Chapter Two

HER PARENTS HAD TAKEN a house at Kirkby Mallory, near Teesdale, where their good friends the Gosfords spent the country seasons. It was a large plain-looking L-shaped hall with a clock tower and a new roof, which glinted in the carriage-lamp as Annabella’s party turned at last into the yard. The rain in which they set forth had given way, in the course of their long journey, to clearer colder weather. The yard had not been swept, and the wheels, as they came to a stop, with the horses sweating and steaming, creaked in the snow. Ada had been asleep upon their arrival, and Annabella left her with Mrs Clermont as she made her way, darkly, into the kitchens. They had been taken to the back entrance, and this was the first sign—Annabella, in spite of her misery, was quick enough to note it—of disordered management and what it suggested about the state of her parents’ affairs.

She was sitting in front of the fire in the parlour—no others had been lit, a girl said, ‘everyone was living upstairs’—when her father came down at last to greet her. Sir Ralph had an air of affectionate embarrassment. His daughter knew him well enough to guess the cause of it. Her reception had fallen short of the expected warmth, although she admitted privately that nothing could have lived up to her sense of homecoming after so bitter a leave-taking. ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said. ‘Your mother particularly requested to be awoken when you came, but I have taken it upon myself, for once, to disobey her. She has not yet quite recovered from her—indisposition at Christmas.’

It was always a source of disagreement between them, how to refer to the malady from which her mother suffered. Annabella was inclined with the doctors to call it a nervous condition, but Sir Ralph, for his own reasons, tended to touch on it more lightly and treated her episodes as nothing more significant than a series of unlucky ailments. There was, in any case, no shortage for either of them of terms to shy from. Still, as he went on, she guessed that a change had been wrung in his own conception of the illness and perhaps in the illness itself.

‘She had been sleeping very badly, but Dr Kendall is confident (thank God) that the crisis is passed. She wants rest—it may take some time—and I decided,’ he attempted a smile, ‘to defy her, come what may. We had tried her at first on a course of emetics, which had the consequence, certainly, of increasing her thirst for natural waters; but she felt the indignity of it, and slept so badly, and looked so wasted and thin that the doctor, who, to be fair, has shown a laudable willingness to experiment with new ideas, prescribed a simpler diet, at night, of laudanum. She sleeps, perhaps, no better than before but longer, undoubtedly, and has begun, as her dose has declined, to recover an appetite.’ After a moment, he added: ‘There was some fear at first of damage sustained to the . . . nervous system, but your mother has really been—progressing so well and so—bravely—that the doctor holds out hopes of a complete recovery.’

The effect on Annabella of this little speech was to quiet within her the story of her own affliction, which had been bubbling away to the rhythm of the four-in-hand for several hours: ‘I am your daughter again; he has sent me away.’ It was a lesson, and she was not too fatigued by her journey to make a note of it, that her suffering lay at the centre only of her own life. One could not expect the world to turn around it, and she vowed, inwardly, to preserve ‘the secret’ of her sorrow. Or rather, she resolved, at least, to demand from her mother a great deal of affectionate pressure before she could be persuaded to give in to it. ‘My dear,’ Sir Ralph said suddenly, ‘let me kiss you; I have not so much as kissed you.’ He bent his large foolish amiable head to her own. Her hand, as she responded, clutched the tuft of grey curls over his ear. She closed her eyes and felt on her face the scratch of his cheek; he had not shaved. It seemed to her then that she was home at last and safe. Tears sprang to her shut eyes, at the thought of what she had suffered, in relief at the prospect of suffering no more. Her father sensed the fierce little urgency with which she clutched at him. ‘My poor girl,’ he repeated, ‘my poor girl; whatever’s the matter?’ in a tone she had learned to recognize, by its sweet helplessness, as the voice he adopted whenever he supposed some greater or more difficult competence might be required of him.

