The Sweet-Shop Owner

14

As the clock showed half-past ten she opened the shop door. She stood for a moment in her white T-shirt, with buttons at the front, and blue skirt that barely hid her bottom, flipping back her brown hair, glancing at them with that look that said (in answer to everything): ‘So what?’

Well now we would see, thought Mrs Cooper, looking along the counter, whether he’d give her what she deserved or not.

Though she knew, of course, he wouldn’t. He indulged her, this brazen little seventeen-year-old. Pretended not to notice her idleness and impudence; treated her cheek almost with kindness, while her own long devotion he met merely with civility. ‘Thank you Mrs Cooper. That’s kind Mrs Cooper.’ ‘Mrs Cooper’ indeed! And he’d called that child ‘Sandra’ after only a week.

She watched him. He was counting out change but he had one eye on the girl.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ The girl grinned, unapologetically, and spoke in that slack, rubbery way which seemed to go with the chewing gum she continually worked and tugged around her mouth, making little sticky noises. ‘Got held up.’

She lifted the flap in the counter and passed through the gap, holding her stomach in and making small, sideways movements with her feet — an unnecessary performance, only designed to demonstrate her slimness.

‘You’ll get held up one of these days,’ Mrs Cooper said.

‘Yeh?’

Then she went into the stock room, slipping off her shoulder bag, to fetch her shop coat. Which she hardly needed, of course. Hers was pink, in contrast to Mrs Cooper’s dark blue. When she’d first got it she’d taken it home and raised the hem six inches. And once — it was a hot day three weeks ago, just like today — she’d stripped to her underwear to wear only the shop coat on top. Mrs Cooper had gone into the stock room and there she was in her knickers. It might have been Mr Chapman who’d walked in.

Held up indeed.

And still he said nothing. Soft as they come. Only now, with the girl out of sight, pretending to busy himself at the counter, did he say, in the most unsevere way: ‘You’re getting held up rather too often Sandra.’ Mrs Cooper caught his eye, pursing her lips. Sack the girl, tell her to beat it. But he looked back with that dim, imperturbable gaze. What was up with him today? She blinked. It ought to be easy to tell a man like him what to do. But it wasn’t.

Sandra emerged from the stock room fastening the buttons of her shop coat.

‘Morning Mrs Cooper.’ She overcame a yawn.

Mrs Cooper stiffened. (Mr Chapman, looking on, anticipated the reply):

‘I suppose it is still morning.’

The girl hoisted herself onto a stool. She crossed her legs, baring her thighs, and slouched carelessly forward. One shoe dangled under the counter from the tip of her toe. It was a slack mid-morning period, which extenuated her lateness. She leant against the counter, unconcerned with explanations, resting on her elbow and propping her chin on her red fingernails.

‘Well don’t just sit there,’ Mrs Cooper said. ‘Tidy up those shelves.’

‘Get out some new birthday cards Sandra, would you, and put them on the racks.’ Mr Chapman spoke at last.

‘Yeh.’

The girl got up slowly.

Yes, without her own little prompts, Mrs Cooper thought, he wouldn’t get her to do anything. Let her lollop like that all day next to him. You could tell why, too. You could tell why he never sent her packing like he should, never had a harsh word. At his age. And with a heart condition. Mrs Cooper’s thoughts grew wild and tried to check themselves, as they always did when she was forced to consider Mr Chapman capable of lust. She straightened her shop coat and turned to a customer.

‘Would that be tipped or plain sir?’

The girl moved across the shop to a low, deep drawer beneath the racks of birthday cards and began rummaging unsuccessfully. Mr Chapman got up to join her.

Well, wouldn’t you know it?

But she didn’t have to pit herself against that girl’s foolishness. When had she ever been late for Mr Chapman, or needed to be shown where things were? And yet — she saw how when Sandra leant she leant towards Mr Chapman, and when she lolled on the counter she lolled towards Mr Chapman. And she saw how Sandra had seen (it hadn’t taken her long, for all her being a slip of seventeen) that she, Mrs Cooper, had leanings of her own (though they were leanings of a different kind, sixteen years had gone into them) towards Mr Chapman. All of which led her to little panics and to the need to hoist on her armour and trim her nails to the fight. Little bitch. What a struggle it all was. And she knew she couldn’t win; she had no answer to that girl’s ‘So what?’ But you had to soldier on, if you wanted your reward.

‘Matches sir? Change a five pound note? No trouble.’

That voice spoilt it of course.

‘This one ’ere, Mr C.?’

There it went, like a rusty hinge.

‘No, the other box, at the back.’

Mr Chapman bent down and reached inside the drawer. His face was plum-coloured. Sandra sat back on her heels. The box was jammed so Mr Chapman had to bend closer. Sandra held out two slender, dithering arms, one with a blue plastic bracelet round the wrist, as though to grasp Mr Chapman.

She watched them, feeling spurned. Suddenly, the box came out. Mr Chapman straightened, rose, then abruptly reached to grasp the display rack, breathing hard. Ah there! She swelled again with a sense of her own significance. The poor man. What he needed was looking after.

‘All right, Mr Chapman? Look what you’ve done you stupid girl! Making him bend down like that!’

She opened the flap in the counter to step forward. ‘All right?’

He recovered.

‘Yes, yes, all right.’

But his voice didn’t seem grateful for her concern. For he bent down again — the obstinate fool — towards Sandra, who said, ‘’Ere, you wanna watch it.’ And, just for a moment, he put his hand, for support, on the girl’s shoulder. So even there, where she had the advantage, she couldn’t win. She shut the flap. Couldn’t he just have another little spasm, so she could take charge quite firmly; make him sit down, fetch him some tea, tell that girl to clear off out of it; take one of his pills from the bottle and scold him with her eyes: See, that’s what you get, not being your age. It was a nurse he needed, not some bit of fluff who showed her legs. But she felt herself grasping the counter as if it were really she who needed support.

Sixteen years.

Light flooded in at the window. Over the road the sun had begun to touch, on the corner site, Powell’s trestles of tomatoes and watercress; but it would be several hours before its rays probed the Diana café or lit the ‘For Sale’ notices in Hancock, Joyce and Jones. In the Prince William they would be laying out beer-mats, placing ash-trays, cutting the cheese and ham sandwiches. Before opening the door, at eleven, with a cool gust of beer.

He breathed, rather hard, and looked, with just a hint of anxiety, at Mrs Cooper. That was what she expected. ‘How about more tea, Mrs Cooper? I’ll take one of my pills.’ You had to humour the woman. Loyalty replaced the reproachfulness in her eyes, and she disappeared obediently through the plastic strips.

He returned to his stool at the counter and watched the girl, standing in the sunlight from the window, arrange the cards. Did she tempt and console, as Mrs Cooper imagined? Did her little provocations work on him? No. So why had he hired her? — it was after Dorry had come that last time. As a sort of cheap replacement? But there was no comparison. Dorry, at seventeen, had not known what to do with her beauty — she’d buried herself in books, as though to disown it. This girl traded so much on her attractions (no, you couldn’t call them beauty) that they sometimes seemed to him not to belong to her at all. So perhaps it amounted to the same?

He watched the girl finish her task, run her hands over her hips and, now that Mrs Cooper was out of sight, turn to him with a pleased, half conspiratorial smile.

The kettle whistled in the stock room. Sandra returned to the counter. He motioned quickly to her. ‘Here, before you have your tea,’ (and before Mrs Cooper could see). His hand moved, holding the ring of keys from his pocket, to the drawer under the till.

He took the brown envelope with Sandra’s pay and handed it to her.

‘Expect you’re waiting for this.’

The girl’s face came close to his. Her sticky, spearmint-scented mouth moved up and down.

‘Going dancing tonight, Sandra?’ he asked. (For Sandra had told him once, she went dancing every Friday night, at a disco called Vibes. It was an excitement that had become a routine).

‘P’raps.’ She gave a little frown. ‘What about it?’

He had taken out the second envelope.

‘Here — don’t ask any questions. Buy yourself a new dress.’

He indicated the edges of five five-pound notes pro-truding from the envelope. She widened her eyes, stopped, for once, her endless chewing. Then actually blushed. As if Mr Chapman really did have some old man’s fancy for her.

‘Oo — ’ere — ta Mr Chapman. But —?’

But his face showed nothing. He looked at her coolly (Sandra thought he had never looked so distant).

‘There. A dress, mind you. Nothing else. Don’t ask any questions.’

Mrs Cooper appeared with two mugs. The light reflected crisply off her glasses. She passed the girl as if she wasn’t there and gave him one of the mugs. ‘There. And here’s your pills. Now you take it easy awhile. Don’t argue.’ She put her own mug on the counter. Then she turned to Sandra, with another flash of her spectacles, taking in her slim picture of health. ‘Yours is in there,’ she said. And added with venom, ‘I’ve sugared it!’

15

‘It will keep,’ she said, ‘It must keep.’

And so it had. Though along the High Street there were the little pits in walls where the fragments had struck, and here and there a window missing, and in Briar Street, not far from the infants’ school, sudden gaps of flattened rubble; so that you seemed to walk (but perhaps you always had) through a world in which holes might open, surfaces prove unsolid — like the paving-stones over which the children picked their way, returning to re-opened classrooms, dodging the fatal cracks. Yet it had kept. Intact. He had only to remove the boarding from the windows, retouch the paint-work, clear away the dust, and then — that was the most difficult part in that time of scarcity — refill the shelves with stock. And yet she knew all about that (it was almost as if she’d planned it), having worked all those months in the Food Office.

It must keep. Though things were scarce. Fewer coupons for clothes; units for bread; and those who said the ration books would go after a year or two were wrong. Prices rose. Half a crown for the cigarettes that in ’39 cost a shilling. And trailing round the streets of London in grey demob suits, trailing with them, like their former kit bags, the bundled stock of what they called their ‘experiences’, were thousands, looking for jobs and homes. There was much trading in ‘experiences’ but very little in homes. Little to buy, little to spend. And yet they’d said, Victory was ours, ours the reward, and some had spoken cheerily of the Fruits of Peace. And now they’d invented a new term to cloak the facts with an air of virtue: Austerity. But at least those children there, treading gingerly over the paving-stones, were assured of schooling, and of milk and orange juice. They were all numbered in a new system so they shouldn’t want. Smithy, who was childless, said that was a good thing. And you could count your blessings, with the news the servicemen brought home on Christmas leave from Germany: ‘They’re starving over there.’

He took down the ‘Closed’ notice, which five years had faded, from the door; sent off his forms to the Ministry and renewed his tobacco licence. Old Smithy, crossing the road, his barber’s jacket frayed and stained (you needed coupons for new ones), greeted his return. ‘So, come to mind your own store.’ There was a fondness in his eyes. His red and white barber’s pole twisted upward again, like a twirl of sea-side rock. And, see, along the damaged High Street they were returning again, like birds to their roosts, resuming their old ploys as if history could be circumvented and the war (what war?) veiled by the allurements of their windows: the thin assistant in Simpson’s replacing the tall flasks of coloured water high on their shelf; Hancock, in his office, scratching with a pencil that fraudulent moustache; and Powell — but they whispered, respectfully, about Powell. There were burn marks all down his back and his left arm — which is why he wore that grey, greasy cardigan and had acquired an ogreish expression. Yet he put out the vivid fruit, such as you could get then, doggedly enough.

Someone had to mind the store. Thrift was what victory cast up, after the cheering ebbed. And he saw what things would be needed, in this time of peace and parsi-mony. Sweets, cigarettes. Useless things.

Half-forgotten customers from before the war would shut the noise of the street behind them and linger, pick up old threads. The stories would be told — the bombs, the deeds of neighbours, the good or ill luck of husbands and sons — moments captured, sifted out of the actual long privations which did not seem to have ended with the war — stories which grew more unreal, more pensive, the nearer the teller got to the end of them, till he or she would stop, slip onto the counter the coupons and ask, as six years before, for a quarter of mints, a bag of rum and butters. ‘And you, Mr Chapman? What about your experiences?’

