Changing Heaven

by Jane Urquhart

  Listen! Someone tells a story while bones bleach underground. The sky has changed a million times between the time of action and the time of documentation, will change again and again before the first sentence tumbles from the lips. Tell me. Listen. The dust the wind took clothes the glass of one warm window. The female faces of ghosts shine through to the interior. Tell me, Emily. Listen, Arianna. Here are some words; here is a voice: “The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all.” This is the language, the waiting, the desire: “I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart …” These are the words the story leads to. This is where we are now. Read the weather. Listen to the storm. “… But really with it, and in it … I shall be incomparably beyond and above you all.”

  Listen to the story, Arianna.

  Ann enters the room and John takes her hand. She feels the width, the generosity of his callused palm, can read by touch the story of his labours: the planer in his workshop and long days spent at looms; and hovering above the hard determined history of his hand, a mind free to gather the bright threads of his landscape, his community. The sweep of it. A long bolt of cloth, a track over the moorland, a linked chain of words. This is the jewellery he gives her.

  John takes her hand and leads her to the fire. “I knew you would come back for the story of the sky.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I just knew.”

  Outside, the ghosts flicker near the glass. They dissolve into each other and separate again. The wind passes through Emily’s mouth, hissing the word listen.

  Ann looks into the orange heat of the fire, remembering what she saw there when she was ill, and what she saw there later. Arianna sees the interior, the large man, the details of the room. Who is at home here? she wonders.

  “I waited for you here,” John says. “I didn’t go back to the farm, except in the afternoons, to work.”

  Ann recognizes evidence of herself everywhere; her manuscript on the table, her pen, a huge exclamation mark across the last page, her waterproof jacket hanging from a nail on the wall, boots caked with mud from the moor lying on a mat near the door, the singing kite near them, quiet, motionless. Her quilted hen. Her Staffordshire friends. She is calm, waiting for the story.

  John does not let go of her hand and so she moves with him to the kitchen, where he performs small tasks, awkwardly, with one free hand, collecting glasses and the bottle, cold currant buns, and then setting the kettle for the tea. Eventually he releases her and she sits carefully in the accustomed chair, attentive, wanting the structure of the story to build itself in the room.

  John brings steaming mugs of tea in from the kitchen, places them beside the bottle and the glasses on the fireside bench. Hungry for the first time in weeks, Ann has already eaten two currant buns. She watches John stir a lump of sugar into the hot cinnamon-coloured liquid and then add two drops of lemon to clarify it, the fruit a semi-circle of light in his huge hand. “And your young man,” he asks softly, shyly, “what of him?”

  Ann colours slightly. “He’s gone back to Canada.” She pauses. “He’s not so young, John.” When John remains silent, she adds, “He’ll be home by now.”

  “And you?”

  “I will have to go back as well, but not for him.”

  “Soon?”

  “Not too soon.” Their eyes meet. They smile. The ghosts outside sway impatiently.

  John relaxes in the chair, moving one massive shoulder into an upholstered corner. “The story I will tell you now is about a man who was known all over England as the ‘Sindbad of the Skies.’ He were a man who knew quite a lot about distance, quite a lot about the wind. He knew how to float away from things, but not how to travel nearer. As I said, he floated all over England but he came down to earth here in Stanbury, eighty years ago – or, at least, he realized that he’d come down to earth at that time. He’d actually been on ground for several years.” John picks up the glass, moves a tablespoon of whisky around in his mouth, then swallows. “It were because of a woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “That you will discover in the story … providing there are no more questions.”

  As John speaks, Arianna listens with such intensity that, behind the glass, her normally vaporous form becomes almost solid. Details of her physiognomy that Emily had never noticed before spring into view: eyelashes, a mole on her left cheek, the tendons in her neck.

  “It were a life, for him, filled with one long farewell and the incessant fluttering of female handkerchiefs. He were a balloonist, moving from country fair to country fair, lifted into the sky away from village after village. The world were a map to him, something folded and carried in his back pocket. All was distance and he loved that. As far as he was concerned, nothing but the sky had any size whatsoever, everything else, you see, just fell away at his feet, just tumbled away into distance, and when the distance were great enough, into invisibility. It were perfect for him, this vocation, because he hated to be intimate, even with objects, and he knew he could travel the sky forever and never become intimate with it, it being so vast – infinite really, and the clouds, when they were there, being so large and mostly unapproachable and, to his delight, utterly lacking in substance, the few times that he did approach them.”

  Arianna/Polly turns to Emily, speechless, amazed, and she sees that her ghostly companion’s lips are moving, are mimicking the shapes taken by the large man’s mouth.

  “Who is telling the story, Emily?”

  “Listen, Arianna”

  “What a happy life he had, so far away from everything, so infinitely above and beyond. Birds bothered him occasionally-they were so detailed-but otherwise all was clear and empty. And quiet. In tact, when he travelled the sky, his senses were rarely assaulted by anything. He heard nothing but wind. He saw nothing but sky, when he looked up, and that map of the earth when he looked down. He tasted nothing but ether. He smelled nothing at all. But, most important, he was touched by nothing but air.”

