“They rescued her, of course,” says John, “but her mind were never the same again.”
“What about the Underwater Club, was it ever the same again?”
“Oh, aye, except they had developed a new appetite for thrills and adventure.”
They laugh together, stroke the morning cat, pour steaming cups of tea. Their conversation of the previous night is, temporarily, laid aside.
IN THE YEAR 1805, a British naval commander became, not surprisingly, obsessed by the air currents upon which the movements of his ships depended. A rational man, he felt he could not rest until he had identified and described the wind’s activities; until he had, in fact, labelled them. This must have involved years of observation, years of using his frigate as the subject of a long experiment, years of testing the soundness of the conclusions he gradually began to draw. Eventually he devised a system whereby the wind could be divided into thirteen categories, and since he was, by then, an admiral, these divisions became known to the world as Admiral Beaufort’s Wind Scale.
Ann has come to the section in her scholarly writings where she feels she must apply Admiral Beaufort’s Wind Scale to the weather of Wuthering Heights. She believes she has come to understand this obsessed admiral. She can see him in her mind’s eye standing on the bridge of his ship at the turn of the nineteenth century, sniffing the wind, scrutinizing the ocean, writing his observations in a small notebook. “Calm, brisk, blustery, smooth, erratic,” would be some of the words he might use as he quantifies the wind. Was his large admiral’s hat ever carried off by the force he was describing? If so, would he then write “Wind strong enough to remove military apparel?”
The Beaufort scale, Ann discovers, has been adapted over the years, and applied to objects other than frigates; it has described the response of trees, chimney pots, insects, birds, children, architecture, clothing, and smoke to varying degrees of wind. Adjectives have been attached and discarded by succeeding generations: “intensely devastating, inconceivable, tremendous, overpowering,” or “light, gentle, soothing, moderate, fresh, bracing.” The nouns used in nineteenth-century descriptions of the levels of the scale have changed in the twentieth. Roof shale has been replaced by telephone wires, chimney pots by television antennae. Ann is particularly fond, however, of the Admiral’s own elucidation of number 13, the hurricane-force wind as “that which no canvas could withstand.” She wants to tell the forever absent Arthur about this, wants him to apply it to the canvases of Tintoretto. And she wants him to be pleased that she suggested this-pleased with her cleverness, her humour.
She also likes the way the admiral refers to a light breeze: its sea criteria. “Small wavelets, still short but more pronounced. Crests have a glassy appearance and do not break.”
But most of all she loves the ancient seaman’s descriptions of storm: land storm, sea storm. He gives ten points to this angry activity on his scale. He is clinging to the mast of his man-o’-war in ecstasy. “Very high winds with long overhanging crests,” he shouts in Ann’s imagination. “Foam in great patches, blowing in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind! Surface taking on a white appearance! The sea! The sea! The sea is tumbling, heavy, shock-like!” The admiral is drenched, gasping. “Seldom experienced inland,” he roars at her across the tumultuous ocean, across the yawning gap of time that separates them.
Oh, really …? thinks Ann. What about King Lear? What about Wuthering Heights? What about last month?
There is only one scene in Wuthering Heights that Ann believes she can place at zero on the wind scale. She reads the few sentences describing it.
They sat together in a window whose lattice lay back against the wall, and displayed beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley of Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top…. Both the room and its occupants, and the scene they gazed on, looked wondrously peaceful
Zero on the wind scale. Calm. “Sea like a mirror,” the admiral whispers, amazed, peering over the edge of the mighty bark whose sails hang limp and lifeless behind him. The cultivated garden of Thrushcross Grange holds its breath, plays statue, becomes the perfect setting, the perfect atmosphere for Catherine and her contented husband, for their marriage.
But Ann, the reader, can predict the weather, can move her mind around the park and investigate. She can see just the suggestion of a nimbo-stratus cloud formation peeking over the horizon. Unlike the couple in the book, who sit as if posing for a portrait whose setting is Eden, Ann knows that a change of barometric pressure is on the way.
