Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart Page B

with the loving. I navigated him, or tried to: me the only detail on a white sea. Soon, however, I saw that there was never going to be any past; that he had locked it out, had locked out even a past that was connected to us because, in that sea, in that white room, there were never going to be any details. There was only weather, the weather of a featureless sea, and the present, which was skin and hair and bone and pleasure.
    “You must know that a sea is unidentifiable, because, despite its waves and white-caps and froth and foam and colour, it really has no identifying details. I could show you engravings or paintings of twelve different oceans – the Indian, the Atlantic, the Pacific – and you couldn’t tell which was which because they all look the same. No recognizable features. No details. Just water the weather is working on. No special details at all.
    “And, of course, I wanted some. To be able to say, this is us. This is what happened and this is where it happened. I wanted more, I guess, something beyond the white room,though when he was touching me I couldn’t have moved to anywhere else. Because I was drowned in him.
    “He would have to leave sometimes to do a performance. He would leave, sail his balloon somewhere and return, usually wordless, with a bouquet of white carnations for me and his heart beating like the sea and his breath as deep as the weather. I began to feel his eyes staring out from beneath my lids and the world got farther and farther away.
    “And so, in time, of course, I wished it back again-just a little, just enough to provide a setting for us to love against. Somehow I thought that unless there was some more scenery, I wouldn’t be able to remember our loving. I wanted memory and there really isn’t any memory in a white room. A white room has no memory, perhaps, if you want to look at it from that point of view.
    “When I mentioned a house to him, or even a journey together, he would become as silent and as neutral as the white walls that surrounded us and I knew he really didn’t want anything more, anything else. ‘There’s just us, Polly,’ he would finally say, for I hadn’t yet become Arianna, ‘just us and your lightness and your whiteness.’ But he would say this almost angrily, if I mentioned the house, or at least coldly, without an expression of any kind on his face.
    “So when he went off to make money in his balloon and I was left alone in the white room for a few days I began to make the house-you know, to picture it in my mind. At first I just made the inside and it was just about the size of a dollhouse I’d had as a child, with the back missing and the other side not quite real despite its lovely little windows with shutters and its front door with a tiny knocker, because you hardly ever turn it around to look from the outside in.
    “I picked out all the wallpapers and the curtains; all the colours for the various rooms. I wanted colour! I refused to have a single white object in the house. Even the bath I had constructed out of cream-coloured porcelain with chartreuse and pink roses painted in it, and green vines. It wasn’t a rich person’s house, mind you, but it had charm:lots of chintz in the parlour, though never on a white ground, and lots of odds and ends, bric-à-brac, and pictures. Pictures on the walls, you see, because I wanted details … to the point where I didn’t mind crowding. I wanted lots of objects and I wanted there to be lots of memories associated with those objects.
    “Gradually, I became quite happy with it, with all of it. The dining room had Chippendale chairs and silver candelabra. But the house was not too large, not, as I’ve said, a rich person’s house. And no servants because I did want to stay alone with him.
    “Eventually, the inside of the house became so wonderful (there were fireplaces in all the rooms), and so full and so furnished (I had those clasps on the inside of the windows-have you seen them?-the