A Quiet Adjustment (11 page)

She soon realized, in a few days, no more, how little these distinctions counted for in the event. After the first happy rush of arrival, it grew clear that she could neither return nor retreat. All that was over. What was over, indeed, was just her capacity for taking comfort. It seemed almost as if her mother, her father, the rocks along the shore, the sea itself, had lost a quality. They had been stripped a little barer, by a kind of winter; and she couldn't but suspect her own heart of being the low sun of that season. In the long journey north, she had played out secretly the various stages of her confession. It was all a question of starting a scene. She had but to get herself remarked upon, for looking pale or thin, for failing in her usual lively spirits. Her father could easily be tempted into sympathies—her mother, into corrections. ‘You've changed, my dear,' Judy might begin. Annabella had only to deny it, with a heat that would forge in the necessary reconciliation its own excuse for intimacy. The length she would go in confession was all that concerned her. She inwardly vowed—one of those promises she supposed at the time of being made for the breaking—just to stop short of his name. That was the limit she set herself. That was the size of the box in which she would treasure her secret. That was the size of the secret: his name.

And yet, to her childish surprise, they rather left her alone than otherwise. Annabella's quiet insistent inward flow of thought ran only into deeper silences. A succession of heavy gales had struck the local fisheries very hard. There had been several shipwrecks, with all their attendant widowings and orphanings. Annabella, for the first week, heard talk of little else. She was persuaded to survey the freshest scene. Under a stark white cloud a grey sea laboured. Upon the rocks, remnants of the fishing smack could still be seen, straining against the ebb to reach shore. The sand was littered with nets and spars and sails; and boots and pea-coats and hats. Annabella remained perfectly unmoved by the sight of them; they might have been left over from a play. Lady Milbanke saw it as her duty to take up a ‘collection' (she was always collecting, Ralph complained) and to see that everyone was ‘satisfied with their burials': the wives happily mourning, the children returning to school. Ralph himself was occupied by a tax-meeting at Durham. He was to give a speech at it, if only he knew which side of the question to support. He asked Annabella's advice. He wished to put the case before her. Her mother had long ceased to take any interest in the business—a remark at which, he was surprised to find, his daughter burst into tears.

‘My dear Bell,' he said, ‘oh my child.' He was conscious suddenly of his preoccupation, and ashamed. The shame got in the way of his reassurance. He put his hand to his mouth and looked at the poor girl: her round red face was too large, it seemed to him, for a child's grief. But he rose to his sense of it at last and joined her—he had been standing—on the sofa and took her head in his soft long-fingered hands. ‘You have been here a week, and no one has said to you as much as a
how do ye
? You find your parents, no doubt, become very old and dull; and the worst of it is, very busy in themselves with being old and dull. My dear child, what is it?'

Annabella had always thought her father the most amiable of men. But no one, perhaps, got the virtue of it more than himself. He was complacent. He indulged his own weaknesses even more than he tended to indulge his daughter's. She had always supposed herself, if put to the test, incapable of holding anything back from him. Well, this was the test. And she found to her surprise that her struggle was all the other way. Something childish in her balked stupidly at confession, and the woman in her hardly had the words to insist on it. ‘Please, carry on,' she began, nobly, perversely, ‘I was really attending; I should like to hear you out. To the end.' But when he, sensibly, answered her only with silence, and her tears had dried up, she condescended to explain—with just that little excess of eloquence which always came out in her under the pressure she felt to suffer the least common griefs. ‘It's my own fault: I expected too much.' She was, by this point, perfectly composed; weeping had cleared her head. ‘I was conscious, you see, of having changed. What I wanted to make certain of was just by how little, the measure of which seemed to lie in the ease of my homecoming. Ease, of course, is a thing impossible to strive for. Perhaps I was guilty of striving. Something, you know, had passed in London that might be seen to have given, to any return, the shame of retreat. I was determined, by force of happiness if nothing else, to put off the shame of it. But the force itself, as one might suppose, struck me as proof of the worst. Under that sense of it, just now, you saw me give way.'

Sir Ralph only stared at his daughter. ‘I don't think I understand you.' And then, finding his feet a little: ‘What passed in London?'

