A Quiet Adjustment (14 page)

Leaving the servants to manage their boxes, Annabella followed Lord Byron inside. Lord Wentworth, her uncle, had been regarded in their family circle with as much awe as pride. He was Judy's brother and incalculably richer than Sir Ralph; Annabella, in fact, had only once in her childhood been to visit Halnaby Hall. This was in the first flush of favour that attended Sir Ralph's election to the House. The invitation itself, greatly cherished, had seemed to usher in a new stage in the Milbankes' fortunes: such was the hospitality it entitled them to. But as her father's amiable helplessness began to declare itself in the bumbling of his career, no second invitation came. Lord Wentworth contented himself with keeping up their relations at a respectable distance. It seemed to Annabella by no means unlikely that only her marriage to so great a figure as Lord Byron had persuaded her uncle to offer them the use of Halnaby for a honeymoon. She bore him little gratitude. Annabella, as a girl, had been amazed and strangely hurt by Judy's deference to the abrupt old man; it was very unlike her mother. Judy, however, had always regarded her brother as a model of virtue and rough gentlemanly common sense. It was by the contrast to him that Sir Ralph had occasionally suffered in their otherwise loving marriage.

Annabella had turned eight years old in the course of that stay and was given a very grand, very miserable birthday party to celebrate the fact. Lord Wentworth, who was childless, invited his county friends, and Judy insisted that Annabella thank him publicly for his kindness. At the end of her party, for which she had been too nervous to eat more than a piece of her birthday cake, Sir Ralph, painfully complicit, lifted Annabella underneath her arms and stood her on the piano stool to deliver her thanks—which she did, as Judy afterwards commended her, a little quietly but very prettily, to her mother's great satisfaction and pride. By supper-time, however, the small girl was running a fever, and Annabella spent much of the night being sick and the last two days of their visit in bed. Feeling again childish with the memory, Annabella thought of that cake, which was made of almond paste and decorated with currants, as she began to explore the house in search of her husband.

Lord Wentworth had classical tastes and an appetite for grandeur. The stairs in the hall were overlooked by a high-hung portrait of Sir Thomas More, in rich and gloomy reds, by van Dreisdale; there was a bust of Aristedes on the landing. It was a puzzle indeed, a lesson in the effects of time, for Annabella to consider them again from her larger view. There was something too insistent in the appointments. More modesty would have conveyed a more satisfied ambition. Her family, on every side—she had only begun to suspect it, after her contact with Lord Byron and the circles in which he moved—was guilty of puffing itself up. She knew now, or could guess, what real fame, what real influence, looked like. Only a wide view by Canaletto of the Grand Canal in Venice offered her any pleasure: it showed a fine cold day in early spring or late autumn (there were no trees to judge by). A gust of sea-wind had sketched a little uncertainty, a little urgency, into the man-made channels. One could feel a heavily bearded, bow-legged gondolier just allowing himself to sway with it, keeping his feet by giving way. It hung over the doorway to the drawing room, in which she found Lord Byron, resting his foot on one of the sofa-cushions. He rose this time quickly to greet her and shut the door behind her, and all her old childishness, the sense of it, returned.

After he was through with her, she sat for a minute recomposing herself on the sofa. He had gone upstairs to change. Little had been said between them: she took this as an indication of preference and was very quick, in these matters, to guess at his tastes. The greed in his face (that was the word she had decided to keep to) left her no room for doubting his—sincerity; and in fact, a dim sense of her own expressions, of pleasure and pain, suggested at least that sincerity of a kind had not been lacking in her. Something had been done away with, a veil had been torn aside, of fine-feeling or hypocrisy, she could not yet be sure; and for a moment, as she sat there shivering, not quite giving way to sobs, if only because of the close heat of the well-laid fire, she was conscious of being for the first time (and she could put it no clearer than this) unadorned. Her sense of it proved how ‘dressed up' she was accustomed to being—discomfort, not painless, remained from her undressing. She hugged her corseted stomach with crossed arms. ‘Have you been only pretending to love me?' she remembered asking her husband. There was, if nowhere else, in Lord Byron's clear appetite something for her to be sure of; and from a depth of loneliness of which she had never supposed herself capable,
that
at least struck her as something to cling to.

