A Quiet Adjustment (10 page)

They had by this point returned to their original station, by the bench overlooking the water; the coachman awaited them. Lady Gosford, who was shrewd enough to suspect in their discussion the heat of a deeper opposition, interrupted it to offer the use of her barouche as a conveyance home. They should be a little uncomfortable and close, but it hardly mattered on a journey so short. Lord Gosford, having business in town, declared his intention of walking, upon which Mary gratefully accepted his wife's invitation.

Annabella reluctantly followed her friend into the barouche. She had hoped to continue their discussion alone: if only, as she put it to herself, to pick the burrs off one's stockings after their pleasant walk. Mary's disagreeable reservations had a way of clinging, and Annabella could not rest until she had removed them, one by one. She was fatigued, she had sat down again, but there remained a little to do. ‘It is better, surely, even for them,' she ventured to say, after an interval in which, one might have supposed, the conversation had been dropped, ‘that Lord Byron's readers satisfy their tastes in fancy rather than fact.' At which Mary took it up again and, smiling sweetly, made an end of it. ‘On that point, we may safely agree.'

They continued their short journey in silence. Mary, indeed, a little pale with exercise; her narrow face had contracted still more around the mouth and eyes. But for all her invalidish airs, she gave off, with her crossed arms, a sense of containment, of careful husbandry: she knew perfectly well her own store of fuel and quietly measured out for herself just what was necessary. You are intolerably self-sufficient, Annabella sourly thought—a phrase that suggested perhaps too vividly the prospect of her own dependence. Well, she had no ambition to live as her friend lived; she was confident, in this respect, of desiring better. Still, as she kissed Mary outside the door at Wilmot Street, it was all she could do not to hiss it.
You are intolerably self-sufficient
. But even the checked violence of that intention stunned her a little, as violence always does. She was glad in the end to have said nothing sharp. It would only have given her another cause for regret. It would only have forced the private acknowledgement of something she still hoped, even privately, to put off.

Chapter Nine

BUT SHE COULD NOT PUT IT OFF FOR EVER
. The weight of indecision, secretly supported, had almost exhausted her by the time she retired to bed. She had never felt heavier in her life, but it was the worst of her weariness that rest itself could play no part in relieving it. She rose after a sleepless hour and struck a light, which she hardly blinked against. It occurred to her that she might, following her aunt's example, attempt to sketch the character of her proposed husband—if for no other reason than to occupy the dead hours of the night. Pressing her hands to her eyes, she breathed deeply and sat down to write at the dressing table. The freedom, of choice, of thought, that she felt, there at the bright centre of her darkened room, struck her even then as extraordinary: she might, after all, do anything with her life; she might, after all, take any place in the world.

‘There is a chivalrous generosity,' she wrote, with an inward nod at Mary, ‘in his ideas of love and friendship, and selfishness is totally absent from his character. In secret he is the zealous friend of all the human feelings; but from the strangest perversion that pride ever created, he endeavours to disguise the best points of his character, with such lamentable success, that these are generally misunderstood. Inevitably, he feels himself wronged, but he scorns to show regard to illiberality of opinion by condescending to a justification.'
Condescending to a justification
, as Annabella felt borne upon her, was just what she had set out to do; but the flow of her remarks loosened more honest reflections, and she continued. ‘When indignation takes possession of his mind, and it is easily excited, his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates with the bitterest contempt. But as soon as he has indulged those feelings, he regains the humanity that he had lost (from the immediate impulse of provocation) and repents deeply. So that his mind is continually making the most sudden transitions—from good to evil—from evil to good. It would require in his wife a disposition both mild and forceful to correct such tendencies. The contradiction in these virtues suggests only too well the difficulty one must encounter in uniting them. My own disposition is, in this respect, the mirror of Lord Byron's, but that I should endeavour to improve it depends not one jot on my acceptance or rejection of his suit.'

