Childish Loves (7 page)

Early the next morning I caught the all-day flight to London out of Newark. I sleep very badly on planes. In response to this problem I try to reduce all activity, mental and physical, to a minimum: drinking water, staring at the seat in front. I lie dormant, as if eight hours occupied by the upright tray-table will pass more quickly than the same stretch of time taken up with random impressions. It doesn't, of course, and besides, I don't have such strict control over my mind. Even when my eyes were closed, I thought about Peter. On our lunchtime expeditions, our escapes from the school grounds, he used to walk holding his hands behind his back. Probably he thought me not much older than one of his students. When I spoke, sometimes he stepped towards me, leaning in to listen. He also seemed very pleased to be talking himself. Once he confessed, quite seriously, that he'd never read
Tom Jones
. This is what passed for intimacy between us. Was there really anything I could learn about him from what he had written? All the way to Heathrow, I drifted in and out of this question, and got nowhere.

It seems to me very cruel that a boy should be sent away to school for much of the year, where he is regularly abused and made to feel painfully any inferiority of station or person, and then, when he is sent
from
, school between terms, should be shut out from his ancestral home. For ten years I was kept out of Newstead by an accident of birth – and death. My cousin had not died, and my great-uncle had outlived him. But now they are both dead. Mr Hanson, who advises me on these matters, has explained that the estate is entangled, and I have seen for myself that it is in ruins. You must be patient, he says. God help me, but I am not.

My mother tells me I have a home, that it is called Southwell. I have been here a week and we are both heartily sick of each other. Yesterday we had a small party to welcome our tenant at Newstead, Lord Grey de Ruthyn. My mother invited the Reverend Becher, and Mrs Pigot, and her daughter Elizabeth – who, with her brother John, make up the only tolerable society in Southwell. Most of the afternoon, I refused to give up my room and was only persuaded to come out when I overheard Lord Grey offering ‘to the young Lord the use of his Park, for shooting in'.

‘If it is shooting you have come to talk about,' I told him, when he repeated the suggestion, ‘you will find the society here very agreeable, for no one talks of anything else.'

But I thanked him for his kindness. He is a fair, lively,
acceptable
-looking young man, who will if he wishes it turn a great many provincial hearts. About the average height and dressed very properly according to the fashion. My mother says to him, with her hand on my hair, ‘I was scarcely eighteen at his birth,' which is a lie – she is out six years.

‘Well,' he said to me, on his departure, ‘I am not one of those men whom it pleases to promise hospitality for its own sake. I shall spend the summer in Caernarvonshire, in the mountains with my cousins. You are welcome to all that's mine, my bed and table, etc.; after all, they are yours. I have them only on lease.'

When he was gone, Elizabeth declared, ‘He looks as if he means to marry one of us.'

‘And I wonder what you mean by that,' Mrs Pigot took her up. ‘He distinguished nobody so much as Lord Byron, which is just what he
ought
to have done.'

‘Perhaps that's just what I
do
mean,' Elizabeth said. Her manner is pretty and arch, which conceals effectively the narrowness of her face and eyes – it is the Pigot face all over, stretched thin and dark. But she wears her brown curls low across the ears and cheeks, to fill them out.

‘His lineage is poor,' my mother broke in, understanding nothing but that the question of marriage had come up. ‘I have looked into the de Ruthyns and cannot find their title in the peerages of England, Ireland or Scotland. I suppose he is a
new
peer.'

‘At least he has a handsome name. Lord Grey de Ruthyn
sounds
very well.'

Our drawing room overlooks the Town Green, through two great French windows, against which my mother has placed a table each, with pots on top and flowers in them to receive the light. She now began to pull one of them aside to improve her vantage. Reverend Becher protested – he is perhaps becoming too much the clergyman. But Elizabeth assisted her and they pressed their noses to the glass.

‘He is mounting his horse, the boy has given it him,' Elizabeth said. ‘He believes he is observed – there, in a single great stride he is on. Shall he look up to make sure? He will. Oh, he has seen me.' And then, with a giggle, ‘He has saluted. What a fine young man he appears, with the addition of a horse. It is a great shame, we have no such advantages to set us off.'

