’ And he’d relent at last and see, surely, how she’d been his comfort all along.

She ran her palms down over her hips.

‘Sixty-three, Mr Chapman? That’s eleven years ago.’

‘Yes. Eleven years.’

She snorted, as if the stretch of time made its own comment. Her throat trembled slightly. Her horn-rimmed glasses and large, curved nose gave her the look of an ageing bird of prey. Her features were all strained and compressed with effort on the end of that loose neck. Perhaps it was her corsets.

‘She’s grown up since, hasn’t she? More’s the pity.’

‘Yes, Mrs Cooper.’ She’d never been beautiful, with that bird’s face. ‘She’s grown up. She takes her own holidays now.’

He finished his tea. She picked up the mug and held it next to her bosom. She would pour him another.

‘Well don’t you fret over that. She’s not worth it.’ And she could have almost reached out and touched his hand there, resting on the copy of the Daily Express. She knew what he was thinking, with those little glances of inspection. She wasn’t much to look at. She knew that. And perhaps that was what kept him there behind his shutters. For Mrs Chapman must have been beautiful, that must have been the trick of it. Though she’d no way of being sure. She’d never seen her, incredible though it was. In sixteen years Mrs Chapman had never come into the shop. But it must have been beauty — what else? — that kept him running to heel like that. And if she could do it, in an invalid chair, why not herself?

‘Another cup?’ She gripped his mug tightly in her fingers.

‘Please.’ He offered a brief, consoled expression. He knew what she was thinking (did she think he was stupid?).

She would get her reward.

The clock over the door showed twenty past seven. ‘Almost time, eh?’ he said. Traffic was accumulating outside. Figures bobbed along the pavement. Every day you watched them, the same faces, through the cluttered window, and you got to know. They were office cleaners coming home; they were from the vinegar factory; they were the night staff from the telephone exchange. Across, on the opposite corner of Briar Street, was the hair-dresser’s. Sullivan’s: Styling for Men. They’d taken down the red and white barber’s pole which used to twirl endlessly upwards, so that it seemed like a rod of infinite length, for ever passing, disappearing into the bracket that held it. Smithy wouldn’t have allowed that. Smithy had shaved him in the mornings, when Dorry was young. He had sat him in the chair beside the window so he could look across and keep an eye on the shop; and Mrs Cooper, if she looked carefully, could make out his round face, rising from white sheets like a coconut at a fair, swathed in lather. It was a bargain: he got his shave, Smithy got a pinch of tobacco and free magazines for his customers. Then one day young Keith came over, with his tight trousers and a pale face: ‘Please Mr Chapman, it’s Mr Smithy …’

Across the High Street only the café was open. The Diana. Dirty cream paint and wide windows on which the condensation trickled in winter. Who was Diana? A goddess, of something — Dorry would know. They opened every morning at seven, half an hour before him. One saw the regulars going in for their beans on toast or sausage and egg and their hot, treacly tea. Patterns. Most of the old shops over there had gone. The electrician’s had once been a baker’s, the off-licence a coal office, the do-it-yourself shop an ironmonger’s. But the estate agent’s — next to Simpson’s the chemist’s — had always been there. Hancock, Joyce and Jones. At a quarter to nine a grey-haired secretary, prim (all his secretaries were prim, proper things now) with a white handbag would come to open up, stooping with one hand still on the key as she picked up the mail. At nine-fifteen, Hancock, in his dark-blue Rover. On odd days, Joyce. And what of Jones? There were the little rows of notices in the window, all with photographs, some with prices. ‘For Sale, Freehold.’ Yes, Leigh Drive might be there, with the hydrangea bushes under the bay window. Dorry might see to that. Hancock would rub his hands and cast a meaning eye through his window to the shop and then to her. But Jones would never know. Yes, most of the shops were gone. But the Prince William still loomed up, with all that new red fancy-work, over Allandale Road; and the chemist’s shop (though it used to be Lane’s before Simpson’s). And old Powell’s was still there, with the great gold letters, painted to give the illusion of depth, on deep green, over the window. He hadn’t appeared yet. Round the back, stacking boxes. But at eight o’clock he would emerge, pull down his awning and start to put out his display, taking the roundest, firmest oranges, the ripest tomatoes to place outside. They were not the ones you got if you asked, you got the second best from inside. That was the trick of it. Every day in his grey, greasy cardigan; polishing the apples, setting them one by one on the blue tissue paper. A little water on the watercress, a sprinkle on the lettuces, to make them tempt. Unsubtle old shark.

Mrs Cooper reappeared through the plastic strips with his second mug of tea. She glanced at the clock as she approached and caught his eye. Her throat strained. No, he hadn’t forgotten — today of all days. At half-past seven on Friday mornings the shop opened; at twenty-five past he paid her. That was the system.

‘Our usual little business,’ he would say. He would clear his throat; and she would look up, as if she’d forgotten, and instinctively rub the palms of her hands on her nylon shop coat. For this matter of money required clean, immaculate hands.

He opened the drawer of the till. It was already there, made up, in a little brown envelope with a rubber band. And beside it another brown envelope.

‘There.’ She took the envelope and, as always, in one movement, without looking at it, slipped it quickly into the pocket of her shop coat. As if to show it meant nothing to her.

And then, taking her empty hand from her pocket and clasping it with the other, she would give that little disappointed glance.

She turned to lift up the counter-flap and move to the door. But he stopped her.

‘Something else, Mrs Cooper.’

‘Something else, Mr Chapman?’

He had the second envelope in his hand.

‘A little — well, call it — a bonus. As it’s summer. As —’ he couldn’t help lending his eye a sharp twinkle — ‘as it’s the time for taking holidays. There’s twenty-five.’

The eyebrows lifted. Mrs Cooper’s smile never worked.

‘Really Mr Chapman. I —’

‘Now don’t say you shouldn’t.’ He planted the cigar once more between his lips. ‘Sixteen years my assistant. Sixteen. You deserve something now and then.’

Little spasms rose and fell in her throat.

‘My holidays?’ She paused. ‘My holidays. It’s too kind of you, Mr Chapman.’

But she didn’t look gratitude. Behind her smile her face pleaded, as if she’d expected something else, something more.

But that was all, Mrs Cooper. Take it. The things you want you never get. You only get the money.

‘Keep it. Keep it for me till later.’

He nodded, blowing out smoke. ‘Very well.’ He cocked his head towards the clock. She gave him back the second envelope, lifted the flap in the counter and passed out, as every morning, to unlock the door, unslip the chain and turn round the little plastic Senior Service sign from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. Later, when the shop would be closed again, when she would have left and returned to her flat, she would take out the envelopes from her handbag, having spurned them in his presence, and count their contents, running the notes through her fingers; and she would find in the second envelope not twenty-five but five hundred pounds. That would stop her, that would surprise her. She would not know what to do — to phone up, to say, to do nothing. But by that time, by that time, it would be too late.

She was paid.

She returned from the door, straightening the hang of her shop coat, and stood beside him at the counter, awaiting the first customers. He passed his eyes over her vexed, hawkish face, seeing, beyond it, arms lifted in a golden sea. And she, not attempting to return the gaze, stared at the sun, the shaft of sunlight slanting through the shop, falling on the smoke from Mr Chapman’s cigar, on his knotted, tarnished hands which rested on the counter, on the words on the front page of the uppermost paper in the pile between them. ‘PEACE BID FAILS.’

5

‘A gem of a site.’

It was old Jones who spoke, in his black greatcoat, with his florid cheeks and stoop, and his bunch of dangling keys like a jailer’s. And they were standing, Jones, himself, and his brother-in-law Paul, in that shop that would one day bear the name Chapman.

Jones sniffed the damp air. He was nearly seventy, they said; had made his pile, but he wouldn’t retire. And young Joyce and Hancock, over in his wood-panelled office, were waiting for him to die so that they could take his place and move the name on the letter head from first to last. ‘Needs going over. But a gem of a site. Corner. Station close by. Good will of previous proprietor. And how many other newsagents along this stretch?’ He ran a finger through the dust on the counter and flicked it away. ‘You’ll be all right here.’ The face, sucking its own lips, was almost apologetic. He was old, tired of business, he no longer cared to encourage or discourage; yet he wouldn’t stop working. Perhaps he knew already (one did know): two weeks after his retirement, the fatal stroke. A further week, speechless as a dummy, then he died. And that was a month after he’d wheezed to him, coming in to buy chocolates for his wife, ‘If you sell, watch Hancock.’

They shivered and their voices echoed in the bare interior. It was November, 1937. Drizzle fell in the High Street. The sea and the cliffs were gone, and he didn’t feel much at all, neither encouragement nor discouragement, standing there in that empty place — there were only some old sweet jars and a faint smell of coconut — that would be his. Brother Paul, with his long, clean fingers, took from his inside pocket a silver cigarette case, tapped a cigarette on the initialled lid, and said to Jones, ‘You understand of course it will be in my sister’s name. In the name of Mr Chapman’s wife?’