Night of full moon, still night. Smoke rises vertically, mist hangs. Black windows of the Grange reflect a quantity of moons. No light glows inside, throws itself into this garden, which is a still, silver sea, a mirror in which waits the gypsy. Ann knows he waits there; his tense breath is the only current in the surroundings, that and the air he disturbs when he shifts with restrained impatience from one foot to the other. Ann knows that, at this moment, the blades of grass that felt the weight of his approaching foot are, hours later, struggling to unbend themselves, struggling to reach towards the moon. Ann understands that the curved mass adjacent to the clean slice of black exterior wall is his intruding shoulder. Catherine and Linton inside, locked in the unmoving trance of compatibility. Heathcliff outside, waiting to gain entrance.
Ann is certain that, as he waits, the wind scale is beginning, subtly, to alter. “A person from Gimmerton wishes to see you, ma’am.” Leaves rustle. A spider-web curves outwards, like the belly of a sail. Catherine feels the light air on her eyelids. “Someone mistress does not expect.” Twigs move. Dust is raised on the path leading to the house. “What, the gypsy-the ploughboy?” A leaf disconnects itself from a tree that has too long been its home, becomes airborne as Catherine walks onto the outside steps and sees the revenant, hears his speech-his eyes, his hair disturbed. Large branches move, winged seeds glide, plumed seeds are airborne. Her own sleeves rippling as her arms rise through the troubled air to meet him.
“Waves taking a more pronounced long form. Many white horses on the crests. Chance of some spray,” says the admiral, in a strong, assured voice.
Number five, perhaps six on the Beaufort scale. And rising.
PART THREE
Revenants
Oh would that I were a reliable spirit careering around
Congenially employed and no longer by feebleness bound
Oh who would not leave the flesh to become a reliable spirit
Possibly travelling far and acquiring merit.
–STEVIE SMITH
IN LOVE AND alone, Jeremy Jacobs, the Sindbad of the Skies, was hovering over the white shores of Edge Island. Above him loomed an enormous globe-a balloon of scarlet silk, a breathtaking drop of blood poised over a frigid, still landscape.
“White,” he mused, as he touched a square inch of the silk absently, with numb fingers, “always magnifies colour.” And then he remembered her colour, pale though she was, vibrant against the Arctic white of bedsheets. He remembered the wet, plum-coloured mouth and yellow hair-the long white limbs, beige inside the room’s blank interior.
He was not even sure, now, that he was travelling over land, and that excited him. Just the idea of entering a territory where land and sea camouflage each other, where sameness and mimicry abound, where his form is the only detail and his actions the only adventure, made him almost wince with joy. Behind him crouched white mountains, in front the hummocks of polar sea.
He had already sailed over the mountains of Spitzbergen, over the sharp blades of the western range and the flat platforms of the eastern, over Stor Fiord, past Whale’s Point, knowing the names from long nights spent with polar maps. Tomorrow he would sail over North East Land, leave the earth behind at Dove Bay, and aim for White Island. But now, with the drag lines anchored on ice, the red balloon remained stationary, and he had time to reflect, to remember.
She was gone. And so was he. They were so marvellously gone from each other. Touch
, talk, impossible. While he had floated over open water, he had sent cryptic messages to her by means of buoys. One had said, My pale rose, I carry you here, a weightless light, near my heart. Another: Angel that you are now, I give you colour, have seen your splendid wings awaken … a borealis. The hurling of the buoys over the edge of the basket had filled him with pleasure. He watched them somersault through air and then waited to see and hear them splash into the frigid water. Then he imagined their complicated journey to the country where she now lived; the fiords of nothing, the long estuaries of never, the country of nowhere. Ah, maiden of feathers and snow, he had written on the piece of paper attached to the third buoy, because you are nowhere, you have entered the ocean of everything. I’ve seen your hair in the sun’s rays and you crystallize around me. Small drifts of you fill the folds of my clothing.
