A Quiet Adjustment (24 page)

Annabella had the sense, as he stood silently with his back to her in front of the fire, of a duty being fulfilled. It needed no imagination to guess at
whose
prompting. Perhaps he was counting the minutes; a Harrison clock, a wedding-gift from Lord Wentworth, stood squat on the mantelpiece. He seemed to be staring at it; and then, indeed, picking it up in two hands and turning around, he broke the silence to say, ‘I wonder how much this might fetch at auction. It is ugly and square, and there is something peculiarly brutal in its regular loud ticking, but the world is peopled by strange tastes. Unless, that is, you should object? It came from your uncle?'

‘It did.' And then, taking up her earlier vow, she said pointedly, ‘I have no objections to anything any more.'

Lord Byron smiled at that, with something of his habitual condescension. ‘I have been thinking, lately, that there never were before two such clever people who knew themselves so little.' He returned the clock to its shelf. ‘I used to give you too much credit for self-penetration. Augusta takes a reasonable view of us both. I believe I am perhaps a little better than I pretend to be, which isn't saying a great deal. And you, my dear, may be a little worse. Now, don't take offence at that—I believe you have not—you are smiling.'

‘Only, a dear friend of mine once said to me that I wished to be a little less perfect than I am. I was wondering what she might say to the fact that, in your estimation at least, I had got my wish.'

‘Nobody, I believe, could accuse you of getting
that
.'

This, effectually, put an end to their conversation; but he lingered several minutes more, holding his coat-tails out with his back now turned to the fire, and gazing at his daughter on her lap. Annabella kept his silence. She was hoping that the object of his contemplation might inspire in him a word of tenderness for its mother. Her own voice and opinions, she was clever enough to realize, would only serve as a check to the freer expression of his more loving moods. She hardly dared to look up at him—she could not have kept from her glance an air of expectancy, which might annoy him. Nor did she like to keep her eyes bent on their daughter: she might be seen to presume too much upon a shared interest in the child. There was nothing left for her to stare at but the fire, so she stared at that, while the clock ticked and she waited for him to break the silence.

‘When shall we three meet again?' he said at last, in the heavy mocking tones he reserved for his little habit of quotation. It occurred to her only after he had gone, that she had no answer to his question and that she had wasted the time she might have spent fixing in her memory a last personal look at his famous face.

She fell that night into a deep sleep and awoke in the morning exhausted. He had promised her that a carriage would be at her disposal to remove them to Kirkby. She saw it at breakfast, below her, in the street. It was raining. The driver sat under his hat, hunched over; the rain dripped off the brim of it onto his hands, which quietly held the reins. The snow in the park had the slickness of ice, and there were ugly scars in the surface of it, where the mud had leaked through. The day seemed colder for the wet, which had crept into the air of the house and got amongst one's clothes unpleasantly. Annabella had changed her dress three times before she believed herself to be warm enough to face the world. Mrs Clermont, a family friend, a spare fussy tall bent woman, had been sent to London to accompany her on the journey. She had seen to the girl. From her window, Annabella watched her carrying the child under an umbrella into the carriage; she imagined hearing faintly through the sound of the rain the voice of her daughter, complaining. It was time for her to go, but she stayed another minute, looking out blankly on the weather, before she went. On her way downstairs, she passed the door to Lord Byron's room. There was a large mat outside it on which his Newfoundland dog used to lie. For a moment she was tempted to throw herself on it and wait at all hazards, but it was only a moment, and she passed on.

Chapter Two

HER PARENTS HAD TAKEN
a house at Kirkby Mallory, near Teesdale, where their good friends the Gosfords spent the country seasons. It was a large plain-looking L-shaped hall with a clock tower and a new roof, which glinted in the carriage-lamp as Annabella's party turned at last into the yard. The rain in which they set forth had given way, in the course of their long journey, to clearer colder weather. The yard had not been swept, and the wheels, as they came to a stop, with the horses sweating and steaming, creaked in the snow. Ada had been asleep upon their arrival, and Annabella left her with Mrs Clermont as she made her way, darkly, into the kitchens. They had been taken to the back entrance, and this was the first sign—Annabella, in spite of her misery, was quick enough to note it—of disordered management and what it suggested about the state of her parents' affairs.

She was sitting in front of the fire in the parlour—no others had been lit, a girl said, ‘everyone was living upstairs'—when her father came down at last to greet her. Sir Ralph had an air of affectionate embarrassment. His daughter knew him well enough to guess the cause of it. Her reception had fallen short of the expected warmth, although she admitted privately that nothing could have lived up to her sense of homecoming after so bitter a leave-taking. ‘I'm sorry, my dear,' he said. ‘Your mother particularly requested to be awoken when you came, but I have taken it upon myself, for once, to disobey her. She has not yet quite recovered from her—indisposition at Christmas.'