This brought the question somewhat close to home, and she sat for a minute considering herself coldly, in the same light she had cast upon Lord Byron. Coldness, in fact, was both the quality and the source of her best nature: she could get by, at a pinch, on very little warmth indeed, and she continued to examine herself with scarcely a shiver. ‘It shall be the duty of my lifetime to mend a temper whose chief defect is its vanity, a sin to which I ascribe my changeable humours and sensitivity to slights. I must also, I believe, attribute to it my reputation for generosity, for innocence, for good sense; but whether my vanity is the
cause
or the
effect
of these virtues has become for me of late a painful and uncertain question.' (Yes, she was equal to that: it was the doubt under her feet; it was the air she was falling through.) ‘One of the benefits to be expected from any prolonged intercourse with Lord Byron is that he might, as they say, knock the wind out of me; I should be forced to draw new breath. I should be forced to draw new breath,' she repeated, as the bees of sleep began to buzz around her. But she shook her head against them and continued. ‘Sensations, indeed, the striving after them, have been his guide from childhood and have exercised a tyrannical power over his very superior intellect. It is this craving void which drives him to gaming and love, to travel and to strongly felt pursuits of every kind. Yet amongst them are many which deserve to be associated with Christian principles. His love of goodness in its chastest form and his abhorrence of all that degrades human nature prove the uncorrupted purity of his moral sense.'

Yet even as she wrote these words, she heard the little interior vibration of an echo. Her sense of solitude—which, at the best of times, and despite her being an only and cherished daughter, had never been complete—had begun to seem hopelessly porous. What was always leaking in, from this side or that, were the feelings of other people. What flooded in now, almost overwhelmingly, were the feelings of Lord Byron himself. He was watching her; and she, demurely, had begun to adapt her step. She recalled now, at their first meeting, standing out a dance with him. ‘Sensation,' he had told her, ‘was his great object in life. To feel that we exist, even though in pain.' Yes, she had borrowed for her character of the poet his own confession. She had seen him only as he had chosen to see himself—or chosen, rather, to present himself to her. The stranger's hand, which she had felt from time to time resting on her shoulder, now revealed itself: it belonged to Lord Byron. He might, with his wide powers of persuasion, have orchestrated everything from the first—a sum in which she included her own small offering of love.

She was ashamed, almost, of being too innocent to guess a motive for it. That Lady Caroline's importunities had grown increasingly scandalous, scandal itself had made plain. That Annabella's spotless reputation might, for the contrast, serve to redeem his own, had already occurred to her; but only, she had presumed, at the expense of his continued relations with Lady Caroline herself. And yet—what was it Mary had said? That there was a something in the poet which she would not care to claim the comprehension of. Lord Byron could with his rough conscience handle a number of truths the mere glimpse of which would defeat Annabella's curiosity. And one of the lessons she inwardly noted was the need for more courage: for more courage and more curiosity. The scope of the game in which she imagined herself to be an innocent player almost took her breath away—the fact that Lady Melbourne might have been enlisted on his behalf; the fact that Lady Caroline herself might have seen, from her own vantage, the benefit of
joining in
. It was as if, by a strange alignment of the planets, a single blackness had appeared in the sky. The great variety of what she had failed to understand could be encompassed by its shape. The shape, whose absence clearly defined itself for her, was Lord Byron's.
He
had been keeping the light away.
His
was the darkness more palpably present when she blew her own lamp out; it was the darkness in which she fell asleep.

In the morning, however, the simpler glow of the sun prompted certain revaluations. It fell on her lap around the edges of a cloud. There was black at the edges and a soft chill within; but in the full surrounding light, pale and level with the approach of winter, she felt the kindness of warmth. How hungry she was. Worked up with nerves, she had hardly, the day before, touched her food. Hunger at least suggested her nerves were quiet. The work, her decision, had been done. Nothing was left but for her to admit to it—to bring it up. She blushed to herself at the recollection of what in the small hours had seemed to her clear-headed and now struck her as the madness of dreams. Still, the effect of it lingered, as dreams do. It was as if the violence she had checked against Mary had in the night released itself, had turned into fact. It demanded, as fact, its due, and she gave it. The private acknowledgement had been made. Lord Byron had proved himself greater than the scope of her choosing: she hadn't the measure of him. That was the fear which in the end decided her. There were other fears, greater and lesser, but none so decisive. She couldn't
see
him, that was the horror, and this blindness had infected her with the sense of being watched. The question remaining was whether what had prevailed in her belonged, most properly, to common sense or cowardice; they were pushing the same way. It was almost impossible to disentangle them.

