Changing Heaven (10 page)

“I want you to have this pepper pot.” Ann’s mother removes a brass object from her handbag.

“It belonged to my mother and now it’s time for me to give it to you.”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s in case any of
them
get out of hand.”

“Out of hand?”

“Yes … in case one of
them
tries something when he is walking you home. Or,” she adds thoughtfully, “in case someone else tries something if no one is walking you home.”

Ann examines the small metal object. “It’s very pretty,” she says.

“Then all you have to do,” her mother continues, “if one of them tries anything, is open your purse, take out the pepper pot, unscrew the lid, and throw pepper in the jerk’s eyes.”

“All right,” says Ann uncertainly, “but what exactly is
something?”

“Oh, you’ll know something when you see it,” Ann’s mother assures her.

Ann stuffs the pot in her new purse, opens the car door, places her loafers on soggy leaves. Heart pounding, she looks towards rectangles of light at lawn level. This is a church. She already feels like broken glass.

“Go on,” her mother says with a dismissive wave of her left hand, “you have to start this nonsense sooner or later.”

Before she turns to walk away, Ann looks at her mother’s face framed by the open car window. “The pepper pot,” she says, “did you ever use it?”

“No,” replies her mother, starting the engine, “unfortunately.”

Ann endures exactly half an hour of the church basement. As expected, Heathcliff is not there and, as dreaded, she is not asked to dance. Outer life is at its worst and most vibrant as, one by one, the girls she has been pretending to engage in scintillating conversation are lured away by sweaty-palmed partners. Ann studies a Bible picture on the wall behind her. This was once, after all, her Sunday school, though the fact of this hideous dance will banish those memories for ever. A few lambs, Jesus, a bunch of boys and girls. Suffer, little children.

When she can bear it no longer she leaves the basement and walks the residential city streets. Unwilling to go home with her pepper pot full and failure written all over her face, she eventually decides to walk all the way up Yonge Street to the highway. This takes over an hour and as she walks, the landscape of the moors returns, reassuringly, in her imagination. Heather shivering under wind. Hearts cracked open. The weather and the landscape a suitable reflection of a province in the mind.

When she returns home Ann will tell her mother and her recently arrived father that she has had a wonderful time at the dance. She will invent suitable partners and name songs. What she will not tell them is that, standing on a cement overpass, looking down at insignificant cars, she had opened the pepper pot to the wind and black snow had scattered into the night.

What she will not tell them is that she has decided to spend a lot more time with Heathcliff.

E
VERY DAY
Arianna had risen at six in the morning, made a lunch of bread and cheese, and left her father’s rooms and her father snoring on a day bed.

The London she entered, then, was dank, dark, and mostly foggy. Gutters filled with trash and horse dung. Noise, pandemonium of dark rattling carriages and no accessible sky. Angry horses snorting steam. Here and there the ridiculously bright, almost garish colours of a flower-seller’s cart set against the grey.

Arianna had wondered occasionally, vaguely, where the flowers came from, what enchanted land was capable of producing days filled with growth and colour, and whether this might be the same land into which her mother had disappeared.

Her mother, the absent flower.

Each morning she proceeded along slimy streets, past seedy pubs, and towards a nauseous-green door, which led her into her place of employment: Furnell’s Fabric and Furnishing, its dim lights, its freezing or sweltering conditions. Presently she seated herself in front of that menacing little black devil, her sewing machine. It was, and she seemed to sense this, evil in the flesh: naughty, dark, shining, busy. Its cogs and wheels and endless supply of thread represented to her the interminability, the dailiness, of her employment.

The machine itself was always seizing two disparate entities, stamping its tiny silver foot on them and then sewing them, inexorably, together. Whir-r-r-r, chang, chang, chang. And Arianna’s own muscles operated this. Pump, pump, pump on the decorative wrought-iron pedal, all day
long. Her thin hands, like two pale spiders, moving the fabric up and over and through, up and over and through.

All around her, stationed at their own personal whirring black demons, were replicas of herself: pale, young women whose spider hands darted over grey or brown broadcloth. They kept their heads bent, their eyes cast down; and they looked, sitting in their straight rows, like one woman at a sewing machine, reflected to infinity in a fun-house mirror.

Except that Arianna sported quite unruly, curly, blond, almost white hair and in that sea of black, brown, and grey heads hers stood out like a new shilling. As if it were a lamp, the only source of light, if you ignored the sooty windows, in the factory.

“So where did you, how did you meet him? I can see that it is inevitable – you’ll insist upon talking about it sooner or later.”

Emily and Arianna were floating up the perilous path towards the height of land known as Ponden Kirk. Sleet was making its ferocious way down the valley towards Haworth but by the time the two ghosts reached the top of the cliff it would be spring again.

“I met him in the factory.”

“Factory-?” Emily glanced in the direction of Ponden Mill where even now hundreds of men, women, and children worked at looms. “I thought you were a balloonist.”

“Oh, that … I told you … that was later.”

“All right, in the factory …”

“I’ll never forget the day-”

“Don’t be so sure … but go on.”

“I was working as usual on grey broadcloth, making winter capes for gentlemen, not paying any attention, when I reached down for more fabric and pulled up a smooth swath of scarlet. I looked around the room and discovered, to my amazement, that everything had changed. The grey interior
of the factory had become enormously festive. Some women held turquoise, others yellow, still others red like mine.”

