A Quiet Adjustment (2 page)

Chapter Two

SHE MET HIM AGAIN
a week later at a lecture given by Mr Campbell at the Royal Institute; by this time, she had read his book. She sat in the row behind him—close enough, had she wished it, to trace the line of his neck with her finger. But her hands were cold with nerves in any case; and even the thought of touching his fair skin produced in him, it almost seemed to her, a chilly shudder. She imagined saying to him, ‘I have read your book', a phrase whose insistent repetition in her consciousness precluded much attention to Mr Campbell. Instead, she argued at silent length her conception of the merits and demerits of
Childe
Harold
. And whenever there was a pause in her thoughts or a hush in the hall, she had to restrain herself from leaning forwards and whispering in his ear, ‘I have read your book. Would you like to hear what I think of it?'

She went home afterwards almost feverish with unspoken feeling. Her silence had produced in her something like a fit of temper; at least, she wished to be left alone with her thoughts—she wanted, quietly, to count them up. Home, of course, was the house of Lord and Lady Gosford, the friends of her parents, who had lately arrived. It surprised her, how little she had trusted her own show of gratitude at the family reunion. Her sleeping quarters, for one thing, had been shifted to the top floor; and as she turned on the landing, her mother called to her from her former bedroom and asked her to come in.

‘Did you enjoy the lecture?' Lady Milbanke asked. She sat at her dressing table. Judy (her mother's family nickname) was never an idle woman: a worthy heap of correspondence lay turned over at her right hand.

‘I did,' was her daughter's answer.

‘And what did you learn?'

It was rare in Annabella not to volunteer for the general improvement her own units of edification. ‘I learned,' she nearly answered, ‘the shape of Lord Byron's head.' Instead she replied, ‘Mr Campbell described, in the most personal terms, the Sinking Fund of the Imagination on which a poet could rely as he grew older.'

‘Did you like his text? Did you agree with it?'

Theirs was a family in which such quizzing was treated as the proper commerce of affection and curiosity, but Annabella met it with an answer perhaps a little deficient in both. ‘No, I did not. In that light, making verses scarcely strikes me as a nobler activity than making mayonnaise; it is only a question of the quantity that can be got out of the smallest expenditure of eggs.'

Judy, who was more efficient than unkind, turned to look closely at her daughter. Her eyes, Annabella couldn't help remarking, were narrowly set and gave to her forehead the appearance of a squint; her mother had not aged kindly. Her hair, cut short behind as a girl's, only emphasized something practical and unadorned about her station in life. Beauty in her presence seemed an excess rather than a quality. She was a keen horsewoman, and her complexion had suffered from exposure to the wind—one of Judy's characteristic oddities was that she insisted on Annabella's retaining the babyish milk-white perfection of her own countenance. ‘I suppose, when called upon, you will learn a greater appreciation for the virtue of drawing out,' she now said, ‘otherwise known as making do.' Annabella bowed her head, not for the first time conscious of being carefully and slowly brought along. There was a lesson appropriate to every stage. If she tolerated the management it was only because its first principle seemed to be a complete conviction in her own extraordinary possibilities. Judy was inclined to give her daughter's reticence the kindest interpretation (and the one most flattering to herself). She inquired if her daughter was suffering from a headache? and when Annabella meekly nodded, she was dismissed.

She had for some years failed to enjoy that perfect sympathy of spirits with her mother which her more idealistic notions of home life seemed to require of her. This proved an irritating imperfection. She could relieve it only like an ordinary itch, by scratching at it. Annabella, in the sanctum of her thoughts, sometimes indulged ungenerous feelings towards her mother—she was a sexless, overbearing, etc.—which soon shamed her into love again.

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 her 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.'