Changing Heaven (6 page)

Arianna, slightly in shock from her sudden awareness of the woman’s presence, craned her neck to examine the spot to which the woman pointed. And there, at the end of a series of billowing hills was a smaller one-rather regular in formation.

“That is Hob Hill,” the woman announced, “and you think a hob is a fireplace, don’t you? Something you put your kettle on. Admit it, that’s what you think.”

Arianna nodded, suspecting that she was wrong.

“Wrong!” said the woman. “A hob is a little friendly spirit who slips into your kitchen at night when you are sleeping and helps you with your household chores. Sweeps up, mops down, et cetera. Since he is a little person, his hill, his moor, has to be smaller than these” – the woman gestured around her in all directions – “and so there it is. And if you don’t believe me then you are a fool!”

“I didn’t say I thought it wasn’t true.”

“You believe it then?”

Arianna was silent for a moment, thinking. “Yes,” she eventually replied.

The woman visibly relaxed. “Well, that’s a good thing,” she said to herself, “particularly under the circumstances.”

“Anyway,” she said to Arianna, “let me continue. These hobs can grow, if you want them to, into almost anything that you want them to be. Then, of course, they start changing their names and demanding more space. Space,” she repeated, looking around her, “then they need a lot more space.”

Spa-a-a-c-e
, roared the wind.

“They’ll take over anything, everything. I’m sure you know the Celtic rhyme: ‘First he sweeps, then he polishes, then he grows up, and demolishes.’”

Arianna didn’t, but at the moment felt it safer to remain silent.

The woman was clearly warming to her subject. “After they grow they’re not so friendly any more. But they still belong to you. Completely. They are all yours.
He
is all
yours.” The woman crossed her arms and looked at Arianna meaningfully. “Then, of course, he is a demon – utterly horrifying-but infinitely more interesting, I’m sure you’ll agree, than a little elf with a broom in his hand.

“The question is,” the young woman mused, “why do one’s demons stick to one?” She looked at Arianna closely. “Because,” she answered herself, “one has created them, after all, one way or another, and so to them, whether they like it or not, one is
mother
, one is
home.”

After uttering this last word the woman sat on a rock and looked rather sadly towards the village where Arianna had slept the previous night. “Home,” she said again, but much more quietly.

Arianna began to feel vaguely afraid. Her childhood, which had begun to nag her the day before, now made a reappearance. She remembered witches and how they were reputed often to live out on the moors, where they collected poisonous herbs and chanted weird words. They had also lived, she now suddenly remembered, in the wardrobe at the south end of her bedroom. Or at least, one had. She could recall every leathery line on the creature’s face, every wart. She resembled Aunt Agnes, who came to tea on Thursdays and who disapproved of children’s laughter. She resembled this woman not in the least.

Witch
, whispered the wind. It appeared to have calmed down somewhat, but, in fact, it was merely taking a rest so that it could gather strength.

From this one witch, this one cupboard, Arianna’s childhood bedroom, in its entirety, recreated itself in her mind. The papered walls, the shelves for picture books and dolls. Six pennies hidden in a drawer. Five small white dresses where the witch was. A parasol, much loved. The hobbyhorse, a friend during the day, a terrifying enemy at night when he turned from white to grey. The whole world as it existed before her mother died and her father took to drink. Arianna began to visualize a little silver locket that she had forgotten until now. One that, to the child’s sorrow, would
not open because it was not made to. Just a solid, shining heart to hang, bright, against white cotton.

“I had one that opened,” said the woman, “with a lock of my mother’s hair inside, but it wasn’t as pretty as yours.”

Arianna was startled out of her pleasant reverie. “What was that?” she asked.

“I said that my locket opened but didn’t have such pretty engraving.”

“How do you know?” Arianna approached the woman now and scrutinized her pale face. “How did you know what I was thinking?”

