Returning, he regards her with humour. “It wouldn’t do to burn the full moor,” he says, his eyes smiling as he uses her words.
“So you are making better grass for the sheep?” Ann finds herself wanting, for reasons which elude her, to continue the conversation.
“Did I say that?”
“Yes, you said your sheep prefer newer grass.”
“They would like that, they would, that lot.” He jerks his head without averting his eyes from her face, towards the flock. “That lot, as I said, would prefer newer grass. But the truth is they’re not mine. Wall’s down as you can see.” He looks sadly at a pile of dark stones which have tumbled, over the winter, from the jig-saw linking of a drystone construction.
“You’re not a shepherd, then. Just a grass-burner?” This is Ann’s own attempt at humour, and it is greeted with precisely the same absence of laughter.
“It were scandal to be just that,” he announces, annoyed, not at all amused by her question. “I am a moor-edger, a carpenter, and a mill worker, a weaver. And it were real pity that I were not born a scholar like some.” Here he looks at her with disdain, then turns his head away to supervise the smoke.
After a few moments he looks at her again. “Your holiday cottage,” he says, “I fixed it. The walls and the windows. For all that you have me to thank.”
“I love the cottage,” says Ann, hoping to mollify him, overlooking altogether the fact that he knows where she lives, the location of the door she stepped out of only hours ago. “What is a moor-edger?” she asks.
“I’m an encloser. I push the moor back where it belongs and then I wall it out. So that I can grow something out here-something to eat, or, depending on walls, something for the flocks to eat.”
“How do you have time, working at the mill?”
“There is no more working at mill. Mills closed last year all up and down valley and those that didn’t will soon. So some of mills’ weavers, the fortunate ones, return to the hills where they might have stayed in the first place for all the good it did them to descend into the valleys and attach themselves to machines. Clogs to clogs in three generations.”
The moor-edger is silent, both hands resting on the handle of his rake.
Ann, almost embarrassed, whispers, for want of anything better, the words “dark satanic mills” and the smoke-covered man whispers the words “William Blake,” cutting into her statement almost before she has finished uttering it, startling her, for she has already constructed a persona for him. The simple moor farmer, the mill worker, the uneducated; one with no access to words.
“‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau. Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain. You throw the sand against the wind, and the wind blows it back again.’“ Now there’s something for you scholars to think about.”
“That’s Blake?” says Ann uncertainly.
“Himself,” sighs the moor-edger with all the resignation of one who spends time trying to reclaim unclaimable land. He looks to the west, whence the wind today is hurtling-carefully reading the light and the dark, the end of one performance, the beginning of another.
“You’d best return to the cottage now,” he says softly. “Bad weather on the way and early nightfall. Besides,” his eyes smile again, “mist comes down, or snow, and then there’s Heathcliff’s ghost.”
A few paces away from him, Ann stops and shouts a question back across the wind. “You push the moor back?” It is as if she doesn’t quite believe him; as if he is inventing his own activities.
“Yes,” he calls across a sea of moving grass, “either that or it advances into the reclaimed land.” The wind lifts his hair. “There’s no stopping it, the moor.”
Ann begins the return journey to the cottage. Ponden Kirk, forgotten for the time being, grows smaller and smaller just above her left shoulder. Above her right the weather advances like a stealthy, murderous army. By the time she reaches the enclosed lane it has begun to snow. The wind becomes muscular, aggressive; its hands flat against Ann’s back. Moor-edger, she thinks. The term has an oddly horticultural flavour, suggesting flower gardens, weedless and raked gravel paths; seems unsuited to the smoky man whose musical speech and clear eyes are staying with Ann as she walks. That and his easy humour, what she was able to understand of it. She laughs a little as she remembers one or two of his statements. The sheep weren’t his. “That lot …,” he called them.
Behind the walls the white animals are bleating, calling each other into a firmly packed cumulous formation, grouped to meet the storm.
In unity there is strength.
