A Quiet Adjustment (23 page)

There was something in his manner that suggested to Annabella a forced good humour. He was embarrassed, and she felt she could play her part no better than by putting him at his ease. She turned to face him, and he, more quietly, more sombrely, reminded her that she had offered to do what she could to please him; that she had placed herself entirely in his hands; that there was nothing they need stop short at. This was, as she saw it, the first test of her resolution to give herself to him in love. And she found the duty of answering her husband made easier by the fact that she perceived in him something of the same intent. Yes—it was her look that said it; yes.

They had no other need of explanation. Indeed, Byron's meaning was perfectly made plain by the act itself, and it occurred to her afterwards that there are things that can only be done
unsaid
. Her silence had the effect of veiling, even in her memories of that night, the extent to which she had been complicit. Annabella could not, of course, have agreed to what she could not imagine, but neither could she have refused the unimaginable. What that was struck her, when it became clear, as sufficiently unspeakable; and she could come no nearer to admitting to it, in her thoughts, than by supposing it to be the answer to a question she had just stopped short of asking Mr Eden. What, after all, she had wanted to say (she had got no further than imagining the laugh with which she might have said it), if the worst
were
true, could the effect of it be on herself, on the security of her own virtue? Surely
theirs
was not the kind of degradation one could oneself begin to suffer from. Well, as her husband slept beside her, resting on her as she had begged him to, Annabella had the leisure of sleeplessness to reflect on how wrong she had been. Wasn't that, in its way, just what she had suffered from? Wasn't she now just as degraded as they?

In the morning, however, the first flush of pain had receded, and she could more calmly attempt an answer to these questions. If she would no longer pride herself on being better than her husband, at least she was no worse. An equality of sins, she reasoned, as well as virtues, is what the harmony of a marriage depended on. There were freedoms to be got by stooping as well as rising, and wasn't the best she could hope for to learn to enjoy them? It is true, she was no longer confident of being able to present to her mother, for example, the strictest account. But the consequence was that she had already ceased to make it, in the constant unwritten confession that gave shape to her thoughts. Really, she was almost relieved, at what her husband had decided to call ‘the last breakfast', by the new internal stillness. She had been dutiful, she had been loving, but she had also been counting over her wrongs; it was the noise of the tally, perhaps, that had most oppressed her. She vowed, henceforth, to keep quiet—it was almost thrilling, to taste on her lips the power of her own resolution.

Augusta had permitted the children to breakfast
en
famille
. Byron, for once, had risen in time to join them. His reluctance to leave was palpable; it took, in fact, the form of Medora, whom he held on his lap and fed with a tenderness that Annabella publicly remarked on. ‘Yes, he spoils them all,' Augusta said. ‘It will do them good, I believe, to get used to their father again.'

‘Oh, they are used enough,' Byron said. When Medora began to cry, Augusta attempted to remove her from him. There was an awkward gentle sort of tussle. Byron clung on, and Augusta, with the first real sign of impatience, gave way at last—she was ready for them to go. Byron held Medora's soft head in his hands and covered it in kisses; the girl continued to cry. Hers seemed the voice of a larger, more general unhappiness, and the women were both relieved when the coachman arrived to signal the readiness of the horses.

Augusta saw them into the yard. It was a fine bright cold spring day. The sun was almost pale enough to look at and cast a vivid colourless light that picked out the beams of the house and threw fierce little shadows. Annabella was surprised to feel, in their parting embrace, a surge of sisterly feeling. ‘I wish you would not,' she said, smiling through tears, ‘leave me alone with him.'

‘If you should ever want me,' she said, ‘you've only to send. I'll come at once.'

There was, however, something in Augusta's answer, an earnestness, that struck in Annabella's ear the wrong note. It made of her own sweet words too significant an appeal. It quite brought the surge of feeling low, and the best she could do, to give a point to her displeasure, was only to say, ‘Oh, I'm sure you'll come more than that.'

