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.
Cliffedge
WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE sea that summons people to it? That beckons the idle to play and ponder at its skirts? What was it that built these ice-cream coloured colonies, these outposts of pleasure along the clifftops and shingle of the south coast? Pleasure of being on the brink? Pleasure in the precariousness of pleasure? How would they have become so strangely intense, so strangely all-in-all, these little worlds (the pier, the life-boat station, the aquarium) we once knew for two weeks out of every fifty-two, were it not for their being pressed against this sleeping monster, the sea?
We came here long ago, Neil and I. To — let me call it, for reasons of my own — Cliffedge. We arrived every August on the train with our parents. It had then the peculiar set-apart redolence of “holidays.” Foreign, enchanting, but not real. It might — it ought to — have remained no more than a memory, lingering yet fading, like the fading photographs taken at the time: the two of us buried up to our necks in sand; or splashing in the waves. Neil, two years my younger, the slighter, more angular, more excitable figure.
I could not have imagined that in fifteen, in twenty years’ time that world of salt and sunburn would not yet have passed into remembrance. That I would still be going with my brother, he thirty-three, I thirty-five, to the same resort; that I would buy him on the train, not lemonade and chocolate as Mother and Father did, but beer and cigarettes; that I would watch him — as if indeed I had taken over the former roles of my parents — on the clifftops, on the pebbles, playing his dangerous games.