A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  In the morning, however, the simpler glow of the sun prompted certain revaluations. It fell on her lap around the edges of a cloud. There was black at the edges and a soft chill within; but in the full surrounding light, pale and level with the approach of winter, she felt the kindness of warmth. How hungry she was. Worked up with nerves, she had hardly, the day before, touched her food. Hunger at least suggested her nerves were quiet. The work, her decision, had been done. Nothing was left but for her to admit to it—to bring it up. She blushed to herself at the recollection of what in the small hours had seemed to her clear-headed and now struck her as the madness of dreams. Still, the effect of it lingered, as dreams do. It was as if the violence she had checked against Mary had in the night released itself, had turned into fact. It demanded, as fact, its due, and she gave it. The private acknowledgement had been made. Lord Byron had proved himself greater than the scope of her choosing: she hadn’t the measure of him. That was the fear which in the end decided her. There were other fears, greater and lesser, but none so decisive. She couldn’t see him, that was the horror, and this blindness had infected her with the sense of being watched. The question remaining was whether what had prevailed in her belonged, most properly, to common sense or cowardice; they were pushing the same way. It was almost impossible to disentangle them.

  ‘I endeavour not to yield to any decided preference till my judgement has been strengthened by longer observation, but I will not assign this as my only motive for declining.’ This, after a good breakfast, is what she wrote to Lady Melbourne. She had returned—her composure just managed an inward smile—to the desk in her bedroom. The sheet of paper on which her night-thoughts had been scribbled lay in the basket beside it, crumpled to a ball. ‘Were there no other objection, his theoretical idea of my perfection, which could not be fulfilled by the trial, would suffice to make me decline a connection that must end in his disappointment.’ Was it true, or true enough, to satisfy her conscience, which was stricter, perhaps, with the letter of truth than its spirit? She supposed it was in the nature of great decisions that they bulked even larger than motives. One approached them, as it were, craning one’s neck—to see around their corners for a glimpse of the motives behind them. These appeared, if at all, only after the decision was struck. ‘I should be totally unworthy of Lord Byron’s esteem if I were not to speak the truth without equivocation. Believing that he never will be the object of that strong affection which would make me happy in domestic life . . .’ Quietly, kindly, in long unpunctuated phrases, she gave him away. Her first trial was past; it seemed to her at that moment the only one that would ever signify.

  For a few days afterwards, the force of her decision sustained her. The only thing to vex her was Mary’s obvious relief. Mary alone knew the secret of Lord Byron’s proposal, and Annabella could scarcely turn elsewhere now to confess her reply. Still, it was very trying, she privately acknowledged, to be obliged to endure (complicitly, as it were) such a return to her friend’s good opinion. The irritation of it, at least, busied her thoughts at a time when they might easily have turned inward with more painful heat; and it was a relief, perhaps, to keep up the argument in the quiet of her head not with him but with her. Had she done right? was a question that quickly presented itself, whenever other occupation failed her. In the first aftermath of her decision, it was a great comfort to her vanity to pity Lord Byron himself for the part she had played in injuring his. She read over, again and again, her favourite passages in Childe Harold and flattered herself that the plaintive, conscience-stricken effusions of his muse had been inspired by her. Well, they would be. It was satisfying, she sometimes admitted to Mary, to think of all the immortal poems he could write just because she had decided to break his heart.

  Even so, she was conscious in the weeks to come of a loss of balance. It was as if a weight she had been pressing against had been abruptly withdrawn, and though she had caught herself, just in time, the absence continued to be felt: she was leaning, as it were, without the support of opposition. A push here or there would have knocked her down. Careful of that possibility, she decided to return to Seaham for the winter. London had ‘ceased to amuse her’. This was her great protestation; she made it whenever she could. She meant by it, of course, to suggest worlds of private ennui, but her suggestions were rarely taken up. It was only, one supposed, the boredom a girl always feels when the balls of summer are over and the men have retired to the country to shoot. Well, perhaps it was, she once admitted, no more than that really. And yet, there were suppers still and the theatre; there were ‘breakfast parties’ and ‘musical interludes’ and tables of whist of an evening to be made up. But these gave her no pleasure now beyond the bright little cards of their invitations; she rarely attended them. She had never before considered herself to be one of those women ‘in the hunt for a husband’, and yet now that she had shied away at the last from catching hers, she discovered, almost to her relief, that the rest of the exercise was not worth the discomfort. She went home.

  Home, then, promised a great deal: her familiar room; its quiet view of a loud sea; and the general shelter of living within her mother’s arrangements. What she made of it would depend on that little distinction between common sense and cowardice—on the distinction, as she put it to herself, between a return and a retreat. It demanded, she was well aware, a very nice subtlety indeed to make out the difference. But she was a subtle girl; she never despaired of living up to nice distinctions. She hoped to return, then, with a more conscious conviction to what she had been: a country girl, unused to society, content with her own. She hoped to continue on the old lines—to make of London a mere interruption. Unused to, perhaps, was the only phrase on which time might be said to have wrought its effects. Another to meet her case could be supplied. Inured to? Untouched by? And yet there were moments—as the coach changed horses at Durham, two hours short of her destination; and she watched them being harnessed, through the fireside window, with the sudden happiness of impatience—in which she took comfort from the very idea of giving in to the weakest of her inclinations, when to be her father’s daughter again seemed the only relation she could ever desire.