Experiences? But he had no experiences. Only the 81,000 packs and the 39,000 helmets.

In the evenings they counted the fiddly sweet coupons, threading them on strings at the dining table. And, more than once, he was tempted to sweep aside the carefully collected squares, like some card game that has proved inane.

‘We don’t have to make money,’ he said, losing count. ‘We have money — now — don’t we? So the shop —’

He eyed her over the green baize table-cloth.

‘Exactly,’ she said in a lucid tone. ‘Exactly. Don’t you see?’

She held her gaze on him. Her face, fretted already by her illnesses, was as frail as paper. It might crumble away completely.

And he knew: the shop was useless; its contents as flimsy as these interminable coupons they were counting. He was the shop-keeper.

The laughter leapt suddenly from her throat and skipped round the room. Then stopped, like something flung away and lost.

Would he hear her laugh again? Never so freely, or so wildly. But she didn’t break her bargain. She finished work at the Food Office. She went out on little necessary errands with shopping bag and ration book, or on more secret, private excursions, to bankers, brokers, dealers — though never (what were the traps awaiting her there?) to the High Street. But mostly she lurked, like some shy animal hidden in undergrowth, at Leigh Drive. At night he parted the leaves. Her body glimmered, received but did not yield. In the morning it was only a bedroom with pale green curtains. And yet she was preparing something. Down at the shop where she wouldn’t venture, he twisted up the little bags of sweets, rang the till, counted change, folded the newspapers (they spoke of the air lift to Berlin), and presented more expertly to his customers his shop-keeper’s camouflage. They didn’t realize (they only took their purchases and gave their money) how he’d perfected it; how it was only a disguise that faced them over the counter. Nor how she too sheltered behind that same disguise. For he saw how her preparations exposed her. She was less hidden, perhaps, by that undergrowth, than threatened by its rampancy, its sticky scents of growth; and only his own daily performance reassured her. He waited. In the evening he tended the garden while she watched from the window. Once, when he came home he found her unpacking cases of china. Pastel bowls and vases with white scrolls and tendrils and scenes from mythology on the side. ‘Wedgwood,’ she explained, without saying where she’d bought them. ‘Things like this will go up in value.’ And after examining them she packed them away again. ‘It wouldn’t do to break them.’

He felt afraid when she said, ‘I am going to have a child.’ Her own voice trembled slightly, though her eyes were bright with the knowledge of a promise fulfilled. As if she had proved a point, and now could be left alone.

That was November, 1948. The blue-rimmed tea cups had rattled on the kitchen table, the kettle hissed. For it was at breakfast she announced the news. So as to give no time, perhaps, for excessive reactions. She eyed the clock. She even led him, in her usual way, into the hall, taking his hat from the peg, ignoring his protest that for such a reason the shop might open late. Those unvarying habits had already formed — the keys, the briefcase by the umbrella stand, the dark grey suit for working — and that day was no exception. ‘Your hat Willy.’ Yet she let him kiss her and clasp her tight — was he afraid now she might slip away? — before she opened the front door.

A child. Something to rejoice over. Yet was it pure joy that made his steps seem light on that crisp November morning? Along Leigh Drive, down Brooke Close, over the common, past the swings and the paddling pool with its flotsam of dead leaves. As if the world slid heedlessly under his feet rather than submitted to his tread.

Smithy would be the first to know. Smithy who had neither wife nor child. When the barber came in for his tobacco, he said, tilting his head confidentially: ‘I am going to be a father.’ Solemn, monumental words which didn’t hide the quiver in his voice. Smithy’s doughy face had creased. ‘Boy or girl?’ And he said — only realizing then he’d never assumed it would be otherwise — ‘Girl.’

November 10th, 1948. There was a red poppy in Smithy’s barber’s jacket and red poppies on the lapels of customers. Hancock would be wearing his Air Force tie and would comb with extra care his tawny moustache. And round the white memorial by the school railings, solemn, pink faces would reverently assemble. He bought a poppy from the seller outside the Post Office, but kept it in his pocket. Better rejoice. While there is time. Real flowers, not paper poppies. Red roses which he bought at the florist’s and carried home as a token.

But she didn’t seem glad. Her face showed only the pinched looks of someone labouring to pay a debt. So that he felt, through that lean winter of ’48, while her womb swelled, that he’d inflicted some penalty upon her for which he, in turn, must make amends by never showing gladness; taking her hint, leaving the house at six, standing obediently behind his counter: counting, counting the endless change so as to pay his own debt.

She took the roses and placed them, meticulously, in a vase, kissing him coolly on the forehead.

Yet her womb did swell. He put his hand on it and felt it, alive, inside. How palpable, how undeniable. But none of his pride suffused her. As if she were saying, as he laid his podgy, shop-stained fingers on her bigness, ‘Enough, don’t touch, don’t touch any more.’ ‘I can manage,’ she insisted, forcing a grin, as he rushed, playing to perfection his own part of anxious father-to-be, to take the shopping bag, the coal scuttle; ‘I’m not an invalid.’ But she carried around that weight inside her like something crippling, longing for but dreading the moment of release. March, April, May 1949. Visits to the doctor. With every month she seemed more the victim. So that when the moment came, precipitately — pink on the sheets, and him sitting on the edge of the bed, summoning the nerve to call a car — not even the words which he was forbidden to speak, which broke the terms of the bargain, could stop that drowning expression or the silent cry on her lips — Save me, save me.

‘I love you — keep still — I love you.’

It was her he looked at first; her and not the baby. Though he knew, as he stood there holding the flowers, that that little thing in a shawl in what looked like a wicker basket on a trolley beside the bed was their child. But he barely took in the fact, to look first at her. Expecting, perhaps, to see her changed, irrecoverable — or else restored completely. For this surely would be the moment: her or the child. But she was neither lost nor, it seemed, redeemed. She lay sleepily in the bed. Her face was soft, tired, but the lips firm. And there was that look, as she became aware of his presence: See, I have done it. See, I am a woman after all. That is my side of the bargain.

How warm it was. But should that window be open? A bee had flown in and was buzzing and tapping on the glass. With all those babies. Had nobody noticed? Sunlight was streaming in between the half-drawn curtains. There were pools of it on the parquet floor and on the white sheets of unoccupied beds. And, in between, wobbling with little unseen movements, these wicker baskets, like the fruits of some bizarre shopping trip.

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

He stooped to kiss her but her eyes directed him to the baby. Before his lips could touch hers she had turned herself to where the rim of the wicker basket lay level with the bed, moved her mouth into a smile — it seemed she’d rehearsed with care that melting, motherly expression — and blown a kiss towards the little head in the shawl.

‘There. Look.’ She sank back.

A squashed-up, wrinkled face. Strands of dark, wet-looking hair. A mouth and tiny hands that seemed to protest feebly at some unpardonable imposition. But the eyes, when they opened, clear, grey-blue, were her eyes.

How simple to be the delirious father. To tickle the little body through the shawl, to chortle unlearnt baby-talk: ‘Hello. Goo, goo. Yes, yes.’ He didn’t look up at her — hadn’t her eyes said ‘The baby, not me’ — but he was aware of her, as she watched his antics, settling more firmly on the pillow, relieved, perhaps, by his simple glee, his compliancy, so that she could turn at last, having acquitted herself, to her old pose. She gripped the bed-clothes. Was she counting the violations of that pose? June 1949, in a delivery ward. June ’37 in a honeymoon hotel. Captured moments. And did she know to what she turned, there, in the hospital bed, steeling herself to the way the world looked from in there? Yes, I have made my forfeit, paid my price. But I will take the responsibility. And you will see, you will see it is for the best in the end.

Dorothy, you thought she didn’t have a heart. You never loved her. You merely suffered each other. And you thought I was her slave; she made a fool of me. But you never saw that look she gave me. How could you? And you never knew how I understood, then, how much she’d done for me. You were a little pink thing in a shawl. I was clicking my tongue at you and making absurd faces, and the nurse was smiling by the window, holding the flowers. There was a board clipped to your basket and a piece of paper with entries which read: Mother’s Name, Sex, Weight at Birth. Five pounds, twelve ounces. Pre-mature; but numbered, listed. When you grew up you wouldn’t go without milk and orange juice. The sun was shining outside on sycamore trees and railings, and a bee was buzzing at a window. You couldn’t have seen how she lay on that bed looking through both you and me as though she could see further than the two of us. But you will see.

They let me pick you up in your shawl. See, you can touch, take hold, after all. But the nurse looked mindful. ‘Your wife should rest now.’

Four days later they let you both come home. And that same month her asthma began again.

16

Sandra counted out change and shut the till.

‘Thirty, forty, fifty — one pound.’

It was approaching lunch-time and customers were multiplying. Outside, the shadows were heavy. Car-drivers leant against open windows in the slowly moving traffic. The pedestrians walking the hot pavement, jackets slung over shoulders, looked parched, in search of relief.

What absurdity. This endless succession of customers each after his little titbit. Papers, chocolates, cigarettes. You could remember faces by the things they bought. He was Gold Leaf; he was Hi-Fi News; she was Brazil Nut. Mr Chapman was better at it than she, but then he had had more practice.

‘Two, three, four and one makes five pounds.’

What fools! Sometimes she felt like denying them what they asked and making them beg. Every day at the same time the same faces. And every day the same cravings. Morning papers, evening papers, early, late editions, weeklies, cigarettes, chocolates.

Sandra chewed gum and tapped her red nails against the side of the till. If it was Sunday she could be at the open-air swimming pool. The Lido. In her new orange bikini. Sun-bathing and being ogled, on the tickly grass. Or at the coast with Dave Mitchell. Dave had a car, and he’d promised. But then — she let out an audible sigh which made Mrs Cooper, along the counter, turn her head — Dave didn’t have much else in his favour apart from his car. It would all lead up to the necessary routine of parking out of sight by some field on the way home. Service rendered; reward given. Things were all rather predictable with Dave Mitchell. Besides — the sea. All those rusty railings and pebbles.

She was bored. She’d give anything for something new. She’d go to the disco tonight, as she went every Friday, with Judy Bates and Linda Steele, looking for something new. But you could predict it all. Someone would start pawing her. Yes, because (unlike Judy Bates and Linda Steele) she had something to offer. And she’d calculate in return his assets and give, or not give (though, usually, she gave) the appropriate favour. But all this had become a kind of business. All predictable; nothing new. She’d try anything (even tempting an old man like Mr Chapman). But it seemed she’d already tried everything. Begun early. Behind the fence, near the allotments, at fifteen. Walking home with the blood between her legs.

She looked along the counter and caught Mrs Cooper’s sour gaze. Now there was something predictable. Still fuming with jealousy because Mr Chapman hadn’t been angry, had spoken softly when she was late, then helped her with the birthday cards. Mrs Cooper’s little game was obvious. ‘Yes Mr Chapman, let me Mr Chapman, I’ll do it.’ But Mr Chapman wasn’t interested. That was hardly surprising, was it? One day she’d have it out with that old bag. She’d say: ‘You’ll never have him!’ That would provide some excitement.

She served a man with cigarettes, who called her ‘darling’ and eyed her unbuttoned T-shirt as she leant forward with the change.

How hot it was getting! Across the road, up the street, they were sitting outside the Prince William, on the little wall by the pavement, glasses of beer in their hands, shirts off. The little half naked plastic dolls which hung in the Briar Street window looked as if they’d stripped for the heat. If only Mr Chapman would let her do the ice-cream. That was the best job in the hot weather. Lifting the black lid and putting your arm down into the cold, vapoury box. And you served mostly kids. Kids were best. They never seemed absurd, like these men and their eternal cigarettes.