It was always a source of disagreement between them, how to refer to the malady from which her mother suffered. Annabella was inclined with the doctors to call it a nervous condition, but Sir Ralph, for his own reasons, tended to touch on it more lightly and treated her episodes as nothing more significant than a series of unlucky ailments. There was, in any case, no shortage for either of them of terms to shy from. Still, as he went on, she guessed that a change had been wrung in his own conception of the illness and perhaps in the illness itself.

‘She had been sleeping very badly, but Dr Kendall is confident (thank God) that the crisis is passed. She wants rest—it may take some time—and I decided,' he attempted a smile, ‘to defy her, come what may. We had tried her at first on a course of emetics, which had the consequence, certainly, of increasing her thirst for natural waters; but she felt the indignity of it, and slept so badly, and looked so wasted and thin that the doctor, who, to be fair, has shown a laudable willingness to experiment with new ideas, prescribed a simpler diet, at night, of laudanum. She sleeps, perhaps, no
better
than before but
longer
, undoubtedly, and has begun, as her dose has declined, to recover an appetite.' After a moment, he added: ‘There was some fear at first of damage sustained to the . . . nervous system, but your mother has really been—progressing so well and so—bravely—that the doctor holds out hopes of a complete recovery.'

The effect on Annabella of this little speech was to quiet within her the story of her own affliction, which had been bubbling away to the rhythm of the four-in-hand for several hours: ‘I am your daughter again; he has sent me away.' It was a lesson, and she was not too fatigued by her journey to make a note of it, that her suffering lay at the centre only of her own life. One could not expect the world to turn around it, and she vowed, inwardly, to preserve ‘the secret' of her sorrow. Or rather, she resolved, at least, to demand from her mother a great deal of affectionate pressure before she could be persuaded to give in to it. ‘My dear,' Sir Ralph said suddenly, ‘let me kiss you; I have not so much as kissed you.' He bent his large foolish amiable head to her own. Her hand, as she responded, clutched the tuft of grey curls over his ear. She closed her eyes and felt on her face the scratch of his cheek; he had not shaved. It seemed to her then that she was home at last and safe. Tears sprang to her shut eyes, at the thought of what she had suffered, in relief at the prospect of suffering no more. Her father sensed the fierce little urgency with which she clutched at him. ‘My poor girl,' he repeated, ‘my poor girl; whatever's the matter?' in a tone she had learned to recognize, by its sweet helplessness, as the voice he adopted whenever he supposed some greater or more difficult competence might be required of him.

‘Nothing,' she said, retreating again and finding in her sleeve a handkerchief. ‘Only I am cold and tired and have eaten nothing since tea.' She made a face for him of sniffling unhappiness. She was playing the game they had always played together, father and daughter. Hers was the voice, as he used to call it, of ‘the miserable good girl' who, he would add, ‘always got what she wanted'. What she wanted, however, she realized now, was her mother; it was the voice she used to keep at bay his deeper curiosity, which he for the most part was perfectly willing to suspend. ‘I shouldn't mind,' he said, ‘a little something myself, if only to help me sleep.' He was older than she had remembered him. His complexion, which had always been made up of reds and whites in equal measure, had a dullness now that softened the contrast between them. He looked as if he had been caught out in the sun, a little dry. ‘The fact is,' he added, and this confessional mode was new to him, too, ‘I haven't been sleeping well lately. Your mother often—needs me in the night.'

It wasn't till lunch the next day that Judy arose to welcome her daughter home. Annabella had got up early and gone for a walk through the grounds. The heavens had that peculiar white cloudless pallor of a northern winter. Annabella, after her confinement, was just beginning to enjoy again, as she put it to Sir Ralph—when he had asked her, on such a raw day, ‘to stop within; the snow will spoil your boots'—‘the use of her legs'. Empty skies and cold exercise gave her the sense briefly of having ‘cleared her head'. Lord Byron had been used to teasing her, whenever she reproached him for unkindness, that she was very welcome ‘to run back to her mother like a spoilt little girl'. Well, she did him the justice of acknowledging now that she
had
run back. And if he had played his part in pushing her to it, she was willing to believe that he had only meant to put her ‘to the test'—a test her love had failed. The fact was, her reception at Kirkby Mallory had failed to live up to the contrast she had imagined between her parents' and her husband's affection. She had awoken in the strange bedroom, with its view of the frozen woods, still lonelier than she had been at Piccadilly Terrace. Augusta was not there; Augusta alone had understood.

When she got back, she sat down at the card-table in the sitting room and wrote him a letter. She had been composing it quietly in her head, against the background of an attention always a little occupied by the task of finding dry snow to step in.

Dearest Duck,

We got here quite well last night and were ushered into the kitchen instead of the drawing room by a mistake that might have been agreeable enough to hungry people. The house, I believe, would just suit you; it is large enough for any number of mothers-in-law and babies! Such a W.C! and such a sitting room or sulking room all to yourself. I have managed to keep for my private use a whole morning, undisturbed, to write to you and to Gus. If I were not always looking about for B, I should be a great deal better already, a great deal steadier in temper and health, for country air. Miss finds her provisions increased and fattens thereon. It is a good thing she can't understand all the flattery bestowed upon her, the ‘Little Angel'. Love to the good goose and everybody's love to you both from hence.

