Anima: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Grace McCleen

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       Anima

      Footnotes

      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.

       ANIMA

       GRACE MCCLEEN

      THE MEN ARRIVED IN the afternoon with horns and with dogs. Rain came in swathes; mist was cold on my skin. I slipped out after lunch. There was only packing to be done, and I didn’t want to stand and watch. ‘You’ll like it,’ they told me, ‘you’ll see. Just give it time. You’ll learn to be a lady,’ they said. ‘Oh miss, such airs and graces, you’ll have – you won’t know yourself!’

      It was this that concerned me. ‘But can I come back?’ I asked them.

      ‘Of course,’ they said. ‘But you won’t want to. You’ll be so busy with your new life there. It’s time you grew up, anyway. You’ve been left to your own ways too long. You can’t stay here for ever. It’s time you went into the real world.’

      I was sure I would be content to stay here, amongst these fields and woods, this hill, for the rest of my life; I did not care if I never discovered the ‘real’ world, but I said nothing. I could always run away, I thought; if the new place was as bad as I imagined, I could run away and come back here. But then I couldn’t stay; they would send me back. Could I live in the wild? I wondered, as I watched them label vests and socks; What would I need to survive there?

      It wasn’t sadness I felt that day, but disbelief that this could be happening. I had never lived anywhere but here. I didn’t know if I could. It seemed inconceivable. I wasn’t sure how my body would function. So there was no sadness, only shock, only amazement that such a thing was taking place. Stupor, I suppose.

      I couldn’t stand around and wait for the car to come any longer, so I crept away that afternoon, despite the weather, and, hidden by the bare blackberry canes, stole down to the fence at the bottom of the garden. Nothing seemed real, though I strove to experience each and every thing as I never had before. I passed the place where I fell and scarred both knees when I was four, the tree where John the gardener had built the lookout for my seventh birthday, the orchard where every September we harvested apples, the place where I laid out supper for the hedgehogs. I touched lichen, caught the sharp stink of badger, noticed the colour, even now, of the dead leaves on the ground, stepped on mushrooms and heard the curious slippery squeak their flesh made as it sundered – and I saw, smelt, heard, and felt nothing. I couldn’t yet feel the rain, which was heavier now. Each drop left only a numbness behind it that might be cold or might be hot, a small presence then absence, a coming and going too slight and too numerous to keep count.

      I reached the fence and looked over the land. There was not much to see, I realised; nothing remarkable to another; but each bush, each stream, each thicket, was essential to me. I wondered suddenly if it would remain