‘Oh, you do very well, my dear, as it is,' my mother said, sharply enough, and restoring the table to its place. ‘Perhaps you
have
made a conquest. A new peerage is better than none at all.'

She fears very much I will marry Elizabeth, because we are so comfortable together. But I will never marry, I tell her, and least of all for comfort.

*

This journal, in fact,
is
a comfort to me and a great relief, for in it I may complain as much as I like about my mother. Even Elizabeth grows tired of the subject, especially as I admire so much her own. Mrs Pigot is kind, plain and sensible, whereas Kitty is only plain. ‘Why do you some times call your mother Kitty?' Elizabeth asks me, and for the rest of the afternoon (as the weather is fine, we have decided to walk a part of the way to Newstead, upon the promise I have made her to return even before she absolutely demands it), I consider this question. ‘Because she is a widow, I suppose. It is what my father called her.'

‘Do you remember your father?'

‘He died before my third birthday.'

‘But do you remember him?'

‘He died in France. For a short time, I believe, he lived with us in Queen Street, in Aberdeen. And then he moved a little away from us, to the other end of Queen Street, before he moved away altogether.'

‘But do you remember him?'

‘Kitty says I mayn't but I do. He used to kiss me on the – on my foot to make me laugh, so whenever he approached I sat down suddenly the better to lift my leg, and sometimes hurt myself and cried, which made
him
laugh.'

‘Poor little Byron,' Elizabeth said, ‘from Aberdeen.'

‘I remember enough of both of them
together
to inherit a horror of matrimony.'

The headmaster at my school, Dr Drury, has told me that I have a fine memory and might make a name for myself as an orator. My future, I am sure, lies in politics. Indeed, I have a great interest in histories of all kinds and wish to set down as distinctly as I may, merely from the recollection, a record of everything I have said and heard and felt. This seems to me an admirable plan. Novels I have read, too, for which I rather despise myself. It is quite a joke with the Pigots that I always have a book in hand, and Mrs Pigot has put aside a chair in a bright corner of their drawing room, pleasantly secluded beside some drapes, which she calls Byron's Chair, and refuses to let anyone else sit in it. And there I may sit and listen as much as I please.

Elizabeth accuses me sometimes of speaking only with her. She says there are a hundred others, even in Southwell, worthy of my confidences and reflections. For example, the Reverend Becher. Anyone would suppose we was always making love, she says, from the way they startle us together.

‘You know I mean never to marry,' I tell her.

It amuses us both to be the subject of so much gossip, especially as it makes my mother anxious. In fact, I confide in Elizabeth less than she imagines, and she isn't quite as pretty as she appears. Kitty, to warn me against her, once reported what she had heard: that Elizabeth, being teased about our intimacy by some ladies, had put them off by declaring she could never marry a
Scot
.

My mother means to poison all of my affections, and not just the filial.

At the moment she coughs incessantly, which is her own fault. Last week she took it into her head to berate Flossie, the maid-of-all-work, for throwing the kitchen scraps into the street instead of giving them to the pig, and she stood on the doorstep in the wet gloaming, looking on, while the poor girl gathered them up. Now the weather, as she says, has got into her lungs as well, on top of everything else (there is a bucket of drips on the landing by the stairs). It was as much as she could do ‘to give us respectable
airs'
, but at present even this exceeds her ‘little strength'.

Yet only yesterday I received proof of strange affinities. I walked out in the morning to inspect a horse Reverend Becher had offered for my use, since I mean to ride to Newstead in the coming week. It was a clear bright cold morning, which looked like warming in the course of the day; but on my return, out of a clear cold sky, a shower of rain fell. Afterwards I stood in front of the fire in our sitting room, rubbing and blowing against my fingers, when I had a strong impression of my father, taking my hand in his own, and performing the same function. Perhaps I was one or two years old. I believe the house in Queen Street was very cold; that my father used to complain of Kitty's economies.