‘Nothing,’ she said, retreating again and finding in her sleeve a handkerchief. ‘Only I am cold and tired and have eaten nothing since tea.’ She made a face for him of sniffling unhappiness. She was playing the game they had always played together, father and daughter. Hers was the voice, as he used to call it, of ‘the miserable good girl’ who, he would add, ‘always got what she wanted’. What she wanted, however, she realized now, was her mother; it was the voice she used to keep at bay his deeper curiosity, which he for the most part was perfectly willing to suspend. ‘I shouldn’t mind,’ he said, ‘a little something myself, if only to help me sleep.’ He was older than she had remembered him. His complexion, which had always been made up of reds and whites in equal measure, had a dullness now that softened the contrast between them. He looked as if he had been caught out in the sun, a little dry. ‘The fact is,’ he added, and this confessional mode was new to him, too, ‘I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Your mother often—needs me in the night.’

It wasn’t till lunch the next day that Judy arose to welcome her daughter home. Annabella had got up early and gone for a walk through the grounds. The heavens had that peculiar white cloudless pallor of a northern winter. Annabella, after her confinement, was just beginning to enjoy again, as she put it to Sir Ralph—when he had asked her, on such a raw day, ‘to stop within; the snow will spoil your boots’—‘the use of her legs’. Empty skies and cold exercise gave her the sense briefly of having ‘cleared her head’. Lord Byron had been used to teasing her, whenever she reproached him for unkindness, that she was very welcome ‘to run back to her mother like a spoilt little girl’. Well, she did him the justice of acknowledging now that she had run back. And if he had played his part in pushing her to it, she was willing to believe that he had only meant to put her ‘to the test’—a test her love had failed. The fact was, her reception at Kirkby Mallory had failed to live up to the contrast she had imagined between her parents’ and her husband’s affection. She had awoken in the strange bedroom, with its view of the frozen woods, still lonelier than she had been at Piccadilly Terrace. Augusta was not there; Augusta alone had understood.

When she got back, she sat down at the card-table in the sitting room and wrote him a letter. She had been composing it quietly in her head, against the background of an attention always a little occupied by the task of finding dry snow to step in.

Dearest Duck,

We got here quite well last night and were ushered into the kitchen instead of the drawing room by a mistake that might have been agreeable enough to hungry people. The house, I believe, would just suit you; it is large enough for any number of mothers-in-law and babies! Such a W.C! and such a sitting room or sulking room all to yourself. I have managed to keep for my private use a whole morning, undisturbed, to write to you and to Gus. If I were not always looking about for B, I should be a great deal better already, a great deal steadier in temper and health, for country air. Miss finds her provisions increased and fattens thereon. It is a good thing she can’t understand all the flattery bestowed upon her, the ‘Little Angel’. Love to the good goose and everybody’s love to you both from hence.

Ever thy most loving
Pippin . . . Pip—ip.

Lies, mostly; she had been welcomed, if anything, somewhat sparsely. And the attention of the house was so forcibly directed at the convalescence of its mistress that there was little warmth to spare for a poor small child. But it was in the note to Augusta, which she slipped inside it, that she allowed herself to communicate her true feelings. ‘I have left a home behind me, in a very disordered and uncertain state, and have arrived at another home, in equal uncertainty and disorder—but its troubles are not my own, NOT my own. Consolation, dearest Augusta, lies chiefly in the fact of having resigned to you the task of looking after him. Never was there a creature who took such taking care of as my husband your brother—excepting perhaps myself, which is really the root of all our troubles, I believe, just as you have been, as far as you were able, the solution to them . . .’ Writing these notes had on her the effect of a secret kept. She sealed them and resigned them to the butler to post; by the time Judy descended, to take a little something at lunch, Annabella felt sufficiently shielded by her own private troubles to face up to the contemplation of her mother’s.

