A Quiet Adjustment (12 page)

The scene in general left its deep print on her mind: the restlessness of the fire in its grate; the sunshine of a muffled winter's day, the colour of bone-china, lying in pieces on the Persian rug at their feet; the intricate leathery gloom of stacked books. The library wasn't a room of which she was used to having the run. A bust of Thomas Gray stood on its pedestal by the door. He was a favourite of Sir Ralph's and had always impressed upon her a sense of adult ponderousness. She was frightened, as a child, of knocking him over, of being crushed. Perhaps that old fear contributed to a new one. For an instant, the sensation of being trapped between these two strangers in her home almost overwhelmed her. She stood on the rug between them: one by the fire, the other by the door. There seemed no escape, but she had collected herself by the time introductions were made. John Hobhouse was his name, a college friend of Lord B's, and a former travelling companion. Reaching out a hand, she welcomed him to Seaham Hall.

Her parents came down at last to dinner. Sir Ralph, himself by now embarrassed at their delay, did his awkward best to charm—it was the awkwardness itself that had its effect. The dining room was perhaps the worst room in the house; he apologized for it. One sat miserably close to the fire—one was, oneself, quite cooked. He had nothing much to praise his own cook for, but he would say this, he would just say this, she knew what to do with a fish. He had a particular horror of seeing a good fish spoiled, and the best, perhaps, he could say of Mrs Tewkesbury, is that she did not spoil it. ‘She let the fish alone, thank God, she did not worry it with too much sauce.' He could never stomach too much sauce; and then, as if the idea had put him in mind of it, he confessed that he had not read
Childe
Harold
. At this Annabella began to blush. His tastes were old-fashioned—but he had promised to do so, if Annabella promised to explain it to him. An attempt had been made. They had been so long waiting for Lord Byron to appear that Sir Ralph had decided at last to dip into his book. Only he could not agree to Annabella's explanations. It was quite hopeless. He had his own opinions, he could not help it, and began to insist on them. The experiment was broken off.

‘It is a father's right,' Lord Byron intervened, ‘to disagree with his daughter. I should not, for myself, presume to attempt it.'

‘Yes, well.' The interruption had broken his flow, but, catching at a chance of wit, he said, ‘And yet, and yet, you would not take No for an answer.'

‘Father!' Annabella cried, but Lord Byron spoke over her, ‘It was only a disagreement over the irregular verb
to love
, but Miss Milbanke has finally taught me the proper conjugation: I did not, I do not, I will. I should rather, I confess, have stopped short at
I do
two years ago but have resigned myself to the charms of the
future
perfect
.'

Annabella could not decide whether the sting in his wit was intended, but she was too good a grammarian to pass up this chance at correction; and then surprised herself by the confession it teased her into. ‘I hope you do not mean to say that you
will have
loved me. It would break my heart. I mean for myself always to love you.'

He bowed at her. ‘We shall attempt our own construction, to be called the
perfect
eternal
. And shall love each other all our lives, I'm sure, as much as if we had never been married at all.' Lady Milbanke, at last, rewarded him with a little smile, just flattening her cheeks to raise the edges of her lips; and Sir Ralph himself gave out a snort. But Annabella could not read him. He frightened her into a wakening sense of the force of other people. Yet it was just this awakening, she bravely told herself, that had persuaded her in the end to accept him. She meant for the first time in her life to be taken along—as it were, by hand. In any case, she could not have stopped at home another year without going mad. There were so many days to be filled, and she had lately begun to entertain the notion that she could fill no more, not with books or music or mathematics. She might just stick inside one, a Tuesday afternoon perhaps, without the means inside her to reach to Wednesday. And yet the years had slipped by quickly enough. ‘I am so glad you have come,' she said suddenly to Lord Byron. ‘Each day I waited for you, thinking, I could not wait another day. It seemed impossible; and yet, just as impossible to me, that you should ever arrive and sit here, to be looked at or talked to.'

Lord Byron turned on her his large grey eyes, with love or pity in them, but said nothing.

