PART TWO
The Upstairs Room
And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven–
–EMILY DICKINSON
“LET ME IN, let me in…. I’ve been lost on the moor for twenty years.”
Then the glass shatters, the arm extends past the window’s teeth into the warmth of the room. The little cold hand that brings a sample of weather with it into the claustrophobic interior. The shards of glass on the dusty blanket. The delicate, damp, determined hand reaching forward. One man’s hysterical, murderous fear.
“I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.”
The wounding. The wrist attacking broken glass. The only evidence of this frantic attempt a blanket soaked with blood. And even that an hallucination.
“Let me in,” thinks Ann, “I’ve been a waif for twenty years.”
She has brought Arthur with her. A part of him has accompanied part of her into this strange geography.
Ann sits, now, out on the West Yorkshire moors on a rock, under a leaden sky and thinks, I’ll never be free of this. She thinks, let me in, let me in. She who has only recently managed to get herself out.
She has memorized the words of the first scene in Wuthering Heights. She cannot shake its weather, cannot stop responding to the descriptions.
“Merely the branch of a fir tree that touched my lattice as the blast wailed by,” and “the gusty wind, the driving of the snow.” I was, she thinks, mistaken. I was misperceived as a harmless piece of vegetation tapping on the glass that separated us. The word “merely” bruises her. The words “detected the disturber” bring tears to her eyes. I was a disturber, she thinks, then more than that … and then the full fury of the nightmare was upon him.
It is as if thinking of that early scene at this moment, when she has left Arthur and has dragged her limping self out into the weather, identifies it, surely, as his; as if he had taken one of his immaculately sharpened pencils and had drawn a fine line beside the passage to bring it to her attention. “Look, here we are, you and I,” he might have said, “This is the nature of our relationship: you trying to get in, me trying to keep you out. The war, the constant war between us.”
She rises now to continue her walk on the narrow path that crosses the moor. Now and then she passes an abandoned farm whose buildings are so black they appear to have been burnt by a mysterious, indifferent fire. From their glassless windows hang the frail lines of broken mullion. Around them, like soft grey clouds, lurk clumps of empty-eyed sheep. Ann has already seen several rotting carcasses, remnants of those animals who, for one reason or another, were unable to survive the winter. Unable to survive exposure.
The thing about weather, thinks Ann as she climbs a wooden stile over a drystone wall, the thing about weather is that you either embrace it or you shelter yourself from it. Either way, it can extinguish the flame, with wind and rain on the one hand, or, if you run from it, if you hide in a closed space, the fire suffocates from lack of oxygen.
God, this sky, she thinks, this uncertain earth. Her feet slide on mud and press into boggy places. Overhead marches platoon after platoon of clouds bringing who knows what kinds of storm fronts, snow, or hail, an abrupt change of season. Bringing, for certain, nothing soft or warm. A consecutive series of polar statements.
She passes the Brontë waterfall, which has become a meaningless trickle since the reservoir was created late in the last century. She crosses Sladen Beck. There is water too, she thinks, and it changes with weather. The rain begins and Ann opens her black umbrella, which is almost immediately snatched from her by the wind. She pauses momentarily to watch it tumble over the heather, a wounded bat trying unsuccessfully to reassemble the mechanism necessary for flight. Then she laughs aloud. Perhaps out here everything will be blown away from her and she will return to her rented cottage and eventually to Canada, light, unencumbered, without any burdens at all.
Top Withins, the rumoured site of Wuthering Heights, is still three miles away. “A rough road and a sad heart to follow it.” Ann trudges along in the rain, letting it touch her bare hands and face, watching the clouds carry curtain after curtain towards her. Ghost magi bringing swaths of dusky silk. All around her, wet heather shivers under air currents and sheep feed on couch grass. Ann feels the sweep, the rhythm of walking settle into her limbs. Her strides become longer as if her legs have begun to grow. Her hips ache with new energy.
