Changing Heaven

by Jane Urquhart

  But Arianna and Jeremy saw little of this as they approached the chosen field at the end of Haworth’s West Lane. Instead, they walked towards a neat, soft, rectangular bundle, which looked like a multi-coloured packing crate tied as it was by the thick rope of its own rigging. Beside this, a sturdy pile of wood and straw awaited ignition. The quivering air produced by its heat would fill Arianna’s balloon when it was unfurled and she, scrambling into the moving basket, would be hurled aloft at what was really an alarming rate of speed. After sailing for a couple of miles in a westerly direction, she and her pretty bubble would part company as, milkweed-like, she would descend to earth somewhere between Scar Top Sunday School and the farm called Old Snap.

  The smell of the heather, trampled under the feet of the crowd that awaited her, was intense, almost intoxicating. Arianna placed a sprig of it in her hair for good luck and handed another to Jeremy, whose eyes had already turned soft mauve, in response to the purple sea that stretched out from where they stood towards infinity. Except for the places where they were interrupted by a swath of couch grass or an outcropping of millstone grit, these tough plants were evident as the predominant flora of the upper countryside. In the valleys, however, three oddly shaped reservoirs reflected the sky.

  “Jeremy,” said Arianna anxiously, “there wasn’t anything said to me about water.”

  “You won’t be anywhere near it. Ignore it.”

  “But I’ll know it’s there.”

  “Erase it from your mind. Think white. Think Arctic and all water will be frozen and covered with a soft snow.” He looked at her tenderly. “My poor darling,” he said and the words were unfamiliar in his mouth.

  A sudden blast of heat slapped Arianna’s back. The fire roared healthily in the dry breeze. Jeremy walked over to the podium which had just finished supporting the entertainment of the Haworth Wiffen, Waffin, Wuffin and the Keighley Bingem, Bangem Comic Bands, the Methodist Sunday Schools’ four tableaux; Britannia and her Colonies, Different Nationalities, Indian Hoop Drill and, in Arianna’s honour, Spirits of the Skies, and even now held up the Keighley Board of Guardians and the Haworth Local Council sitting straight-backed and dignified on their wooden chairs. It would take approximately fifteen minutes to fill the balloon, which was now unfurling around the rising heat. It hung, at the moment, suspended from a wire that had been attached to two strong poles, so that it looked like a gigantic piece of laundry flapping on a line. During this interlude Jeremy gave his customary speech on the virtues of womankind.

  “Purity,” he began, “is colourless, odourless, and, most importantly, weightless. It is silent and it is constant. It is the dewdrop that reflects the world and yet does not interfere with the world except to make flowers clearer and brighter. It is moonlight bathing, perhaps, this very moor on which we all stand on a frosty night. It is the gentle crystals of snow, which can, overnight, change our sooty towns into fairylands. And it is air, the playful breezes that refresh us in the midst of summer heat.

  “It is of these things, of these blessings that our purest women are constructed and they are capable of breathing moonlight, frost, and dewdrops into our lives if we are wise enough to let them. Consider our modern man, exhausted and disillusioned by the day’s labours, returning with aching body and troubled mind in the evening to his own hearth to find this pretty snowflake, this moonbeam waiting there for him, waiting to smooth his brow and ease his soul’s torment with her love and dedication.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the delicate Arianna stands here before us, clothed in white, ready to begin a performance, which will, in the manner of your excellent tableaux, act as a symbol of the purity I have been speaking of. She stands there, as I’ve said, and represents the women; all the pure, unselfish women who daily ease the lives of that poor base animal known as man.

  “Sometimes we poor fellows need reminding. Yes, we need to be reminded that without the care and comfort of a pure woman we would be nothing. It is she, after all, who spurs us on to great and noble deeds. It is she who, when we are in the midst of despair, brings to us the moonbeams of hope. It is she who, without a thought, would throw away her own happiness just to see us smile.”

  A few of the shepherds and colliers and weavers scratched their heads remembering only too clearly Jeremy’s treatment of Arianna the day before. Most, however, forgot about it altogether or assumed that they had misjudged him.