‘I endeavour not to yield to any decided preference till my judgement has been strengthened by longer observation, but I will not assign this as my only motive for declining.' This, after a good breakfast, is what she wrote to Lady Melbourne. She had returned—her composure just managed an inward smile—to the desk in her bedroom. The sheet of paper on which her night-thoughts had been scribbled lay in the basket beside it, crumpled to a ball. ‘Were there no other objection, his theoretical idea of my perfection, which could not be fulfilled by the trial, would suffice to make me decline a connection that must end in his disappointment.' Was it true, or true enough, to satisfy her conscience, which was stricter, perhaps, with the letter of truth than its spirit? She supposed it was in the nature of great decisions that they bulked even larger than motives. One approached them, as it were, craning one's neck—to see around their corners for a glimpse of the motives behind them. These appeared, if at all, only after the decision was struck. ‘I should be totally unworthy of Lord Byron's esteem if I were not to speak the truth without equivocation. Believing that he never will be the object of that strong affection which would make me happy in domestic life . . .' Quietly, kindly, in long unpunctuated phrases, she gave him away. Her first trial was past; it seemed to her at that moment the only one that would ever signify.

For a few days afterwards, the force of her decision sustained her. The only thing to vex her was Mary's obvious relief. Mary alone knew the secret of Lord Byron's proposal, and Annabella could scarcely turn elsewhere now to confess her reply. Still, it was very trying, she privately acknowledged, to be obliged to endure (complicitly, as it were) such a return to her friend's good opinion. The irritation of it, at least, busied her thoughts at a time when they might easily have turned inward with more painful heat; and it was a relief, perhaps, to keep up the argument in the quiet of her head not with
him
but with
her
. Had she done right? was a question that quickly presented itself, whenever other occupation failed her. In the first aftermath of her decision, it was a great comfort to her vanity to pity Lord Byron himself for the part she had played in injuring his. She read over, again and again, her favourite passages in
Childe
Harold
and flattered herself that the plaintive, conscience-stricken effusions of his muse had been inspired by her. Well, they would be. It was satisfying, she sometimes admitted to Mary, to think of all the immortal poems he could write just because she had decided to break his heart.

Even so, she was conscious in the weeks to come of a loss of balance. It was as if a weight she had been pressing against had been abruptly withdrawn, and though she had caught herself, just in time, the absence continued to be felt: she was leaning, as it were, without the support of opposition. A push here or there would have knocked her down. Careful of that possibility, she decided to return to Seaham for the winter. London had ‘ceased to amuse her'. This was her great protestation; she made it whenever she could. She meant by it, of course, to suggest worlds of private
ennui
, but her suggestions were rarely taken up. It was only, one supposed, the boredom a girl always feels when the balls of summer are over and the men have retired to the country to shoot. Well, perhaps it was, she once admitted, no more than that really. And yet, there were suppers still and the theatre; there were ‘breakfast parties' and ‘musical interludes' and tables of whist of an evening to be made up. But these gave her no pleasure now beyond the bright little cards of their invitations; she rarely attended them. She had never before considered herself to be one of those women ‘in the hunt for a husband', and yet now that she had shied away at the last from catching hers, she discovered, almost to her relief, that the rest of the exercise was not worth the discomfort. She went home.

Home, then, promised a great deal: her familiar room; its quiet view of a loud sea; and the general shelter of living within her mother's arrangements. What she made of it would depend on that little distinction between common sense and cowardice—on the distinction, as she put it to herself, between a return and a retreat. It demanded, she was well aware, a very nice subtlety indeed to make out the difference. But she was a subtle girl; she never despaired of living up to nice distinctions. She hoped to return, then, with a more conscious conviction to what she had been: a country girl, unused to society, content with her own. She hoped to continue on the old lines—to make of London a mere interruption.
Unused to
, perhaps, was the only phrase on which time might be said to have wrought its effects. Another to meet her case could be supplied. Inured to? Untouched by? And yet there were moments—as the coach changed horses at Durham, two hours short of her destination; and she watched them being harnessed, through the fireside window, with the sudden happiness of impatience—in which she took comfort from the very idea of giving in to the weakest of her inclinations, when to be her
father's
daughter
again seemed the only relation she could ever desire.