Changing Heaven

by Jane Urquhart

  “No one ever asked how Grief Mill burned. The workers never got their union, at least not then, so the only result of the conflagration were that blackened ruin, now covered with vines, and a longer walk, a different path to the mill at Lumbfoot. The lad never saw Thomas Grief again, as he left the district soon after the fire. And so, at the age of fourteen, he gave up the study of Greek. His father never asked about the whereabouts of the first book, perhaps because he suspected the truth about it. Life at the little moor-edge farm continued as usual.

  “Except that book were gone, and the others as well, so that the lad had to keep the memory of the stories and the wonderful language that told them in his mind or else, he knew, the books would be forever erased from his life.

  “But memory has a way of playing with things-perhaps you’ve noticed that yourself-and as time went by the lad began telling himself stories that were not quite like the original. And since he often told himself the stories at night before he went to sleep, his dreams crept into them and, as time went by, some of his own memories. And because he lived here, on the moors, it were impossible-you’ll like this-to keep the weather out of the stories. He had learned, with the help of Thomas Grief the Third, all the Greek names for the winds, amazed at the language that knew and expressed the differences that make up the turbulent ocean of air.

  “Eventually, the stories were all his. A bit borrowed, true, from the Greek and a bit from the Bible, which were now his only reading material, a bit from his father, a bit from his mother. Very little from the afternoon classroom. More, much more from the silently mouthed rumours of the mill, his memories of Thomas Grief, and the persistent surrounding weather that nudged its way into his mental narrations whether he wanted it to or not.

  “That were how he became the local story-teller and it made him right popular too-a good person to sit beside in the pub, entertaining like. But only he himself knew the agony of it, the loneliness: telling the stories, often ones of lies, betrayals, injustices, and broken hearts, over and over to himself in the dark until they came to be just right. And always the far chambers of his brain were holding on to whispers of a dead language that he had once learned but had now forgotten. Then there were the glimpsed images of a man’s face; one that could disintegrate, then reassemble itself before your very eyes. That and one memory he could not erase: the fire in the valley reflecting from the windows of workers’ cottages where he believed the ghosts of the hand-loom weavers must have puzzled over what it was that had suddenly turned their upstairs rooms orange.”

  John pours whisky into his cup and drinks it, neglecting to add the tea. Ann notices that his neck is flaring, red with emotion.

  “You?” she asks.

  “Myself,” he confesses.

  She creeps across the room and settles near his chair, placing her cheek against his knee so that he can easily touch her hair. Later, when they make love, she is a river of pleasure, a garden of fire; the unravelled story, the architecture of the upstairs room. The landscape belongs to John, and through his attentions to Ann, to her as well; the tributaries of his stories travelling over the moors and into the valleys.

  They are in place.

  “WHEN I SPOKE to you about building my house; Polly/Arianna, I did not tell you what else I built.”

  Arianna stopped watching the clouds, comparing them with the sheep that grazed nearby, and turned to her evanescent friend. “All right, Emily,” she said patiently, “what else did you build?”

  “This landscape and a lot of talk. Some people-not all pleasant people either. And I had to sew their clothes as well, and I had to set their tables.”

  “You could not possibly have built this landscape!” Arianna gazed down the groin of the valley: burgundies and ochres and greys. Fierce, breathing wind and everywhere black stone heaving out of the earth. White circles of snow on the heights, visibly shrinking. Lapwings, curlews, grouse – a profusion of springing rabbits, and all the various moor grasses astir.

  “But I did, I did! I invented, I built it all!” Emily laughed and shot up, like an ascending Virgin Mary, straight towards the sky in order to survey her creations. Then she settled back down again. Arianna did the same and the two of them bounced like this for some time, twenty or thirty yards into the air – little girls joyfully skipping in a playground of ether.