Chapter Three

FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE,
whenever it snowed, Annabella thought of Halnaby, of her honeymoon there. It snowed every day. The effect was relentless, a steady covering-up. They could hear it against the windowpanes in gusts of wind, as if it were trying to get in: a soft scratch like a dog's paw on the glass. She imagined, each morning, taking pity on it, letting it in—and saw herself sleepily disappearing, only the shape of her features remaining, marbled by snow. Sometimes, after lunch, she used to step outside just to feel it against her face, that quiet release in the air. The whiteness of Lord Wentworth's grounds expressed in the simplest way the unmaking of her world. The trees and the roads and the grass were gone. What was left was only a very large house, a few servants, and the two of them.

At dinner on their first night, Lord Byron finished the bottle of wine set between them and called for another, which Payne brought. Byron glanced at it and said, ‘I think we can do better,' and persuaded Payne to lead him into the wine-cellars. He had a way with servants when it suited him; and when it didn't, they quickly learned to forgive his ill-temper. It was one of the first things Annabella knew to be grateful for. With all her best politeness, she was conscious of the little resentments her manner aroused. Her husband seemed to charm by giving open offence. Payne and Lord Byron were gone for some time. Annabella, alone again, quietly ate—a dish of salted pork and mashed turnip. She heard them laughing together as they came up the stairs and felt, briefly, a pinch of envy. They emerged both with a bottle in each hand. Annabella, with an anxious tender voice, wondered aloud whether her uncle had intended to give them the run of his cellar? She could not help herself and disliked her own manner. Anxiety gave her tone the edge of correction. Byron, with a free, easy air of injury, presumed they had something to celebrate: Lord Wentworth, he said, appealing to Payne, would not stint them. Besides, he had no intention of spending the honeymoon
dry
. By the time he began to consider his bed, he had drunk two of the bottles and opened the third. Annabella, meanwhile, contented herself with a glassful. She anticipated, in a confusion of fear and longing, a repetition of their performance on the drawing-room sofa.

In the end, on rising, Lord Byron asked her, ‘Do you mean to sleep in the same bed with me? I hate sleeping with any woman—but you may do as you please.' The remark, no doubt, was intended to achieve a distance. It had, he could see, its effect: Annabella felt in herself the stiff little stalk of her dignity quivering upright. ‘Shall we say then,' she answered, ‘that I'm at your disposal?' At which, by that perversion of pride and sympathies which marked his character, he attempted to make up some of the ground. He hardly imagined her, he said, accustomed to sharing a bed with a man. ‘Perhaps she had had enough surprises.' Their journey had been fatiguing, and Annabella had seen, he supposed, as much of him as she cared to.

Annabella was shocked to find how quickly her dignity drooped; it needed only a touch of gentleness. In a childish voice, she said that she would not like to spend the night alone. The house frightened her; she felt very far from home. It was a long time since she had stayed at Halnaby. She had been very small before, and unhappy. And—she would not know what to
think
to herself, alone.

He looked at her and then at the bottles on the table. ‘Well, I am not quite yet savagely drunk,' he said. ‘As you wish.'

They undressed separately and retired at last in the light of the heaped-up fire; it cast a red glow through the curtains of their bed. ‘I suppose we are not in hell?' he said to her, as they lay side by side. ‘Not in hell,' she repeated, and then more firmly, ‘I have never known such happiness.' It was an assertion, not of fact, but intention. She was conscious, already, of wanting his grace, his power of charming a sentiment into truth, but she wished to make clear to him what it was she offered: the strength of purpose, of application, of consistency that he lacked. Love itself, she seemed to be saying, lay within the scope of her will. A monument of love—that was what she had determined to build out of their marriage.

