Changing Heaven (30 page)

“You never really meant to hurt me, did you?” she asks.

“No.”

“I know that now … and because I know it … you’ll never hurt me again.”

They crawl, shaky, exhausted, into bed at the beginning of a grey, weak dawn. Ann has begun to weep, her talk de-escalating into a choked whisper. “I’m not unhappy,” she sobs, her voice becoming less and less audible. “There are all these miracles around us.”

Outside, the rain has stopped. The canal has become an aluminum-grey replica of the sky, dotted here and there with floating objects that pass slowly under the nearest bridge. One of these is a dead bird which, during the night, has been taken on a complicated tour of the city. Positioned with its wings outstretched on the opaque, featureless surface, it appears to be coasting calmly through air on a benign wind. But this is neither flight nor freedom, and when the small boat with the wire basket cleans the canal in an hour or so the bird will enter a steel bin with all the other garbage.

“I’m not unhappy,” Ann says to her pillow, “because of this wonderful chain of miracles.”

Arthur has turned his face to the wall, has fallen down a well of sleep so deep not a single detail of his angels appears in his black dreams.

“E
MILY
, I
AM
getting very tired, and you don’t seem as clear to me as you used to.” Arianna looked earnestly at her friend. “Is it possible that we have talked ourselves silent?”

Sh-h-h … sh-h-h
, whispered the wind.

They had discussed everything, each nuance of their lifetime of emotion, all the frivolous details of taste: favourite jams, best hymns, secret pleasures, most becoming colours, hair styles, fashions, methods of building fires, the making of watercolours, music, sewing machines, pony traps, embroidered cushions. Emily had spent several weeks describing a wooden tray she had painted with elaborate birds, and had later pitched into a fire. They had haunted every inch of this particular moor, making significant appearances near standing stones for the benefit of unsuspecting solitary travellers. This activity was allowed, now, by Emily, to prove that she was not narrow-minded about humanity, she merely preferred to inhabit unpopulated wastes. Branwell had fallen in once or twice, temporarily expelled for forms of behaviour he had no desire to explain. He had amused Arianna with descriptions of Emily’s behaviour as a child, had quarrelled constantly with his sister, and was conveniently called back to his celestial abode just as he was beginning to sigh melodramatically and make sheep’s eyes at the ghost of the balloonist.

“How awful he is!” Emily would announce after his re-ascension. “How awful he is! How wonderful!”

Now, nearly a century after Arianna’s arrival, they leaned, rather anemically, against the broken walls of the farmhouse called Top Withins while Emily quietly cursed the Power Authority for turning her favourite glens into reservoirs.

“You knew they were there,” Arianna argued, “they were there when I fell in. They’ve been here as long as I have, longer in fact. I told you. I glimpsed myself for the last time in one of them.”

Emily paid no attention. “Imagine,” she grumbled, “calling yourself the Power Authority, combining those two words into one name. It’s worse than Mr. Capital H!”

It was then that Arianna complained of feeling weak. “We never leap up into the air like we used to,” she said, “and we don’t make time go backwards any more. We just don’t seem to have the strength to control it. Why don’t you make the reservoirs disappear, Emily? You’d feel a lot better. Let’s go back to the day of your funeral, or even Charlotte’s funeral. Everything was much more picturesque.”

“I suppose we should,” said Emily listlessly. Both ghosts made an effort to concentrate. The waters of Ponden Reservoir began to shrink. Workmen appeared, carefully lifting one stone at a time and carrying them to waiting wagons. These were pushed by draught horses who stepped gingerly backwards towards the Peniston quarry. And then, when the walls were almost dismantled, both ghosts collapsed. The reservoirs filled with water and behind their backs Top Withins fell into ruin.

“It looks,” sighed Emily, “as if for some reason or other, we can no longer transcend time. We’re attached to it again. What can this mean?”

“I think it means that you should tell me what happened to me. I think it means we are not going to be together too much longer. You should tell me, Emily, before it’s too late.”

“You fell out of a balloon.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? What makes you so certain that I know?”

“You know everything.”

“Why should I have to be the one to tell you?”

“You tell me everything.”

“Maybe Branwell will be expelled again. He can tell you.”

“I don’t think he knows. Besides, the last time he was here he spoke only in Latin … and I couldn’t understand him … or you. The two of you making classical jokes at my expense. Anyway, we haven’t seen him for a long, long time.”

Time … time
, barked the wind.

Emily looked up toward heaven. “You don’t suppose he’s reformed?”

“Perhaps.”

“If that’s the case, then all is scattered and everything will just fall away.” Emily eyed Arianna closely. “Do you still want to haunt Jeremy?”

“I’m not certain …” said Arianna slowly, “but, you know, I really don’t think that I do. Now I just want to know.”

The wind ripped three or four clouds in half and broken light scattered itself over the hills.

“That kind of light looks like falling angels,” said Emily sadly. “It’s odd, but there’s very little about that kind of sunlight that resembles ghosts.”

Arianna looked for comfort at several stone outcroppings, some close, some far away. These never changed regardless of the games the spirits had played with time. “Emily,” she eventually said in a soft, hollow voice, “do ghosts ever just … stop?”

