Changing Heaven (2 page)

And what a village it was!
What a village this is
, thought Arianna (whose real name was Polly Smith), as she trudged against the wind over damp, unhealthy-looking cobblestones. When she had caught the first glimpses of West Yorkshire’s unique architecture from the train window she had been horrified, and this village, perched though it was, was merely more of the same. Rows of weavers’ black cottages, interrupted occasionally by a graveyard full of greenish-black stones or the square solidity of a black pub. She had at first blamed the dark village on the factories; still, there were no industrial chimneys in this elevated section of Haworth since the owners and builders had made use of the water power in the valleys below. “Millstone grit,” Jeremy had told her on the train, not bothering to explain. Those were the only words he had spoken to her all day.

Arianna lifted her head now and the ferocious wind brought sudden, emotionless tears into her pale blue eyes. She could see they were almost at the inn. Was there a church? she wondered, gazing around. Then she remembered, ah yes, the church and the clergyman’s weird daughters who had, fifty years before, written books and died young; the latter fact not surprising in a place like this. Arianna had not read these books because, as she perceived it, the only function of a book would be to weigh you down if you happened, for whatever reason, to be feeling lighter than air.

At this moment the crowd, spellbound though it was by Arianna and her menacing companion, turned its attention towards two burly men who were leading a horse and cart up the street. Or, to be more exact, towards the contents of the cart: a display of disorderly and colourful rumpled fabric. Necks craned, eyes narrowed, silent conclusions were drawn until, at last, one of the taller members of the gathering and one whose eyesight had remained
miraculously undamaged by childhood diseases, announced with certainty:

“Aye … that be balloon.”

While the crowd gathered round the wagon to examine this deflated world wonder, Arianna lingered for a few moments at the door of the inn with her back turned to the public. Then, as always, displaying her most dazzling smile, she turned around and said:

“I’m happy to be here and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s performance.”

This short speech was answered by cheers as Arianna, after waving one pale hand, followed her companion, who had let the door slam in her face, into the inn.

The men were wrong about this handsome man. He weighed her down all right. He weighed her down very well.

The interior of the inn was dim and decrepit, but warmed and cheered on this most special of occasions by a wood fire – a thing unheard of in this coal-consuming district in any season, let alone September. The landlord was a rotund, red-faced man whose visage mirrored, almost exactly, those on the decorative china tankards that lined his walls. Upon seeing Arianna enter he left off speaking with her dark companion and rushed forward to greet her, enthusiastically uttering his welcome in a language which was as foreign to Arianna as if it were Polish or Greek.

“Tha’ll be agait aboon in t’ sky with birds,” he expostulated, “tha’ll be and only tomorra, God bless, and t’owd wind wutherin’ around tha’. And aw’ll be there watchin’, aye that aw’ll. Darnut goe aboon wi’out tha iron shoon, tha’rt that light – a slip tha’rt! T’ rahnd balloon, it were lakly skift t’ Lancashire, it were.”

“Thank you,” replied Arianna, baffled.

“Naw, a’wl fetch t’ vittels,” he announced as he scurried into an inner room, from which came sounds of iron pots and cutlery. “Sit tha’ doun.”

Arianna pulled out a chair beside her handsome manager. He had already ordered a pint, which he was now moodily consuming.

“Ah, Jeremy,” she said, “I feel as heavy as lead.” And she did, she felt as weighted down as she had in a long time. They had been travelling, travelling, landscapes skimming by the sooty windows of railway cars, the constant sandwiches and beer, country fair after country fair. And very little had Arianna to show for it except survival and proximity to a man whom she adored, but who now no longer loved her back—though sometimes at night she might have been able to believe that he cared. Even there, however, even then, there was not, as there had been in the past, any tenderness, any endearments. It was something else that drew him to her flesh; something Arianna could not understand, and something that Jeremy resented but was unable to break from.

