Free The Sweet-Shop Owner by Graham Swift Page A

the notepaper. ‘Missis?’ he asked, knowing the answer, then slumped back, putting his nose to his magazine. He read endless magazines, propped on his elbow, turning the centre-page spread – ‘This Month’s Babe-in-Arms’, a girl in stockings and a tin helmet – through every angle. What did he do (he never said), this man who’d expressed one moment of awe at History and then slumped back to spend the war issuing kit and reading magazines?
    And on the bunk below he read the letters, looking for signs – ‘With Love, with All my Love.’ And he wondered should he write ‘I love you’ (for perhaps in this time of war –); though he knew, if he did, it would alarm her, more than war, more than bombs and blackness.
    No, she would say, that wouldn’t be a good plan.
    He wrote, ‘5520 helmets,’ meaning, ‘I love you.’
    Up above, the white curves in the sky had grown more complex, then dwindled. On the grass behind the barrack huts some conscripts, off duty, stripped to the waist, played football.
    ‘It seems as if your leave will coincide with Jack and Paul’s. They will be here briefly before they go to the Clyde. Have asthma.’

9
    She sat opposite the window in the shadows of the living-room, and Mr Harrison, in the garden, peering in and holding a camera, was saying, first sternly then beseechingly, ‘Come out Irene. Come out. Don’t you want to be in it?’
    She held a hand to her throat and shook her head.
    *
    She’d met him at the station. Her eyes had been watery and her speech quick and breathy. And there was that other look about her, of someone sent on errands they resent.
    ‘Won’t you come out? Don’t you want to be in it?’
    Up on the lawn, where the October sun fell over the house, in front of the rockery, the michaelmas daisies and the apple trees, they were taking photographs. Figures grouped, regrouped; fussed and posed, as if it were a function or prize-giving, and they were not dressed for war, those brothers in their dark naval uniforms, but for some ‘special occasion’. Mr Harrison bore the camera like a master of ceremonies. Jack and Paul, with caps on, with caps off and held proudly over the breast, jutting their chins and giving self-conscious grins, so that the moment might be captured, manhood vindicated. This deserves a picture, this is something to be kept. And someone leafing through the pages, the school photos, the holiday snaps, would say, ‘– and there, at Aunt Mad’s in their uniforms: what fine boys.’
    Click went the camera. The figures broke up, brushed lapels, recomposed. Jack alone: Paul alone. The two with Mrs Harrison, with Mr Harrison, with Aunt Mad, with Mr and Mrs Harrison together.
    But the one they most wanted, the one they most needed to complete the picture, sat in the living-room and wouldn’t take part.
    ‘Come out Irene, come on out.’
    ‘The sun will go in.’
    As they left the station for the taxi someone eyed his uniform and his limp. Perhaps they were thinking, ‘Dunkirk?’ Her face looked excited, but it was only the illness. In the taxi he said, ‘What can be done?’ ‘I have some new pills. They help. But there’s no cure really. It’snot like that.’ And, taking his hand, she said, ‘Look,’ and pointed out of the window to an orchard where a man on a ladder was picking apples.
    He sat in the deck-chair near the back porch, holding Aunt Madeleine’s ginger cat, glad to be out of his uniform. They didn’t want him in their photographs. He could sit in peace. The garden looked neat, the far end dug for vegetables. Mr Harrison stood close to the window. The lines in his face were reflected in the glass.
    ‘Come out.’
    ‘It’ll bring it on again,’ she said, her voice muffled, from within.
    Though they both knew, it wasn’t the asthma.
    ‘Just for a moment. That surely won’t do any harm.’
    Mr Harrison moved aside from the window. His hair was combed and smoothed down for the photographs but his face, unseen by