“It was perfectly clear. Your little bedroom and then you, small, trying madly to open the tiny silver heart. It was all right here.” And the woman pointed to a boggy area vaguely to her right. “And, I suppose you’ve been trying to open an impossible heart since then, haven’t you? We always do these things at least twice. If at first we don’t succeed we become obsessed. It’s very simple. What’s your name?”

“Arianna Ether.”

“Oh, no, it’s not.”

Arianna confessed. “It used to be Polly Smith but now it’s Arianna Ether.”

“No, now it’s Polly Smith again. You were having some very strong memories. Arianna Ether had very few memories,
n’est-ce pas?
Hard at work in the here and now picking away at some closed heart. Where are we, by the way, these days in the here and now? What year is it?”

“How can it be that you don’t know? It’s 1900, the turn of the century.”

“Well, even that’s debatable. Maybe it’s the turn of the last century, or maybe it’s the turn of the next century, or maybe the centuries have stopped turning altogether. Who cares? Why did I ever bother to ask? Curiosity, I guess. Good thing you are out here. You might have
still
been picking away at that closed heart at the turn of the century after the next.”

“That heart,” said Arianna/Polly with dignity and pride, “is open now.”

“Really?” asked the woman with more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “Black hair? Perfect profile? I have my doubts.”

“How do you
know?”
asked Polly, “What
are
you?”

“I am exactly the same as you,” said the woman, “Look, I’ll have a memory and you tell me what it is.”

And Polly/Arianna, unpractised though she was, did see a coal fire and an unhealthy little boy sitting near it writing in a tiny notebook.

“The boy?” she asked.

“My brother.”

“The fire?”

“Our parlour.”

“Then are we
both
witches?” asked Polly/Arianna, horrified at the thought.

“No,” replied the woman. “We’re both ghosts.”

“You mean I’m …?”

“As a doornail.” The young woman extended her arm towards Polly/Arianna as if to congratulate her. As if to shake her hand.

It took several moments for Arianna to grasp this information. “It’s not true,” she said at last.

“Oh, truth,” said the woman vaguely, “I’d forgotten all about that. Facts, I suppose she means.” Then, looking at Arianna, “The facts are: we’re ghosts.”

“It’s not true. I feel … I’m supposed to fall; but the parachute-”

“Didn’t open.”

“I must get back to him,” announced Polly/Arianna, floating as quickly as possible to a standing position. “He’ll be waiting and oh, God, he’ll be angry. Where’s my balloon? What wild wind! Where did it take my balloon? I
must
get back to him!”

“Him, him,” hummed the wind.

“You mean you want to haunt him?” asked the woman. “Because if that’s what you mean it can be easily arranged.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want! I want to haunt him. Haunt him. I want him and I want him to want and to love me!”

Hurly burly, burly burly!
chanted the wind.
Haunt, haunt, haunt!

“Personally,” said the woman, “if you want my opinion, and even if you don’t, I think that haunting is a waste of time. Mooning around rather, when there’s so much to be done out here. And now that there are two of us there’s twice as much. All this sorting and sifting and settling of accounts. Mountains of memory after you’re dead!”

“I’m not dead.”

“Yes, you are, and so am I. Only I’ve been dead a little longer.”

Suddenly it began to snow-fiercely. The little black village disappeared from sight. Every feature of the landscape was shut out by white. Arctic weather.

“This is my home, where whirlwinds blow, where snowdrifts round my path are swelling. ’Tis many a year, ’tis long ago, since I beheld another dwelling,” chanted the woman.

“What’s all that?” asked Arianna in confusion.

“Oh … just something I wrote.”

“Well, it seems quite strange to me.”

“Yes, I was quite morbid, really. It’s amazing how much I’ve cheered up since I’ve been dead.”

The wind roared through the two women.

“Do you always get blizzards like this in September?” asked Polly/Arianna.

“Sometimes. But it’s not September any more. It’s probably, let me see, February. When you are dead, time has no meaning and weather is more capricious.”

