A Quiet Adjustment Read online

  Retiring to her room, she found in it little enough to occupy her. Solitude always seemed to place before her, with the distinctness almost of a mirrored reflection, an image of herself to stare at; and she turned for a kind of relief to the other image that had begun to absorb her thoughts. She decided to spend the time before dinner writing up her impressions of Lord Byron in her diary, but she found herself hesitating to fix these in ink—not so much out of fear at having them read over, by her mother, for example, as at the prospect of having to admit them to herself.

  After the lecture, she had become entangled in the stream of people pushing past. She only just escaped at the door to the hall, where she stopped a minute, hoping to let Lord Byron overtake her. But he had been caught up in what she could only presume was a group of his friends, who were lobbying him to make some kind of speech or recitation on the stage where Mr Campbell had been speaking. She heard him say, ‘I believe you mock me.’ He was smiling broadly, but his face was pink. Mr Campbell himself, however, clearly flattered by the poet’s attendance, offered him a copy of his celebrated book, which he had been reading; and a handful of people waited at the door in case the famous young man could be persuaded into a performance. He bowed at last and without lifting his voice, in perfectly clear tones, declared his intention of playing what he called the part of Childe Harold in the manner of one Gentleman Jackson, whom he had overheard himself that morning, before a lesson, rehearsing certain scenes from the poem. He proceeded to recite his own verses in a broad angry accent that contorted the beautiful symmetry of his features. His friends drowned him out in applause, and his face broke into lines of laughter which so little suited Annabella’s tender reading of the character, either of hero or poet, that she fled the pocket of onlookers into the cold spring day. She had not supposed him happy or light-hearted—qualities that threatened to nip her growing sympathies in the bud.

  It was the image of their first meeting, then, at Melbourne House, that rose before her inward eye, and the thought of that dancing pair soon banished all temporary annoyance. There was something in their sibling familiarity, which seemed so natural and attentive, that led her to imagine that she possessed in the quiet of intimacy just those qualities which they took pleasure in ‘drawing out’ from each other. (That phrase of Judy’s had come to mind. It often astonished Annabella how difficult she found it to escape the pattern of her mother’s thoughts.) Augusta, or ‘Gus’ or ‘Goose’ (though she didn’t yet dare to assert the privilege of a nickname) seemed a woman particularly susceptible to the comfort that Annabella trusted herself to be capable of giving. Her shyness, partly overcome, could help her to relieve another’s; and it was characteristic, Annabella thought, of her better nature that her own black moods inspired in her mainly the desire to console others.

  Of course, she was conscious, no one more so, of the little delusions excited by celebrity of any kind: of reciprocal interest or knowledge. And certainly Lord Byron had suffered his share of admirers. It might be kinder (or shrewder) to direct one’s sympathies at her who was herself the object of Lord Byron’s care. Annabella was enough of a gossip to be in perfect possession of the family history. Their father had remarried after the death of Augusta’s mother. A second child, a son, was eventually born, but by this stage the first had been committed to the care of relations from whom her father had become effectually estranged. His children, inevitably, shared in that estrangement, for a period that Lord Byron had expressed himself determined to make up for. Not the least proof of his honourable nature was the extent to which, as Annabella herself had observed, he had lived up to his word.

  She dipped her pen and wrote, ‘My dearest Augusta,’ and stopped short. Her diary, half against her will, had begun to shape itself into a letter. She need hardly stay shy, after all, of his sister, and the phrase itself seemed to entitle her to intimacies; it loosened her tongue. What she wished to make clear was ‘that she too had known what it meant to suffer from the absence of a beloved sibling. She too understood the peculiarly affecting claims of a partial relation—those curious admixtures of likeness and dissimilarity, which in the happiest instances offered such a perfect medium between the pleasures of friendship and of family.’ Annabella’s mother had a sister who died young, and that sister had had a child, who was brought up as one of her own by Judy. And how welcome, at the time, seemed that increase to the family sum. ‘Their cousinship quickly took on the deep sisterly feeling inspired by the remoteness of their situation: a charming house in Seaham, a quiet charming village on the Yorkshire coast, where the only society for miles around depended on their obligations to the tenantry and the pleasure they took in their own.’

