A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘If I am not happy, it will be my own fault.’

  He only let go when the carriage moved away.

  Chapter Two

  THEY WERE ALONE TOGETHER, almost for the first time, but until they passed the gates Lord Byron continued, from a sense perhaps of being still in eye-shot, to stare straight ahead of him at the underside of the carriage roof. The line of his profile was vividly distinct against the white background. How well I know it, she reflected lovingly, then remembered having seen it, for years, on his frontispiece. The thought struck her: I have married a famous man. As they were turning into the road, a violent crack of sound erupted behind them. It startled Annabella into breathing; she had half been holding her breath and now leaned her head out the window to look back. The servants, in a ragged line at the front of the house, stood darkly, holding muskets to their shoulders. They had just fired off a volley. Annabella, in a surge of high spirits, laughed, at the—she could hardly have put it into words herself. At the show of it, for such a quiet virtuous studious country girl. Lord Byron, determining to break their silence, found only something to recite. ‘Such a sight as this,’ he said, ‘becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.’

  ‘I’m sure my father,’ she began to say—very eager, if nothing else, to placate him, until she noticed he was smiling, faintly. She smiled more broadly at him, indifferent for once to the fact that smiles only made her round face rounder. Then he took her hands in his. ‘You should have married me two years ago,’ he said. For a moment she thought he meant only a kind of whimsy, a regret that the happiness they now shared had been put off, needlessly, for so long. And she wanted an endearment to respond in kind.

  ‘What shall I call you, sir?’ she said. ‘I can scarcely call you, however much I might think of you as, my lord.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll find names for each other in time.’

  Again, his manner puzzled her, but she took his remark as a corrective, the first of their marriage, from his larger store of experience in such matters. (‘My love’, ‘my sweet’, she had wanted to say.) And Annabella found that she was willing, to an extent that surprised her, to be guided by him. She felt herself pushing a little, impatiently, at Lord Byron, a fact gently brought home to her by a certain pressure on her own affections. It could only be caused, however innocently, by his rebuff. They had time, he seemed to be saying, as much as they could want. She was hurrying him. The coachman, she noted in passing, had ignored her father’s advice and taken the road to Durham after all—a disobedience which, in its way, duly comforted her. She was travelling outside a sphere of influence that she had been accustomed to thinking of as the world itself. To escape it had been, in many ways, the object of her marriage. She had escaped.

  The snow, which had held off in the morning, now began, lightly as spiders, to descend. On landing, the new flakes, many-footed, stood resting on the old. The road was still passable, though they encountered little traffic in the course of the day. Everyone, it seemed, had decided to stop at home, and this only contributed to Annabella’s sense of venturing forth, of embarking. Trees to either side of them broke darkly against the muffled sunshine, which was of that charged oppressive whiteness that suggests the imminence of a thunderclap. It seemed to Annabella not the least of her anxieties, drawn out over the length of that endless journey, that no thunder came—that the heavens continued to thicken silently, while the snow softened underfoot. That cushioning, above and below, rendered their voices (on those rare occasions when they spoke) and the knock of the horses’ hooves and the cries of their driver both quiet and curiously distinct. Only the light changed, as the day wore on and the pallor of the horizon took on a deepening yellow stain.

  At Durham, as they trotted through it, the bells rang out. Lord Byron at last broke his silence. ‘Ringing for our happiness, I presume?’ She could not read his tone. Was he asking for corroboration? Of what? The fact of the intention, to honour their wedding day—or the fact of their happiness? She decided to understand him simply. ‘I expect we have been looked-out for.’

  He smiled at that. ‘I expect we have.’