They trooped through the rain across the road to Jones’ office — it was just Jones and Partners in those days — while Jones held the umbrella so that Paul wouldn’t get wet. They mustn’t get wet, the Harrisons; they had little white laundries all over the suburbs: Jones had secured them all. A dust cart was grinding down Briar Street. In the office, sombre as an undertaker’s, with the gas fire fizzing in the corner, were Hancock, lean and suave (without his moustache then) and Joyce, chubby and pert, as though to complement him. They looked up, obliging to Paul, suspicious of him. And already, no doubt, they were spreading the word: ‘That is what’s-his-name, married to the Harrison girl — the laundry Harrisons — God knows how. House in Leigh Drive. Shop in the High Street. Sheer fluke. None of it his.’ And already he could see his legend being shaped. ‘You’ll act then for Mrs Chapman, Mr Chapman?’ said Jones drily, as if he knew a secret. ‘Of course, she will have to sign when the time comes.’ And as they departed — Paul was ahead at the door, raising his coat collar, anxious to report to brother Jack — the estate agent caught his arm and said, ‘A lovely woman, your wife.’

Jones let slip nothing. His face was full of dour discretion. But later when he told her (it was dark by then, the fire was bright and her face was mirrored in the dripping window) that it was done, and she must sign, she said promptly, turning, as if she’d only been waiting for the moment: ‘No, you must sign. The solicitors know, Jones knows. Only Paul and Jack don’t know. The shop will be yours.’ And over her lips had passed — was it? you couldn’t tell in the firelight — for the first time without its seeming like an act of charity, a smile.

‘You mean —?’

‘Yes.’

He had wanted to laugh. So she could play a trick, after all, for all that coolness. She might say next, ‘See, I was only pretending,’ and melt completely. On the table was a vase, empty of flowers, which they’d bought in Dorset. Was she laughing too, behind the shadows from the fire? Her skin was flickering. He bent forward to find out, lifting his hands. And then he’d seen, through the flames, a blankness, like the blankness in old Jones’ face: No, that doesn’t mean there is any question. He’d dropped his hands; they were still cold from walking home in the rain. It was as if he’d mistaken the reward and so appeared ungrateful. He had had to look — for it seemed he couldn’t look at her — at that reflection, thin and inaccessible, in the dark. And she’d repeated, unsmiling, as if offering a bribe: ‘The shop will be yours.’

She got up, smoothing her skirt, to make tea.

‘Don’t say you don’t want it.’

She stood looking down at him as if she’d found her balance. He must obey, perform while she watched, or she’d fall.

‘They’ll find out in time — the family I mean — but so what?’

She seemed to wobble again.

‘You’ll manage, Willy. Won’t you?’

But he had no fears for the shop. To do what was fixed for you, that was easy. The shelves were empty, the counter was laden with dust. But he would clean them, and he would buy the stock (she would give him the money) to fill them. Sweets, newspapers, cigarettes. And though he’d stood there like a dummy with Paul and old Jones, though he knew nothing of shop-keeping, he would get a shop-keeper’s coat and adopt a shop-keeper’s manner. And in time it would be wholly plausible.

‘Yes, I’ll manage.’

‘W. Chapman, Newsagent, Confectioner, Licensed to sell Tobacco.’ A sign would go up like an official stamp. He’d leave every day at six-fifteen, she’d watch him, hand at throat, from the doorway, and he’d return at seven-thirty, bearing in a briefcase the little red and black books which recorded the progress of trade and which now and then she’d open and inspect to make sure there was a healthy margin between outlay and takings. And if he should ever feel, what sham, what play-acting, she would say — how neatly she set out the table, bringing in the tea tray, the china cups, the glass sugar-bowl — Let me bear that. Let me absolve you of that. The responsibility is mine.

She put down the tea pot. She looked relieved. Perhaps they were both safe.

So nothing would happen? She poured milk, spooned sugar. That is what it meant perhaps. The shop is yours: let nothing happen. The dancing foliage of the firelight dappled her face. For one moment he wanted to sweep aside the tea cups, to catch her like some wild thing glimpsed in a forest. But her eyes sharpened, held him, as though to save him from stumbling headlong. She balanced her plate on her knee. Let nothing happen.

Though something did happen. He was fixing the name-board over the shop door; the sign-painter had finished it and he had only to fit it in its brackets. That was two weeks before he was due to open. But he wasn’t thinking of what he was doing. He was thinking of the creature disappearing into the forest. He reached out; ‘W. Chapman, Newsagent’; he toppled from the step-ladder, the name-board clutched still in his hands; broke a bone in his leg and displaced another in his back. And there he was, when the shop should have been open, lying in St Helen’s, unable to move, his leg in plaster, having tests done on his back. She came in with detective novels, grapes or bananas, first eyeing him reproachfully, as if he’d let her down perhaps, done it deliberately. Then, as she sat by the bed, her look would soften, as if in some way his accident consoled her and she meant to say: ‘See, you too are helpless. When you fall your bones break. How easily you forget how fragile you are.’

Did she foresee then, how intimately she would know that hospital?

‘Do what the doctors tell you.’ She patted his wrist. How commanding she looked, there at the bedside. And if only she would say, not that she loved him, but …

All through the visiting hours the man in the next bed, a hernia case who had no visitors, kept his eyes on her.

How auspicious. To fall and half break your back, when the shop was almost ready to open. He had to sit at home, still trussed and plastered, while she nursed and attended. She never complained. She was the soul of patience. And did her attentiveness then spring from a sense of another bargain struck? (It would be her turn, later, to be the invalid, his the nurse.) Or did it spring perhaps from her having proved her point? There was that knowing look as she helped him manoeuvre his crutches. That is what you get for adventuring, that is what you get for wanting things to happen.

So he would play his part. With a permanent limp. In six or seven years’ time people would inquire about it: Was it in the war? And he would say: What war? — I fell off a ladder.

It was summer again, summer 1938. Powell was sprinkling his watercress and lettuce. Smithy’s barber’s pole was twirling, endlessly, upwards. And the shop was open. Its coloured frontage adorned the High Street. And, sure enough, the customers came, without needing to be asked, for their cigarettes and dailies. He sold out, for the sun shone hot and bright, of lemonade and ice-cream. And not one of them doubted that he was the sweetshop owner, that he was in his rightful place behind the counter. He would play his part. What was easier? To step inside it like a bubble, to feel it buoy you up over the passing days, so that though you moved and gestured and the grime of loose change came off on your hands, you were really intact. Nothing touches you, you touch nothing.

That was what he’d believed at Ellis’s, before she’d walked in that lunch-time. And what he’d believed, that far-off afternoon, seated by the window in the history lesson. His head was pressed against the dusty glass. He was a shop-keeper in a schoolboy’s outfit. The history master was speaking as if his words were turning into print. Henry VIII and his wives were like characters in costume. They weren’t real, but they didn’t know it. History fitted them into patterns. He was looking out at the still rows of chestnuts, the asphalt, the footballers on their marked-out pitches. You touch nothing, nothing touches you. All the rest is wild adventure. See how the football players turn their game into grim earnest. Their shouts sound like the screams of fighters. And see them still, unappeased by their fervour, trailing home down the path by the iron railings, restless, greedy for something to happen, for the real thing …

‘Chapman! Are you with us?’

He had laughed then, unheard. And at Ellis’s. He’d carried round inside him a little hidden laugh. So that he didn’t mind about his school reports (he was only good at woodwork and distance running) or that his parents were disappointed, or that those others around him in that chalky class-room would get on better than him. Let them go to meet history. History would come anyway. Nothing touches you, you touch nothing.

Sunshine slanted through the striped awning. Over the road, outside Powell’s, the shadows of the lime trees were black and small. Summer, 1938. Sold out, in only a few days, of lemonade and ices. But he’d learn. He’d make something of it: there, in the night, as he lay sprawled beside her, he pictured it, glimmering in the dark, stuffed with ices, with lemonade, with things with no use.

Trams were passing in the High Street, full again in the late afternoon. People were going home, faces hot, collars loosened, calling in for their papers and evening cigarettes. ‘No, sorry — sold out of ices.’ But Powell too had sold out of watercress. Trains were unloading. Homegoers were dispersing down the pavements, past the open doors of the Prince William which sent out a cool, inviting waft of beer, and up over the common. The evening sun was making them come alive, and there — was it in the breeze, in the scent of the grass over the common, in the swing perhaps of a summer dress? — a glimpse of something, slipping away, as in the depths of a forest.