Hobhouse she greatly took to. He had, after an initial shyness, much of the talking to himself. His father was a Whig MP, and John was in the first bloom of his own parliamentary ambitions. He had come from London full of stories of the House. Sir Ralph, in the middle of dinner, broke into one of these with, ‘Tell me your name again, sir? I am sure I have heard it before. Would you spell it out?' It so happened he knew Hobhouse's father well. They had opposed each other on several questions with a very good grace. He thought it always a sign of character when a man could ‘disagree agreeably', and they often sought each other out, after a fractious vote, and ate a good dinner and never said a word about it. Yes, a perfect gentleman; it was a pleasure to meet his son. The final test of a man's character was, of course, the character of his son. Sir Ralph was glad to see it ‘lived up to'.

The fish was followed by minced pies, left over from Christmas, indifferent Stilton, and very good port. Lord Byron inquired after Lady Milbanke's health. He had heard she was ill; he hoped she was better. Annabella froze. Judy's fondness for a drink had in the past two years taken on a more public quality, or rather, her mother's privacy was no longer large enough to contain the whole of her appetite. The effect on her character had been a gradual diminishment of force; and though Annabella at first rejoiced shamefully in her own comparative powers, she had lately, as her wedding approached, begun to mourn the loss of an example. One had the sense, observing Lady Milbanke, of a tremendous underwater struggle, in which all her old strength was being brought violently to bear—though one received now only the muffled report of it, a few small waves, rather than, as before, its full immediate weight. She had sat very still through dinner, hardly trusting herself to say a word, and drinking steadily. She was very well, she thanked Lord Byron, only it had been a cold winter. Her circulation was not what it should be; one had only to look at her face to see how she suffered for it. It was a terribly draughty house. She had not felt warm, properly warm, since September. Her hands and feet seemed not to belong to her, she'd grown so clumsy with them. Her only recourse—but here Sir Ralph interrupted her to say that he had heard ‘something odd that day from Dawlish, who had heard it from the cook, when she sent for the fish. An Irishman has been inquiring in the village for Seaham Hall; he claims to be Lord Byron, on his way to be married to the daughter of the house. Mrs Tewkesbury, who saw him herself wandering around the harbour and talking to the fishermen, said he couldn't have been any younger than fifty; he wore a long thin grey beard and a dirty grey coat. Even so, Dawlish has been cleaning my fowlers all afternoon. One can't tell, he says, what an impostor will stop short at.'

‘It's a form of madness,' Lord Byron said, ‘I am only too well acquainted with.' Annabella, whenever he spoke, attended him so closely that she could scarcely make out the words. There was a public character to his charm she could read very little into. He seemed to be playing a part—himself. The intention itself made up a kind of mask, which hid him none the less for being framed to suit his face. Occasionally, in a moment's shyness, in his stutter, she believed to catch a glimpse of the push involved—she sensed a boyish reluctance in him to perform a duty. The scale of the task staggered her conceptions: what concentration it must require to hit always upon one's characteristic response! His moment of hesitation, his stutter, was where she hoped to prise open a space for herself, for her companionship. ‘My misanthropy, which is more poetical than personal,' he continued, ‘is so generally believed in that the most wretched men attach themselves to it, as beggars sometimes dress themselves in cast-off clothes, to look like gentlemen. I'm afraid the borrowing does no honour to either of us. Should you like to make sure of me, however,' he added, smiling, ‘you are welcome to inspect my foot. It is the too hasty signature of my Maker and serves me as a proof of authenticity.'

After dinner, they staged a mock-marriage in the drawing room. Hobhouse was given away as the bride. Sir Ralph was in fine spirits and acted the part of reverend. Dawlish was the father, and Lady Milbanke played a limping Lord Byron—a joke at which Annabella noticed the poet wince. The lovers themselves sat side by side on the music bench and watched. Dawlish decided to look for the epithalamium, which his master had spent the several months' delay in carefully rewriting. It was discovered eventually on the music stand of the harpsichord and read out to a very mixed reception. Lord Byron managed to revenge his humour upon it. Sir Ralph blushed. Hobhouse was more judicial. Only Annabella kept quiet—she could think of nothing to say. It struck her as almost blasphemous, the mockery that was made of the ceremony on which she had pinned her hopes of a new life. But her begrudging reticence shamed her just as much, and she turned at last to face the harpsichord and play a wedding march as her own tongue-tied contribution to the entertainment. The music somehow sobered them all to silence. The tune was wrong, too mournful and grand, and they sat and dutifully attended to her. It was all she could do to keep on playing without breaking into tears. In the smattering of applause that followed, she managed to rub away the softness in her eyes with the flat of her palms. At eleven o'clock, Dawlish brought in a bowl of champagne-punch, which kept them lively till midnight, when they shook hands together and listened to the bells of St Mary's ringing in the New Year. Judy, red-faced, had fallen asleep in her chair.