Then there was the moment when the dark fluid beneath him changed texture, became grey, opaque. The first evidence of polar ice. The ruffle on the bottom of the Arctic skirt. This was followed by painful, dazzling, unbroken white and the mountains of Spitzbergen, an enchanted glass castle on the horizon.
He was delighted, charmed by the snow-covered ice, even though it effectively put an end to his water messages. He loved to watch the wind play with the surface, creating small blizzards with available snow, without the help of clouds. The low sun wheeled across a sky so blue it was impossible to believe. Jeremy felt, in fact, that blue was absolutely the wrong name for the colour of that sky. It needed something clearer: a sound composed of long vowels and knife-sharp consonants. Something like strike or take.
From now on his messages to Arianna would, of necessity, be airborne. These, of course, would be the purest statements of all. She had been, he remembered, afraid of the water, an element that really had nothing to do with who she was/had been. With communication in mind, he had brought with him a cage of untrained white pigeons. Where these birds eventually landed mattered little as long as they flew away from him, because there was one thing certain about Arianna’s whereabouts, and that was that she was away from him.
Now, anchored over Edge Island, he began to compose the airborne messages, ones that he knew had to be beautiful, exact, and pure. The paper, he decided, would not be folded, would rather trail from the ankle of each bird, banner-like across the sky. For this reason he tore several pieces of paper into long ribbons and then anchoring these with a milk-white paperweight on his small wicker table, he pulled out his pencil and began to write.
That night the aurora borealis did not appear. Instead there was a carpet of stars so thick, a meadow so crowded with bright flowers, that Jeremy stood at the outer edge of the wicker gondola, believing that, had he wanted to, he could have taken one or more on the journey with him. “Oh, Polly,” he whispered as all sense of space-upper, lower, near, far-disappeared. “Oh, Polly … see how close the farthest distances are.”
He was rapturously happy. He had never been so deeply in love. Alone, on a suspended wicker floor, he bowed and began to waltz, under the celestial grandeur, with an invisible partner.
It had been days and days since he had felt the cold.
The next morning, the wind, co-operating, blew lightly in a north-eastern direction. Jeremy cut his drag line and, with compass in hand, manipulated the white sail at the front of the balloon into the correct position. He looked through his mother-of-pearl field glasses towards the north for some minutes. Then, having established utter emptiness, he began to dispatch his white birds. In a vacant region it is unnecessary to complete any task in haste, and knowing this, he allowed an hour or two to pass after each release.
The small banner attached to the first bird said: Oh, white maiden, frost’s mistress, how I long for your icicle thighs.
It was the moment when his hands opened and the bird’s wings unfolded that he most wanted to freeze in his memory. He could stand outside himself now and see the exact image he was creating: his dark form in all the endless bright, his arms raised, the confusion of flight’s inception bursting from his hands. The message lifting heavenward like a banderole of prayer emerging from the mouth of a painted saint.
I have seen you in ice floes, the second message read, silver in your veins, the gentle snowdrifts that are your breasts.
The third bird had shadows of grey here and there on its white feathers. Jeremy chose it for his darkest message.
You are night’s negative, the blaze on the other side of the globe; I cannot see your dawn but believe none the less in its shine.
He floated over the mountains and glaciers of North East Land, noting Arctic foxes and their blue cousins who sometimes trailed behind them like shadows. Various birds visited the balloon: snow buntings, ivory gulls, Arctic terns. They seemed completely unafraid and would perch on the edge of the basket for hours. When he again left the land behind for a combination of solid ice and broken floes, he twice saw polar bears feasting on seals. Irregular swaths of blood on snow. Such purity. Such clearly documented, innocent murders were these fine red statements of survival.
Finally, in the middle of an afternoon (though by now he had stopped counting and so couldn’t say which afternoon), just as the sun began its descent below the horizon, when all the ice and bergs and hummocks had turned orange, he saw a surprisingly regular dome-shape coming into focus in the distance. “White Island,” he breathed, astonished that because of its unbroken cap of ice it was, in fact, blue. A single cloud of approximately the same shape hung over its summit. The left side of the island was covered with shadow.
