A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  She had begun to concern herself over his drinking, although her least remonstrance threatened to call forth, in his justifications, the example of her mother—she could only reprove the one behaviour by acknowledging the evil of the other. On the whole she kept quiet; at least, she said less than she might have, than she wished to. He had discovered in the cellars a cache of Tokay vintnered in the year of his birth, and vowed to get through it by the end of their stay. He drank heavily at lunch, afterwards retiring to the library ‘to work’ with a flask of ‘right sherries’, as he called it, in hand. By suppertime, he was rarely steady, and having ordered Payne to open several bottles of burgundy and let them breathe, he ‘hated to see them go off’ and finished, sometimes, even the remnants of Annabella’s glass. She found herself against her will attempting to keep pace, if only for the sake of his sobriety; and though he was rarely, as he put it, ‘savagely drunk’ by bedtime, they indulged what they called their ‘greed’ for each other in a manner that suggested rather the anger than the kindness of love. What surprised Annabella was how quickly she had come to feel dependent even on those rough tokens of his affection.

  Their isolation was great; they saw no company, and the house was too large to be thoroughly kept warm. The hallways, lofty and overlooked by high windows, were particularly bitter, and Annabella used to run from the fire in her bedroom to the fire in the sitting room without drawing breath. They relied on each other for heat if nothing else; and Annabella was almost grateful to the cold, in that it prompted Lord Byron sometimes to huddle beside her on a chair or rug and permit his wife to fold her arms about him. These were her happiest interludes. They might lie for as much as an hour together, wordlessly—she, waiting for him to speak, for fear of breaking the spell that held them. She was always, Annabella had learned, saying the wrong thing and began to practise her silences. These, she discovered, could also offend. ‘I only want a woman to laugh,’ he once said to her, as they were thus entwined, ‘and don’t care what she is besides. I can make Augusta laugh at anything.’

  What she wanted was to be, as she put it to herself, ‘more natural’, but it wasn’t a thing one could act, and she was conscious in the weeks to come of using too much muscle. The fact, palpably, made itself felt. She was constantly tired. And occasionally tiresome: she sensed it herself, by the tension kept up within her of a leash in the hand. She was pulling at him, and it struck her eventually that the fault of that contest lay only partly in the creature harnessed. At least, sometimes, he managed to pull her along. She had never before considered herself a burden, and the real lesson it taught her, in feeling him shoulder his share, was how great was the weight she used to carry on her own.

  In the afternoons, he was engaged in working up a number of songs on biblical themes for a set of tunes composed by one of his friends. He sat in the library in his overcoat, drinking and writing. At first, she used to join him there, reading, or standing at the fire with her back to it, so that she could look over his shoulder at the half-finished verses. ‘I don’t want you,’ he finally said to her. ‘I hope we are not always to be together—that won’t do for me, I assure you.’

  Later, he relented (it amazed her sometimes, his indulgence) and allowed her to transcribe his pointed scrawl in her fairer hand. They spent long, almost happy afternoons together, in perfect silence, both writing. He insisted that she keep her distance and pushed one of the tables under a window for her to serve as a desk. It overlooked a slope of lawn running down to a brown sketch of elms, which bordered a frozen stream. She watched the short days set behind the trees, a dirty light that spread its stain up the snowy hillside to the shrubs in the beds below her sill. Then it climbed up the wall. When it reached her, she stopped—till the sun set, she could see nothing more than the ache of yellow in her eyes. Her knuckles grew stiff with cold, and she began to drink hot grog after lunch to keep fingers and heart warm. Contented enough to sit near him, and sometimes quite blissful, when the beauty of his verses flowed on to her page as if they had but freshly occurred to him. She felt, almost, the force of them in her own hand, as if she held it against a fall of water.

