A Quiet Adjustment (28 page)

Annabella was almost gratified to find, in the course of this speech, her powers of disgust renewed. They were as fresh and strong as ever, although she was prevented from making a show of her feelings by a little twist of the knife, in whose use Lady Caroline remained so beautifully proficient. ‘I confess,' Caroline continued, ‘that I have always shrunk from the contemplation of an act which is not only repugnant in itself, but whose practice is sufficiently vague that one might be said to regard its specific details with a horror that approaches incomprehension.' This was, in the first faint glimmer of understanding, the reflection that brought a hot sudden blush to Annabella's cheeks. She had wondered once, after the shock of her suspicions of Augusta, just what, if the worst were true, the effect of it might be on her own steady virtue—in the falter of which (she hardly dared, even now, to give a name or a thought to what they had done together) she believed at the time to have found the sharpest answer. She had hoped, indeed, to keep
that
secret, if only by virtue of the fact that it was just so unspeakable. What struck her most forcefully in her cousin's last remark (it was about as cold and vivid as a bucket of water) was the sense that Caroline had managed, almost, to give it a voice. Annabella began to see, as if the low grey land were spreading around her, just how exposed in the general dawn of their separation her own private self might become.

There seemed to her afterwards no clearer measure of just how great, as she privately put it, her emergence had been than the fact that Caroline's words struck her so entirely as a challenge to be met. ‘I see, my dear,' she managed to get out, when her hot little blush had grown cooler, ‘just the necessity you felt of breaking your promise. It isn't, of course, for my sake that I thank you. The most hardened wretch would not have consigned my own poor girl to the education she would likely receive at the hands of her father. And neither of us, I believe,' she added, with what was really, in the circumstances, the sweetest of smiles, ‘is a hardened wretch.'

That was the phrase on which their interview ended, though it hung in the air and seemed, as she rose to take her leave, rather to swell than recede. It gave them both a colour and, perversely, brightened them by the contrast it suggested: as a dark frame might bring to life a portrait of rosy cheeks. What things those two quiet and frail examples of the feminine had proved capable of considering, in the whitest light of their curiosity—considering, and enduring, and plotting to adapt to their own advantage. They were certainly hardened, and one of them, at least, was wretched enough. Caroline had remained, as Annabella turned in the door, huddled palely in the light of the fire, at which she continued to stare. Hers, it seemed, was the kind of loneliness that had begun to grow, at its edges, quietly permeable. It spilled out even in company; she returned to it almost before she had lifted her cheek to receive the quick kiss of farewell.

Annabella stopped then, for a moment, in the space her retraction offered, to consider her cousin. Here was a fine fractious restless powerful nature, and this is what had become of it. She had compressed herself, remarkably, to the expression of a single theme. One practically winced, taking her in, at the repetition of that high thin note: no child had ever amused itself at the piano with so stubborn a finger. Annabella was determined to give to the music of her own suffering a larger harmony; she was confident, at least, of drowning out every competing noise. The lesson, really, was that if a life could be spent in mourning what was lost, then the least that might make it acceptable was a kind of pre-eminence. She was living, once more, to win. This was the thought that offered, as soon as the door shut behind her, its own consolation. As she strode the length of the corridor, the sole soft quick living thing amid the procession of statues that lined its ochred walls, she indulged in the whimsy of one day taking her place among them. Lady Byron, at least, was a title that no one could take from her; it would look very fine on a bust.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the tiled, echoing hall of Melbourne House, Annabella was startled by the sudden entrance of her aunt. Lady Melbourne swayed against the frame of the door, which led to her own apartments. ‘I hope you know what you are about,' she said. The pallor of her countenance was almost ghostly. It was like a vision of her father, long-faced, with the little thickening aged bruise of bone under her eyes, and the dishevelment of loose hair and too much powder. ‘Lord Byron will never suffer for you as you suffer for him. Caroline can tell you, it's a thankless task.' And then, inconsequently: ‘Remember, it's a very long life.' She had the staring interrupted air of instant waking; perhaps she had been listening out for Annabella's step. ‘I hope you know exactly what you are about,' she repeated. Annabella was so surprised by her appearance, its urgent disordered sincerity, that she could only back away from her aunt, bowing and offering respects, as Jennings held for her, against the changeable spring winds, the opened door.

