Changing Heaven (26 page)

She was gone. And so was he. They were so marvellously gone from each other. Touch, talk, impossible. While he had floated over open water, he had sent cryptic messages to her by means of buoys. One had said,
My pale rose, I carry you here, a weightless light, near my heart
. Another:
Angel that you are now, I give you colour, have seen your splendid wings awaken … a borealis
. The hurling of the buoys over the edge of the basket had filled him with pleasure. He watched them somersault through air and then waited to see and hear them splash into the frigid water. Then he imagined their complicated journey to the country where she now lived; the fiords of
nothing
, the long estuaries of
never
, the country of
nowhere. Ah, maiden of feathers and snow
, he had written on the piece of paper attached to the third buoy,
because you are nowhere, you have entered the ocean of everything. I’ve seen your hair in the sun’s rays and you
crystallize
around me. Small drifts of you fill the folds of my clothing
.

Then there was the moment when the dark fluid beneath him changed texture, became grey, opaque. The first evidence of polar ice. The ruffle on the bottom of the Arctic skirt. This was followed by painful, dazzling, unbroken white and the mountains of Spitzbergen, an enchanted glass castle on the horizon.

He was delighted, charmed by the snow-covered ice, even though it effectively put an end to his water messages. He loved to watch the wind play with the surface, creating small blizzards with available snow, without the help of clouds. The low sun wheeled across a sky so blue it was impossible to believe. Jeremy felt, in fact, that blue was absolutely the wrong name for the colour of that sky. It needed something clearer: a sound composed of long vowels and knife-sharp consonants. Something like
strike
or
take
.

From now on his messages to Arianna would, of necessity, be airborne. These, of course, would be the purest statements of all. She had been, he remembered, afraid of the
water, an element that really had nothing to do with who she was/had been. With communication in mind, he had brought with him a cage of untrained white pigeons. Where these birds eventually landed mattered little as long as they flew away from him, because there was one thing certain about Arianna’s whereabouts, and that was that she was away from him.

Now, anchored over Edge Island, he began to compose the airborne messages, ones that he knew had to be beautiful, exact, and pure. The paper, he decided, would not be folded, would rather trail from the ankle of each bird, banner-like across the sky. For this reason he tore several pieces of paper into long ribbons and then anchoring these with a milk-white paperweight on his small wicker table, he pulled out his pencil and began to write.

That night the aurora borealis did not appear. Instead there was a carpet of stars so thick, a meadow so crowded with bright flowers, that Jeremy stood at the outer edge of the wicker gondola, believing that, had he wanted to, he could have taken one or more on the journey with him. “Oh, Polly,” he whispered as all sense of space-upper, lower, near, far-disappeared. “Oh, Polly … see how close the farthest distances are.”

He was rapturously happy. He had never been so deeply in love. Alone, on a suspended wicker floor, he bowed and began to waltz, under the celestial grandeur, with an invisible partner.

It had been days and days since he had felt the cold.

The next morning, the wind, co-operating, blew lightly in a north-eastern direction. Jeremy cut his drag line and, with compass in hand, manipulated the white sail at the front of the balloon into the correct position. He looked through his mother-of-pearl field glasses towards the north for some minutes. Then, having established utter emptiness, he
began to dispatch his white birds. In a vacant region it is unnecessary to complete any task in haste, and knowing this, he allowed an hour or two to pass after each release.

The small banner attached to the first bird said:
Oh, white maiden, frost’s mistress, how I long for your icicle thighs
.

It was the moment when his hands opened and the bird’s wings unfolded that he most wanted to freeze in his memory. He could stand outside himself now and see the exact image he was creating: his dark form in all the endless bright, his arms raised, the confusion of flight’s inception bursting from his hands. The message lifting heavenward like a banderole of prayer emerging from the mouth of a painted saint.

I have seen you in ice floes
, the second message read,
silver in your veins, the gentle snowdrifts that are your breasts
.

The third bird had shadows of grey here and there on its white feathers. Jeremy chose it for his darkest message.

You are night’s negative, the blaze on the other side of the globe; I cannot see your dawn but believe none the less in its shine
.

He floated over the mountains and glaciers of North East Land, noting Arctic foxes and their blue cousins who sometimes trailed behind them like shadows. Various birds visited the balloon: snow buntings, ivory gulls, Arctic terns. They seemed completely unafraid and would perch on the edge of the basket for hours. When he again left the land behind for a combination of solid ice and broken floes, he twice saw polar bears feasting on seals. Irregular swaths of blood on snow. Such purity. Such clearly documented, innocent murders were these fine red statements of survival.

Finally, in the middle of an afternoon (though by now he had stopped counting and so couldn’t say which afternoon), just as the sun began its descent below the horizon, when all the ice and bergs and hummocks had turned orange, he saw a surprisingly regular dome-shape coming into focus in the distance. “White Island,” he breathed,
astonished that because of its unbroken cap of ice it was, in fact, blue. A single cloud of approximately the same shape hung over its summit. The left side of the island was covered with shadow.

“Home,” shouted Jeremy, enjoying the sound of the word: a deep, bell sound in the emptiness all around him.

The balloon landed, scudding gently across a thin, icicle-shaped stone beach, the only exposed earth for hundreds of miles: an inexplicable dry lip on the edge of the island. Jeremy, standing on land for the first time in days, felt disoriented but content. He began, at once, to deflate the balloon. He had no intention of returning. “Home,” he said, almost sang as he watched the globe change shape, tilt to the right, and finally become a huge puddle of scarlet silk. Then he climbed back inside the gondola to prepare his evening meal of champagne,
pâté de foie gras
and hard tack. He toasted the island, himself, the collapsed balloon, and his cherished absentee.

