Changing Heaven (25 page)

“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. Something 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.

“They rescued her, of course,” says John, “but her mind were never the same again.”

“What about the Underwater Club, was it ever the same again?”

“Oh, aye, except they had developed a new appetite for thrills and adventure.”

They laugh together, stroke the morning cat, pour steaming cups of tea. Their conversation of the previous night is, temporarily, laid aside.

I
N THE YEAR
1805, a British naval commander became, not surprisingly, obsessed by the air currents upon which the movements of his ships depended. A rational man, he felt he could not rest until he had identified and described the wind’s activities; until he had, in fact, labelled them. This must have involved years of observation, years of using his frigate as the subject of a long experiment, years of testing the soundness of the conclusions he gradually began to draw. Eventually he devised a system whereby the wind could be divided into thirteen categories, and since he was, by then, an admiral, these divisions became known to the world as Admiral Beaufort’s Wind Scale.

Ann has come to the section in her scholarly writings where she feels she must apply Admiral Beaufort’s Wind Scale to the weather of
Wuthering Heights
. She believes she has come to understand this obsessed admiral. She can see him in her mind’s eye standing on the bridge of his ship at the turn of the nineteenth century, sniffing the wind, scrutinizing the ocean, writing his observations in a small notebook. “Calm, brisk, blustery, smooth, erratic,” would be some of the words he might use as he quantifies the wind. Was his large admiral’s hat ever carried off by the force he was describing? If so, would he then write “Wind strong enough to remove military apparel?”

The Beaufort scale, Ann discovers, has been adapted over the years, and applied to objects other than frigates; it has described the response of trees, chimney pots, insects, birds, children, architecture, clothing, and smoke to varying degrees of wind. Adjectives have been attached and discarded by succeeding generations: “intensely devastating, inconceivable, tremendous, overpowering,” or “light,
gentle, soothing, moderate, fresh, bracing.” The nouns used in nineteenth-century descriptions of the levels of the scale have changed in the twentieth. Roof shale has been replaced by telephone wires, chimney pots by television antennae. Ann is particularly fond, however, of the Admiral’s own elucidation of number 13, the hurricane-force wind as “that which no canvas could withstand.” She wants to tell the forever absent Arthur about this, wants him to apply it to the canvases of Tintoretto. And she wants him to be pleased that she suggested this-pleased with her cleverness, her humour.

She also likes the way the admiral refers to a light breeze: its sea criteria. “Small wavelets, still short but more pronounced. Crests have a glassy appearance and do not break.”

But most of all she loves the ancient seaman’s descriptions of storm: land storm, sea storm. He gives ten points to this angry activity on his scale. He is clinging to the mast of his man-o’-war in ecstasy. “Very high winds with long overhanging crests,” he shouts in Ann’s imagination. “Foam in great patches, blowing in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind! Surface taking on a white appearance! The sea! The sea! The sea is tumbling, heavy, shock-like!” The admiral is drenched, gasping. “Seldom experienced inland,” he roars at her across the tumultuous ocean, across the yawning gap of time that separates them.

Oh, really
…
?
thinks Ann.
What about
King Lear?
What about
Wuthering Heights?
What about last month?

There is only one scene in
Wuthering Heights
that Ann believes she can place at zero on the wind scale. She reads the few sentences describing it.

They sat together in a window whose lattice lay back against the wall, and displayed beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley of Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top…. Both the room and its
occupants, and the scene they gazed on, looked wondrously peaceful

Zero on the wind scale. Calm. “Sea like a mirror,” the admiral whispers, amazed, peering over the edge of the mighty bark whose sails hang limp and lifeless behind him. The cultivated garden of Thrushcross Grange holds its breath, plays statue, becomes the perfect setting, the perfect atmosphere for Catherine and her contented husband, for their marriage.

But Ann, the reader, can predict the weather, can move her mind around the park and investigate. She can see just the suggestion of a nimbo-stratus cloud formation peeking over the horizon. Unlike the couple in the book, who sit as if posing for a portrait whose setting is Eden, Ann knows that a change of barometric pressure is on the way.

Night of full moon, still night. Smoke rises vertically, mist hangs. Black windows of the Grange reflect a quantity of moons. No light glows inside, throws itself into this garden, which is a still, silver sea, a mirror in which waits the gypsy. Ann knows he waits there; his tense breath is the only current in the surroundings, that and the air he disturbs when he shifts with restrained impatience from one foot to the other. Ann knows that, at this moment, the blades of grass that felt the weight of his approaching foot are, hours later, struggling to unbend themselves, struggling to reach towards the moon. Ann understands that the curved mass adjacent to the clean slice of black exterior wall is his intruding shoulder. Catherine and Linton inside, locked in the unmoving trance of compatibility. Heathcliff outside, waiting to gain entrance.

Ann is certain that, as he waits, the wind scale is beginning, subtly, to alter. “A person from Gimmerton wishes to see you, ma’am.” Leaves rustle. A spider-web curves outwards, like the belly of a sail. Catherine feels the light air on her eyelids. “Someone mistress does not expect.”
Twigs move. Dust is raised on the path leading to the house. “What, the gypsy-the ploughboy?” A leaf disconnects itself from a tree that has too long been its home, becomes airborne as Catherine walks onto the outside steps and sees the revenant, hears his speech-his eyes, his hair disturbed. Large branches move, winged seeds glide, plumed seeds are airborne. Her own sleeves rippling as her arms rise through the troubled air to meet him.

“Waves taking a more pronounced long form. Many white horses on the crests. Chance of some spray,” says the admiral, in a strong, assured voice.

Number five, perhaps six on the Beaufort scale. And rising.

PART THREE
Revenants

Oh would that I were a reliable spirit careering around
Congenially employed and no longer by
feebleness
bound
Oh who would not leave the flesh to become a reliable spirit
Possibly travelling far and acquiring merit
.

–S
TEVIE
S
MITH

I
N LOVE AND
alone, Jeremy Jacobs, the Sindbad of the Skies, was hovering over the white shores of Edge Island. Above him loomed an enormous globe-a balloon of scarlet silk, a breathtaking drop of blood poised over a frigid, still landscape.

“White,” he mused, as he touched a square inch of the silk absently, with numb fingers, “always magnifies colour.” And then he remembered
her
colour, pale though she was, vibrant against the Arctic white of bedsheets. He remembered the wet, plum-coloured mouth and yellow hair-the long white limbs, beige inside the room’s blank interior.

He was not even sure, now, that he was travelling over land, and that excited him. Just the idea of entering a territory where land and sea camouflage each other, where sameness and mimicry abound, where his form is the only detail and his actions the only adventure, made him almost wince with joy. Behind him crouched white mountains, in front the hummocks of polar sea.

He had already sailed over the mountains of Spitzbergen, over the sharp blades of the western range and the flat platforms of the eastern, over Stor Fiord, past Whale’s Point, knowing the names from long nights spent with polar maps. Tomorrow he would sail over North East Land, leave the earth behind at Dove Bay, and aim for White Island. But now, with the drag lines anchored on ice, the red balloon remained stationary, and he had time to reflect, to remember.