  Nothing but air, repeated the wind out where the phantoms were. “Nothing but air,” whispered Emily to Arianna, who stood, as if struck, her ghost’s heart open to the story.

  “But then he met her.”

  Arianna quivered at these words, became electricity, became light, her spirit ringing like a bell.

  “She were light and white and pale yellow like clouds at evening. Her eyes were blue and infinite and he saw the sky in them. She were young and unformed and lacking in content. She seemed so beautifully vacant to him, so empty, so like the air that he loved her immediately. And so he, who had touched nothing but air, touched her, because she was so wonderfully like the air as to be entirely mistaken for it. He took her away with him and she must have loved him too, because she went without protest, walked with him out of her life into a sort of dream and groundlessness. And here I speak figuratively and only out of my own intuition, for, of course, I don’t know. But it would seem to me that a love affair with the ‘Sindbad of the Skies’ would have to be all dreams and shadows, illusory and ungrounded. Loving a man who loved distance would be, in a manner of speaking, like embracing absence.

  “They went on like this for some time, away and apart from the world, embracing the absence and each other. And he still sailed the skies for the love of distance and for the money it put in his pocket. He would lock her away, it were said, when he went to a fair, not because he were worried or jealous, but because he wanted her unchanged, as empty of experience as he had found her. He wanted her to accumulate no more memories concerning the details, the trivia of the world than she had already had, for he considered all the world’s details to be trivia. In fact, he considered all details to be somehow unclean and wanted them all washed away by an ocean of emptiness, an ocean of air.

  “Still, what he didn’t know and what were his undoing, were that if you leave a mind alone long enough in a v
acant region it will invent details. What he didn’t know was that all the details of arranging to escape from details had occupied his own mind sufficiently that it sought no other employment. But with her it were different. As he had insisted that her outer life, with him and without him, be a blank, her inner life had flourished, inventing who knows what kind of landscape and architecture, friends and enemies, circuses and theatricals, possessions and trinkets, toys and games, for, as I’ve said, she were only a child. And when he returned one night she told him all her fancies and he were angered and all his love for her were broken.

  “But he couldn’t leave her, because she had come to love him in a difficult, in a stubborn sort of way, and he was held by her tenacity. That, and the fact that he had loved her and felt that, if he could only find the lost key to that vacuous region, if he could return her, somehow, to that state of beautiful beloved vacancy, he might be able to love her again. And so she went out into the world with him and up into the skies as well, for a while, for the people at the fairs adored her light foot and her prettiness. Sindbad could not bear, however, to be witness to all the details of her floating around in what was formerly nothing but air, and so eventually he decided to remain on the ground, taking care of details where he believed details ought to be. He was by then a sad and bitter man, full of self-loathing and longing for the Arctic; that being the only region on earth vast enough, empty enough, white enough, and cold enough to please him.

  “They called her Arianna M. Ether, though her name were really Polly Smith. The ‘M’ stood for milkweed, for Arianna had to leap out of the balloon during each performance and drift lightly and gracefully down to earth by means of a parachute, which she did successfully time after time. It is significant, I suppose, to remember that while the most important part of Sindbad’s performance had been the drifting away, the achievement of distance and emptiness, the most important part of Arianna’s performance were her return to earth, to intimacy and detail. And so now there were poor Sindbad, the lover of nothing but air, harnessed to the details of the earth, watching his woman return from the regions of ether over and over. It weren’t long before his broken love turned to hate.

  “Now, before you being to think badly of our Sindbad, let me explain to you that he were not a hard man, not an unfeeling man – not a man, for instance, who had never loved at all. Remember, he had loved ‘nothing but air’ and he had loved a woman who he thought resembled ‘nothing but air’ … which is a lot more love than some men put into an entire lifetime, or women either, for that matter. Sindbad was always looking and not finding. Until he came here, to Haworth, to Stanbury.”

  Here … sighed the wind. “Here … hear,” breathed Emily.

  “You should have seen the galas in those days. I should have seen the galas in those days. Some of us worked in the quarries then, carving out stones for the reservoirs that were being built all over the moors, but most of us, my grandfather and all my great-uncles and many of my great-aunts, worked in the valley mills as usual. And all appreciated a good fair, a good gala. There were the men who played in the comic bands, the men who pulled white doves out of black hats, the men who made speeches, the men who performed juggling acts and cartwheels. And all of these practising and preparing for the day that Sindbad and his lady entered Haworth. It were a dark and brooding day, like himself. The next day were light and clear, like herself. And, for some reason, this dark and brooding man had become light and clear as well. Why? You may well ask. It was because of love. Some time during the night, Sindbad had discovered how to recapture love.

