A Quiet Adjustment (15 page)

But can it be true? Are you married at last? I hardly credit it. I awoke that morning in a very low spirit, without remembering the occasion for it. It was very cold, you remember, and here at least snowing a little forlornly, which I know you hate—and then I did remember, in a rush, and must sit down again to clear my head. He is to be married today, I declared to no one. I made a miserable breakfast, sitting in George's seat so I could look at the clock. And I remember saying to him, George will tell you, how I said to him, at ten o'clock, it is just gone ten o'clock, he will be dressing now; and at half past ten, I said, how shameful for it to be so cold, for I am sure he would like a turn in the garden, alone, above all things; and at eleven o'clock, they will be calling him down, I wonder if she is dressed already? Then the children imposed and made a mess of something, I hardly remember what, till it was suddenly a quarter to twelve, and I said, I suppose they are all assembled. What a dreadful word that is: assembled. You may imagine my feelings when the bells at noon rang, which I knew to be your wedding hour. I turned quite pale I am told, George particularly remarked it. All was agitation within me, as the sea trembles when the earth quakes, though I managed to keep down the worst appearance of it . . .

Annabella was dimly conscious, as she lowered her hand to the table, that Lord Byron had entered and was observing her. She sat with her back to him, had heard his step; but her husband had done nothing yet to declare his presence, and so they could continue, if they liked, in silence—he standing, she sitting—without any appearance of rudeness. There was nothing, she consoled herself, very horrible or improper in the letter, barring that shameful aside about her mother—all the more shameful because it wasn't quite true. She had the sense, however, that any correction would only involve her more deeply in explanations. These were, above all, what she wanted to avoid. Augusta's ‘agitations', her quakes and waves, were easily accounted for by a reference to Annabella's own feelings at the marriage of her cousin Sophy; and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for ‘Goose' to prefer in a sister-in-law an old friend to a stranger. As for Miss Elphinstone, Annabella could hardly resent a woman for having failed to become her husband's wife.

And yet the effect of the letter, the shadow and chill it cast, was quite as strong as a real shadow and a real chill. It reminded her of the conversation she had overheard between Hobhouse and her husband outside the gates at Seaham House. What was shocking was really just the fact of the conversation itself. The way they had carried on without her—that she lived in their thoughts without any rights of contradiction. She saw herself, for the first time, through their eyes: a good quiet kind of a girl, an acceptable match. Her own self-opinion, perhaps, was what lacked proportion. And yet she was mindful, in spite of that little evasion (of dropping her hand to the table), that the letter contained something she could challenge him with if Lord Byron complained of her snooping. She didn't suppose he would dare to—afterwards noting, how quickly she had reconciled herself to the role of spy. In fact what he said, when he broke their silence at last, surprised her in another way. It was not quite an apology or an accusation. ‘I was a villain to marry you, I could convince you of it in three words.' And then, when she failed to look round: ‘Anyway, it is too late now. And I hate scenes.'

She did not say, what is too late? And she made no scene. She had the virtue of forbearance, when it suited her, and was conscious of waiting him out. It seemed to her the clearest intimation of success, that in a contest of patience, at least, he was sure to lose.

Chapter Four

THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING
weighing on his heart, she did not doubt; though whether indeed what seemed to him so terrible was a large secret or a small one, Annabella could not be sure. She feared the small secrets more. The other, his works had beautifully acquainted her with: the burden placed on a noble nature by the recollection of an ill-spent youth. She considered it among the purposes of her marriage to train him into a more reasonable view of his own bad character—she suspected him of delighting a little in his reputation for sinfulness. He certainly, in the first weeks of their honeymoon, played up to it. But his nature was really too generous and fine to sustain the part for long without internal violence. Annabella hoped to teach him that a greater regulation of his own temper, though it might involve a sacrifice of high spirits, would preserve him in the end from his worst demons.

She had begun to concern herself over his drinking, although her least remonstrance threatened to call forth, in his justifications, the example of her mother—she could only reprove the one behaviour by acknowledging the evil of the other. On the whole she kept quiet; at least, she said less than she might have, than she wished to. He had discovered in the cellars a cache of Tokay vintnered in the year of his birth, and vowed to get through it by the end of their stay. He drank heavily at lunch, afterwards retiring to the library ‘to work' with a flask of ‘right sherries', as he called it, in hand. By suppertime, he was rarely steady, and having ordered Payne to open several bottles of burgundy and let them breathe, he ‘hated to see them go off' and finished, sometimes, even the remnants of Annabella's glass. She found herself against her will attempting to keep pace, if only for the sake of his sobriety; and though he was rarely, as he put it, ‘savagely drunk' by bedtime, they indulged what they called their ‘greed' for each other in a manner that suggested rather the anger than the kindness of love. What surprised Annabella was how quickly she had come to feel dependent even on those rough tokens of his affection.