“Oh, dear,” said Arianna, but to her surprise rather light-heartedly, “I guess I really am dead. He was handsome and now I’m dead. What’s your name?”

“Emily Jane Brontë. I wrote a book, but I’m not sure that matters. Brontë means thunder in Greek.”

“No, it’s not,” said Arianna, astonished at her own sudden knowledge. “It’s not Brontë, it’s Brunty. Your father changed his name. Was he a lot like thunder?”

“No … yes. Now he is like memory.”

“So, if we decide not to haunt, what exactly do we do out here?” Arianna surveyed the wastes all around her.

“We remember,” said Emily. “And now that there are two of us we’ll watch each other’s memories and tell each other stories.”

“True stories?”

“Oh … truth …” said Emily, vaguely. “Whatever you want, I don’t mind much, really, one way or the other. It depends on what you remember … whether you remember the ideas or the objects.”

“I remember him,” said Arianna. “I remember hope.”

“Yes, memories of hope are good. A beautifully unrequited state and very memorable. You hoped …”

“I hoped all the time for a house.”

“Oh, yes,” said Emily, now surrounded by the spring flowers on the moors. “Yes, I see it. Let’s remember houses. We could talk about building them.” She hugged her transparent knees in anticipation. “You must tell me the story of that house. You don’t still want to haunt, do you?”

“Well, not just yet,” said Arianna, who was already beginning to construct the story in her mind. “But maybe this house we never built was already haunted … by something.”

“Oh, good,” said Emily sitting, now, cross-legged at her companion’s feet, “a ghost story! I just love ghost stories!”

Ghosty, ghosty
, chuckled the wind, and in quite a lyrical fashion for, by now, it was summer.

T
HE HIGHWAY
.

Its arrival in the province has, for Ann, heralded the end of an era. And the beginning of another where four lanes sew the disparate parts of her life together like a long, grey thread. The highway connects everything: the countryside and the city, the known and the unknown. It makes certain of her mother’s friendships possible to maintain. It reduces distance to a manageable time frame. It connects the house in the city with Ann’s mother’s past-a village and a farm in a rural landscape that becomes, with the advent of the highway, a miraculous hour and a half away. An hour and a half of grey speed and you are able to enter the nineteenth century; its general stores, its woodstoves, its large high-ceilinged rooms, its dusty gravel roads.

Ann had been forced, until recently, to carry rural attributes around in her mind in much the same way she carried
Wuthering Heights
, the two melding now and then.

Before the highway, there was Ann’s early childhood in the city and a more complicated road to the past: a road made up of the sequential experiences of earlier forms of travel. Ann sitting in the back of her mother’s lush, curvaceous Buick, meandering along the old road which turned and dipped and then changed with ruler-straight regality, into the King and Queen Street of one small town after another. Pickering, Newcastle, Port Hope, Grafton-their red brick town halls, their clapboard churches, their five-and-dime stores, their gas pumps which resembled undersea divers. There were spots, too, in the countryside between towns where trees would reach towards each other to make a tunnel through which the car hummed. Then light and shade would flicker briefly on the paper dolls and
their wardrobes which Ann had placed on the plaid fabric of the back seat.

Farmers rumbled by in pick-up trucks; twelve bales of hay in the back, a dog beside them, alert, in the cab. Other dogs, too, that leapt towards the car, having crouched in anticipation behind farmhouse shrubbery ever since the appearance of the last vehicle some twenty minutes before. Porch swings, rail fences. Brief glimpses of water: a brook, one river, and now and then the Great Lake itself shining on the far side of an orchard.

All of this seen from deep inside the moving room of the car and through the sun-shot mist produced by the cigarettes her mother smoked as she sat behind the wheel, separated from her daughter by the thick slab of the seat. Ann straddled the hump in the back and picked up the cardboard dolls and laid them down again. Gingham dress after gingham dress. Or she counted horses in disappearing pastures. Or she looked for children of her own age playing near the front stoop of their houses.