But Mr Chapman was at the fridge. Relishing it. A small girl had come in asking for two cones, and she watched him plant the wafer cups in his left hand, push up the sleeve from his right, plunge down the metal scoop and with a stylish gesture top each cone and present them to the girl. The girl held out her money, smiling. Mr Chapman didn’t smile. He seldom did. Not actually. And yet somehow you felt he did. That’s why she liked him. He wasn’t obvious. How she’d hated at first that changeless expression, that everlasting blue or dark-grey suit, and how important it had become suddenly for her to change it, challenge it. Why not? An old man — it was something different. But he hadn’t reacted, no. He’d noticed, but his face had remained unmoved. She’d gone on trying to ruffle him; and it was only after a fortnight that she’d realized she did so because she wanted Mr Chapman to like her. She wanted to be liked by this unobvious, red-faced man of sixty.

And perhaps he did like her; for he’d given her, just now, twenty-five pounds, as a gift.

She watched him stooping, rearranging the contents of the fridge. His wife had died, not long before she’d started at the shop. What must she have been like?

‘Here!’ he suddenly said, producing two choc-ices from the fridge, tossing one, without further warning, to her and making to toss the other, like a juggler, across the full length of the shop to Mrs Cooper. ‘Cool off with these!’

‘Oh no Mr Chapman,’ Mrs Cooper protested, staying the throw. ‘Not while I’m busy at the counter.’ And she looked with virtue at Mr Chapman, and with malice at Sandra.

Sandra returned the stare. She’d never have him. One day she’d tell her.

Mr Chapman leant back on his stool by the fridge so that he looked along the counter. His face was heavy and weary. He was watching her eat her ice-cream. She bit off a mouthful. Twenty-five pounds, as a gift. Then he turned, suddenly, away. The thin coating of the choc-ice broke up beneath her fingers and slipped awkwardly. A piece fell on her skirt. She didn’t enjoy it.

‘Twenty Seniors, darling.’

She licked her fingers and dabbed at her skirt.

A new dress he’d said. Yes, she’d buy a new dress. She knew the very one. Deep red, with a black pattern. She’d seen it in Slik-Chiks. Yes, she’d go at lunch-time. It would suit her perfectly. Sexy, they’d say. She’d wear it to the disco tonight, get all the looks, and pretend all the time it was giving her pleasure.

She’d give anything for something new.

17

The stained-glass window in St Stephen’s church was bright with afternoon light. John the Baptist, in brown furs, and Christ, by a blue river Jordan. It shed little quivering patches of colour on the stone floor and the backs of the pews.

‘… except he be regenerate and born anew of water …’

He wore a pale grey suit with a white rose in the button-hole, and beside him he heard, in the silences of the service, her long, husky breaths. How accustomed would he get to that labouring sound?

Mrs Harrison was not there. Too ill, she said, replying to their dutiful invitation, to make the journey. But Aunt Madeleine was there, in a brown hat with black sequins, a conciliatory ambassador visiting under truce. ‘Will Paul be here?’ she said inquisitively, ‘I’d hoped Paul would be here.’ But no one heard from Paul. He didn’t write or phone. Aunt Madeleine said he was living in the North. Smithy stood beside Aunt Madeleine, in a sagging coat. For who else could he ask? Hancock? ‘Good God, no,’ she said, as they discussed arrangements. But it was difficult to deter him. ‘Hear you’re christening the little one,’ he’d said, casting his quick eye round the shop. And how could one say, ‘Don’t come’? So Smithy was there — he gave little looks of concern for Irene’s ragged breathing, and he was the one who opened doors for her, hastened to assist, as if the occasion were one of bereavement — and Hancock was there, sucking his teeth as the vicar spoke. Smithy brought his sister, Grace, thin, delicate and quiet; and Hancock brought — they’d never seen her before — the future Mrs Hancock.

‘Irene, Willy, meet my fiancée Helen.’

He gave Irene a little quick glance.

She was young, that Helen. No more than twenty-two. And Hancock, then, was thirty-six. She had blonde hair, waved like Lana Turner’s, and prominent breasts.

‘Let us pray,’ said the vicar.

Why St Stephen’s? ‘It’s the local church,’ she’d answered. ‘But they’ll never come,’ (and he meant, without saying, the marble plaque which glimmered, even now, on the far wall, beyond the pulpit; that, and the grave outside). ‘They’ll never come there.’ ‘It’s the best place — we will have it there.’ As if there were some logic. ‘We’d better put flowers on Father’s grave.’ ‘No,’ she said.

And so they stood, around the carved font, while the colours quivered on the floor, and the vicar spoke, who had spoken over Mr Harrison’s coffin.

‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father …’

(You didn’t cry, Dorry, or flail your arms when I dipped you quickly in the water.)

‘Congratulations Mrs Chapman.’ The vicar’s large and black-haired hand was extended. ‘And a very obliging little girl.’ Smithy stepped forward from the church porch holding his hat in one hand and dabbled a plump finger, as in a bowl, over the face wrapped in its white wool, then kissed Irene warily on the cheek. Hancock edged in, stood for a moment looking squarely at Irene, not regarding the baby between them, then laughed suddenly as if at his own joke, bent down and kissed the child. That rough moustache against that soft cheek.

There had been rain, but the sun gleamed on the pavement and on the wet laurels in the churchyard. The gravel made sucking noises as they walked over it. Helen giggled, holding her hat, picking her way round the puddles. Little orange spots of mud flecked her stockings. The wind was fresh, through the thin laburnums, making the sunlight clean and chill.

New life. How the past shifted into the background that day, and how the present seemed sharp and clear. New life: held in my hands. ‘Don’t let her catch cold,’ said Aunt Mad. But you were warm, warm to touch, and I held you close in your white shawl while Irene adjusted her hat and straightened the flower in her button-hole. She held a hand over her eyes against the glare of the wet road and frowned. Then I gave you back to her. The car was waiting at the kerb, glistening with drops. We strode over the gravel. Helen was sitting already in Hancock’s new Sunbeam, holding up the mirror of her powder compact to her face, while Hancock stood by the driver’s door. The rest of us were passing through the gateway when he reached inside, produced a camera and said: ‘Hold it there! Out you get, Helen.’ And Helen got out, dabbing her cheeks. Later you saw the picture, in the old album: Uncle Smithy, Auntie Grace, Auntie Mad, Mrs Hancock (though she wasn’t Mrs Hancock then), I, with my trousers flapping, and she holding you with that look (yes, you noticed it, sitting with the album on your knees) as if someone had passed you to her and she didn’t know where to put you.

‘Hold it,’ said Hancock. He grinned as the camera clicked.

Sweet sherry, christening cake, tea in the best cups; little bridge rolls with spreads and sprigs of cress on white doilies on the cake stand … ‘Thank you so much Mrs Chapman.’ Helen’s glassy voice tinkled in the hallway by the barometer clock. ‘Lovely party. And I’m so glad’ — she paused, as if to lay some special emphasis — ‘to have had the chance to meet you.’ There was a crumb of christening cake in the corner of her lips and her face was flushed from the sherry. ‘Bye Mr Chapman.’ Hancock hovered in the doorway and, behind him, the other guests to whom he was offering lifts. ‘Bye!’ How grotesque they looked, bobbing on the doorstep. How awkward Smithy seemed, in his best coat and his Homburg (he worked hard at his social graces), out of his crumpled barber’s jacket. But you had no pretensions, you were wholly yourself, and you didn’t struggle or cry (you’ll never remember it) as they passed you round from one to the other, rocked you and dandled you. ‘What a lovely thing,’ said Helen longingly. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’, turning to Hancock; while Auntie Mad cornered Smithy and whispered, ‘Tell me, did you know William before he, er, met Irene?’; and Smithy’s sister sipped her sherry delicately; and Helen, patting her hair, giving quick glances to Hancock, kept letting her eyes drift over the laden sideboard, the silver, the Derby and Worcester in the china cabinet: ‘I’ll come and see you Mr Chapman — if I may — in your shop’; ‘And tell me,’ said Aunt Mad, ‘What do you do?’ ‘Oh — modelling actually — er, photographic work. But I’ll stop when me and Frank …’; and the cake was cut — white icing with pink scrolls — and handed round on the white and blue patterned plates; and Aunt Mad said to Hancock, ‘Well, and how’s business, Frank?’: Hancock said, ‘Can’t go wrong, property market’s got to expand’: and Aunt Mad began again, ‘Pity Paul isn’t here’; and Smithy said, at last, helping me with some things to the kitchen, ‘We’d best be off, old pal — Irene’s looking, er, rather tired.’ ‘You look after that baby now.’ He winked. Though it wasn’t clear from his voice which baby he meant.

‘What nonsense,’ she said as the door shut. ‘What a performance! Thank God they’ve gone.’ Her breath heaved. ‘Take the baby, will you?’ She held her forehead as I took you from her. ‘Can you put her to bed? I’m going to get one of my migraines.’ And she sat in the chair by the french window, leaning forward, her head in her hands, breathing heavily, fingers tightening over her brow, but resolutely, uncomplainingly, as if she’d long been prepared to suffer like that.

It was only when I held you out so that she could say goodnight and as she lifted her face you started to cry, that she winced, as if it were you who made her feel her pains.

‘Ssshh. Don’t cry. Mummy’s got a headache.’

I whisked you upstairs, soothed you (‘There, be quiet for Mummy’), undressed you, bathed you, laid you in your cot, waited till your eyes closed, while she sat below.

When I came down her head was still in her hands.

‘Is she asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ She looked through her fingers. ‘Now I’ll go up and lie down.’ She got up, gingerly, from the armchair. ‘I’m sorry Willy. You’ve been good. Thank you.’ She put her hand on my shoulder. But it wasn’t a leaning for support so much as a gesture of command.

‘All right. I’ll be up later.’

And still the things needed clearing from the table — the plates, the tea service, the glasses, the remnants of the christening cake, the damask table-cloth.

You thought I slaved for her, didn’t you, Dorry, ran to her beck and call?

I carried the piled-up tray into the kitchen. Washed and dried. Brushed the crumbs from the chairs. Put away the silver. New life. Your eyes were hers (they all agreed) and the nose; only something in the mouth was mine. ‘Dorothy’: we called you ‘Dorothy’. There it was in the church register, on the iced cake, on the silver napkin ring Aunt Madeleine gave you. But it was only years later that you yourself, coming home from school (how quick you were to learn things) explained what it meant. Dorothea: God’s gift.

‘Like it wrapped?’ Mrs Cooper took down the large box of chocolates for the customer and busied herself (a speciality of hers) with the fancy string and the shiny paper.

‘Present is it, for someone?’

She looked aloofly at Sandra wiping ice-cream off her skirt.

’50, ’51, ’52. How quickly the years pass when you watch the growth of your child. Fourteen years since I first opened the shop and fixed my name, hazardously, over the door; twelve years since the war closed it. Its place was established now. Grey-overcoated City workers on their way to the station spoke of ‘popping into Chapman’s’, and no one remembered the name of the previous owner. And along the façade of the High Street it was other changes that bore witness to novelty. Across the road the ironmonger’s had gone and the home decorators (Hobbes’ Home Supplies) had moved in. Determined young couples, wheeling prams, would frequent it on Saturday mornings, earnestly choosing linoleum and paint and emerging with rolls of wallpaper (muted shades, tiny raised fleurs-de-lis on pale grounds and heavy braided strips for below the picture rail). Beyond the post-office, the electrical shop was stocking televisions, heavy and wooden, ready to bring a Coronation into living-rooms. The bomb-site had been cleared in Briar Street; and behind the Prince William, where the brewers had sold the little walled beer-garden, they were levelling the ground for a garage and a showroom. For petrol rationing had ended and the private car, they said, would boom.