By the time she reaches the height of the moor, the ruin that purports to be the home of Heathcliff, every part of her that is not covered by her anorak is soaked through. She is enveloped by weather and her skin drinks moisture. She is bursting with something resembling hope, resembling joy, and she turns to face the landscape, the open miles of view that the weather caresses without comment. And then her small body; alone in enormous space, the only heartbeat in a sea of dark hills.
“Open, open, open!” she shouts into the wind, swinging her arms in circles from her shoulder joints. “Space,” she cries. “Air!” Angels, she recalls, have bodies composed of thick air. The wind assaults her with magnificent indifference and she inhales all of it that she can, loving the touch of it on her scalp when it lifts her hair, the itch of its sleet upon her cheek. She believes that the wind has moved past her inner ear, has invaded the folds of her brain and is polishing them with a great, cold, cleansing roar. Planets whirling out of her sky into some other destiny. Every root of each low scrub plant straining towards ether, towards freedom.
Then Arthur speaks in her memory and Ann’s arms fall to her sides. “God damn him,” she mutters, his remembered words pulling her back to the rooms along the highway. Aware of her solitude in the somber landscape, she straightens her spine and raises her voice. “God damn him!” she announces to the miles of heather.
And then she is shouting again: “I want him to want me! I want him to want me! I want him to want this!” She gestures wildly towards both earth and air. “Why can’t he want this?”
She begins to run, escalating her descent from the heights; hills becoming a brown smear on either side of her. Magically, when she slows to a walk, wet heather bursts into colour, prismatic, under the touch of the sun.
Just before she leaves the moor for the day, Ann finds the umbrella that the wind snatched, broken against a stone wall. Twisted spokes, torn fabric. She leaves it there. It is an artificial form of shelter, after all, which has been mutilated, far beyond all hope of repair, by all this wonderful weather.
And even on dark days Ann awakens to an infusion of light in the cottage she has rented in Stanbury. Designed as a workshop for an eighteenth-century hand-loom weaver, her bedroom is surrounded by windows through which light blasts, and around whose panes creeps the persistent wind.
Everything in the room trembles under the influence of currents of air; the papers on the desk, the thin curtains, even, during the day, Ann’s cotton nightgown where it hangs from a hook on the door. At times this odd interior wind is so strong it ruffles the pages of Emily Brontë’s Collected Poems, which Ann has left open on her night table.
After four or five days Ann is obsessed by the wind. It both pleases and perplexes her. It scatters the mail that the postman leaves at the door, dispersing her one link to her past, her real life. It encourages or kills her difficult coal fire–the only source of heat in the cottage. It rattles at the coal cellar door at night like a vigilante group demanding entrance. It blows into her dreams.
When she walks over the moor the wind causes a knife of pain, straight through her neck just below ear level. It makes all the bracken and bilberry and heather swell and undulate, as if some unknown substance beneath the earth’s surface had just reached boiling point.
Each day Ann walks on the moor, mostly across Sladen Beck and along the footpath that leads into Haworth, home of the Brontës. She enters the village through the grave
yard, which surrounds the parsonage where her subject lived her weird, closeted life and scribbled her dark book. The cemetery is crowded with green-black stones and filled with the noise of angry rooks who croak, “Wind, wind, wind!” in outrage and panic at Ann’s approach.
She is propelled by currents of air into the parsonage museum through the gift shop. This space Ann ignores: its Brontë calendars and bookmarks and cookbooks and paperweights – although, she muses, she could use a paperweight now to protect pages from the advances of wind.
She walks through the rooms of the house; each space put to death and then preserved as a museum. Glass cases. Emily’s writing desk, Charlotte’s shoes, their juvenilia, the dog Keeper’s collar-too large fop an ordinary dog and made out of shining brass. The view from each window includes tombstones, then the chimney pots and shale roofs of the little town.
When Ann arrives at the parsonage library, she asks for the diary that was kept by the stationer who sold Emily Brontë her writing paper. In it he reports, combining gossip and legend, some of the writer’s activities: the time she rescued Branwell from flaming bedclothes, the time she removed Keeper from the throat of another snarling dog, her ability to bake bread, read German, and shoot pistols all at the same time. None of this describes weather; but weather exists, Ann believes, in levels of engagement. Ann wants to solve the problem of how a woman so withdrawn could also be so engaged with life. Heathcliff, she has decided, was the moor, and Catherine, she has even more recently decided, was the wind.