“Home,” shouted Jeremy, enjoying the sound of the word: a deep, bell sound in the emptiness all around him.
The balloon landed, scudding gently across a thin, icicle-shaped stone beach, the only exposed earth for hundreds of miles: an inexplicable dry lip on the edge of the island. Jeremy, standing on land for the first time in days, felt disoriented but content. He began, at once, to deflate the balloon. He had no intention of returning. “Home,” he said, almost sang as he watched the globe change shape, tilt to the right, and finally become a huge puddle of scarlet silk. Then he climbed back inside the gondola to prepare his evening meal of champagne, pâté de foie gras and hard tack. He toasted the island, himself, the collapsed balloon, and his cherished absentee.
It was now quite dark. The wind, having completed the task of propelling Jeremy to his intended destination, was still. Jeremy toasted the wind, but with less exuberance, wine dampening the excitement of his brain. Soon he climbed inside his reindeer-hide sleeping sack. He was almost at once lost in dreams of his dear departed, his abandoned one.
The following day was green! Pale green sky, emerald-green sun, very low, like a patinated bronze disc rolling along the edge of the horizon. The mountain of ice behind Jeremy had turned an interesting shade of turquoise, and behind it stood a half moon of an olive colour.
On the strange, naked beach the grey stones were blackish-green and scattered on top of them was the world’s oddest collection of driftwood: water-smoothed huge branches in whose erratic shapes Jeremy believed he could see suggestions of dark warriors, the ruins of Bavarian castles, Bernini’s sepulchral monuments, The Albert Memorial, The Trevi Fountain, all tangled together and darkly silhouetted against the approaching ice. He stood off shore for some time, savouring the formations, playing the same visual games with them that he had played as a child with passing clouds. Curiosity eventually moved him closer and he discovered, amazed, that the currents of the world’s oceans had transported fragments of their nautical kills to these shores so that, mingled with the parts of the gigantic pines that had been ripped by turbulent spring waters from the banks of Siberian rivers, he found relics of demolished Norwegian sloops and Siberian river craft. These consisted of fishing floats, an elaborate desk, table legs, half of the face of a figurehead, a wooden bathtub, and something resembling a pulpit. All this wood, hundreds of miles above the spot where the last stunted tree struggled into existence.
As he ambled back t
owards the gondola, Jeremy noticed something just beyond the driftwood, which he took to be the skeleton of a small boat, but which, on further examination, proved to be a sledge. To the right of it there were two pieces of crumpled fabric-one plaid, one solid blue-and then, to his surprise, one boot; all of this strange, unreal in the greenish light. Jeremy began to examine the ground more carefully and found, to his great excitement, several leather notebooks, a bundle of letters, a tin box, a pair of field glasses, and a large case containing five cracked bottles of French champagne-all partly exposed but cemented to the ground by ice. On a neighbouring rock lay a perfectly beautiful compass glowing in the green light and pointing, relentlessly, towards the north.
Jeremy rushed back to the driftwood and gathered its smallest pieces for a fire, hungry for the words he would thaw out of the notebooks and letters. Arctic messages! The white truth! As he scurried over to the gondola to fetch matches, his foot slipped on the lip of the glacier and he fell towards the turquoise ice. It was then that he first saw the emerald-green skull, floating there, six inches down.
During the next few days, when he wasn’t reading the journals and letters, he would stroll up and down the beach looking for and finding bones: thigh bones and scapulae, cages of ribs and one perfect spine curled, like a long still snake, on the rocks. But none of this would strike him hard in the chest the way the skull had. It was the recognition and then the denial of access that shocked him. It was the familiarity. How clear, how vulnerable the skull looked, encased forever in that cold, solid, unbreakable glass.
Changing Heaven Page 18
