Changing Heaven (19 page)

It has been snowing for three days and the view is temporarily eliminated, the wind driving walls of white across the top and down through the valleys. Drifts crawl in under Ann’s door and do not melt in the cold interior. She takes the scuttle and descends the stairs to the cellar. The scrape of the shovel on the stone floor and the roar of fresh lumps of coal pouring onto the fire are the only man-made sounds inside the cottage. Ann is making new forms of conversation. She performs a task and the cottage responds with the rattle of spoons in a drawer, the creak of an opening door, the purr of a boiling kettle.

She has not stepped across the threshold for three days and she is developing a personal relationship with each of the details of the cottage’s interior. As all but one of the remembered faces from her abandoned life fade, the little china figurine on the mantel, for instance, or the quilted hen that serves as a tea-cosy, gain power, become almost as important as similar objects were to her when she was a child. And then she realizes, for the first time, how alone she was as a child, and she knows that her reverence for
often-touched objects – objects that are both familiar and dependable – is growing as a result of her solitude here in another country.

And she is cold. Her fingers are aching, then numb-even when she pulls the chair in which she sits as near the glowing coals as safety permits. She warms her hands on teapots, stretches them towards the hearth, places them between her thighs when she sleeps, but they remain two uncooperative, icy appendages. She searches clumsily through her copy of
Wuthering Heights
for descriptions of cold, its persistence causing her to give it the literary attention she is now certain it deserves. She remembers the cold outside the rooms along the highway and sometimes she remembers the cold inside.

The wind that comes in under the door, that slides around the windows, attacks her ankles, and shinnies up the inside of her jeans. To the delicate china lady on the mantel Ann says, “If you are this cold and there is wind everywhere there’s no stopping anything.” She apologizes to the plump motherly hen when she removes her from her warm post. “Sorry … but we all share now. Yes, it’s share and share alike.” “Dear Arthur,” one of her many unsent letters begins, “I know more and more about the cold now. I know even more about cold than you.” When bent, in a trance of conversation, over a letter to him, she mouths the words she is writing. As if she were speaking to him directly, as if he were locked with her inside the cold house.

She attempts to continue her work on the varying climates of
Wuthering Heights
, but the contemporary storm distracts and confuses her, and her sentences change before her eyes into pleas for Arthur’s attention. Heathcliff’s statement to the child Hareton, “And we’ll see if one tree will grow as crooked as another with the same wind to twist it,” is repeated in the sound of the coal she is constantly pouring into the small hell of her fire. “Arthur,” she writes, “I have twisted towards, away, from your fire. You put the storm in me. I am a wind, shrieking!”

On the morning of the fourth stormy day, the wind outside the walls and the wind inside the cottage begin to converse in a jumble of words that Ann can decipher only at intervals. She sits near her now-grey hearth clutching the quilted hen to her chest, while whispers, moans, and laughter reach her ears, and then the hot, combined breath of a man and a woman, one inside, one out.

Ann knows the sounds: the rustle of clothing being discarded, a sob, a cry, the soft, purring noises a hand makes when it journeys over skin.
How can this be?
she wonders,
one of them is out, the other in
. The persistent noises of small animals attempting to make homes in earth, the insistent sounds of the separate each, straining to enter other. Winged lovers beating and beating up against the mirror of their opposite selves. Prisoned inside walls, locked behind doors, together and apart from each other. The storm has given birth to a disturbance of lovers who have now entered Ann’s cottage.

And it is she who is apart.

They are everywhere Ann isn’t. She can hear the woman brushing her hair in the next room, electricity snapping in the cold surrounding atmosphere. She can hear silk garments slide on and off her body. She knows when he has turned away from her, has become distant, silent, brutal. She can smell the herbal garden of him.

At night the lovers come subtly closer, all the while holding on to distance, as if Ann were a ghost of whom they are, as yet, unaware. They are beside her when she sleeps, moving and moving on the edge of her dreams. The woman weeps in the dark sometimes and the man strikes invisible matches to look at her more carefully, to scrutinize her suffering. But when Ann reaches for them they have descended the stairs and are murmuring, agonizing in the kitchen. Ann hears the male voice articulate the word “can’t.” It spills into her ears like coals onto a fire. And then the woman’s words: “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.” The walls echo, change the lovers’ language. “Leave me, leave me!” they cry, or, “Don’t, don’t.”

In the morning light, the cottage is an enormous furnace, a heartbeat, the furniture throbbing. The wind inside is pleading,
Please, please
…. It gasps, its tongue a flame. The lovers are in the coal cellar, crashing up against granite walls. “Oh, my God,” Ann whispers, “they have become one.” Yes, they have become one during the night and the new beast they are is prowling. Ann hears it groan and pace and sigh and lick its wounds and she knows she must find it and set it free. Its huge violent body is seeking space, needs to burst out into the open. But still it eludes her. She spends the day pursuing it from floor to floor. No longer quiet, it howls in corners and scratches on the other side of doors. “My God, Arthur,” Ann writes, “the beast we were is
here
, but I can’t find it!”

Let me out, let me out!
the animal growls, always on the other side of walls that Ann can’t see through. Frantic, she runs in her nightgown from room to room to room. “Where are we, where are we?” she sobs, “I want to let us out!” Rooms whirl around her glowing, pulsing. “Arthur,” she scribbles, “you have to help me get it out … otherwise the monster will be everything. I want to force it out, to push it out. Yes, yes, I want to lock it out, to keep it out.”