Their relationship caused storm.
“PAPA,” SAID Emily, “I am remembering Papa. Papa reading the Leeds Intelligencer. Papa dining alone. Papa taking down the curtains. Papa climbing stairs. Papa in the morning wrapping flannel round his throat. Papa’s Bible readings.”
“Papa,” Arianna echoed. “Papa staring at the wall. Papa and his bottle. Papa talking to the voices. Papa sleeping in the afternoon. Papa’s face like a grey mask. Papa’s hands shaking.”
Emily turned her eyes towards the little grey village in the distance. “Mama died,” she said, “and Papa never mentioned her. Someone, Tabby, I think, told me that he cut the arms off her best silk dress. I imagined her armless, then. A woman without arms: one who could not sew or draw or write or cook or hold me. I imagined that she died from severed arms.”
“Mama died,” said Arianna, “coughing in the morning. Horses stood outside on the street and stamped their hoofs. Then they carried her away. Papa returned with a bottle. He never looked towards the window. He spoke to voices that I couldn’t hear and there was no light around him. He would never draw the curtains back, open them to morning.”
Emily stood knee-deep in heather. “Papa feared fire and so there were no curtains. I imagined rooms of flaming fabric: all the drapery ablaze and Papa’s furious shadow growing on the wall. Papa loved guns. He taught me how to shoot, standing near the back wall of the graveyard, firing at air. After breakfast Papa told me stories about harpies, about the love-talker, about silkies. Papa said the word ‘Ireland’ and his face changed.”
“Papa only spoke to voices and a bottle. Sometimes he sang, weakly, songs I couldn’t hear, singing to the bottle, holding it in the crook of his arm as he might have held a child.”
“Papa never held us. He delivered sermons, shot his pistols out naked windows, daydreamed fame for Branwell, took his meals alone.”
“Papa drank a river of whisky, swallowing his nightmares.”
Emily lifted her pale hand and touched Arianna’s shoulder. “Every nightmare Papa ever had,” she said, “came true. He taught me how to shoot a pistol out towards the moor. He said that we were murdering the wind.”
ANN DECIDES that today she will walk the Ponden Kirk; that great outcropping of rock that so often sheltered Heathcliff and Catherine when they were children. Peniston Crag, Emily Brontë had called it in the book.
She sets out from the cottage by way of the narrow, walled road that climbs towards the moor. Black stones tower on either side of her, a light mist softens the view, which at this moment includes only the dark quarried walls and the pot-holed, sloppy asphalt that barely covers the track beneath. Shrinking puddles here and there reflect the sky, in an unusual manner, for the weather has turned surprisingly dry; and the atmosphere above, and hence on the surface of these small enclosed bodies of water, is bright blue. Beyond the tall drystone barriers Ann hears sheep nudge and push in a determined attempt to claim another square inch of grass. Occasionally, a desperate bleating cry floats over the wall, for lambs have been born in great numbers over the last few weeks and they all seem to suffer from some form of inexplicable terror.
The road tilts forward, becoming steeper, like a black banner swaying before her in a parade, and still Ann’s vision is arrested by walls. But the wind has reached her face and she identifies, a quarter of a mile ahead, the stile she must climb to reach the footpath on the higher ground. When she steps up and over the little ladder, the sky and the earth burst open all around her, more startling, more wonderful because of the restricted approach. “No trees!” she whispers, astounded as always by this phenomenon.
