Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Yet Mary showed no deep interest in Edward’s work, and did not involve herself directly with it. She listened and indeed gave him advice when asked, but seldom sought out his company or spent any amount of time alone with him. Arthur thought his mother was afraid of her husband, ‘in bondage’ to him and to the intensity of his displeasure. On arriving in Truro, Edward had thrown himself immediately into infusing life into his new diocese, into raising money for and starting building work on the new cathedral – the first to be raised in England since the Reformation. He selected figures of Cornish saints to fill its windows, dismissed the design for an episcopal coat of arms proposed by the College of Arms as ‘not fit for a public house’. He established the school for girls, made trips to London and toured his See extensively. One year he found time to put together a service for Christmas Eve comprising nine carols interspersed with nine lessons drawn from the Bible that tell the story of the Nativity – the beginnings of the service that, as adapted by the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, has become famous throughout the Protestant world. Yet as at Wellington, and to some extent also in Lincoln, Edward was assailed by fits of dark depression, ‘moods of blackness and tortured irritability’ that overwhelmed him for days, when he fell into silences that seemed to consume all around him, broken only by his formidable censure of the most innocent or trivial deeds. As he struggled with this ‘demoniacal load, longing to be rid of it, yearning to burst out of it, but possessed by it to the point of helplessness’, he became entirely unapproachable. Only Mary made the attempt, with some success, though he scorned her. ‘Fancy his telling her (as he did),’ Arthur commented, ‘that she did not enter into his struggles and ideals, and did not give him the background of sympathy he needed! He wanted someone much more clinging and admiring.’

  REX GOODWIN, HERO OF E. F. (FRED) BENSON’S NOVEL REX, OBSERVES HIS PARENTS’ RELATIONSHIP

  [His mother] had not, it would seem, been in love with [his father], and she had yielded, rather than known the imperious need of the one man: his tumultuous desire for her had swept her off her feet, even as it had swept him. Anything so strong and so menacingly sure of itself had something of the force of destiny about it, and Margaret Ashton gave him herself, her beauty, her tenderness, the gay charm, the sunshine of her, yet wholly without needing him. Devotion of mind and body, entire self-abandonment she could bring him, and these were his, but it was not till the birth of Rex that love dawned for her. Motherhood was her prime emotional need: all that concerned Rex was her passion, all that concerned her husband was a matter of her watchful and eager duty. . . She had never come to him with the white-hot fire, but what was within her power she gave him, warmth and tenderness, and as the years went by the pity that is akin to love.

  From time to time, Mary welcomed old friends on visits. They went on evening walks in the garden, were burned by the hot Cornish sun, played ducks and drakes at Falmouth, talked long into the night and, if Edward was up in London or on a visit elsewhere, turned tables and conducted experiments in mesmerism. Her beloved brothers also managed the long journey to Cornwall with some frequency, but old Mrs Sidgwick died in 1879 following a stroke – the force that had so dominated little Minnie long since subdued. ‘Her spirit went long before the body ceased its working,’ observed Edward. Mary’s own children tumbled towards adulthood. Nellie went up to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford in 1881 – her father was a strong believer in higher education for women. At Cambridge her uncle Henry Sidgwick was a renowned champion of the cause, and their family friend Elizabeth Wordsworth had become the founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, which

  NURSE BETH, WHO LOVED BEING READ TO BUT WHO STRUGGLED TO READ OR WRITE HERSELF, TAKES PAINS OVER A POSTCARD

  Dearest,

  One line to tell you I am sending your Box to-morrow Wednesday. I hope you will get it before tea-time. I know you will like something for tea, you can keep your cake for your Birthday. I shall think about you on Friday. Everybody has gone away, so I had no one to write for me. I thought you would not mind me writing to you. – Dearest love from your dear

  Beth

  offered the first ever opportunity for women to study at Oxford, in 1879. In the same year as Nellie went up, Arthur took his place at King’s, Cambridge, and Fred went on from prep school to Marlborough. To Mary’s disbelief the following year, even little Hugh was ten and old enough to go away to prep school. Edward delivered him to Walton House in Somerset, while she and Beth sat miserably at home. Beth, especially, who had adored and pampered the youngest of what she saw as her own brood, was as devastated as if she had been widowed, and from the moment Hugh left focused every moment of her life on the advent of the school holidays.