It snowed through the night. Lord Byron had asked her, before going to bed, when she liked to appear in the morning. Ten o'clock, Annabella had said; she was very fond of a walk at breakfast. If he liked to join her, she would be glad of his company. And in spite of their late night she came down at ten, if only to live up to her word. If only to get him for an hour to herself, for she felt they had come to an understanding—the first of their intended marriage. She waited for him in the drawing room; it was the morning of New Year's Day. She had a secretive nature and decided to class it among the thrills of love that it expanded the scope of privacy: from ‘one', as Lord Byron had put it, into ‘two'.

One felt all through the house the effect of the snow. It threw ghosts of itself against the walls, against the rugs on the floor. It reminded Annabella of a high repeated note on the harpsichord. There was a kind of sweet insistence in it from which one eventually began to wish to avert one's sense. And yet there was, in spite of the chill of the house, a new softness in the air that seemed a little like warmth. The fires had only just been laid and burned more brightly than hotly; Annabella, as the morning grew older, watched them settle in the grate. Her mother had for several months been accustomed to taking her breakfast in bed. Sir Ralph slept poorly, especially after a night of drinking, and tended to rise early and work in the library and sleep there. Annabella believed she had heard him, shifting his easy chair to be nearer the fire. She waited for Lord Byron to come down till the clock struck eleven, then she put on her boots and went out into the world on her own.

A low snowy sky hung over the elms of the drive. But the air was grey and spotless; the falling had stopped. A layer of white brought out the irregularities in the ground, in the gravel and grass—a thin crust like toast, she thought to herself absurdly, as she stepped upon it. She took a quiet satisfaction from making her mark on the road. After the gate, which she opened herself, was a small hut, intended once for a gatekeeper. Sophy and she used to hide in it as children and spy on the carriages, which in Sir Ralph's electioneering days often thronged the drive. Now it stored mostly a collection of sticks, boots, shawls. One was always forgetting things; one hated going back to the house. A small round window by the door let a little light in. There was still the bench inside that the children had brought there to stand on: they could not see out of it otherwise. Annabella, feeling the air on her neck, decided to wrap herself in another shawl. The smell of the hut, of mud and leather mixed, of enduring cold, brought on—she was very sensitive to recollections—a flood of sentiment. She had hidden there to watch Sophy drive out to be married; Annabella had refused to come in her carriage. ‘What shall I do without you?' she remembered saying to her cousin. ‘What shall I do with
them
?'

‘Marry,' Sophy had said, laughing.

Marry, she repeated now to herself. Yes, it was time.

The snow had thickened even over the beach, except where the waves had washed it away, leaving a rim of ice. There was little wind. The rollers seemed, more out of duty than desire, to repeat their advances on the shore. In the low-hung cloud, the horizon looked very near, almost palpable—looming and vague at once. Annabella imagined how quickly the land behind her would disappear from view if she sailed out to it: a prospect which, she supposed, would awake in Lord Byron the simplest of yearnings. She herself had never left England before. Well, she must learn to reconcile him to quietness. That, she suspected, would prove the task of her marriage. She walked down the middle of the sand, to keep clear of the waves, and began, as she used to, composing verses in her thoughts. As much as anything else, it was a test of her memory. ‘Let my affection' was the phrase she had been mulling over. The last word suddenly acquired a crispness, a clarity, brought out by the sound of dry snow compacting under her steps. ‘Let my affection be the . . . the bond of peace . . .' And then, as they sometimes did, the lines came almost unbidden, which seemed to her at the time the best evidence of their beauty, of her sincerity.