Changing Heaven Read online

  But Arthur, facing in the opposite direction, does not see this. He is too busy with the flaming drapery, too busy trying – as his father sees when he opens the door-to put the fire out with his bare hands.

  ANN’S MOTHER is brushing out her daughter’s hair, preparing her for the dance in the Presbyterian church basement.

  In the face of this dance, this reality, which looms as large as a freighter in the harbour of her imagination, Ann is unable to exchange her auburn curls for the preferred long black curtain of hair. She is unable, too, to exchange her grey pleated skirt and cashmere sweater for a wind-tossed dark cloak, dampened by rain. The failure of her imagination, at this point, appals her. As she looks out the kitchen window she sees only the back of the neighbouring house on Glen Grove Avenue, several fruit trees whose leaves detach in a light wind, Toronto autumn twilight, and her own garage. Tonight is her first dance. She is fourteen.

  “Sit still,” her mother says.

  Ann stiffens the muscles in her neck against the pull of the brush. Everything around her is in sharp focus; the waxed linoleum, the glass-covered kitchen clock, the ungainly handle and buckle lock on the refrigerator door, one knife and one fork on the gleaming kitchen table. She is terrified, practically paralyzed. After the torturous brushing of hair Ann will be forced, by her mother, to eat. Then she will be forced, by her mother, to go to the dance.

  “Aren’t you going to have supper?” she asks, now.

  “Daddy’s coming home later.”

  “Daddy’s coming home tonight?”

  “You knew that,” says Ann’s mother, tying a ribbon in Ann’s hair-which has grown, under the attentions of the brush, into something resembling brown candy floss. “Business,” she explains.

  Sometimes Ann’s father inhabits a territory called Ungava, a vast trackless region in Arctic Quebec where there may or may not be minerals. Sometimes Ann’s father inhabits a territory called “the bush,” the middle north of eight out of ten Canadian provinces, where there also may or may not be minerals. Sometimes he inhabits a region called Bay Street, where he attempts to convince millionaires that minerals exist in the other two regions, whether they do or not. The territory that he rarely inhabits is this kitchen, where Ann is experiencing a terror of anticipation concerning a church basement. Though graced by a startling imagination, (as evidenced by his belief in invisible minerals), and given to spectacular appearances, in bush planes, near the docks of Ann’s various summer camps, Ann’s father is neither vain nor showy. He prefers the midnight chill of an Arctic tent or a cabin overheated by wood-stove to the comfort of wall-to-wall carpets and French Provincial furniture. He is hardly ever home.

  “Does he … did he know about the dance?” asks Ann.

  “I don’t know. …” Ann’s mother is removing a tuna fish casserole from the oven. “I don’t think so … why?”

  Ann does not wish to risk the possibility of the spectacular appearance of a bush plane on the church lawn. Once, her father buzzed one of her backyard birthday parties and five little girls ran tearfully home.

  “Oh … nothing,” she says.

  She closes her eyes tight, inhales the fishy odour of the casserole and attempts to be Catherine preparing for the arrival of Edgar Linton at Wuthering Heights. No banal bush planes there, buzzing doggedly through wind. There, financial security rides up from the valley to the heights in a stunning leather coach, pulled by charcoal-coloured horses. The calendar on the wall would not reveal her father’s itinerary (Ungava, Goose Bay, Yellowknife), would sport instead a series of grim black crosses made by Heathcliff on the days that Catherine had not spent with him. And Heathcliff, himself, would be brooding about this; in candlelight, in firelight, in moonlight. But he could never successfully brood, Ann knows, under the fluorescent light over this kitchen sink. Sink light, thinks Ann, attempting to banish it with her imagination.

  But it is no use. Fear causes even the vaguest of animals to pay attention. The outer world has never been so clear.

  Ann is afraid of two things: one is a certainty and the other is almost a certainty. She is afraid that there will be no one resembling Heathcliff in the church basement-a certainty–and she is afraid that no one will ask her to dance. Her mother, driving Ann through the autumnal streets that lead towards the dance, is afraid of something else altogether.

  After she has stopped the car near the church door she looks directly into her daughter’s eyes. “This is your first dance,” she says.

  “Yes, mother.”

  “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.

  EVERY 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 cap
able 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 sam
e 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.”

  ANN’S LONG voyage to the rented room.

  There are midnight skies and suggestions of a meteor shower. This is summer: heat, and strange inexplicable lightning.

  They had known each other superficially for some time; had attended the same parties, taught at the same college, moved in the same circles. Still, they had never spoken, at least not intimately, and when they touched hands, or kissed in the perfunctory way that acquaintances do, it had been awkward, a collision, something to be pulled away from quickly, with embarrassment, before one moves on to the next meaningless greeting.