Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart

Author:Jane Urquhart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Ghost, Man-Woman Relationships, Balloonists, Fiction, Literary, Women Scholars, Historical, Haworth (England), General
ISBN: 9780771086632
Publisher: McClellan & Stewart Ltd.
Published: 1993-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

“IN ALL THESE love affairs the loved one becomes the prison of the lover, Arianna.”

“You mean the prisoner?”

“No … no, I mean the prison, the dungeon. The loved one starts to acquire architectural properties; so much so that the bars the prisoner looks through could easily be the loved one’s ribcage and the lover knocking like a heart trying to break free. Each is held captive in a cage of the other’s bones. Each claims to be the heart. Each denies being the prison. And the terrifying truth is that the heart and the cage need each other for survival. Without the blood there is no bone. Without the rib there is no heart. I wrote a lot of poems about dungeons; the great dark inner caves of the loved one where the lover exists chained to the wall, powerless.”

“I told him that he was free.”

“But he wasn’t free and neither were you. You were each imprisoned in the dungeon of the other.”

“I couldn’t leave him.”

“He couldn’t leave you.”

Two lapwings dropped from the sky, flying in a synchronized trance. They sliced the phantoms in half at waist level and disappeared behind the adjacent hill. Emily scanned the sky for more birds, and then continued, “My brother looked for prisons, I think. Some people do, you know. He searched for prisons, hoping that they would break his spirit: that wonderful, hilarious, awkward spirit that I loved so well. It wasn’t so much that he was trying, all the time, to break his heart, as he was trying to imprison himself and to break his spirit. The married woman he supposedly loved had little to do with it really. She had to have the knowledge of her cage of bone so that he could lock himself inside it. After that she could go where she wanted, do as she pleased, because he trapped himself inside a prison of her, where he was busily breaking his spirit.”

“Did I break Jeremy’s spirit?”

“No … yes … not on purpose.”

“And your brother – was his spirit broken? Did he succeed?”

“Ah, yes. He succeeded absolutely … brilliantly. ‘Tell me about this married woman,’ I would say to him, and, you know, each time I asked him, his reply was different … no … not his reply, exactly, it was the same in tone. Each time I asked him, she was different. And as he became more and more ill, she became, to my mind, more and more interesting.

“The first time he told me about her she was a saint … a paragon of virtue, clothed in modest grays and browns, her eyes cast down, her hands folded on her lap. But it was as if he were aware that this was not a suitable prison for someone as wonderful and terrible as he, and so he drank and brooded and raved and came up with something better.

“The next time he described her, her hair had changed from brown to black; her dress was satin, peach-coloured, I think. She had a band of black velvet wrapped around her throat.

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