I think that I shall never keep, muses Ann, while the wind parts her hair into two equal portions at the back of her head, a thing as stupid as a sheep.
From the other side of the wall the adult animals demand safety, shelter. The lambs are quiet. Their panic has subsided in the face of focused fear.
“IN ALL THESE love affairs the loved one becomes the prison of the lover, Arianna.”
“You mean the prisoner?”
“No … no, I mean the prison, the dungeon. The loved one starts to acquire architectural properties; so much so that the bars the prisoner looks through could easily be the loved one’s ribcage and the lover knocking like a heart trying to break free. Each is held captive in a cage of the other’s bones. Each claims to be the heart. Each denies being the prison. And the terrifying truth is that the heart and the cage need each other for survival. Without the blood there is no bone. Without the rib there is no heart. I wrote a lot of poems about dungeons; the great dark inner caves of the loved one where the lover exists chained to the wall, powerless.”
“I told him that he was free.”
“But he wasn’t free and neither were you. You were each imprisoned in the dungeon of the other.”
“I couldn’t leave him.”
“He couldn’t leave you.”
Two lapwings dropped from the sky, flying in a synchronized trance. They sliced the phantoms in half at waist level and disappeared behind the adjacent hill. Emily scanned the sky for more birds, and then continued, “My brother looked for prisons, I think. Some people do, you know. He searched for prisons, hoping that they would break his spirit: that wonderful, hilarious, awkward spirit that I loved so well. It wasn’t so much that he was trying, all the time, to break his heart, as he was trying to imprison himself and to break his spirit. The married woman he supposedly loved had little to do with it really. She had to have the knowledge of her cage of bone so that he could lock himself inside it. After that she could go where she wanted, do as she pleased, because he trapped himself inside a prison of her, where he was busily breaking his spirit.”
“Did I break Jeremy’s spirit?”
“No … yes … not on purpose.”
“And your brother – was his spirit broken? Did he succeed?”
“Ah, yes. He succeeded absolutely … brilliantly. ‘Tell me about this married woman,’ I would say to him, and, you know, each time I asked him, his reply was different … no … not his reply, exactly, it was the same in tone. Each time I asked him, she was different. And as he became more and more ill, she became, to my mind, more and more interesting.
“The first time he told me about her she was a saint … a paragon of virtue, clothed in modest grays and browns, her eyes cast down, her hands folded on her lap. But it was as if he were aware that this was not a suitable prison for someone as wonderful and terrible as he, and so he drank and brooded and raved and came up with something better.
“The next time he described her, her hair had changed from brown to black; her dress was satin, peach-coloured, I think. She had a band of black velvet wrapped around her throat. She was tall-she had been small before – and she had abandoned the needlework and charitable acts that he claimed had previously occupied her time. Now she played some kind of musical instrument, something foreign and exotic – a mandolin, if I remember correctly – and on this musical instrument she played nothing but songs of lamentation and
farewell.”
“Jeremy did not sing songs,” said Arianna/Polly. “There wasn’t much music between us.”
“Just before he died, Branwell described his married woman one last time. By now he had not seen her or communicated with her for over a year. ‘I am dying for the love of a woman whom I find impossible to interpret,’ he said. ‘Have I told you about her?’
“I said that he hadn’t, because I knew that, by now, she would have altered drastically. And she had. Now she was silent and motionless and reaching for him only with her eyes, which he said were just like his eyes. Her hair, which was red now, hung loose. She was brooding, resigned, dying for love of a man whom she found impossible to interpret. She drank and took opium and wrote long, desperate, undeliverable messages. She had shut everyone else out of herself.
“Branwell’s true spirit-breaker, his perfect prison. An exact reproduction of himself one week before he died.”