A café had opened next to the baker’s. It was the Tudor then — high-backed chairs, gingham table-cloths — and it would become the Calypso Espresso Bar before it became the simple Diana. And, two shops along, behind the wooden partitions of their office, sat Hancock and Joyce. The Sunbeam was parked outside, and now and then, in dry weather, Hancock would pull back the hood and drive up in the leather flying jacket he’d procured from his Air Force days. ‘Well didn’t you nab anything,’ he’d explain, ‘working in the stores?’ They’d tried to run that business, he and Joyce, with the panache of young bachelors, relying for dignity and esteem on the memory of old Jones. But now they’d have no need to prove their probity, for the houses would begin to be built (hadn’t he said to Aunt Madeleine, munching his piece of christening cake, ‘Can’t lose, selling houses after a war’?); the market would revive, the little ‘For Sale’ notices would be exchanged ever more rapidly in the window. He was married too (we never went to the wedding because of Irene’s asthma), with a house in Sydenham Hill. The blonde Helen would sit, while Hancock worked, in wifely ease, thumbing the fashion pages and the catalogues, listing the furniture, the carpets, the kitchen appliances she would need to have. Did she know how long all that would suffice her? ’53, ’54. See, the ration books are being withdrawn. Prices have risen, but we are free to spend. And Hancock, coming in with that quick glance round and that competitive twinkle in his eye, said, ‘Not doing so badly yourself, are you? Shall we make it cigars?’

And what do you first remember, Dorry? When do the dates begin and the shapes first emerge? When did you first see — was it from the classroom at St Stephen’s Primary where you learnt what your name meant, in Miss Hale’s lesson or Miss Shepherd’s — the patterns forming, beyond the window?

Was it the yellow wallpaper in the room where we put your cot, or the dappled curtains — leaves and flowers round which butterflies flew? Or the cot itself, the wooden bars, the blue rattle shaped like a rabbit and the floppy doll made of knitted wool? That room became your own bedroom, the bedroom of a young lady, a single bed with a white bedspread and shelves for your books — and it’s still just as you left it. Was it those things, Dorry? Or was it the smell of soap and powder, the touch of the warm water in the little enamel bath? I always thought you would scream and struggle when I put you in. I’d dry you, dust you with talc and carry you in your flannel nightdress to your cot. The room would be warm from the electric fire. I’d say ‘Sshh’ and ‘There, there’, tucking you in; play with the woollen doll, which we called Winnie, making it dance on the rail of the cot, till your eyes began to close, and I’d kiss you and turn off the light. Do you remember that? Or was it rather the darkness: lying awake and feeling, too, as I shut the door, like an abandoned toy?

Irene would lie awake as well. Her health was weak even before you were old enough to know it. I wouldn’t know which one of you to tend first. But she’d nod, beside me, towards the door, reach for the water and the pills and lie back as if she were glad there was a reason why I couldn’t give her all my attention. Then I’d scuffle through to you, in my pyjamas and dressing-gown, say ‘Sshh’ and ‘It’s all right now’; change your clothes. Do you remember those moments, Dorry, in the early hours? Sometimes I’d pick you up and walk you round the room. You were fascinated by the twirled red and blue tassels at the end of my dressing-gown cord. And sometimes I’d forget, and listen out, as I held you, for her breathing and wonder what she was thinking — whether, perhaps, that I’d for-saken her. I’d tiptoe back. How fragile her face was on the pillow.

You thought she made a slave of me.

But she was alone with you all day, with all the chores to do. She used to push you in the pram down the hill to the shops in Common Road. Do you remember the ration book in her hand and the assistant licking her pencil, taking down the order? Flour, tea, sugar in blue bags. The shop girls fussed over you. When you were older they used to sit you on the counter and give you broken biscuits; though you didn’t like that — you were afraid you’d be left in the shop — and once you screamed at the man, smiling, leaning over the bacon-slicer. But she wouldn’t have left you. And that grim look in her face, as she wheeled you home; it wasn’t what you think. It took all her breath, that push up the hill. And it would have been so much further to push, back from the High Street. I might have sat you on my counter, fetched you something from the sweet-rack, shown you off to my customers. But she never did come to the shop: my customers never saw my wife. They had to pump Mrs Cooper for gossip.

She used to buy you instructive toys — do you remember, the coloured bricks, the wooden jig-saw with the picture of farmyard animals? — to keep you occupied. She’d sit in her chair and watch you on the carpet. But you didn’t know what to do. You took it all so seriously. You cried when the pieces wouldn’t fit, and it became a kind of system, that playing; do it right and she’d kiss you, build the bricks and you’d get your reward. It wasn’t her fault. It taxed her, looking after you while she was ill. Don’t you remember how relieved she was when I returned in the evenings? I’d walk up from the common with my briefcase and my coat over my arm and something, often, in crackly paper, in my pocket for you. You’d wait for me, your head in the corner of the bay window, pulling the curtain back. She used to come to the door holding you, as if to make sure I would take you from her. Didn’t you see how relieved she was, slipping away into the kitchen, when I picked you up? And didn’t you see how when I lifted you up in my arms and kissed you, she wouldn’t kiss me?

Did you judge us, Dorry, even then? If the word love is never spoken, does it mean there isn’t any love? If she never kissed me in front of you …

But she wasn’t that kind of woman. You used to look at that firm, unyielding expression of hers and wonder why I plodded year after year for her at the shop — till you stopped wondering and began to despise me instead. But you never looked closely at that face, into those blue-grey eyes, because if you had you would have seen how much more she knew than you.

Was it her face then? Was that how you first discerned the patterns forming? Her face. Pale, and the smoothness being furrowed and the cheeks beginning to slacken. You had her looks. At the christening they saw that. ‘She’ll be beautiful too,’ murmured Smithy, and Irene looked up. Only the mouth, they said, was like mine, a little loose, a little heavy, as if the things it said would bear a tone of resentment. Was that it? Did you feel that face read your own? And did you feel: whatever I do, she will have predicted it; whatever I do, it will not be my own?

How bright those eyes. And the hair, too, kept its lustre, even when her skin had faded. Your hair was black and glossy, but it never had the blaze of her deep chestnut. Yet you used to toss it from side to side in a way she never did, and you had that lightness and deftness of step as if you’d have liked to dance — if only someone had let you.

Was that how you first saw? Or was it the summer holidays (how quick those years); the long ride in the train, the sea rippling out to the Isle of Wight, the yachts, and the rusty, tarry smells of the pier? We took you up to Waterloo with our suitcases and bags, and little did you know how that journey of ours was already history. That railway line. New houses in Esher and Weybridge, new signs on the stations, and cars, Prefects and Zephyrs, passing down the roads where once the army transports had rumbled. The same and not the same. And that familiar Dorset scenery, green downs and bleached cliffs, unchanged. We might have gone elsewhere, to Wales, to Norfolk, but (since we had to go) she was against anywhere new. Nothing new. Yet (how could you defy her?) everything was eternally new; the old cry of the sea-gulls, the old tingle of the breeze, the old mystery of the rock-pools — how you loved to squat and explore those delicate little worlds.

Did you sense how she shrank from all that? And did you sense how that scene in which you stood for the first time had already been encountered before and its limits fixed? The sea air was good for her. She used to sit in the deck-chair outside the beach hut, and read the papers. Even on holiday she read the papers. And when she wasn’t reading, or leaning back, her face turned from the sun, she’d watch you and me digging holes and making walls to stop the sea, in the same way as she watched you playing on the carpet. She wore a straw sun-hat and a wide, striped cotton frock, and only now and then would she be persuaded — she who should still have been glad to show herself — to change into her swimming costume and tread down to the water. When she did so (did you notice?) it was like a kind of concession: ‘Yes, I allow you this — just so much.’ And when you watched her closely there was that look of panic in her eyes. Slowly, hesitantly, the three of us — you in the middle — into the waves.

Other people noticed her, other people admired. Though she’d never known how to deal with their glances except by lowering her own eyes. Settling the sun-glasses more firmly, pulling the paper more closely round her. People wondered at her, and wondered even more when they saw me beside her, with my lumpish looks, the beginning of a paunch and my limp. You wouldn’t have known I was once a mile-runner. The sea air was good for her. She could sit and breathe freely on the beach. But she wouldn’t come up, in the evening, for walks on the cliffs. Peveril Point and Durlston Head. Shimmer of the sea; crickets in the long grass; the lighthouse beacon blinking in the dusk. Memories stalked those paths. And she didn’t come when I took you, in the bus, to Corfe. We clambered up the ruined castle, and had ice-cream and lemonade. Years later you would have visited such a place with studious reverence; devoured the guide-books; scoured the stones. Ancient monuments; churches; places of historical interest: your eyes hungry for knowledge. But your gaze hadn’t acquired that seriousness then (or had it?). Running down the turf slopes, by the frozen tumbles of masonry. It rained. The bus back smelt of wet plastic macs. When we returned she was lying in the bedroom of our holiday flat and I couldn’t tell whether she was glad or sorry we’d spent the day without her.

Those holidays. We rented a place where you could only glimpse the sea in the gaps between other houses. We could have afforded more but we’d become thrifty. Gulls perched on the chimney-pots opposite. The rooms smelt of bared skin and calamine lotion, and there were old magazines and crime novels, bits of dried seaweed and a torn shrimp-net left by previous tenants. In the night we could hear each other’s breathing. And what else Dorry? You couldn’t have told, could you, whether those gasps of hers were gasps of pain or joy? But you slept soundly then, full of air and exercise. Your little body was engrossed in its own adventurousness. You raced over the beach and you weren’t afraid (it always surprised me) of the water. Later you became a good swimmer. School swimming galas: winner of the back-stroke, second in the diving. Life-saving. Why did you stop all that? You scurried bravely, as if you had a challenge to make, across the sand and you only checked yourself when you caught her eyes trained upon you. Was it then? When you walked along the top of the breakwater? There were breakwaters at intervals along the beach, high and barnacled, and the uprights of some were only a yard apart and perhaps only nine inches thick. You climbed up on one, where it was low in the sand, above the water-mark, and walked out, not on the horizontal planks, but on the narrow uprights, leaping from one to the next. You knew she was watching you. I saw your head set in defiance, and your legs tremble at the risk (how you needed to run risks) you were taking. But your light limbs carried you through, gingerly, on your toes like a ballerina, over the narrow posts. ‘Dorothy!’ she yelled, getting up from her chair, taking off her glasses. People looked. The uprights were seven or eight feet high out there and the sand beneath was wet and hard. ‘She’ll fall,’ she said. But you didn’t fall, or stop, and only swung yourself down, reluctantly, when the posts became too far apart to attempt. How fragile you seemed walking back across the sand. You saw that look in her eyes, afterwards, as if she wouldn’t acknowledge your daring. And you saw that glance she gave me because I’d stood with my mouth open and done nothing myself (I knew you wouldn’t fall) to rescue you.

How many years did we go to Dorset? ’53, ’54, ’55. We had a holiday every year, though every year she’d say, putting her hand to her throat, ‘Can we afford to leave the shop?’ Afford? Later we ventured further afield: Lyme Regis, Padstow, Teignmouth. But we had the car then. The Morris Oxford. We bought it when you were seven or eight; and only for you; so that we could take you out for rides and educational visits. Sunday outings to the country (I did only the papers on Sundays then). Picnics by the Thames and on Box Hill, on which she would come as if under constraint, sitting in the car while we got out the basket and the blanket to spread on the grass. After a while she’d sometimes say, ‘No, you go; I’ll stay here, I don’t mind.’ You saw how it hurt me to leave her, how I worried about her all day, so that it was never exactly fun we had by ourselves. And then, one day, she ceased to come out at all; and you spent your week-ends reading, timidly studying for exams, and I opened the shop all day Sundays. I only used the car to drive to work (I never did at first — I used to like that walk over the common — but it became hard, lugging my lame leg up the hill). Lyme Regis, Padstow, Teignmouth. They were the only holidays we had. And then you went — you must have been fourteen — on the school trip to Venice, and then again to Greece. History, art; guide-books from St Mark’s and the Parthenon. Neither she nor I had been abroad. Yet we paid for those trips for you. And then you holidayed by yourself (though she said you were too young), with school friends; coming back home and telling us nothing of what you’d done. But by that time she was turned fifty. How quickly. She had to visit the hospital, and the doctor said her heart, too, was weak. And I was fifty-one. And at fifteen there was already a gravity in your face.

Holidays. Holidays.

