A Quiet Adjustment (7 page)

He bowed and in a softer tone declared, ‘When there is no more to be said, even I know enough to keep silent.' After he had gone, she moved to the window to see him striding into the road; there was, in his step, the little skip of a purposeful haste. She almost smiled—enjoying as always, after the initial scene, the exercise of her power of refusal. It bucked her spirits up, like a warm ride in cold weather. But in the morning she woke so low, so out of sorts, her first thought was that somebody dear to her had died; her second, that she had dreamed it in the night. And it required the better part of the day for her to compose her thoughts to a suitable order: it was only the uncertainty of his attraction to her, which had amused her and sustained their companionship; it was only that which she now regretted, in its passing . . .

Chapter Six

IT WAS SOMETHING OF A RELIEF
when, a few weeks later, a note from her aunt arrived. London had gone quiet, and Annabella had grown first listless, then dull, then bored altogether, and subsequently irritable—after which it needed only a run of wet days to induce in her a steady depression of spirits. Lady Melbourne, from private motives she promised later to reveal, wished for Miss Milbanke to call on her. She had a little test to set her niece, which, she suspected, might prove as amusing as it promised to be instructive.

Annabella arrived at Melbourne House on a cold morning whose dryness suggested the real beginnings of autumn. The smoke of hearth-fires sharpened the air. She had not felt so light-hearted in weeks. She had walked all the way, as she confessed at once to Jennings when he showed her inside. He complimented her on her fresh colour, and she glanced at her reflection in the hall mirror, to test his praise. Her own eyes stared back at her, bright with exercise. As she looked, she felt the startle of an actual recognition, blinking back at her, and quickly turned to follow Jennings into the library.

Lady Melbourne rose to greet her. There was in her aunt's weak-chinned, amiable face something so expressive of her father that Annabella was obliged, as usual, to repress an instinctual confidence. ‘My dear Annabella,' Lady Melbourne said, holding out her hand, which was still babyish and pale, in spite of age, ‘how well you look; how delighted I am to get you to myself for a morning.' The family features, Annabella was forced to concede, not without a nod towards her own vanity, appeared to greater advantage in their feminine incarnation. Lady Melbourne wore her hair piled high on her head and wound round with pearls; she had, by the restless touch of her hand, to keep a loose strand tucked behind her ears. ‘We have heard such tales of you!' she said, delightfully, as she guided her niece into a chair.

‘Nothing, I hope, to my discredit.'

Her aunt only smiled at her, without opening her mouth; then she rang for coffee to be served. ‘Ralph asked me to speak with you. He wrote to say, they feel themselves cut off in Seaham from London life; had no sense of what was proper to a girl.' What followed, evidently, took some formulation, for Lady Melbourne paused to make it. ‘He complained of his own innocence,' Lady Melbourne began again. ‘He once attempted, he said, a fatherly inquiry into the state of your feelings, but you put him off in terms that suggested the hopelessness of a second experiment. What your prospects were, what intentions you cherished, were his only concern.'

Annabella felt herself blushing.

‘Come, come, my dear,' Lady Melbourne continued, as if to cut short her embarrassment. ‘I can imagine what a sad fist he made of it. Ralph, bless him, for all his good nature, is not the confessor a girl would choose for herself.'

Nor was she, thought Annabella, bristling slightly, the kind of woman a brother would lightly confide in. Ralph, she suspected, would apply to his sister, whom he hardly pretended to trust, only under the influence of a grave and particular anxiety. ‘He knows me well enough, I believe,' Annabella said, ‘to rely on his own understanding of my state of mind.'

‘A faith in your father that does more credit to your sense of duty than to his penetration.' Coffee came. Annabella sipped her cup, considering her aunt through the heat of it in her face. Then, to soften the briskness of her last remark, Lady Melbourne added, ‘No, I think it's high time we took you in hand. You have been coldly breaking hearts long enough . . .'