‘I had in London'—it was wonderful really, how lightly it all came out!—‘a prospect opened before me, a very fine view. Or what might have been, on a clear day; though one can't expect, as Mary would put it, mountains without clouds. The mountain, one may say,' she had found a smile, ‘was the picture of sublimity, but I mistrusted the path that ran up it. You have always, I know, presumed me worthy of the largest acknowledgement. It was offered, and I refused it, less from a sense of falling short—of deserving it, that is—than from the faith that real value would show itself indifferent even to the justice that can be done it. Well, I had that faith, but events have proved me very far from indifferent. And the worst of all my regrets has been, as I say, the shame that goes with them. At the time, I felt the largest grandeur of refusal, but it turns out to have aged rather worse than acceptance might have.'

‘I can't make you out,' her father said, becoming impatient. ‘Am I to understand that you turned down an offer of marriage?'

This was the point she had come to, but Annabella, as soon as she met it, guessed her own reserves. She could let it press harder still before giving in. A sign, perhaps the first, of her renewal: the strength to put him off. She was equal, for once, even to the necessary lie. ‘No,' she said, ‘it isn't that at all.' Her little secret began to grow from that moment, compacting from the privacy in which she stored it into an awkward irritable lump of obscurity. Her family felt only the discomfort it kept up within her. It made for just what couldn't be smoothed away—her obstinacy, to which they attributed the two long years of unhappiness that followed. They didn't see it for what it was, the deep digging in of independence. Lord Byron's name had the power, for Annabella, of all stolen treasure: it bought freedom with guilt.

And then, more bitterly, and with what almost passed in her for candour, she added, ‘It isn't always and only a question of men. What was offered was much larger than marriage—call it fame if you like. And I didn't suppose I should miss it, but I do.'

‘Well, then,' he repeated, ‘I can't make you out. You're too subtle for me, my dear. You always were.' And then, happily, he hit on an evasion. ‘Shall I fetch your mother?'

This brought on, in his daughter, a return of the childish. ‘Please,' she said, ‘don't!'

Chapter One

IT WAS LORD BYRON'S PARTICULAR WISH,
expressed in the confidence of Annabella's perfect agreement, that they be married quietly at Seaham. Cushions were all they required, for kneeling on; he was sure Lady Milbanke would be kind enough to provide them. There were to be no invitations. He had only to arrange a few of his affairs in London ‘for their mutual comfort' before he could come north—just stopping at Newmarket on the way to take ‘a bachelor's leave' of his sister, before he embarked on that remarkable journey ‘from one into two'.

Annabella could hardly bear the weight of her own impatience. Two years had passed since she first refused his offer of marriage. After a period of silence, during which, as Lord Byron said, ‘he was mourning his suit', a sort of understanding had sprung up between them. The unhappiness each had caused the other, by that offer and by that refusal, still bound them; and they looked to each other, inevitably, for certain sympathies. In time they became, as he eventually put it, ‘epistolary lovers'. It had been one of the sorest trials of her subtlety to suggest to Lord Byron in the course of a long correspondence, without exposing herself to a charge of inconsistency, that the No with which she had met his first proposal might, under the pressure of a second, split like the shell of a truth to reveal the little nut of a
yes
within. But her subtlety had triumphed in the end; his proposal came early in the fall of 1814, and Lord Byron himself followed it shortly after to Seaham. Annabella had been sitting in her own room, reading, when she heard his carriage in the drive. Quietly, she put out the candles in her room before descending. She found him in the drawing room, standing by the side of the chimney-piece. He did not move forwards as she approached him but took up her extended hand and kissed it. A silence followed which she could not for the life of her break. That
he
did was the first thing she had to be grateful for. ‘It is a long time since we met,' he said. ‘For that, I believe,' she answered, commanding herself, ‘I have only myself to blame.' To escape for a moment the strain of his company, she added, ‘Let me call my parents. They are quite on fire to meet you. It is only that they don't dare to.'

‘I am not such a gorgon as all that.' And then, finding a way to good humour, ‘though frightful enough, I'm sure, in the relation of son. My own mother never liked to admit it.' This brought out a smile in her. Until he continued, ‘But she's dead, God bless her—I know I shan't.' It was the first note struck of a tendency she began to fear in him: to break against harmony simply for the sake of it.

Within a week she had sent him away again to attend to his affairs in London, preparatory to their marriage. As soon as his carriage disappeared between the lines of the elms, she regretted her impatience to see him go—since it was only replaced by another, to see him come back. There was a great deal in her conduct as a lover that she could not think on without blushing, and in Lord Byron's absence she had nothing to do but think. She had been so silent with him, a silence that perplexed them both extremely, for neither knew how to break it. Her parents, of course, were charmed—he had set out to charm them. Byron talked of Kean and politics with Sir Ralph and village life with Judy, who, to be fair, had managed for the space of his visit to remain plausibly sober. It could not last, and Annabella's fear of a lapse, as she secretly expressed it to herself, seemed to her at the time reason enough for cutting his visit short.

