Changing Heaven (22 page)

John pauses here in order to allow the full impact of the bog-burst to settle in Ann’s mind.

“The Brontë children were out on the moors that day,” she says to him, “but fortunately they were taken to shelter. Otherwise
Wuthering Heights
might never have been written.”

“Jack finished
his
book by suggesting that, and I quote, ‘the green from southern forests doth reflect itself wantonly upon the roof of the sky causing great tempests and whirlwinds therein and bringing forth great eruptions out of the heart of the earth when it looketh thereon lustfully.’ After he wrote these words he walked up to the Grouse and Rabbit to collect those same short, stout, strong men who at first refused to go with him thinking that he would make them push the rock again. But that wasn’t what Jack had on his mind.

“‘See there,’ he said to them as he stood at the top of his own hill at the door of his own house. ‘There is where I’m to be buried.’ And the men looked down and saw the rock, halfway down the valley, arrested by a small natural plateau of land just at the point where the little stream that rushes down to join the beck divides into two parts. ‘A right nice burial plot,’ Jack said to his four friends, ‘and chosen especially for me by the boulder.’

“After this there weren’t much left for Jack to do except die and this he did with expedience. The four strong, stout
men convinced two more of their comrades at the Grouse and Rabbit to help dig the grave and to carry Jack’s coffin down to it. They put up a headstone beside the rock and they built drystone walls around the little plot. Jack must have confessed his sad story late one night at the Grouse and Rabbit for on his tombstone you may read these words:

Here lies Jack Green
Kind as can be
Who died in mid-life
For love of a tree

“If you go down there, and you should soon – for the fresh air which can be got in the valley without suffering the wind on the moors – you will see that there are four laurel trees growing: one in each corner of the plot. Some say that they were planted, one apiece, by each of the four short, strong, stout men who had come to be quite fond of Jack as he had often dropped by the Grouse and Rabbit late in the evening after a regular fit of written tree deprecation. But my father always said that it were the wind that brought the laurel seeds to the spot from a tree in one of Jack’s southern forests, a tree that had been watered over time by the woman’s tears. Because, you see, all his forests and the trees in them and the sorrowful woman herself had loved Jack much, much more than he ever knew.”

“Do real stories end like that?” Ann asks John.

“More often than you think,” he replies.

“D
ID YOU
know Latin?” asked Emily.

The ghosts had been amusing themselves in the fog by disappearing, and then coming gradually back into focus, making a guessing game of it. Thick mist: at ten feet everything was invisible, even phenomena that were normally visible.

“Have I dematerialized or am I swallowed in the fog?” they called to each other. Emily kept score and had become bored only when she was certain that she was winning. Then she wanted to talk.

“I didn’t know it exactly, but I learned a little at school.”

“And so, did you read the
Aeneid?”
Emily began to fade as she asked this.

“Come back.” Arianna searched the vapours for her companion and eventually discovered traces of her near her right-hand side. “No,” she said, “I never got further than some noun declensions. I wasn’t much for books.”

“My
favourite part,” said Emily, snapping into clear focus and startling Arianna a little, “is when Aeolus unchains the winds so that Juno can shipwreck the Trojans.”

Arianna sighed, “You and weather. Who is Aeolus?”

“The king of Aeolis: land of storms.”

“I might have guessed.”

“Juno was Jove’s wife –
and
his sister I might add. She harped away at Aeolus until he unleashed all these winds that he kept in a cave. The winds picked up ships and smashed them into rocks, they gathered up huge waves and dropped them onto the wooden decks, they blew scores of men right out of the rigging and into the deep. They howled and shrieked and caused tremendous havoc.”

This last sentence was pronounced by Emily with great satisfaction.

“Good Lord! What happened to the balloonists?”

“There weren’t any, but if there had been, your misadventure would have seemed like a fairy tale.”

“I can’t imagine Latin telling any of this. Puella, puellae … puellam,” she added uncertainly.
“Now
where are you?”

“Back here. I’ve found some even denser fog. Venus, who was the mother of Aeneas, covered him in a cloud of mist so that he could enter Carthage unobserved, all the while observing what took place around him. Aeneas … the hero of the story.”

“I only remember one story. Something about an angel with wax wings who flew near the sun.”

“Icarus. He was Greek. He fell out of the sky like a stone. You would remember him. He wasn’t an angel. His father made those wings for him. Afterwards he may have been an angel, but I doubt it. From what I can gather of his temperament it seems more likely that he would have become a ghost. It’s good to be a ghost, don’t you think?” Emily evaporated once again, as if to prove her point.

“Are there angels really? … And come to think of it, why aren’t we?”

“I’ve only met one … an aggressive sort of beast. I think they all are, flapping away in that disturbing fashion. And those wings! Their wings are quite dirty really. Not white like you’d think but a sort of dullish yellow-grey. And often there’s lice.” Emily floated nearer to Arianna who, although she could not see her, was aware of her proximity. “I suspect that we aren’t,” she confided, still invisible, “because we never expected to be. I certainly never did.”

“I
never expected to be dead,” sniffed Arianna. “Who was the angel?”

“My brother Branwell … and in such bad temper. It was before you. Several decades ago. I’ll tell you about it if you like.”