  They spent several afternoons in this companionable silence, which Annabella liked all the better for the steady view it gave her of Lord Byron’s best, most patient and considered self. She supposed herself to be, in copying his hasty script, a conduit to another age. There was something indeed in the mere act of writing out fair that suggested the role she was playing, careful, loving, neat, in preserving his name. Hers was, she could almost imagine, the fist of posterity. And yet at other times she felt only too vividly the personal element; these songs became, she grew convinced, Lord Byron’s private language of love and apology to her. He could express himself in them with a free-hearted clarity that the pressure of her affections otherwise forbade, and she occasionally suffered from the curious feeling, as she picked out a line of his text, of being complicit in his own opinion of her—of playing, as it were, both sides of the marriage question, husband and wife, and admiring from this detachment equally the suffering of the victim and the eloquence of her abuser.

  It was their custom, after breakfast, to remove to the sitting room and read. Sometimes Lord Byron, from a general restlessness or a more particular sore head, asked his wife to read aloud to him, while he sat in the easy chair, pushed up to the fire, and closed his eyes. His manner at these times was wonderfully indifferent and relaxed, and Annabella could not help, occasionally, attempting to provoke him to a response. He crossed his legs at the ankles with his feet against the fender; he rested his clasped hands on his stomach and pointed his chin in the air. It was the heat he basked in, but his wife, she thought, might be forgiven for thinking that in the general sum of warmth her own poor contribution of love was just another quantity. One morning, after a sleepless unhappy night, Annabella chose an album of their letters, which she had put together in the long delay preceding his arrival in Seaham. She even dressed up for the occasion, in jewels and ribboned braids: she was determined to begin an assault upon what she considered the constant quiet level of unhappiness in their relations. What she wanted him to feel was just how large a quantity her love made up. The scale of it was something which, in her way, she might admit to being proud of, and perhaps a note of that pride made itself felt in her voice.

  ‘I wish for you, want you, Byron mine, more every hour,’ she read out, very prettily, in clear carrying accents. ‘All my confidence has returned—never to sink again, I believe. A confidence in the power of my affection to make me anything, everything that you and I wish.’ He did not stir; he might have been asleep. ‘Do I understand you? you asked. Surely I do, for without understanding of the completest kind, I should fear to love you less, if you proved any different from that which has made me love you.’ It was a queer sort of recital. Annabella felt the queerness of it, and that within her praise was a sting of reproach; but there was also, she hoped, the balm to soothe it with. ‘I have no such fears.’ She repeated: ‘I have no fears.’ And then, continuing, ‘I have always insisted (you may guess how often I am quizzed about your character) that you are the most lovable of men,’ whereat Lord Byron interrupted,

  ‘Then if I were unfaithful, you should not resent it?’

  His eyes were still closed. She did not at first answer, until he, sitting up and looking her in the face, insisted. ‘I ask only for information.’

  She still considered her reply. At length, carefully, slowly, Annabella offered: ‘I have been taught to believe that a wife had better not notice deviations which are more likely to be repented of if her own conduct continues kind and constant.’

  ‘Then you would let me be unfaithful?’

  ‘No—that is a different thing.’ She was perfectly equal, Annabella discovered, to meeting his stare. ‘Even as your friend I should love you too well to let you do what would injure yourself.’

  He smiled at that and repeated, ‘Oh
, as my friend . . . You have a very pleasant notion of injury. It might surprise you to hear that Augusta has no such scruples.’

  She had nothing to say to this.

  ‘Does it surprise you?’

  ‘I cannot answer for her conduct.’

  ‘Be careful,’ he said, with imperfect consequence, ‘before you attack my sister. I think you will find that it does not help your case. She is the only woman who has ever loved me—as I am. A love of the completest kind, as you put it, must include an understanding of one’s little sins, to call them no worse. No other love is worthy of the name.’ And then, very coolly, ‘I thought you would be more malleable.’

  It was that word, she later reflected, which set her off: malleable, to a point, is what she had intended to be. Hadn’t she taken pains that very morning to dress the part of loving wife, just as a woman might, to her advantage, appear in it? The failure of her little experiment upon their happiness, as she framed it to herself, was perfectly evident. And the consciousness of wasted energies, as much as anything else, induced in her a quiet show of tears, to accommodate which she hardly needed to increase her breathing. The effort to support her role (kind, just, loving, temperate) was sometimes too great for her. But her misery seemed to irritate him further. ‘This is intolerable,’ he said. ‘I will not be tear-beaten into marriage.’ And then, from a greater depth of unhappiness: ‘You provoke me, you know you do, by your damned tolerant virtuous tireless suffering. It is too much; I will not stand it. I cannot stand it.’

