A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  The analogy produced in her another fear. What was lacking was love, that was the wind that failed them. Without it, they could only keep their course by little adjustments. That she herself loved, the unhappiness of the past two years had given her ample proof. The failure was his, though when she offered (honourably, as she believed) to break off their engagement, the violence of his response shocked her into a deeper faith. He turned pale and fell into a seat; called for salts, brandy; said to her at last that there was no cruelty like virtue. He spoke unguardedly, in a tone that was new to her. Not even Lady Caroline, fiend that she was, would tease him into a proposal after two years only to spurn him again. He had staked everything; his life depended on her. Annabella, from a deep conviction of her own goodness, was colder than any coquette . . . Her tears finally calmed him. ‘It was only,’ she said, ‘that she thought he did not love her.’

  It was not a reproach. She had not intended a reproach, but he took it as such and gave one bitterly back: that she stared at him so silently. He could hardly make love to a statue.

  She stared at him now, but at least she managed to interrupt her silence. ‘She wished only to please him; she could not find the words. Consequently, she said nothing at all. And he was so peculiar with her.’

  The word restored his humour—how often, in their relations, the temper of it depended on such a piece of luck, either good or bad. ‘He should like to be a great deal more peculiar,’ he said. She had been standing over him, and he now took her into his lap, which she submitted to, while he began to kiss her neck and cheek and temple. ‘Sweet little round face,’ he said, ‘my little apple.’ Annabella, quite ashamed of herself, silently endured these attentions, until he began to kiss her mouth—they had never kissed—which startled her into an equal greed that had left them both quite breathless by the time a foot on the stairs recalled them to their sense of place.

  For the rest of that long week, whenever their tempers seemed misaligned, Lord Byron attempted a similar ‘process of adjustment’. ‘You are quite caressable into a good humour,’ he said to her once. ‘I think we shall get along very well.’ She had taken him on her favourite walk over the cliffs. A late October sun had a low scurfy bank of cloud to keep the heat in. Their faces were bothered by flies, as he with difficulty clambered over the rocks, taking her hand from time to time or resting on her shoulder. The breeze on top of the cliffs was fitful, but the long sweep of the waves, flatly repeated, tirelessly arriving, suggested out to sea a steadier blow; and they had the sense of catching at the fragments, gratefully enough in that autumnal haze, of a much larger force. She had brought with her an apple and a purse of cashews, and they stopped once to sit with their backs against a rock and eat them. After a while, the extent of what she was capable of desiring began to frighten her. She made them go home again, each in a surly and childish mood, which was not unloving: they were turned, as it were, towards each other in sullen frustration. The waves and the shore. That evening she asked him to leave. The sooner they were married the better; she could not trust herself. He should ‘arrange his affairs’ in London as quickly as possible, and then come back to her when these were settled for what they both desired, a quiet wedding.

  As the year 1814 drew to a close, she passed her twenty-first Christmas stuck at home, the precocious daughter of her parents’ affections. These had begun to chafe; it was time she grew up. Lord Byron complained bitterly of the ‘law’s delay’ (Hamlet, indeed, was the text on which they both drew for material), but nothing, save her most particular command, could persuade him to marry without having settled his debts. Newstead Abbey, his ancestral home, much as it pained him, must be sold, but the buyer was proving as indecisive as, by force of that indecision, Lord Byron himself must appear to her. Sir Ralph could not help remarking that in spite of Lord Byron’s injunction to invite no one, they had better, after all, invite the groom himself; it would be a sad sort of wedding without one. Annabella, at last, commanded.