Their isolation was great; they saw no company, and the house was too large to be thoroughly kept warm. The hallways, lofty and overlooked by high windows, were particularly bitter, and Annabella used to run from the fire in her bedroom to the fire in the sitting room without drawing breath. They relied on each other for heat if nothing else; and Annabella was almost grateful to the cold, in that it prompted Lord Byron sometimes to huddle beside her on a chair or rug and permit his wife to fold her arms about him. These were her happiest interludes. They might lie for as much as an hour together, wordlessly—she, waiting for him to speak, for fear of breaking the spell that held them. She was always, Annabella had learned, saying the wrong thing and began to practise her silences. These, she discovered, could also offend. ‘I only want a woman to laugh,' he once said to her, as they were thus entwined, ‘and don't care what she is besides. I can make Augusta laugh at anything.'

What she wanted was to be, as she put it to herself, ‘more natural', but it wasn't a thing one could act, and she was conscious in the weeks to come of using too much muscle. The fact, palpably, made itself felt. She was constantly tired. And occasionally tiresome: she sensed it herself, by the tension kept up within her of a leash in the hand. She was pulling at him, and it struck her eventually that the fault of that contest lay only partly in the creature harnessed. At least, sometimes, he managed to pull her
along
. She had never before considered herself a burden, and the real lesson it taught her, in feeling him shoulder his share, was how great was the weight she used to carry on her own.

In the afternoons, he was engaged in working up a number of songs on biblical themes for a set of tunes composed by one of his friends. He sat in the library in his overcoat, drinking and writing. At first, she used to join him there, reading, or standing at the fire with her back to it, so that she could look over his shoulder at the half-finished verses. ‘I don't want you,' he finally said to her. ‘I hope we are not always to be together—that won't do for me, I assure you.'

Later, he relented (it amazed her sometimes, his indulgence) and allowed her to transcribe his pointed scrawl in her fairer hand. They spent long, almost happy afternoons together, in perfect silence, both writing. He insisted that she keep her distance and pushed one of the tables under a window for her to serve as a desk. It overlooked a slope of lawn running down to a brown sketch of elms, which bordered a frozen stream. She watched the short days set behind the trees, a dirty light that spread its stain up the snowy hillside to the shrubs in the beds below her sill. Then it climbed up the wall. When it reached her, she stopped—till the sun set, she could see nothing more than the ache of yellow in her eyes. Her knuckles grew stiff with cold, and she began to drink hot grog after lunch to keep fingers and heart warm. Contented enough to sit near him, and sometimes quite blissful, when the beauty of his verses flowed on to her page as if they had but freshly occurred to him. She felt, almost, the force of them in her own hand, as if she held it against a fall of water.

They spent several afternoons in this companionable silence, which Annabella liked all the better for the steady view it gave her of Lord Byron's best, most patient and considered self. She supposed herself to be, in copying his hasty script, a conduit to another age. There was something indeed in the mere act of
writing out fair
that suggested the role she was playing, careful, loving, neat, in preserving his name. Hers was, she could almost imagine, the fist of posterity. And yet at other times she felt only too vividly the personal element; these songs became, she grew convinced, Lord Byron's private language of love and apology to her. He could express himself in them with a free-hearted clarity that the pressure of her affections otherwise forbade, and she occasionally suffered from the curious feeling, as she picked out a line of his text, of being complicit in his own opinion of her—of playing, as it were, both sides of the marriage question, husband and wife, and admiring from this detachment equally the suffering of the victim and the eloquence of her abuser.

It was their custom, after breakfast, to remove to the sitting room and read. Sometimes Lord Byron, from a general restlessness or a more particular sore head, asked his wife to read aloud to him, while he sat in the easy chair, pushed up to the fire, and closed his eyes. His manner at these times was wonderfully indifferent and relaxed, and Annabella could not help, occasionally, attempting to provoke him to a response. He crossed his legs at the ankles with his feet against the fender; he rested his clasped hands on his stomach and pointed his chin in the air. It was the heat he basked in, but his wife, she thought, might be forgiven for thinking that in the general sum of warmth her own poor contribution of love was just another quantity. One morning, after a sleepless unhappy night, Annabella chose an album of their letters, which she had put together in the long delay preceding his arrival in Seaham. She even dressed up for the occasion, in jewels and ribboned braids: she was determined to begin an assault upon what she considered the constant quiet level of unhappiness in their relations. What she wanted him to feel was just how large a quantity her love made up. The scale of it was something which, in her way, she might admit to being proud of, and perhaps a note of that pride made itself felt in her voice.

