Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

Chemistry

THE POND IN OUR PARK was circular, exposed, perhaps fifty yards across. When the wind blew, little waves travelled across it and slapped the paved edges, like a miniature sea. We would go there, Mother, Grandfather and I, to sail the motor-launch Grandfather and I made out of plywood, balsawood and varnished paper. We would go even in the winter — especially in the winter, because then we would have the pond to ourselves — when the leaves on the two willows turned yellow and dropped and the water froze your hands. Mother would sit on a wooden bench set back from the perimeter; I would prepare the boat for launching. Grandfather, in his black coat and gray scarf, would walk to the far side to receive it. For some reason it was always Grandfather, never I, who went to the far side. When he reached his station I would hear his “Ready!” across the water. A puff of vapor would rise from his lips like the smoke from a muffled pistol. And I would release the launch. It worked by a battery. Its progress was laboured but its course steady. I would watch it head out to the middle while Mother watched behind me. As it moved it seemed that it followed an actual existing line between Grandfather, myself and Mother, as if Grandfather were pulling us towards him on some invisible cord, and that he had to do this to prove we were not beyond his reach. When the boat drew near him he would crouch on his haunches. His hands — which I knew were knotted, veiny and mottled from an accident in one of his chemical experiments — would reach out, grasp it and set it on its return.

The voyages were trouble-free. Grandfather improvised a wire grapnel on the end of a length of fishing line in case of shipwrecks or engine failure, but it was never used. Then one day — it must have been soon after Mother met Ralph — we watched the boat, on its first trip across the pond to Grandfather, suddenly become deeper, and deeper in the water. The motor cut. The launch wallowed, sank. Grandfather made several throws with his grapnel and pulled out clumps of green slime. I remember what he said to me, on this, the first loss in my life that I had witnessed. He said, very gravely: “You must accept it — you can’t get it back — it’s the only way,” as if he were repeating something to himself. And I remember Mother’s face as she got up from the bench to leave. It was very still and very white, as if she had seen something appalling.

It was some months after that that Ralph, who was now a regular guest at weekends, shouted over the table to Grandfather: “Why don’t you leave her alone?!”

I remember it because that same Saturday Grandfather recalled the wreck of my boat, and Ralph said to me, as if pouncing on something: “How about me buying you a new one? How would you like that?” And I said, just to see his face go crestfallen and blank, “No!” several times, fiercely. Then as we ate supper Ralph suddenly barked, as Grandfather was talking to Mother: “Why don’t you leave her alone?!”

Grandfather looked at him. “Leave her alone? What do you know about being left alone?” Then he glanced from Ralph to Mother. And Ralph didn’t answer, but his face went tight and his hands clenched on his knife and fork.

And all this was because Grandfather had said to Mother: “You don’t make curry any more, the way you did for Alex, the way Vera taught you.”

It was Grandfather’s house we lived in — with Ralph as an ever more permanent lodger. Grandfather and Grandmother had lived in it almost since the day of their marriage. My grandfather had worked for a firm which manufactured gold- and silver-plated articles. My grandmother died suddenly when I was only four; and all I know is that I must have had her looks. My mother said so and so did my father; and Grandfather, without saying anything, would often gaze curiously into my face.

At that time Mother, Father and I lived in a new house some distance from Grandfather’s. Grandfather took his wife’s death very badly. He needed the company of his daughter and my father; but he refused to leave the house in which my grandmother had lived, and my parents refused to leave theirs. There was bitterness all around, which I scarcely appreciated. Grandfather remained alone in his house, which he ceased to maintain, spending more and more time in his garden shed which he had fitted out for his hobbies of model making and amateur chemistry.

The situation was resolved in a dreadful way: by my own father’s death.

He was required now and then to fly to Dublin or Cork in the light aeroplane belonging to the company he worked for, which imported Irish goods. One day, in unexceptional weather conditions, the aircraft disappeared without trace into the Irish Sea. In a state which resembled a kind of trance — as if some outside force were all the time directing her — my Mother sold up our house, put away the money for our joint future, and moved in with Grandfather.

My father’s death was a far less remote event than my grandmother’s, but no more explicable. I was only seven. Mother said, amidst her adult grief: “He has gone to where Grandma’s gone.” I wondered how Grandmother could be at the bottom of the Irish Sea, and at the same time what Father was doing there. I wanted to know when he would return. Perhaps I knew, even as I asked this, that he never would, that my childish assumptions were only a way of allaying my own grief. But if I really believed Father was gone forever — I was wrong.

Perhaps too I was endowed with my father’s looks no less than my grandmother’s. Because when my mother looked at me she would often break into uncontrollable tears and she would clasp me for long periods without letting go, as if afraid I might turn to air.