He turned round the sign from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’. Checked the windows, checked the till, checked the locks. How many times, how many times? He was young then. He carried his jacket over his shoulder. He didn’t need braces to hoist his trousers and his cheeks were not mottled with red. Only the limp to show that he was no longer all that he was. For once he’d been good at running. Over the common, up the Rise, into Leigh Drive. And there she was, opening the front door, ready to take his jacket and case and the evening paper and to give him a smile, like the scattering of coins.

‘Good day?’

This was a sort of code.

‘Four pounds. And I sold out of lemonade.’

Clomp, clomp. Who was that banging into the shop as if he owned it? It was Hancock, ducking his six feet under the door, raising one of his long, elastic arms to fish for his wallet, and leaning forward in a sinuous, confidential way as he asked for cigarettes. ‘Thought you should know. Old Jones died last night. We all knew, didn’t we? Funeral Saturday, already fixed. Shame.’ He pocketed the cigarettes and patted the wallet on his palm. ‘Mrs Chapman all right?’ He looked round the shop. There was a gleam in his eye. ‘Great friend of the Harrisons, old Jones. Poor feller didn’t want to stop work.’ He patted the wallet a second time, turning to go. ‘Thought you ought to know.’

Clomp, clomp. What was that? Another death? Yes. The noise of the earth falling on his father’s coffin. August, 1938. And again, clomp, a month later, on Mother’s. As if they’d said, All right, that’s enough — you first, I’ll follow. As if they’d done it all in time: lived to see their son come into money and marry a beautiful woman; to dance on his wedding night round the living-room. What rejoicing. She did nothing, Mother, in that final month. Only dug out the will which left it all to her — for a month — and made up her own — which left it all to him. You touch nothing. The sun shone at both their funerals, making the white graves in the cemetery sparkle like wedding cakes. Irene stood beside him with her black gloves and black handbag and a black hat with a veil. She took his arm to steady him. And did she see, behind her veil, standing there so firm, that he was no longer all he was?

Clomp. What was that? Only the piles of morning papers, tied with string, being dumped at the door by the lad from the van. He lifted the bundles onto the counter, cut the string, and there, on the appropriate page, were the notices: Jones, Arthur Russell, August 2nd; Chapman, George William, August 16th; Chapman, Edith, September 24th. The neatness of the columns. Deaths, marriages. The black and whiteness of memorials. He hadn’t wanted it in the papers. What sham. But she’d said, it was the thing to do: do it.

Sunlight fell on the piles of papers, on his hands smudged by that same neat print. And what were the headlines then? In September, 1938?

‘WILL GERMANY MARCH?’

6

‘Ah! The ice-cream, Mrs Cooper.’ He looked out through the window. ‘Wouldn’t do to run out on a day like this.’

The blue and cream company’s van had pulled up at the kerb outside and the driver was emerging with his pad of pink receipts and invoices and his blue carbon paper.

‘Let me,’ she said, turning on her heel. But ‘No, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘You manage here’ (for it was not quite nine and they were coming in thick and fast on their way to work).

‘Lovely weather.’

‘Gorgeous.’

And there he went, in his grey nylon jacket, dodging an incoming customer, out onto the pavement to help the man with his smoking, hoary cartons of ice-cream. Sprightly enough, with his limp, and his heart, and his dumb expression. But he shouldn’t do it (she thumped at the till); what would she do if something happened? Couldn’t she help?

He re-entered bearing three cartons, followed by the delivery man bearing five.

What a fool he was, bringing in the stuff himself, as if it were some sort of precious treasure, and not ice-cream to sell on a hot summer’s day; opening the black lid of the fridge, making room for the new cartons, taking out two loose choc-ices and juggling them — there, up and down — in his hands. Him and his tricks. He turned to go out for more boxes. And she gave him a stare, with the full vulture-like force of her amber spectacles. You shouldn’t: it’ll kill you. But what was he doing, staring back at her, blindly, wiping the cold moisture from the fridge off his hands? Smiling was it? Though his face never moved. Smiling though he wasn’t smiling, so that she was obliged to offer back a great, snarling flash of her teeth (which were not her own) and to feel stupid for it afterwards.

He returned and went out again. What a fool he was, prancing about on the pavement, climbing up into the back of the delivery van and hopping down again, as if he were only a kid.

And what was he doing out there? Signing the delivery man’s pink pad and slipping him — what was that for? — a pound tip?

He entered again, puffing, carrying the last of the treasure chests. His face was like a red balloon.

Yes, she thought, seeking the source of that invisible smile. It must have been beauty.

7

Sit back Willy; drink your tea, rest your head, if you like, on my lap (he did not hear, there in the autumn evening by the french windows, but what did he ever hear of those inward commands, spoken to soothe her own nerves?). You’re tired. Think of nothing, listen to the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. All day at the shop; and two visits, twice in two months, to the grave-side. Rest your head. Sometimes I see in your face that little hidden smile, far behind it all, as if you don’t mind, as if you’ll play your part, laugh at the joke. How that pleases me. And yet sometimes, like now, when you’re tired, it goes out, that tiny flicker of laughter, as if you’d said, no, it’s not a joke, things must happen; I’ll have what is mine. How stern you look then, how earnest. How frightened you make me. There, be still. Listen to the clock. Relight the flame.

How little you know me, Willy. How little you know of that young girl (I wasn’t yet fourteen) who looked at herself once in the bedroom mirror — the spring night was warm and I’d slipped off my cotton nightdress — and knew that she was beautiful. You think that’s what every young girl wants? Something to rejoice over? I had eyes like blue embers and little breasts that pointed at me. But it’s not like that. It’s like being chosen. It’s like being told (that other figure, in the mirror, seemed to tell me): You’re special. You must cherish your gift.

That was in ’27. I was young. All I knew was that Father had a business and my elder brothers were going to go into it; and that my mother’s brothers (how Mother egged Father on in that business of his) had all been killed, one, two, three of them, in a war I was too young to recall. I pictured them like skittles, those would-be uncles of mine. Uncle Mark, Uncle Philip, Uncle Edward. Bright painted skittles, all suddenly knocked down (it said in the Book of Remembrance they were ‘fallen’). And later I learnt — it was a common fact so nobody mentioned it — that everywhere there had been knocking down, great gaps and holes everywhere, families with only one or two skittles left standing.

But that was in the past. They talked of Trade and Opportunity, Recovery, the Fruits of Peace. They wanted to forget history. They wanted new life. And when in the school holidays I returned from little educational outings with my girl-friends, to Greenwich, to the Crystal Palace, I felt the eyes of men in the High Street, still standing skittles, waiting at tram queues and outside pubs, turn to look at me. Life, their eyes said, and I felt their message lap around me like waves.

Drink your tea. Be still, think of nothing. It was like something allocated in error, that image in the mirror. When I walked down the High Street with my girl-friends, Joan Proctor, Betty Marshall, Carol Smith, all of whom had thankful little marks of plainness, little blemishes and flaws which relieved them of responsibility, I knew I couldn’t laugh out loud, giggle and squeal like them. I held my head and shoulders stiffly like a puppet. They called me ‘beautiful and proud’, sulky, hard-to-please, and they blamed me all the more because, having beauty, I should also have grace. But they didn’t see how I cowered inside my looks like a captive, how my looks didn’t belong to me, and how, when they thought me haughty and peevish (what else could they think, seeing only what I saw in the mirror?) I was really helpless and afraid.

My family nursed my beauty like a rare plant. For it had its uses after all. They set me up into a little emblem, carried me before them like a banner, so they could say, Look, even beauty is on our side. And I knew I was responsible. Father would come home, tired and indignant-looking, in the evening. He was indignant because there was going to be a Labour government. He wore heavy coats, and a scarf wrapped tightly round his neck as if he were always cold or ill (though it was Mother who had the chest trouble) and his face was set and lined as if nothing was more weighty, more pressing than the burdens he bore. Yet he would look at me as if the sight restored him. Mother would say, ‘Look your best for Father’, and when I became a certain age she bought me new under-clothes, a little white shapeless brassière like a pair of ribbons, and spoke to me earnestly and sharply, yet never quite plainly, of girls needing to be pure, of the duty of keeping one’s purity. I never quite knew what it meant: purity. Perhaps it had something to do with the clean white sheets my family laundered — ‘Pure’ it said on the handouts given to customers and stuck in windows, ‘All your laundry fresh and pure’. Perhaps it had something to do with those dead brothers of my mother, engraved on the white war memorial. ‘Their deaths have purified them,’ somebody said of all those skittles. I only knew it was another of those things they looked to me for — pure, beautiful — and which I couldn’t provide.

A second cup? Let me pour you a second cup — I’ll put it near. Lean back. I’ll stroke your brow — no, don’t look at me. Lightly, lightly. There. That’s better. You are already beginning to look again as you did on the common when I said, ‘Why don’t you?’ — and straight away, you did.

