A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  He stopped there and read silently for a minute. Augusta tried to take the letter from his hands. The petulance with which he resisted her proved, if nothing else, that his good humour had soured. Pushing her away, he upset the glass of sherry on the rug and threw it, empty, into the fire. The sound of its breaking startled Annabella, for the first time, from the stillness of horror. Augusta, with tears in her eyes, sat down with her back to her brother. He picked up another letter and began to read. ‘My dear brother, I never supposed it possible, but I heard this morning that you are going to be married. A great parti, Hobhouse informed me (was it you who sent him?) with a gentleness which suggested that he guessed the probable effect of his news. Her uncle is said to be very rich. I am glad of it, for your sake—and for mine, too, and managed in the face of your friend’s curiosity to appear happy, with such success that the appearance of it survived, by several hours, any necessity for keeping it up. Though when the mask slipped off at last, I seemed to have no face at all beneath it and was almost surprised, indeed, when little George and Augusta Charlotte, waking from their sleep, recognized their mother and ran into her lap.’ Byron put down the letter and picked up another. ‘Do you know, Gus, I have some doubts whether this marriage will come off. The father’s estates, it seems, have been dipped by electioneering. Part of the remainder is settled on Annabella, though whether that will be dowered now, I do not know. There is an uncle in the case, who is, happily, both rich and childless, and dotes on his niece; but his health is uncertain. He is a widower and may live to an hundred, and, in short, it isn’t only a question of money. The bride, I believe, has her doubts (she is reckoned very virtuous and makes herself loving only by a great violence of will); and these may be played upon in such a way that the public burden of disappointment, such as it is, would fall to the groom. And—send me only a word, Gus. A word from you is all I need. Have you ever known such happiness as our quiet little escapes from other people? at Newstead? and Bennet Street, and once, on the road between Cambridge and Newmarket, on the floor of a post-chaise?’

  Byron stopped and looked at his wife and, keeping his eyes upon her, said, ‘Well, Gus, I am a reformed man, ain’t I?’

  Annabella never forgot the silence that followed. She felt herself to be suspended in it, and trusted to her natural diffidence or air of reserve only to discover that it had taken on a kind of public quality: to say nothing seemed really the most explicit language of acknowledgement. It was up to Augusta, in the end, to break the spell. ‘I believe I have noticed some improvement,’ she offered at last.

  Worse was to come. (Later that night, for the first time, she began to set down for the benefit of lawyers her impression of Lord Byron’s behaviour during their stay at Six Mile Bottom.) At ten o’clock, as was his wont, he ordered his wife to kiss him goodnight and retire; but the action (Annabella had learned dutifully to comply and was almost relieved, by this time, to make good her escape) put an idea into his head. Augusta was sitting beside him on the sofa, and he bade her kiss him, too, so that he could compare ‘at first hand’ the difference in effect between a sister’s and a wife’s embrace. He seemed in dangerously high spirits, hot-tempered and strangely loving. He had worked himself to such a pitch of good humour that he would brook no resistance against the demands of his affection. On such nights, Annabella had learned to expect, whenever he came up to bed, the consolation of being asked, with that tender grace of which he was always capable, to live up to her uxorial duties.

  There was something so impossibly brazen in his experiment that a kind of disbelief carried the sisters through it. Lord Byron had pulled Annabella against his lap, where she remained; and he took it in turns, kissing her, with an almost comic exaggeration of conjugal passion (to which she was far from indifferent), and his sister, who sat beside him. In fact, the weight of Annabella against his leg was involved in his every movement, and she could not prevent herself, as he addressed Augusta, from leaning awkwardly against her sister and becoming entangled. ‘A kiss for you,’ he repeated, ‘and a kiss for you; a kiss for you, and a kiss for you,’ in a babyish manner that reminded Annabella of nothing so much as the cooing clucking language with which Augusta comforted her children.