  A loving house, undeniably, of which she herself was the ‘cherished pet’; and if (her confession was growing in scope) Annabella ‘occasionally quarrelled with her mother, as she had begun to do, it was only the result of that daunting example Judy had set of what a woman with all the privileges of rank and talent was capable of achieving. Her energy, her charity, her curiosity were famous in the parish; and few of her fellow parishioners had the heart to mock or resent that completeness of moral persuasion from which they themselves had so frequently benefited.’ Annabella, as she refreshed her pen, refrained from adding (and only just whispered to herself) that her mother’s fondness for a drink had recently taken on a more secret character; and there were, she now recalled, the remains of a bottle of sherry standing uncorked beside the papers on Lady Milbanke’s table. Its medicinal scent had only just penetrated Annabella’s picture of her mother’s dressing room—adding its influence, strangely, to a sense of Judy’s inviolable privacy.

  ‘I shall never forget,’ she wrote now, ‘the morning my cousin left us to be married. I had prayed for that event,’ she added, when it struck her as odd to be rehearsing such scenes for a stranger’s benefit from the quiet of her room in Gosford House. Her childhood, however, had been so poor in incidents that she stored them up as a kind of precious coin—to be spent, from time to time, on intimacies. ‘It was, I thought, to ensure her happiness,’ she continued, and the simple truth of her confession began to impress itself upon her. ‘But when after a long engagement the wedding finally arrived, when I passed her apartment in all the sudden disrepair of evacuation, the misery of my loss became insupportable to me. I remember feeling for the first time as if the actual scene was visionary. I made one attempt to confide my despair to her who was its object. I had been weeping and kissing Sophy’s neck. My wet lips tasted the heat that they themselves had pressed upon her skin; there was nothing of her own. She was cool as ice. “What shall I do without you?” I asked. “What shall I do with them?” “Marry,” was her answer, with a shrill laugh. It struck me, at twelve years old, as a contemptuous sort of reproof, and I shrank into an existence of solitary reverie that remained largely unbroken until my coming out. It being understood, of course, that my family relations, warm and enveloping as they were, seemed less and less to involve any kind of excursion from the kingdom of my solitude.’

  ‘What are you writing?’

  There had been no knock at her door, only a fat hand gripping the edge of it and the hesitant step of a large foot. It warmed her, unreservedly, that her father still trusted sufficiently to their relationship to admit himself unannounced into her bedroom. She looked up at Sir Ralph. His face, amiable as an egg, was turned on her; and she recognized in his loose cheeks and doubled chin the foolish excess to which her own appetites would incline her, unchecked. His eyes, wide rather than large, had a gentleness that owed a great deal to what Annabella thought of as their slowness of expression. He had a habit of repeating himself and did so now—‘What are you writing?’—as he peered over her shoulder against the glow of her lamp.

  ‘My diary,’ she said, feeling not so much guilty over her slight evasion as forced unpleasantly into a consciousness of it. She smoothed her hand over the paper. What she wanted above all—and it had struck he
r more and more, lately, the pressing need of it—was a language in which she could reconcile the duty of honesty to her growing appetite for secrecy. There must or should be terms of confession in which neither truth nor privacy was sacrificed to the other.

  ‘Mother thought you was looking hipped,’ he said, ‘and I wondered if you wanted a game of chess before supper. I know how it cheers you to beat me.’

  ‘Yes, that is just what I should like.’