  She was beginning to tire from the strain of his presence. There was a moment, as the shuttered shops sped by, when she thought of stopping the carriage and getting out. They were running along the High Street and passed the millinery store, above whose bright-red shop-front Mrs Clermont lived. She was an old friend of the Milbankes and had been Annabella’s governess for many years. Annabella considered it a kindness to visit; she sometimes journeyed to Durham only to take her a cake and a bag of tea and sit for an hour with her. It seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to knock against the roof of the coach and descend, leaving Lord Byron to proceed to Halnaby alone. To talk with Mrs Clermont in her little room overlooking the street. Annabella had, after all, a great deal to gossip about. The most natural thing—not nearly so strange as the other. But she did not knock, and the carriage continued regardless, and the houses of Durham grew scarcer on either side of the road, then disappeared altogether on the ascent towards Crook. They drove for a space along the river. It somewhat consoled her to see its current flowing thickly the other way, back to Seaham and the sea.

  Once, to relieve the silence perhaps, Lord Byron broke into a kind of song. Annabella could not make out the words. It had an Eastern ring and reminded her of just those poems through which she had first come to know him. ‘Will you teach it me?’ she interrupted at last. He started, as if he had forgotten her, and said roughly, ‘You wouldn’t much like to know what you were singing.’ She bowed her head at this, humbly and hurt, and he, seeming to repent, took her hand in his and kissed it. He left his lips on her skin, looking up at her, and then, with growing fervour, began to kiss her palm, dropping it as suddenly again. ‘You might have saved me once,’ he said. ‘Now it is too late. I fear very much you will find out you have married a devil.’ Annabella endured all this silently, but no explanation followed, and she hadn’t the heart to require one. She had the sense of waiting him out.

  What she was waiting for, not just in name but in shape and force, oppressed her thoughts. His too, perhaps; and she hopefully supposed it the source of the awkwardness between them, just as it might prove the solution to it. Her first tastes of passion, such as they were, had surprised an appetite she little suspected herself of possessing. She had proved, as Lord Byron said to her, ‘quite caressable into good humour’. Just what else she might be caressable into began to occupy her more and more as they left Durham behind. There was nothing he couldn’t do to her; there was nothing, she guessed, she would not let him do. She was conscious, even then, of reserving for herself a passive part. The burden of anticipation, the task of supporting it, seemed to her active enough.

  There were in the course of a long journey several mute exchanges that seemed, as Annabella put it to herself, to ‘bear upon the question’. Lord Byron had kissed her hand; she had observed him, feeling heat rise to her face. Once, the coachman taking too quickly a bend in the road, she had found herself resting her head against him while he kept quiet and still. In the act of righting herself, Annabella put her hand against his thigh. As she gathered her weight, the carriage lurched again. Lord Byron, curiously inert, supported her shoulder and head upon his breast; and closing her eyes, she for a moment remained recumbent upon him by a forced inaction. The seconds passed. Neither stirred, until the carriage, turning the opposite way, by its own speed released her from his involuntary embrace. Nothing was said, but the silence itself persuaded her that whatever she felt, of uneasiness, of attraction, was shared by him.

  At the inn in Rushyford, they changed horses. Stepping out briefly into the snowy air, she observed him wince. ‘I hate the cold,’ he said. And she, rising at once to meet him in sympathy, replied, ‘It must be very painful for your . . .’ until he stared her out of the end of her sentence. She didn’t yet dare. They spent a few minutes inside, warming
their hands together at the fire with their backs to the room. She wanted at least to make a show of conversation; it was their wedding day, after all. There were people about. ‘How much longer to Halnaby is it, do you suppose?’ To which he repeated, ‘You should have married me when I first proposed.’

  She, at a push, found something to smile at this time. ‘I think you mean that it can’t be as long as two years.’ And then, when he did not look up, she added, ‘Surely now there’s no need to regret the past. We have time enough.’ But the coachman then returning, Lord Byron was spared an answer and preceded his bride briskly into the carriage.

  The sun set before them in a muffle of cloud, though for a bright half hour they squinted against the pervading whiteness. It was an eight-hour journey to Halnaby from Seaham, but through the long day she looked at him perhaps a dozen times: he so insistently stared in front. Annabella had not known what to expect of their enforced solitude. It had not been this—this electric silence. She had supposed herself rather in danger of too readily complying to his greed for her (that was her phrase for it) and had wasted her anxieties in composing, ahead of time, a number of subjects on which they might calmly discourse. None of them now, as she counted them over in her head, seemed appropriate. She could almost smile, with the wisdom of a wife, at the girl she had been. Of course, Lord Byron was right. Such silence was just what would suit them. It had the tendency, in her at least, to arouse her own greed for him, though as the dark set around them, that greed appeared to her in its plainest form: she was terribly lonely and cold. She wanted, more than anything, a word of comfort from him, a little warmth.