She awoke at false dawn to find him sitting up in bed, the moonlight brightly reflecting in the snow and falling redoubled into the room. They had forgotten in their embarrassment of the night before to draw the window-curtains. For a moment, she imagined her father had come to sit with her, in her fever; had fallen asleep beside her, and woken up. Then—‘My love, my love,' she said, reaching out to touch his back. He turned to look at her, staring, it seemed, without recognition. She scratched at his nightshirt, as he pushed aside the draperies and stepped out of bed. Annabella was too sleepy to follow, but for the next hour, drifting in and out of dreams, she heard him: pacing the halls, coming sometimes nearer, and receding again. A watchful, warning presence. And then, turning over in her sleep, she knocked against him and allowed her arm to fall across his face. He didn't wake, but at least he had come back. Later, she found him lying in the crook of her arm; the skin of her neck was wet, from his mouth or his tears. She guessed, for the first time, that he was unhappy and muttered every kind of endearment, stroking the hair out of his eyes and tucking it behind his ears. Grateful, at least, for the power of comforting that comforts the consoler. In the end, though, he couldn't be woken, and she rose up without him and went down to breakfast alone.

Afterwards, she could scarcely recall how they passed their days. There was of course, as her husband put it,
that there sort of thing
. The language she had despaired of knowing grew of its own into a system of phrases and looks that veiled, in flimsiest decency, what they otherwise might have been too embarrassed to admit to. Greed was her private word for it, but it became, between them, a kind of public face to their desires. ‘Are you greedy?' he might say to her. And she: ‘I am a fat greedy child.' His confidence that they would find names for each other in time was justified by the event. Pip he began to call her, for her pippin-apple face, her bright round cheeks. An endearment, once offered, which she clung to; it stuck from her own insistence. ‘Should you like Pip to read to you? Shall Pip sit on your lap?' And sometimes: ‘Pip is happy, her husband pleases Pip.' Was there nothing, Pip wondered, she could call
him
? Goose, he remarked, with one of his characteristic airs, between tenderness and irony, was the name he reserved for his sister. ‘Well, then,' she said, not to be outdone, ‘I shall call you Duck.' Once, when he had tired of her, he said, ‘Pip mustn't be greedy.' And the shame she felt in asking, after all, only to please him made her burn and retreat, until he coaxed her into something like loving-kindness again. Though it wasn't, quite, only to please him, she must acknowledge to herself. Her appetites were not unsensual, and she discovered to her great surprise that her own strict regulation of character had masked a nature only too willing to indulge itself. At the very least, she grew dependent on her right to give him pleasure. Between coaxing and retreating, on both sides, they pushed the hours along.

Her image of her husband was rather sketched than painted in full, the outline on a frontispiece; and she considered it, among other things, the task of her honeymoon to fill in and complete the picture. That Lord Byron was not in the steadiest of spirits she could not hide from herself. Her own changeable temper, she must own, was only the reflection of his; she was the sea that imaged forth his clouds and might have been serenely happy had he been clear and calm. ‘And yet, perhaps,' she philosophized, ‘she had been guilty, in her old life, of too much consistency. She should not complain then that her struggle to overcome it involved her in contradictions.' Contradiction, clearly, is what she
was
involved in. Her husband's manners, when he wished them to be, were so easy that one imagined an easy man. She found to her cost that he was not. Annabella saw that he was unhappy and guessed that it had nothing to do with her. She was generous enough not to mind that—at least, to tell herself she did not mind it yet. The duty of her marriage, in this light, was simple: to make of his state of mind her own affair.