How different you are from my family, Willy, from Jack and Paul. Their bodies are agile and eager, their faces keen and lifted, and yet they are stiffer, stiffer and hollower than you, with your woodenness and your glum expression. They have the looks of statues, trapped in immovable poses, and they already show signs of Father’s indignation. They think a lot of purity. On the wall in the office, over the laundry, someone has pinned the motto ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ and they do not see it as a joke.

There are wicked types, said my mother. Her face was always harsh. Wicked things; better you should never know. But that didn’t stop her, or the rest of them, when the time came, from giving their encouragement to Hancock. He was a good sort, they said. He drank with Paul and Jack at the Sports Club. He was good at squash and tennis and drove a green Riley Lynx. And, what was more important, old Jones had taken him in; old Jones who’d served us well and had a sound business and couldn’t work on much longer. No, they didn’t discourage Frank Hancock. He was tall, springy-stepped, with the air of a participant in some competition. He took me out like a boy on his best behaviour, as if I should reward him in some way. And when he pulled me into the hedge on the way back from a drive to Brighton (how sickly the grass smelt and the stems of cow-parsley) I did not assume it was wickedness at first. He looked at me as if I should have expected this. He pulled up my clothes like a man unwrapping a parcel. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, now’, as if we had both been anticipating. I struggled. The sun was in my face. This was like a performance in which people were really stabbed and wounded. He needed his victory. And afterwards, in the green Riley — it was a careless evening in June with sunlight through trees — his face, watching the road, terrified me. I only knew I wasn’t prepared. Life, life.

Lie still Willy. Don’t look up. Think of nothing.

I spoke to Mother. I used the coy evasions she would have used. ‘He was not good to me.’ ‘What nonsense,’ she said, ‘a nice young man like Frank’ (for old Jones had just been visited by the doctor). And I knew I’d failed them. And not only them, but myself. For I couldn’t go near the grass or lounge in the sunlight without suffering. I had my first asthma that summer. I was scared I was pregnant, but I wasn’t. My eyes were red, my breath strained. Father looked displeased; how it spoilt my looks. And down at the Sports Club Paul and Jack played squash with Hancock and stood him beers (because he always won) and said what a fine fellow he was. I went out with him again in his green Riley, with preparatory handkerchiefs tucked in my sleeves. I knew what he wanted, with his lean sportsman’s body and his prize-seeker’s eyes: the figure in my bedroom mirror. But it wasn’t mine to give. I even felt sorry for him, that fine fellow who couldn’t get the thing he wanted. How innocent maybe he was. Oh, I restrained him. I learnt there is a sort of command in beauty even though inside you wobble like a skittle. Lie still Willy. Though it only perhaps encouraged him all the more, that disdain. How you pay, Willy, even for the things you never own.

‘What nonsense.’ I had refused to see Hancock again. I lay in my room struggling for breath. ‘Ungrateful!’ they said. ‘Pull yourself together! What will Frank do? What nonsense!’ There in my bedroom mirror I saw almost with relief the red blotches on my skin, and watched my face contort as I gasped for air. I locked the door. Their voices insisted outside. Then one day I smashed the mirror.

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.

8

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.’

There was this tone about her letters as if she were writing from the thick of the fighting.

He dropped the wallet just as the sergeant came in the door and called attention. He was folding her letter inside it and then it slipped from his hand. The sergeant loured, flexed his shoulders and stooped to pick it up. ‘Your wife, Chapman?’ he said, looking at the photograph. A beach photographer had taken it in Swanage. The sun was in her face. ‘ ’Oo’s a lucky man then?’ He spoke loudly so everyone in the hut should hear. Then he tossed the wallet back and sauntered out through the far door, flicking with his baton at a pile of blankets, looking for another reason to shout.

‘Sod him,’ said Rees. But he glanced too at the photograph and smacked his lips.

He wrote: ‘The sergeant passes by each day to make sure we are being good soldiers.’

And then her next letter came from London.

‘They finally cajoled me down here. Bombs and all. Strange, when they were so keen to pull me out in April. Father very anxious now about the business. He’s short staffed and will have to work out quotas. He behaves oddly. It’s as if the war is something I shouldn’t have to be troubled with — really his responsibility — and he apologizes to me for it. He says the country should do this and that, we must all do our bit, but it’s all a different story when it comes to the laundry.

‘I’ve had a look at Leigh Drive and the shop. They are still standing.’

He tucked each letter in his wallet behind the photograph and then when a new one arrived put the old one in an Oxo tin inside his locker. Things must be kept. On still nights you could hear the noise of anti-aircraft fire. He wrote: ‘Take care.’ But he didn’t add — perhaps that was only for the heroes, writing from the field of action — ‘I love you.’

Should they rent out the shop, he wrote (for she wouldn’t run it herself — she’d made that quite clear). Someone might take it. Perhaps Smithy knew of someone. It was only gathering dust there, wasn’t it, with its shelves cleared and its windows shuttered up? Besides there was the question of income. You got two shillings a day as a soldier. But she wrote — it was as if he’d slighted her — No, that wouldn’t be a good plan at all. So that he found himself asking — guessing how many years the war would last — How much money did she really have?

He picked up the grey-green helmets for the Quartermaster and stacked them in piles like dishes.

And yet she’d been to the shop; she wrote so. She’d been to Smithy opposite to thank him for his help and sending on the mail. So she must have gone over to look inside the shop.

Yes, though he would never learn (she had paused over her letter wondering how much to mention) how she’d stood alone by the empty counter — Father was waiting, drumming his fingers, at the office and at any moment the sirens might go — how she had run her hand over the rows of empty jars and the bare shelves and sniffed the air. It smelt of coconut.

‘3640 helmets.’

‘Back to Aylesbury, for the weekend, with Father — and it looks as though I shan’t be returning to London with him. Mother says I shouldn’t vex him. He has responsibilities and misses Jack and Paul. For the business, I wonder, or because they’ll soon be fighting for their country? Mother waits for letters from them. She prays. I have actually seen her, with her hands clasped in the bedroom. And Jack and Paul haven’t even left England. I don’t give her your news and she doesn’t ask for it. I haven’t told you, but Mother had three brothers in the army in the last war and they were all killed. I think that’s why Jack and Paul volunteered for the navy.’

*

The trucks with the canvas tops lumbered in past the guard house, wheeled round and stopped beside the gravel, and then the new conscripts got out. Some of them tried to vault over the tail-board and sometimes they fell.

He wrote: ‘I never knew about your uncles.’

‘Letter from Paul. Mother glows. He and Jack are still at Portsmouth though they leave soon for the Mediterranean. Father up for the weekend again. He says to me, “I’m proud of those boys.” I think he might have meant this as a dig at you, because he made some sort of apology afterwards. But don’t you mind him. Be a good soldier.’

The blond-haired recruit made a soft thrust at Rees, which, perhaps unintendedly, flipped his glasses into his plate. ‘You’ll need them,’ the recruit said, pointing, ‘so you can see to frig yourself in the stores.’ Rees clenched his fork and held it vertically against the table. ‘Bugger off,’ he said, ‘Willy, tell them to bugger off.’ The sergeant entered with two corporals and the men in the mess hall stood up. Rees had a splash of gravy on his cheek and was without his glasses. He was slow to find his feet. ‘Getting jealous of the new boys again, Rees?’ said the sergeant, stepping close. The blond lad smirked. ‘Don’t you laugh sonny,’ the sergeant snapped, ‘you’ll be stopping bullets soon.’

‘We are planting the vegetables for this winter. Four rows of cabbages and four of sprouts. One of the laundries has been bombed. No casualties, just machinery. Considering there are three all within five miles of the docks this was likely to have happened sooner or later. But Father’s mad. It’ll mean re-organizing and he’ll have to send some things at the shops back to customers. I don’t want to be roped in. I’m thinking of getting a job here. They want women as insurance collectors. Mother, Father and Aunt Mad disapprove, naturally, but I say to Father, “One must do one’s bit”.’

Rees, in the top bunk, leaned over to watch him fold up the notepaper. ‘Missis?’ he asked, knowing the answer, then slumped back, putting his nose to his magazine. He read endless magazines, propped on his elbow, turning the centre-page spread — ‘This Month’s Babe-in-Arms’, a girl in stockings and a tin helmet — through every angle. What did he do (he never said), this man who’d expressed one moment of awe at History and then slumped back to spend the war issuing kit and reading magazines?

And on the bunk below he read the letters, looking for signs — ‘With Love, with All my Love.’ And he wondered should he write ‘I love you’ (for perhaps in this time of war —); though he knew, if he did, it would alarm her, more than war, more than bombs and blackness.

No, she would say, that wouldn’t be a good plan.

He wrote, ‘5520 helmets,’ meaning, ‘I love you.’

Up above, the white curves in the sky had grown more complex, then dwindled. On the grass behind the barrack huts some conscripts, off duty, stripped to the waist, played football.