  She soon realized, in a few days, no more, how little these distinctions counted for in the event. After the first happy rush of arrival, it grew clear that she could neither return nor retreat. All that was over. What was over, indeed, was just her capacity for taking comfort. It seemed almost as if her mother, her father, the rocks along the shore, the sea itself, had lost a quality. They had been stripped a little barer, by a kind of winter; and she couldn’t but suspect her own heart of being the low sun of that season. In the long journey north, she had played out secretly the various stages of her confession. It was all a question of starting a scene. She had but to get herself remarked upon, for looking pale or thin, for failing in her usual lively spirits. Her father could easily be tempted into sympathies—her mother, into corrections. ‘You’ve changed, my dear,’ Judy might begin. Annabella had only to deny it, with a heat that would forge in the necessary reconciliation its own excuse for intimacy. The length she would go in confession was all that concerned her. She inwardly vowed—one of those promises she supposed at the time of being made for the breaking—just to stop short of his name. That was the limit she set herself. That was the size of the box in which she would treasure her secret. That was the size of the secret: his name.

  And yet, to her childish surprise, they rather left her alone than otherwise. Annabella’s quiet insistent inward flow of thought ran only into deeper silences. A succession of heavy gales had struck the local fisheries very hard. There had been several shipwrecks, with all their attendant widowings and orphanings. Annabella, for the first week, heard talk of little else. She was persuaded to survey the freshest scene. Under a stark white cloud a grey sea laboured. Upon the rocks, remnants of the fishing smack could still be seen, straining against the ebb to reach shore. The sand was littered with nets and
spars and sails; and boots and pea-coats and hats. Annabella remained perfectly unmoved by the sight of them; they might have been left over from a play. Lady Milbanke saw it as her duty to take up a ‘collection’ (she was always collecting, Ralph complained) and to see that everyone was ‘satisfied with their burials’: the wives happily mourning, the children returning to school. Ralph himself was occupied by a tax-meeting at Durham. He was to give a speech at it, if only he knew which side of the question to support. He asked Annabella’s advice. He wished to put the case before her. Her mother had long ceased to take any interest in the business—a remark at which, he was surprised to find, his daughter burst into tears.

  ‘My dear Bell,’ he said, ‘oh my child.’ He was conscious suddenly of his preoccupation, and ashamed. The shame got in the way of his reassurance. He put his hand to his mouth and looked at the poor girl: her round red face was too large, it seemed to him, for a child’s grief. But he rose to his sense of it at last and joined her—he had been standing—on the sofa and took her head in his soft long-fingered hands. ‘You have been here a week, and no one has said to you as much as a how do ye? You find your parents, no doubt, become very old and dull; and the worst of it is, very busy in themselves with being old and dull. My dear child, what is it?’

  Annabella had always thought her father the most amiable of men. But no one, perhaps, got the virtue of it more than himself. He was complacent. He indulged his own weaknesses even more than he tended to indulge his daughter’s. She had always supposed herself, if put to the test, incapable of holding anything back from him. Well, this was the test. And she found to her surprise that her struggle was all the other way. Something childish in her balked stupidly at confession, and the woman in her hardly had the words to insist on it. ‘Please, carry on,’ she began, nobly, perversely, ‘I was really attending; I should like to hear you out. To the end.’ But when he, sensibly, answered her only with silence, and her tears had dried up, she condescended to explain—with just that little excess of eloquence which always came out in her under the pressure she felt to suffer the least common griefs. ‘It’s my own fault: I expected too much.’ She was, by this point, perfectly composed; weeping had cleared her head. ‘I was conscious, you see, of having changed. What I wanted to make certain of was just by how little, the measure of which seemed to lie in the ease of my homecoming. Ease, of course, is a thing impossible to strive for. Perhaps I was guilty of striving. Something, you know, had passed in London that might be seen to have given, to any return, the shame of retreat. I was determined, by force of happiness if nothing else, to put off the shame of it. But the force itself, as one might suppose, struck me as proof of the worst. Under that sense of it, just now, you saw me give way.’

  Sir Ralph only stared at his daughter. ‘I don’t think I understand you.’ And then, finding his feet a little: ‘What passed in London?’

  ‘I had in London’—it was wonderful really, how lightly it all came out!—‘a prospect opened before me, a very fine view. Or what might have been, on a clear day; though one can’t expect, as Mary would put it, mountains without clouds. The mountain, one may say,’ she had found a smile, ‘was the picture of sublimity, but I mistrusted the path that ran up it. You have always, I know, presumed me worthy of the largest acknowledgement. It was offered, and I refused it, less from a sense of falling short—of deserving it, that is—than from the faith that real value would show itself indifferent even to the justice that can be done it. Well, I had that faith, but events have proved me very far from indifferent. And the worst of all my regrets has been, as I say, the shame that goes with them. At the time, I felt the largest grandeur of refusal, but it turns out to have aged rather worse than acceptance might have.’

