A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  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.

  ‘I do not regard beauty,’ Lady Melbourne continued her recitation, ‘but am influenced by the manners of a gentleman.’ Lord Byron unquestionably had both; and to confuse the matter further, Annabella had written, and now heard her aunt read back to her, that ‘she was always, by nature, suspicious of any too perfect agreement between them. That is, she preferred good manners that seemed not merely the most flattering ornament to good looks.’ If Lady Melbourne was aware of having been matched for subtlety, she could console herself with the reflection that her niece had become lost in it. ‘Genius is not in my opinion necessary,’—she had at least come to the end of the page—‘and, I suspect, difficult to unite with the qualities I have mentioned. Yet I am afraid that some genius is requisite to understand a fellow-creature, and a good heart is not the best proof of penetration. A good heart, however, is what I absolutely require in the character of a husband, which leaves me, I suppose, much as you found me: unwed.’

  Lady Melbourne, in whose voice the smile might be said to have hardened with the strain of preserving it, now ventured to suggest ‘that anyone who could make up the sum of these contradictions must be either a madman or an angel.’ It amazed Annabella afterwards that she forbore, simply, to grin, as she directed her aunt’s attention to the reverse of the page, on which a single condition had been written. This, Lady Melbourne, flustered at last, now read aloud: ‘I would not enter into a family where there was a strong tendency to insanity.’ Annabella had feared, in the final minute, that in spite of everything she had tipped her cap too plainly at Lord Byron. She had hoped by this late addition to upset anything like certainty in her aunt’s views. Lord Byron’s descendence from Admiral Byron, or ‘Mad Jack’, was so well known that Lady Melbourne could not doubt the object of Annabella’s reference, which had the additional effect of seeming to acknowledge the character against which each of them, privately, had been testing Miss Milbanke’s description. ‘Well,’ Lady Melbourne said, asserting her dignity by rising first, ‘I believe we must find you an angel after all, if you’re not to become incorrigibly spinsterish, like your dear friend Miss Montgomery.’ Annabella was sensible of the threat in these words; it was, perhaps, the clearest note of her little triumph.

  It seemed wonderful to Annabella to have put her famous aunt into a temper, especially as she had in no respect compromised the innocence of her role. Sir Ralph might be the victim of other people’s bullying self-assurance, but his daughter saw no reason to give way with him. Lady Melbourne left Jennings to see her out. Annabella watched her recede into a private room, with a delicacy of womanly grace that had just begun to stiffen into brittleness.

  Jennings, as it happens, had a message for Annabella, which, he advised her, was to have an immediate reply. It came from Lady Caroline—the Lambs occupied the apartments on the second floor of Melbourne House. Lady Caroline had seen Miss Milbanke come in and had guessed with whom she was closeted; now, in turn, she begged for a minute of her time. Jennings showed himself in the confidence of his mistress’s daughter-in-law by guiding Annabella up the broad stairs. She was conscious of a slight pressure on her vanity induced by the attention she was receiving, at one of London’s great houses, from its most glittering figures. She felt the need to spill off, a little, some of the flow of her spirits; and so she remarked, as Jennings allowed her to pass on the steps, ‘that it seemed quite a morning for little chats. She was unused to being the object of so much curiosity.’

  Afterwards, she had occasion to remember his response. ‘Miss Milbanke will no doubt grow accustomed to it—as much as one may, that is.’ T
his was, as she later reflected, the first chord sounded of what became the deafening symphony of her life. The curiosity of strangers struck her more and more as a noise in which all other sounds, including the intimations of lovers, of friends, of her own conscience, were lost. At the time, she felt only the flutter of tickled vanity at what was expected of her, at the prospects to which she must learn to inure herself.

  There was no one to direct or receive her when she reached the top of the stairs, but the door was open, and she pushed against it. She found herself standing at the fringe of a long Persian carpet, unrolled down the length of a hallway. It was adorned on either side by a succession of busts, the heads, as she noted in passing, of their famous contemporaries: Canning, De Witt, Fox, Sheridan, etc. Lady Caroline’s husband, as Annabella knew, harboured ministerial ambitions, but the bust that presented itself most forcefully to her inner eye was that of Lord Byron. It would, she imagined, beautifully ornament any hallway, including her own; and she considered for a minute in that light the possession of him, as one might consider the purchase of a work of art. Yes, she decided, he would do very well as a husband in marble. A series of doors stood between the heads, and she walked the length of the hall—her sense of invasion becoming acute—to determine if any of them hinted at their mistress’s presence. The thought struck her that Lord Byron himself must have come this way, many times; the apartments seemed designed to keep a visitor secret. She tried at random a succession of handles. One of them turned, and the door gave way, yielding at first a view of the gravelled walk behind the house, and then the closer comforts of a study: a thick rug, the remains of a fire, a deep chair, and a table, covered with papers, pushed under the window. A door to the side opened inwards. Annabella had just stepped forwards to glance at the contents of the desk. She had little time to register the shock of surprise at finding her name at the top of one of the papers, and her writing below it, when a voice from the inner chamber called clearly, ‘You have found me out.’