‘It seems as if your leave will coincide with Jack and Paul’s. They will be here briefly before they go to the Clyde. Have asthma.’

9

She sat opposite the window in the shadows of the living-room, and Mr Harrison, in the garden, peering in and holding a camera, was saying, first sternly then beseechingly, ‘Come out Irene. Come out. Don’t you want to be in it?’

She held a hand to her throat and shook her head.

*

She’d met him at the station. Her eyes had been watery and her speech quick and breathy. And there was that other look about her, of someone sent on errands they resent.

‘Won’t you come out? Don’t you want to be in it?’

Up on the lawn, where the October sun fell over the house, in front of the rockery, the michaelmas daisies and the apple trees, they were taking photographs. Figures grouped, regrouped; fussed and posed, as if it were a function or prize-giving, and they were not dressed for war, those brothers in their dark naval uniforms, but for some ‘special occasion’. Mr Harrison bore the camera like a master of ceremonies. Jack and Paul, with caps on, with caps off and held proudly over the breast, jutting their chins and giving self-conscious grins, so that the moment might be captured, manhood vindicated. This deserves a picture, this is something to be kept. And someone leafing through the pages, the school photos, the holiday snaps, would say, ‘— and there, at Aunt Mad’s in their uniforms: what fine boys.’

Click went the camera. The figures broke up, brushed lapels, recomposed. Jack alone: Paul alone. The two with Mrs Harrison, with Mr Harrison, with Aunt Mad, with Mr and Mrs Harrison together.

But the one they most wanted, the one they most needed to complete the picture, sat in the living-room and wouldn’t take part.

‘Come out Irene, come on out.’

‘The sun will go in.’

As they left the station for the taxi someone eyed his uniform and his limp. Perhaps they were thinking, ‘Dunkirk?’ Her face looked excited, but it was only the illness. In the taxi he said, ‘What can be done?’ ‘I have some new pills. They help. But there’s no cure really. It’s not like that.’ And, taking his hand, she said, ‘Look,’ and pointed out of the window to an orchard where a man on a ladder was picking apples.

He sat in the deck-chair near the back porch, holding Aunt Madeleine’s ginger cat, glad to be out of his uniform. They didn’t want him in their photographs. He could sit in peace. The garden looked neat, the far end dug for vegetables. Mr Harrison stood close to the window. The lines in his face were reflected in the glass.

‘Come out.’

‘It’ll bring it on again,’ she said, her voice muffled, from within.

Though they both knew, it wasn’t the asthma.

‘Just for a moment. That surely won’t do any harm.’

Mr Harrison moved aside from the window. His hair was combed and smoothed down for the photographs but his face, unseen by the rest of the family, seemed crumpled, and it glared momentarily at him in his deck-chair, accusing. ‘Won’t she come out?’

The cat purred in his hands.

Up the garden the brothers conferred, shifted legs and lit each other cigarettes, like guests when there has been a hitch in the programme which someone else must correct. But they looked uneasy, as if deprived of something they’d bargained for.

‘The sun will go in.’

At the end of the table Mr Harrison spoke about Churchill, about invasion, about the weakness of the French, while Aunt Madeleine, holding a cake-slice, served up ‘Patriot Pie’, an economy recipe from a magazine. Mrs Harrison sat with her fingers on her necklace. Each time Mr Harrison declaimed upon a subject he turned to him and said, ‘What do you think?’ Then,

‘Well, Jack and Paul should be here tomorrow,’ and ‘I dare say you envy them.’

‘Irene!’ Mr Harrison suddenly barked aloud, turning to the window, as if giving an order. Then he said in the voice of someone at a public meeting, ‘Don’t let your brothers down!’

His cheeks quivered. The camera he held in his hand might have been a weapon, a missile he would have hurled through the window. Up the garden the figures stiffened, rallying. What was happening? They wanted her to come out but their gaze seemed to shut her in.

‘Irene!’

Mr Harrison turned, accusing once more, the camera in his hand. ‘What’s the matter with her? You should know.’ He seemed to be really craving for information. ‘You don’t help much, do you?’ — looking with contempt at the cat.

He leant forward in his chair. He would have said, putting down the cat: ‘Now just a minute, Mr Harrison.’ But he saw her eyes, through the window, bright and precarious in the gloom, suddenly fix and hold his, sending little threads between them, taut with warning: Don’t fall. Don’t fall.

No, he wouldn’t enter this particular action.

‘She isn’t well Mr Harrison, you know that.’

The older man stood before him, flexing his shoulders, like a man waiting for his opponent to make the first move so as to crush him blamelessly. He drew breath. Sweat oozed in the crevices of his face, strands of hair fell over his forehead. The war wouldn’t be for him, as it would for many, a temporary curtain lowered over the past. It would be dropped for him for ever.

‘Damn you,’ he said softly.

Paul and Jack raised their cigarettes. Mrs Harrison strode towards the house. ‘If she won’t come out,’ said Aunt Madeleine, taking off her wide straw hat, ‘then that’s the last of the photographs.’

The sun went in. A breeze fanned out over the garden, ruffling the michaelmas daisies, flipping the black tie from Paul’s jacket, shaking the trees beyond the patch which Mrs Harrison and Aunt Mad, soiling their hands, had diligently dug. For an instant they all stood awkwardly, looking in different directions, actors waiting for a prompt.

‘Irene —’ began Mrs Harrison, approaching the window. But she paused. For there she was, emerging from the side of the house, tucking a handkerchief in her sleeve, and coming up to place one hand behind him on the frame of the deck-chair.

‘All right. Where do you want me?’

‘You can’t blame the French,’ he’d said, meeting Mr Harrison’s armed scrutiny, but first swallowing his mouthful of Aunt Mad’s uninspiring pie. ‘After all, they’ve been invaded many times before.’ He remembered his history lessons.

Click. The shutter flicked, drawing its curtain over the past. Paul and Jack, with Irene between. The fair flanked by the strong. Click. ‘Smile, Irene.’ But she didn’t smile. She had come out. She stood where they told her to stand. She took her place in the picture, but she didn’t smile. She breathed heavily.

‘Just one please.’ Mr Harrison was no longer angry. He was apologetic. Standing looking down at the view-finder, his head bent, he had an air of penitence.

‘Ready?’ The brothers leaned in towards the sister. The developed photograph would show her like some captive between two vigilant sentinels.

‘Just once for your brothers.’

She looked towards the camera, and beyond it, past Mr Harrison’s shoulder, to where he sat in his deck-chair. ‘You see, you see what I am doing.’ Her eyes spoke as she looked at him. She steadied her face like a performer. And she smiled.

Click.

Mr Harrison raised his head with a gesture of relief. As if he’d been forgiven.

‘There.’

The shadow of the house had edged up the lawn. Someone suggested tea but Aunt Madeleine thought the sun might go in.

‘How many left?’ said Mrs Harrison.

‘Another two.’

‘One of us all,’ said Aunt Mad putting her straw hat back on her head.

‘Yes, yes.’

‘William will take it.’

They all looked at him as if they’d forgotten he was there.

‘Would you mind, old chap?’ said Mr Harrison. He was buoyant again, once more the master of ceremonies.

‘No.’ He got up, putting down the cat. Mr Harrison eyed his limp which was always more noticeable after he raised himself from sitting.

‘Know how to work it?’

Apples had fallen from the tree and were lying at the edge of the lawn. ‘You shouldn’t waste those,’ Irene said as they drank beer before lunch. Over by the rockery the bottles and glasses were still on the tray on the lawn and wasps were licking them. ‘Not with a war. You must keep them.’ ‘What war?’ Jack said, grinning, lying back on the grass, raising his beer glass so as to catch the sunlight in it. But Mrs Harrison looked away, at the fallen apples.

The figures grouped, composed. Mr Harrison wanted to stand between Irene and the brothers with Aunt Madeleine next to Irene and Mrs Harrison beside Jack and Paul. Irene blew into her handkerchief and sat down on the low wall next to the rockery. She watched the wasps at the beer bottles. ‘Come on,’ said Mr Harrison, afraid perhaps she might succumb to asthma before the picture could be taken. He linked his arm in hers and raised her, as if shouldering a shield. It didn’t matter; it didn’t matter she was ill, that he was forcing her, that the laundry had been bombed and under the composure there was discomposure. So long as the picture was good, so long as the moment was vindicated.

Already, perhaps, he was preparing his memorial.

‘Have you got us?’

‘You’ll have to move further in.’

The figures shuffled. Mr Harrison, erect and pleased, casting a marshal’s eye down the line to his left, the brothers jutting their chins. Irene looked wedged in the centre.

‘All right? Got us?’

In the little glass view-finder they looked as anonymous as the ranks of conscripts drawn up on the gravel.