18

The telephone was ringing on the little shelf next to the doorway into the stock room. Above it, on the wall, was the list of vital telephone numbers (St Helen’s Hospital had been crossed out, but it was still the same list) and next to it, fixed with Sellotape, the postcards from Mrs Cooper’s more leisured friends. Torquay and San Remo, in predominant blue. ‘I’ll get it,’ said Mrs Cooper, as he began to raise himself from his stool by the fridge. The sun had moved round so that the awning obscured it, but a shaft penetrated inwards from a corner of the window. It fell fully on her face at the phone; but her skin was pale and chill-looking. She stepped back, holding a hand over the mouth-piece, deliberately jostling Sandra at the paper counter — who, in Mrs Cooper’s view, was not worthy enough to answer the phone.

‘It’s Pond Street, Mr Chapman. They say they don’t have the usual orders for Callard’s and Fry’s. Have you forgotten them’ (she hesitated — Mr Chapman never forgot) — ‘or have you got them here?’

‘No, that’s fine Mrs Cooper. I didn’t make those orders.’

‘Didn’t —?’ She looked momentarily flummoxed at this unprecedented lapse. ‘Didn’t — But what shall I —? Here, are you all right, Mr Chapman?’

He was looking straight at her, but as if he didn’t see her. His fingers gripped the rim of the fridge.

‘Tell them,’ he said, as if forcing aside a distraction, ‘I’ll explain when I bring their money round. And tell them that might be a little later this afternoon.’

She paused, raised a puzzled eyebrow, but turned back to the phone. As she spoke she glanced at him, then at the blue postcards above the shelf.

*

‘Please come in, Mrs Cooper.’ He twisted the sign from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’ and bolted the door on the inside, on a damp September evening in 1958. And there she was in a blue twin-set, putting a face to the letter she’d written, sitting behind the counter, brushing imaginary specks from her knee.

‘I’m sorry it had to be this late, but I couldn’t show you the ropes with customers coming in.’

‘Oh, no trouble Mr Chapman.’

Her hair was fair, still thick, and the beak-like nose and straining throat less prominent amidst a general plumpness.

‘Now let me show you what’s what …’

And so he’d explained, extending an outspread hand to the four corners of the shop, with an air, perhaps, of proprietorial pride. For they’d swelled and multiplied, those items to which he gestured. The coloured wrappers had thickened and brightened, like synthetic fruit on the wooden shelves; the trellis-work of racks and cardboard displays flourished. A new till and scales stood on the counter. And, outside, bright new blue paint, a large new name-board and a clutter of signs, some of them lit at night, adhering to or projecting from the walls, made it seem that the treasures within had spilled out onto the pavement.

And yet it wasn’t pride, now that he addressed his first ever employee, so much as an urge not to waver from the role expected of him, that made him sweep his hands so grandly.

She followed him, assessing him behind her smile.

‘Up till now, Mrs Cooper, I’ve managed pretty well by myself. But it’s my wife. Er, she’s not well, she has to visit the hospital, and there may be times when I’ll need to be able to leave the shop. This’ll mean, of course, that now and then you’ll be left in charge yourself.’

‘Oh’ — a warmer glint came into her eyes — ‘I’ll manage. It’s nothing serious I hope?’

‘Asthma. With complications.’

Her gaze drifted over the shelves and the counter with the new till. There were none of the gobbling vulture looks in that rounder profile, and yet there was something un-nerving about her dcsire to please.

He showed her the stock room, his system of stock lists and how to use the till and scales.

She bent closer with little blinks and nods, as if being admitted to intimate secrets.

‘Well, if you’ve nothing further to ask, perhaps I can give you a lift home. I expect you’ve a husband and family to look after.’

‘Family yes, husband no. I’ve divorced my husband,’ she said deliberately.

‘Oh,’ he said, withdrawing tactfully.

But she went on: ‘Yes — some time ago now. I’m left with his kids of course. I call them “his” because I wouldn’t own to them myself. Is that your car then?’ She nodded towards the Morris, just visible from the Briar Street window.

She brushed more specks from her skirt and looked up, satisfied by the confusion in his face and the expression of sympathy, which she waved aside.

‘Not to worry, Mr Chapman. I’ll get by.’

She crossed her legs, sitting on the wooden stool. Her nylons made slithering noises.

In the car she motioned to him to pull up at the corner of a road in which lights were already lit in the tunnel-like entrances of a squat block of flats.

‘Here’ll do, Mr Chapman, thanks very much. I wouldn’t take you out of your way. You go on to —?’

‘Oh — Leigh Drive.’

‘Leigh Drive. Oh yes, that’s nice, up there. Well —’ she said, struggling to get her knees, her handbag and a laden shopping basket from between the seat and the door-frame, ‘quarter to nine, Monday morning — I’ll be there.’ And so she was, on the dot, and always so, faithfully, tirelessly, for sixteen years — he never imagined she would become a permanent fixture — the fair hair growing crisp and grey, horn-rim glasses encircling the eyes, the neck growing gaunter, ever working and straining to lift the bony face, like some creature peering from its cage to see what it was missing.

She stooped at the car door as he leant over to pull it shut and gave a commiserating look: ‘I do hope Mrs Chapman gets better, Mr Chapman.’

But Mrs Chapman didn’t. No. How many times did he drive to Doctor Field’s to collect the prescriptions for isoprenaline, and thence to Knight’s or Simpson’s to have them made up? There were laurel bushes and a rowan tree by the doctor’s front path and when he entered the waiting-room the faces looked up, some with recognition, from copies of Punch and Life that came from his shop. How many times to the allergist for injections? And how many times to the gloomy hallways of the Chest Department at St Helen’s, to see Doctor Cunningham? The corridors smelt of carbolic and laundered sheets, and he sat in the out-patients’ cafeteria, sipping tea and reading the sombre notices on the wall. ‘Give Blood’, ‘Drink Milk’. She would come out through the swing doors, afterwards, to join him. How sure she looked, how undaunted, appearing behind the glass, not like a sick woman at all. Sitting down at the table, she’d shrug at the inquiring glance he gave her: ‘Oh, nothing. They can do nothing — why don’t they say so and be done with it?’ And gulping the tea he brought her, she’d look at her watch and say, ‘Well, let’s be off — you better be back to work.’ Yet once she said, coming out from her check-up — ‘He wants a word with you — in his office — I don’t know why.’ And she looked at him sharply as he got up, as if he might betray her.

‘These tablets and inhalers don’t cure a thing — you realize that?’

Doctor Cunningham, tall, smooth-faced, strong-jawed, with the wholesome expression of a young, intelligent schoolmaster or games instructor, leant back, holding a fountain pen.

‘They merely alleviate the attacks. I’m afraid we need to know more, Mr Chapman.’

‘More?’

There were papers and files scattered over his desk, which he scanned as if about to make a friendly reprimand on a student’s report.

‘Your wife’s condition seems to have worsened steadily since the birth of your daughter — that’s to say in the last nine years.’

‘Yes.’

‘And before that, since, at least, the end of the war, little aggravation. Intermittent, comparatively mild attacks.’

He looked up quickly from his record sheets as if in need of corroboration.

‘Yes.’

‘And a history of migraine … Cast your mind back, Mr Chapman.’ He suddenly put down his fountain pen and stroked his chin. ‘Would you say there has been — with your wife that’s to say — any pattern of emotional distress?’

‘Pattern?’ He stiffened, remembering her glance.

‘Anything perhaps — please be frank — in your own relations with your wife?’

The office was warm, comfortable, with a maroon carpet and a gas fire surrounded by glossy brown tiles; but outside the view of the hospital — tall windows, fire-escapes, the black pipes of a boiler-house — lay flat and frozen in a dead November light as if projected on a screen.

The close-shaven face smiled sympathetically.

‘For instance — do you know much about your wife before she met you? Does she ever speak of that period?’

Over the gas fire was a wooden mantelpiece, and on one corner, just above Doctor Cunningham’s head, a silver cup on which he just made out the words ‘ … Seven-a-Side Competition 195 …’

‘No, not a lot.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ The doctor raised his eyes a fraction and glanced at one of his buff files. Then he looked up again and half grinned, as if at his own formality.

‘Don’t think I’m grilling you, Mr Chapman. These questions do have a point.’ He leant forward with his arms on the desk. ‘You see, we know very little about asthma, but when there’s no definite physical cause there’s very often an emotional factor. Your wife’s a remarkable woman, Mr Chapman: unusually calm, unusually patient as far as her physical symptoms go; unusually — if you’ll forgive me — unco-operative when it comes to investigating a cure. That’s why I ask you these questions. They’re in your wife’s best interest.’

He had picked up his fountain pen and held it horizontally between his hands.

He wanted to say: ‘How do you know what is in Irene’s best interest?’

‘Do think over the things I’ve asked you, Mr Chapman. And do, please, talk it over with your wife. A lot might depend — I get this impression from her — on the sort of help you’re able to give her.’ He put down the fountain pen and one of the hands pulled back the cuff from the other to expose a wrist-watch. ‘Then perhaps we can have another little chat.’ He got up. ‘You know, there are times when your wife almost seems not to want to get better. We can’t have that. I gather you and Doctor Field had some difficulty in persuading her to attend here. But unless we can be clearer about the cause, her condition’s unlikely to get any easier.’

The smooth face eyed him as if it might be withholding some vital piece of information — or as if he were.

And had he persuaded her to attend so that other people would determine the pattern, decide her interests? So that she would be cured and possess the thing it already pleased her to renounce? Restored to him: the bargain broken?

And she had given him, in her place, Dorothy.

‘Goodbye Mr Chapman.’

A plume of steam released itself from the boiler-house, like a white hole in the flat vista. Outside in the corridor a girl was being pushed along in a wheel-chair while a nurse walked beside her reading a clip-board chart.

In the car, looking forward, her handbag on her knees, she said as they drove back:

‘Don’t talk to the doctor again, Willy.’

No, she did not get better. How many more visits to Doctor Cunningham? Though he never spoke again, true to her command, to that suave-voiced man with his files and sheets of notes. Nor was he asked. She made sure of that. ‘They can do nothing, Willy.’ Another drug, another test; and each time her looks affirmed in advance what would be the result: no change. In between her attacks her breath wheezed continuously, her voice fluttered and rattled. Bouts of bronchitis. A scarf round her neck even in warm weather. And that face slowly being worn away; the cheeks hollow and drained from sleeplessness, the mouth stretched from the effort of breathing. Only the eyes remained, ashy-blue and steady, as if they watched in some mirror the dismantling of her other features and approved the process. As if, if she could have done so, she would have torn off that thin mask of loveliness at the very beginning. For that was never the real thing.

The attacks were worse at night. They frightened him with their violence. Often they slept with the windows open and the pale green curtains drawn back, but there was never enough air in that room. Was it to be saved she gasped and clawed, or to be left alone? For sometimes she clutched with those flailing hands, sometimes fended. And it was never, it seemed, against the illness she struggled but against something else.

No change. Outside the hospital, through the cafeteria window, there were railings, notices, a row of plane trees, and the dark, glossy statue of some Victorian benefactor. Out-patients, with sticks and thick coats, trailed over the asphalt, and mushroom-coloured ambulances glided in and out of the entrance gates. Any pattern of emotional distress? There was a flower-stall beyond the railings on the pavement, and as he drank his tea he watched the woman with a red head-scarf and a faded apron pick the bunches of gold and bronze chrysanthemums, daffodils or irises and wrap them, with a twist, in the sheets of paper.

Should he have asked, pressed, more than he did? Gone unannounced, despite her strictures, to Doctor Cunningham? Or confronted Doctor Field, hammered, flailing, on the surgery door on one of those visits when all he did was take the prescription form from the green felt board; clutched the poor man by the collar: ‘Doctor, save my wife! What is happening to my wife?’ No: that would have alarmed her more than any illness. For didn’t he know by now, didn’t he understand, the terms of the agreement? He watched the flower-lady, from the window, shaking out the wet stems, stripping the surplus leaves with a knife.

19

The new till thumped and rang on the counter, the change tinkled, and Mrs Cooper said, dropping in the coins, putting the pound notes under the clip, as if she herself were the cause of success, ‘Busy day, Mr Chapman. How much today?’