I don’t know if Grandfather took a secret, vengeful delight in my father’s death, or if he was capable of it. But fate had made him and his daughter quits and reconciled them in mutual grief. Their situations were equivalent: she a widow and he a widower. And just as my mother could see in me a vestige of my father, so Grandfather could see in the two of us a vestige of my grandmother.

For about a year we lived quietly, calmly, even contentedly within the scope of this sad symmetry. We scarcely made any contact with the outside world. Grandfather still worked, though his retirement age had passed, and would not let Mother work. He kept Mother and me as he might have kept his own wife and son. Even when he did retire we lived quite comfortably on his pension, some savings and a widow’s pension my mother got. Grandfather’s health showed signs of weakening — he became rheumatic and sometimes short of breath — but he would still go out to the shed in the garden to conduct his chemical experiments, over which he hummed and chuckled gratefully to himself.

We forgot we were three generations. Grandfather bought Mother bracelets and ear-rings. Mother called me her “little man.” We lived for each other — and for those two unfaded memories — and for a whole year, a whole harmonious year, we were really quite happy. Until that day in the park when my boat, setting out across the pond toward Grandfather, sank.

Sometimes when Grandfather provoked Ralph I thought Ralph would be quite capable of jumping to his feet, reaching across the table, seizing Grandfather by the throat and choking him. He was a big man, who ate heartily, and I was often afraid he might hit me. But Mother somehow kept him in check. Since Ralph’s appearance she had grown neglectful of Grandfather. For example — as Grandfather had pointed out that evening — she would cook the things that Ralph liked (rich, thick stews, but not curry) and forget to produce the meals that Grandfather was fond of. But no matter how neglectful and even hurtful she might be to Grandfather herself, she wouldn’t have forgiven someone else’s hurting him. It would have been the end of her and Ralph. And no matter how much she might hurt Grandfather — to show her allegiance to Ralph — the truth was she really did want to stick by him. She still needed — she couldn’t break free of it — that delicate equilibrium that she, he and I had constructed over the months.

I suppose the question was how far Ralph could tolerate not letting go with Grandfather so as to keep Mother, or how far Mother was prepared to turn against Grandfather so as not to lose Ralph. I remember keeping a sort of equation in my head: If Ralph hurts Grandfather it means I’m right — he doesn’t really care about Mother at all; not if Mother is cruel to Grandfather (though she would only be cruel to him because she couldn’t forsake him) it means she really loves Ralph.

• • •

But Ralph only went pale and rigid and stared at Grandfather without moving.

Grandfather picked at his stew. We had already finished ours. He deliberately ate slowly to provoke Ralph.

Then Ralph turned to Mother and said: “For Christ’s sake we’re not waiting all night for him to finish!” Mother blinked and looked frightened. “Get the pudding!”

You see, he liked his food.

Mother rose slowly and gathered our plates. She looked at me and said, “Come and help.”

In the kitchen she put down the plates and leaned for several seconds, her back towards me, against the draining board. Then she turned. “What am I going to do?” She gripped my shoulders. I remembered these were just the words she’d used once before, very soon after father’s death, and then, too, her face had had the same quivery look of being about to spill over. She pulled me towards her. I had a feeling of being back in that old impregnable domain which Ralph had not yet penetrated. Through the window, half visible in the twilight, the evergreen shrubs which filled our garden were defying the onset of autumn. Only the cherry laurel bushes were partly denuded — for some reason Grandfather had been picking their leaves. I didn’t know what to do or say — I should have said something — but inside I was starting to form a plan.

Mother took her hands from me and straightened up. Her face was composed again. She took the apple-crumble from the oven. Burnt sugar and apple juice seethed for a moment on the edge of the dish. She handed me the bowl of custard. We strode, resolutely, back to the table. I thought: Now we are going to face Ralph, now we are going to show our solidarity. Then she put down the crumble, began spooning out helpings and said to Grandfather, who was still tackling his stew: “You’re ruining our meal — do you want to take yours out to your shed?!”

• • •

Grandfather’s shed was more than just a shed. Built of brick in one corner of the high walls surrounding the garden, it was large enough to accommodate a stove, a sink, an old armchair, as well as Grandfather’s work-benches and apparatus, and to serve — as it was serving Grandfather more and more — as a miniature home.

I was always wary of entering it. It seemed to me, even before Ralph, even when Grandfather and I constructed the model launch, that it was somewhere where Grandfather went to be alone, undisturbed, to commune perhaps, in some obscure way, with my dead grandmother. But that evening I did not hesitate. I walked along the path by the ivy-clad garden wall. It seemed that his invitation, his loneliness were written in a form only I could read on the dark green door. And when I opened it he said: “I thought you would come.”

