Changing Heaven

by Jane Urquhart

  He collapses into sleep and wakes again to find her staring into his face. “This time,” she says, “while I watched you sleep, I was almost able to see your dreams.”

  “I wasn’t dreaming,” he says coldly. And then he flings himself away from the bed, away from her, stands naked in the fading afternoon light, and hisses, a cornered animal, “Don’t you understand … I don’t want you to see my dreams.”

  “I don’t believe that because, otherwise …”

  “No, no … believe it. I don’t want that. Who do you think you are looking into me, scrutinizing me like this. God damn you!” he shouts, his voice rusty from days of inactivity, “looking into me like that. You fool! There’s nothing there to look into!”

  “Yes, yes, there is,” Ann says, her heart cartwheeling in panic. “There’s all this activity, this emotion … I’ve glimpsed it. I’ve seen your face, I’ve seen …”

  “You’ve seen nothing.” Arthur reaches for a full package of cigarettes and rips it open angrily. “I want you to stop! Whatever this web is that we’re trapped in, you wove it! God, Ann, why don’t you look at me, just once, why don’t you really look at me?”

  “But I do, and I see everything alive and moving and vital.”

  “No, you don’t! Or maybe you do. But you don’t see me, Ann, you see yourself.”

  She has begun to weep, has covered her eyes with her hands. “Without you I was vague, nothing. You awakened me and then I saw what you were and I fell in love with you.”

  “For God’s sake, Ann, stop it! Look at me!” Abruptly he sinks into a chair and turns his back on her. Then, just as abruptly he rises and crosses the room. “Look at my hands, Ann,” he says, thrusting them near the vicinity of her covered face. “We’ve been together all this time and you’ve never looked at my hands.”

  “You’re not being brutally honest,” she sobs, “you’re just being brutal.”

  “Look … at … my … hands!”

  “Oh …” she says, gazing at smooth, seamless skin. She has never seen flesh like this. Poreless, tight, stretched across bone and muscle, it appears completely unvisited by experience, instead of what it really is: the product of an experience from which it can never recover.

  “Doesn’t that tell you something?” Arthur asks. “It should tell you everything.” Sitting on the edge of the bed he turns away from her. “I’m not what you think,” Arthur’s voice is practically inaudible, “and I never will be. I’m not desperate or passionate. We tumbled into each other, that’s all. I’m fixed, Ann, stationary. Nothing like this should have ever happened to me. I’m just trying to live for the rest of my life.”

  “Your hands,” she whispers, awe-struck, “is there pain?”

  “No … not now. Now there’s just nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Ann repeats. “How can there be nothing?”

  Arthur does not immediately answer, carries his hands in front of him to the other side of the room. Then he speaks. “I wanted to touch you, to love you in that way, but I can’t just stop living the rest of my life. I’m terrified that my life will collapse around me and then I will feel nothing.”

  “But I feel everything.”

  “I know.”

  Ann looks at Arthur and sees his averted face, his spine curved like a scythe near a table filled with sad, neglected papers. She remembers the beast that prowled through her illness, how it was both male and female-the fused lovers–what she wanted to become, what she has been trying to draw Arthur into. It wasn’t that she wanted him so much as that she wanted him to become her. That was how she was trying to tempt him. Like that other androgynous beast, the beautiful devil/angel in Tintoretto’s wilderness, she held fragrant loaves in her outstretched hands, but they contained annihilation for him. She wanted him to feel only what she felt. A rush of moorland wind-the weather–and all the real details swept away.

  “I am only an interpreter,” he is saying. “I can’t live this. I can’t make the paintings. I can only interpret them.”

  “But I’m an interpreter too. I’ve always been apart … living my life through books. In that way we are alike.” Ann would like to touch him again, to make this last tentative connection. “Neither one of us,” she says, “has anything to do with real life.”

  But Arthur won’t accept this either. “No,” he says, “the difference is that you want to live the fiction or the life or whatever and I … I simply don’t. You said it … you said you feel everything.”

  “Do you think I really meant that?”

  “Oh … yes.”