Ever thy most loving
Pippin . . . Pip—ip.

Lies, mostly; she had been welcomed, if anything, somewhat sparsely. And the attention of the house was so forcibly directed at the convalescence of its mistress that there was little warmth to spare for a poor small child. But it was in the note to Augusta, which she slipped inside it, that she allowed herself to communicate her true feelings. ‘I have left a home behind me, in a very disordered and uncertain state, and have arrived at another home, in equal uncertainty and disorder—but its troubles are not my own, NOT my own. Consolation, dearest Augusta, lies chiefly in the fact of having resigned to you the task of looking after him. Never was there a creature who took such taking care of as my husband your brother—excepting perhaps
myself
, which is really the root of all our troubles, I believe, just as you have been, as far as you were able, the solution to them . . .' Writing these notes had on her the effect of a secret kept. She sealed them and resigned them to the butler to post; by the time Judy descended, to take a little something at lunch, Annabella felt sufficiently shielded by her own private troubles to face up to the contemplation of her mother's.

Her mother's appearance, however, was not quite what Annabella had been expecting. She moved, it is true, with a delicacy that bespoke her stretched, discriminating nerves and sat down to eat with both her hands on the table. Her red windblown face had grown paler and softer by enforced confinement. It had now the almost embarrassed and adipose complexion of something unused to exposure. Her short hair had lengthened, roughly. She had got fatter, too, but the fatness suggested a kind of health, the renewal in her of decent appetites. The butler, a surprisingly small man referred to as Mr Arthur—he had a reed-like upright posture and musical voice—spoke quietly to her but without gloves, as it were, without too gentle a deference. There was nothing of apology in her own manner. She ate well, too, with a steady patient hunger: a meal of hot broth, warm bread and cold chicken. She picked for some time over the remains, carefully cleaning her fingers, after each bone, in a bowl of water one of the maids brought out to her. She drank several cups of tea and had in general the air of a woman with time on her hands—she seemed pleasantly, expectantly uncertain of how to fill it. What astonished Annabella most, in her mother's mood, was its expansiveness; she had imagined a humbler retraction. Judy wanted to talk and was particularly pleased to see her daughter, she said, ‘because Ralph was beginning to tire of me.'

‘Nonsense, my dear,' he answered. His own appetite, in Judy's presence, seemed diminished; he had contented himself with dipping a little bread into his soup and leaving the crusts on his plate. Annabella counted them. It was unlike her father to be careful of his food. It suggested how much of his life, of his household dealings, had come under the scope of necessary calculations. He had accepted the role of preaching restraint to his wife and could hardly make an exception of his own example. One could not resist, after a while, giving in to a general habit of moderation. Judy's health had needed so strict a management that he had begun to manage himself and looked the poorer for it.

‘Not at all,' Lady Milbanke replied. ‘You hope to keep me quiet, not for my own sake, but yours. I believe I have
talked you out
. Besides, I have things to tell Annabella that I shouldn't like you to hear.'

‘Naturally.' He blushed, then replied more sharply, ‘I'm sure you have a great deal to complain of.' Annabella was unused to seeing, in the open oval of his face, the tightness of withheld reproach. She resolved not to blame him. Patience, she had learned first hand, like a cut flower, begins to lose colour in time.

‘The secrets of wives,' Judy said, with a nod to Annabella, ‘are not always and only complaints.' Then she added, with a deliberate humility, ‘I have only become shy, lately, of depending too much on you.'

Her father, she noticed, had drunk nothing at lunch; the retraction was all his own. Afterwards, he confided to Annabella that her mother had one way of talking ‘in the sunshine' and another ‘in the moonlight'. For his part, he slept poorly and was often a dull dog in the day; at night he had his wits about him. ‘But the nights,' he added, ‘were growing shorter—she improves.'

Such confidences were the air she breathed in; she hadn't yet had the space to breathe
out
. Judy's secrets, as it happened,
were
mostly complaints. Annabella's private afflictions, in the week that followed, were buried under the weight of her mother's, which nevertheless touched curiously upon her own. Judy had presumed when she married her father that his modest assurance was nothing but a kind of ambition. He was very well connected. It seemed to her that, at a certain level of society, nothing but decency and common sense were required ‘for getting on'. Ralph was decent and sensible; his reticence struck her as a kind of easiness or carelessness. It was only the poor, she argued by analogy, who counted their money; the rich could make a show of indifference. She had been very ambitious herself, that's what she wished to say, but was willing to take from him a lesson in the finer graces of it. Only, she had mistaken him from the beginning. His aspirations, such as they were, belonged to some private arena from which she felt increasingly her exclusion. Her notion of a life well lived did not tally with his, and she was made to appreciate the vulgarity of her conception. He settled into marriage, congratulating himself on a job well done—which seemed to her only an excuse for leaving all the other jobs to her.