Beyond the curve of three solid hills Ann can see the granite cliff, and she leaves the path, which by now is almost familiar to her, in order to move, magnet-like, towards its metal. Her boots are drawn towards the centre of the earth by oozing marsh and pushed away again by springy turf. She remembers the scene where Catherine and Heathcliff run all the way down from the Heights to Thrushcross Grange and Catherine loses her slipper in the bog. Ponden Hall, the supposed site of the Grange, sits now on Ann’s right, a small dark rectangle in the distance, surrounded by the leafless tangle of the valley trees. It is still inhabited and sometimes, returning from the moor in the late afternoon, Ann has seen lights appear in its tiny far-off windows, one by one, as if an interior fire were moving from room to room of the house. The cry of confused infant sheep is carried by the wind from behind a small hill, and then grouse, invisible, deep in the grass, calling, “Go back, go back, go back!”
Going forward with difficulty in this trackless region, Ann sees a wide pillar of smoke bubbling from behind an abandoned farm and wonders if here, as in other obscure regions, the Tierra del Fuegos of the earth, there are unaccountable fires. Fires that spring into being for no reason, as if they were the vocabulary of a landscape whose passions must speak, can no longer keep silent. Secret deathless fires, spontaneous and inexhaustible. Ann thinks of the bog-burst she has read about, which almost swallowed the Brontës in their infancy when they were out walking. Walking a century ago where she is walking now. She believes in the bog-burst, believes that there are moments when the calm earth loses its composure: begins to mimic the violence at the heart of weather.
Arthur’s absence flickers for several minutes in her own heart – a geographically remote, inexplicable fire – and all she had wanted him to feel burns there.
Ann skirts a broken wall, keeping close to its flank in order to avoid a marshy area to her left, carefully stepping from tuft of yellow grass to tuft of yellow grass; mind in the rooms along the Canadian highway, eyes on the Yorkshire ground. She is, therefore, face to face with the man responsible for the smoke before she has a chance to change direction or to let her shyness compose an acceptable space between them. Acknowledgement is now necessary-unavoidable.
“Here now,” he says automatically, “don’t go that way. I’ve got it going nicely there.”
As he speaks Ann notices a perfect square of fire, the size of a suburban lot, burning behind him, and how his face and hands are blackened by smoke.
“Why,” she asks, surprised at her own inquisitiveness, “are you burning the moor?”
“For better growth later in spring.” He looks at the sky for a moment as he speaks, then at Ann. “They …,” he tips his cap in the direction of a far flock, safely gathered on a distant hillside, “they prefer newer grass. Not that it should matter to them then, or now. Walk over there. It sometimes
advances fast … though it will stop, for certain, at the bog.”
Ann notices the bright blue eyes … startling in the midst of the blackened face.
“I’m black as coal pit,” he admits. “From the burning,” he adds, awkward in the face of her scrutiny.
Ann looks back to the escarpment she has been trying to reach. “Can I get there from here?” she asks, pointing.
“Not without ruining your boots in the bog you can’t. And what is it that brings you out here running with the wind? You aren’t hunting grouse, or rabbit, that’s one thing sure.”
“I’m trying to reach Ponden Kirk.”
“What on earth is the purpose in that?”
Ann confesses her fascination with the Brontës and the grass-burner’s eyes glaze slightly. Tourists for him have become, over the years, a form of litter on the moor. They rarely appear, though, in this season.
“It’s research,” Ann says in self-defence, sensing his disapproval, wanting to justify her presence in his territory.
“I myself,” he says, “have spent my time without searching, so could not be persuaded to begin re-searching.” He pauses for a moment, awaiting her laugh. When it doesn’t come, it is because Ann has missed his humour, not because she has rejected it. Unaware of this, he turns again towards the practical, the native giving advice on the peculiarities of his own geography. “Well, you’ll have trouble searching today,” he comments, wryly. “The top there will still have ice. And you’ve taken the wrong track, that’s the truth. In fact you’ve departed from the track altogether. You should have turned right at Middle Withins – the last farm – and now it will take too long.” He consults his watch. “Dreadful and dark by five-thirty today. Excuse me.” He hastily rakes some of the burned grass back into the flames and, as he turns, Ann sees that the hair on his head, which she had assumed to be dark is, when untouched by smoke, in fact very fair, perhaps even white.
Changing Heaven Page 12