‘I wish for you, want you, Byron mine, more every hour,' she read out, very prettily, in clear carrying accents. ‘All my confidence has returned—never to sink again, I believe. A confidence in the power of my affection to make
me
anything,
everything
that you and I wish.' He did not stir; he might have been asleep. ‘Do I understand you? you asked. Surely I do, for without understanding of the completest kind, I should fear to love you less, if you proved any different from that which has made me love you.' It was a queer sort of recital. Annabella felt the queerness of it, and that within her praise was a sting of reproach; but there was also, she hoped, the balm to soothe it with. ‘I have no such fears.' She repeated: ‘I have no fears.' And then, continuing, ‘I have always insisted (you may guess how often I am quizzed about your character) that you are the most lovable of men,' whereat Lord Byron interrupted,

‘Then if I were unfaithful, you should not resent it?'

His eyes were still closed. She did not at first answer, until he, sitting up and looking her in the face, insisted. ‘I ask only for information.'

She still considered her reply. At length, carefully, slowly, Annabella offered: ‘I have been taught to believe that a wife had better not notice deviations which are more likely to be repented of if her own conduct continues kind and constant.'

‘Then you would
let
me be unfaithful?'

‘No—that is a different thing.' She was perfectly equal, Annabella discovered, to meeting his stare. ‘Even as your friend I should love you too well to let you do what would injure yourself.'

He smiled at that and repeated, ‘Oh, as my friend . . . You have a very pleasant notion of injury. It might surprise you to hear that Augusta has no such scruples.'

She had nothing to say to this.

‘Does it surprise you?'

‘I cannot answer for her conduct.'

‘Be careful,' he said, with imperfect consequence, ‘before you attack my sister. I think you will find that it does not help your case. She is the only woman who has ever loved me—
as I am
. A love of the completest kind, as you put it, must include an understanding of one's little sins, to call them no worse. No other love is worthy of the name.' And then, very coolly, ‘I thought you would be more malleable.'

It was that word, she later reflected, which set her off: malleable, to a point, is what she had intended to be. Hadn't she taken pains that very morning to dress the part of loving wife, just as a woman might, to her advantage, appear in it? The failure of her little experiment upon their happiness, as she framed it to herself, was perfectly evident. And the consciousness of wasted energies, as much as anything else, induced in her a quiet show of tears, to accommodate which she hardly needed to increase her breathing. The effort to support her role (kind, just, loving, temperate) was sometimes too great for her. But her misery seemed to irritate him further. ‘This is intolerable,' he said. ‘I will not be
tear
-beaten into marriage.' And then, from a greater depth of unhappiness: ‘You provoke me, you know you do, by your damned tolerant virtuous tireless suffering. It is too much; I will not stand it. I cannot stand it.'

‘You forget,' she said, with a hint of anger, ‘that we
are
married.'

‘For the moment. I will live with you, if I can, until I have got an heir—until I have got an heir. And then—and then—we shall see.'

At lunch, they never mentioned the scene, and after lunch something happened to lighten their mood. Lord Byron had discovered a billiard room at the back of the house overlooking the terrace; in it were stowed dirty boots and overcoats, some of them piled across the table itself. His lordship had asked Payne to see that it was cleared up. After his meal, he decided he wanted a walk, if only for air. He was sick of the close heat of fires, which had not, he said, ‘the fragrance of a honeymoon but the settled smell of marriage'. He wouldn't dream of troubling his wife, he was only going ‘to stomp once around' and come back in. Annabella watched him go; she was too unhappy to move. In a minute he returned and taking her hand led her back along the corridor very quietly. There were sounds coming from the billiard room, but he drew her outside, into the cold, and then along the balcony to a window. He signalled for her to look in. She was shivering already, in her muslin gown, from the chill, and it may have been the shivering that induced her to giggle. The window gave on to the billiard room. The table had been cleared, and Payne was playing a game in the company of Miss Minns, who had been assigned to Annabella as a lady's maid, although she was a stout beet-faced woman of forty-five. They were clearly in high spirits. There were boots and coats everywhere on the floor, and instead of using sticks, they played with their hands, rolling two balls rapidly against each other from opposite ends of the table. Occasionally, a loud crack announced a successful hit. Annabella could hear the concussion through the windowpanes, although their laughter, which attended these collisions, could only be seen and not heard. Lord Byron leaned over her and whispered, ‘I suppose, Pip, they are very much in love?' which only made Annabella giggle more. Payne, for all anyone knew, might have been a respectable grandfather, but he looked no more than twenty-five years old. The contrast between his threadbare youthfulness and Miss Minns's solidly maternal charms seemed irresistible to Annabella—although the longer they stood watching, and the colder she became, the contrast that struck her most was rather between the couple outside and the couple within. Lord Byron seemed to feel it at the same moment.