Besides, he had seemed to her so strange, moody and unaccountable that they rarely had a minute's peace together. Peace, perhaps, was not the quality lacking—they had been only too quiet. In the summers when she was a girl, Sir Ralph used to take her sailing out in Seaham harbour with her cousin Sophy. Running south along the shore, they could just make out the humped shapes of the collieries through gaps in the trees on the coastline. Sophy, as the older child, more often than not handled the tiller; but when the winds were low, Sir Ralph put the sheet in Annabella's clenched fist and told her to pull till the sail flattened. What she remembered most vividly was the awkwardness of a perfect calm: every shift required a startled readjustment. Only when the wind filled again could they relax against its steady pressure. The sense she had in Lord Byron's company was of perfect calm. Each word or touch produced a light imbalance, and it required the lightest of words, of touches, to restore their tempers.

The analogy produced in her another fear. What was lacking was love, that was the wind that failed them. Without it, they could only keep their course by little adjustments. That she herself loved, the unhappiness of the past two years had given her ample proof. The failure was his, though when she offered (honourably, as she believed) to break off their engagement, the violence of his response shocked her into a deeper faith. He turned pale and fell into a seat; called for salts, brandy; said to her at last that there was no cruelty like virtue. He spoke unguardedly, in a tone that was new to her. Not even Lady Caroline, fiend that she was, would tease him into a proposal after two years only to spurn him again. He had staked everything; his life depended on her. Annabella, from a deep conviction of her own goodness, was colder than any coquette . . . Her tears finally calmed him. ‘It was only,' she said, ‘that she thought he did not love her.'

It was not a reproach. She had not intended a reproach, but he took it as such and gave one bitterly back: that she stared at him so silently. He could hardly make love to a statue.

She stared at him now, but at least she managed to interrupt her silence. ‘She wished only to please him; she could not find the words. Consequently, she said nothing at all. And he was so peculiar with her.'

The word restored his humour—how often, in their relations, the temper of it depended on such a piece of luck, either good or bad. ‘He should like to be a great deal more peculiar,' he said. She had been standing over him, and he now took her into his lap, which she submitted to, while he began to kiss her neck and cheek and temple. ‘Sweet little round face,' he said, ‘my little apple.' Annabella, quite ashamed of herself, silently endured these attentions, until he began to kiss her mouth—they had never kissed—which startled her into an equal greed that had left them both quite breathless by the time a foot on the stairs recalled them to their sense of place.

For the rest of that long week, whenever their tempers seemed misaligned, Lord Byron attempted a similar ‘process of adjustment'. ‘You are quite caressable into a good humour,' he said to her once. ‘I think we shall get along very well.' She had taken him on her favourite walk over the cliffs. A late October sun had a low scurfy bank of cloud to keep the heat in. Their faces were bothered by flies, as he with difficulty clambered over the rocks, taking her hand from time to time or resting on her shoulder. The breeze on top of the cliffs was fitful, but the long sweep of the waves, flatly repeated, tirelessly arriving, suggested out to sea a steadier blow; and they had the sense of catching at the fragments, gratefully enough in that autumnal haze, of a much larger force. She had brought with her an apple and a purse of cashews, and they stopped once to sit with their backs against a rock and eat them. After a while, the extent of what she was capable of desiring began to frighten her. She made them go home again, each in a surly and childish mood, which was not unloving: they were turned, as it were, towards each other in sullen frustration. The waves and the shore. That evening she asked him to leave. The sooner they were married the better; she could not trust herself. He should ‘arrange his affairs' in London as quickly as possible, and then come back to her when these were settled for what they both desired, a quiet wedding.

As the year 1814 drew to a close, she passed her twenty-first Christmas stuck at home, the precocious daughter of her parents' affections. These had begun to chafe; it was time she grew up. Lord Byron complained bitterly of the ‘law's delay' (
Hamlet
, indeed, was the text on which they both drew for material), but nothing, save her most particular command, could persuade him to marry without having settled his debts. Newstead Abbey, his ancestral home, much as it pained him, must be sold, but the buyer was proving as indecisive as, by force of that indecision, Lord Byron himself must appear to her. Sir Ralph could not help remarking that in spite of Lord Byron's injunction to invite no one, they had better, after all, invite the groom himself; it would be a sad sort of wedding without one. Annabella, at last, commanded.

