A Quiet Adjustment (25 page)

This, with several digressions, was the story Annabella heard in the course of a housebound week. The London rain had followed them north, where it turned to snow. It fell in a clatter from the roof and piled up outside the sitting-room windows, which were fogged and wet to the touch, in drifts as high as the lintels. The room (she gave Sir Ralph her opinion) was simply too large for the fire to heat it—the truth of which was vividly illustrated one morning when the maid had to stand on a chair to sweep cobwebs from the ceiling with her broom. Judy had decided to take the house in hand again and presided, from the comfort of her convalescence, over a fever of activity, which drove her husband to the dusty quiet of his study. In fact, he was glad to be relieved, for once, of the duty of keeping Lady Milbanke cheerful, on which Doctor Kendall had particularly insisted. When Ada cried, Mrs Clermont brought her in to feed. (Her present trouble, Judy confided, began when she was encouraged to drink porter while nursing.) Otherwise, Anna-bella had her mother to herself. She pushed two armchairs to the foot of the hearth, and they baked and froze together, taking it in turns to warm each side. Annabella never once said to her, though the words were constantly on her lips: I have left my husband; he has sent me away.

Instead, she endured silently her mother's misplaced admiration. Lord Byron, Judy understood now, was an image of the kind of man one ought to marry if one hoped to cut a figure in the world. It was no use angling for decency or common sense; these qualities brought one at last to Seaham or Kirkby Mallory. She had done what she could in Seaham to shape a role for herself in the little society she found to hand. She liked to think that, until her troubles (that was her phrase for it), she had made a success of it—as great, at least, given the poverty of local resources, as the success
his
sister had had at Melbourne House. Sir Ralph couldn't abide Elizabeth, and Judy blamed the modesty of his political ambitions on the contrast he hoped to suggest between himself and Lady Melbourne. It had lately become a source of consolation to her mother that Annabella had decided to follow the example of her aunt's career. A woman could only get on in the world, she had learned, by playing a part
behind the scenes
of public life. But one needed something to work with—one needed a scene, or a stage. It was no use sitting at the heart of a web like Seaham. She had run, quite simply, out of things to do.

How grateful she was for once to have so much time on her hands. They could talk properly, as they used to when Annabella was a girl. Tea was served them and buttered cakes, set down on the table between them. As a girl, Judy continued, lifting a piece to her mouth, she had never been told that what one depended on a husband for, in the first place, was the scope he gave to one's talents. A woman, of course, has no other scope. She touched a napkin to her chin.
Scope
, if she might call it that plainly, rather than riches or love, was what one should marry for. Though the quality, as such, had this to be said against it: it was harder to measure than riches, harder even than love. A fool might offer scope; Lady Melbourne had married a fool. Sir Ralph, she granted, was none, and there had been a time, before the last election but one, when she supposed herself on the brink of his great career. She called for more hot water. They had almost beggared themselves to make a name for him, but Sir Ralph, it turned out, was just the kind of man that names don't stick to. He is the kind of man whom other men trust in his private rather than his public capacity—they will listen to his jokes and not to his advice. Hot water came; she filled the pot and waited, then poured herself a fresh cup. Annabella refused one. Not the least of her regrets over the whole affair was the fact that it left them, as far as Annabella's dowry was concerned, a little short of pocket. She only hoped that money matters had not cast their shadow over the first year of Annabella's marriage.

‘No,' Annabella assured her, mindful of Dr Kendall's warning. ‘Not much.'

Each day, after lunch, they returned to the same two chairs by the fire and the same themes. As the week wore on, Annabella, who said little by comparison to her mother, began to insist on keeping her daughter beside her. I have left my husband, she thought; he has sent me away—and the confession, unspoken, kept her from exchanging other more commonplace intimacies. She had nothing to say but that, and she did not say it. Her baby, however, its mere presence, and the habits Annabella exposed while nursing it, struck her as a kind of confession of her new life, of her new role; at least, it was the only one she made. Sometimes Ada slept between them on the floor to catch a little of the hearth's heat. When she cried, Judy took her on her lap and made faces. Annabella could never remember seeing her mother so unconscious of her dignity. Perhaps she was really improved. Although, of course, an indifference to her own dignity had been one of the signs, her father had said, of the last stages of that illness or nervous indisposition whose history she had, in her own way, been attempting to give.