  ‘I can’t make you out,’ her father said, becoming impatient. ‘Am I to understand that you turned down an offer of marriage?’

  This was the point she had come to, but Annabella, as soon as she met it, guessed her own reserves. She could let it press harder still before giving in. A sign, perhaps the first, of her renewal: the strength to put him off. She was equal, for once, even to the necessary lie. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it isn’t that at all.’ Her little secret began to grow from that moment, compacting from the privacy in which she stored it into an awkward irritable lump of obscurity. Her family felt only the discomfort it kept up within her. It made for just what couldn’t be smoothed away—her obstinacy, to which they attributed the two long years of unhappiness that followed. They didn’t see it for what it was, the deep digging in of independence. Lord Byron’s name had the power, for Annabella, of all stolen treasure: it bought freedom with guilt.

  And then, more bitterly, and with what almost passed in her for candour, she added, ‘It isn’t always and only a question of men. What was offered was much larger than marriage—call it fame if you like. And I didn’t suppose I should miss it, but I do.’

  ‘Well, then,’ he repeated, ‘I can’t make you out. You’re too subtle for me, my dear. You always were.’ And then, happily, he hit on an evasion. ‘Shall I fetch your mother?’

  This brought on, in his daughter, a return of the childish. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t!’

  Chapter One

  IT WAS LORD BYRON’S PARTICULAR WISH, expressed in the confidence of Annabella’s perfect agreement, that they be married quietly at Seaham. Cushions were all they required, for kneeling on; he was sure Lady Milbanke would be kind enough to provide them. There were to be no invitations. He had only to arrange a few of his affairs in London ‘for their mutual comfort’ before he could come north—just stopping at Newmarket on the way to take ‘a bachelor’s leave’ of his sister, before he embarked on that remarkable journey ‘from one into two’.

  Annabella could hardly bear the weight of her own impatience. Two years had passed since she first refused his offer of marriage. After a period of silence, during which, as Lord Byron said, ‘he was mourning his suit’, a sort of understanding had sprung up between them. The unhappiness each had caused the other, by that offer and by that refusal, still bound them; and they looked to each other, inevitably, for certain sympathies. In time they became, as he eventually put it, ‘epistolary lovers’. It had been one of the sorest trials of her subtlety to suggest to Lord Byron in the course of a long correspondence, without exposing herself to a charge of inconsistency, that the No with which she had met his first proposal might, under the pressure of a second, split like the shell of a truth to reveal the little nut of a yes within. But her subtlety had triumphed in the end; his proposal came early in the fall of 1814, and Lord Byron himself followed it shortly after to Seaham. Annabella had been sitting in her own room, reading, when she heard his carriage in the drive. Quietly, she put out the candles in her room before descending. She found him in the drawing room, standing by the side of the chimney-piece. He did not move forwards as she approached him but took up her extended hand and kissed it. A silence followed which she could not for the life of her break. That he did was the first thing she had to be grateful for. ‘It is a long time since we met,’ he said. ‘For that, I believe,’ she answered, commanding herself, ‘I have only myself to blame.’ To escape for a moment the strain of his company, she added, ‘Let me call my parents. They are quite on fire to meet you. It is only that they don’t dare to.’

  ‘I am not such a gorgon as all that.’ And then, finding a way to good humour, ‘though frightful enough, I’m sure, in the relation of son. My own mother never liked to admit it.’ This brought out a smile in her. Until he continued, ‘But she’s dead, God bless her—I know I shan’t.’ It was the first note struck of a tendency she began to fear in him: to break against harmony simply for the sake of it.

  Within a week she had sent him away again to attend to his affairs in London, preparatory to their marriage. As soon as his carriage disappeared between the lines of the elms, she regretted her impatience to see him go—since it was only replaced by another,
to see him come back. There was a great deal in her conduct as a lover that she could not think on without blushing, and in Lord Byron’s absence she had nothing to do but think. She had been so silent with him, a silence that perplexed them both extremely, for neither knew how to break it. Her parents, of course, were charmed—he had set out to charm them. Byron talked of Kean and politics with Sir Ralph and village life with Judy, who, to be fair, had managed for the space of his visit to remain plausibly sober. It could not last, and Annabella’s fear of a lapse, as she secretly expressed it to herself, seemed to her at the time reason enough for cutting his visit short.

  Besides, he had seemed to her so strange, moody and unaccountable that they rarely had a minute’s peace together. Peace, perhaps, was not the quality lacking—they had been only too quiet. In the summers when she was a girl, Sir Ralph used to take her sailing out in Seaham harbour with her cousin Sophy. Running south along the shore, they could just make out the humped shapes of the collieries through gaps in the trees on the coastline. Sophy, as the older child, more often than not handled the tiller; but when the winds were low, Sir Ralph put the sheet in Annabella’s clenched fist and told her to pull till the sail flattened. What she remembered most vividly was the awkwardness of a perfect calm: every shift required a startled readjustment. Only when the wind filled again could they relax against its steady pressure. The sense she had in Lord Byron’s company was of perfect calm. Each word or touch produced a light imbalance, and it required the lightest of words, of touches, to restore their tempers.