Chapter Six

WHAT SHE WAS ABOUT
BECAME,
in the next few weeks, mercifully clearer to Annabella. Lady Caroline's secret was safely confided to Dr Lushington, who promised to make the force of it felt by a canny suppression. He held out great hopes of what he called a ‘complete satisfaction'. That, of course, was beyond his power to secure; but Lord Byron himself had given, within days, a generous off-hand assurance that he had no designs on the child. It was his intention to go abroad again, and the life he planned to pursue, though large in scope, was not sufficiently immense to include within it the encumbrance either of a wife or of a child. On April the 21st (the onset of spring, to Annabella, carried always a heavy burden of recollection; it suggested to her only the renewal of old griefs), he signed the separation papers, and within a few days he was gone. Dr Lushington, who had sent to Dover what he called a ‘professional witness', wrote at last to Annabella these consoling words. ‘Lord Byron, as promised, has departed these shores amidst a general hubbub made up of the curiosity to see him—which was so great at the inn where he had resided, that many ladies accoutred themselves as chambermaids for the purpose of obtaining, under that disguise, a nearer inspection of what they supposed might become, as one of them put it to the agent I had sent to make sure of him, a “famous farewell”.'

Well, she had made her own farewell, some months before, and without the recourse to any disguise whatsoever. She must learn to accustom herself, henceforth, to the
way women ‘threw them
selves' at the man who was still, as
far as her title to him was con
cerned, her husband. Annabella was sufficiently acquainted with Lord Byron's habits and appetites to admit that the truth of ‘his relations' was at least as rich and various as the rumours to which they gave rise. There was one rumour, however, in particular, that touched her much more closely. It was all she could do, in fact, not to squirm at the pressure, and the only relief she discovered was to make of her great discomfort a sharp occasion for acting. Lord Byron, it was said, intended, once he had established himself on the continent (at Geneva, in all probability: he was supposed to have taken a fancy to the prospect of boating, placidly enough, on an inland sea), to send for Augusta.

Lady Byron decided to call on her old friend Mary Montgomery. She had seen her, perhaps, once or twice since her marriage as they made the rounds of the London scene together, but the presence of her husband had seemed, in Mary's eyes, to make of her friend's perfection a significant difference. Annabella, who had always been pretty and clever and good, had become famous, too; and it was a part of Mary's modesty—though Annabella felt it at the time, painfully enough, as a kind of reproach—to hesitate to approach her in the dazzle of Lord Byron's reflected brilliance. Miss Montgomery, of course, had never married, and Annabella had been conscious of indulging, as a balm to her wounded feelings, a sweet tooth for pity at the prospects of her invalid friend. The recollection of this, in the aftermath of her separation, sufficiently shamed her—although she was honest enough to admit that where the sense of shame was so general, it was difficult to be particular about its cause—that she had failed since her return to London to pay a visit to the broad pleasant house on Wilmot Street.

Miss Montgomery had not changed: that was the truth the sight of her gave instantly back. Annabella was shown on her arrival into the little front room on the first floor, where Mary sat, with a chair for her feet, by the fire. It was a grey watery changeless sort of a day, rather dark than cold. Lady Byron, who had walked all the way from Cumberland Place, blushed in the close air of Mary's apartment, which smelt entirely, and sweetly, of her friend: of buttered cakes and books and the branches of fir she scattered from time to time across the fire, where they smoked and glinted. Mary shifted the rug from her knees and swung her feet to the floor and just rose up, not from her seat, but on tiptoes, to offer a hand to her friend. ‘Sit here, my dear,' she said, pulling a fold of the rug from the empty chair with an intimate insistent manner that almost brought a tear to Annabella's eyes, at its easy resumption. ‘I have been stretched out all morning till I am perfectly roasted. And I want you near to me today, very near.' It was her quiet little mention of ‘today'—quite as if she had been coming every morning for weeks—that peculiarly touched Annabella. It suggested that even
in
absentia
their friendship had grown and demanded the freshness of variety.