Money. It was mounting in the little piles in the till, and on the shelves of the safe in the stock room where he locked it overnight. Twelve, thirteen pounds a day. Prices were up, but people were buying. Bigger orders, new lines; and already, so they said, his paper deliveries were exceeding Henderson’s across the common. They smiled when they saw him come in, twice a week, to bank his cash. And at night, after checking the lights, the locks, the burglar alarm, he bore home in his briefcase the figures (Cash, Petty Cash, Shop Takings, Stock Book, Trading Account, Profit and Loss); neat, symmetrical columns, which now and then she would want to see. ‘Good, Willy,’ she’d approve. The maroon-covered books and the file of accounts would be open on the baize table-cloth. He was a slow calculator — hadn’t he always been slow, brainless at school? — and Dorry, whose arithmetic, even then, was deft, might have helped him, sitting by his side, totting the figures. But Irene wouldn’t have it. She would not let Dorry even glance at those books. So that when she crept in from her bedroom, where she did her homework, he would only say, with a joking sigh, ‘Doing my homework too, Dorry.’ But it wasn’t a joke; it was more an apology. And he saw the look of criticism in her eyes.

‘Good, Willy, good,’ as he closed the books. ‘Now you rest. I’ll make a cup of tea.’ And she would raise herself up, with an air of relief and fresh purpose, clatter in the kitchen, as if it were better than any medicine, better than any of Doctor Cunningham’s treatments.

Across the road Powell, puffing a little, brought out his crates of oranges and lemons and stacked them on the trestles. Better produce, and more of it. Oranges from Morocco, lemons from Cyprus. Do you remember when you never saw a banana? Longer queues through his shop door. But still he put the best goods on the table outside, polishing the apples on his sleeve, arranging the tomatoes and creamy sticks of celery on the carpets of imitation grass. And still he wore the same grey cardigans over his scars. The home-decorating shop was thriving. In the Calypso coffee-bar (for so it had become) surly youths with swept-back hair were sitting at the tables; Mrs Cooper frowned on them and their juke-box music, but the bluff proprietor, pumping the coffee machine, welcomed them paternally. The attendants in Armstrong’s garage, in blue overalls with yellow collars, waltzed on the long arms of the petrol pumps. And in Hancock, Joyce and Jones, Hancock was congratulating himself on the surges in the property market. A slight taunt showed under the peppery moustache as he dropped in for his cigars or his evening paper, and said, watching him rattle the pennies in the till, ‘Coming on is it?’; and the same taunt would remain, just visible, as he added, ‘Irene any better?’ The Sunbeam exchanged for a Wolseley, and the raffishness of bachelordom for the suavities of success. Leather gloves and camel coats. Golf on Sundays with architects and property dealers. Dinner parties at which the lovely Mrs Hancock would shine as hostess. And everyone agreed (the guests would finger their glasses beside importunate or jealous wives) that Helen Hancock was the perfect foil to his success. Old ’Cock had picked a peach.

*

He fitted the bubble-gum machine outside the shop: red, white and yellow balls of gum jostling inside the perspex cover with plastic rings and trinkets. And a cigarette vendor, next to the newspaper placards and the oblong board on the abutting wall in Briar Street on which, every week, a man would paste the coming programmes at the Odeon. John Mills and Kenneth More in cheerful re-enactments of the war. History enshrined in make-believe. Like the lurid stories in the boys’ comics he sold in the shop: grim-jawed fighter-pilots and ogreish Germans. What war? A packet of gum please, and another card in the series ‘Great Battles of World War Two’.

He hung the advertisements and the illuminated signs from the facia. ‘Craven A’, ‘Corona’, ‘Gold Flake’, ‘Players Please’, ‘Lyons Maid Sold Here’. Wired them up himself, and scanned the advertisers’ catalogues for additions and replacements. New awnings, black and white striped, and neon lighting over the door. And the windows — the windows were his own special concern. He allowed Mrs Cooper to arrange the displays only under the strictest supervision, and most often it was he alone who at slack periods or after evening closing would snake and stalk through the precarious stands, as through tangled foliage, positioning the imitation sweets — plastic chocolates and wooden toffees — the cardboard cut-outs, the silver and gold paper, and emerging afterwards onto the pavement to gauge the effect. People complimented him on his windows, their profusion, their colour. ‘Highly commended’ in the local trade gazette for window dressing. At dusk the corner of Briar Street scintillated like a fair-ground. And he was silently pleased at the effect of his labours — of something which promised real goods, real riches within, but was itself quite specious. So that he looked forward to those seasons when special occasions allowed him to heighten the trickery. Christmas, Easter. The allure of tinsel and fake snow in the window, the enticements of chocolate boxes and gift-pack cigars. Easter eggs. Fireworks. Useless things.

Fourteen, fifteen pounds a day. He folded the papers with a flick between his thumb and forefingers and cupped his palm for the coins. Up the road they came from the station, with their briefcases and raincoats and work-weary expressions; the same faces stopping by in the evening as stopped by in the morning. ‘Evening Mr Chapman’, ‘Okay, Mr Chapman?’ ‘My usual, Mr Chapman.’

And he didn’t alter for any of them his shop-keeper’s image, his ‘much obliged’ and ‘thanking you’. It was they who bought and he who sold. That was the arrangement. Let them think of him as some cut-out figure, popping up like the sums on the till, behind the counter: Mr Chapman, the sweet shop man.

On Saturday mornings the High Street thronged. The same faces, down to the department stores and the new supermarket. Frozen food, electric mixers, long-playing records. Something new, something new in a shiny cover or a crisp cardboard box. And on the way back a call at Chapman’s, to pay the papers and buy the weekend’s tobacco. A drink in the Prince William. They had the juke-box now, and the television in the corner. Then football, a visit somewhere on Sunday. What randomness. ‘Don’t overdo it, will you Mr Chapman?’ But why should he mind? He only sold. Ceaselessly he filled his shelves and embellished his windows so their useless bounty might never fail. And when he knew what they whispered (echoes of Mrs Cooper’s gossip couldn’t escape him) — ‘He’s tied to that shop — Thinks of nothing else — Loves to rake it in’ — he didn’t mind. Let them whisper. Let them cast him in the miser’s role. He wouldn’t question it. For did they think it belonged to him, that cut-out behind the counter?

He watched himself fold the papers between his thumb and fingers; ring the till, swop pleasantries with customers, weigh up quarter-pounds and half-pounds in the scales; put the money in the safe at night, check the cash float, check the alarms, check the doors. Watched the figures mount in the maroon books. Watched himself drive home at night, briefcase and raincoat on the back seat, left at the traffic lights, up the Common Road, under the red chains of the sodium lamps. Watched himself construct his performance, as she watched herself, in the mirror, slowly being dismantled. Weakening of the lungs; a strain on the heart. That last holiday in Teignmouth — Dorry had found her solution by taking all her books with her to study. Going afterwards to Doctor Field’s. ‘She no longer has migraines, doctor.’ ‘That’s quite common, Mr Chapman, for a woman, er, at her time of life.’ He watched himself at night, listening to her laboured breathing, feeling his body temporarily recede, but seeing its daytime animation capering before him like some jerky phantom. And in the morning as he let Mrs Cooper in, drank the milky tea she brought him and heard her ask, ‘Mrs Chapman any better?’ he’d watch himself as he said: ‘No change.’

20

‘Know the latest?’

Smithy, working the pedal rather laboriously, winched him up, swathed in white, on the barber’s seat and wiped his comb and scissors. His old face was pale and his eyes yellowish in the mirror, and the fingers tucking the towel in his collar were cold.

‘Friend Hancock’s branching out.’

There was a smell of cologne and Brilliantine, adverts for razors and Durex. Two young assistants clipped at the other chairs and their faces seemed to be waiting, as Hancock and Joyce had once waited.

‘Had it from Schofield, and from the man himself.’

He bent closer to his ear. For Smithy’s art was the art of discreetly gathered and exchanged information. Didn’t they come to him, all of them, for their fortnightly clip — Simpson, Kelly from the Prince William, Ford the post-master, Schofield, Hancock? Only old Powell’s perpetually cropped hair was a mystery. And if things slipped out when they spoke, couldn’t Smithy be trusted, in return, to impart some useful snippet? But always with tact, always with disinterest. For what should Smithy care, piecing together the patterns of the High Street but going home at night to his spinster sister? Besides, he was old: his fingers were cold when they touched your neck.

‘He wants to open an office in Lewisham. The idea’s to move Joyce out there so he can rule the roost here. Head Office. Joyce won’t have any of it, and I don’t blame him — they’re supposed to be equal partners. They’re not exactly friends at the moment — I got that from Schofield. Cocky’s looking for a third partner so as to play things off.’

‘Lewisham?’

‘Empires start somewhere. He’s on the make. But he’s got wife trouble. Got this from Joyce. She does all right: everything on a plate. Schofield was describing their place. But she’s getting tired of being just one of the furnishings. Joyce says she’d do a flit on him if he didn’t buy her off.’

‘Stories.’

‘Who’s to say? Schofield says something could happen. She’s no longer exactly the belle of Sydenham Hill. We’re all getting on, pal.’

The clippers and the scissors snipped in silence. The barber’s pole twirled outside. Then Smithy said, picking up the comb, in a surer, routine voice as if the previous topic had never been raised: ‘Business all right?’ He nodded. ‘Irene?’ ‘No better.’ The fingers gripped his head and tilted it to one side: ‘Keep still now. Don’t you worry. Those doctors’ll come up with something. And Dorothy?’

He put the comb and scissors in his breast pocket and held the wooden handled mirror up to the back of his neck.

‘There. That’s you neat and trim for your customers.’ He put the mirror back on the hook on the wall. ‘I see Mrs Cooper’s having a nice little jaw about you to one of them.’ He cocked his eye towards the Briar Street window, where, across the wet road, through the gleam and clutter of the window display, Mrs Cooper could be seen, arms folded, talking to a woman in a navy coat.

‘Better go and live up to your publicity.’

Smithy took the towel from his collar and removed the sheet, scattering hair clippings to the floor. He got up from his seat. Then Smithy threw the sheet into the bin and, taking a brush from beside the sink, began brushing his jacket, twisting him slowly round on the floor with a slight pressure from his fingers, until he slipped the brush under his arm, put both his bloodless hands on his customer’s shoulders, and the two of them stared at their reflections in the mirror.

‘Know what I heard?’

There were five suits in the wardrobe. Five suits for a man who worked six and a half days out of seven. And he might have done his work in a shirt and a pullover or an old cardigan like Powell. But she insisted, bought him suits for Christmas and birthdays — what else should he need? — chose the material herself. So he hoisted on the red braces, in the dim, early-morning bedroom, tucked in his shirt — his stomach had begun to press against the line of his buttons — and tightened the maroon tie.

‘Know what Smithy told me?’

The tray with the tea cups was on the bedside table, next to her medicines and inhaler. The bedside lamp was on and she lay propped up against the pillows. In a little while, when he’d gone, she’d lie back; for often, after a restless night, she would only sleep in the early morning, in between his departure and Dorothy’s rising. But that was not before she’d got up, slipped on her dressing-gown and breakfasted with him at the kitchen table.

‘Hancock’s opening a new branch. In Lewisham. He’s looking for a third partner.’

‘Oh,’ she answered, as if she’d already had the information, noted it as she did those predictable columns in the newspapers. But she looked up, suddenly wary, so that he didn’t add at first, as Smithy had done, that all was not well between Hancock and Helen. Supposing she took that as a veiled allusion to themselves?

‘Empire building,’ he said and twanged the red elastic of his braces, like a clown, against his shirt. ‘Only a story, I expect.’