  They could do nothing but comply, patiently, and endure, miserably—that was the part to which Annabella usually resigned herself. There seemed no clearer proof of her husband’s unhappiness than the lengths to which he went to inflict it upon them. What surprised her, as she tasted in his kiss something of the warmth off Augusta’s skin, was the infection of Lord Byron’s high spirits. Someone began to giggle. She heard a tremor in her own voice and found herself, against her will, playing up to the role he had assigned her. Closing her eyes, she kissed him and waited and kissed him again. What she had shut them against was the eye of conscience: this, she imagined, is what it’s like to go unobserved. For a minute, Annabella struggled to keep down, within her, a tide of feeling. Her feet, as it were, had slipped, but something had caught her up; she supposed it to be nothing less than a kind of communion. Loneliness, she had always believed, lay at the root of suffering. She was living, at least, in the heart of things now and could hardly complain of the fact that it involved her in certain complications. Hedged about with duties and virtues, as she generally was, she sensed the relief of rising clear of them. She felt his face against hers and took it in her hands and kissed it and let him go and waited again.

  Then the minute passed, and a different sense of her situation began to overwhelm her. Augusta, she believed, had permitted herself in the context of the game the fullest expression of sisterly love, and the first chord struck of the dissonance in which the scene broke up was the note of rivalry aroused in her breast by the sound of her breathing. Her husband’s state of excitement was undeniable. Annabella had slipped between his legs and was forced to stoop under his arms as he reached towards his sister. Their laughter had become hysterical; and Lord Byron, it seemed, satisfied with the results of his experiment, had been acting for some time on the preference it established. In any case, Annabella’s patience for waiting her turn had come to an end.

  She opened her eyes at last, but what she saw had little to do with what she had heard. ‘Gussie’ (Byron repeatedly invoked her pet name) was sobbing, and the deep breath of her passion was brought on only by tears. Her brother had been attempting to quiet her, and the real measure of Annabella’s unhappy position was her exclusion not from the pleasures of a game but from its miseries: she had been kept out of their consolations. Annabella could not move until Byron let go of his sister, which he refused to do until Gussie had contained herself. So she was obliged to wait until her sister’s sharper sense of the horror of their violation had subsided, characteristically, into a breathless little laugh. ‘Oh my dears,’ Augusta said, drying her eyes with her palms. ‘I had not guessed how much I needed a good weep.’ Then she added (it was impossible to say, how subtly or simply), ‘I felt very strongly being absent at your wedding. Think of these only as wedding-tears.’ Annabella, with great difficulty, managed to keep back her own as the blood rushed to her cheeks. (What kind of a fool do you think I am? she thought.) Rising, with the dignity of awkwardness, she bade the pair of them goodnight, as she had been ordered to do, and left them together on the sofa.

  Later, in the mirror on her dressing table, Annabella stared for half a minute at the puffed red face staring back and refused to pity her: what she required now was the great impersonal clarity of justice. Then she took up her diary. For an hour she wrote down, as carefully as she could, an account of the evening’s entertainment—from an ‘impartial’ view, in a manner she supposed appropriate to an affidavit. ‘Confirmation forced on her by documents and testimony of her having been a dupe and a victim. A feeling on her part of immeasurable horror . . .’ She described Lord Byron’s behaviour, the state of mind and character it suggested, and what she had suffered at his hands. She touched also on Augusta’s collusion and t
he suspicions aroused by it, snuffing her candle at last, with a flurry of anger, to act on a sudden determination. The murmurs of brother and sister in the drawing room below her had died out; the silence itself, as sharply as a bell, brought her attention to the fact. Inspired by the promise of the law, she rose from her chair and opened the door to her bedroom. Documents, testaments and feelings were all very fine, but nothing, it struck her, might serve her so well in the future as the proof of her eyes.