  Lord Byron appeared, unannounced, in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. He had a friend with him, a young man, whose large straight nose cast a shadow over his chin. Annabella heard their carriage running over the gravel of the drive and watched them from her bedroom window. Still, she did not come down. She had a sense of his arrival that the mere physical fact of it couldn’t live up to. Two months had passed since she had seen him, and she had spent the time attempting to discover what the awkwardness in her manner was that had produced its echo in him. She wanted to prepare herself—she wanted, internally, to meet him, her idea of him. Or rather, she needed a moment to enter into what she conceived to be his idea of her. She was conscious, of course, of the play between these two ideas, and of the fact that Lord Byron himself was quite likely to ‘break up the game’. This was, as she put it to herself, just what she needed him for, the man himself: to break up the game. Still, she waited and listened to Dawlish, the butler, showing them to their rooms at the back of the house. It pained her that neither Sir Ralph nor Judy had moved to greet them—out of pique, no doubt, at his endless delays. She must learn to disregard their pleasure, to attend to his.

  After a few minutes (she had not moved from the window), she heard the carefulness of his step, descending. One two, one two, on every stair. No other sounds; his friend must have stayed behind to change. If she hurried now, she might just catch Lord Byron alone. A glance in her bedroom mirror gave back to her an image of outward calm: she seemed fairly smothered up, from top to toe, or rather, from neck to ankle, in a long dress of green muslin that brought out the pink in her round cheeks. You strange quiet girl, she thought, is there nothing inside you? She counted to herself—one two, one two—sighed deeply and emerged into the corridor. It was only when she reached the bottom, from being out of breath, that she guessed she had been running—down the stairs helter-skelter to the library door. But she could not wait any more. She could not wait and pushed in. Lord Byron stood by the fire with his back to her. He was fatter than she remembered him, a fact just brought out by the pinch of his black waistcoat against his hips. Perhaps he had been unhappy, this struck her at once—and then: that he was still unhappy. She had seen him only two months before, but he changed shape lightly. It was a kind of nimbleness in him, the way he fattened, and peculiarly expressive in the largest sense of mood, of temper. With one foot over the other, he stooped to the heat. He turned to see who it was—saw it was she—stretched out his hand to her. For a second she hesitated, then ran across the room and flung herself sobbing into his arms. ‘My lord, my lord.’

  He gently disengaged himself from her embrace, but keeping her hand in his, he kissed it, cold-lipped. She was conscious of the fluster in her hurry, the smudge of tears around her eyes, and pressed her fists to them. ‘I told myself that you would come today, that you must come. I knew that you would, you see, and yet, when you did, it was no less a shock.’ She was expressing herself very badly, she knew, and thought of poor Mr Eden.

  ‘I did not mean to upset you,’ he said.

  ‘No, that’s not it at all. Only this time, you see, I know what to expect. More than before. I know you—’ And then, breaking off, she smiled, too hopefully perhaps, ‘I’m afraid I can’t make myself clear.’ But there was no answering smile; and she began to suspect that something had happened since she had seen him last. He had not in the least, as she put it to herself, attempted to enter into her idea of him—that was the fact that struck her. The fault, no doubt, lay in her own idea. She wondered if, for her part, she had failed his.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a dull Christmas at my sister’s. Her husband, a very pretty piece of foolishness, was at home, and the children screamed at him, and the dogs barked at the children, and the servants beat the dogs. I have,’ he added, ‘a particular horror of children.’

  For the first time, she looked at him with something like detachment. (It relieved Annabella, after the foolish rush of her gre
eting, that she could return to it.) His hair was curlier than she had remembered it, his aspect altogether more boyish. Plumpness had rounded his cheeks and thickened his neck. His shirt was open, with a cravat tucked into it; his chest, broad and firm (she had felt her head against it), suggested a simplicity of character, of honesty, she knew him to be far from possessing. His face was a little pale, except here or there where the heat from the fire had reddened it. There was something in his attentions, as she remembered them, so feminine, which had been still more fully developed in the spirit of his letters, that the plain masculine effect of his presence came as a shock. It was not what she had counted on. The fear of giving her life to a man—to this man—renewed itself in her. She was conscious of desiring allies. Her parents had again proved tardy in their welcome, and she was turning to the door to say, ‘I will just call out to my parents’, when the door opened and the unfamiliar young gentleman with the strong-shadowed nose came in. The hair around his ears was shiny and wet from a hasty wash. This was one of the recollections that stayed with her.

  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 afte
rnoon. 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.’