A Quiet Adjustment (16 page)

In the afternoon, her husband as usual retired to work, and Annabella joined him in the library. The light crept up the hill. As she sat by her window, looking out, he came over to her chair and laid a set of verses on the table, which she with the promptness and indifference of a scribe began to copy onto a fresh sheet. It was only as she reached the second stanza, with the sunset working against her sight, that the meaning of the lines began to make itself felt.

I saw thee weep—the big bright tear

 Came o'er that eye of blue,

And then methought it did appear

 A violet dropping dew.

I saw thee smile—the sapphire's blaze

 Beside thee ceased to shine.

It could not match the living rays

 That filled that glance of thine.

As clouds from yonder sun receive

 A deep and yellow dye,

Which scarce the shade of coming eve

 Can banish from the sky,

Those smiles unto the moodiest mind

 Their own pure joy impart.

Their sunshine leaves a glow behind

 That lightens o'er the heart.

It was an apology, perhaps, as much as a token of love. What was it he had said of Augusta, that he only wanted a woman he could make laugh? Well, Annabella had laughed, and the lines were very pretty, and for a day at least she could believe them to be true.

Chapter Five

MOST NIGHTS LORD BYRON WAS
too drunk to sleep well. He woke before dawn and, too restless to recompose himself, would crawl out of bed and begin, as she once put it to him in the morning, ‘to haunt the corridors'. He complained of noises in the night. It was a big empty house; he feared intrusions. The only sounds Annabella heard were the creak of his steps in the halls as he paced up and down them—sometimes, as she learned, when he retired again to bed, by the gleam of it, with a dagger in his hand. The hint of excess in his unhappiness she was not too in love with her husband to overlook. He dressed himself in it as one might in rich clothes, and she saw it as her duty to teach him a simpler habit. That she was in love with Lord Byron her own urgent desire to console him made perfectly plain. One night as he returned to her, worn out from his vigil, she moved to lay her head against his breast. She wanted him to feel her warmth, but he only said, more gently than he was used to, ‘You should have a softer pillow than my heart.'

He talked a great deal of his sister and once, in a happier mood, compared Annabella to her: they had the same round face and shy, perplexing manners, though he had ‘unpuzzled Augusta' and hoped to do the same for his wife in time. Of course, they had their differences, too, he said, and added, looking at her teasingly, that his sister, for example, always wore drawers. She blushed and in her confusion suggested that they invite her to Halnaby for the last week of their stay. It might be a relief to them to have a little company, and she was fully determined to claim Augusta as a sister. Lord Byron at first demurred, in some alarm. He warned that a visit from Gus would not contribute to their ‘hymeneal harmony'; that Augusta made claims upon him, as her brother, which he could not resist; and that Pip might find her Duck a bird of altered feather in his sister's company. In short, Annabella did not know what she was about. But Annabella was determined. She had no such wifely jealousies as Lord Byron imputed to her, and she would be glad herself, it might surprise him to know, to have about them in the large cold house what he once described to her as the ‘softening presence' of another woman. Miss Minns's manners, she feared (venturing boldly into a little joke), were not quite so comforting or comfortable. She wrote to Augusta that evening, and for a day or two, in fact, her husband seemed to her in better spirits: Lord Byron drank less and slept more and spoke of what they might do when his sister came.

They even spent an afternoon at the billiard table, though Annabella insisted on learning to play in the orthodox fashion. Lord Byron obliged by standing over her and guiding the cue in her hand—in its own way, she supposed, striking through the ball, a scene just as affecting as the one they had witnessed together. Duck, however, despaired of instructing his wife. Pip played too rigidly, by calculation, as it were, and had not the easy manner to bring a shot off happily. Besides, she proceeded too slowly, she spoiled the sport of it. Annabella herself felt that she was ‘getting in her own way'. Her corset, for one thing, struck her as awkwardly constricting. She guessed that her own patience, for improving, was quickly beginning to tire her husband's, for teaching her. And he began to play more seriously, commanding the table for great stretches, and beating her steadily. It was a question of grace, he said—that is, one must give to a skill the appearance of luck. Angelo, his fencing-master, who despised the brute bulk of the boxer, had a phrase for it, applied to swordplay. He called it ‘muscling', his English was very rough, but it perfectly suited the action, and Annabella might be said to be ‘muscling the shot'. Her husband's lecture only determined her to beat him more, though that determination seemed to have the very effect he was describing. He found her anger charming, which provoked her exceedingly, until he placated her in the usual way. Later, she overheard him instructing Payne to clean off the baize. He had had his wife on the billiard table, he said, and there had been a little ‘untidiness'.