I don’t think Grandfather practised chemistry for any particular reason. He studied it from curiosity and for solace, as some people study the structure of cells under a microscope or watch the changing formation of clouds. In those weeks after Mother drove him out I learnt from Grandfather the fundamentals of chemistry.

I felt safe in his shed. The house where Ralph now lorded it, tucking into bigger and bigger meals, was a menacing place. The shed was another, a sealed-off world. It had a salty, mineral, unhuman smell. Grandfather’s flasks, tubes and retort stands would be spread over his work-bench. His chemicals were acquired through connections in the metal-plating trade. The stove would be lit in the corner. Beside it would be his meal tray — for, to shame Mother, Grandfather had taken to eating his meals regularly in the shed. A single electric light bulb hung from a beam in the roof. A gas cylinder fed his burners. On one wall was a glass fronted cupboard in which he grew alum and copper sulphate crystals.

I would watch Grandfather’s experiments. I would ask him to explain what he was doing and to name the contents of his various bottles.

And Grandfather wasn’t the same person in his shed as he was in the house — sour and cantankerous. He was a weary, ailing man who winced now and then because of his rheumatism and spoke with quiet self-absorption.

“What are you making, Grandpa?”

“Not making — changing. Chemistry is the science of change. You don’t make things in chemistry — you change them. Anything can change.”

He demonstrated the point by dissolving marble chips in nitric acid. I watched fascinated.

But he went on: “Anything can change. Even gold can change.”

He poured a little of the nitric acid into a beaker, then took another jar of colourless liquid and added some of its contents to the nitric acid. He stirred the mixture with a glass rod and heated it gently. Some brown fumes came off.

“Hydrochloric acid and nitric acid. Neither would work by itself, but the mixture will.”

Lying on the bench was a pocket watch with a gold chain. I knew it had been given to Grandfather long ago by my grandmother. He unclipped the chain from the watch, then, leaning forward against the bench, he held it between two fingers over the beaker. The chain swung. He eyed me as if he were waiting for me to give some sign. Then he drew the chain away from the beaker.

“You’ll have to take my word for it, eh?”

He picked up the watch and reattached it to the chain.

“My old job — gold-plating. We used to take real gold and change it. Then we’d take something that wasn’t gold at all and cover it with this changed gold so it looked as if it was all gold — but it wasn’t.”

He smiled bitterly.

“What are we going to do?”

“Grandpa?”

“People change too, don’t they?”

He came close to me. I was barely ten. I looked at him without speaking.

“Don’t they?”

He stared fixedly into my eyes, the way I remembered him doing after Grandmother’s death.

“They change. But the elements don’t change. Do you know what an element is? Gold’s an element. We turned it from one form into another, but we didn’t make any gold — or lose any.”

Then I had a strange sensation. It seemed to me that Grandfather’s face before me was only a cross section from some infinite stick of rock, from which, at the right point, Mother’s face and mine might also be cut. I thought: Every face is like this. I had a sudden giddying feeling that there is no end to anything. I wanted to be told simple, precise facts.

“What’s that, Grandpa?”

“Hydrochloric acid.”

“And that?”

“Green vitriol.”

“And that?” I pointed to another, unlabelled jar of clear liquid, which stood at the end of the bench, attached to a complex piece of apparatus.

“Laurel water. Prussic acid.” He smiled. “Not for drinking.”

All that autumn was exceptionally cold. The evenings were chill and full of rustlings of leaves. When I returned to the house from taking out Grandfather’s meal tray (this had become my duty) I would observe Mother and Ralph in the living room through the open kitchen hatchway. They would drink a lot from the bottles of whisky and vodka which Ralph brought in and which at first Mother made a show of disapproving. The drink made Mother go soft and heavy and blurred and it made Ralph gain in authority. They would slump together on the sofa. One night I watched Ralph pull Mother towards him and hold her in his arms, his big lurching frame almost enveloping her, and Mother saw me, over Ralph’s shoulder, watching from the hatchway. She looked trapped and helpless.

And that was the night that I got my chance — when I went to collect Grandfather’s tray. When I entered the shed he was asleep in his chair, his plates, barely touched, on the tray at his feet. In his slumber — his hair disheveled, mouth open — he looked like some torpid, captive animal that has lost even the will to eat. I had taken an empty spice jar from the kitchen. I took the glass bottle labelled HNO₃ and poured some of its contents, carefully, into the spice jar. Then I picked up Grandfather’s tray, placed the spice jar beside the plates and carried the tray to the house.

