Free England's Lane by Joseph Connolly Page B

number of times I’ve said to Jim—God’s sake, man: you’ve just got to do something about the state of your window. Well you can imagine his reaction: “Window? My window? State of my window? What’s b-word wrong with the state of my window? Looks all right to me. Nothing wrong with my b-word window.” On and on. Yes well—like so many men, he just doesn’t see. I mean … even the glass itself, that hasn’t been cleaned in a decade, and every day he hangs up the same old things outside—and that tin bath, I’m telling you: it must be a museum piece, by now. All dented and gray—not silvery and shiny like galvanized is when it’s new. When it’s not a museum piece. It’s not even as if anyone’s ever going to buy a tin bath in the first place. We may not all be living in Buckingham Palace, but I think we’ve at least progressed from that. And everything else out there is coated in grime, from the traffic and the flies. The idea of a window display, I say to the man, is to entice people into the shop—to tempt them to buy something they may not have thought of. People look at your window, they’d run a mile. He says I don’t know what I’m talking about: they come in, they buy their flypapers, their nuts and bolts, their paraffin, their brooms and their four ounces of tacks—and the b-word butcher buys his buckets. No doilies and pretty pink bows in the window are going to make the slightest bit of b-word difference. And I don’t know—he might even be right. I still used to argue, though—and then I stopped. I used to do a lot of things where Jim is concerned. Yes I did. But now I’ve stopped.
    It is true though that Mr. Barton, Jonathan, he does seem to buy an awful lot of buckets. And in his line, you don’t really care toinquire, do you? I did think of asking him one time, but I didn’t like to in the end. Now
his
window—oh my goodness! That really is a work of art, and no mistaking it. All these neat little white porcelain trays divided up by what I think is supposed to resemble parsley, though I must say the green is very vivid. The sirloin steaks, all fanned out so very handsomely, their creamy fat and marbling part of nature’s wonder, to my mind. The carcasses of pig, the neatly trussed-up chickens (for those who can afford them) with those sweet little chef’s hats perched on the ends of the drumsticks—and that parade of pinkish lamb chops, curling like commas. Mr. Barton, Jonathan himself—oh, he’s just such a gentleman. So very beautifully spoken and courteous, and always just perfectly turned out. Immaculately groomed, his hair and mustache always just so. Sounds so silly now, but I used to be quite … well, not frightened of him, exactly, no—but never really wholly at ease in his presence. Awed, I think I was, maybe just a little. He is rather commanding. He does tend to dominate any given space—and particularly so when he’s behind the counter of his own very brightly lit and nearly glittering shop. Which always smells so … I don’t know … clean, really. Is the nearest I can get to it. But it’s true that I still hear people talk of him as being really rather intimidating, but you just have to see beyond all that: that’s only his manner—he’s actually very kind. I find it all, all of it, quite a comfort. Big strong hands. Well you need that, I suppose. If you do what he does.
    But just thinking about it all now, you know … nearly all of the windows in the Lane—they’re really rather wonderful, in their funny little ways. The nighties and stockings and petticoats in Marion’s all got up as if they’re just about to fly away—Bona, of course, with all these very strange packets of things, covered in seals and foreign languages. Some of them aren’t even written in a