The next day a letter from Gus arrived. Her husband was stuck at home and would not spare her; there were also the children to be considered, a constraint with which Annabella, she had no doubt, would shortly sympathize. No, it would not do, much as she longed to, she could not get away. Although, perhaps, on their return to London, her brother might be persuaded to stop for an extended visit? If only, as Augusta charmingly put it, for the purpose of ‘introducing a sister to her'. That was the hope she would cherish in the meantime; Annabella must know how attached she was to ‘dearest B'. Gus then struck the note of confession—in part, no doubt, Annabella ungraciously reflected, for the purpose of disarming. She had been almost overcome by emotion on their wedding day. Augusta made no apologies for the fact. Only, raised as she had been by the generosity of strangers, it had made an epoch in her life when she learned of a nearer relation: a younger brother (or a half-brother, at least), living all the time within a day's journey, and entering just those interesting stages of life which women were barred from enjoying themselves. His school, his university, his travels—Annabella could imagine how much Gus delighted in his letters. They came to depend on each other alone for the comforts of family, and the thought of losing Byron to a stranger had made her go dark, for a minute, as the bells rang out the hour of their wedding. She had sat down with her children in a heap upon her lap and she could not hear or feel them; they tugged at her hair, they pulled at her face, she clung to them so hard. Her only consolation, which she promised herself afterwards, was the right to claim Annabella ‘for her own'. She planned to insist on it . . .

Well, Annabella had been disarmed, and it struck her eventually (when she had time and occasion to regret her defencelessness) as a proof of how lonely she'd been, that she felt so intimately the force of Augusta's appeal. The comfort of women: she had been starved of it, for these, the hardest weeks of her life, and she sat down instantly to answer Augusta's letter. The marriage of her cousin Sophy when Annabella was twelve, her childish unreasonable insistent sense of abandonment, gave her a ‘text'; and she rejoiced in her own ‘confession' in that it allowed her to show how little she minded Augusta's. From that moment they fell into the habit of writing to each other every day. At breakfast, letters from Suffolk began to appear, addressed to Lady B. Annabella would read from them to her husband as they ate—selecting whatever, she said (conscious of scoring a point), she felt might amuse him. Afterwards Annabella retired to her dressing room to answer the latest. Not the least of her pleasures in the correspondence lay in the fact that she saw how deeply her husband resented it.

But she had other motives besides, nobler and gentler both, and altogether more desperate. Her husband was unhappy. His misery was infectious: she had caught it herself. Gus in her first letter had mentioned how easily he might be managed, and Annabella had undoubtedly sunk to the point that she was willing to take advice. In the album of love letters, which she had made up for Lord Byron, she came across the character she had once sketched of him, before her first refusal. It was crumpled, of course (she had rescued it from the bin), and her acquaintance at the time had certainly been slight enough, but she could almost smile now at the thought of how much she had seen:

When indignation takes possession of his mind, and it is easily excited, his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates with the bitterest contempt. But as soon as he has indulged those feelings, he regains the humanity that he had lost (from the immediate impulse of provocation) and repents deeply. So that his mind is continually making the most sudden transitions—from good to evil—from evil to good. It would require in his wife a disposition both mild and forceful to correct such tendencies. The contradiction in these virtues suggests only too well the difficulty one must encounter in uniting them.

Of course, she had not guessed at the time the particular form his sudden transitions would take: from the acting out of his sensual nature to the revulsions he suffered from
post
coitum
. Nor, indeed, that she would come to consider the first in the light of a good and the aftermath as its consequent evil. It seemed a measure of her unhappiness that she often looked forward to the violence of his desires as a respite from the indifference of his larger neglect. That her own disposition, mild and forceful as she strove to make it, only added to his irritation, she was perfectly aware; but she had not the trick of making him laugh as Augusta could. And it struck her as something to be grateful for, that in the three years since she had written her character of Lord Byron, she had learned, at least, to rate the virtue of a sense of humour.

