The Sweet-Shop Owner by Graham Swift Page A

it wouldn’t burn. For, look, behind the flames, objects immune to fire, heroes of bronze and stone, too rigid and fixed ever to dance, and black names on marble, gold names on bronze, ‘undying memory’, ‘their name liveth’; and one of the names under the chestnut trees by the railings, on the white school memorial,where boys born after the war would be herded on Remembrance Day, was Harrison. No, it doesn’t burn, it doesn’t perish. Undying memories.
    ‘Irene!’
    Who was that? It was Hancock. Stepping out of the shadows, in an Air Force uniform, with a beaker of beer in his hand, and a darkish, slightly curled moustache, grown since the war had started, to give the impression he was a pilot, not a ground officer.
    ‘Well I never. Come for the fun? Hello Willy old man.’
    ‘Hello Frank.’
    ‘Hello, helloh. Wangled some leave too?’
    He rocked to and fro. Only his feet seemed to hold him to the ground, as if they were clamped with weights. One hand held his beer and the other was extended, palm forward, behind Irene’s back.
    ‘Fancy –’ He stood, open-mouthed, for a moment, as though embarrassed for something to say. ‘Well – there goes the war.’ He looked at the fire. He raised his beaker and brought his mouth to it by leaning his whole body.
    ‘Look –’ Irene said. She shifted forward.
    ‘Soon be out of this, eh Willy?’ Hancock tugged at his uniform. ‘Back to the shop?’ He winked, bobbed his head sideways, then stood, swaying, looking at the fire. Burning planks shifted in the blaze. He looked like a man in a train corridor watching scenes go by. ‘There it goes, there it goes. All over. Forgive and forget eh?’ When the train lurched his hand touched Irene’s waist.
    ‘Willy, let’s go.’
    Dancers jostled by so they were hemmed in.
    ‘Hey, come on Irene!’
    Hancock spread his arms and went springy like a tennis player.
    ‘Give us a dance.’ He held out a hand. ‘Don’t mind, doyou, old man? Don’t dance – with that leg of yours – do you?’
    Irene stepped back. For a moment Hancock waltzed gaily with the air.
    ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Irene said.
    ‘Come on now, don’t be like that.’
    ‘You’ve had too much of that beer.’
    Hancock looked at him. Strands of his moustache were wet and frothy. Irene seemed to look at something between them. She bit her lip. He didn’t understand any of this. They were standing in a row with people dancing round them, as in some game.
    ‘What’s the matter with you two?’ Hancock said. ‘The bloody war’s over you know.’
    Better rejoice.
    He said to Hancock: ‘It’s Irene’s father, he’s –’
    ‘No, that’s all right, Willy.’ Why was she scared?
    ‘One dance.’
    Hancock looked spruce and forlorn in his uniform. He swung on his feet. Irene stood still. Her face was lit up like a statue’s. The piano played ‘Yours’.
    ‘All right,’ Hancock said. He shrugged ruefully, then looked swiftly at him as if he’d proved a point. Over the roof-tops searchlights were projecting great swaying Vs. ‘Just as you like.’
    He finished the rest of his beer.
    ‘Be seeing you then.’
    He made off through the swirl of dancers, palms extended, smiling now and then at other couples, his tall, agile body moving to the music, seeming to melt into the scene.
    ‘Let’s go, Willy.’
    Across the common, figures were flitting in and out of the light of yet more fires. The searchlights weaved in the sky like diagrams. Why did they walk that way? Past thepaddling pool, the children’s playground – the slide and swings had been salvaged in ’41, but it was the same playground – and up, not by the quickest route but by the path by the allotments, by the houses facing the sports ground. Because they’d walked that way before? When he worked at Ellis’s, in those lunch-times, when it was all yet to come. The same but not the same. There was an orchard of apple trees adjoining the back gardens. She had said once: ‘Did