Changing Heaven (32 page)

“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
to 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.”

A
S 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.

Listen! Someone tells a story while bones bleach underground. The sky has changed a million times between the time of action and the time of documentation, will change again and again before the first sentence tumbles from the lips. Tell me. Listen. The dust the wind took clothes the glass of one warm window. The female faces of ghosts shine through to the interior. Tell me, Emily. Listen, Arianna. Here are some words; here is a voice: “The thing that irks
me most is this shattered prison, after all.” This is the language, the waiting, the desire: “I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart …” These are the words the story leads to. This is where we are now. Read the weather. Listen to the storm. “… But really with it, and in it … I shall be incomparably beyond and above you all.”

Listen to the story, Arianna.

Ann enters the room and John takes her hand. She feels the width, the generosity of his callused palm, can read by touch the story of his labours: the planer in his workshop and long days spent at looms; and hovering above the hard determined history of his hand, a mind free to gather the bright threads of his landscape, his community. The sweep of it. A long bolt of cloth, a track over the moorland, a linked chain of words. This is the jewellery he gives her.

John takes her hand and leads her to the fire. “I knew you would come back for the story of the sky.”

“How did you know?”

“I just knew.”

Outside, the ghosts flicker near the glass. They dissolve into each other and separate again. The wind passes through Emily’s mouth, hissing the word
listen
.

Ann looks into the orange heat of the fire, remembering what she saw there when she was ill, and what she saw there later. Arianna sees the interior, the large man, the details of the room.
Who is at home here?
she wonders.

“I waited for you here,” John says. “I didn’t go back to the farm, except in the afternoons, to work.”

Ann recognizes evidence of herself everywhere; her manuscript on the table, her pen, a huge exclamation mark across the last page, her waterproof jacket hanging from a nail on the wall, boots caked with mud from the moor lying
on a mat near the door, the singing kite near them, quiet, motionless. Her quilted hen. Her Staffordshire friends. She is calm, waiting for the story.

John does not let go of her hand and so she moves with him to the kitchen, where he performs small tasks, awkwardly, with one free hand, collecting glasses and the bottle, cold currant buns, and then setting the kettle for the tea. Eventually he releases her and she sits carefully in the accustomed chair, attentive, wanting the structure of the story to build itself in the room.

John brings steaming mugs of tea in from the kitchen, places them beside the bottle and the glasses on the fireside bench. Hungry for the first time in weeks, Ann has already eaten two currant buns. She watches John stir a lump of sugar into the hot cinnamon-coloured liquid and then add two drops of lemon to clarify it, the fruit a semi-circle of light in his huge hand. “And your young man,” he asks softly, shyly, “what of him?”

Ann colours slightly. “He’s gone back to Canada.” She pauses. “He’s not so young, John.” When John remains silent, she adds, “He’ll be home by now.”

“And you?”

“I will have to go back as well, but not for him.”

“Soon?”

“Not too soon.” Their eyes meet. They smile. The ghosts outside sway impatiently.

John relaxes in the chair, moving one massive shoulder into an upholstered corner. “The story I will tell you now is about a man who was known all over England as the ‘Sindbad of the Skies.’ He were a man who knew quite a lot about distance, quite a lot about the wind. He knew how to float away from things, but not how to travel nearer. As I said, he floated all over England but he came down to earth here in Stanbury, eighty years ago – or, at least, he realized that he’d come down to earth at that time. He’d actually been on ground for several years.” John picks up
the glass, moves a tablespoon of whisky around in his mouth, then swallows. “It were because of a woman.”

“What woman?”

“That you will discover in the story … providing there are no more questions.”

As John speaks, Arianna listens with such intensity that, behind the glass, her normally vaporous form becomes almost solid. Details of her physiognomy that Emily had never noticed before spring into view: eyelashes, a mole on her left cheek, the tendons in her neck.

“It were a life, for him, filled with one long farewell and the incessant fluttering of female handkerchiefs. He were a balloonist, moving from country fair to country fair, lifted into the sky away from village after village. The world were a map to him, something folded and carried in his back pocket. All was distance and he loved that. As far as he was concerned, nothing but the sky had any size whatsoever, everything else, you see, just fell away at his feet, just tumbled away into distance, and when the distance were great enough, into invisibility. It were perfect for him, this vocation, because he hated to be intimate, even with objects, and he knew he could travel the sky forever and never become intimate with it, it being so vast – infinite really, and the clouds, when they were there, being so large and mostly unapproachable and, to his delight, utterly lacking in substance, the few times that he did approach them.”

Arianna/Polly turns to Emily, speechless, amazed, and she sees that her ghostly companion’s lips are moving, are mimicking the shapes taken by the large man’s mouth.

“Who is telling the story, Emily?”

“Listen, Arianna”

“What a happy life he had, so far away from everything, so infinitely above and beyond. Birds bothered him occasionally-they were so detailed-but otherwise all was clear and empty. And quiet. In tact, when he travelled the sky, his senses were rarely assaulted by anything. He heard nothing
but wind. He saw nothing but sky, when he looked up, and that map of the earth when he looked down. He tasted nothing but ether. He smelled nothing at all. But, most important, he was touched by nothing but air.”