  Jeremy continued, “And so, my friends, what you are about to see is not simply a young, pretty woman sailing away in a balloon. Oh, no … no indeed. What you are about to see is the very spirit of British womanhood ascending to her rightful place with the angels in the clouds. Remote, untouchable, apart. Who are these women who help us, after all, if not angels? Should they not be given the power to fly like other angels? And if this is impossible for all, should not there be one who can represent the rest?

  “Arianna Ether has chosen to perform this task, to ascend like an angel to heaven and then, with the aid of this wonder of modern invention, the parachute, to float, sylph-like, back to earth again in order to demonstrate the absolute purity, the lightness of the cleansed female soul.”

  Arianna gazed, as he spoke, reverently at Jeremy’s beautiful face. Then she looked, with almost as much awe, at her gorgeous balloon, which was growing larger and larger with the help of the fire beneath it. Already it had begun to tug at its rigging, which was being held down by several of the village’s strongest men. Arianna tensed each muscle in her body in anticipation, preparing for the moment when she would have to spring without hesitation into the basket.

  “We could call this,” Jeremy suggested, “the apotheosis of Arianna.” The crowd looked confused. “Apotheosis,” explained Jeremy, “means deification, and deification, my friends, means changing a normal human being into a god or, in this case, into a goddess. This is normally accomplished by placing the deified person above the rest of humanity, by placing her in the sky. Shall we deify Arianna? Shall we apotheosize her?”

  Jeremy paused meaningfully.

  The crowd roared, “Yes!”

  “Are you sure?”

  The word sure was Arianna’s cue to sprint towards the basket and scramble inside so that, as the crowd shouted the second “Yes!” she would be launched towards the stratosphere.

  How quiet the journey was. Arianna rested her hands lightly on the edge of her basket and looked down at the crowd, which very rapidly shrank to the size of a dark puddle. On the podium, now not much larger than a brown envelope, Jeremy was merely a small dark exclamation point, his face like a distant star. Several hundred handkerchiefs fluttered on the puddle’s surface as if there were beams of sunlight dancing there. As always, every single muscle in Arianna’s body relaxed except for those areas where the halter for the parachute was uncomfortably fitted.

  Below her, the balloon’s shadow slipped easily across the heather and the unconcerned sheep who fed there. It broke into angles when it crossed a sheepfold or a stone wall. Very occasionally, it mingled with the shadow of a tree, but not often, for only a few trees survived the harsh climate of the moor and its incessant winds. These winds were co-operating today, blowing Arianna steadily in the direction that she intended to go, guiding her safely over all three of the fearsome reservoirs.

  As she glided over these smooth, polished, liquid tables Arianna forced herself to look down at the water and saw, to her amazement, her balloon and a half acre of sky shining up at her. It was, at that moment, as if there were no Earth left at all, only Heaven, and she felt dizzily joyful in the excess of light and air, realizing that for the first time she could see herself the way others saw her; a circle of colour in an expanse of sky. Her fear of water vanished in the serenity of these quiet mirrors and she happily remembered how Jeremy had changed.

  She had never felt safer. She thought of the love in his purple eyes, which would be blue now as he watched the sky across which she floated. Seeing the dark, solid shape of Scar Top Sunday School emerging from b
ehind another swell of the moor she examined her harness, its buckles and leather, looked back, once, at the lovely series of reservoirs, lifted both slender legs over the edge of the basket and, in ecstasy, jumped.

  The balloon sailed away without its passenger in a westerly direction, its shadow moving past the Old Silent Inn, over sheepfolds, across patches of ling and bilberry. It darkened, for just a second, the dancing water in the beck, extinguishing the blinding gold of reflected sun. It slid over, consecutively, Lower Withins, Middle Withins, and Top Withins – the alleged site of Wuthering Heights. Then, without a single sign of regret, it slipped over the shoulder of a hill and past the monolith that marked the entrance to Lancashire. Eventually it came to rest on the green of the town of Colne, where Jeremy rescued it the following morning.