I thought I would throw the acid in Ralphs’s face at breakfast. I didn’t want to kill him. It would have been pointless to kill him — since death is a deceptive business. I wanted to spoil his face so Mother would no longer want him. I took the spice jar to my room and hid it in my bedside cupboard. In the morning I would smuggle it down in my trouser pocket. I would wait, pick my moment. Under the table I would remove the stopper. As Ralph gobbled down his eggs and fried bread …

I thought I would not be able to sleep. From my bedroom window I could see the dark square of the garden and the little patch of light cast from the window of Grandfather’s shed. Often I could not sleep until I had seen that patch of light disappear and I knew that Grandfather had shuffled back to the house and slipped in, like a stray cat, at the back door.

But I must have slept that night, for I do not remember seeing Grandfather’s light go out or hearing his steps on the garden path.

That night Father came into my bedroom. I knew it was him. His hair and clothes were wet, his lips were caked with salt; sea-weed hung from his shoulders. He came and stood by my bed. Where he trod, pools of water formed on the carpet and slowly oozed outwards. For a long time he looked at me. Then he said: “It was her. She made a hole in the bottom of the boat, not big enough to notice, so it would sink — so you and Grandfather would watch it sink. The boat sank — like my plane.” He gestured to his dripping clothes and encrusted lips. “Don’t you believe me?” He held out a hand to me but I was afraid to take it. “Don’t you believe me? Don’t you believe me?” And as he repeated this he walked slowly backwards towards the door, as if something were pulling him, the pools of water at his feet drying instantly. And it was only when he had disappeared that I managed to speak and said: “Yes. I believe you. I’ll prove it.”

And then it was almost light and rain was dashing against the window as if the house were plunging under water and a strange, small voice was calling from the front of the house — but it wasn’t Father’s voice. I got up, walked out onto the landing and peered through the landing window. The voice was a voice on the radio inside an ambulance which was parked with its doors open by the pavement. The heavy rain and the tossing branches of a rowan tree obscured my view, but I saw the two men in uniform carrying out the stretcher with a blanket draped over it. Ralph was with them. He was wearing his dressing gown and pyjamas and slippers over bare feet, and he carried an umbrella. He fussed around the ambulance men like an overseer directing the loading of some vital piece of cargo. He called something to Mother who must have been standing below, out of sight at the front door. I ran back across the landing. I wanted to get the acid. But then Mother came up the stairs. She was wearing her dressing gown. She caught me in her arms. I smelt whisky. She said: “Darling. Please, I’ll explain. Darling, darling.”

But she never did explain. All her life since then, I think, she has been trying to explain, or to avoid explaining. She only said: “Grandpa was old and ill, he wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway.” And there was the official verdict: suicide by swallowing prussic acid. but all the other things that should have been explained — or confessed — she never did explain.

And she wore, beneath everything, this look of relief, as if she had recovered from an illness. Only a week after Grandfather’s funeral she went into Grandfather’s bedroom and flung wide the windows. It was a brilliant, crisp late-November day and the leaves on the rowan tree were all gold. And she said: “There — isn’t that lovely?”

The day of Grandfather’s funeral had been such a day — hard, dazzling, spangled with early frost and gold leaves. We stood at the ceremony, Mother, Ralph and I, like a mock version of the trio — Grandfather, Mother and I — who had once stood at my father’s memorial service. Mother did not cry. She had not cried at all, even in the days before the funeral when the policemen and the officials from the coroner’s court came, writing down their statements, apologising for their intrusion and asking their questions.

They did not address their questions to me. Mother said: “He’s only ten, what can he know?” Though there were a thousand things I wanted to tell them — about how Mother banished Grandfather, about how suicide can be murder and how things don’t end — which made me feel that I was somehow under suspicion. I took the jar of acid from my bedroom, went to the park and threw it in the pond.

And then after the funeral, after the policemen and officials had gone, Mother and Ralph began to clear out the house and to remove the things from the shed. They tidied the overgrown parts of the garden and clipped back the trees. Ralph wore an old sweater which was far too small for him and I recognised it as one of Father’s. And Mother said: “We’re going to move to a new house soon — Ralph’s buying it.”

I had nowhere to go. I went down to the park and stood by the pond. Dead willow leaves floated on it. Beneath its surface was a bottle of acid and the wreck of my launch. But though things change they aren’t destroyed. It was there, by the pond, when dusk was gathering and it was almost time for the park gates to be locked, as I looked to the centre where my launch sank, then up again to the far side, that I saw him. He was standing in his black overcoat and his grey scarf. The air was very cold and little waves were running across the water. He was smiling, and I knew: The launch was still travelling over to him, unstoppable, unsinkable, along that invisible line. And his hands, his acid-marked hands, would reach out to receive it.