Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart Page A

broken dome, Heaven changes. Ann again takes the book down from the shelf. She looks at its cover; a strong man depicted there, growling at the wind, his back to a stunted tree. The wood engraver has drafted theweather so intricately it looks like the sea. Swirling currents lift the man’s dark curls. Ann opens the book and turns from wood engraving to wood engraving: graveyards, stone walls, fierce emotion, snarling dogs, landscape, landscape. She begins to read and becomes once again irrevocably lost in that first moorland blizzard. Let me in, let me in. I’ve been lost on the moor for twenty years . She enters, Ann enters the structure called Wuthering Heights .
    “Oh, Heathcliff, Heathcliff,” she whispers in the dark of her own pink bedroom, any winter night the wind chooses to howl through the city in which she lives. “Oh, Heathcliff,” she sighs, while her mouth aches with a combination of desire and orthodontia. She is taking small steps, groping, blind, towards weather.
    The blizzard she has stumbled into shrieks through the dining room, on whose round rug she often sits reading. It howls around the china cabinet and attacks the sturdy, plump rosewood legs of the table as if, the moment she opened the leaded-glass door of the custom-built shelves to remove the book, she had let it out; this beast, this innerness, this otherness. The past. The difficult past.
    The events along the road from the valley to the heights.

“W HEN YOU’RE lighter than air,” Arianna/Polly said, settling herself into a corner made by the intersection of two stone walls, “then a house can hold you down, weigh you down in a pleasant way, so that you don’t float away altogether.”
    “I suppose …” said Emily, doubtfully.
    “And, if possible, there would have to be two houses for us. One for the balloon, you see. A Balloon House.”
    “Was this imaginary house yours or his?”
    “It was ours.”
    “No,” said Emily thoughtfully, “No, I think it was yours, but … never mind. Go on. Tell me what happened.”
    “I began thinking about the house a lot when we lived in a white room-a white room in a tourist home right by the sea so that, no matter what, I was always afraid that one wave might wash us away altogether. And I couldn’t swim and was very afraid of the water.”
    Arianna looked at Emily to see if she disapproved of this fear. Seeing no reaction, she continued.
    “It pounded, this sea, always, because it was winter and stormy, and its nearness fogged the windows behind the white curtains, making the glass white, too, and shutting the view of the world out. The water was always out there calling and, because of that, the room felt temporary and, of course, what I really wanted was eternity. I didn’t much like what the sea was doing to the house where we had the room. I discovered why the term ‘weather-beaten’ had come into existence. That house was beaten by the weather every day. Eventually, I knew, it would have to succumb.
    “All we did in the white room was make love, over and over and over. He was under me and over me and all around me and inside me. There wasn’t an inch of me anywhere that he didn’t know, hadn’t touched somehow. He was only concerned with me as I was then, with the physical details of me and he would want to know nothing of my past; only what I thought, how I responded there and then. He would always silence me when I spoke about another time, by placing his mouth on mine, his body flat over mine, as if constructing a barrier to memory.
    “And the sea that I feared got into our lovemaking until at times I felt that he was a large wave crawling up my shore; a wave or maybe a whole ocean, filling the rented, white, temporary room. A white sea that I sailed, dazzled and terrified, because, as I knew, water is heavier than air. I’ve never been afraid of the air.”
    “This moor is like a sea sometimes,” said Emily.
    “How I loved him, though, so that the fear got mixed up