Sometimes, indeed, the conversation brought Judy's confession to a sharper point. ‘Your father's career,' she said (she had lost her shyness of repetition), ‘has not been entirely what I could have wished it. For one thing, it has afforded less employment than a woman of my capacities requires to occupy them.' Then she went on, and Annabella pricked up her ears: ‘I have gone to this honest extreme, of composing a trouble of my own making.' Her mother stared at the fire; she would not look at her daughter, and the heat of it had reddened entirely one side of her face. Annabella held her tongue and hardly breathed. She had hoped for some time to hear from her mother the clearest admission; it might bring relief. There were secrets, of course, that she kept herself, and she needn't look far to determine from whose lips she had learned the habit of concealment. ‘Well,' Judy continued, with a laugh, ‘it has kept me busy these last few years, which is something to be grateful for, particularly as you have, by degrees, begun to give me less trouble. I found it very painful to watch you
slip the reins
in search of a career that I myself had had the ambition, but not the luck, to pursue. You have made a name for yourself, at least. It will “ring through the ages”; Lord Byron will make sure of it. I don't like to think,' she turned to her daughter now and smiled, ‘of the
names
he will give to me.' After another pause, she added, ‘though I don't suppose I was ever as drunk as I pretended to be—I mean, at my worst.'

Annabella took up, from this strange bold speech, the quieter word. ‘I don't pretend to understand you.'

‘Oh,' her mother answered, ‘you needn't fear for me now. At my best, I know perfectly well, I was bad enough.'

Her own confession, in the end, depended on a respite from her mother. Sir Ralph had intimated to a few of their friends that Lady Milbanke was well enough to receive familiar visitors. Company would do her good, he wrote. She was growing tired of Sir Ralph, and Annabella, perhaps, was growing tired of them both. On Sunday, after church, the Gosfords paid their respects and stayed to lunch. It was the first time Annabella had dined in the dining room, whose views, over the gardens behind, were a little spoilt by the hothouse adjoining it. It was a house, Judy was complaining as they sat down, in which every modern convenience had been awkwardly added on without the least consideration of taste. In fact, one found in its design only a show of convenience. The kitchens had been rebuilt too far from the dining room. French doors had been added where they were not wanted; consequently, the sitting room was as cold as the cellar. The grounds themselves, which had been arranged according to the most expensive fashions, were large and variable and as bleak as a mountainside. Eight months a year they were too muddy for any respectable woman to walk in—excepting perhaps the coldest depths of winter, when the paths froze over. Annabella had guessed, by the end of this discourse, the purpose with which her mother had embarked on it, and could not help but admire her: she had wanted to set her guests at ease, that she was her old unhappy critical self entirely and required no special kindness.

Lady Gosford had such natural tact that one never suspected her of using it, and she was perfectly willing to disagree with everything that Judy said. She much preferred a modern house and could scarcely recall how they ever got on without Kidderminster carpets and hob grates. Sir Ralph, meanwhile, attempted to interest Lord Gosford in parliamentary speculations. He was hopelessly behind-hand in such matters and was eager to hear etc.—a strain of talk that excluded Annabella, happily enough at first, until she began to feel in her continued quiet the rising absurd voice of neglected egoism. One might have supposed, she told herself, that a greater share of the conversation would have devolved to
her
: a reflection whose truth she had every reason to regret when it finally was. Lady Gosford sensed Annabella's exclusion. As a childless woman, she declared, pleasantly enough, that she had no right, and consequently no intention, of inquiring into what she called the commonplace particulars. Such as, how often the child fed, and other questions less fit for mixed company. Instead, she wished simply to know, did the girl look like her father? How well she remembered, it was but three years ago, at their house in Piccadilly, where Annabella had been staying, their . . . excitement at dinner over the fact that one of their party had made the poet's acquaintance. Speaking of whom, she had heard that day from the vicar's own lips the voice of a general anxiety: when might they expect such a famous addition to their humble society? Annabella, dry-throated, just managed a tearless reply: business would oblige him to remain in town indefinitely. She kept her eyes fixed firmly on Lady Gosford; her mother was looking at her.

Later, a due parade was made of Lord Byron's daughter. Ada, wrapped in a blue cloth that brought out the brightness in her eyes, was handed about in the sitting room. Mrs Clermont hung unquietly back, to relieve anyone of the burden should they tire of it, until Annabella sent her away again. She was happy for once to preside as Ada's mother. The child fell asleep in her arms, and her face, in sleep, contracted in such a way as to exaggerate her resemblance to Lord Byron: the faint scornful puckering of his lips, the stubbornness of his chin, his fresh colour. Judy, by now unaccustomed to company, was on fire with talk; at least, she was too restless to stare (as she said) at babies. She had resumed, if nothing else, the show of her old assurance and offered to lead Lord Gosford on a tour of the hothouse, the care of which had been her particular consolation in the months preceding. When Ada awoke, loudly, with her tongue in the O of her mouth searchingly stretched, Sir Ralph volunteered (quick as usual to recognize the duty of his absence) to leave Annabella to nurse the child in peace. ‘He had always been very awkward,' he said with a laugh, ‘about babies, when they cried. He
would
try to reason them into tranquillity, but they preferred milk to reason.' Lady Gosford offered to sit with her, and he helped her to push the two armchairs, which had been pulled out for company, back to the foot of the hearth.