Every morning the tea, the hard light of the bedside lamp which showed the lines in her face; the electric fire in winter. Every morning he would dress and go down to prepare the breakfast — the shadowy forms of the garden would stare at him beyond the kitchen window — and he would scarcely need to glance at a clock or his watch to know whether he was on time. Up at five-thirty; out at six-fifteen. Put the cash books in the briefcase; polish shoes; warm the car engine. ‘Smithy says Hancock and Helen aren’t so hand in glove.’ And if he’d faltered once — sat down on the edge of the bed, torn the maroon tie from his neck that he’d tied so diligently —? But such mutinies could never have occurred, for her glance would have caught him before he slipped and fell: ‘Play your part.’ In the mirror his hair was thinning above the brow, it ran in black streaks over the scalp, and his face had assumed the moulded fleshiness of men — you saw them in the shop, asking for cigarettes, and lingering outside the Prince William — who carry their bodies around like so much ballast.

‘Only a story,’ he said, twanging his braces like catapults — and was that a smile at the corners of her lips?

He took the toast from the grill and the boiled egg from the bubbling pan. She did not eat breakfast, only drank the tea, but the table was laid, the blue and white crockery, the pale blue napkins — even at six in the morning. Darkness pressed against the window-pane, where in summer they could see the dewy lawn, the lilac tree, its stem grown thick after twenty-five years. The house was still, save for the tap-tap of his spoon against the egg and the ‘heee … heee’ of her breath, and you would scarcely have known that in the room above Dorothy lay asleep, books on the shelf over the bed where once they had propped the striped woollen doll and the jig-saws. Every morning as he went down to make the tea he paused to listen at her door — why did he listen? — and sometimes he heard her stir, wakened by his own movements. But stillness usually. Stillness: so that sometimes, far from complaining, he pitied the seven and eight o’clock risers who did not know the early morning calm, before the traffic began, before the world jerked into action. Her breath hissed in the chair opposite his. There were wrinkles in the cleft of her breasts. But she drank her tea deliberately, holding the cup between her hands, dipping her head forward rhythmically to sip; and as she drank she seemed to be saying too: ‘Yes, this is the best hour. You will go, to your old place, and return. Dorothy is still in bed. And I can sleep now. The day is poised; for an hour or so there is peace.’

He checked his pocket for the keys, his wallet, picked up his briefcase. She helped him on with his oatmeal scarf. It might have been he who commanded, as he drew the dressing-gown about that wheezing throat and said, ‘Stay in the warm’; were it not for her answering eyes: ‘Go on, go on.’ Past the hall mirror, the umbrella-stand and out into the dark morning — a frosty ring as his feet struck the front path — where sometimes it seemed he was quite alone in a world which had suspended its activity. Under the amber sodium lamps. And even in the shop, after he had sent off the paper boys (they were a different bunch then but their careless loyalty was the same) there was still a calm. Those minutes before he opened. A few cars in the High Street, footsteps, scuttling on the pavement. Soon they would be coming in their droves, summoned by trains, clocks, streaming to their work, bustling in at the shop door for their daily purchases. And he would be there, bobbing at the counter to receive them. ‘Morning Mr Casey, morning Mr Saville, Mr King.’ All was ready. But he would listen, for a few minutes, to the crinkling of the shelves, the hum and tick of the fridge, and sniff — it was still there but no one but he perhaps could smell it — that faint whiff of coconut he had first sniffed when the shelves were bare and dust lay on the counter and old Jones had stood in his black coat. Stillness. And while he waited, hands resting on the morning’s headlines, he laughed inwardly, not the old laugh — a dry laugh, thin like her breath, which didn’t change the look on his face. But a laugh.

And that same year, when he was fifty and the shop twenty-five years old, he said to her one night, closing the maroon books — her smile had lit her face then — ‘Toys, I will sell toys.’

21

Dorothy. Why did you have to come into the shop? To disturb those patterns? To see my look of disguised excitement, faint apology, as I greeted you from behind the counter? To hear the catch in my voice as I said, ‘Mrs Cooper, my daughter Dorothy’? You could have got the bus as far as the Common Road, but you got off in the High Street, in your blue uniform and your blue beret, a satchel under your arm, and walked down to the corner of Briar Street. To see me without Irene? To see if I was any different without her?

Half-past four, five o’clock. Under the brightening lights, through the deepening dusk, other children were going home from school, in groups, in reckless gaggles, but you always seemed alone. Even when you came in flanked by your friends — Sally Lyle and Susan Dean — you stood apart, untouched by their boisterousness and their forwardness, watching them giggle at the counter and say, ‘Oh, Mr Chapman!’ as I slipped them free chocolates. Though anyone could see, of those three, you were the prettiest, the one who most deserved to be to the fore.

You watched me arrange the toys in the Briar Street window. For they were arriving now, picked from the wholesalers’ catalogues, in boxes that rattled and squeaked and threatened to jerk into imitation life. Meccano and Lego, Yogi Bear dolls and model kits of the Lone Ranger. There was a frown on your face as I clambered into the window with them. A man of fifty fussing over toys? But it was my job to sell them. You stood with your arms holding that satchel in front of you and your fingers tapping restlessly on the leather, for you never quite knew what to do with those long, delicate hands. You’d let them fall awkwardly by your side and sometimes one of them would reach up, just like her, to your throat, but you’d remember suddenly and let it drop quickly again. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘put that satchel down, you can help.’ And you were in two minds whether you ought to or not. I got out from the box the set of three little clockwork chimpanzees. Each wore a hat like a fez. One had a pipe, another a tambourine, another a pair of bongos, and when you turned the key in their backs their heads swivelled and their arms moved. ‘Where should they go?’ I said. And you said, hesitating at first, and then with a little sharp decision, ‘Why not there?’ — and pointed to the display rack over the counter above my head. I hung them there, Dorry (you see, I didn’t question, didn’t hesitate). And later, when I’d sold three sets of those monkeys and people pointed to the ones above me, I said, ‘No, they’re not for sale.’ ‘There,’ I said, fixing them, ‘like that?’ But you looked away.

For you’d finished with your own toys. You thought we’d thrown them out, but I merely put them, to be kept, in the trunk in the spare bedroom. You no longer wanted to play or be thought of as a child. You’d got a place at the High School; you were going to make your mark, and it wasn’t games you looked for any more. Was that why you walked uneasily between your breezier friends? Why you buried your face behind books? And why you threw those little fits and sulks at home, picking quarrels over the dinner table — for that was a way of creating a little drama, of making your mark, without ever having to leave familiar ground?

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

You raised your head and spoke urgently, so that we stopped and looked at you, our spoons half-way between plate and lips.

‘Doesn’t it bother you — that there might be a war?’

On the leather foot-rest by her chair were the papers she’d been reading. Their headlines said: ‘Ships Move Towards Cuba’, ‘Britain Urges Removal of Missiles’.

You looked at her first and then, when her lips tightened in annoyance, to me, to see if I would move to her defence or yours.

‘There won’t be a war, nothing will happen,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t. It’s what I think.’

She resumed eating. You watched, not eating, your face trembling. I thought: thirteen, and talking of war. And then you flung down your spoon and pushed aside your plate.

‘Neither of you care! What do you read the papers for if you don’t care what happens? It’s not something you can just ignore —’

‘No — nor is it something to make a scene over when we’re eating. If you want an argument, have it with one of your fancy teachers at school, don’t be clever with us at the dinner table!’ She began suddenly to gasp for air.

Your cheeks burned. There was that little hard furrow in your brow. You looked at me, to test me.

‘Dorry, don’t upset your mother,’ I said. And I knew that would send you up out of your chair, out of the door (how many times did we hear that door slam behind you after something she’d said or I’d said, or something we hadn’t said?), up the stairs, your steps heavy on the landing, into the refuge of your bedroom.

And I knew it would make me come up to you to make my truce.

‘Why does she do it?’ she said, her gasps subsiding, ‘Why does she do it?’ She sat with her elbows on the table, her own plate pushed away. She put the napkin which you’d dropped back in its silver ring. ‘She’ll do something stupid one of these days, don’t you think Willy?’ She got up, moved to her seat by the window and looked at the headlines on the papers. Then she said at last, searching my face: ‘All right, go to her.’

There were pictures of Kennedy over your bed. Photographs out of Time and Life and the Illustrated London News which I got from the shop. Kennedy in Vienna. Kennedy beneath the white statue of Lincoln. Other girls pinned up the grinning faces of pop-stars: Billy Fury, Adam Faith; centre-spreads from the fan magazines I sold. Too simple and trivial for you, Dorry?

‘She didn’t mean to be unkind.’

You lay with your head pressed to the pillow, to hide your tears.

‘She’s ill, remember.’

But you didn’t answer.

Then you turned at last.

‘You always take her side.’

‘It’s not like that. There aren’t “sides”. It’s not a fight.’

‘Isn’t it?’

You fell back again on the pillow. Your left leg, in a white school sock, swung over the edge of the bed; a silvery down at the knee. How still that room was, how familiar. Yet it would become soon ‘your’ room exclusively; the room of a young woman, at which I would pause and knock before entering.

I stroked your shoulder.

‘Don’t make an enemy of her, Dorry.’

You looked at me as if I’d already been defeated.

‘What does she want?’

‘I think what she wants is peace.’

22

The Saturday crowds in the High Street grew bigger and bigger. They bobbed like figures carried in water past the cluttered port-hole of the shop window. Eighteen, nineteen pounds a day. And was it just my imagination or were there more youngsters among those crowds, with money to spend and little looks, as they walked, of arrogance and temerity? They drew out notes from their pockets to buy clothes that were made solely for them. Blue jeans that hugged their hips; skirts that got shorter and shorter. I saw them look at me across the counter as if I’d never been young. And was there really once a William Chapman, aged eighteen or nineteen, who’d taken the tram every morning to work, dressed in a grey waistcoat and a stiff collar, as if he were already old?

‘You’ve got competition, old man,’ said Hancock. There were creases under his eyes and his movements had lost their athlete’s jauntiness, but he still wore the air — with that crisp, thick-striped shirt, those long side-burns and the way he lit his cigar, in the shop now, not waiting till he had gone, peeling off the roll of cellophane and crushing it in his hand — of a contestant anxious to prove he can win.

‘It’s not on my books, but that site opposite Samuel Road — going to be a newsagent’s. One of those groups.’

His brown eyes gave a little dart as he crackled the cellophane.

‘Thought you should know. Not so hot for the one-man business, is it, these days?’

But as if I cared. Competition? Had I ever competed? The shop was a gift, I’d got it for nothing. Rivals didn’t bother me. (Besides, I saw it when it opened that October: a clean, functional establishment; swing glass doors, stainless steel, rubber matting by the entrance, and a staff that changed every six weeks. Magazines spread loosely to look more numerous than they were, a mere sampling of sweets: no toys. And after a year it closed.)

‘They’re the newcomers,’ I said. ‘It’s me they’ll have to compete with.’

‘That’s the style.’ Hancock’s eyes narrowed concedingly as if they’d really hoped for some expression of dismay.

‘While we’re on the subject’ — he removed the cigar, still unlit, from his mouth — ‘you might have heard already, we’re opening this new office in Lewisham. In about a month. Having a little party to celebrate. Just Joyce, Ted Schofield, a few people from the golf club. I’d, er, invite you old man, but of course, with Irene —’ he struck a match. ‘How is she?’

‘No change really. Helen?’

‘Oh fine, fine.’ He pulled the match away from the end of his cigar and waved it furiously, flapping his hand long after the flame was out. ‘Something Irene might be interested to know, by the by. Been meaning to tell you. I’ve been seeing a bit of her brother — Paul. Been a bit down on his luck recently. I’m thinking of letting him in on the firm. He needs some sort of break and we need someone new, now we’re expanding.’

‘We haven’t seen Paul for years.’

‘Really? Is that so? Well, tell Irene. She’ll remember when we used to be great buddies before the war — me, Paul and —’

He held his cigar a few inches from his mouth. ‘But I mustn’t chatter.’ One eye was cocked as if gauging an effect. ‘I’ve got business.’

He rubbed his hands together, puffing blue fumes and strode to the door. As he opened it he took the cigar from his mouth again, turned and said — was there a sly note in his voice? — ‘Was that Dorothy I saw popping in here last night? Growing up, isn’t she?’