  The drawing room was empty when they descended to it. A table had been permanently arranged against the tall corner window; it overlooked a chestnut tree, spreading its shade on the street. The chair creaked as Sir Ralph rested his weight on it; he always, as he remarked, over-indulged himself in London. There was something about the city in season that dispirited him: such energy and youthful gaiety. He had never himself in his own youth participated in the pleasures of it, much. That is, before he had set his sights upon her mother; and then he had condescended to ‘enjoy himself,’ as he put it, ‘only as much as was required to gain his prize, and no more.’ They began to play; Annabella as usual deferred to her father the opening sally. It was among the carefully nurtured family illusions that Sir Ralph was shy and slow in conversation. In fact, he had a tremendous patience for repetition and those layered confessions it was capable of easing away. The difference that age had wrought in him, he continued, was, that while he had always detested the buzz of social life, he had lately begun to be ashamed of his comfortable, solitary inclinations. And he drank too much and ate too much to occupy those appetites that flourished in him by way of compensation. Judy and he intended shortly to return to Seaham, once they had seen Annabella happily established. ‘It did his heart good,’ he added, and his daughter guessed at once that this was the conclusion towards which he had with some difficulty been working himself up, ‘to see how . . . graciously Annabella had taken to the scene.’

  His real intention, his daughter suspected, was only clothed in praise. He wanted to find out (perhaps her mother had sent him) just what it was that had put Annabella in a pet. It could only be, they reasonably supposed, a question of love. He may have hoped by admitting his own penchant for withdrawal to set the stage for her more romantic confession. And among the calculations that occupied Annabella, as her bishop began to take control of the board, was whether she was confident enough in her feelings to submit them to the test of her father’s curiosity. Was there anything—and her attraction as yet could hardly be defined by its object, so slight had their acquaintance been—about her attitude towards that family which could lead to a more general exposure? She said, as she exchanged, with a knock of pieces, her castle for his knight, ‘I have been reading, in the company of half of London, the adventures of Childe Harold; in fact, just this afternoon I finished. Have you seen it? If not, I shall lend you my copy. I should like to hear what you think.’

  He had not; it would give him the greatest pleasure, etc.

  ‘In general, as you know,’ she continued, ‘I disdain to follow fashions; but there are occasions when they reach such a fever as to require of the spectator, at the very least, his opinion of the fashion itself. It was in this spirit that I began to read, but I soon found that there was more to sustain my interest than a mere social curiosity. It contains many stanzas’—Annabella’s philosophical vein had always been indulged with scarcely discernible irony, and Sir Ralph listened patiently now—‘in the best style of poetry; if anything, he is too much of a mannerist. That is, he wants variety in the turns of his expression. He excels most in the delineation of deep feeling, in reflections relative to human nature. I thought of him just now, Papa, because his case makes an interesting contrast to your own: he despairs of an excess of that capacity for whose deficiency in yourself you have expressed such regret. I mean, the capacity for taking pleasure. That despair frames the moral of his Pilgrimage—one which, I think, no one need shame himself for admiring. It has given me at least one sleepless night; and, as you have seen, a sleepy head-achy sort of a day.’

  ‘There is, of course,’ Ralph was quick to agree, ‘nothing shameful in that.’

  Annabella had grown accustomed to beating her father, regularly and with something like carelessness, at chess. She had his king now in a terrible thicket of pawns, and he was silent a minute as he considered his situation. ‘No, there is no help,’ he concluded. His face grew very red in thoughtfulness. The blonde grey hairs of his brows stood out palely and his eyes took on a blinking dimness: he seemed old, at odds and ends. Annabella was but thirteen when she first defeated her father at chess. Victory had surprised and delighted her; it had set up their relation to each other for years to come. She had just begun to bristle at her mother’s constant example and used to greet Sir Ralph’s returns from parliament with something like a lover’s restless welcome. ‘Shall we have a game, father, before dinner? Shall we just sit down—you see, I have laid out the table . . .’ But she had lately had to suppress a strange sort of disinclination to watching him lose. Partly, to be sure, out of pity; but her sense of triumph did not lack the faint frictive energy of impatience, which she had recently learned to recognize in her mother’s own treatment of Sir Ralph. He was no fool; his temper was good; his taste in matters of wit and poetry was both joyously inclined and well considered; but there was something about his good nature that inspired, even in the kindest and best-disposed of his acquaintance, the desire to abuse it. And Annabella could not help resenting in him a weakness that, she suspected, such resentment would help her to expunge from her own disposition.