FROM THE COTTAGE windows, Ann has a view of hills criss-crossed by drystone walls, the buildings of a few dark farms with names such as Slack Edge and Old Snap, Ponden Mill-now a craft shop and tea room-and, at the bottom of the valley, the Old Silent Inn. Behind the cottage, like two large parallel snakes on either side of the road, winds the village of Stanbury: a series of attached weavers’ cottages now converted into modern dwellings, one school, a small church, and two pubs. Above all this, the brown stain of the moor spills over the wide, gentle hills, which hold firm under vast, changeable skies.
It has been snowing for three days and the view is temporarily eliminated, the wind driving walls of white across the top and down through the valleys. Drifts crawl in under Ann’s door and do not melt in the cold interior. She takes the scuttle and descends the stairs to the cellar. The scrape of the shovel on the stone floor and the roar of fresh lumps of coal pouring onto the fire are the only man-made sounds inside the cottage. Ann is making new forms of conversation. She performs a task and the cottage responds with the rattle of spoons in a drawer, the creak of an opening door, the purr of a boiling kettle.
She has not stepped across the threshold for three days and she is developing a personal relationship with each of the details of the cottage’s interior. As all but one of the remembered faces from her abandoned life fade, the little china figurine on the mantel, for instance, or the quilted hen that serves as a tea-cosy, gain power, become almost as important as similar objects were to her when she was a child. And then she realizes, for the first time, how alone she was as a child, and she knows that her reverence for often-touched objects – objects that are both familiar and dependable – is growing as a result of her solitude here in another country.
And she is cold. Her fingers are aching, then numb-even when she pulls the chair in which she sits as near the glowing coals as safety permits. She warms her hands on teapots, stretches them towards the hearth, places them between her thighs when she sleeps, but they remain two uncooperative, icy appendages. She searches clumsily through her copy of Wuthering Heights for descriptions of cold, its persistence causing her to give it the literary attention she is now certain it deserves. She remembers the cold outside the rooms along the highway and sometimes she remembers the cold inside.
The wind that comes in under the door, that slides around the windows, attacks her ankles, and shinnies up the inside of her jeans. To the delicate china lady on the mantel Ann says, “If you are this cold and there is wind everywhere there’s no stopping anything.” She apologizes to the plump motherly hen when she removes her from her warm post. “Sorry … but we all share now. Yes, it’s share and share alike.” “Dear Arthur,” one of her many unsent letters begins, “I know more and more about the cold now. I know even more about cold than you.” When bent, in a trance of conversation, over a letter to him, she mouths the words she is writing. As if she were speaking to him directly, as if he were locked with her inside the cold house.
She attempts to continue her work on the varying climates of Wuthering Heights, but the contemporary storm distracts and confuses her, and her sentences change before her eyes into pleas for Arthur’s attention. Heathcliff’s statement to the child Hareton, “And we’ll see if one tree will grow as crooked as another with the same wind to twist it,” is repeated in the sound of the coal she is constantly pouring into the small hell of her fire. “Arthur,” she writes, “I have twisted towards, away, from your fire. You put the storm in me. I am a wind, shrieking!”
On the morning of the fourth stormy day, the wind outside the walls and the wind inside the cottage begin to converse in a jumble of words that Ann can decipher only at intervals. She sits near her now-grey hearth clutching the quilted hen to her chest, while whispers, moans, and laughter reach her ears, and then the hot, combined breath of a man and a woman, one inside, one out.
Ann knows the sounds: the rustle of clothing being discarded, a sob, a cry, the soft, purring noises a hand makes when it journeys over skin. How can this be? she wonders, one of them is out, the other in. The persistent noises of small animals attempting to make homes in earth, the insistent sounds of the separate each, straining to enter other. Winged lovers beating and beating up against the mirror of their opposite selves. Prisoned inside walls, locked behind doors, together and apart from each other. The storm has given birth to a disturbance of lovers who have now entered Ann’s cottage.
And it is she who is apart.
They are everywhere Ann isn’t. She can hear the woman brushing her hair in the next room, electricity snapping in the cold surrounding atmosphere. She can hear silk garments slide on and off her body. She knows when he has turned away from her, has become distant, silent, brutal. She can smell the herbal garden of him.
