The Sweet-Shop Owner Read Online Free PDF

trees which the sun filled like a pool, that it happened? Her blue and white dress was taut as she climbed in front of him. Little marks of sweat appeared on it. She panted with the heat. They stopped to rest on the grass bank, behind the elder trees. And he meant, if nothing more, to pick a stem of grass and tickle her chin with it, for that would make her laugh. But when he turned she was gasping, her chest was heaving, long jagged breaths came from her throat, and she tore at the stem he held out to her, in panic, as if she werereally drowning, clutching the straw, as if it were closing in to suffocate her, that golden summer-time.
    It was asthma, she said, stretched on the bed in the hotel. ‘I’ve had attacks before … The heat … It runs in my family.’ She had recovered her composure; her breath was quiet, her face was calm. But he knew now the picture would never be complete. Those hands flailing in the sunlight.

4
    ‘Weekend, Mr Chapman?’ She said it, right on cue, plonking the tea down before him, her face the colour of the milky liquid in the mug. ‘As if
you
would know what a weekend is.’
    ‘But that doesn’t answer my question, Mrs Cooper.’
    ‘Well, no plans actually.’ The horn rims glinted. ‘But then if you were to have something in mind – I’d be glad – you know – to look after things.’
    He lowered his face to his mug. How many times had she tried that one?
    She smiled.
    ‘Go on. Give yourself a treat for once. I’ll manage. Look at that sunshine.’ Her eyes darted to the window. Across the road the lime trees quivered. ‘Take a trip to the coast. Get some air.’
    And what she really meant was: ‘We could both have a treat, you and I. We could get the train together. Stroll arm in arm on the pier. You will put the question at last. I will no longer have to work.’
    ‘When did you last have a holiday? You’re not chained to this place you know.’
    ‘I last had a holiday, Mrs Cooper, in sixty-three. Teignmouth. Do you know Teignmouth? Devon. Thereare associations with the poet Keats. Know Keats, Mrs Cooper? My daughter Dorothy was fourteen.’
    She blinked and tightened her lips; though her tongue smarted of course to have its say about that good-for-nothing of a girl. All that nonsense about literature, poetry, Shakespeare (guess how
he
knew about the poet Keats) and underneath it was only the money. But she saw, all the same, how it hurt him, how when you said the name there was a sort of wince in his eyes; as though he pulled down a shutter: Don’t trouble me any more.
    She avoided his eyes now. She allowed a slightly wounded expression to cross her face. She’d never deserted him, in sixteen years. When Mrs Chapman died; when he phoned up that time and began, ‘Mrs Cooper, I’m afraid you must manage without me for a few days …’ – Hadn’t she offered to do all she could, to come round in the evenings to cook, to tend (‘No, Dorry’s at home,’ he’d said); and hadn’t she even wept a tear herself all alone in the shop, at this very same hour, when normally she would make his tea and say, ‘How’s Mrs Chapman, Mr Chapman?’ Not that you hadn’t seen it coming. She’d been ill for years. But to see him return to the shop again for the first time, with his face empty, a dummy going through the motions. You knew then what made him tick.
    ‘Is there nothing Mr Chapman, nothing at all?’ She would have comforted him. A fortnight after the funeral she had her hair done; bought a new corset. But it was all Dorothy then. Dorothy, Dorothy. She might have had her chance, with time, if it hadn’t been for Dorothy. So she was almost glad when the little bitch ran off like that, taking the things, demanding the money (if only he’d said just
how much
money). ‘Oh I’m sorry Mr Chapman, truly sorry. See how they turn out in the end. Better off without her. Is there nothing? Nothing at all?’ And he’d relent at last and see, surely, how she’d been