  ‘You forget,’ she said, with a hint of anger, ‘that we are married.’

  ‘For the moment. I will live with you, if I can, until I have got an heir—until I have got an heir. And then—and then—we shall see.’

  At lunch, they never mentioned the scene, and after lunch something happened to lighten their mood. Lord Byron had discovered a billiard room at the back of the house overlooking the terrace; in it were stowed dirty boots and overcoats, some of them piled across the table itself. His lordship had asked Payne to see that it was cleared up. After his meal, he decided he wanted a walk, if only for air. He was sick of the close heat of fires, which had not, he said, ‘the fragrance of a honeymoon but the settled smell of marriage’. He wouldn’t dream of troubling his wife, he was only going ‘to stomp once around’ and come back in. Annabella watched him go; she was too unhappy to move. In a minute he returned and taking her hand led her back along the corridor very quietly. There were sounds coming from the billiard room, but he drew her outside, into the cold, and then along the balcony to a window. He signalled for her to look in. She was shivering already, in her muslin gown, from the chill, and it may have been the shivering that induced her to giggle. The window gave on to the billiard room. The table had been cleared, and Payne was playing a game in the company of Miss Minns, who had been assigned to Annabella as a lady’s maid, although she was a stout beet-faced woman of forty-five. They were clearly in high spirits. There were boots and coats everywhere on the floor, and instead of using sticks, they played with their hands, rolling two balls rapidly against each other from opposite ends of the table. Occasionally, a loud crack announced a successful hit. Annabella could hear the concussion through the windowpanes, although their laughter, which attended these collisions, could only be seen and not heard. Lord Byron leaned over her and whispered, ‘I suppose, Pip, they are very much in love?’ which only made Annabella giggle more. Payne, for all anyone knew, might have been a respectable grandfather, but he looked no more than twenty-five years old. The contrast between his threadbare youthfulness and Miss Minns’s solidly maternal charms seemed irresistible to Annabella—although the longer they stood watching, and the colder she became, the contrast that struck her most was rather between the couple outside and the couple within. Lord Byron seemed to feel it at the same moment.

  In the afternoon, her husband as usual retired to work, and Annabella joined him in the library. The light crept up the hill. As she sat by her window, looking out, he came over to her chair and laid a set of verses on the table, which she with the promptness and indifference of a scribe began to copy onto a fresh sheet. It was only as she reached the second stanza, with the sunset working against her sight, that the meaning of the lines began to make itself felt.

  I saw thee weep—the big bright tear

  Came o’er that eye of blue,

  And then methought it did appear

  A violet dropping dew.

  I saw thee smile—the sapphire’s blaze

  Beside thee ceased to shine.

  It could not match the living rays

  That filled that glance of thine.

  As clouds from yonder sun receive

  A deep and yellow dye,

  Which scarce the shade of coming eve

  Can banish from the sky,

  Those smiles unto the moodiest mind

  Their own pure joy impart.

  Their sunshine leaves a glow behind

  That lightens o’er the heart.

  It was an apology, perhaps, as much as a token of love. What was it he had said of Augusta, that he only wanted a woman he could make laugh? Well, Annabella had laughed, and the lines were very pretty, and for a day at least she could believe them to be true.

  Chapter Five

  MOST NIGHTS LORD BYRON WAS too drunk to sleep well. He woke before dawn and, too restless to recompose himself, would crawl out of bed and begin, as she once put it to him in the morning, ‘to haunt the corridors’. He complained of noises in the night. It was a big empty house; he feared intrusions. The only sounds Annabella heard were the creak of his steps in the halls as he paced up and down them—sometimes, as she learned, when he retired again to bed, by the gleam of it, with a dagger in his hand. The hint of excess in his unhappiness she was not too in love with her husband to overlook. He dressed himself in it as one might in rich clothes, and she saw it as her duty to teach him a simpler habit. That she was in love with Lord Byron her own urgent desire to console him made perfectly plain. One night as he returned to her, worn out from his vigil, she moved to lay her head against his breast. She wanted him to feel her warmth, but he only said, more gently than he was used to, ‘You should have a softer pillow than my heart.’