He was her teacher, as he reminded her over and over, almost her creator. Without him she would be merely Polly Smith. Had he never been drawn to her ethereality he would still be the great “Sindbad of the Skies” (which he had been only two short years ago), not the Jeremy Jacobs who was now merely an accoutrement to her performances. She would be Polly Smith, he told her, shopgirl, charwoman, barmaid, scullerymaid, factory worker, or at best, paid slut. She would be, as she should be, in the crowd watching
him
. As she should be, should be. But, human nature being as fickle as it is, as the crowds had begun to thin for “Sindbad of the Skies,” they had begun to swell again whenever he had taken Arianna up into the skies with him.

Arianna held and held to the memories of their flights together; flights that had taken place almost immediately after a long season of sensuality in a white room. She recalled Jeremy’s perfect profile, near hers, against a turquoise sky, and the crowd growing smaller and smaller below them. That unique privacy, their distance from the
world, his heart near her shoulder. She was, in those moments, perfectly happy. Soon, however, he had insisted that she sail alone, meeting her afterwards in the dark anonymity of a small hotel room where he fiercely, and rather sadly, took whatever pleasure he could find.

Once he had accused her of robbing him of the sky. “You’ve taken the sky from me,” he said, “you’ve made me earthbound. Now I’m concerned with mundane materials; train schedules, patching canvas and silk, testing leather harnesses….” He was wearing black that day and Arianna would always remember his eyes, like two lifeless coals, staring at her accusingly. She had begged him tearfully, then, to come to her, and, as they had in the past, to enter the clouds.

He had looked at her with utter hatred. “You shop-girl, you
SLUT
!” he had shouted. “You are capable of understanding absolutely
NOTHING!”

And that night, for the first time, he had not come into her room at all.

The landlord returned with a strange, heavy mass of meat and potatoes, which he called a pudding. As Arianna attempted first to decipher and then consume it, Jeremy, at last, began to speak.

“You’ll be using the parachute tomorrow. I’ve printed that in all the announcements. There’s a flat field, apparently, somewhere in this God-forsaken countryside, and you’ll be landing there.”

Arianna felt a little lighter. Whenever she used the chute Jeremy visited her room afterwards, and then became almost loving, almost as he had been in the past. Perhaps it was the sight of her falling-separating from the balloon, which had separated them-that excited him. She didn’t know. All that mattered was the pleasure of his perfect face coming nearer hers and his broad hands on her skin.

The landlord having retired into the back rooms, and Jeremy having announced his business intentions, the ground floor of the inn filled with an anticipatory silence, which seemed out of place in the gloomy interior. It was the silence of a space that was normally thick with conversation, pipe smoke, and human sweat. The silence of a room surprised by its own vacancy.

“Have you noticed,” Arianna said now, “how quiet it is in here? It is as if something is absent, as if something has been shut out.”

“Something has,” Jeremy replied, but not unkindly. “Listen.”

Then Arianna heard the wind, roaring down the chimney and rattling the windows in their casements. It was struggling to get in, in exactly the way a prisoner shakes the bars of his cell when he is struggling to get out. There was anger and desperation in its assault and the suggestion of a refusal to believe that the materials that it attacked were unyielding.

Why didn’t I hear this before?
Arianna wondered, and as she wondered, Jeremy turned his chair and himself in a counter-clockwise direction, away from her, so that she was left with a view of one of his corduroy shoulders and the even darker shape of his hair against the inn’s dark wall.

Later that night, though too early for sleeping, Arianna approached Jeremy’s room and knocked tentatively at his door. He slid back the bolt and allowed her to come in. Once she crossed the threshold, she walked over the worn carpet to a red chair near the window.

“You should talk to me,” she said. “You should let me talk to you.” When he didn’t answer her she added, “I still love you.”

“Your love is a prison,” he said. “I can’t get out.”

“I don’t keep you,” she said.

“Oh, you keep me, your delicacy.” A mock bow followed this. “I created you and now you keep me with you.”

Arianna ran her fingers through the halo of her yellow hair. She understood little of this. Outside the window she could see the moon racing through grey clouds, full, like an alabaster balloon travelling, travelling.

“Do you remember,” she asked the man across the carpet, “how you found me? Do you remember the white room and all the white nightdresses and the sheer curtains and those white sheets? Even the furniture was painted white and you said everything around me should be white.” She turned to look at him. “Jeremy … Jeremy.
How
did you stop loving me?”