  Nightfall, it seemed, had its own effect upon him. In the darkness she ventured to examine her husband more closely. Curly hair partly obscured his high forehead and the peculiar fineness of his ears, which were harp-like, distinctly shaped. His blunt, masculine nose and square cleft chin suggested the soldier or the statesman more than the poet. But his lips and large eyes were almost indecently soft and boyish, eloquent of vanities and sympathies and enthusiasms—to say nothing of a painful susceptibility to his own changing temper. There was bitterness, too, written in the lines between his brows and around his mouth. Feeling her gaze upon him, he burst out, ‘This is intolerable!’ And when she shrank, at the edge of tears, into her corner of the carriage, he turned towards her for the first time in an hour with an urgency of manner that was not ungentle: ‘I wonder how much longer I shall be able to keep up the part I have been playing.’

  It was all she could do to summon a little voice. ‘Have you been playing a part, my lord? I wish you would not. I should not have thought we needed parts to play.’

  ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘you have only been pretending to love me. You cannot love me as I am.’

  And then, in her highest tone (which she for the first time suspected of priggishness), Annabella replied, ‘That is what I have vowed to do.’

  ‘Brave girl!’

  His face in deep shadow was almost unreadable—was he mocking her? She finally took her courage in both hands. ‘Have you been only pretending to love me?’ Her voice, as she asked it, was perfectly steady and clear; there was not the tremor of an appeal. They had come to the point, but only then did Annabella guess how awkwardly she had felt it intruding, regardless of the way she wriggled—ever since his first proposal, throughout their protracted engagement and that long day’s silent journey. Afterwards, she remembered the question and marvelled at how simply she had faced it.

  ‘How can you ask me that?’ he said, at his wits’ end.

  Her nerve failed her then; Annabella decided to take this as reassurance enough. There were tears on both sides, which he caressed them out of, kissing them off her chin, her cheeks, the line above her lip. She put her palms to his face and with her fingers rubbed the wet out of his eyes: she had never touched his face. His hand, with the force almost of anger, ran down her neck and the length of her spine. He began to grip her thigh from behind her, and she felt for the first time the indifference to everything else of the appetite he had awakened. There was nothing like sentiment in it, very little like love, and she waited with shut eyes to feel what else he might do to her, when the coach slowed to a halt and the coachman knocked his fist against the roof. Halnaby Hall had appeared, in its own light: eight splendid windows in two rows, casting a mullioned glitter. The servants (a half dozen of them) stood on the balcony above the drive to greet the happy couple.

  Lord Byron barely gave them a glance as he hobbled inside. Annabella, still breathless, managed to compose herself before she stepped out into the snow. Wondering a little: what had she done to displease him? And she began to blame herself for putting on, at the coachman’s knock, too quickly a public face. Perhaps she had even looked her relief. They had in their communications always been sensitive to slights and misunderstandings, and she was conscious of having entered an arena in which the least gesture was liable to misinterpretation, if only because her grasp of the language was still very weak. The butler, who had been hovering on the steps, now introduced himself—a Mr Payne, a large-headed, large-handed, slack-jawed, somewhat ageless young man, whose manner communicated cheerfulness and hesitation in equal measure. He took upon ‘himself the duty of welcoming Lord and Lady—I mean, Lady Byron, to Halnaby Hall’ and wished them a pleasant stay, which he would do everything in his power to ensure. He was perfectly at their disposal; they were to consider him ‘quite their own’.