‘Yes, that’s better. Don’t move.’

‘Wait for it,’ said Mr Harrison.

‘Dohn anticipate the ordaah!’ said the sergeant.

‘Now.’

The shutter flicked.

Up in the bedroom Aunt Madeleine had prepared for them she was kept awake by asthma. This was the night of his arrival, but they didn’t make love. He felt as if he still wore his army boots. Between Aunt Mad’s sheets he lay, his body sprawled, dispossessed, like a toy. As if it made no difference whether one touched skins or exchanged letters.

‘What’s the matter with your father?’

‘I think he wants to be forgiven.’

Her body might dissolve if he touched her.

‘Forgiven? What for?’

‘That’s hard to say.’

The figures broke up. Irene stepped back and supported herself with one arm against the wall. ‘I’m going in,’ she said and coughed. ‘There’s one more,’ said Mr Harrison; but he turned and extended an arm to his daughter. It seemed to convey at one and the same time, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Why must you spoil things?’ ‘I’m going in,’ she repeated hoarsely but firmly, disengaging herself.

Perhaps it was time he acted.

He walked towards her, holding the camera. As he approached, Mr Harrison wheeled round and stepped between them, as though to say, ‘She’s mine, she’s ours.’ Mrs Harrison glanced towards her husband but didn’t move from where she stood with her sons. The black peaks of their caps flashed in the sun. He shouldered the camera on its strap and made to take Irene back into the house. Mr Harrison stepped closer and changed his manner. He became solicitous. ‘Yes Irene, you’re not well.’ He gripped her arm. ‘You should go in and rest, shouldn’t you?’ ‘I’ll manage,’ Irene said, wrenching free her arm. Her father stepped back unbalanced, and glanced round, appealing, to his family. They looked on as if they were watching a competition.

Mr Harrison turned to face him again; he might have been about to raise a fist. But her face was there too, commanding, assuring: Don’t move, keep still. So he said only, in a low voice, ‘What is it Mr Harrison?’

‘There’s another picture to take,’ Aunt Madeleine said. As if that might bring order, another pose, another grouping, over the threatened strife.

‘One more of Jack and Paul,’ said Aunt Mad. Then Mrs Harrison said, ‘Yes.’

Mr Harrison looked at the two figures in uniform. He seemed to recall something. He pulled the white cuffs of his shirt down over his wrists.

‘In with you then,’ he said to Irene. ‘Give me the camera.’

‘Let Willy take it as he’s got it,’ Irene said. She walked into the house. The figures in the garden drew themselves up, collected themselves, as if it were better perhaps, simpler, without her. But they all looked diminished.

‘What war?’ Jack said, raising his beer glass, and Mrs Harrison looked away. She could never have had Irene’s looks. But there, as she turned, he saw the resemblance. The slender neck, the head just balanced on it. Then Mr Harrison said, looking at his wife, ‘Photographs! We must take photographs.’

She was behind him, behind the window. He felt her eyes on his back. And he was looking, in the view-finder, at Jack and Paul in front of the apple tree. They were ready now. As they’d started to pose, Paul’s cap had caught in a branch of the apple tree and fallen off. Jack had laughed and, as Paul bent to pick it up, made to kick it from his hands. Paul snatched the cap and feinted at Jack. It seemed a tussle might follow. They both laughed. The commotion sent two pigeons, pecking unnoticed up the garden, clattering into the air — which caused Aunt Mad to chase after them up the path. ‘Shoo! Go on! You mustn’t eat the vegetables, there’s a war on!’ The brothers laughed. But Mrs Harrison and Mr Harrison didn’t laugh.

And now they’d recovered. Paul had replaced his cap and their faces contrived to erase mirth. As if they remembered the gravity of their situation; or recalled who it was who eyed them through the camera — their brother-in-law, the store-keeper.

‘All right?’

They straightened their backs. The sun fell on the apple tree. Jack looked at him as though he wished to stare aloofly through him, but only succeeded in looking narrowly at him. Paul blinked. The moment captured: gallant figures locked in the view-finder.

Why did he wince holding the camera?

‘All right. Now!’

10

‘Move along, look sharp.’ Along the counter they shuffled — you didn’t remember faces, only lists, numbers — past Rees who checked them, yawning, licking the tip of his pencil, out through the door to where they filled their kit bags on the grass worn threadbare now by the trampling of boots.

Helmet, pack, ammunition pouches. Move along. Where to, where to? Where did they go, those carefully listed items? To Maktila, to Mersa Matruh? You read the names in the headlines — gains, losses, landmarks of war that loomed and receded into the sanctified distance in which perhaps flags bearing the same names would hang in cathedral aisles. Private Rees checked the list and, supine on his bunk, read magazines; and he put the letters (fresh envelopes were becoming scarce) one by one into the tin in the locker. Tobruk, Gazala. ‘Don’t forget,’ said the sergeant, ‘What you have don’t belong to you.’

She went back to London. The bombs ceased to fall, after nine months, and she was released (that was how she put it) from Aunt Madeleine’s and the family.

‘The asthma is improving. I am going to get a job at the Food Office. They’ll make it compulsory for women to work soon. Father says in that case I could assist at the laundry, but I absolutely refuse.’

So she wrote, in her forthright way. But he wondered, what did she do all alone in that blacked-out house? Unless that was what she wanted — to sit still, alone.

On Aunt Madeleine’s mat the letters arrived, from Alexandria, long after the deeds of which they spoke. They had seen action, those brothers, the real thing at last, in the sunlit waters round Crete.

‘Don’t get down,’ Rees said, ‘that’s a long face you’ve got.’ But Rees’s own face was hardly bright, propped on his arms on the back of a chair in the NAAFI, pinched round a cigarette, while the endless commands — ‘By the right!’ ‘Presehnt!’ — drifted in from the parade ground.

‘Going to that dance Saturday?’

He patted his leg. ‘You should know I don’t dance.’

’41, ’42, ’43. How monotonously, how anonymously those years passed whose events would fill the chronicles. Like the lorries, passing in and out by the guard house, loaded with pale faces. Like the trains which bore him up to London to see her (how many times did he make that journey?), click-clacking over the points, slowly over the sections of bomb-damaged embankment, past the stations whose sign-boards had been removed to confuse a non-appearing enemy, so that you sometimes forgot where you were. And yet the places hadn’t changed. Basingstoke, Farnborough, Woking. The same line had borne them, in ’37, to the white cliffs and the seagulls. And out there, beyond the window (if you could see for the bodies, kit bags and cases that crammed the corridor), the same countryside, green, threaded with streams, peaceful under the evening sunshine. ‘What war? What war?’ said the steam chunting from the engine. Nothing was changed. Save that the drinkers, there outside the pub, were uniformed and were perhaps drowning the thought of comrades killed over Germany; and that gap in the hedgerow which might perhaps have been for a gate or a hayrick was where the Dornier had crashed and the children from the village had scrambled, before the wreckage was cleared, seeking trophies and the smell of an enemy’s burnt flesh. So that it was not the same as it seemed, and he found himself, as the train window eclipsed scene after scene, counting — counting, as he counted helmets and nameless stations — captured moments, pictures over which curtains had dropped, shutters flicked, counting, where to, where to, till he slept, and someone said, awakening him (had nothing changed?), ‘Waterloo,’ and they slid into the grey platforms, under the iron girders named after a victory.

‘What do I do?’ she said (for she’d welcomed him, given him that quick kiss and that touch of the arm that was never really an embrace, and now she was telling him about the job she’d got at the Food Office). ‘Count ration books, coupons.’

‘Exciting,’ he said flatly. He was tired. His head still ached from sleeping in that crowded train.

‘There’s a war. Who wants excitement?’ She was bringing in the things from the kitchen for supper. Her body in the doorway was brisk and slender. But he didn’t appreciate her joke. He wanted to say: ‘I want excitement.’

She wore an old, out-of-date dress he’d never seen. He was an imitation of a soldier on leave.

‘And when all this — excitement — is over,’ he said bleakly, looking to the window where the blackout curtain was now fixed permanently and you could sense the dust gathering behind it, only to be revealed when the war ended, ‘what’s left then?’

She didn’t acknowledge his irony.

‘Then? Peace.’

‘Peace?’

He watched her laying the table, taking care over the placing of the knives and forks, the mats, the water tumblers, even for this frugal war-time meal. What peace? To Mr Harrison and his two gallant sons peace meant beating the Germans. To old Jones, to Mother, to Father it meant the grave. But he didn’t know what it meant to her or him. Save perhaps a kind of not acting.

What peace? he would have said, but her face, turning, as if at a signal, checked him.

‘There. Now I’ll dish up.’

Heroes come home from the fighting; they meet wives, lovers. He sat restlessly on the sofa.

‘While I’m doing that,’ she added, taking a little packet from the sideboard, ‘Look at these.’