It was now quite dark. The wind, having completed the task of propelling Jeremy to his intended destination, was still. Jeremy toasted the wind, but with less exuberance, wine dampening the excitement of his brain. Soon he climbed inside his reindeer-hide sleeping sack. He was almost at once lost in dreams of his dear departed, his abandoned one.

The following day was green! Pale green sky, emerald-green sun, very low, like a patinated bronze disc rolling along the edge of the horizon. The mountain of ice behind Jeremy had turned an interesting shade of turquoise, and behind it stood a half moon of an olive colour.

On the strange, naked beach the grey stones were blackish-green and scattered on top of them was the world’s oddest collection of driftwood: water-smoothed huge branches in whose erratic shapes Jeremy believed he could see suggestions of dark warriors, the ruins of Bavarian castles,
Bernini’s sepulchral monuments, The Albert Memorial, The Trevi Fountain, all tangled together and darkly silhouetted against the approaching ice. He stood off shore for some time, savouring the formations, playing the same visual games with them that he had played as a child with passing clouds. Curiosity eventually moved him closer and he discovered, amazed, that the currents of the world’s oceans had transported fragments of their nautical kills to these shores so that, mingled with the parts of the gigantic pines that had been ripped by turbulent spring waters from the banks of Siberian rivers, he found relics of demolished Norwegian sloops and Siberian river craft. These consisted of fishing floats, an elaborate desk, table legs, half of the face of a figurehead, a wooden bathtub, and something resembling a pulpit. All this wood, hundreds of miles above the spot where the last stunted tree struggled into existence.

As he ambled back towards the gondola, Jeremy noticed something just beyond the driftwood, which he took to be the skeleton of a small boat, but which, on further examination, proved to be a sledge. To the right of it there were two pieces of crumpled fabric-one plaid, one solid blue-and then, to his surprise, one boot; all of this strange, unreal in the greenish light. Jeremy began to examine the ground more carefully and found, to his great excitement, several leather notebooks, a bundle of letters, a tin box, a pair of field glasses, and a large case containing five cracked bottles of French champagne-all partly exposed but cemented to the ground by ice. On a neighbouring rock lay a perfectly beautiful compass glowing in the green light and pointing, relentlessly, towards the north.

Jeremy rushed back to the driftwood and gathered its smallest pieces for a fire, hungry for the words he would thaw out of the notebooks and letters. Arctic messages! The white truth! As he scurried over to the gondola to fetch matches, his foot slipped on the lip of the glacier and he fell towards the turquoise ice. It was then that he first
saw the emerald-green skull, floating there, six inches down.

During the next few days, when he wasn’t reading the journals and letters, he would stroll up and down the beach looking for and finding bones: thigh bones and scapulae, cages of ribs and one perfect spine curled, like a long still snake, on the rocks. But none of this would strike him hard in the chest the way the skull had. It was the recognition and then the denial of access that shocked him. It was the familiarity. How clear, how vulnerable the skull looked, encased forever in that cold, solid, unbreakable glass.

Jeremy knew that at this moment he was looking at himself.

“H
OW TRANQUIL
everything is becoming,” said Emily wistfully. “Spring was never one of my favourite seasons. These playful breezes annoy me. What has happened to the wind? We could go back to winter if you like.”

“I
like
spring,” said Arianna, “at least I like what I can remember of it from before him. Some of the girls from the factory would go out walking in the afternoon on Sundays, along the embankment or to the park. And when I was a little girl I
loved
spring. I remember birds from then, and daffodils. After him I couldn’t seem to bring the seasons into focus … or anything else that happened regularly, predictably: days of the week, holidays, mealtimes. All that seemed to be gone, after him, because his unpredictability became my reality.” Arianna looked straight ahead, right across the valley. She crossed her thin, translucent arms. “I suppose I should have liked spring when I was ballooning … it was the easiest time.”

“I think my early interest in the Arctic must have had something to do with my dislike of spring, my love of winter. You see,” Emily was incandescent with enthusiasm for her chosen season, “much more is happening in the winter. It is a more active state. None of this slow, practically imperceptible growth, this steady, dogged unfolding. The wind attacks everything around it, it makes instant contact, it changes the landscape in a great big hurry. A blizzard changes everything. It’s as if it cares about the landscape so much it simply has to touch it recklessly, has to fling itself upon it. Inappropriately sometimes, yes, but always fearlessly. Passionately. None of this gentle, sentimental coaxing.” Emily looked indignantly towards some
cowslips growing nearby. “Aren’t they a bit much, don’t you think? They positively scream, See how sweet I am! I’m a flower! I’m a flower!”

Arianna examined the little blossoms thinking that, yes, they were sweet and they were flowers.

“You’re just like my sister Charlotte,” said Emily. “She would write something ridiculous about those flowers I’m sure. Anne would have, too.” She paused and eyed Arianna closely. “As a matter of fact you
are
quite a lot like Charlotte. Proficient at pining, wanting to haunt, and all that.” Emily laughed. “You should have seen him. Nothing resembling a perfect profile there.”

“Was Charlotte in
love?”
asked Arianna, surprised. She had already heard quite a lot about the famous Charlotte, about the huge numbers of books that she had sold, about her desperate desire to please, socially. About her exhausting trips to London, and, in conjunction with these, about Emily’s utter refusal to have anything to do with the place.
Literati
, she had sniffed. Hrumph!

Emily was not answering, but she had stopped laughing.

“Well,
was
she in love?”