One Letter Different: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Joanna Cannon

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       One Letter Different

      Note on the Author

      A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

      This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

       ONE LETTER DIFFERENT

       JOANNA CANNON

      ‘YORKSHIRE ISN’T WHAT IT used to be.’

      Ellis’s mother addressed the kitchen window of the holiday cottage, as if the entire county had spread itself out before her, waiting for an evaluation. They’d only been there half an hour, but her mother had already found herself a dishcloth to run over the draining board.

      ‘It’s the same as it always was, Carole. Still sandwiched between Lancashire and the North Sea.’ Ellis’s father didn’t address the kitchen window, but carried on opening and closing the drawers and the cupboards, because when you walk into a holiday room, the first thing you do is look at all the empty space and wonder how you might go about filling it.

      ‘There’s no view. The brochure promised a view.’ Her mother rinsed the cloth under the tap, and gave herself something else to wipe. ‘Brochures aren’t what they used to be either.’

      There was a view, it just wasn’t the one her mother had expected to see. It was a view of another, identical holiday cottage, a recycling bin in the back yard of a pub called The Cow and the Canary (a ridiculous name, said her father), and a single, wooden bench decorated in graffiti, because there are certain things in life that are so important, they need to be written down somewhere to make sure they are always remembered.

      ‘There’s a view from my window. You can see the edge of the moors if you stand on tiptoe.’

      Ellis looked at each of them in turn, but her parents didn’t answer.

      She turned and headed back to her room, listened to the sound of her feet on an unfamiliar staircase and the echo of herself in another house. Unlike the carpeted world they usually inhabited, the cottage had floorboards and flagstones. It made every noise more important than you intended it to be.

      ‘Ellis, you sound like a herd of elephants,’ shouted her mother. ‘Do try to be more graceful.’

      It took seven trips for her father to unload the car. Ellis watched from the bedroom, using her rucksack as a step and breathing silence into the glass. People go on holiday to escape their lives, yet her mother seemed to have packed as much of their life as she could into the back of the Ford Focus and brought it along with them.

      ‘I’m fairly sure they have frying pans in Yorkshire,’ her father had said that morning.

      On the seventh trip, her father just carried one thing. The photograph. Ellis wasn’t surprised to see it, because it accompanied her mother everywhere in its tired gilt frame, but she was surprised to see it carried in all by itself. Perhaps her