Her mother’s appearance, however, was not quite what Annabella had been expecting. She moved, it is true, with a delicacy that bespoke her stretched, discriminating nerves and sat down to eat with both her hands on the table. Her red windblown face had grown paler and softer by enforced confinement. It had now the almost embarrassed and adipose complexion of something unused to exposure. Her short hair had lengthened, roughly. She had got fatter, too, but the fatness suggested a kind of health, the renewal in her of decent appetites. The butler, a surprisingly small man referred to as Mr Arthur—he had a reed-like upright posture and musical voice—spoke quietly to her but without gloves, as it were, without too gentle a deference. There was nothing of apology in her own manner. She ate well, too, with a steady patient hunger: a meal of hot broth, warm bread and cold chicken. She picked for some time over the remains, carefully cleaning her fingers, after each bone, in a bowl of water one of the maids brought out to her. She drank several cups of tea and had in general the air of a woman with time on her hands—she seemed pleasantly, expectantly uncertain of how to fill it. What astonished Annabella most, in her mother’s mood, was its expansiveness; she had imagined a humbler retraction. Judy wanted to talk and was particularly pleased to see her daughter, she said, ‘because Ralph was beginning to tire of me.’

‘Nonsense, my dear,’ he answered. His own appetite, in Judy’s presence, seemed diminished; he had contented himself with dipping a little bread into his soup and leaving the crusts on his plate. Annabella counted them. It was unlike her father to be careful of his food. It suggested how much of his life, of his household dealings, had come under the scope of necessary calculations. He had accepted the role of preaching restraint to his wife and could hardly make an exception of his own example. One could not resist, after a while, giving in to a general habit of moderation. Judy’s health had needed so strict a management that he had begun to manage himself and looked the poorer for it.

‘Not at all,’ Lady Milbanke replied. ‘You hope to keep me quiet, not for my own sake, but yours. I believe I have talked you out. Besides, I have things to tell Annabella that I shouldn’t like you to hear.’

‘Naturally.’ He blushed, then replied more sharply, ‘I’m sure you have a great deal to complain of.’ Annabella was unused to seeing, in the open oval of his face, the tightness of withheld reproach. She resolved not to blame him. Patience, she had learned first hand, like a cut flower, begins to lose colour in time.

‘The secrets of wives,’ Judy said, with a nod to Annabella, ‘are not always and only complaints.’ Then she added, with a deliberate humility, ‘I have only become shy, lately, of depending too much on you.’

Her father, she noticed, had drunk nothing at lunch; the retraction was all his own. Afterwards, he confided to Annabella that her mother had one way of talking ‘in the sunshine’ and another ‘in the moonlight’. For his part, he slept poorly and was often a dull dog in the day; at night he had his wits about him. ‘But the nights,’ he added, ‘were growing shorter—she improves.’

Such confidences were the air she breathed in; she hadn’t yet had the space to breathe out. Judy’s secrets, as it happened, were mostly complaints. Annabella’s private afflictions, in the week that followed, were buried under the weight of her mother’s, which nevertheless touched curiously upon her own. Judy had presumed when she married her father that his modest assurance was nothing but a kind of ambition. He was very well connected. It seemed to her that, at a certain level of society, nothing but decency and common sense were required ‘for getting on’. Ralph was decent and sensible; his reticence struck her as a kind of easiness or carelessness. It was only the poor, she argued by analogy, who counted their money; the rich could make a show of indifference. She had been very ambitious herself, that’s what she wished to say, but was willing to take from him a lesson in the finer graces of it. Only, she had mistaken him from the beginning. His aspirations, such as they were, belonged to some private arena from which she felt increasingly her exclusion. Her notion of a life well lived did not tally with his, and she was made to appreciate the vulgarity of her conception. He settled into marriage, congratulating himself on a job well done—which seemed to her only an excuse for leaving all the other jobs to her.