  As she tiptoed downstairs, the quiet of the house seemed to cast, as brightly as any lamp, a large flickering shadow of sound at her every step. Something about the role she was playing coloured her sense of righteous injury—it began to look like fear; it began to look like guilt. Her courage, she was almost relieved to discover, was equal to both, to the fear and the guilt, as she crouched at the door of the drawing room and put her eye to the keyhole. She had not stopped to ask herself, amidst the thrills of her impromptu mission, what she was hoping to see. What she saw, however, touched in her a very different faculty than hope. Lord Byron, she could just make him out by the legs of the sofa, sat huddled on the floor with his head thrown back. He was weeping, quite noiselessly, and what most appalled her were the childish little convulsions of his frame: he seemed almost patiently inconsolable; he had a great deal of grief to get through. Augusta had his head in her lap, but all she could see of her sister were the hands in Lord Byron’s hair. These, indeed, rested tenderly against him, though Annabella could not help but perceive, in their quiet and comforting pressure, the force that had put him in his place. Annabella suffered most, to her great surprise, from the sense of her own intrusion—it made itself felt, if nowhere else, in the discomfort of her knees. She had witnessed, she had no doubt, a proof of something, but she was willing to admit, as she made her way chastened back up to bed, that whatever it was might not in the end help her case.

  Chapter Nine

  IN THE MORNING, OVER BREAKFAST, Annabella asked her sister for a favour. She had been wanting to go to church. She particularly wished to hear a certain clergyman who preached at Sutton, but the journey, of course, was too great for her to undertake it on foot, and she was perfectly aware that the Leighs had not at their disposal a gig or barouche for the convenience of a guest (Annabella laughed) who wished to go twenty miles out of her way to be a little nearer to God. Even so, she had a great desire to go to Sutton. It was a point on which she could give no explanation beyond a simple repetition of the fact. It was out of the way; she wished to go. And she wondered whether Augusta might not solicit from a kindly neighbour the use of a conveyance. She could only assure her sister that she would not request it without the strictest regard for necessity. It had become, for reasons Augusta could, perhaps, appreciate, essential for her to purge her mind of certain—doubts or suspicions; and she needed, she believed, the comfort of a familiar face to inspire in her the confidence to make the completest expiation. There (another laugh), she had, after all, explained herself! It remained for her only to add that she would be doubly grateful to Augusta if, when Lord Byron came down, she could inform him merely that his wife had gone to church and was expected to spend the day in prayer.

  Augusta nodded, demurely. She perfectly understood. Within the hour, a stately high-backed barouche, fitted to a pair of geldings from the stables of their neighbours, the Bassets, was waiting outside their door. Annabella was to consider it perfectly at her disposal. Colonel Leigh had much obliged Mr Basset in the past by advising him on the purchase of horses; it seemed the least he (Mr Basset) could do was to offer them to Mrs Leigh’s sister-in-law. Annabella, meanwhile, had dressed for church and wore a smart new tamboured dress and the curricle jacket she had been married in. She thanked Augusta and kissed her goodbye. Gus said, ‘I thought you should be lonely here for familiar faces. I’m afraid my brother and I are wretched company. It is the worst of family relations that, for the sake of them, one never puts on the least effect of manner or charm. I am sure you must find us very dull. A drive will do you no end of good.’

  Annabella called her answer from the window, with an air of sweetness: ‘It will be a relief to you to spend a quiet civil day with your brother, as you have been used to doing. Goodbye.’

  The barouche pulled out of the yard and entered swiftly the open country surrounding Six Mile Bottom. As the house disappeared behind a hedgerow, Annabella felt a great weight lifted and was somewhat astonished by what emerged beneath it. The perfect calm she had kept up all morning (without, it seemed to her, the least unnatural effort) dissolved at once, and she hugged herself and shook from side to side, grateful to the clatter of the horses for permitting her, as she afterwards put it to herself, a little clatter of her own. The motion of the gig, in time, absorbed the rhythm of her sobs; and she passed from one to the other with the gentleness of imperceptible degrees. A line came into her head (addressed to whom, she knew not) that might safely serve to describe her stay: ‘What I suffered at Colonel Leigh’s house was unimaginable.’ There was solace in the thought of a future that would allow her to speak so clearly of such a present. The day was brisk, with sudden alternations. The large hand of the wind bent back, and released, the stalks of the trees edging the farmers’ fields, and flattened, and uplifted, the meadows of grass between them. Rain fell amidst bursts of sunshine, and the clouds at times took on a luminous darkness. She stared out the window of the barouche while the hour sped by.