  THERE IS ALWAYS, on the way downtown, someone on the street, someone she glimpses through the glass shield of the car window, someone who can cause Ann to be surrounded by the cloud of pathos that she has, by the time she is ten, begun to associate with the enormous, dark paintings in the city gallery; paintings filled with blood, lust, wars, and a lively assortment of seven or more deadly sins and betrayals.

  This time Ann spots her on the Toronto street corner of Church and Dundas: an old lumpy-legged lady struggling across the street with two full bags of groceries-the word “lonely” flashing on and off like a neon sign persistently, if invisibly, above her head. Cars honking her out of the way.

  Although she is now six blocks behind her, the old lady will haunt Ann. Ann knows this because that one glimpse of the old lady has caused her to sit bolt upright against the plush slab of the back seat of the car. It has taken her breath away, has caught in her throat. As surely as if her mother’s car had run directly over both of the lumpy legs, the old lady has thrown this particular day in Ann’s childhood into a kind of nightmare. Much as she tries to think of something else, Ann finds that her imagination is forced to follow the old lady home; home to her dreary furnished room, home to her hot plate. Ann has never seen a hot plate but once whispered, in fear and despair, from the back seat of the car, “Mummy, where do those old men live … the ones down here with the groceries?”

  “Were they sitting on benches in the park?” her mother had asked.

  “No, Mummy, they were walking with groceries and old ladies do too.”

  “If they are not sitting on benches in the park then they do not live at the Scott Mission. If they have groceries they live in a room with a hot plate.”

  The hot plate appals Ann. It renders her speechless with pity. The rooms these lonely beings enter, then, are empty except for one dangerous plate – glowing, hot, offensive. These old men and women take their groceries home, struggle up dark staircases, enter a shabby room and lean, wheezing, against the wall while they regard with sorrow that single piece of burning crockery. Such, according to Ann’s imagination, is the fate of the thoroughly betrayed.

  Nobody carries groceries on the street where Ann lives. Nobody, Ann is certain, has to spend hours regarding with sorrow that terrifying hot plate. Seldom has she seen anyone over the age of fourteen walking anywhere. The street’s outdoor population is composed instead of a row of stately, stationary maples, which in summer interrupt the sunlight that normally pours through the bow windows of the large mock-Tudor houses. Very occasionally, an old lady or two is seen in winter stepping gingerly into the snow from the front seat of a gigantic car while a grey overcoated son or son-in-law holds her firmly by the elbow.

  The old ladies downtown have no sons, no sons-in-law. Ann is sure of this. Their pasts contain nothing but a series of brutal departures: sons gone off to killer wars, husbands gone to buy that inevitable newspaper (from which there is no return), hope emigrating to a warmer climate. And then one terrible arrival. The hot plate.

  At the Art Gallery of Toronto, one of her mother’s favourite downtown destinations, Ann crosses the parquet floor. It squeaks under her feet like the bones of abandoned old ladies, while, on the right and on the left, monumental, dark oil paintings slide in and out of her line of vision. These works of art are full, as always, of tumbling figures set against angry skies and brooding vistas. Venus Bringing Arms to Aeneas, The Elevation of the Cross, Judith with the Head of Holofernes. Such weapons! Such torture!

  In the midst of all this adult chaos, Ann searches for the children whose portraits, if not comforting, are at least calm, and Ann has become familiar on previous visits with their small sober faces. How stiff they look in their bejewelled garments, holding a bird or a flower in one raised hand as if to say, “Look, this is what I am … destined to fade, destined to fly away.” Like the little white tombstones Ann has seen in country graveyards, the ones with a carved lamb or an etched rose, their eyes carry messages concerning removal. “We are gone,” they seem to say, “We are gone and we will never come again.” Portrait of a Boy with a Green Coat, Boy with a Dove.

  Her mother thinks these children are cute. But Ann knows better. They are not cute at all; they are terrifyingly absent, as is everything connected to them. Oh, little boy, Ann thinks, where are your curls now, your bird, your green coat?