They were copies of the photographs taken at Aunt Madeleine’s. He sat at the table and looked at them uneagerly, placing them back in a pile. The one of all the Harrisons in a row was on the top, and as she re-entered bearing the dinner plates she eyed it over his shoulder and said with a little twist in her voice: ‘Skittles.’

She continued, the meal finished, her chin resting on her knuckles, on the same meagre theme.

‘They will ration sweets sooner or later. You hear things at the Food Office. It’s already bad enough with the sugar shortage. It would have been hard work if we’d kept the shop open. They say it’s tough for the housewife; it’s tougher still for the shop-keeper.’

He nodded, glassy-eyed. The room was bare — with the blank curtaining and the things removed for safety. It seemed to get barer as the war progressed.

Her breasts had grown smaller. Was that the war too?

‘Other things will be rationed,’ she went on. ‘But the war won’t last for ever. Three, four more years.’ She seemed to regard that prospect with complete equanimity. ‘We’ll win, yes — but of course at a cost. There’ll be rationing long after the war, higher prices. But don’t you worry, we’ll manage with that shop.’

She spoke as if she’d already arranged for what she said to happen. He couldn’t connect her voice with her face. He wanted to say, ‘Let’s talk about something else. Let’s go to bed.’ But he said:

‘How much money will we have?’

‘Money?’

She looked relieved, as if this were the sort of question she could readily cope with.

‘Money?’ She glanced away as if she didn’t have to speak. Her mouth was sly and shrewd. Between them was the photo; the Harrison family all in a row. And he half realized — so that he would ask later, How could she have known? And she saw that he realized and looked quickly, testingly at him, as though to say: ‘Be calm, the responsibility is mine.’

‘You’re tired.’ She leant towards him, taking his plate to put on top of hers. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ And then she added, as a kind of condition: ‘Tomorrow go and look over the shop.’

Left, right. The patterns shifted, the figures grouped, regrouped over the gravel. ’42, ’43, ’44: while the headlines spoke (what was the connection?) of faraway action. Messina, Salerno, Monte Cassino. ‘Lord grant us victory,’ said the round-voiced Chaplain as the recruits stood, lined-up for prayers, bare-headed, looking at their feet. Corporal Rees (for they’d made him and Rees corporals now) wiped his glasses, replaced them and hummed monotonously through his nose ‘Amapola’, ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More’. The Quartermaster yawned. The sergeant prowled from the guard-room to the stores, from the stores to the mess. He was getting fat. His belly bulged over his belt, his neck over his collar. They wanted to know how he did it, with a war on. But he still barked at the conscripts, like an overweight, distempered watch-dog.

12,840 helmets, 25,700 packs. When she wrote now from London she added at the foot of her letters numbers of her own. 4,000, 5,000 ration books. Was it the same code? ’43, ’44. History was drawing up its inventory. And out there, beyond the wire fencing, beyond the outspread downs, overseas, actions were being fought which would claim a special place in that inventory. Could you believe it? It was the same placid scene — chalk downs, may trees, dappled English fields — over which the bombers flew, yet it was not the same; like the ravaged, bomb-scarred streets of London — the same London yet not the same. What was the connection? What war? What action?

Yet here, in April ’44, was proof at last of action, here was official evidence.

He held in his hands a simple letter. He held it before him looking at it as if it were a code.

‘Dear Willy, Mother and Father have had a telegram from the Admiralty. Jack’s ship was sunk on the homeward convoy. There were no survivors.’

Click. What you have doesn’t belong to you.

‘Hey, what’s up?’ said Rees.

Why did he weep? Why did he put his head in his hands and feel tears smear his palms, coming back in the car from St Stephen’s church? Ahead of them (he could see if he looked through his fingers) drove Mr and Mrs Harrison in the black, shining Humber. Why had he trembled as they stood lined in the pew? Mr Harrison had shed no tears. His face was grey and dumb and held in suspense as if he couldn’t make some connection. Even the memorial tablet — a plain slab with black lettering which they’d hurriedly had made — seemed to confound him. No flags, no marble muskets, no white tomb where the knight might lie, pure in his armour, his sword blessed and at rest. Twice he leant on Irene’s arm during the service, while she looked before her, her features demure yet griefless, like some pale heroine’s; and Mrs Harrison, on the other side, coughed and muttered once, ‘Poor Paul.’

Why did he weep? Why did he sob into his hands? And why did she look at him as she took off her black hat, her black gloves, eyeing him warily, circumspectly, as if there were something she hadn’t done for him?

11

‘Where’s that child?’ demanded Mrs Cooper, looking at the clock and then at Mr Chapman, though he didn’t return her urgency.

It was half-past ten. She always called Sandra, the girl Mr Chapman had taken on since the start of his heart trouble, ‘that child’; out of contempt for her seventeen years, her free looks, the way she flaunted her little body, even to customers in the shop, and out of a sneaking suspicion, perhaps, that Mr Chapman had hired her for just those things. Where was she? She was supposed to start at nine. Out all night, no doubt, with one of her hot-fingered boy-friends. Always late the next morning as if to advertise it. Up in the cinema car-park, in a back seat, long after the performance had finished, or in that place — now the weather was hot — near the sports ground, by the old allotments, where the orchard had been before the war. You could hear the couples, they said, in the grass, behind the fence, if you walked late along that footpath. Yes, she knew what Sandra Pearce got up to. Coming in the next day, bold as brass, two hours late, and just daring you to say: ‘And where have you been?’

She rubbed her nose and straightened a crooked stack of magazines. She glanced at Mr Chapman, pressing her point, but he merely shrugged. He wasn’t bothered, oh no. He should have sacked the girl weeks ago. No wonder he couldn’t manage his own daughter.

She huffed. That child. But she remembered — taking out some new Reveilles from below the counter and counting them — how he had touched her, Terry Cooper, in the dark, that night. It was in the air-raid shelter. First on the arm and then on the knee. Bombs were falling outside, slithering through the sky like tiles; and a man was touching her in the dark. Mum and Grandpa feet away. His fingers were inside her blouse. That was action, that was excitement; something was happening in her life. And later he had married her, fathered two louts on her, then upped and gone. And now, the years had passed — she lifted the magazines onto the counter — and she didn’t want action any more, only peace.

12

Irene wrote: ‘Dear Willy, Father went again to the doctor’s today. Mother made him. His heart’s no better. He’s been told to stop work completely and rest, but of course he won’t. The laundry is losing money. I think he believes nothing will be salvaged out of it after the war unless he stays on personally. He talks of “saving the business”. Then again, he says it isn’t the money — “Money won’t bring Jack back”. It’s a matter of principle. I don’t know what he means by principle. I’ve never known him distinguish principle from money before. Anyway, he won’t stop work. He upsets Mother. He wants to make her responsible for everything. And he makes demands of me, wants me by him. Well he’s ill, it’s not like earlier in the war. I try to be patient. But I won’t have any part in the laundry — that’s his affair. I’ll stick to the Food Office. He’s not going to be penniless anyway, even if the business folds. And most of that money was never his in the first place. Perhaps this is the time to tell you. It came from Mother, and she would never have had it herself if it wasn’t for her three brothers being killed. That’s how the laundry was started. It can’t have all gone. You don’t make money in a war, but there’s not so much to spend it on either. I know for a fact he put a large sum into Government stock when the war started, in order to do his bit, and he swears he’ll never touch it again now Jack’s dead. Perhaps that’s “principle”. Well, we’ll see. It’s hard to know what his reasons are, the way he behaves. You should have seen him shout at Mother for insisting he went to the doctor’s, and later, apparently, he had a long row with the doctor himself. Then afterwards he says to me, “I’m not ill, am I Reny, my heart’s all right, isn’t it?” — as if he’d quite believe me if I agreed. I try to put up with him. He swears there’s nothing wrong with him, he won’t give up the laundry. And all the time he gets more fanatical about the war. We must win soon, he says. Jack’s killed, we must win and wipe all the Germans off the map.’

18,000 ration books.

The roads up over the downs were thick with traffic. Lorries, tanks, bulldozers. Troops were being moved to sealed-off training areas. Outside the American camps MPs in white helmets drove up and down in jeeps blowing whistles and waving arms at the convoys of Shermans. The skies buzzed. Something was happening.

Then, one day in June, it was still.

13

What was that? Had he slept? He woke up. Only the rain falling, heavy and thunderous, on the window ledges, gurgling in the gutters, pattering on the flowers, on the lilac bush in the back garden. Nothing had changed. Light spreading behind the pale green curtains — the blackout curtains had been lifted in April; and on the dressing-table the things she’d packed away at the beginning of the war — the Derby figurines, the silver hand-mirror — all replaced unharmed. See, we endure.