  During the long night, while Arthur sleeps, Ann sits near the window at the little wooden table, one small light washing over all his scattered notes. As the hours advance, the air calms and clears and she, glancing at the unconscious man, is at last able to see his fragility and his imperfection. His age. The obsession is breaking, is falling away. She hears Arthur’s breath, helpless, lost in the rhythms of sleep, while the night hours fill the space that has always existed between the man that he is and the woman that she is. The space that she has refused to acknowledge. The space that Arthur has had to cross each time they met.

  Ann thinks of how Catherine described her adolescent dream in Wuthering Heights’, how she knew that heaven was not her home. Ann can practically see this dream, in which angry angels toss a young girl out of the clouds and down onto the unreclaimed moor, as if her body were weather itself. Catherine asleep, her mind falling through air, the angels receding. And then the crash, the awakening. The real, the painful joy.

  All through the night Ann falls, falls to earth, just as if certain angels had taken it upon themselves to toss her out of an inappropriate heaven. Everything she sees is draining downwards; the dim furniture, roses on the wallpaper, curtains, bedclothes. She can actually feel her own body gain texture, substance; the miracle of gravity guiding her towards solidity and weight. The city beneath her is rumoured to be sinking as well. She imagines it shifting and settling under her newly acquired weight. How the real earth holds, embraces, reclaims these built things; Tintoretto’s painted tantrums or her own frail palace of romance. The man she built and now this breathing form. This life.

  Every now and then Ann lifts her right arm up from the table and then lets it collapse with a satisfying thud onto the wooden surface, and, as she does this, she marvels at the construction of her own hand and the complicated grain on this one piece of ordinary furniture.

  By dawn Ann has completed her descent, has fallen back into the world. She watches as the grey light turns to gold, fills with wind, parts the white curtains and dances towards her on a rug whose patterns she has never seen until this moment. She pictures herself an Elizabeth, a Magdalene, alone, surrounded by vital light and tumultuous weather-a still figure in a frantic landscape. She can keep it all: the idea of this man, this city, the ancient moor wind – even the currents of the highway with its clouds of fumes and thunderous noise, keep everything in the manner of painted saints, with patience, near trembling streams under glistening trees. The difficult love. The troubled awakening weather.

  Before she leaves the room Ann goes to Arthur and reaches for his arm. “Sandy,” he whispers, without opening his eyes.

  “Who is Sandy? … your wife?… your little girl?” Ann tentatively approaches, now, the facts of his real life.

  “My dog,” he says, stirring. “You didn’t even know I had a dog.”

  “No,” says Ann, “I didn’t even know you had a dog.”

  Without turning to look at her, he moves one hand to her wrist. “I told you I’m not in love with you,” he says.

  “Yes, you told me.”

  He is silent and still turned away from her. She places his hand on the pillow and lifts her own from his naked shoulder.

  “PARRY LOVED the northern latitudes. He made certain that he spent a lot of time in them. No grand tourist he! He wanted to live in the countries he visited. There were two words in my father’s book of Arctic anecdotes that d
escribed him perfectly. The sentence reads, ‘Parry was the first explorer to winter deliberately in the high Arctic.’ You see, he was a deliberate winterer. What a wonderful verb! To winter. That is what Parry liked to do most of all, he liked to winter. So first he lived in Halifax, Canada. But that wasn’t wintery enough for him. So then he accompanied the whalers to Spitzbergen. Now there’s a spot! After that he deliberately wintered in the high Arctic. I suspect he loved that! Oh … and he attempted to reach the North Pole by sledge over the pack ice from Spitzbergen. He was a winterer.”

  Emily was lecturing Arianna about the life of Sir Edward Parry. But she was not standing up and raising her clenched fist as she normally did when pontificating on this particular subject; rather she was quietly relating the information, as if teaching prayers to a child.

  “Ross was different … a fool and a coward. He didn’t enjoy wintering at all, I expect. He was a negationist. Nothing went anywhere as far as he was concerned. There was no Northwest Passage. There was no North Pole. There was no hope. There was no dream.”