She waited in the coach for Byron to take his leave. After a minute he entered, a little flushed, but calm enough. ‘Well, Pip,' he said, ‘what do you think of her?' She was spared, at least, the need of an answer. As the horses began to shoulder their burden, he leaned out the window and waved; she left to him the privilege of last looks. It occurred to her that if she had wanted a proof of his love, she need search no further than her own conscious feeling of complicity in the state of their several relations, in the sins of that house. They were involved, all three of them, in a struggle for something: was it absurd to imagine that something as Byron's love? She could almost, in the light of that thought, pity him—it wasn't a quantity, she supposed, one took pleasure in seeing divided and counted up. What a relief it was, after all, to get away from that place! She could only be sure they had passed out of sight when he turned back in.

Chapter One

THE CRYING OF THE GIRL
was the voice of those December weeks—a noise of complaint Annabella found particularly tiresome, given how painfully she had learnt to keep her own voice down. Augusta Ada cried and ate and slept; her mother did little else, only more quietly. After New Year, which she celebrated on her own, with a cold supper and a half-glass of hock, her first since the child was born, three bailiffs installed themselves in the house. Mr Torchard, a narrow, stoop-shouldered man with a rolling belly, was the only one who spoke to her. They always took to themselves the most comfortable chair, but he stood up from time to time to let her nurse in it. He had a newborn himself; it was a terrible intricate business, giving suck. He put his finger in the girl's mouth and watched her pull at it. For a moment, Annabella wistfully imagined that the child was among the articles of which he had come to dispossess her. Ada, she supposed, would never love her: she was Byron's daughter.

January sunshine peered briefly each day into the drawing room, which was reserved for her. It bled everything of colour and suggested, more generally, the light in which she saw her life: very cold, very clear. She was conscious, of course, of the changes a season could bring; conscious, also, as she put it to herself, of the force of internal seasons; and though the days, each day, grew a little longer, it was the equivalent within her that failed to lengthen and brighten. She had the wit, nevertheless, in writing to her parents to dress up in something like gaiety the worst of her fears. ‘Dear father!' she wrote, ‘you will hardly recognize me, I think. You know the pains I was used to taking over my complexion. Now, without the least care, I find myself beautifully bleached. Dear me, how pretty I look in that glass! I had heard of a mother's vanity but supposed its sum, entirely, made up of the precious child. I have discovered (it is a kind of relief, after my confinement) a sufficiency left over for my own use. Believe me, I use it.'

They planned to visit her parents at Kirkby and ‘parade the dauphine. B particularly wished, he said, to show it off to the “dear old man”—a phrase at which, my dear old man, I know you will be affronted.' She noticed only afterwards, as she read the letter over, that the girl had slipped neutered into her thoughts.
It
, she had written, and repeated the strange syllable under her breath, to drum it out of her: it it it. She remarked on it only as an error that required correction; in future, she would correct herself.

For some time, she had been communicating with her husband through notes, and it was through one of these that she learned his intentions had changed. The pressures of business must keep him in town. ‘When you are disposed to leave London, it would be convenient that a day should be fixed: if possible, not a very remote one. This damned money-business! You know, better than anyone, how it oppresses me. I hate the thought of it, and it leaves me no other thoughts. As Lady Noel has asked you to Kirkby, there you can be for the present—unless you prefer Seaham. The sooner you can fix on the day the better. The child of course will accompany you.' Her room had a desk pushed under the window. It overlooked, across the busy breadth of Piccadilly, the quiet of the park—which was in that dark winter (she sometimes kept up a flow of talk, using ‘the child' as an excuse) ‘rather white than Green'. Ada lay in her matted basket on the desk, staring at the mild pervading colourless January light. Annabella answered Lord Byron's note with a single line: ‘I shall obey your wishes and fix the earliest day that circumstances will admit for leaving London.'