When they were alone together, she confessed the great pleasure it gave her to see Annabella's mother restored. ‘It was a terrible affliction. No name did it justice; there is something shameful in the names.' There was no shirking about Lady Gosford—that is, she wished intimately to convey that she saw no need for any shirking. Her plump shapely hands lay folded across her lap. She shifted her feet now and then to relieve her legs from the heat of the fire. Ada was nursing steadily, with that blind selfishness which always moved in Annabella the tenderest feeling of pity. What she thought was: ‘You mustn't depend on me, little thing. You mustn't depend on me.' She hardly heard what Lady Gosford, who seemed determined to speak frankly on the subject, was saying—which was only that she had never admired Lady Milbanke more than she did now. ‘It must be a great comfort to you, to be reminded of the strength of purpose of which your mother is capable. I am glad to see you taking after her. Your father is the most amiable gentleman of my acquaintance. His virtues are entirely, if I might put it this way, of the
winning
kind. There is a softness in his manner, a willingness to please, which is, I believe, generally considered the virtue of our sex. I regret to say, however, that we have need of sturdier qualities. It is only the gentlemen who have the luxury of gentleness. Women depend . . . but my dear, what's the matter?'

Annabella had begun, silently and without the least air of hurry, to weep. She had never in all her life, she believed, been so talked at; and she was conscious, as she gave way to tears, of hiding behind them. Lady Gosford had retreated into the dimness that lay outside the small quiet light of her own misery. Even at the heart of it, though, Annabella knew quite well that she was raising, as brightly as she could, the flag of her surrender. They must all, she supposed now, come rushing to her; they might never let her alone. Ada continued to nurse and she continued to feed her: Annabella's supply of milk, of tears, seemed equally deep. Lady Gosford had risen, and she sensed her approaching now, awkwardly enough, to relieve her of the child—repeating helplessly, ‘My dear, you must let me help. What's the matter?' It was a cruel, selfish comfort not to answer her. Annabella guessed that she might never again feel so simply, so sweetly her own affliction: she hoped by her silence to draw it out just a little longer. And Lady Gosford, at last, despaired of consoling Lady Byron herself and went out to find her mother.

Chapter Three

IF HER MOTHER HAD COMPLAINED
previously of a ‘want of occupation', Annabella was struck by how quickly Lady Milbanke recognized the rich seam of activity that her daughter had now opened up to her. First, the Gosfords were sent home under the cover of Lady Byron's exhaustion. She had only just arrived from London. She was tired, and there is a kind of fatigue that can, of itself, produce an appearance of misery. Judy turned frankly to Lord Gosford in the doorway: she had learned in the past few months that one may make a
habit
of tears. Annabella, who overheard her, was persuaded for the first time of her mother's complete recovery by the fact that she was willing, coldly, to make use of it as an example. Their delight, Lady Milbanke continued as she ushered them into the parlour, in Annabella's company had led them to overindulge in it. What she wanted was nothing more than quiet and rest . . . Although, once the Gosfords were gone, Lady Milbanke dispatched Sir Ralph to his study and refused to allow her daughter to retire until she had heard from her ‘a full confession'. She had lately favoured her daughter with the most intimate confidences (there was a note in her voice both of reproach and self-reproach), and these perhaps had drowned out the gentler noises that Annabella had been trying to make. Had she been holding something back?

Just what a ‘full confession' would require of her was the problem that Annabella, in the midst of her distress, was forced to confront; and she was still sufficiently the wife of Lord Byron and the sister of Augusta to keep from Judy the secret of her worst suspicions. To admit to these might, in any case, deny her the luxury of a reconsideration. Fortunately, Lord Byron's conduct had furnished her with enough material for a reasonable account of sincerest sorrow, and that is, to the best of her ability, the account she gave. Her husband had, from the beginning, freely expressed how little he was suited to the part his vows required of him, and his subsequent behaviour had only justified these professions. He had never actually beaten her. That is, he had never done so intentionally; but their great pecuniary embarrassments, and the strains on the marriage produced by her condition and, subsequently, by the birth of their child, had reduced him to a kind of madness in which the threat of violence against her was really the least of the fears she laboured under. They had practically ceased to hold any common intercourse with each other. They communicated chiefly by notes, but his state of mind was so disordered that it announced of itself, in the most explicit manner, the chaos of his unhappiness.