Lord Byron appeared, unannounced, in the afternoon of New Year's Eve. He had a friend with him, a young man, whose large straight nose cast a shadow over his chin. Annabella heard their carriage running over the gravel of the drive and watched them from her bedroom window. Still, she did not come down. She had a sense of his arrival that the mere physical fact of it couldn't live up to. Two months had passed since she had seen him, and she had spent the time attempting to discover what the awkwardness in her manner was that had produced its echo in him. She wanted to prepare herself—she wanted, internally, to meet him, her idea of him. Or rather, she needed a moment to enter into what she conceived to be his idea of
her
. She was conscious, of course, of the play between these two ideas, and of the fact that Lord Byron himself was quite likely to ‘break up the game'. This was, as she put it to herself, just what she needed
him
for, the man himself: to break up the game. Still, she waited and listened to Dawlish, the butler, showing them to their rooms at the back of the house. It pained her that neither Sir Ralph nor Judy had moved to greet them—out of pique, no doubt, at his endless delays. She must learn to disregard their pleasure, to attend to his.

After a few minutes (she had not moved from the window), she heard the carefulness of his step, descending. One two, one two, on every stair. No other sounds; his friend must have stayed behind to change. If she hurried now, she might just catch Lord Byron alone. A glance in her bedroom mirror gave back to her an image of outward calm: she seemed fairly smothered up, from top to toe, or rather, from neck to ankle, in a long dress of green muslin that brought out the pink in her round cheeks. You strange quiet girl, she thought, is there nothing inside you? She counted to herself—one two, one two—sighed deeply and emerged into the corridor. It was only when she reached the bottom, from being out of breath, that she guessed she had been running—down the stairs helter-skelter to the library door. But she could not wait any more. She could not wait and pushed in. Lord Byron stood by the fire with his back to her. He was fatter than she remembered him, a fact just brought out by the pinch of his black waistcoat against his hips. Perhaps he had been unhappy, this struck her at once—and then: that he was still unhappy. She had seen him only two months before, but he changed shape lightly. It was a kind of nimbleness in him, the way he fattened, and peculiarly expressive in the largest sense of mood, of temper. With one foot over the other, he stooped to the heat. He turned to see who it was—saw it was she—stretched out his hand to her. For a second she hesitated, then ran across the room and flung herself sobbing into his arms. ‘My lord, my lord.'

He gently disengaged himself from her embrace, but keeping her hand in his, he kissed it, cold-lipped. She was conscious of the fluster in her hurry, the smudge of tears around her eyes, and pressed her fists to them. ‘I told myself that you would come today, that you must come. I knew that you would, you see, and yet, when you did, it was no less a shock.' She was expressing herself very badly, she knew, and thought of poor Mr Eden.

‘I did not mean to upset you,' he said.

‘No, that's not it at all. Only this time, you see, I know what to expect. More than before. I know
you
—' And then, breaking off, she smiled, too hopefully perhaps, ‘I'm afraid I can't make myself clear.' But there was no answering smile; and she began to suspect that something had happened since she had seen him last. He had not in the least, as she put it to herself, attempted to enter into her idea of him—that was the fact that struck her. The fault, no doubt, lay in her own idea. She wondered if, for her part, she had failed
his
.

‘Forgive me,' he said. ‘I've had a dull Christmas at my sister's. Her husband, a very pretty piece of foolishness, was at home, and the children screamed at him, and the dogs barked at the children, and the servants beat the dogs. I have,' he added, ‘a particular horror of children.'

For the first time, she looked at him with something like detachment. (It relieved Annabella, after the foolish rush of her greeting, that she could return to it.) His hair was curlier than she had remembered it, his aspect altogether more boyish. Plumpness had rounded his cheeks and thickened his neck. His shirt was open, with a cravat tucked into it; his chest, broad and firm (she had felt her head against it), suggested a simplicity of character, of honesty, she knew him to be far from possessing. His face was a little pale, except here or there where the heat from the fire had reddened it. There was something in his attentions, as she remembered them, so feminine, which had been still more fully developed in the spirit of his letters, that the plain masculine effect of his presence came as a shock. It was not what she had counted on. The fear of giving her life to a man—to this man—renewed itself in her. She was conscious of desiring allies. Her parents had again proved tardy in their welcome, and she was turning to the door to say, ‘I will just call out to my parents', when the door opened and the unfamiliar young gentleman with the strong-shadowed nose came in. The hair around his ears was shiny and wet from a hasty wash. This was one of the recollections that stayed with her.