Only rain. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she whispered. Her hair was matted over her forehead. And then he remembered what day it was, the day allotted for victory, and that he ought to be glad (though something stopped him rejoicing) to be there to share it with her.

Victory, victory. The word was uttered and re-uttered on the wireless — how slow they were to make the final announcement — until it sounded brittle and dry: Victory. Yet, outside, rain was falling, drenching the spring leaves. Already flags had been hung from windows, and in the streets on the far side of the common bunting was stretched from roof-top to roof-top, bonfires stood prepared. Would they burn with all this rain? And he too had hung a Union Jack over the front porch (it would be sodden now, wet and drooping), for one must do one’s bit; and she had watched him from the front path — momentarily alarmed when he leant too far from the upstairs window — arms folded, unsmiling.

‘Go back to sleep,’ she said, as if he’d woken in needless agitation. But he wanted to lie and listen to the rain hissing and sluicing beyond the window.

Soon history would be honoured. With cheers, with hymns, with jubilation. Yet how still it seemed. As the day broke, the rain eased, sparrows started under the guttering …

He had got a special leave, on compassionate grounds. Her telegram had arrived at the camp: ‘Father very ill. Please come.’ And so he’d journeyed up to London, on the eve of victory.

‘There’s hope,’ said the sister with a practised smile, ‘he’s a strong man.’ But how weak he looked, lying in the ward (there were no more private beds) among flying-bomb victims in the last stages of recovery or decline — jaw dropped, lips blue, the expression, as at Jack’s memorial service, frozen, utterly taken aback. As if there were some trick; this couldn’t happen like this. Mrs Harrison sat on his left, Irene on his right. Other patients were listening to wirelesses and he wanted to know — it was the one thing for which he still seemed to rally — ‘Is there any news? Have we won?’ He might have been asking the result of a race. ‘No, not yet’ — it was Irene who spoke — ‘soon.’

White sheets, white rows of beds; the white apron of a nurse saying, ‘I think it better if you went now.’ May 8th, 1945. An orderly was mopping the floor. She walked down the corridor, leading her mother, her lips pressed tight.

There was a fancy-dress parade on the common, planned for after Churchill’s speech. Little children dressed in costumes made from cardboard and old blackout material would be exhibited as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Hope and Glory’. Then the parties would follow (already they were queueing in the High Street for food and beer): bonfires, dancing. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. They sat in the garden listening to the exultant wirelesses; the sun shone after the rain. But she looked up: ‘What about Father?’ ‘The hospital said there’s no change. And Aunt Madeleine’s with Mother.’ But he knew that her question was only a kind of excuse.

Sparks flew upwards into the blue evening sky. Along the house-fronts coloured lights were arranged in Vs, candles in jam-jars perched on front walls. They were spilling in and out of the Prince William, singing ‘Shine on, Victory Moon’. Pianos in the street; kisses for anyone in uniform; children banging dustbin lids; and out on the flattened ground of a bomb-site, tables set up, drinks, tinned meat sandwiches, a Victory Pudding (bread, milk and saccharine — the feast of victors) and the bonfire (‘bomb-fire’ the children insisted), sparks flying upwards, upwards. Speech! Speech! Someone wanted to make a speech. A stout patriarch whose sons even then, perhaps, were encamped beyond the Rhine, stood up, swayed, but only got as far as ‘Three cheers for Victory!’ Victory! Victory! echoed the cry. But no one used the other word that had hissed gently in the falling rain: Peace.

Figures danced, silhouetted by flame. Composing, recomposing, round and round the fire. Yes, better dance, better rejoice. The war is won: that is something to rejoice over. But he had a lame leg (No, no, not a wound, he explained) and that was his excuse, and hers, for not dancing.

More fuel for the fire: don’t let it die. More fuel to make the sparks leap and the dancers whirl. Bring anything. Those old duck-boards from the shelter, those old out of date coupons, those letters stamped with the military franking from Cairo and Rome. Burn it all. Burn away the memories of five years, the ‘sacrifice’ and ‘endeavour’, the headlines, the photographs, the odour of barrack huts, the names of foreign battlefields, the 39,000 helmets, the 81,000 packs. But it wouldn’t burn. For, look, behind the flames, objects immune to fire, heroes of bronze and stone, too rigid and fixed ever to dance, and black names on marble, gold names on bronze, ‘undying memory’, ‘their name liveth’; and one of the names under the chestnut trees by the railings, on the white school memorial, where boys born after the war would be herded on Remembrance Day, was Harrison. No, it doesn’t burn, it doesn’t perish. Undying memories.

‘Irene!’

Who was that? It was Hancock. Stepping out of the shadows, in an Air Force uniform, with a beaker of beer in his hand, and a darkish, slightly curled moustache, grown since the war had started, to give the impression he was a pilot, not a ground officer.

‘Well I never. Come for the fun? Hello Willy old man.’

‘Hello Frank.’

‘Hello, helloh. Wangled some leave too?’

He rocked to and fro. Only his feet seemed to hold him to the ground, as if they were clamped with weights. One hand held his beer and the other was extended, palm forward, behind Irene’s back.

‘Fancy —’ He stood, open-mouthed, for a moment, as though embarrassed for something to say. ‘Well — there goes the war.’ He looked at the fire. He raised his beaker and brought his mouth to it by leaning his whole body.

‘Look —’ Irene said. She shifted forward.

‘Soon be out of this, eh Willy?’ Hancock tugged at his uniform. ‘Back to the shop?’ He winked, bobbed his head sideways, then stood, swaying, looking at the fire. Burning planks shifted in the blaze. He looked like a man in a train corridor watching scenes go by. ‘There it goes, there it goes. All over. Forgive and forget eh?’ When the train lurched his hand touched Irene’s waist.

‘Willy, let’s go.’

Dancers jostled by so they were hemmed in.

‘Hey, come on Irene!’

Hancock spread his arms and went springy like a tennis player.

‘Give us a dance.’ He held out a hand. ‘Don’t mind, do you, old man? Don’t dance — with that leg of yours — do you?’

Irene stepped back. For a moment Hancock waltzed gaily with the air.

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Irene said.

‘Come on now, don’t be like that.’

‘You’ve had too much of that beer.’

Hancock looked at him. Strands of his moustache were wet and frothy. Irene seemed to look at something between them. She bit her lip. He didn’t understand any of this. They were standing in a row with people dancing round them, as in some game.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ Hancock said. ‘The bloody war’s over you know.’

Better rejoice.

He said to Hancock: ‘It’s Irene’s father, he’s —’

‘No, that’s all right, Willy.’ Why was she scared?

‘One dance.’

Hancock looked spruce and forlorn in his uniform. He swung on his feet. Irene stood still. Her face was lit up like a statue’s. The piano played ‘Yours’.

‘All right,’ Hancock said. He shrugged ruefully, then looked swiftly at him as if he’d proved a point. Over the roof-tops searchlights were projecting great swaying Vs. ‘Just as you like.’

He finished the rest of his beer.

‘Be seeing you then.’

He made off through the swirl of dancers, palms extended, smiling now and then at other couples, his tall, agile body moving to the music, seeming to melt into the scene.

‘Let’s go, Willy.’

Across the common, figures were flitting in and out of the light of yet more fires. The searchlights weaved in the sky like diagrams. Why did they walk that way? Past the paddling pool, the children’s playground — the slide and swings had been salvaged in ’41, but it was the same playground — and up, not by the quickest route but by the path by the allotments, by the houses facing the sports ground. Because they’d walked that way before? When he worked at Ellis’s, in those lunch-times, when it was all yet to come. The same but not the same. There was an orchard of apple trees adjoining the back gardens. She had said once: ‘Did you know, that belongs to one of Father’s friends?’ But the fence was broken now, the rows of trees had not been pruned since the beginning of the war.

Victory, victory. But not for her. Along the path by the privet hedges and blossoming trees her face had tensed, as if to a vigil still to be maintained. Hancock? Was it Hancock? With his false fighter-pilot’s moustache. ‘Watch him,’ old Jones had said. But when he asked, ‘What was all that about?’ she only said, ‘That nonsense? Some day I’ll tell you.’

Later, up in the bedroom, she said suddenly, spreading her legs: ‘All right.’

Victory. But not for Mr Harrison, sinking slowly, surely in his coma, till he died in the small hours the following morning. ‘Peacefully,’ said the hospital. ‘Peace’, said the gravestone in St Stephen’s churchyard. That was Irene’s word: Peace. And had he found it, old Harrison, while his daughter stood, on the eve of victory, by his deathbed? For he’d leave the house to Mrs Harrison (she wouldn’t want it — a month after the funeral she’d go to live with Aunt Mad) and the flagging laundry to Paul (far away, in the Far East, where victory was yet to come); but the money, most of the money would be hers.

The searchlight Vs waved over the apple boughs. And what was that, from behind the fence? Voices in the grass.