Perhaps George Eden has talked, was Annabella's first thought, though it seemed unlike him. He had the kind of pride that would rather conceal than advertise the wounds it received. Of course, she could not keep from herself the flutter of a hope that Lord Byron had been intended by her aunt's remark. Lady Melbourne was well known to be his confidante, and she was perfectly capable of intriguing on his behalf—even at the expense, events had proved, of her own son, whom Caroline had made to look very foolish. How little the discomfort of a brother would count for in her calculations—a reflection that led Annabella to guess the real source of Ralph's anxiety. Her father wanted to know the state of her relations with Lord Byron. Annabella experienced the new and not unpleasant sensation of being the object (in prospect at least) of disapproval. It seemed to her delightful, from the security of her virtue, to know that someone suspected her of being, if nothing else, a prey to temptations.

‘Her coldness,' she said, intending to catch something of her aunt's tone, ‘was so generally believed in that any man who put it to the test had only himself to blame for finding the rumour justified.'

Lady Melbourne's reply suggested to Annabella for the first time how little she had the measure of her aunt. Miss Milbanke felt in it the not unpleasant force of correction: a very hot dry wind against which she partly closed her eyes. ‘It isn't only a question,' Lady Melbourne began sensibly enough, ‘of what you might be blamed for. You have made a very good beginning. Anyone with your interests at heart will be concerned to see how you follow it up. Naturally, what we all desire for you now is a brilliant match. Naturally, what we ask ourselves is the manner of man who could, shall we say, justify your interest in him. I am trying to discover from you what the nature of that interest is? What the scope and depth of your ambitions are? Think for a minute, Annabella; I have no use for a half-cocked reply.'

Annabella thought. As she thought, she looked round her, and the prospect from the window had the advantage of suggesting what the fruits of an ambitious match could be. A flagstoned promenade at the foot of the garden was bisected by an avenue of birch trees. These marched away towards the shimmering quiescence of a fountain—at such an angle that Annabella, from her vantage, fancied she could almost hear the military beat of guards parading up and down. Yes, there was an unmistakable air of protection, in no way diminished by the fact that wealth, that luxury, that beauty itself formed the shield to be reckoned with. The library in which they sat exceeded the comprehension of her view. There were corners and alleys in it, still to be discovered. She imagined the pleasure to be got from the possession of them; there was a scale of riches that could make, even of solitude, a continuing exploration.

Lady Melbourne, then, served both as a model and a warning of what a womanly ambition could effect for itself. Annabella believed herself, not unhappily, to be made up of the same materials as her aunt. They were both strong-willed, subtle, vain; yes, she was willing to admit that much. And if Annabella had been used to regarding the differences between them with some complacence, she now began to revise, not her opinion perhaps, but the certainty with which it was held. Lady Melbourne, unquestionably, had had a brilliant career. She had managed to attach, with a degree of immorality that her niece hoped at some point to calculate, the greatest figures of her day—with the result that the best of society, its soldiers, its statesmen, its artists, now revolved around her sun. Lord Byron was only the latest, and not perhaps the brightest, of her planets; and the prospect of shifting the centre of his orbit to herself was not without its attractions to Annabella.

There could be no doubt, of course, that the niece regulated her feelings with a greater propriety than her aunt had ever been disposed to attempt. But whether the difference between them should be attributed to an excess or an absence of certain qualities was becoming for Annabella a very decided point. Was there a talent for sin? Could virtue be considered a deficiency of it? Annabella, in the course of that summer, had begun to learn something about the force and variety of desire. It was only a question, perhaps, of how successfully she could translate her virtue into a style with which to engage the society around her—if she wished, that is, to make an equal name for herself in time.

Their coffee had grown cold. As Annabella sipped it, a man came into her view, dragging his rake across the gravel of the avenue; he appeared and disappeared between the trees. It was out of her silence that Lady Melbourne's suggestion seemed to grow. ‘Would Annabella care—it should only take a minute or two—to make a list of whatever qualities in a husband she felt were necessary to attach her?' After all, it was a library, there must be paper and ink in it; Lady Melbourne promised to leave her to collect her thoughts.