Mary herself, however, was just what she had been. It was almost as if, Annabella reflected, invalidism in her friend was nothing more than the language of constancy. She looked frail, pale, and cheerful in a deep-red dress with puffed sleeves that showed to delicate advantage her slender arms. She looked gently declining, though wasting away seemed to involve her only in the ease of a downward slope. She looked tidy and careful, well-layered in a cashmere shawl, and politely amused: she looked, in fact, utterly unchanged. Three years had passed since the pair of them had sat in that room comparing the virtues of Lord Byron and Mr Eden, and for the first time in months Annabella was grateful for what had been so eventful a passage. She could congratulate herself, at least, on having picked up along the way an accumulation—of what, she wouldn't have liked to say, except that she felt in the presence of her old friend by contrast a kind of addition. She was
not
what she had been, and the difference might also be counted as an increase in force. Mary, she remembered, had been used in their friendship to exercise the superior ironies of her detachment. These, she presumed, had been unblunted by time, but Annabella grew conscious in the course of their interview of the still keener edge of her own experience. It was a pleasure, almost, to feel the weight of it bear.

‘Now I won't ask you how you are,' Mary began. ‘Everyone, I'm sure, is always asking you that, and I have long been determined, as you know, to be unlike everyone. I will call for more tea. I believe we still have a few cherry tarts.' She lifted from the recesses of her lap a little silver bell and gave it a tinkling shake. ‘And I will try in the meantime to think what the devil I can ask you that isn't that.' After a pause: ‘Have you seen the new dresses at Delacourt's?' There was a knock at the door, and one of the maids appeared, curtseying. ‘Tea, please, Lizzy,' Mary said, ‘and have we still any cherry tarts?'

‘Yes, miss. Two or three, from dinner.'

‘We'll have them all.' And then, when the girl had gone: ‘Have you been lately to Vauxhall?'

‘I have not,' Lady Byron answered, smiling, ‘nor have I seen the dresses at Delacourt's. But I have not come to you, my dear Mary, to talk of nothing. I talk of nothing all day. Except with my mother: she talks to me of the law. But between Nothing and the Law, I trust, there is still enough room for a conversation.'

‘May I ask you then anything?' Mary said. ‘Shall I take your hand and kiss it and say, was it very terrible, the company of men?'

‘If you do, I shall answer: it was a great deal like the company of women, only lonelier and less various.' She hesitated, to give her friend a minute to consider the possible scope of such consistency, and then, taking her courage in both hands, continued: ‘Though as for that, there were women enough, I believe, in the house of my marriage. I am sure you have heard the rumours of one in particular. No, I have come, in fact, after too long an absence to ask something of
you
—a favour.'

Mary, in the pause, reached out for another stick of fir. These were stored in a basket beside the fire, and as she stooped towards it, a book fell out of the folds of her rug onto the floor between them. She pulled a branch from the cluster of branches and threw it on the flames; they watched it crackle and flare and turn black. Sparks flew up into the chimney, and the ash of the needles sighed and bent away from the wood. When it was quite burned out, Annabella glanced down at the book, which lay open at the spine. It was a copy of
Childe
Harold
. Mary looked her frankly in the eye, with a twitch of amusement in her lips. Then, more soberly, she said, ‘You asked me once before for my advice; I gave it. I don't believe it did you much good. I would willingly give you anything else you wanted of me, but I am rich, I believe, only in advice, which is a poor sort of thing to be rich in.'

Lady Byron stooped to retrieve the volume and spread it across her lap. She began quietly to read. Mary, somewhat ashamed for once, held her tongue. She had not supposed herself in a position to be ‘caught out' and was annoyed at having to admit to the role. She watched her friend turn a page. Annabella might have been reciting a passage from it, when she said at last, ‘I am told you are acquainted with a woman by the name of Thérèse de Villiers.'