As I stood there, Kitty remarked to me, ‘Your father hated the cold very much. You are a Byron all through. I used to tell him, it is quite the worst thing for a boy to be too warm all the time.'

With all my heart, I wish it were so, only I sometimes feel the mark of my mother's family. Kitty has a great appetite for sweets of all kinds, which she considers becoming in a woman. ‘Your father liked to see me eat,' she told me once. ‘To eat and laugh. It was said he married me only for money, but my fortune wasn't large – he ran through it quickly enough. At Bath in those days there were a great many beauties, and fortunes. He might have had his pick. But I liked to laugh and eat, and as he liked both laughing and eating, he said, we got on very well.'

It pleases her nearly as much to see me indulge myself.

My mother keeps a locket in her dressing-table, with his picture engraved within. Several times I have asked her for the gift of it, that I might take it with me to school – and sometimes she says, ‘Perhaps I will give it you, after all, if you are very good,' or, ‘I mean tonight to make up my mind about the locket.' And then in the morning she forgets. If I press her, she resorts to tears, and as her caprices disgust me I have given up asking. It matters very little to me one way or another, only I don't like to be made a fool of.

A few days ago I stole into her room and took it from her dressing-table, to show Elizabeth; Kitty never missed it. I intended to give it to Lord Grey, in return for his kindness to me, but Elizabeth dissuaded me, and after all, it is a mean act, for if I meant to be honourable I would claim it openly. It should be mine by rights, as his son – for a man may abandon the duties of a husband but can never forsake the title of father. Elizabeth said Lord Grey don't want it but admired very much my father's good looks and cheerful air.

I believe Mr Becher is in love with Elizabeth (I can't always call him Reverend), for he speaks to me often of her. She is a kind of cousin to him, which gives him, he supposes, ‘a right to advise her'. But he does not dare to, and so he advises me. He considers me capable of taking a part in great events and clearing the Byron name of its association with misanthropy and vice; he upbraids me for my idleness. Sometimes, even, he urges me to fall in love. He considers this necessary in a nature such as mine to the establishment of certain habits of feeling: gentleness, but not only gentleness, he means a kind of chivalry.

‘My lord,' he says to me, ‘I believe you might accomplish out of
love
what you should never, for your own sake, attempt from ambition.'

I am inclined to laugh at him, for love in my humble opinion is utter nonsense – a mere jargon of compliments, romance and deceit. ‘I suppose you mean that I should fall in love with Miss Pigot?'

He looked at me a moment, a little unhappily. ‘In her case, I'm afraid,' he said, ‘there is the question of rank.'

The Vicarage at Rumpton, where he presides, is being ‘done up'; he is staying for the summer in a small cottage on Burgage Lane, and Lady Hathwell has provided him with her barouche. This is the reason he can spare his horse. Mr Becher has literary ambitions. He means to write a history of penal reform, and his parlour, where he keeps a fire lit, is covered over in loose pages and opened volumes, on which he spends most of his unsociable hours. When he rises to take your hand, you may observe him, for a minute or so after, just perceptibly continuing to unbend until his top and bottom halves are aligned.

I asked him his opinion of Lord Grey.

‘I knew him at Oxford a little,' he said. ‘And others of his kind. He was mostly drunk and always in debt. But at seventeen or eighteen, tolerable enough. There is a kind of freshness even in debauchery. But age does not improve men of his type; their
methods
harden into habits. I should dislike it extremely if you came under his influence.'

*

I spent this morning riding over to Newstead and have only just returned – a two hours journey each way. The impression it made was very strong. As soon as I came upon the lake, and the sky opened up within it, I felt the beat of my heart as if a hand lay against it. And beyond it, the Abbey itself rising greyly out of the lawn. That some part of my destiny lies within those walls strikes me as certain – if only that I wish to be buried in its vaults. And yet the mansion itself, or its habitable portions, looks common enough.

Owen Mealy, the caretaker, answered my shout and opened the door to an undistinguished hall with dirty boots in it. A wired box (for keeping chickens) lay on its side by the door, propping it open. The weather, at least, has improved and the house had the dusky, watchful air of a hot day indoors.