  In a guilty burst of more filial spirit, she said, ‘I saw him, Lord Byron, that is, today for the second time. We danced together, I mean, we danced separately, at a waltzing party given by Lady Caroline last week. He waltzed with his sister, a very pretty woman though shy as a wren. And then I read his poem and then I met him again at Mr Campbell’s lecture. It was particularly gratifying for me, so soon after finishing, to test my sensibilities, my reading of his verse, against what I saw of his actual character, revealed in person.’

  ‘And what,’ Ralph asked, ‘of his actual character, did you see revealed?’

  After a hesitation: ‘Mostly the back of his head.’

  It was one of those little triumphs of her good humour that were only ever brought out by Sir Ralph. Even so, she suspected, in that half-second of consideration, an inclination to deceive. She wanted to keep from her father any sense of the seriousness of her . . . preoccupation—an intention that constituted nothing less than the first acknowledgement of it to herself.

  At dinner, Childe Harold came up again in conversation—specifically, the moral character of its author. Lady Gosford had not read the poem, a fact which she happily admitted and which in no way restricted her interest in or contribution to the discussion. She was a round comfortable woman, in whom the pleasures of the table had preserved, by the outward pressure on her fattening face, something youthful and good-natured in her countenance. Lady Milbanke was, by force of opposition if nothing else, her great and particular friend. And though their relations, especially in the course of the Milbankes’ extended stays in London, were not without their little frictions, the two old companions were on the whole each grateful for the correcting influence of the other. Their friendship took shape from their competing philosophies; and where Judy was, at least in principle, strict, abstemious and actively charitable, Lady Gosford indulged her own and others’ appetites with equal complacence.

  She now took the side of Lord Byron’s admirers. ‘No harm could come,’ she insisted, ‘of a miserable libertine, whose various immoralities serve only the cause of his unhappiness. Besides,’ she added, ‘my own experience suggests to me that his sins are more talked about than read.’ She drained her claret and gestured for more. As the butler made his rounds, Judy (Annabella was pleased to note) placed her hand above the glass. An act of abstinence that her daughter delighted in, not so much as a
n example of her pretensions or as a step towards her reform, but out of admiration for Judy’s self-control: no private weakness could corrupt Lady Milbanke’s public sense of her position. ‘You take him altogether too willingly at his own estimation,’ she countered. ‘I have glanced over the volume. That famous misery is only the fancy dress of his desires. He pinches himself into it as some women powder their faces, to look interesting. It is really the worst of his bad example that he has made a fashion of unhappiness. I should almost prefer it that the young surrendered to the greatest of vices; instead, they take on the aspect of them and study to appear melancholy. No, the real wickedness of Childe Harold is a peculiar form of hypocrisy in which everybody strives to seem much worse than they really are.’

  ‘Do you not think him sincere?’ Sir Ralph inquired of his wife.

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘But surely that is a question that cannot be answered merely from a perusal of the text. It requires a most particular knowledge,’ Lord Gosford, who had kept silent, now intruded, ‘of correspondence between word and deed.’ A thin, straight-backed man, he presented to the company’s view rather the surface shine of spectacles than his colourless eyes. Sir Ralph was somewhat in awe of him. Ralph was a conscientious but quiet parliamentarian; and though Lord Gosford spoke little enough in the House, that little was seen as being very much to the point. His influence was of the kind that consisted as much in the rumour of it as in its original force. His opinions were more sought after than known. In the friendship of their marriages, Ralph had made an amiable alliance with Lady Gosford—to be comfortable together; but their relations, they both suspected, lacked the electric charge of Judy and Lord Gosford’s quarrelling.

  ‘I believe,’ Sir Ralph said, ‘that we have to hand a source of that particular knowledge.’ Annabella had already begun to blush, as her father proudly turned towards her. ‘Did you not dance with him, my dear?’