Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

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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 HNO 3and 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.”