The shoppers swirled along the High Street. I read the headlines in the mornings, under my print-stained fingers: ‘Kennedy to Tour Europe’, ‘Kennedy Acclaimed in Berlin’, ‘Kennedy Shot Dead’.

What was the point of all that study, Dorry, all those books? Was it to spite me? Because you guessed what my school reports must have said — ‘Slow’, ‘Could try harder’ — and you saw what a plodding brain I had, leaning over the baize table-cloth, mouthing those figures silently as I checked them with my pencil? Your own reports were so much better, but they weren’t unmixed: ‘Great promise but not always co-operative in class’, ‘First-rate work but apt to be moody’. Your form-mistress said: ‘She’s a very bright girl, but she needs to come out of herself.’ Do you remember? It was after the school play — ‘The Merchant of Venice’ — put on with the boys from John Russell. They wanted you to play Portia, the biggest part, but you wouldn’t. You played Shylock’s daughter. There were traces of stage make-up, incompletely removed, on your face, which made you look younger, not older than you were — and you overheard that remark as you came out from the side-door of the hall to where I stood with Mrs Bennet. Parents were waiting, fussily, to collect sons and daughters. You were angry with her for talking about you and ashamed of me because I stood in my grey work suit — I’d come straight from the shop to the play — my raincoat over my clasped hands; and you thought Mrs Bennet, with her spry, cultivated voice, would find me dull and stupid. You stood in the lobby by the coat-rack — I saw you over Mrs Bennet’s shoulder — pretending to read the notice-board, and did not come forward till Mrs Bennet said, sighing commiseratively: ‘But she ought to be ambitious. She’s got the world ahead of her. Oh — there you are my dear.’

We walked, the three of us, to the car park. Trees cast long shadows in the light from the hall onto netball markings on the asphalt. Mrs Bennet said: ‘Try a bigger part next year, Dorothy’ and patted your shoulder as we said goodbye.

In the car you asked: ‘Well, what did you think?’ ‘Oh I thought you were good.’ ‘No — the play,’ you said. And I muttered something feebly in reply. What did I know about Shakespeare, Dorry? I’d sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair after a hard day at the shop, while on the stage schoolchildren in costume played the parts of grown-ups and spoke lines I did not understand.

You were almost sixteen. Little hillocks of breasts had grown under your school pullover, and you were aware beneath your skirt of the contours of your legs. You crossed them carefully and tucked your skirt under your knees. You tried to pretend that you weren’t attractive — though, in the play, a schoolboy lover had wooed you with long speeches. But you couldn’t do it by covering your knees, or letting your hair fall over your face, or raising arguments with us over the dinner table so as to divert attention. And besides you knew — lingering by the mirror and looking sideways at yourself as if you didn’t want to see — that it couldn’t be hidden. And you really wanted, didn’t you, though the thought of it frightened you, to live up to it?

Down the High Street after school. It wasn’t the quickest way home. Was it to receive the darting glances of men leaning from car windows as you crossed at the zebra, looking up, turning their heads as you passed on the pavement, muttering low words? Or of boys your own age sauntering circuitously home, in restless gangs? I saw them meeting girls in Briar Street, next to the cinema adverts. Mrs Cooper tut-tutted and sometimes banged the window to shoo them off. Their breath steamed in the dusk. They wore Parka anoraks. Their hair was longer than the school approved, their trousers tighter; they carried records, with their school books, under their arms — the Rolling Stones and Donovan with text books of physics and geography. And it wasn’t Shakespeare and poetry they spoke of. Was it that, Dorry? Did you have to run that gauntlet, to test yourself? Though it made your head sit uneasily on your shoulders and you didn’t know how to reply with any naturalness to those adventurous looks.

Nothing touches you, you touch nothing. Sixteen, in a blue school beret. You could have kept your poise and learnt the trick of it. You were beautiful and young. Wasn’t that something to rejoice over? You could have performed the trick, without fear and without needing to make your mark. For hadn’t you once — at the schools swimming gala — stood up, unafraid, high over the swimming pool, over the blue tiles wobbling beneath — that was no adventure, you knew how to keep your balance — and hadn’t you plunged, with a perfect arch, and bobbed up again, to take second prize, with a laugh?

Shakespeare, history books, volumes of poetry. Post-cards from art galleries — replacing Kennedy — on the wall; and faded ink-splotched school copies of Latin texts, Virgil and the Metamorphoses, whose contents I puzzled from the English heading before each extract: ‘Narcissus and Echo’, ‘Diana and Actaeon’. I put the mug of coffee on your desk, knocking first at your door, and treading softly over the carpet. For your head was lowered and you were intent on your reading. Your hair hung forward in the light of the anglepoise lamp and the line of your neck seemed fragile and exposed as you leant. You were doing your project on Keats and over your shoulder I read lines of verse (did you know, Dorry, how I peeped into those books when you weren’t there?) which I didn’t understand:

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss …

I put the mug on your desk. You said in a quiet, unsteady voice, ‘Oh thanks,’ but you didn’t turn and smile at your father.

23

We bought you dresses. She would have said: She doesn’t need them, not so many — but she yielded, for my sake. Bright dresses — how they changed, Dorry, as you grew up, from wide skirts to little skimpy things next to nothing — lying over the back of a chair for you to find at Christmas or on birthdays. Dresses to make a young girl feel special, and that cost her father a pretty penny. For we had money. Thirty, forty pounds a day. I worked all day Sundays, and we no longer took holidays. And even without the shop we had money. For she still scanned the closing prices in the paper, made phone calls, and struggled out, in her weak state, to meet agents, and sign cheques for crystal and porcelain. ‘They’re beautiful,’ I said of all those things she bought. But she replied, her tired eyes somehow disinterested: ‘They will keep their value.’

Bright dresses — deep red suited you best — that should have been worn at dances and parties. Weren’t there parties to go to? I sometimes saw them, driving home late from the shop, in Mannering Road and Clifford Rise and in Leigh Drive itself: little gaggles, sixteen and seventeen, no older than you, in short skirts and leather jackets, arriving at bay-windowed houses where the parents were out for the evening or away for the weekend, and from which record-players boomed. ‘Talkin’ ’bout my ge-en-eration …’

But you didn’t wear those dresses. You put them on to please me — you came down the stairs and stood like a shy doll in the doorway. And you wore them on the predictable occasions (do you remember, Dorry, those drear Christmases, when we dutifully had the neighbours in for drinks and you and I walked after dinner, not talking, round dark, empty streets, where the decorations in front windows looked like shop-fronts?). But you didn’t go out in them, though you liked them and thought you deserved them — I saw that. You hung them up in your wardrobe and preferred your white school blouses and navy skirts or that shapeless brown sweater and slacks.

No parties. No self-conscious but light-headed youths ringing at the front door to take you to dances and cinemas. Were you above that? Was it more daring excitements you wanted? Or had she spoken to you — surely not — told you of wolves that prowl? No time to go out. Books to be read, exams to be worked for, essays to be written.

Yet you knew, nonetheless, John Schofield — Schofield’s lanky and precocious son who’d done the lighting at the school play — and you knew more than I did about what was going on up there, amongst the trees and the old villas and the new estates at Sydenham Hill. You told me it all later — that time, the first time, she was taken to hospital. That was the only time we ever really talked.

Houses through the trees, and lights, illuminating costly furniture, in the houses. That was where your mother’s family had a house; and I remember when it was mostly all woods and fields and my father used to walk there on Sundays. They’d built a lot up there: luxury houses for executives, tall, clean-cut flats, but with banks of turf and carefully preserved clumps of trees in the best of taste. The people inside the houses were building too. Hancock was building (you never liked him because of his businessman’s swagger — too crude a contrast to me? — but most of all because he winked at you once as you came home from school): new branches in the suburbs; bigger figures on the ‘For Sale’ signs in his window. And Helen was building. More gadgetry in the kitchen so she could lounge and entertain more. A bigger wardrobe so she could lounge more prettily; richer fare on the side-board so she could entertain more lavishly. You wouldn’t remember her from your christening; her breathy charms and her quick shrill giggle. Hancock had chosen her for her obvious looks and curving figure. For he wanted a wife to prove his merit, a prize on display other men might envy.

Candlelight on the faces of the guests at table and on the bare arms of the hostess serving the meal; jokes about the cost of living, and an atmosphere like that before a race where each contestant smiles sportingly and wills the other to lose. It wasn’t enough, that enviable trophy. More business, more houses to sell. More adornments for wife and home so that the prize would prove the achievement. And though he strode over the High Street with that swaggering gait his restless face was never content.

I can see his glinting eye as he offered Paul that partnership. ‘I could fix you up here, if you like, old man.’ And I can see Paul’s stiff features trying not to flinch at the condescension — ‘I’ll think about it.’

Where had Paul been all that time? Seventeen years. Seventeen years since he returned from the war, sold up what was left of the Harrisons’ laundry and looked for openings with the money. And it was still a fight, though the war was over, finding the contacts, making one’s mark. Those failed schemes in London; a partnership, at last, in a textile business in Leeds. Irene told me all about it, Dorry. Paul wrote to her. But she never replied, and she never — this was the gist of the story — lent him a penny. And when the business folded in Leeds (and his marriage with it) Paul had no one to turn to but an estate agent friend in London. ‘Great buddies before the war.’ But Irene never went into that. She never did say much about the time before we met.

Soft lights and expensive furniture, in the house where the two friends struck their terms, made their bargain. What did each stand to gain? Paul: a job at the expense of pride? Hancock: the satisfaction of the upper hand? ‘Take your time old man — don’t let me force you.’

But something else was at stake in that plush house. What did Helen hope to gain; a dozen years their younger, getting up from the table, moving perhaps, so they could both watch her, over the noiseless carpet, to look out of the window at the stillness of houses, trees? A little adventure?

Was it true, Dorry, that Hancock beat her, — when it was all over and she came back to him, — so she couldn’t show her face?

How did you know all that? Coming home from school on the bus with John Schofield, who was bookish enough for you not to be troubled by his company. Making fun (that was the fashion amongst free-thinking teenagers) of your affluent parents. But even Schofield, who gossiped so readily with Smithy, wouldn’t have told his own son so much. Paul himself then? Your own uncle. When was it? Those evenings when you said you were rehearsing the school play? Going to Paul’s flat in Camberwell? Did his face still have a trace of those keen looks he wore at my wedding? Did he see Irene in you? Did he welcome you, Dorry? Because he had questions to ask, things to tell; and because you reminded him of a time when the picture was still complete? Under the apple tree, in a black peaked cap. The fair flanked by the strong.

You should have been at rehearsals. You hardly went out otherwise. Mrs Bennet wanted you to play a bigger part. But was it better than drama — all those things he had to tell you?

A little adventure. It didn’t last long. Helen came back and Hancock beat her. The bruises healed but something else didn’t. She had to go for visits to a hospital. She returns there even now on occasion. She still serves the guests at Sydenham Hill; but her giggly laugh has snapped and the faces round the table are fewer now, they say. Hancock doesn’t allow his guests too much laughter. He wears a fixed face like a statue’s — even when he comes in here for cigars — as if he wants to be regarded as beyond reproach. And when I ask, ‘How’s Helen?’ he answers, ‘How’s Dorothy?’

Soft lights over the table. The captured moment.

Why did I wince, Dorry, why did it shock me so, that evening after dinner? You didn’t go straight to your room, and your little head was flushed with anticipation and daring. You made an enemy of Irene that evening. No, it wasn’t what happened with Paul and the Hancocks. She even said of that, with a sort of strange approval: ‘Well — there’s justice there.’ It was that note of adventure in your voice.

You made an enemy of her. But not of me. So why did I wince, as if I were being accused myself, why did I find myself playing the distressed father? — when you placed one hand on the table, drew up your head and blurted out those words as if they were the caption to some vivid and indelible photograph: ‘Something has happened. Mrs Hancock’s left Mr Hancock. She’s gone off with Uncle Paul. I know it’s happened because Uncle Paul told me it would.’

Dorry. You’ll come. You’ll come back.