  “I wish you’d tell me, Emily,” Arianna insisted. “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “So Parry said to Ross, ‘Go your own way, then, and I’ll be the Arctic explorer for both of us!’ Oh, crime can make the heart grow old, sooner than years of wearing woe; can turn the warmest bosom cold, as winter wind or polar snow.”

  “Parry said that?”

  “No … I said that.”

  “Please tell me. How did I die, Emily?”

  “I wonder whether Parry is an angel or a ghost? Perhaps he began as one and ended up as the other. Did I tell you about his kingdom? The one I made for him when I was a child?”

  Arianna was silent.

  “I probably did, but I’ll tell you again. It was white, well ordered, sparse, and, of course, cold. Ice palaces everywhere. And statues … clear blue, like glass. It is odd, but I seem to remember only my imagination now. I wonder, do I still have one? Perhaps I have become my imagination. I can see those statues perfectly, and the little snow paths around them, but I can’t recall Anne’s face. Poor Anne … what colour were her eyes?”

  “You said they were blue. Emily … you do remember what happened to me, don’t you?”

  “Yes. And Charlotte’s eyes? Did I mention them?”

  “How do you know? Were you there? Were you out here watching?”

  Emily was quiet for several seconds. Then she spoke. “I remember seeing your white balloon. And for some reason I remember haunting your hotel room. Why did I do that I wonder? That wasn’t like me at all. Then I drifted around the village for a while the next morning, through the graveyard and into the house for a bit. Oh, yes … I was collecting views. You know what I mean. This was to be my last haunt, I meant to give it up completely. There’s something cowardly about haunting, you know, trailing listlessly about, all unapproachable, and then vanishing at the least provocation. And besides, only certain gifted individuals can see you, even when you’ve materialized.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “No … though I thought you did once … in the middle of the night. You spent a lot of time looking out the window. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

  “Were you collecting views of me?”

  “Good heavens, no … I hadn’t you in mind at all … not at first, anyway. I just happened to see you and then I became a bit, well, curious I suppose. I was collecting views. I had this terror of forgetting them. Now it appears that I’ve forgotten everything … even the terror. At least I’ve forgotten what the terror felt like. But I’m glad I collected the views because I still remember them … a good thing, since it appears that we can no longer transcend time and everything has changed. The graveyard has trees full of rooks now. And the little lane that opens to the moor … trees line it as well. And then those reservoirs. The church burned, you know. Charlotte would have loved that! She became part of the Great Everything, I imagine, probably almost instantly. I haunted him, your Mr. Perfect Profile.”

  “Oh … did he see you?”

  “Of course not … he was far too busy with his plans!”

  “What plans?”

  “His plans. Who else’s? The only reason I paid any attention was because of the polar maps. I thought, foolishly, for a few moments, that we might be kindred spirits because of the maps. But his tundra and mine were placed in different regions. It was just by chance that I saw what he was thinking. The only reason that I was in the room at all was because of the view of the Black Bull that could be had from there. That and John Greenwood’s stationery shop. I rather hoped that if I transcended time I could catch a glimpse of Branwell through the windows of the Black Bull, from the windows of the Olde White Lion. I had never been inside a public house and the fact that I was now a ghost did not alter my views of what was and what was not proper. Still, I was always curious about how he behaved in there. I did see him, too tipped back on his chair, holding forth on some subject before an audience of stupefied idiots … waving his arms around and toasting the air. Outrageous! Unthinkable! How wonderful he was! The stationery store I loved, because of paper, ink, pens …”

  “Was I there?”

  “In the Black Bull? I should hope not.”

  “In Jeremy’s room … was I in his room?”

