A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  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.’

  In the end, only Payne could remove her, by absolute force, lifting her with both his arms around her generous waist; they heard her shouting as she was carried downstairs. ‘I will not stand aside. I will not stand aside.’ A minute or two passed in relative peace before either Lord Byron or Annabella acknowledged the other. It was she, however, who rose first: her husband, she saw, was shivering with tears. She sat beside him and laid her arms ar
ound his neck and her cheek against his ear. He was deadly cold to the touch. Lord Byron turned and covered her face in kisses; she had to close her eyes against them, the wet from his own was stinging her into little blindnesses. Even Miss Minns was quieted at last. Only three days of their honeymoon remained, after all, and they did not leave, and the days passed.

  There was, indeed, even in his misery a certain thrill—in his capacity for feeling it and giving shape to it. Such things she wrote in his name! And among the consolations of her marriage was the fact that her husband could hit so brilliantly the heart of their despair. Just to feel what he felt seemed enough to her, just to borrow his grace of feeling. Towards the end of their stay in Halnaby, she copied out a poem for him, which he had titled simply ‘Stanzas for Music’. It began: ‘There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.’ She sat at her library-window and wrote it out in a mist of sentiment, almost happy, with the white of the snow in her eyes. But it was the last verse that stuck in her thoughts and came to stand, for the rest of her life, as an image of Halnaby, of the heartbreak she had suffered there and would never suffer from again.

  Oh could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been,

  Or weep as I could once have wept o’er

  many a vanished scene—

  As springs in deserts found seem sweet,

  all brackish though they be,

  So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears

  would flow to me.

  Her honeymoon, she always remembered, had been bitterly unhappy; and though she never forgot the fact, as the years passed she began more and more to miss, not perhaps the misery of those weeks, but the freshness of feeling that had permitted her the sharpest sensation of it. The life that followed grew unquestionably drier with age. ‘Springs in deserts found seem sweet,’ her husband had written. And yes, there were those, too, which they had occasionally, almost against their worst intentions, stumbled upon and taken nourishment from.

  Annabella had determined to beat her husband at a game of billiards. She had often, while he was scribbling, retired to the billiard room to practise. And in spite of her habit of ‘muscling the shot’, as he put it, she had managed to improve. She was very sensitive to her own capacity for error, and by dint of great concentration of mind and slow particular attention to the dispositions of her body, she had acquired an action of cueing that was more steady than graceful. On the eve of their departure, after he had drunk a considerable quantity of what he called his ‘birthday Tokay’, she invited him into the billiard room to observe, as she said, her technique—and was gratified to find that her nerve did not fail her under the pressure of his gaze. Annabella’s improvement was unquestionable. Her husband applauded her for it. He drank a toast to it.

  She offered to play him. He refused, preferring to watch. She committed a number of shots and repeated her offer. He continued to refuse. She said she would beat him, that she had been practising steadily and was sure to beat him; she wanted to beat him. And it was, strangely, her insistence on that word that for the first time brought home to her how much she had suffered at his hands—for his lovelessness, as much as anything else. There was, almost, a relief in the repetition. She was joining in the fight and felt again that fine upright stalk of dignity quivering within her. He, however, coolly put her off with praise, until she became incensed and tried to provoke him in turn. ‘It was ungentlemanly to refuse; really, he had the manners of a sailor. Hobhouse would never dream of refusing.’ He sat at his ease with crossed legs, laughing, and admitted that he was only somewhat afraid of her. ‘You are terribly . . . provoking,’ she said, stamping her foot. ‘I will not be put off, I will not’—although in the end, she was. She could not help herself, she began laughing, too. Not quite, as it happens, at her husband’s high humour, but rather at her own absurd angry helpless attempts to make him love her, to argue him into love, by beating him at billiards. He might have guessed as much, for the consolation he offered in the end seemed out of proportion to the injury inflicted. ‘You married me to make me happy, did not you?’ he said at last, when he had kissed and caressed her into a more sombre pliable temper. She nodded and he continued: ‘Well, then, you do make me happy.’ And the recollection of that moment, as the coach bore them away from Halnaby, through acres of fields in snow, and woods hidden under it, and roads covered in it, was almost enough to make her smile.