This, with several digressions, was the story Annabella heard in the course of a housebound week. The London rain had followed them north, where it turned to snow. It fell in a clatter from the roof and piled up outside the sitting-room windows, which were fogged and wet to the touch, in drifts as high as the lintels. The room (she gave Sir Ralph her opinion) was simply too large for the fire to heat it—the truth of which was vividly illustrated one morning when the maid had to stand on a chair to sweep cobwebs from the ceiling with her broom. Judy had decided to take the house in hand again and presided, from the comfort of her convalescence, over a fever of activity, which drove her husband to the dusty quiet of his study. In fact, he was glad to be relieved, for once, of the duty of keeping Lady Milbanke cheerful, on which Doctor Kendall had particularly insisted. When Ada cried, Mrs Clermont brought her in to feed. (Her present trouble, Judy confided, began when she was encouraged to drink porter while nursing.) Otherwise, Anna-bella had her mother to herself. She pushed two armchairs to the foot of the hearth, and they baked and froze together, taking it in turns to warm each side. Annabella never once said to her, though the words were constantly on her lips: I have left my husband; he has sent me away.

Instead, she endured silently her mother’s misplaced admiration. Lord Byron, Judy understood now, was an image of the kind of man one ought to marry if one hoped to cut a figure in the world. It was no use angling for decency or common sense; these qualities brought one at last to Seaham or Kirkby Mallory. She had done what she could in Seaham to shape a role for herself in the little society she found to hand. She liked to think that, until her troubles (that was her phrase for it), she had made a success of it—as great, at least, given the poverty of local resources, as the success his sister had had at Melbourne House. Sir Ralph couldn’t abide Elizabeth, and Judy blamed the modesty of his political ambitions on the contrast he hoped to suggest between himself and Lady Melbourne. It had lately become a source of consolation to her mother that Annabella had decided to follow the example of her aunt’s career. A woman could only get on in the world, she had learned, by playing a part behind the scenes of public life. But one needed something to work with—one needed a scene, or a stage. It was no use sitting at the heart of a web like Seaham. She had run, quite simply, out of things to do.

How grateful she was for once to have so much time on her hands. They could talk properly, as they used to when Annabella was a girl. Tea was served them and buttered cakes, set down on the table between them. As a girl, Judy continued, lifting a piece to her mouth, she had never been told that what one depended on a husband for, in the first place, was the scope he gave to one’s talents. A woman, of course, has no other scope. She touched a napkin to her chin. Scope, if she might call it that plainly, rather than riches or love, was what one should marry for. Though the quality, as such, had this to be said against it: it was harder to measure than riches, harder even than love. A fool might offer scope; Lady Melbourne had married a fool. Sir Ralph, she granted, was none, and there had been a time, before the last election but one, when she supposed herself on the brink of his great career. She called for more hot water. They had almost beggared themselves to make a name for him, but Sir Ralph, it turned out, was just the kind of man that names don’t stick to. He is the kind of man whom other men trust in his private rather than his public capacity—they will listen to his jokes and not to his advice. Hot water came; she filled the pot and waited, then poured herself a fresh cup. Annabella refused one. Not the least of her regrets over the whole affair was the fact that it left them, as far as Annabella’s dowry was concerned, a little short of pocket. She only hoped that money matters had not cast their shadow over the first year of Annabella’s marriage.

‘No,’ Annabella assured her, mindful of Dr Kendall’s warning. ‘Not much.’

Each day, after lunch, they returned to the same two chairs by the fire and the same themes. As the week wore on, Annabella, who said little by comparison to her mother, began to insist on keeping her daughter beside her. I have left my husband, she thought; he has sent me away—and the confession, unspoken, kept her from exchanging other more commonplace intimacies. She had nothing to say but that, and she did not say it. Her baby, however, its mere presence, and the habits Annabella exposed while nursing it, struck her as a kind of confession of her new life, of her new role; at least, it was the only one she made. Sometimes Ada slept between them on the floor to catch a little of the hearth’s heat. When she cried, Judy took her on her lap and made faces. Annabella could never remember seeing her mother so unconscious of her dignity. Perhaps she was really improved. Although, of course, an indifference to her own dignity had been one of the signs, her father had said, of the last stages of that illness or nervous indisposition whose history she had, in her own way, been attempting to give.