  Room after room, groaning step after groaning step. Ann and her mother walk and pause and walk and pause. Eventually they reach the end of the last room of the gallery and there, on the far wall, is a large photo mural that has been divided, by some painstaking hand, into thousands of one-inch squares. Hanging directly above this strange work of art, which depicts Christ washing the disciples’ feet in fuzzy black and white, is a fabric sign that states OWN A SQUARE INCH OF TINTORETTO! in bright block letters. Ann carries the ten dollars necessary to make the purchase in her little black purse, the one with the small brass clasp and the three pink flowers, because last Sunday she discovered, in the middle of the painted, then photographed, table, something from which all the disciples turned away, busy as they were removing their shoes and stockings for their master’s attention. It rests right in the middle of the painting on the white tablecloth and is so flat, so unobtrusive, that you might mistake it for something else altogether. But Ann suspects, Ann knows. And Ann will buy the square inch of canvas that it rests upon as a sort of charm to ward off the possibility of having it foisted upon her when she’s old.

  She approaches the woman at the desk beside the painting. Her mother hovers proudly behind her.

  “I’d like,” she says, “to buy a square inch of Tintoretto. That part in the middle of the table. The hot plate.”

  “The plate …?” asks the woman, surprised. “You are sure that you wouldn’t like Christ’s eye?”

  “No, I mean yes, I’m sure.”

  The woman smiles at Ann’s mother, and says to Ann, “Is this your first art purchase?”

  “Yes.”

  Patting Ann on the head, the woman murmurs, “Congratulations. You are now a patron of the arts.”

  These glass shields that block the betrayed from contact with the child seem permanent, somehow, as if they have been cemented to her right shoulder. It is odd that in order to visit culture, Ann and her mother must travel into the dark heart of cities, past alleys filled with starving cats, past Indians lounging by liquor stores, past immigrant labourers returning from night shifts carrying black lunchpails. “They earn their groceries,” her mother says. Past brick walls covered with grime and manholes belching steam to the Art Gallery of Toronto, the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Massey Hall. Near these palaces of the arts there are steamy restaurants filled with tired waitresses and-not too far away-the Victory Burlesque planted, ironically, in the centre of the garment district, as if to advertise the clothing these women shed with such astonishing gestures. Gestures Ann will never see. Past Portuguese gardens that grow sunflowers, beans, and then – miraculously – a small enshrined Virgin. All this glides like a parade by the child’s pale face in the window when her mother drives downtown. And then there is Swan Lake, Mozart, Tintoretto. Her own Tintoretto. Her own square inch of it.

  Now, t
hree years after the purchase, Ann gazes through glass at yet another city’s centre: Franco’s Madrid. Long boulevards leading to the architecture of Fascism and, snaking out from these, thin streets filled with the small lives into which Ann’s tour bus is too large to shoulder.

  “There is no poverty in Madrid,” the tour guide announces in perfect English, with only a hint of the song of her native tongue. “There are no slums.”

  As mother whispers, “That’s a bunch of nonsense,” Ann looks down from her elevated seat, through the window to the sidewalk where an old woman is selling lace to tourists. Does the tour guide mean there are no hot plates in Madrid?

  They glide down the boulevard behind polished glass. They are well above the crowd, travelling as if on a low-flying magic carpet towards the Prado Museum.

  Though the child doesn’t know it yet this is the world’s darkest collection. It inspires awe. It inspires terror. The first five crucifixes cause Ann’s knees to weaken; her heart to pound. Yellow skin, too many wounds, too much blood, too many women screaming sorrow. And the familiar parquet, platform of the world’s great art, sighing and groaning in sympathy under her feet.

  Room after room after room of Rubens. Pink and yellow and lavender skin. Eyes and mouths. Then Bosch’s daydreams and nightmares. “Mummy, look! He has a flower growing there! And, look! Is that dog going to the bathroom?” The Goya horrors: assassinations, witches’ sabbaths, monsters, cripples, and hunchbacks. And then a memory in the making, one that Ann will never shake. Her mother standing, contemplatively, in front of Goya’s bloodstained Saturn who is frozen in the act of devouring one of his children. “Mummy, that man has bitten the baby’s head off!”

  “Goya’s vision,” says her mother, still gazing at the painting with admiration, “was remarkably dark.”