In the absence of his affection, she depended utterly on Augusta's. Augusta had come to stay, both to ease the progress of her confinement and to distract Lord Byron during the necessary tedium of the lying-in. Her sister's presence had inspired in Annabella a feeling of helplessness which she gave way to almost consciously: conscious, that is, of conceding a point to her in the struggle for Byron's attention. But lovelessness had made her childish; childishness made her loving again. Goose was also her best source of news, of views into Byron's heart—to say nothing of the fact that Mrs Leigh had, many times over, suffered the pangs of motherhood and could relieve Annabella, from time to time, of the worst of them. Mr Torchard had sometimes the decency, amidst these ministrations, ‘to leave the room to the ladies'; he followed on delicate legs his full-sailed belly out the door. His absences, brief and rare as they were, often produced in the patter of their intercourse a sort of intimate hush. It gave them an air of secrets and confessions.

‘He has been violent; he has been cold,' Annabella said, indulging a little in the drama of her suffering, while Goose held Ada on her lap and squeezed the child's small feet and hands. ‘But he has never before treated me with such sustained indifference. I should prefer it almost that he abused me worse than he does the bailiffs, but to be regarded by him as an equal nuisance is more than I can bear.'

Augusta did not answer; she had bent her face to the girl's and blew hot air against it. Annabella continued: ‘He takes no more interest in the baby than he might in the bed she sleeps in, which is forfeit to creditors. There is nothing, one feels, the creditors might not claim. They have claimed this,' she touched her heart, ‘they have claimed
him
. You know that during my lying-in he sent me a note to say that my mother had died. My first thought on the birth of that child was the misery of being motherless myself; nothing but lies, thank God. And then he comes up to behold our daughter and says, as casual as you please, sweeping the cold air into the room with him, “The child was born dead, wasn't it?” I am becoming shrill; God help me, he has made me shrill. I used to have a subtler art of complaining. And the worst of it is, I look on that girl and think: she will never love me; she is a Byron. I will beat on her heart all my life, and she will never love me.'

‘I am a Byron,' Augusta said, giving way to tears herself, which she did very easily. ‘I love you.' These protestations, which drew the weeping women, bent over the child, still more closely together, required nevertheless a certain strength and clarity of voice. Lord Byron had made a habit of relieving his anxiety by tossing soda-bottles against the ceiling, a pastime he tended to engage in whenever he sensed the two sisters conspiring and felt his exclusion. He sensed it now; they could hear the bottles breaking below them. The sound they made was like the footstep of a giant ghost pushing his way blindly through the room. He was present, invisibly, and clumsily violently helpless. Already that winter, he had run through several cases in this manner. Under the noise of it, Augusta whispered into Annabella's ear, by way of apology: ‘You don't know what a fool I've been about him.' She drew her hair back from her forehead with both hands to look her unobstructed in the eye. It was the closest she came to confession, and there was, in the embattled intimacy of the two sisters, an ample sense of confederate thrill to have tempted her into it. But Annabella put her off by kissing her forehead and holding her hands over Augusta's ears—what she meant was, that
she
did not want to hear. She had never before felt so tender towards Augusta. The large swelling love of forgiveness rose within her. She had so much to forgive; it was a mode of feeling that always brought out in Annabella the proportionate heat of affection. She wanted to kiss her again—Gus looked sometimes very much like her brother. And then the child began to cry.

‘I shouldn't worry.' It was Augusta herself who introduced the humbler note. She lifted Ada over her shoulder, stood up and began to move about, swaying the skirts of her dress from side to side—an ostentation that suddenly irritated Annabella. ‘It often takes the father this way,' she continued. ‘Colonel Leigh, I remember, was so drunk with our first that he put her to sleep in the piano-stool. I don't like to think how long she had been crying before I found her. He was all contrition; it was the noise he couldn't bear.'

‘But you must have heard her at once.'

‘No,' Augusta was beginning to laugh. ‘He had been playing scales.' And then, more soberly: ‘They learn to love them. The best you can do is take them away at once, until they seek them out themselves.'

‘I fear myself. I fear that once I have removed with her to Kirkby, I shall lose the heart to return.' She added, in a lighter tone that struck both their ears as false, ‘I don't suppose my mother would permit it.'