  “It came to him all of a sudden like. At one point during the evening the girl had been in his room, but then she had gone – they never shared the same room when they were travelling, something to do with propriety, I expect. The important part were that she had departed from his presence when he was engaged in some other activity-reading, or looking at maps-and so he had not seen her leave. Her absence, then, had registered itself upon him less the way a fact might and more like a state of mind. Concentrating on something else he had felt her absence before he knew the fact of it, and it felt wondrous, complete, miraculous … the very room seemed to shine with her absence, the walls of his heart were ready to burst with her absence before Sindbad could say what all this shining and bursting were for. By simply stepping out of his room when he were not looking, she, Polly/Arianna M. Ether, had brought the space back, the emptiness, the vacuum, and before Sindbad had completed one thought concerning this, he were back in love again. But with one terrible difference: he knew he could love her only if she were utterly absent from him. And then he knew what he had to do.”

  “What did he have to do?” asks Ann.

  “What did he have to do?” asks Arianna.

  Have, have, howls the wind.

  “My father would end the story here by telling us what Sindbad had to do and then telling us what he did afterwards, and then he would tell us about the dangers of illicit love and we would read in the Bible about Jesus casting out the seven devils. As I got older, though, I wanted to tell the story differently. It seemed to me that the most interesting part of the story was the mind of Sindbad and so I decided to stay inside that mind and tell the rest of the story that way. Do you object to this at all, Ann?”

  “No,” she says.

  “No!” shouts Arianna, who has acquired so much substance that she is clothed, down to the last brass button, in her aeronautical costume. Her call is mistaken by the couple inside for a strong wind sliding around the outside corners of the cottage.

  “Sindbad stood on the edge of Haworth’s West Lane field and watched all the complicated details of this woman float away from him, up into the uncomplicated emptiness of a clear blue sky. All around him there were the clamour of the world; the brass bands, the jugglers, and the clowns, and above him this woman moving farther and farther away. Then, as she neared Stanbury he saw her leap from the balloon into absence. His heart leaped with love, I might add, while she leaped into absence. He knew, you see, that she were leaping into absence-for he himself had prepared the parachute that morning so there were no chance that she could leap into anything else. And then he wept with all the colliers and mill hands that surrounded him; the difference being that they were weeping with sorrow at a young life cut short, and he were weeping with joy at reactivated love.

  “Later, he went to the Arctic in a balloon and was never seen again. It were as though he had embraced a vacuum so complete that it erased every trace of him. Which would have been what he wanted in the end: white love, the absence, emptiness, and eradication.

  “While he were up there, perhaps he found the remains of icemen such as himself, Arctic madmen who chose that particular kind of slow suicide. At least that’s the way I see it. Perhaps he found their frozen journals full of awkward entries or maybe a packet of impossible love letters to a girl they left behind. Yes, I like this last part, so that is the way I am going to end the story, breaking into the white landscape just at the point when our Sindbad is reading impossible love letters.”

  John pours himself a large glass of whisky, then empties half of it into Ann’s teacup. The ghosts pressed up against the pane become thinner, flatter. They watch the large man lean earnestly forward in his chair, speaking the last words of the story directly to the woman facing him.

  “SINDBAD READ the diaries for three days in the ever-darkening twilight: each dawn dimmer, each day shorter. He read about days of gruelling travel over ice floes, about wonderful feasts on icebergs, about hunting bears. He read about the erection of ice houses and the frying of seal blubber. He read about the exchange of confidences under Arctic moons and about the odd, desperate confession. He read about illness and recovery; about the singing of the Swedish national anthem in the morning. He read about the sighting of the very island on whose shore he himself had landed, about a pet Arctic fox that you, Ann, would have loved to hold, about the malfunction of a primus stove. The last words written under th
e final date in each of the three journals that he found were: ‘I climbed as far as I could and looked around in all directions.’ These were oddly comforting in that Sindbad knew that all they would see in any direction was nothingness.

  “On the fourth day he began to read the packet of letters. ‘My poor darling,’ the first began, ‘what can you be thinking now that I have not returned?’ Sindbad, reading this in the midst of emptiness, felt an odd tickling sensation in his throat and he knew that, for the second time in his life, he were going to weep. And then he did weep. Tears froze on his moustache, his eyelashes, his beard, and as he wept longer and harder, some dropped to the ground where they began to form the kind of small, conical castles children sometimes make with wet sand on the beach. He wept all through the long nights and the increasingly short days ahead, intermittently reading once again the seven letters which he came to all but memorize. ‘If I could only,’ so many of the paragraphs began. ‘If I had only.’ Phrases from the letters hung in Sindbad’s mind, you see, even when he were not reading: ‘the colour of that dress,’ ‘As you listened to the orchestra,’ ‘The first time we,’ ‘Your little cat,’ ‘Your hair shining,’ ‘The last ride together.’ And words, words like ‘known,’ ‘cruel,’ ‘madness,’ ‘open,’ ‘touch,’ ‘wait.’