She did not wish to go deeply into particulars, but she was willing to cite, as an example, the fact that during her confinement he had relieved his anxiety by breaking soda-bottles against the ceiling of his room, which lay directly under her own. She had heard them crashing beneath her; she thought they were gunshots. Annabella did not mean to suggest that his intentions towards herself had ever been murderous. It struck her on the whole as more likely that he would injure himself. His sister's presence in their household had the effect of goading him into a kind of intimate and demonstrable confession of the viciousness of his character.
His
was the sort of conscience that reproached itself as deeply for what he had imagined doing as for what he had actually done. Although—to be fair to Augusta—her patience, her gentleness, her formidable common sense, more than made up for the . . . the pressure her company produced on their mutual relations. (It was throwing Augusta, just a little, in Lady Milbanke's way. In spite of her protestations of love, Annabella could not refrain from exposing her sister-in-law to the brunt of her mother's curiosity. She had lifted no more than the edge of that veil—who knew what would happen if the wind caught hold of it?) In the end, that pressure had grown intolerable. She could not with any certainty declare whether she had of her own free will escaped that unhappy home, or whether her husband had deliberately dismissed her from it. These were ‘the gentler noises' which, she discovered, in spite of her reddened eyes and sore-tipped nose, it was something of a relief for her to make.

Supper brought the three of them together again. Sir Ralph was particularly subdued, and just shy enough of his wife's more intimate knowledge to resign to the women the tenor of their table talk. Annabella had left it to her mother to lay at his feet the list of Lord Byron's abuses—his menaces, furies, neglects and infidelities—and was surprised to find that nothing had yet been said. Only Judy showed much signs of an appetite, and Annabella retired, leaving her pudding untouched and pleading as excuse the fatigues, as she put it, of her ‘sudden display'. She had dined, she said with a brave ironic smile, on tears; and Sir Ralph, who disliked such airs, gave her an impatient look, not unmixed by the pain of his exclusion. She supposed it might drive him at last to make inquiries of her mother, and was gratified to hear him, after the necessary interval, storming through the house to find her, where she had decided to wait for him, in the tidy back parlour by the fire. She listened with a little smile of indulged love. ‘Bell,' he was calling, opening and closing doors, ‘Bell, Bell, Bell,' until he found her, with his large kindly face so puffed up that the unshaved hairs of his cheek stood on end.

His indignation could be counted on to do justice to whatever his daughter had suffered, though Annabella presumed that he would, in his accustomed manner, make of an excess of feeling an excuse
not
to act. In fact, nothing could have been more explicit than the avowals he demanded of her, never to return to him, never to answer his letters, never to speak to him, if she didn't want either the blood of her father, or her husband, on her conscience. His fury brought home to her, as nothing else had, a sense of her helplessness. There was a kind of violence in the sheer fact of it. She could almost feel in the weight of each moment the irresistible gravity of events, pulling her forward; and she responded to her father's anger with an equal passion of supplication. ‘He was mad, he was mad, he was only mad,' she repeated, clutching at his hands, while he, strangely, attempted to fend her off. ‘He does not know himself.' She finally managed to extract from her father a promise: that if Lord Byron was deemed, by those medically competent to judge him, to be insane, she should be allowed, in the event of his recovery, to return to him. Otherwise—and this was, privately, the vivid little phrase she allowed herself—he was lost to her for ever.

Sir Ralph retired at once to compose a letter, in which he would begin to address the question of their separation. Annabella stayed up by the fire. Mrs Clermont had put Ada to bed, and for the first time since her outburst to Lady Gosford, Annabella had a minute or two to herself—she practically counted them up. Her quick burst of feeling had offered a little relief. On the whole she confessed herself satisfied by the turn of events. She had at least restored herself to the centre of their small world; and the sense of living at the beating heart of things brought home to her, as nothing yet had done, how long she had suffered on the peripheries of Lord Byron's stronger passions. Nothing she suffered or felt could stand up to the heat of his sufferings and feelings. She was conscious, however, as the thought crossed her mind, of having at last found an occasion that might bring out, in their brightest colours, her own quiet and enduring qualities. Then her father came in with a draft of his letter, which he read to her; and the simpler truth of what was happening to her entered and pressed, by another inch, deeper in:

Circumstances have come to my knowledge which convince me that, with your opinions, it cannot tend to your happiness to continue to live with Lady Byron. I am yet more forcibly convinced that after her dismissal from your house, and the treatment she experienced whilst in it, those on whose protection she has the strongest natural claims could not feel themselves justified in permitting her return thither . . .