Sometimes, indeed, the conversation brought Judy’s confession to a sharper point. ‘Your father’s career,’ she said (she had lost her shyness of repetition), ‘has not been entirely what I could have wished it. For one thing, it has afforded less employment than a woman of my capacities requires to occupy them.’ Then she went on, and Annabella pricked up her ears: ‘I have gone to this honest extreme, of composing a trouble of my own making.’ Her mother stared at the fire; she would not look at her daughter, and the heat of it had reddened entirely one side of her face. Annabella held her tongue and hardly breathed. She had hoped for some time to hear from her mother the clearest admission; it might bring relief. There were secrets, of course, that she kept herself, and she needn’t look far to determine from whose lips she had learned the habit of concealment. ‘Well,’ Judy continued, with a laugh, ‘it has kept me busy these last few years, which is something to be grateful for, particularly as you have, by degrees, begun to give me less trouble. I found it very painful to watch you slip the reins in search of a career that I myself had had the ambition, but not the luck, to pursue. You have made a name for yourself, at least. It will “ring through the ages”; Lord Byron will make sure of it. I don’t like to think,’ she turned to her daughter now and smiled, ‘of the names he will give to me.’ After another pause, she added, ‘though I don’t suppose I was ever as drunk as I pretended to be—I mean, at my worst.’

Annabella took up, from this strange bold speech, the quieter word. ‘I don’t pretend to understand you.’

‘Oh,’ her mother answered, ‘you needn’t fear for me now. At my best, I know perfectly well, I was bad enough.’

Her own confession, in the end, depended on a respite from her mother. Sir Ralph had intimated to a few of their friends that Lady Milbanke was well enough to receive familiar visitors. Company would do her good, he wrote. She was growing tired of Sir Ralph, and Annabella, perhaps, was growing tired of them both. On Sunday, after church, the Gosfords paid their respects and stayed to lunch. It was the first time Annabella had dined in the dining room, whose views, over the gardens behind, were a little spoilt by the hothouse adjoining it. It was a house, Judy was complaining as they sat down, in which every modern convenience had been awkwardly added on without the least consideration of taste. In fact, one found in its design only a show of convenience. The kitchens had been rebuilt too far from the dining room. French doors had been added where they were not wanted; consequently, the sitting room was as cold as the cellar. The grounds themselves, which had been arranged according to the most expensive fashions, were large and variable and as bleak as a mountainside. Eight months a year they were too muddy for any respectable woman to walk in—excepting perhaps the coldest depths of winter, when the paths froze over. Annabella had guessed, by the end of this discourse, the purpose with which her mother had embarked on it, and could not help but admire her: she had wanted to set her guests at ease, that she was her old unhappy critical self entirely and required no special kindness.

Lady Gosford had such natural tact that one never suspected her of using it, and she was perfectly willing to disagree with everything that Judy said. She much preferred a modern house and could scarcely recall how they ever got on without Kidderminster carpets and hob grates. Sir Ralph, meanwhile, attempted to interest Lord Gosford in parliamentary speculations. He was hopelessly behind-hand in such matters and was eager to hear etc.—a strain of talk that excluded Annabella, happily enough at first, until she began to feel in her continued quiet the rising absurd voice of neglected egoism. One might have supposed, she told herself, that a greater share of the conversation would have devolved to her: a reflection whose truth she had every reason to regret when it finally was. Lady Gosford sensed Annabella’s exclusion. As a childless woman, she declared, pleasantly enough, that she had no right, and consequently no intention, of inquiring into what she called the commonplace particulars. Such as, how often the child fed, and other questions less fit for mixed company. Instead, she wished simply to know, did the girl look like her father? How well she remembered, it was but three years ago, at their house in Piccadilly, where Annabella had been staying, their . . . excitement at dinner over the fact that one of their party had made the poet’s acquaintance. Speaking of whom, she had heard that day from the vicar’s own lips the voice of a general anxiety: when might they expect such a famous addition to their humble society? Annabella, dry-throated, just managed a tearless reply: business would oblige him to remain in town indefinitely. She kept her eyes fixed firmly on Lady Gosford; her mother was looking at her.