  He talked a great deal of his sister and once, in a happier mood, compared Annabella to her: they had the same round face and shy, perplexing manners, though he had ‘unpuzzled Augusta’ and hoped to do the same for his wife in time. Of course, they had their differences, too, he said, and added, looking at her teasingly, that his sister, for example, always wore drawers. She blushed and in her confusion suggested that they invite her to Halnaby for the last week of their stay. It might be a relief to them to have a little company, and she was fully determined to claim Augusta as a sister. Lord Byron at first demurred, in some alarm. He warned that a visit from Gus would not contribute to their ‘hymeneal harmony’; that Augusta made claims upon him, as her brother, which he could not resist; and that Pip might find her Duck a bird of altered feather in his sister’s company. In short, Annabella did not know what she was about. But Annabella was determined. She had no such wifely jealousies as Lord Byron imputed to her, and she would be glad herself, it might surprise him to know, to have about them in the large cold house what he once described to her as the ‘softening presence’ of another woman. Miss Minns’s manners, she feared (venturing boldly into a little joke), were not quite so comforting or comfortable. She wrote to Augusta that evening, and for a day or two, in fact, her husband seemed to her in better spirits: Lord Byron drank less and slept more and spoke of what they might do when his sister came.

  They even spent an afternoon at the billiard table, though Annabella insisted on learning to play in the orthodox fashion. Lord Byron obliged by standing over her and guiding the cue in her hand—in its own way, she supposed, striking through the ball, a scene just as affecting a
s the one they had witnessed together. Duck, however, despaired of instructing his wife. Pip played too rigidly, by calculation, as it were, and had not the easy manner to bring a shot off happily. Besides, she proceeded too slowly, she spoiled the sport of it. Annabella herself felt that she was ‘getting in her own way’. Her corset, for one thing, struck her as awkwardly constricting. She guessed that her own patience, for improving, was quickly beginning to tire her husband’s, for teaching her. And he began to play more seriously, commanding the table for great stretches, and beating her steadily. It was a question of grace, he said—that is, one must give to a skill the appearance of luck. Angelo, his fencing-master, who despised the brute bulk of the boxer, had a phrase for it, applied to swordplay. He called it ‘muscling’, his English was very rough, but it perfectly suited the action, and Annabella might be said to be ‘muscling the shot’. Her husband’s lecture only determined her to beat him more, though that determination seemed to have the very effect he was describing. He found her anger charming, which provoked her exceedingly, until he placated her in the usual way. Later, she overheard him instructing Payne to clean off the baize. He had had his wife on the billiard table, he said, and there had been a little ‘untidiness’.

  The next day a letter from Gus arrived. Her husband was stuck at home and would not spare her; there were also the children to be considered, a constraint with which Annabella, she had no doubt, would shortly sympathize. No, it would not do, much as she longed to, she could not get away. Although, perhaps, on their return to London, her brother might be persuaded to stop for an extended visit? If only, as Augusta charmingly put it, for the purpose of ‘introducing a sister to her’. That was the hope she would cherish in the meantime; Annabella must know how attached she was to ‘dearest B’. Gus then struck the note of confession—in part, no doubt, Annabella ungraciously reflected, for the purpose of disarming. She had been almost overcome by emotion on their wedding day. Augusta made no apologies for the fact. Only, raised as she had been by the generosity of strangers, it had made an epoch in her life when she learned of a nearer relation: a younger brother (or a half-brother, at least), living all the time within a day’s journey, and entering just those interesting stages of life which women were barred from enjoying themselves. His school, his university, his travels—Annabella could imagine how much Gus delighted in his letters. They came to depend on each other alone for the comforts of family, and the thought of losing Byron to a stranger had made her go dark, for a minute, as the bells rang out the hour of their wedding. She had sat down with her children in a heap upon her lap and she could not hear or feel them; they tugged at her hair, they pulled at her face, she clung to them so hard. Her only consolation, which she promised herself afterwards, was the right to claim Annabella ‘for her own’. She planned to insist on it . . .