“We left the room. I stopped.”

“Why won’t you leave me?”

“I can’t.
You
won’t stop.”

She stood up and approached him. “I set you free,” she said. “Go!”

“I’m not free to,” he whispered, turning his face away. “I’m not free. No more sailing for Sindbad. Prison instead for Svengali.”

“Come up with me.”

“No!”

“Go by yourself.”

“You understand nothing!”

Several leaves from some lone tree struck the window Arianna had abandoned, and then disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. A sudden touch of night’s fingers against the glass.

“You used to tell me stories,” Arianna said.

“No more stories, Arianna.”

“You used to love me.”

“No more love, Arianna.”

“Admit it … you used to love me.”

“What is memory, Arianna? A reflection of something that is gone … gone.
Why
do you insist on memory? There is only this now,” he gestured around the room,
“this ever-changing prison that you’ve built for me. Oh, don’t look at the walls, Arianna, they have nothing to do with it. Nothing solid like that. It is a prison of light, of ethereality … I can’t get out.”

“You’re free to go,” she said, nodding towards the door.

“No,” he said quietly, “I’m not free. There is nothing out there. There is only this.” His delicate features contorted into a look of despair.

Arianna, moved by his sorrow, reached one hand forward to touch the side of his cheek. He clutched at it with one of his own.

“There is only this,” he repeated, drawing her down on the bed beside him.

There he made passionate, prolonged love to her, crashing up against her again and again like a ship in a hurricane encountering rocks.

When Arianna awakened an hour later Jeremy sat hunched over a table at the far end of the room, his black hair gleaming in the lamplight. He did not turn around when he heard her stir, leave the bed, begin to dress. He did not turn around when she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

She knew what he was doing, what he always did after they made love. He was scrutinizing his maps of the polar seas. Tonight, she had noted, as she passed quietly by his table, it was the South Pole he was examining; a contradiction in terms as far as she was concerned. How a continent could be south and cold at the same time eluded her. Nevertheless, back in the days when he still spoke to her, his polar lectures indicated that that particular end of the earth was as bleak and white and featureless and freezing as the other. More than anything Jeremy had wanted to sail a balloon there … to disappear into white. Instead, he had somehow evaporated because of her. Or, so he believed, had become grounded, ordinary.

For his sake, in the early days, Arianna had pretended to love the idea of polar regions and, in fact, had eventually in some ways come to do so, because they represented Jeremy. She had learned the names of glaciers and ice barriers and Arctic seas. She had listened for hours while he spoke about polar expeditions and their sad, inevitable ends.

Now she tiptoed down the hall to her room and left Jeremy alone in his. Alone with his isolated, personal interpretations, his calculations concerning ice floes, icebergs, and Arctic air currents, his lists of polar destinations. “Starvation Cove,” she had heard him whisper as she slowly, quietly, closed the door, “Cape Farewell, Ice Haven, Fury Strait, Winter Harbour …”

The wind woke her, though it had been in her dreams as well, tossing white garments from a long clothesline up towards black chimneys. She lit the lamp and walked over to the window, whose deep ledge allowed plenty of room for both the oil lamp and her own two thin arms. Fierce black outside; the moon was down, and dreadful stars, sharp and exaggerated – little knife-points in the sky. But steady, at least, in the shrieking gale.

It is an interesting phenomenon that the light that warms evening rooms creates a barrier, a kind of blindness, to the differing darknesses outside. It also transforms all windows miraculously into mirrors, so that their function suddenly is to reproduce what is in the room rather than to reveal what is outside it. Arianna, leaning towards the window, then, could see very little of the street below; could see only black, those intense stars, and then her own white face floating in the centre-light, airborne, balloon-like.

Gradually, the thought of a balloon at night began to form in her mind and, as it did, the ominous stars became benign. Sailing through silence into black, with or without moonlight, but with the night wind; a song in the silence.
Enchantment. “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” she murmured, remembering, just for a moment, something of her lost childhood.