Later, a due parade was made of Lord Byron’s daughter. Ada, wrapped in a blue cloth that brought out the brightness in her eyes, was handed about in the sitting room. Mrs Clermont hung unquietly back, to relieve anyone of the burden should they tire of it, until Annabella sent her away again. She was happy for once to preside as Ada’s mother. The child fell asleep in her arms, and her face, in sleep, contracted in such a way as to exaggerate her resemblance to Lord Byron: the faint scornful puckering of his lips, the stubbornness of his chin, his fresh colour. Judy, by now unaccustomed to company, was on fire with talk; at least, she was too restless to stare (as she said) at babies. She had resumed, if nothing else, the show of her old assurance and offered to lead Lord Gosford on a tour of the hothouse, the care of which had been her particular consolation in the months preceding. When Ada awoke, loudly, with her tongue in the O of her mouth searchingly stretched, Sir Ralph volunteered (quick as usual to recognize the duty of his absence) to leave Annabella to nurse the child in peace. ‘He had always been very awkward,’ he said with a laugh, ‘about babies, when they cried. He would try to reason them into tranquillity, but they preferred milk to reason.’ Lady Gosford offered to sit with her, and he helped her to push the two armchairs, which had been pulled out for company, back to the foot of the hearth.

When they were alone together, she confessed the great pleasure it gave her to see Annabella’s mother restored. ‘It was a terrible affliction. No name did it justice; there is something shameful in the names.’ There was no shirking about Lady Gosford—that is, she wished intimately to convey that she saw no need for any shirking. Her plump shapely hands lay folded across her lap. She shifted her feet now and then to relieve her legs from the heat of the fire. Ada was nursing steadily, with that blind selfishness which always moved in Annabella the tenderest feeling of pity. What she thought was: ‘You mustn’t depend on me, little thing. You mustn’t depend on me.’ She hardly heard what Lady Gosford, who seemed determined to speak frankly on the subject, was saying—which was only that she had never admired Lady Milbanke more than she did now. ‘It must be a great comfort to you, to be reminded of the strength of purpose of which your mother is capable. I am glad to see you taking after her. Your father is the most amiable gentleman of my acquaintance. His virtues are entirely, if I might put it this way, of the winning kind. There is a softness in his manner, a willingness to please, which is, I believe, generally considered the virtue of our sex. I regret to say, however, that we have need of sturdier qualities. It is only the gentlemen who have the luxury of gentleness. Women depend . . . but my dear, what’s the matter?’

Annabella had begun, silently and without the least air of hurry, to weep. She had never in all her life, she believed, been so talked at; and she was conscious, as she gave way to tears, of hiding behind them. Lady Gosford had retreated into the dimness that lay outside the small quiet light of her own misery. Even at the heart of it, though, Annabella knew quite well that she was raising, as brightly as she could, the flag of her surrender. They must all, she supposed now, come rushing to her; they might never let her alone. Ada continued to nurse and she continued to feed her: Annabella’s supply of milk, of tears, seemed equally deep. Lady Gosford had risen, and she sensed her approaching now, awkwardly enough, to relieve her of the child—repeating helplessly, ‘My dear, you must let me help. What’s the matter?’ It was a cruel, selfish comfort not to answer her. Annabella guessed that she might never again feel so simply, so sweetly her own affliction: she hoped by her silence to draw it out just a little longer. And Lady Gosford, at last, despaired of consoling Lady Byron herself and went out to find her mother.