  Out of these prospects emerged the sense that she would have to face up to things squarely—that she had not been facing up to them. She was not yet willing to convict her husband of a total failure of love, but the evidence of a partial failure was so plentiful that she hardly needed to go over the particulars. There were times when, it pained her to admit it, her presence occasioned in him the acutest distress. A corner in her character rubbed awkwardly against a corner in his. They were both a little raw with the rubbing, although Annabella was sufficiently in love to wish to remove from her nature anything that protruded uncomfortably into his own. That, at least, is what she told herself, though she recognized even then that the little brute fact of her incompatibility might not be extracted from her (the image of herself she had in mind, for this purpose, was of a plain, pleasant, weathered wall of brick) without a general tumbling down. What she would suffer in that tumbling down she dared not think. Her suffering, she supposed, had already been ample enough—enough for what, however, was just the question that she had, for the past few weeks, been putting off.

  What puzzled her still was the extent of Augusta’s complicity. Her kindness had been so constant and particular, it was difficult not to trace in it the effect of guilt. Annabella was mindful, however, of reading into her sister’s behaviour only the motives in her own conscience that might produce such behaviour in herself. In fact, Gus’s open show of misery at her brother’s treatment appeared to be the most natural expression of a clear heart. By contrast, her own awkward attempt at dignity—the way she stood on it, as it were, and attempted to make off with it—seemed evidence of duplicity. Surely, if the worst were true, Gus would never have indulged her brother in such a kissing-contest. If the worst continued to be true. (Wasn’t that, after all, the question that counted?) And what could be sweeter in a sister than her little confession of attachment? ‘Think of these only as wedding-tears.’ The phrase, unhappily, called to mind Lord Byron’s own: his wedding shoes, the wedding breakfast, the wedding sneeze, his wedding chill. No, Augusta herself was not what worried her most. It was only what might be inferred from her behaviour, about her brother’s, that mattered—a reflection that brought home to Annabella for the first time how much she was willing to accept. Her powers of forgiveness seemed to her extraordinary: there was nothing in their past she need stop short at. Nothing, not the darkest stain of sin, would appal her, so long as she could persuade herself of his determination to reform, which she depended on as a proof not so much of his compunction as of his love.

&nb
sp; It occurred to her, with a burst of simplicity, that the question she must put to herself was only this: how little of that could she live on? She was reminded suddenly of the lecture at which, for the second time, she had diverted herself by staring at Lord Byron (or rather, at the back of his head). Mr Campbell had spoken of ‘the Sinking Fund of the Imagination on which a poet could rely as he grew older’, and she had afterwards complained to her mother that the noble art had been reduced to nothing more romantic than the task of making mayonnaise. ‘It was only a question of the quantity that could be got out of the smallest expenditure of eggs.’ Annabella had become used (she was relieved at being able to give the problem so comical an aspect) to getting by on very little indeed. She congratulated herself, without any false pride, on the fact that such economies depended on just those virtues which she had always striven to cultivate. She did need, however, a little love, after all. By the time she arrived at the church, she was even equal to a smile: she needed at least one egg.

  The coachman left her at the broken steps of the cemetery; he promised to wait for her afterwards in the drive leading up to the poor-houses. Annabella, whose tranquillity was always improved by the necessity of keeping up a public face, thanked him and made her way on the dry gravelled path that ran between the gravestones. The air was cooler in the porch of the church, and she sat down for a minute on one of the stone benches that lined the walls. His voice emerged from the rumble of noises that escaped to her through the half-opened door. Mr Eden was preaching his sermon, and the sound of it awoke in her such a sense of familiarity that she smiled at the idea of having heard his sermons before. It struck her that she might really have been sitting within, on a quiet Sunday morning in Sutton, had she accepted his proposal; and she imagined, waiting for her, a Mrs George Eden, who would turn towards her with a composed, superior, unafflicted look and welcome her in. The thought fell across her like a shadow; she quickly rose and stepped inside.