The Sweet-Shop Owner Read Online Free PDF Page B

his comfort all along.
    She ran her palms down over her hips.
    ‘Sixty-three, Mr Chapman? That’s eleven years ago.’
    ‘Yes. Eleven years.’
    She snorted, as if the stretch of time made its own comment. Her throat trembled slightly. Her horn-rimmed glasses and large, curved nose gave her the look of an ageing bird of prey. Her features were all strained and compressed with effort on the end of that loose neck. Perhaps it was her corsets.
    ‘She’s grown up since, hasn’t she? More’s the pity.’
    ‘Yes, Mrs Cooper.’ She’d never been beautiful, with that bird’s face. ‘She’s grown up. She takes her own holidays now.’
    He finished his tea. She picked up the mug and held it next to her bosom. She would pour him another.
    ‘Well don’t you fret over that. She’s not worth it.’ And she could have almost reached out and touched his hand there, resting on the copy of the
Daily Express
. She knew what he was thinking, with those little glances of inspection. She wasn’t much to look at. She knew that. And perhaps that was what kept him there behind his shutters. For Mrs Chapman must have been beautiful, that must have been the trick of it. Though she’d no way of being sure. She’d never seen her, incredible though it was. In sixteen years Mrs Chapman had never come into the shop. But it must have been beauty – what else? – that kept him running to heel like that. And if
she
could do it, in an invalid chair, why not herself?
    ‘Another cup?’ She gripped his mug tightly in her fingers.
    ‘Please.’ He offered a brief, consoled expression. He knew what she was thinking (did she think he was stupid?).
    She would get her reward.
    The clock over the door showed twenty past seven. ‘Almost time, eh?’ he said. Traffic was accumulating outside. Figures bobbed along the pavement. Every day you watched them, the same faces, through the clutteredwindow, and you got to know.
They
were office cleaners coming home; they were from the vinegar factory; they were the night staff from the telephone exchange. Across, on the opposite corner of Briar Street, was the hair-dresser’s. Sullivan’s: Styling for Men. They’d taken down the red and white barber’s pole which used to twirl endlessly upwards, so that it seemed like a rod of infinite length, for ever passing, disappearing into the bracket that held it. Smithy wouldn’t have allowed that. Smithy had shaved him in the mornings, when Dorry was young. He had sat him in the chair beside the window so he could look across and keep an eye on the shop; and Mrs Cooper, if she looked carefully, could make out his round face, rising from white sheets like a coconut at a fair, swathed in lather. It was a bargain: he got his shave, Smithy got a pinch of tobacco and free magazines for his customers. Then one day young Keith came over, with his tight trousers and a pale face: ‘Please Mr Chapman, it’s Mr Smithy …’
    Across the High Street only the café was open. The Diana. Dirty cream paint and wide windows on which the condensation trickled in winter. Who was Diana? A goddess, of something – Dorry would know. They opened every morning at seven, half an hour before him. One saw the regulars going in for their beans on toast or sausage and egg and their hot, treacly tea. Patterns. Most of the old shops over there had gone. The electrician’s had once been a baker’s, the off-licence a coal office, the do-it-yourself shop an ironmonger’s. But the estate agent’s – next to Simpson’s the chemist’s – had always been there. Hancock, Joyce and Jones. At a quarter to nine a grey-haired secretary, prim (all his secretaries were prim, proper things now) with a white handbag would come to open up, stooping with one hand still on the key as she picked up the mail. At nine-fifteen, Hancock, in his dark-blue Rover. On odd days, Joyce. And what of Jones? There were thelittle rows of notices in the window, all with photographs, some with prices. ‘For Sale,