‘Yes, I know her. She has something to do with the court and is very silly: vain as a peacock, though perfectly featherless. Ugly, I mean. She is stupid, though fancies herself clever, because she says what others daren't—in which respect, I suppose, she is rather like me. Who told you I knew her? It isn't a thing one would generally like to be known.'

‘She did. She said you would vouch for her character.'

Mary, after a moment, was equal to the highest good humour. ‘Have I vouched?'

Annabella met it. ‘As much, perhaps, as I require. We have begun a sort of correspondence—that is, she has been writing to me about her
very dear
friend
Mrs Leigh. She believed that I had mistreated her. At least, she believed that my sister-in-law had suffered more in this affair than was generally admitted to, and that a word in season (I was the only one placed to make it) might have helped her to repair the damage to her character. I explained to her how reluctant I was, for reasons that I trusted were abundantly plain, to pay Augusta a visit.' Annabella stopped and seemed to reconsider; she had an air of beginning again. ‘We were once, I confess, very close, sisters in affection as well as in name, which is why I believed that her striking resemblance to Lord Byron, and the still-living tenderness of our mutual relations, would have occasioned me in the aftermath of the separation a fresh pang. It was quite like a proposition in logic: if A, then B, and then C. But since the middle term had been proven, as I might safely put it, erroneous . . .'

She was spared, however, from completing her thought; Lizzy entered with a tray, which she set down on the table beside her mistress's chair. Mary dismissed her and began to pour the tea. That was the noise against which Annabella continued her little confession. ‘I had decided in any case, for the sake of my own happiness, to detach myself from the affairs of that family. Rumours, of course, had begun to circulate about them, and I positively assured Mrs Villiers that not one of the reports now current had been sanctioned or encouraged by me, or by my family, or by my friends. I could not, in consequence, consider myself in any degree responsible for them.'

Miss Montgomery, with a quizzical look, offered a cup to her friend. ‘I presume the matter rested there.'

Annabella lifted it to her face and blew against it. ‘I have recently been given grounds for reconsidering my position. Lord Byron, I am told, once his household is established, intends for his sister to join him. It has always, I believe, been one of his fondest hopes to set up a home with her. I have been guilty, perhaps, in the past few months, of an occasional indifference to the plight of my sister; but I am not cruel. I should never like it to be said that I was cruel, and I am determined not to stand idly by while Augusta, in all the waywardness of her affectionate nature, consigns herself to ruin.' She collected her thoughts. Her voice had grown somewhat heated, and she more softly said, ‘I have been searching lately for a suitable purpose. My time had been so busily occupied, in the year preceding, with being miserable. I was married to misery; that, as I like to think of it, was the marriage that failed. And the worst of my unhappiness was that it has made me selfish. I wish to devote myself—it is really a question of finding my feet again and looking around—for the space of a day, or a week together, to somebody other than poor Lady B. I believe I could devote myself to Augusta. I believe she needs it.' When Mary continued silent, Annabella added, ‘You have not asked me about the nature of these reports.'

But Miss Montgomery still hesitated. ‘What is she like?' she said at last.

‘I owe her a great deal.'

It was not an answer to her question, and Mary let the silence that followed give a point to the fact. Eventually, Lady Byron continued: ‘I was very much in love with my husband. You have not, from a tact, Mary, that is quite unlike you, questioned my feelings about him. If in the reckoning of our married love we came up just shy of the required sum, then the dearth lay all on his side. It is not necessary to think ill of his heart in general, but to me it was hard and impenetrable enough that my own must have broken before his had been touched. As long as I live, my chief difficulty will probably be
not
to remember him too kindly.' She bit into a cherry tart and brushed the crumbs from her lips; her complacence was just as formidable a display as the wildest courage. ‘Augusta, who was in so many ways his sister, failed just in that respect to live up to the family character. There was something in her capacity as a receiving vessel that was not quite passive. She is almost made for love, and I am perfectly conscious of the implication carried by that phrase and the extent to which my own poor feeling nature might be said to fall short of such a description. The channel of my affections, which had on the whole been thwarted by my husband's coldness, turned gratefully into her open heart; and there were times when one of her kind words or touches made the difference for me between life and death.'