The hearth inside is grey and cold. The storm outside settles.

The beast is asleep. Ann crouches under an eiderdown near the mantel and waits for the monster to reawaken. But only stillness surrounds her, stillness and pain. The immobility and torture of a blade wedged between the ribs and a heart frozen in the midst of seizure.

She cannot move.

She dreams of the dark Venetian paintings of Tintoretto, the reproductions Arthur showed her; of the painted, rugged
faces of apostles and the soft features of angels. She sees wings like fronds of palm leaves set against skies alive with lightning. She dreams of Velazquez’s portraits of dwarfs, of a long hall filled with small, intense men. As she walks the marble floor beneath them they increase in size until, she suddenly perceives, they are no longer dwarfs, but giants, a gallery of giants-the last a Norseman with a broad high forehead and fierce blue eyes. The painting bubbles into life and the large man is shouting, calling through canvas. His hands appear, slapping up against the flat, framed surface. “Let me in!” he is bellowing as the gold frame turns to painted wood and the dark oil to glass.

Rising from her chair Ann staggers past tilting furniture, turns the bolt, lifts the latch.

She feels the beast slip past her body, slide around her legs, taking its leave of her as she opens the old oak door.

“W
HEN
I
WAS
alive,” said Emily, “there was this important moment and that important moment and long, eventless seasons in between when I was vague and unfocused and wandering. I’m speaking of externals, of course, when I speak about moments – those circumstances from the outside that force themselves upon your attention. The ones that choose you: love, birth, death, and one parhelion, and a bog-burst. And the once or twice when I was away.

“I never wanted to be away. I wasn’t much interested in change. I flourished in the empty times and in the familiar open. I hated the closed-in foreign places, the palaces of instruction, time tables someone else had constructed. It
is
wonderful to be dead, because nothing ever happens–except this barrage of seasons, and then you falling in here. I’m really very comfortable with this. I’ve never liked it when things were taking place. I didn’t want anyone to be born, to burst uninvited into my world. And I didn’t want death to tear my few companions out of it. And I certainly didn’t
ever
want to fall in love.”

“But, Emily,” said Arianna, “you’re not telling me you lived without love?”

“The trouble with falling in love is that it is really born of a perverse desire to invent the plot of your own life story, to make it episodic. Life should be plotless – none of this and-then-he, and-then-he nonsense. Besides, being in love is really being in a state of rage; it is furious, it is an extended tantrum. Surely you, of all people, should know this.”

“But I was never angry with him.”

“Ah … but how angry he was with you! There is always,
believe me, anger involved, as I think there should be. And then there is the accompanying dreadful collection. There is certainly always that as well.”

“The dreadful collection?”

“You know all about that.”

“What
are
you talking about? Emily, I have no idea….”

“I’m talking about the
everything
of the outside world that gets drawn into the love affair. It is like a whirlwind sucking the world’s objects, the world’s events into its chaos until nothing has any meaning any more except in relation to it. The world’s inhabitants, its architecture, its seasons, its weather patterns gain significance only in that they represent the mood of the love affair. A combination of blindness and scrutiny sets in. Focus and then expansion. And then the leaf falling from the tree is no longer a leaf falling from the tree. It is another addition to the dreadful collection.

“In my book, Mr. Capital H announces that the whole world is ‘a dreadful collection of memoranda that Catherine did exist’ and that he has lost her. Her features are reflected in the flagstone floors; her moods, her capriciousness, in the winds that assault his house. His walls keep her out! His windows let her in! Her whispers follow him, but he can’t make out what she is saying. A piece of coal shifts in the fire. She is Flame! He can’t touch her. She is the smoke that scatters down the valley. She is the news from afar carried on the lips of gypsies and she is the trinkets they sell him from their carts. The creak of their departing wagon wheels-her complaints. He cannot eat, but he tastes her. She monopolizes him utterly. Everything that exists is a message from her. He carries her in his sleeves, his pockets. He wears her like a medallion next to his heart or like the band inside his hat that circles his brain. He breaks a goblet and
her
bones shatter,
her
blood spills. Her eyes stare out beneath his lids. He takes her on unimaginable journeys, so unimaginable even I dared not describe them. For three years she existed in landscapes she would never see, never
visit. It is unthinkable! Better to be dead, to be cast into this calm sea of eventlessness. Better to be here where these seasons hurling themselves down the valley towards us are merely seasons. Oh, no, Arianna, I never wanted to be in love. It’s devil’s work. And you
do
understand what I’m saying.”

“Yes, Emily, I do understand what you’re saying.”

H
OW SLOWLY
, slowly the world comes back. The view from the upstairs window is at first a simple abstract study in black and white: flat, far away, indecipherable, or sometimes, on the edges of either end of sleep, misinterpreted, mistaken for the view from the window of an airplane or from the porthole of an ocean liner. Ann, her cheek resting on her flattened hand, tends for now to ignore it, to content herself with touring, from her pillow, the continent of her night table. Great full hours of exploring between hours of engulfing sleep; sleep that forces itself upon her, first liquefying, then absorbing her like a sponge.