Emily did not reply, because as the wind gathered the sunlight up in its arms and sealed it again behind the clouds, both women became aware of the answer to the question.

A
RTHUR TELLS
her that she cannot come with him when he makes his daily journey to the Scuola. She has not stopped talking. Each sentence of his is transformed by her into several paragraphs.

“It’s not that I have to be with you all the time everywhere,” she says, “but I have to be with you all the time here. Anywhere else it’s all right, my not being with you because, in a way, I really
am
with you all the time in my mind. But here, I want to see everything the way you see it. Even before I found you I saw some of the angels the way you would see them. I know I did because I would be looking and looking in the mirror at some of the angels, at the light of their faces and suddenly I would have this flash and I would know that this one or that one was a particular angel of yours because of the way it suddenly moved me. I must be with you while I am in this city. That’s why I came here. That’s why you wanted me to come here, why you wrote the letter.”

He walks quickly through the streets to lose her voice in the crowds but she follows him doggedly. He is pale, drained, weak … filled alternately with fear and compassion. He desperately wants her to stop, her dark love, her talk. But she does not stop and he is mesmerized by her obsession, half believes that it carried across the ocean, forced him to write and mail that one unwise sentence. The beginning of the epic she is speaking now.

“If I could paint the way I feel about you,” she says, “it would be all explosions of light and bright: pure lightning and wind … but clear. Summer sheet lightning and Arctic winds in a clear sky. Everything moving and pulsing and orbiting and just being! Shimmering! It’s the wind, you
know, that makes things shimmer; leaves, ponds … look, the canal is shimmering. The sun makes things shine, glare, but it needs wind to create a shimmer. When you touch me I swear I start to shimmer. I can’t help it. I know you have the rest of your life. I know this. But think what you are to me. I can hardly sleep at all because I am so alive with you, so awake. And it doesn’t matter that I don’t sleep. It hasn’t affected me at all because of the energy I feel in your presence.”

Arthur looks at her drawn face and trembling hands and silently disagrees. He does not know what to do, vows to expel her, then inexplicably finds himself burying his face in her hair. Later, he is flung into a devastating sea of guilt and remorse. Please stop, Ann, he says silently, please, please leave me. If she would only stop talking he might be able to explain himself to her, to himself. Last night she fell asleep in the middle of a sentence and awakened two hours later, at dawn, picking the thread of words up exactly where she had unwillingly dropped it.

He has tried to move the ship of conversation into other ports. How, he asks, is her work going, her book? She tells him that the book, she now knows, is not really about weather as such, it is really about him, about her response to him, which, she says, is just like the emotional weather
of Wuthering Heights
. Without him, she explains, she never would have understood this the way she does now. And perhaps, she suggests, without her he would never have been able, really able, to understand Tintoretto.

A part of him wonders if this last statement might not be true. Then his daily self shouts out in panic, for God’s sake don’t listen! Make her stop!

On the steps of Scuola he pleads with her. “Please, Ann,” he says, “I must look at the ceilings alone.” To his surprise he feels his eyes filling with tears. “Please … I have to take some notes.”

“I have wonderful ideas for your notes … you could do a whole section on scribes. What kind of notes were they
taking, I wonder? Probably ones very similar to yours. There is something of the Old Testament prophet
and
something of the New Testament Evangelist in you, you know.”

“Please
Ann,” he whispers chokingly, “let me go up there alone.”

Ann is startled by this first suggestion of emotion in his voice. “Alone …?” she echoes. They walk through the entrance together but on the ground floor she finally stops following, talking, and he ascends the staircase by himself.

She stands stunned, arrested in mid-sail, in front of the two paintings that Arthur pointed out the day she found him. The two female saints are remarkably calm in the centre of storm-torn landscapes, their bodies perched on the edges of shimmering streams. While palm fronds rake the air above them, their minds occupy the serene country of aftermath. Whatever it was they were meant to learn from experience has been taught, reflected upon, and allowed to drift away. Everything they are now, emotionally, is contained in the landscape in which they sit. The past is somewhere else, beyond the borders of the gold frame that holds them. Ann sees this and almost understands its possibilities. Then, she turns and the opposite wall reveals an aggressive angel hurling himself through a brick wall in order to bring impossible news to a startled Virgin Mary. A thunderstorm of
putti
and the Holy Ghost complete this invasion.

Suddenly Ann is very tired. She slumps onto a wooden bench where she sits for several hours staring at the two lone, contemplative women. Once in a while she closes her eyes and places the back of her head against the wall. Behind her an angel is frozen forever in the act of delivering a brutal message. In front of her two silent women occupy the eventless regions where no more stupendous announcements are necessary.

Walking back to the room Ann resumes her monologue. She is speaking about the wind, but now even Arthur knows that his name could just as well be substituted for every noun she articulates.

“Isn’t it funny,” she says, “how, because this city is all palaces and churches and museums and restaurants and hotels and shops and water and piazzas and bridges, how nothing bends in the wind here. Everything that can move at all does so awkwardly. It flaps,” she points to a café awning, “or, when the wind gets strong enough, it crashes and smashes. If the wind got strong enough those tables would tumble around in it and those glasses would smash. There are no trees or grasses, you see, that’s why nothing bends. The wind has to get really strong and then it would have to do damage before it would be felt at all.”