  “No … you were in your room. He was alone … alone and making plans. Now I vaguely remember. I was standing by the window watching Branwell. You should have seen him, Branwell, that is. His mouth was open all the time. He was shouting and laughing and pouring tankards of ale down his throat. Once he lunged at a passing barmaid, he who was, at the time, supposed to be dying of love! What a farce that was! And behind me, in another time, Mr. Perfect Profile brooding boringly over polar maps. I was standing by the window experiencing all of the emotions that I always did when I looked at Branwell’s bad behaviour: joy, sorrow, anger, hilarity, love, covetousness, envy. Then, suddenly, right behind my back, I felt the brooding stop, a kind of clarity was in the air so I turned to look at the brooder and I saw that his face was full of light … a look of real joy. And whether I wanted to or not, I could see his plans.”

  “He was planning to love me again,” said Arianna, “wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Emily, uncertainly. “Yes … he was, but …”

  “He was planning,” Arianna continued, “to marry me. I know it now, that was what he was planning. It makes me so happy to know this, Emily, thank you for telling me.”

  “That was certainly not what he was planning. I didn’t tell you that!”

  Arianna floated to higher ground. Frost covered all the moorland and it softened the oranges and ochres and burgundies and greens. But, if you looked closer, you could see that each blade of grass, though gentler in colour, would be hard and frozen to the touch. The surrounding rocks, covered by this deceptive white cold, looked astonishingly like clouds.

  “Emily,” said Arianna, straightening her transparent spine, “you must tell me what happened to me.”

  Emily drifted up to her. “Arianna, Polly, I just can’t.”

  “But I have to know!”

  Emily felt very weak, her senses attached inexorably to the present, her memories fading, unclear. From where she sat she could see a banner of smoke issuing from the last cottage in Stanbury, and light glowing in one of its windows. There was a hearth there, near which, Emily knew, stories had been told, stories with the breath of the wind in them; told in a rich moorland voice. She could not say how she knew this, perhaps it was the look of the cottage itself. Yes, the little building had an absorbed, entranced look, as if all the while the spirits had been experiencing weather, the stone walls had been turning towards the inner voice of stories. And now those absorbed walls had an expectant look, as if there were one more story that they were waiting to hear. With a flash of her former ghostly intuition Emily realized why the cottage had caught her attention, which story was about to be told, and who would be listening.

  “I have t
o know,” Arianna/Polly repeated.

  “Yes,” said Emily, “I believe you do.”

  “Well, then, tell me.”

  Emily moved closer to her companion, her face open, sad, honest. “I can’t remember,” she whispered, “just fragments, and even they are going. It was something to do with a balloon. And just yesterday, even an hour ago, I would have known. I can’t grasp it; I am suddenly so tired.”

  For the first time since she had been a ghost, Polly/Arianna felt despair. Her whole life, her existence, was being forgotten; even her death was disappearing. She crumpled into a heap at Emily’s feet. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she sobbed.

  “No, no …” Emily was gaining a little strength, reading her friend’s thoughts, “you haven’t disappeared at all. You are part of the texture of this landscape now. I know it. Look! That cottage is holding its breath because inside it you, your story, is on someone’s mind.”

  Arianna looked down the seam of the valley to the warmth of one small rectangle of light. The wind nudged her non-existent back, tentatively pushing her towards the village.

  Listen, listen, it breathed.

  “Listen,” said Emily. “Let’s listen. Come with me.”

  AS THE GHOSTS accompany the wind down through the valley into a late spring day somewhere, some time, in the last half of the twentieth century, this is what they see.

  They see that ruins of farmhouses vacated by saddened people in the nineteenth century are much the same as stones left by Vikings or monuments erected by Celts. They see that weather’s main purpose is to melt rock and that that purpose is carried out with more tenderness than aggression. They see that storms are really acts of love and that the earth demands this passion, this tantrum of response to its simply being there. They see that every crack, every ripple, every undulation of surface, has been etched by wind requesting entry, by rain desperate for absorption; that weeds, heather, ling, the stunted trees are really currents of air reaching back to a heaven amazed by its own power. They understand that the birds, as they move, sail a sea, dive in an ocean of trembling emotion, the space of the first great union. They begin to read the language around them: a raindrop striking stone, a cloud coming apart at the edges, dust torn by wind from an ancient path in the midst of intense relationship. It is written on the land. It is speaking. The ghosts read; they listen.