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.