“Why?” Emily motioned for Arianna to join her in her favourite spot, under an outcropping of granite. They could see almost all the way to Keighley from there.

“God,” said Arianna, remembering vividly now, “looking back, it seems as if all that colour was an omen of change.” She settled into the hollow beside Emily. “It was balloon silk. The factory had received a contract to make three balloons.”

“And?”

“And one of them was for Jeremy Jacobs … the ‘Sindbad of the Skies’!”

“Was he there with the silk?”

“Not that day. That day we all fought with the silk-it was slippery, you know, hard to manage. We had to learn how to handle it. But a few days later he arrived-I suppose to inspect the work in progress. He told me that he spotted me right away. Something about a shaft of pale sunlight breaking through the sooty window and illuminating my hair. I remember that I looked up from my machine to see this astoundingly handsome man standing in the aisle staring at me. And then when the shift was over, there he was, waiting at the factory door. Somehow it was that simple. We just … walked away together.”

“To where?”

“That first day? All over London, it seemed. Mostly to clothing stores. He said, I love you but I hate your grey clothes. You should be dressed in white! And then he bought me seven white skirts, seven white blouses, white ribbons for my hair. I followed him around like a household pet. I felt … stunned … somehow … drugged. I never returned to the factory and I never saw my father again. The next day we took the train to Dover, where we rented that room I told you about.”

“Didn’t you feel like a fallen women?”

“On the contrary, I felt lighter than air. For a while. And then I felt like I wanted some detail. That was what ended it. Or part of it … but I already told you that.”

“I think I like trains,” said Emily suddenly. “Sometimes I drift down to the station at Haworth. I like the steam and the energy. They are like weather. Some of them are named after winds.”

“On the train he sat across from me and just looked at me and told me to do certain things so that he could watch me doing them. Look out the window, he would say, or, Read this book. Put your chin in your hand, lean forward, lean back against the seat. Then, after each change, he would look at me with utter adoration. No one, absolutely no one had paid that kind of attention to me before.”

“And you did those things?”

“Instantly.”

“Why?”

“Because he told me to.”

“He told me he would look after me, completely, that I would never have to worry again.” Arianna paused. “About anything.” She watched the moor turning violet, autumn approaching again. “But it wasn’t true. Eventually I started to worry about him … after he changed, I mean.” Arianna was silent. Then she grabbed Emily’s transparent sleeve.

“Heavens! Can’t we slow this down? I was just getting to enjoy the heather and now, I can tell, it’s November. November, by the way, was terrifying in the white room.”

“Yes,” said Emily, “we can slow it down. We can focus in and that slows it down. Or we can haunt, which means that we have to enter that time.”

“Can we haunt him now? Can I haunt him now?”

“He’s gone. Soon he will freeze to death on an ice floe in his Arctic sea. Or starve to death. It doesn’t really matter which. Perhaps it will be both. Anyway, he will be perfectly preserved up there. A solid block of ice. But dead. And
there will be no spirit floating around either, as far as I can see. He’ll probably go to Limbo. But why was November so terrifying?”

“The promenade was deserted. So was the tourist home. The sea was dark green, or steel-grey and threatening. Jeremy was there all the time. There were no balloon trips. Once he covered me, buried me, in white feathers and then he dug me up again. Feathers floating all over the room. And the wind rattled the window panes. Once it was so stormy and windy, there was seaweed stuck to all the glass in the morning. He started to draw me with white chalk on black paper. Jeremy will be dead?”

“Yes.”

“I knew that. Should I be sad?”

“No.”

“No … I don’t feel sad.”

“Why should you? You’re already dead.”

“Ah, yes, I’d almost forgotten. Anyway November was terrifying because of the dark. Jeremy had some theory that he was the dark and I was the light-the light part of him perhaps – I don’t know. He dominated, and as it grew darker he dominated more.”

“Did you fight?”

“Never.”

“You should have fought and fought and fought. Love should be angry, otherwise there is no ferocity. And then it just doesn’t matter. It could be anyone’s love affair, any ordinary person’s love affair.”

“How do you know this? You never had a man.”

“Listen, I’ve been inventing angry love affairs since I was nine. It was my life’s work. Who needs a real man? They’re all so unpredictable and they never get angry at the right times or say the appropriate things. They only interfere with the inventing. Anyway, one thing I know for certain: all love affairs are pure fiction and if two people are imagining the same love affair it just gets too complicated. Every love affair I ever invented was filled with lies, betrayals, lust,
double-crossings, madness, imprisonment, and death. White feathers! Hrumph! How banal! But I like the sea part and the seaweed on the windows. As if the tourist home had gone for an ocean voyage while you were sleeping or as if it had been attacked by the sea. The trouble is I’ve never lived near it, the sea, that is, but I don’t think you can enter the sea when you are angry. You can’t participate. You can only stand and stare at it or float over it in a boat or swim in it with long, graceful strokes. Therefore I prefer the earth, the moor, where you can run and run and run. Away. Towards. It doesn’t really matter which.”

“I never really ran anywhere,” said Arianna, “except over to the balloon on the word ‘sure.’”

“What about walks by the sea? Surely you and Jeremy took walks by the sea.”

“Not often. Outside the room he would become strange … distant; as if, as if he were having a problem with space. Nothing locking us in together. Which is odd, now I think about it, because space was already his profession and later became mine. But not until after he changed. Then, after that, we were always sailing away from each other.”