Augusta had stopped swaying, though the girl continued to scream. ‘It is impossible to think,' she said, ‘in all this noise,' but the noise continued, and for a minute the two women distractedly, thoughtlessly listened to it. The January light fell into the room as softly as dust; it seemed to gather, settling, upon them. How easy it seemed, just then, to imagine a long life, spent in similar duties and maintained at just that pitch of tolerated suffering.

‘Would he follow me there?' Annabella said.

There was in the look she gave Augusta a kind of appeal; and she wondered, afterwards, whether this was precisely the corner into which Byron's sister had hoped from the first to push her. ‘I asked him myself, this morning, whether he had any thought of going to Kirkby. He said, Not at all, if he could help it. And then he talked all sorts of strange things, fell on me as usual, abused the colonel and the children, which you have heard before. But he mentioned quite coolly his intention—of going into lodgings by himself.'

‘I see your significant eye. I know perfectly well what you mean by it: that I should make good while I can my escape. Is that not it? That I should leave him to you?'

Augusta at this made no sort of innocent protest, but still drew up short of agreeing. ‘I have never known him so black and gloomy.' She shifted the child from one shoulder to the other. There were times, and this was one of them, when Annabella could only wonder, for all Goose's softness and sweetness, at her simple good sense and general competence—at just those qualities, in fact, she was conscious of lacking herself. ‘You mustn't suppose that I spare him,' Augusta continued. ‘He has behaved very badly and cruelly but does not love himself the better for it. He is full of false love; it is a kind of indigestion with him. When he is very unhappy, he gives off tremendous boasts.' She laughed. ‘I said to him, whatever you have suffered is nothing compared to what Lady Byron has suffered, and at your hands, too. But he's reached such a pitch of vanity that he can think only of himself. It seems to him intolerable to be living, as he is, as you are, together, in this house, among the bailiffs and the—he could never bear the crying of children. He is too soft-hearted for it. One of the things he said was that he considered himself “the greatest man existing”. I tried to tease him into a more sensible humour; you know how quick I am to laugh him out of his horrors. “Excepting Bonaparte,” I said. But he only answered, after a moment, “By God, I don't know that I do except even him.” There was a wildness in his eye. He seemed capable of any violence against anything—' but at this Mr Torchard returned, bearing on an unsteady saucer a cup of tea. ‘Ladies,' he said, sitting down; and Augusta was forced to whisper, ‘I should not like to answer for him. Indeed, I could not . . .'

On the eve of her departure, he came down to bid her goodbye; he looked greatly altered. She had come to believe that his proud shy careless dishevelment was the product of strict regulation—of that ‘art of the self' in which he was so conspicuous a master. But his margins, she felt, for once had been overstepped; he was a page scribbled over. His face had fattened. The whites of his eyes were red and suggested, by the fine web of veins running through them, a fracturing gaze. He limped into the room and stood in front of the fire with his back towards her. ‘I believe we both feel the cold somewhat?' he said. Annabella, ever since her brusque reply, had been fretting over the note. She was sensitive to the fact that she always took her tone from him and had vowed, henceforth, to seek out her own natural voice—to be loving, that is, even when he was indifferent; or angry, when he was quiet; or contented, when he was miserable. But it was no longer clear to her what her natural voice might be, that is, what it might say. What she said was, ‘Would you like for a minute to hold the child? I am tired of it.' And then: ‘If nothing else, she will keep you warm.'

He turned and looked down at his daughter. Her little lips frowned under the weight of her cheeks. She was sleeping; her high pink square of forehead wrinkled in her sleep. ‘I wonder where it was begotten,' he said. ‘If it was at Newmarket, no wonder it should be like Augusta.' And then, after a pause, with a touch of that unfeigned curiosity regarding himself which distinguished his happier moments: ‘Do you know, I have never held her in my arms?'

‘Would you like to now?'

‘No, no,' he said, ‘I shouldn't dream of separating a mother from her daughter.'