Arianna was silent. She knew Emily would tell her about it even if she didn’t like.

“‘What do
you
want?’ he asked me, very rudely, as if I’d called him down, interrupted him. He was all dishevelled … very untidy, probably drunk. ‘You’re always so demanding!’ he said.

“This angered me not a little. ‘
Me
demanding!’ I said. ‘You were always the one who was demanding. Attention! Attention! I’m setting the bedclothes on fire now! That was you. Rescue me! Rescue me! I am drunk! I am a drunk genius. I deserve attention!’

“‘I was not like that,’ he replied, ‘I was retiring, sensitive. … Clean my wings!’

“This infuriated me. ‘I will
not
clean your wings,’ I said. ‘Clean your own wings.’

“‘I can’t,’ he whimpered. ‘I can’t reach around the back where the itch is the worst. It torments me.’”

Emily’s tone when imitating her brother was very sarcastic. She continued the story.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘it was you who decided to become an angel.’

“‘I did not,’ he whined, ‘it wasn’t my fault. It just happened.’

“‘There you go again, never taking any responsibility for anything. When are you going to grow up?’

“‘I can’t grow any more,’ he roared … really angry now. ‘I’m dead.’

“‘Excuses, excuses,’ I countered, ‘you’ll never change. You’ll always be baby Bran, bedwetting and complaining, and furthermore I did not invite you here, regardless of what you might think.’

“‘Well, then what am I doing here?’

“‘Who knows? You’ve probably been thrown out. You’re probably a fallen angel. What have you been up to?’

“‘Oh, nothing.’

“This was a typical answer. I decided to scold him concerning his apathy. ‘Angels have chores,’ I said, ‘the good ones do them. But you probably haven’t …’

“‘I’ve not been feeling well,’ he said.

“I became impatient. ‘You’re
dead
, for heaven’s sake,’ I said, ‘dead people always feel fine. Angels feel wonderful! Beatific! Ghosts, on the other hand, are capable of a range of emotions, revenge being one of the most prevalent–though personally I think it’s a waste of eternity-but
angels
, angels are always supposed to be in good humour.’

“‘Well, I’m not!’

“‘So I see,’ I said. Then he ruffled his feathers testily.” At this point Emily shook her shoulders, demonstrating this angelic activity and Arianna laughed at her.

“‘You always knew it all,’ he said. ‘You were so bossy. Lording it over everybody. Your attitude was terrible. Imperious! Outrageous!’

“‘What an ingrate! Who helped you upstairs?’ I demanded. ‘Who told Papa you were in bed asleep when in fact you were still drinking at the Black Bull?’

“We argued on and on like this for some time, and the wind got into it of course, tossing words around as it does, and all the while this voice inside me kept saying,
I love him, I love him
. And I did, you know, he always touched some bright fuse in me. He ignited me like a torch and the world became clear in the eye of anger. I loved the way he left the house, a whistling boy, and then I loved the way he crashed drunkenly back into it. I cherished and protected the tormented side of him, the side that angered me, and I called it out of him too so that I could watch this side of myself reel clumsily through life meeting all the brutality head on. And there he was, a poor excuse for an angel, thrown out of heaven in exactly the same way he’d been thrown out of every pub he ever frequented. There he was, rending his celestial garments and holding forth about how he’d died for love. In the middle of this we both broke into laughter and I said to him, ‘Branwell, I’ve really missed you. I’m so glad to see you.’”

“Did
he die for love?” asked Arianna, immediately interested.

“He died for an idea of love, that unattainable married woman. But he really died of drink. I was the one who died of love.”

“But Emily … you said …”

“Not that romantic kind of love. I died for love of him: that furious, catastrophic side of myself that was buried with him. I never went out the door of the house again after his funeral, didn’t even come out here. They wanted me to see doctors but I knew I was dead already. I couldn’t live without his complexities, which were really my complexities. So I just died!”

Arianna pondered this for a while. “Isn’t it odd,” she said, “that I didn’t die for love. Isn’t it ridiculous, when you think about it, that I had to die just at the moment when he started loving me again?”

“Not as ridiculous as you might think.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Arianna suspiciously.

Emily floated backwards in order to resume the game, her voice becoming softer as she slowly disappeared. Her words, when they reached Arianna, seemed to have no source.

It’s not as odd as you think
, the wind seemed to say.

A
FEW EVENINGS
later, John returns to the cottage and Ann, pleased to see him, brings the bottle of whisky from the kitchen to lace their tea and make the talk easier. She is burning a new form of coal: large, round, flat lumps.

“They look like hockey pucks,” she says.

“What’s this, these hockey pooks?”

“A Canadian game … with skates and sticks and ice.”

“Ah, yes …” He has almost forgotten her foreignness. “Wilt tha have another story tonight?” he asks, using the Yorkshire, asserting the ground they stand on in the face of the pucks, in the face of her belonging somewhere else.

Ann pours the tea and adds a splash of liquor. This is a form of assent.

“The story is of Grief Mill, where I worked years ago as a young person – a child almost – and where my father worked before me. An odd sort of name for a mill, I suppose.”

“Is it is a true story, then?”

“Why, Ann, they are all true stories that I tell.” John opens his large hands towards her, as if by investigating his palms Ann should be able to read his honesty.