  Leaving the servants to manage their boxes, Annabella followed Lord Byron inside. Lord Wentworth, her uncle, had been regarded in their family circle with as much awe as pride. He was Judy’s brother and incalculably richer than Sir Ralph; Annabella, in fact, had only once in her childhood been to visit Halnaby Hall. This was in the first flush of favour that attended Sir Ralph’s election to the House. The invitation itself, greatly cherished, had seemed to usher in a new stage in the Milbankes’ fortunes: such was the hospitality it entitled them to. But as her father’s amiable helplessness began to declare itself in the bumbling of his career, no second invitation came. Lord Wentworth contented himself with keeping up their relations at a respectable distance. It seemed to Annabella by no means unlikely that only her marriage to so great a figure as Lord Byron had persuaded her uncle to offer them the use of Halnaby for a honeymoon. She bore him little gratitude. Annabella, as a girl, had been amazed and strangely hurt by Judy’s deference to the abrupt old man; it was very unlike her mother. Judy, however, had always regarded her brother as a model of virtue and rough gentlemanly common sense. It was by the contrast to him that Sir Ralph had occasionally suffered in their otherwise loving marriage.

  Annabella had turned eight years old in the course of that stay and was given a very grand, very miserable birthday party to celebrate the fact. Lord Wentworth, who was childless, invited his county friends, and Judy insisted that Annabella thank him publicly for his kindness. At the end of her party, for which she had been too nervous to eat more than a piece of her birthday cake, Sir Ralph, painfully complicit, lifted Annabella underneath her arms and stood her on the piano stool to deliver her thanks—which she did, as Judy afterwards commended her, a little quietly but very prettily, to her mother’s great satisfaction and pride. By supper-time, however, the small girl was running a fever, and Annabella spent much of the night being sick and the last two days of their visit in bed. Feeling again childish with the memory, Annabella thought of that cake, which was made of almond paste and decorated with currants, as she began to explore the house in search of her husband.

  Lord Wentworth had classical tastes and an appetite for grandeur. The stairs in the hall were overlooked by a high-hung portrait of Sir Thomas More, in rich and gloomy reds, by van Dreisdale; there was a bust of Aristedes on the landing. It was a puzzle indeed, a lesson in the effects of time, for Annabella to consider them again from her larger view. There was something too insistent in the appointments. More modesty would
have conveyed a more satisfied ambition. Her family, on every side—she had only begun to suspect it, after her contact with Lord Byron and the circles in which he moved—was guilty of puffing itself up. She knew now, or could guess, what real fame, what real influence, looked like. Only a wide view by Canaletto of the Grand Canal in Venice offered her any pleasure: it showed a fine cold day in early spring or late autumn (there were no trees to judge by). A gust of sea-wind had sketched a little uncertainty, a little urgency, into the man-made channels. One could feel a heavily bearded, bow-legged gondolier just allowing himself to sway with it, keeping his feet by giving way. It hung over the doorway to the drawing room, in which she found Lord Byron, resting his foot on one of the sofa-cushions. He rose this time quickly to greet her and shut the door behind her, and all her old childishness, the sense of it, returned.

  After he was through with her, she sat for a minute recomposing herself on the sofa. He had gone upstairs to change. Little had been said between them: she took this as an indication of preference and was very quick, in these matters, to guess at his tastes. The greed in his face (that was the word she had decided to keep to) left her no room for doubting his—sincerity; and in fact, a dim sense of her own expressions, of pleasure and pain, suggested at least that sincerity of a kind had not been lacking in her. Something had been done away with, a veil had been torn aside, of fine-feeling or hypocrisy, she could not yet be sure; and for a moment, as she sat there shivering, not quite giving way to sobs, if only because of the close heat of the well-laid fire, she was conscious of being for the first time (and she could put it no clearer than this) unadorned. Her sense of it proved how ‘dressed up’ she was accustomed to being—discomfort, not painless, remained from her undressing. She hugged her corseted stomach with crossed arms. ‘Have you been only pretending to love me?’ she remembered asking her husband. There was, if nowhere else, in Lord Byron’s clear appetite something for her to be sure of; and from a depth of loneliness of which she had never supposed herself capable, that at least struck her as something to cling to.