Her mother joined their little conference in her nightdress and took the letter from him. It should not be sent without due consultation. ‘You mustn't in the meantime,' Judy added, ‘write him so much as a line. You must leave all that to me.' She intended to make an early start on the road to London, where she would engage the services of a lawyer.

It amazed her (she told herself afterwards that she should not have been amazed) how quickly the legal element intruded upon the question. Indeed, the law had a sort of taste, of itself, which flavoured the subjects it treated, and she grew conscious, in the weeks to come, that the savour of her predicament had been almost imperceptibly altered. She was learning to count up her wrongs with a little dry irony. Annabella believed that she had a natural talent for the law. It soothed the worst of her exacerbated feelings to be able to exercise, besides the wounded faculty of her sentiment, something like her old subtlety upon the matters of her heart. She was acting, for the first time since her marriage, in confederation with her mother—who, to do her justice, had taken up the cause with all the energy stored up in her dormant years.

Judy reported almost daily from London, addressing herself to Sir Ralph; what Annabella heard was only the echo of these letters. Reverberations, she supposed, rang out both ways, and she caught, from a postscript that her father read out to her, the low sound of those reports which Ralph must have sent back to Judy, regarding herself. ‘Let me entreat you to calm your mind. Don't look for imaginary bugbears, Annabella, when so many real ones exist.' Nor could her mother, in the headlong rush of her newfound purpose and under the guise of a kind of reassurance, resist the odd humble boast: ‘I assure you I have never been saner. My brains are particularly clear.' Their letter to Lord Byron had been submitted for legal adjustment. Judy would return when she could with the corrected text, which Sir Ralph was to copy in his own hand and sign himself. Nothing—she presumed that her daughter might take some consolation from the delay—could be formally undertaken until she had rejoined them. In the meantime, however, she had consulted a number of doctors on the strength of the testimony of Mrs Leigh (who seemed to Lady Milbanke a shy foolish calculating bundle of pieties), regarding the state of Lord Byron's health. There seemed little hope that his treatment of Annabella could be the unhappy effect of a mental
malaise
. At least, if it were, the medical opinion, with one voice, despaired of finding a cure. She must proceed, then, as if all parties to the issue had proceeded, in their common affairs, in their proper minds and had acted on their soberest intentions. It would be wise, accordingly—and this was her mother's own strange phrase, which Sir Ralph duly repeated with the letter in hand—for Annabella, henceforth, to conduct hersel
f
‘in the best legal fashion'.

In practice this meant that she was once more forbidden from writing to her husband—an injunction that brought out in her the shameful confession of the intimate tender playful letter she had sent him upon her arrival at Kirkby Mallory. Had she a copy of it? She had, and was forced to stand idly by while her father read it, leaning lightly against the mantelpiece, warming his coat-tails in the fire. There was nothing in it, she supposed, for which a young wife need reproach herself, although she regretted now the dry little reference to ‘mothers-in-law and babies'. But what embarrassed her most was just its tone, which seemed natural and affectionate. She winced particularly, as she imagined his progress through the lines, over that silly loving nonsense of her signature: Pippin . . . Pip-ip. When he was finished, he looked up at her; and she was duly alerted to the increase in her filial respect by the difficulty she inwardly admitted to in returning his stare. ‘This does not read,' he began, kindly enough, ‘like the letter of a woman . . .'

‘No,' she interrupted him, blushing. ‘Only, you must understand the fears we all had for his sanity—for our safety.'

‘We?'

‘I mean, Augusta and I. We had acquired a sort of habit of kindliness towards him, if only because we tended to suffer more when it was broken.' She was moved by her own account, which was, after all, nothing less than the truth. It seemed to her then that the fullest confession might really exonerate her, so she attempted to make it. ‘You must understand the particular form his . . . malady takes. He rather swells with his own unhappiness and grows expansive on it, just where others (among them, I believe myself) are inclined to contract. Everything, you see, the least word said, touches him nearly. One learns to give him the largest berth and to approach him, if at all, only with the—gentlest hands. You see by my letter the . . . gentleness he has taught me, which I practised, it must be said, willingly enough, for my own sake as well as his.' She was equal, at that, to the largest admission—and, feeling it rising within her, she made it. ‘You see, I love him, still. I have always loved him; I always
will
love him.'