At night the lovers come subtly closer, all the while holding on to distance, as if Ann were a ghost of whom they are, as yet, unaware. They are beside her when she sleeps, moving and moving on the edge of her dreams. The woman weeps in the dark sometimes and the man strikes invisible matches to look at her more carefully, to scrutinize her suffering. But when Ann reaches for them they have descended the stairs and are murmuring, agonizing in the kitchen. Ann hears the male voice articulate the word “can’t.” It spills into her ears like coals onto a fire. And then the woman’s words: “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.” The walls echo, change the lovers’ language. “Leave me, leave me!” they cry, or, “Don’t, don’t.”
In the morning light, the cottage is an enormous furnace, a heartbeat, the furniture throbbing. The wind inside is pleading, Please, please…. It gasps, its tongue a flame. The lovers are in the coal cellar, crashing up against granite walls. “Oh, my God,” Ann whispers, “they have become one.” Yes, they have become one during the night and the new beast they are is prowling. Ann hears it groan and pace and sigh and lick its wounds and she knows she must find it and set it free. Its huge violent body is seeking space, needs to burst out into the open. But still it eludes her. She spends the day pursuing it from floor to floor. No longer quiet, it howls in corners and scratches on the other side of doors. “My God, Arthur,” Ann writes, “the beast we were is here, but I can’t find it!”
Let me out, let me out! the animal growls, always on the other side of walls that Ann can’t see through. Frantic, she runs in her nightgown from room to room to room. “Where are we, where are we?” she sobs, “I want to let us out!” Rooms whirl around her glowing, pulsing. “Arthur,” she scribbles, “you have to help me get it out … otherwise the monster will be everything. I want to force it out, to push it out. Yes, yes, I want to lock it out, to keep it out.”
The hearth inside is grey and cold. The storm outside settles.
The beast is asleep. Ann crouches under an eiderdown near the mantel and waits for the monster to reawaken. But only stillness surrounds her, stillness and pain. The immobility and torture of a blade wedged between the ribs and a heart frozen in the midst of seizure.
She cannot move.
She dreams of the dark Venetian paintings of Tintoretto, the repro
ductions Arthur showed her; of the painted, rugged faces of apostles and the soft features of angels. She sees wings like fronds of palm leaves set against skies alive with lightning. She dreams of Velazquez’s portraits of dwarfs, of a long hall filled with small, intense men. As she walks the marble floor beneath them they increase in size until, she suddenly perceives, they are no longer dwarfs, but giants, a gallery of giants-the last a Norseman with a broad high forehead and fierce blue eyes. The painting bubbles into life and the large man is shouting, calling through canvas. His hands appear, slapping up against the flat, framed surface. “Let me in!” he is bellowing as the gold frame turns to painted wood and the dark oil to glass.
Rising from her chair Ann staggers past tilting furniture, turns the bolt, lifts the latch.
She feels the beast slip past her body, slide around her legs, taking its leave of her as she opens the old oak door.
“WHEN I WAS alive,” said Emily, “there was this important moment and that important moment and long, eventless seasons in between when I was vague and unfocused and wandering. I’m speaking of externals, of course, when I speak about moments – those circumstances from the outside that force themselves upon your attention. The ones that choose you: love, birth, death, and one parhelion, and a bog-burst. And the once or twice when I was away.
“I never wanted to be away. I wasn’t much interested in change. I flourished in the empty times and in the familiar open. I hated the closed-in foreign places, the palaces of instruction, time tables someone else had constructed. It is wonderful to be dead, because nothing ever happens–except this barrage of seasons, and then you falling in here. I’m really very comfortable with this. I’ve never liked it when things were taking place. I didn’t want anyone to be born, to burst uninvited into my world. And I didn’t want death to tear my few companions out of it. And I certainly didn’t ever want to fall in love.”
Changing Heaven Page 13