Once, at breakfast, he received a letter that put him very much out of humour. She asked him: ‘Who it came from and what it said? She was his wife: their troubles were shared.' And he began to recite, in a bored hurry, the particulars of his, he begged her pardon, their various debts, which amounted to nothing short of thirty thousand pounds. Six thousand charged on his home at Newstead to a Mr Sawbridge. Another thousand in his mother's name—a Jew debt, by the bye, of which the interest must be greater than the principle. Then another Jew debt, six hundred in principal, and no interest (as he had kept that down) to a man in New Street. He had forgotten his name, but it should be known to him on half year's day. There were others, too many to count over, which he had collected (this was his word for it) before his majority. They had been negotiated by his landlady at the time, a Mrs Massingberd, whose daughter he had once paid off with somewhat less expense. Various debts to tradesmen of various descriptions, some of them transcendently usurious. Meanwhile, against these, he had collected his own share of the
uncollectable
. There was Hodgson, a clergyman, who owed him sixteen hundred pounds, and his friend Webster, to whom he had lent a thousand. Nearly three thousand to his sister Goose, from whom he had the letter in hand, which stated what he had already supposed: that her husband was in no position to honour it, having gambled recklessly at Newmarket. In any case, he never wished to see that sum again, but there were others he shouldn't mind having repaid. Webster's bond was worth a damn or two, though he never wanted, nor asked, any security of Hodgson. Although, as for that, he had lent him an additional two hundred at Hastings last summer, which Hodgson had promised to repay punctually in six weeks, and which he had repaid with the usual punctuality, that is, not at all. Lord Byron was generally supposed rich. It always amazed him. His money was eaten away by interest, and the rest had been swallowed up by duns, necessities, luxuries, fooleries, jewelleries, whores and fiddlers. His marriage settlement, or rather, he begged her pardon again, theirs, was totally inadequate to meeting these expenses, and as for what is politely called expectations, Sir Ralph and Lord Wentworth seemed to grow healthier every day, and he verily believed they were at this moment cutting a fresh set of teeth.

At this point he ran out of breath. Annabella had only been staring at him, growing closer to tears, until Lord Byron abruptly excused himself and left the table. For a minute she gazed at his empty chair, before she noticed the letter still lying on his plate amidst half-eaten fruits and the rind of a cheese—he had forgotten to take it up. She watched it for a minute, as if to see what it might permit. How quickly, she was honest enough to concede, the threat of tears vanished without the pressure of his presence! Her honesty, she found, had been set a more difficult test: the duties of a wife might be variously construed. Perhaps, after all, he had intended for her to read the letter; and to stand on a dignity that he did not believe she possessed would not allow her to fulfil, in the largest sense, her obligations. This supposition supported her, for a time, which was just long enough to enable Annabella to rise and walk to his seat.

The letter was indeed from Augusta and addressed
Dearest and gentlest and best of human beings
, a line whose insistent rhythm reminded Annabella of the morning-waltz at Melbourne House almost three years before. She had seen
her
then, her husband's sister, standing in her husband's arms. One had the sense, looking on them, of a kind of feeding; one felt the flow of nourishment between them, and one's own exclusion from it. Of course, they had been dancing together: naturally, they appeared a little entangled. Still, there was something for her to strive towards in that image of their affections . . .

Meanwhile, she had begun to read, and her train of thought was interrupted by the attention increasingly claimed by the ramblings of the letter to hand. Augusta, as it happens, had little to say on the score of her husband's debts:

Of course you did quite right to go about everything quietly, and John has sent me a very loving picture of what you looked like, and what everybody looked like. Miss Milbanke (whom I long to call sister) was said to be very prettily and properly got up in muslin, with a simple curricle jacket—you see, I have quite insisted on hearing everything, and John complains of all the niceties I required of him, which made him feel like a Mrs. somebody in a play, I can't remember which: you know, a terrible gossip. Mrs. Milbanke, he says (do you call her mother?), was drunk throughout: can it be true? I have heard she is such a formidable respectable lady. He thinks and I agree with him that you have done very well with Miss Milbanke, though it's a great pity that Miss Elphinstone took fright, whom I very much hoped would suit you, because I know her and love her better. You aren't so very frightful, I told her myself, and perfectly manageable to anyone who wishes to attempt it. The least kindness will govern you, or so I have always found, and you have never had the heart to contradict me! But you did very right, I was saying, to proceed so quietly, and I was only sorry George was here when you stayed at Christmas. The worst of his debts to you is that they confined him to home. You should have liked a sisterly farewell, which he made quite impossible.