  “I did, you know,” said Emily, eventually coming back to earth, lying down, relaxing on a couch of heather. “I knew it the day I finished the book. My dog Keeper and I set out on our daily walk and, suddenly, the landscape had altered. There it was, the landscape of my novel! I could never see it any other way again. It was mine, mine! I’d made it mine! And I’d changed it, forever. It is hard work too, building landscape. The rocks were particularly difficult, and that is what Mr. Capital H was made out of-different shapes of black stone. And he was obdurate, unyielding, fixed, unchanging, difficult to describe, and originating God knows where. Practically unkillable! A landscape can only be killed by dynamite or natural disaster – especially landscape formed by millstone grit. And even then the death is very slow. First it merely fragments.

  “Mr. Capital H lost his soul when Catherine died. He was broken, fragmented. The stone centre of him, the black core was shattered and even so it took him thirty years to die.”

  “This Mr. Capital H sounds like a tyrant,” remarked Arianna. “I don’t think I should have liked him.”

  “O-o-o-h …?” asked Emily sarcastically. “Really? Not interested in fierce men, nasty ones … is that it?”

  “Well … I …”

  Emily, having made her point, continued to explain her craft. “I had to build a farm and then this very pretentious manor house in the valley,” she said. “I had to put tea tables and armchairs and chandeliers and all sorts of other things I’m not very interested in inside it too. God! … linen napkins and goblets. All these external objects in the manor house on the inside, in the valley, when most of the time I wanted to talk about the innerness of the landscape outside and above. You see what I mean? But I controlled myself and built it all very carefully, recording speeches, no matter how silly, and letting the landscape intrude only at significant moments, mostly through windows.”

  “I was always looking down on everything,” said Arianna uncertainly. “It was always passing beneath me.”

  “I know everything about the stones beneath my feet,” said Emily with pride, “and I talked about that. I know everything about kitchens, copper pots, and cinders and I talked about that too.”

  “It was always happening down there and I was two miles away. But, you know, occasionally something would reach me, some sound: a laugh, the bark of a dog, a cow bell, the whistle of a farm boy and once a phrase of music from a violin I couldn’t see.” Arianna was silent, thinking for a moment or two. “Perhaps if I could have followed one of those sounds to its source I might have … But it was no use. I was too far away and moving, always moving farther away. Except at night when he was so close … I didn’t know whose hands, whose hair … mine or his. Too close and no love. And the rest of the time too far away, and love coming up to me in those sounds. In Devon a sob reached me from the centre of a forest. Someone who could have loved me was there weeping. And I, knowing this, was a mile away and moving on. I was always a mile away and moving on.”

  “Until you crashed into my geography.”

  “Yes … until then.”

  A KIND OF beautiful order steps with John into Ann’s life: an order all the more clearly visible set as it is against the chaos of the surrounding moorland, which trembles daily under the touch of the wind.

  In the mornings, Ann and John rise to the sound of glass milk bottles being set down on the cottage’s stone doorstep, clinking together like Japanese chimes. As John dresses in his work clothes, Ann descends the stairs, an expert now, to stoke the fire, and then further down to the cellar to fetch a fresh scuttle of coal. In the kitchen she chooses plates and bowls whose flowers she has become fond of
, leaving the little cracked cup of her illness on the windowsill: enshrined, a relic, a magic object. The morning cat, a creature who visits only once a day and always at this time, rubs against the window behind the cup, flattening his fur upon the glass. It is waiting for a saucer of the milk that Ann brings, along with a remarkable quantity of wind, in from the front door. John appears in the kitchen and fills the kettle for tea. He is, she realizes, the most scrubbed man on earth, his face aglow, his hair neatly combed and parted.

  They talk at breakfast, quietly picking the lock of each other’s pasts.

  “Didst tha never have nowt but the city tha left behind?” John often, now that he is always with Ann, lapses into broad Yorkshire.

  “Ah, no,” she says, “I had the countryside – I’ve told you about the little church-in my childhood. But if I were to go there now I would find it all changed. They’ve built suburbs and shopping malls. They’ve bulldozed all the secret hidden places – all the little forts I made as a child near the creek.”

  “Creek?”