  Chapter Six

  THEY HAD BEEN STOPPING AT SEAHAM until a house in London could be fitted up for them. Lord Byron had been for several weeks on his best public behaviour in front of Annabella’s parents—with one notable exception, which was just strange enough to be passed off as a joke and which, consequently, had hardly upset the genial illusion of their domestic harmony. (He had lifted, in the midst of a drunken parlour game, the wig from Lady Milbanke’s hair.) The cost, however, of this show of gentlemanliness had been, from the wife’s point of view, that he presented to her in private an utterly blank face—the reverse of the card, as it were. And she was honest enough to admit to herself a preference for this state of affairs, except on those evenings when, with scarcely a word spoken and a countenance of stone, he insisted on taking up, as he called it in the morning, his ‘conjugal subscription’.

  At last, through Lady Melbourne’s intervention, a house was arranged: a little large, perhaps, for the needs of their establishment, but pleasantly situated and with a view of Green Park. Lord Byron anxiously anticipated their return to London. His financial affairs remained considerably unsettled, and his business agent, Mr Hansen, was more inclined to consider his duty than to act upon it—he was not a man to be left to his own initiative. Besides, spring in London was not a season to be thoughtlessly missed. ‘Only think, Annabella: a London spring.’ The theatres like rivers were swelling; the fashions were blooming. Tom Moore and Hobhouse and Dougie Kinnaird were shooting ‘new leaves’. The tone he took persuading her to return, its hackneyed enthusiasm, reminded her with a sudden vividness of the airs he used to adopt in their courting days, when he played the gentleman for her. She marvelled now, with a kind of nostalgie, that she had ever mistaken the role for the man. And then he surprised her again by stepping out of it. He freely confessed that he had been at times an awkward sort of brute. The fact was, which he admitted in the teeth of his poetical proclamations, that he could never for very long endure the confinement of women. He preferred women in the company of men: they set them off to such advantage. Annabella, by this stage, was sufficiently patient or inured to abuse to draw a little consolation from the prospect of his reform—even if it came at the cost of being lumped together, in her husband’s view, with the generality of her sex.

  The only question remaining was whether, on their way to London, they should stop at his sister’s house at Six Mile Bottom for a week or two. She was determined to make Augusta’s acquaintance, or rather, to seal in common intercourse the friendship they had already pledged each other in correspondence. Lord Byron had deeply opposed the plan, and it struck Annabella as the first sign of her successful influence that she managed to override his opposition. Indeed, Augusta herself, as the prospect of their visit approached, appeared suddenly reluctant. Her husband had decided at the last minute to put off a shooting-party with some friends in Northumberland. He had just bought a horse from a stabler in Newmarket. It wanted breaking, and he didn’t trust anyone but himself to do it properly. Added to which, her aunt, Miss Sophia Byron, had proposed a visit, which had been promised for several months, and which she could not hospitably defer. In short, much as she regretted the fact, if Lord and Lady Byron chose to descend upon her now, Augusta would not ‘have a hole to put them in’.

  It struck Annabella as curious, the disinclination with which brother and sister (who, after all, made such a show of their affections for each other) treated the possibility of a reunion. She wrote to Augusta directly, accepting of course though not with
out a taint of suspicion ‘her sister’s word for the necessity of a postponement. Yet she bitterly regretted any delay that would prevent her from claiming, in person, a relation she had decided to cherish above all others—with the exception, of course, of the marriage-bond itself.’ This marked, in its way, her first hesitant insistence on her rights as Lord Byron’s wife, and she was puzzled, afterwards, by the taste of irony these modest phrases left on her tongue. Her own sincerity was never among the things she had been taught to question. What surprised her, really, was only the pleasure she managed to take from having, as it were, acquired another lens through which to regard herself.