Annabella might have resented such interference more if it did not involve just the kind of game that she delighted in. It seemed to promise her a sort of
playing at
life. Still, a touch of that resentment coloured the way she acted it out. ‘Indeed, that's just what I would like,' she said and began, gently, to tease her aunt's expectations. ‘It hits off my idea of what they call a literary marriage, exactly: between a woman, that is, and a list of qualities. I feel I have the character of the perfect husband so clearly in mind that sketching it would be a positive pleasure.' A literary marriage, in flesh and blood, was naturally what both of them had at the back of their thoughts: Lord Byron's name figured all the more prominently between them for being unmentioned. If only Annabella could persuade him to show his hand, without being compelled to give away her own! She believed that nothing could make
her
feelings clearer than the confession of
his
. She wished, above all, to determine the state of her affections. That was the prize, for which a certain amount of sincerity might be sacrificed. The worst she would be guilty of was ambiguity; her real fear was failing to stick to it under pressure of her aunt's conversation.

That she was, in the most important sense, at odds with Lady Melbourne, she had no doubt—in spite of the fact that one of the feelings her aunt inspired in her was a desire to confide. Annabella's confessional instincts were always strong, and though she hoped, at least in part, to overcome them, her greatest stroke was to guess from the first that nothing could conceal how much she had at stake as well as honesty—in a careful measure, of course, and strictly hedged about. She wished to indicate to Lord Byron how acceptable his attentions would be, without appearing to play for them. The fact that she still thought of the experiment as a kind of game suggested that she hadn't yet taken on the full weight of her aunt's advice. In any case, Annabella intended to win it. The idea of scoring
off Lady Melbourne was just what a daughter of Sir Ralph was practically bound, by filial duty, to delight in.

In the event, it took her considerably longer than a minute or two. Lady Melbourne appeared, at shortening intervals, to inquire how her niece got on. Annabella waved her away, with a practised blush and a shake of the head. The fact was, as she ‘confessed' to her aunt afterwards, that she had enjoyed the task of composing her lover from scratch. She doubted, she said, whether any man would ever exert himself as much in living up to her idea of a husband as she had in framing it. Lady Melbourne, smiling, sat down and picked up the paper to read. Miss Milbanke asked her to excuse the several blottings; she could not refrain from indulging her powers of correction. Flesh-and-blood gentlemen, she found, rarely suffered being improved upon so patiently. Her aunt said nothing; and so Annabella, after a minute, gave way to silence herself, surprised by the flutter of vanity she felt: that of an artist seeing her work examined.

Years later she remembered the scene and was constantly struck, not so much by the subtlety of her intent or its naivety, as by what the combination of the two had produced: a kind of prescience. Yes, she was young. She had had little sense of the force that her ideas would achieve in their reality, and her tone suggested most clearly the imaginative luxury to which a spoilt daughter had become accustomed. But the contradictions in her description had been only too faithfully played out in the conflicts of fact; and though the free expression of them had not, at first, been without its ironies, it was a mistake to dismiss out of hand the sharpness of her vision. She had seen clearly what lay ahead, and her best consolation lay in the fact that she had, she believed, lived up to her sense of desert.

Her aunt read out, selectively, her sketch of a husband. The paper lay in the flat of Lady Melbourne's palm. She lifted a lorgnette to her eyes to scan the page and began to declaim it in the off-hand fluent rhythms that carried her own conversation along. Her voice had a kind of smile in it; it was, almost perfectly, an expression capable of being put on and kept up. ‘
That her husband was to maintain consistent principles of duty
,' she read; ‘
that he must be possessed of strong and generous feelings
. . . And pray,' she interrupted herself suddenly, glancing up at her niece, ‘how was he to reconcile them, when these opposed each other?'

Annabella repressed a smile: she had reckoned on a little quizzing of this sort. One could scarcely suspect Lord Byron of ‘consistent principles of duty'. She had hoped, by this opening sally, to put her aunt off the scent of what she was hunting for. But it mattered just as much to throw Lord Byron a little in her way—to hint that she might be willing to come round. No one, of course, could claim a more generous share of strong feelings than the poet himself. Paradox, then, was the note to be struck; and Annabella was conscious of the almost physical pull involved in taking with one hand what she refused with another. She hoped to require from her husband ‘
an equal tenor of affection
', but she ventured to assert that ‘
any attachment, which has not been violently fixed, cannot steadily endure
'. Lord Byron's capacity for, as Annabella put it, ‘violently fixing' an attachment, the mother-in-law of Lady Caroline, and his great confidante in their affair, had little reason to suspect, but she could not answer for his ‘endurance' and was puzzled by the freedom with which her chaste niece seemed to play on such themes.