  “The beck,” she explains. “It’s not like here. In Canada much of the past has been thrown away. No one cares. No one records it. It was very hard for me, losing the past like that. I honestly believed nothing would ever happen to me, because my past was gone. Only the lake stayed the same: at least it looked the same. It’s poisoned.”

  “Who poisoned it? What has poisoned it?”

  “Nuclear power plants, chemical companies, cement factories, sewage.”

  “Yes, I know about the poisoning of water by factories. Still, with them all closed here perhaps our water will clear itself.”

  “Perhaps.”

  After John leaves for his workshop or the farm, Ann sometimes walks over the moor and into Haworth, passing through the old crowded graveyard, past the church and the Black Bull Inn to the town’s main street. Here she enters Tyson Mather’s High Class Butcher Shop, Mrs. Eccles’ Bakery and the greengrocer’s-the location of tulips and figs. Occasionally she rides an old groaning bus deeper into the valley, and examines, through its sooty windows, the abandoned mills and the desperate, idle people. The mill where John most recently worked is now a gaping hole in the ground the size of a city block; not only closed but utterly demolished. Ann tries to imagine him, one of several workers, in a room full of noise and labour, but can bring him to mind only as an isolated figure in the carpentry shop that she now knows well, or in the barn out on Moor Edge Farm. Places that he controls, that are his own.

  Her book about weather continues, Arthur’s remembered face intruding now less often into this solitary activity. John, amused and fascinated by her work (“Tha writes a book about a book!” he has commented, amazed), has made two objects for her in his shop-objects that he claims will capture the wind. The first he presents to her one evening after work. For days it sits, a long thin box graced with a circle of pierced holes and several taut gut strings, on the windowsill in the light, demanding that Ann decipher it. It isn’t until John takes it out into the garden, until she hears its voice, that she knows it is an Aeolian harp. It moans outside all night, weeps its way into Ann’s dreams, until the wind, tired of its plaything, smashes it up against the garden wall. In the morning there is no more weird music, only the gasp of atmosphere and thin random shards of wood scattered among the tilting crocuses.

  John replaces this with chimes made from old keys whose locks and doors no longer exist. “That were key to Scar Top Sunday school before t’ new door.” he explains or “these were for t’ church in Haworth during the time of Reverend Grimshaw. They had six padlocks on all doors for fear of Luddites. And this …” he says to her, winking, “were key to Top Withins before it were abandoned. I’ve given tha’ key to Wuthering Heights, I have.”

  “And where did you happen upon all these keys?”

  “From my father. He kept a drawerful out at Moor Edge. It were pity, he always said, not to keep something of habitations vanished from the hills.”

  This source of music proves sturdier and more lyrical: laughter tossed by a turmoil of wind.

  “Ah, but I regret the harp,” John says. “I must have wanted it because of the Greek that I learned and forgot. But they have different winds there I suppose. Neither their words nor their harps are suitable to express this climate.”

  It is a Sunday in April, a combination of sun and showers. Black rocks, onyx-like, glisten in the sun or become sullen and removed under brief bouts of rain. In the village now each window, each small display case directed at the street, holds not only the customary Staffordshire lad and lassie sick with love, or doggies made by Royal Doulton, but also bright bouquets of daffodils in dazzling cut-glass vases. These flowers flourish in gardens as well, sometimes flying their yellow flags for a full week before being flattened by the wind. The green of the reclaimed pastures on the moor edge is beginning to deepen; March lambs are daring to leap and spring ten to fifteen yards away from scolding ewes. The windows of the upstairs room reflect solid white clouds hurrying through azure. The moors are alive with noisy, hidden, hurrying streams.

  In the afternoon, after he returns from the chapel, John takes Ann out to the farm in order to fly a kite he has made. When they have moved away from the enclosed area into the open moor, he grasps one of the strips of crossed wood of which the kite is constructed and pulls it outwards into the shape of a bow. Then he ties a thin piece of sheep gut to each end of the curved shape, producing one taut string.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You’ll see. Keep your eyes and ears open. Out here you learn either to fight or to play with the wind. Over the years I’ve chosen to play.”

