Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart Page A

room.”
    “Where is he, where is he?” wept Arianna, “Why do I want him?”
    Waste, waste, waste , whispered the wind.
    “All this wanting is a waste,” said Emily. “And I thought you’d stopped.”
    “So did I,” said Arianna miserably.
    “Why want?” Emily continued. “Enjoy desirelessness. Such is oblivion. This wanting will pass. And yet … and yet Catherine would never rest in my book. She scratched and clawed and wanted and haunted. Poor Heathcliff. How weak he was and how weathered by her wanting. ‘I’ll never rest!’ she promised. But how elusive she was. Just beyond his grasp … always. She was shameless. A shameless, shameless ghost! Always a ghost – a wanton shadow. Ah Heathcliff, she would sigh, and then evaporate! Take any form! he cried. So she became invisible out here in the landscape. Ha! Such forms! He couldn’t see her, so he wanted her, which was what she wanted! They were engaged in a never-ending circular argument. It was their chosen vocation.”
    Hallucinate, hallucinate , howled the wind.
    “Their whole love affair was an hallucination! I never really let them touch-except once. One desperate embrace. But by then she was dying. And on purpose! To make him want her! Her death swallowed him whole. The new form she took-that of absence-obsessed him.”
    “Who is Catherine?”
    “Someone I invented. And in some ways she was the invention of someone else I invented and he was her invention. I invented them so that they could invent each other.”
    “He invented Arianna Ether,” said Polly, becoming for the moment Polly, “but then he didn’t want her.”
    “He was afraid of the second invention. He invented the white girl too, though, and he wasn’t afraid of her-Polly Blanc, Polly Blank: Who was she, anyway? An evanescent creature. Pure fog. He could walk right through her. Listen, once in the book I have Mr. Capital H – Heathcliff, He , Him -bribe the sexton to open Catherine’s coffin eighteen years after her death. ‘It was her face yet,’ he comments and then, ‘It would change if the air blew on it.’ So he closes the casket – quickly. A little air, a little exposure in his presence and it would change. The face, the person would evaporate. He knew that; so did she. Absence was essential, after childhood, to the hallucination. Desperate departures, absences, reversals, withdrawals – the ongoing war. A permanent state of unfulfilled desire. And, weirdly enough, longing itself was what they desired. Mr. Capital H gave a long melodramatic speech about Catherine’s ghost, her well-honed haunting skills. Moaning and complaining and writhing and loving every minute of it.
    “If you must haunt, Polly/Arianna, then haunt well–although I still maintain it’s a waste of time. Never reveal yourself completely. Just when the haunted one believes in your presence-disappear. Never let him see you whole.
    “It’s good to be a ghost, Polly/Arianna … you can use absence to a marvellous advantage.”

S IX SILENT months in Ann’s tidy kitchen where tea towels hang-clean, motionless rectangles – from a gleaming metal bar; where the only change in temperature is the heating and cooling of the pristine oven that warms single portions of frozen food; where Ann sits at a small, unstained table, marking the papers of students who do not share her passion for Wuthering Heights , or where she sits, as she does now, working on her book.
    She has just written a paragraph on rain. “Weather has come right in through the window,” she has stated, “in the form of driving rain at the time of Heathcliff’s death. He has finally (she has underlined the word finally) opened the window. He has opened himself. He has let himself out and he has let the weather in.”
    The first ring cuts right into the middle of a mental picture Ann has constructed of a casement window swinging free on its hinges. With the second ring the window slams shut, and the landscape begins to fade, hill