If only she could make him laugh! Was it, she wanted Augusta to tell her, a trick that could be taught? She had taken a position (this is what she tried to explain to her ‘sister'), she wasn't quite sure where, only it was in his way, and for whatever reason, she wasn't budging. Not that she didn't try to, only somehow she couldn't help it—she was stuck where she was. Augusta had responded that it wasn't only a question of making him laugh; it was also a question, of course, of laughing oneself. Annabella could not help but acknowledge the good sense of this remark, and yet, in spite of her best intentions, there were times in which she couldn't see her way to doing justice to the humour of her situation. For example, and she decided on balance not to publish this episode to her sister, one night, after his sleepless rambles, Lord Byron had returned to their bed. She had felt his absence, as she often felt it, and had been lying awake. But with her eyes shut and her breathing regular, he had reasonably presumed her asleep, so that when she reached out to touch his face, she felt him shrink from her in disgust, and she opened her eyes to the look of horror in his own. She had had, she could now admit it, a moment of weakness then, for she allowed herself to ask what she should not have asked: ‘Why do you hate me?' To which he replied almost tenderly, ‘I do not hate you, Pip. Only, I do not love you either, which may be worse.' Her lesson, at least, had been learnt—never to ask him anything she did not care to hear the answer to—but she wanted to inquire of Augusta, nevertheless, whether she should have found the heart to laugh at him then?

That his unhappiness had not everything to do with her, she could with some complacency reflect on. He had always been unhappy; she had the poems to prove it. There were times, however, when this seemed scant consolation. Once, towards the end of their stay at Halnaby, she came back from a lonely tramp over the fields—Lord Byron rarely ventured outdoors in those three weeks because of the snow—to find the library and the sitting room empty. It was a large quiet house, and yet the quiet seemed to have taken on a different character. She began to be frightened for him and feared that he might have attempted to do himself some harm. She went upstairs. He was not in their bedroom or any of the bedrooms (there were a great many), and the silence around her, she noticed, had almost silenced herself: she was hardly breathing. In her dressing room, where she went to rouse herself with a dose of salts, she found him at last, sitting on the day-bed with a gun in his hand and Augusta's letters scattered across his lap. ‘You will not like it if we visit her, I promise,' he told her, calmly enough. ‘Remember later that I warned you.' But her silence—she did not know what to answer—suddenly provoked him. ‘Was ever anyone so tormented? It isn't human; it can't be borne,' he cried out. ‘I forbid you to write to her. I forbid you to see her.' She remained in the doorway, unmoving—shaping, she hoped, a look of compassion on her face. ‘Have you nothing to say? You know I can't stand your patient preening airs.'

‘What would you like me to say?' she was in the midst of asking, when the gun went off in the direction of her dressing table. The mirror cracked. Something else had smashed and Annabella was just looking to see
what
—a soda-bottle, they afterwards discovered, broken at the neck—when she noticed that a piece of glass had caught her in the hand. She pressed it at once against her side, where it bled brightly onto the dress. There were footsteps at once. Miss Minns came running, red-faced, so that the hairs around her lips stood out darkly, and pushed into the room. Annabella, feeling faint, had collapsed into the chair at her dressing table; her image was variously reflected in the broken mirror. Lord Byron sat behind her with his head in his hands. The gun, an old boot pistol with a plain wooden handle, lay at his feet. Miss Minns saw the bloodstain spreading along her mistress's waist and screamed. Lord Byron (Annabella could see him in the glass) looked pale as a milk-bottle; he did not stir. Then the real commotion began, which Annabella only dimly perceived. Her head seemed wrapped in cotton, not ungently. In fact, she had the strangest sense of some merciful intervention, which prevented the full force of events from reaching her; she remembered being conscious of a kind of mercy, of having been spared. ‘You must leave this house at once,' Miss Minns began to hector, ‘this day, this minute. I will not stand aside and watch him murder you.' And then, with a certain reasonableness, which Lord Byron in a calmer moment could not help but admit to and admire, Miss Minns continued: ‘I should not be able to look your mother in the eye if you was murdered. I waited on her when she was a bride, and I'll wait on you. But your father was a respectable husbandly man, and this man is a monster. A monster.'