  The kite in John’s hands falters once or twice and is finally jerked aloft by forceful currents of air. It pulls and thrashes for a few moments like an angry fish on a line and then, resigning itself to its leash, it sails, as yellow as daffodils, proudly above. Ann watches and then she listens.

  The kite is singing! The kite is singing to the hills in a strange and joyous voice.

  John shouts with pleasure. “I was na’ sure that kite would sing but that it does!”

  Ann is laughing. Her shoes are filled with mud. Her head is filled with breeze and sunshine. Even the several sheep surrounding John and Ann lose, for a moment, their vacant look, snap out of their life-long trance long enough to look upwards, seeking the source of the sound.

  “We could make more,” says Ann, “we could make different colours and sizes and then we would have a regular orchestra.”

  “The wind section.”

  Sunday walkers approach singly and in pairs, pause to chat, to discuss the kite, tell their own tales of airborne miracles. Kites stolen by the wind and delivered, unscathed, to Loch Ness. A three year old kidnapped by a kite and transported to Hebden Bridge. A forty-year-old man, father of five, choked to death by a kite string. The kite that was reeled in with a tenacious hawk in tow. The bridge that was begun when a kite was flown over the Niagara Gorge.

  “I’m from Canada,” says Ann proudly.

  “Aye,” says the old man who is telling the tale, “it were begun on British side. But how dost get kite to sing?”

  That night for the first time John speaks about his wife.

  “There were a completeness about her death,” he says, “that did not leave me torn. Left me empty, hollow, but not broken. Like a cup whose contents have been drunk, which is waiting to be filled again. She were a good lass who never knew, till she became ill, what it was not to be working; neither she nor her people, always getting up in the dark and going down to the mill. She knew that there was nowt for it when she became ill but that she were going to die.”

  “And there were no children?”

  “No children. There were not yet any children. It were a pity; that, and her being so young.”

  “You loved her.”

  John passes a large hand over his forehead. “Yes … but I was undamaged by it-saddened, but still whole. With you it’s different. Somethi
ng has torn you, left you raw at edges.”

  Ann is silent. For a moment Arthur’s body fills the space between the chairs that she and John occupy, blocks her view of the other man. The condensed world of the highway and its rooms knocks at the cottage door. No breezes bouncing melodious kites there. Inner weather: despair, passion, some joy. Weather confined by the limits that gold frames impose on paintings. Tintoretto’s angry storms and sudden celebratory showers of tumultuous stars. The man whose name she has spoken only to herself, never to John. The mystery of the man who wounds and then, seconds later, is able to move the ships of drastic joy out of their safe harbours into some dark, beautiful, inexplicable sea. He is unstoppable. He cannot be cancelled by absence, by distance. Transparent in this landscape he is nevertheless around Ann all the time, an idea touching all her nerves. Even here, even now, as she bathes in John’s warmth.

  Ann seeks John’s eyes. He sits with his elbows resting on his knees, his large hands clasped in front of him in an attitude of supplication, perhaps of resignation. His eyes are down. He will not look at her. Eventually he speaks.

  “He has torn you and you still love him.”

  Ann does not answer. The wind becomes uneasy; its palms testing the window glass, the doorframe for weaknesses, for access.

  John looks up now, directly at her face. “And does he … did he love you?”

  “I don’t know … no. I don’t think so.” Ann rises from her chair, walks to the window, lifts a dying daffodil out of her otherwise healthy bouquet. “I wonder why, if they are all picked at the same time, one would fade before the others.” She shows John the flower. “It seems odd, doesn’t it?”

  John takes the flower from her and drops it gently onto the coals. Ann watches it convulse, bubble, blacken.

  “And yes,” she says, “I still love him.”

  It is surprising to them both when, all the same, they awaken the next morning to embraces and sunlight. At breakfast John tells the story of an old lady of the dales who, having resolved to commit suicide in the Wharfe River at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve some years back, was surprised to discover, at the end of her descent through the water, the Bolton Underwater Club clothed in scuba-diving gear, celebrating the New Year at the bottom of the strid-a small whirlpool formed by a bend in the river.