  The family took holidays on the Cornish coast and in Switzerland, where Edward and the children went on energetic walks. Mary, who was growing plumper, found walking a trial and generally stayed behind. Nor did she take any interest in scenery, or accompany Edward and the children as he toured them through cathedrals and other sites of antiquity. Her rebelliousness was taking subtler forms. Firmly but delicately, she placed behind her the days of those energetic marches with Edward over the countryside around Wellington College, and the unbearably tedious trudges around old churches in France. Instead, she ‘made excursions into public sitting-rooms, and formed rapid acquaintances with all kinds of surprising and subsequently inconvenient persons’. There was the woman fanatical about the heretical works of Emanuel Swedenborg; the one with violent anti-vaccination theories; the one who collected cowries and glued them on to cards to form religious texts. All these new friends were women, and they invariably ended up in intimate conversations with Mary, confiding their deepest secrets. On the whole, Mary was happiest on visits to country houses, and here, too, would ‘attach herself with indissoluble bonds of friendship [to] some member of the hospitable household’, not with mere passing cordiality, but in a way that created ‘a deep sense, on the part of some girl or woman, that something strong and wise and different had touched her life to finer issues’.

  A layer or two deeper than the dutiful Mrs Benson, deeper than the sympathetic and ever-understanding Mary, deeper even than the adored Mama, ‘Ben’ survived – small and solitary, perhaps, but strong. Edward may have emotionally overpowered her, but there were three areas where he could not intrude – on the private, individual bond she was building with her God, on the world that enclosed her and her children, and on her feelings for other women. The friendship with Tan continued, though fading in intensity. But it was not until the summer of 1879 that anyone came near to rivalling her in Mary’s affections.

  Charlotte Mary Basset lived in one of the grandest houses in Cornwall – Tehidy, an Italianate pile with four flanking pavilions and a large park, near Camborne, fifteen miles away. Her husband, Gustavus, was head of one of the richest families in the county, and an invalid. The Bassets had made an immense fortune from copper mining in the eighteenth century, and traced their history as lords of the manor of Tehidy back to Norman times. Gustavus had himself added to the family’s fortunes, but had been paralysed by a stroke and had lately developed throat and lip cancer. Once kindly and generous, he was becoming known for his greed, alarming irritability and explosive temper. Mrs Basset, who went by her second name, Mary, was vivacious, amusing and adventurous – if at times crushingly haughty. She was undaunted by convention and liked to smoke, keeping a stash of cigarettes in her garden room, in a box with a secret spring lock, disguised to resemble a calf-bound volume of Hymns of Faith and Love. Young Arthur was entranced by this remarkable addition to his parents’ social circle, thinking Mary Basset ‘a woman of great character and charm, upright and handsome, silent, with big dark flashing eyes which seemed to indicate deep reserves of passionate feeling’. Yet he thought he detected an unease about her, ‘a certain aversion to life. . . something pent-up and thwarted’. Mary Benson quite lost her heart.

  At first, Mary was cautious. ‘In some ways letters of this kind are like a gam
e of chess,’ she wrote to Mrs Basset, after spending sleepless nights thinking of her, waiting anxiously with each post for a letter. ‘I moved my pawn – you know I did – in August. It seemed to me then – was it so? – that yours did not come sharp up to meet it – so now I wanted to make a much more important move – and I was afraid of “check”’ [heavy deletion follows]. Eventually, Mrs Basset made her move, too. She invited Mary to call her ‘Chat’. Mary was delighted. ‘In the greatest friendship of my life,’ she replied, ‘made in 75, I was “Mrs Benson” until suddenly “Ben” was invented, and she always calls me so now. You will have to invent something – what will it be now?’ They settled on ‘Robin’.

  Over the next three years, ‘Chat’ and ‘Robin’ exchanged photographs, books, gifts of jewellery. Letters became more passionate. ‘I want to know more about you. . . what makes you,’ Mary began. ‘Since last week so much has happened between us. I want you to talk to me. In short I want you.’ Later, she would fill page after page, pouring out feelings she found ‘overwhelming’. ‘I feel as if I am in a dream,’ she wrote, just a few months after they had met. ‘I am in the middle of your life and you and I cannot come out of it. . . you are in my heart of hearts. . . I don’t feel big enough to hold you.’ Chat would fall asleep, clutching the last letter Mary had written. After yet another ‘restless’ day, Mary would spend a night ‘restlessly dreaming – you know what I mean?’ So full of Chat did Mary feel that she could scarcely do anything but sit and glow at the thought of her. Even as she kissed and comforted Nellie during her monthly cramps, she wished she were doing so with Chat. Chat paid visits to Truro, and Mary – together with Edward or one or two of the children – would go to Tehidy. Edward approved of Mary Basset, as he had not of Tan and Emily Hall before her. Perhaps he now realized that in his wife’s case, such friendships were essential to contentment in marriage. Certainly, Mrs Basset had lifted Mary’s spirits, which in the first years of his bishopric had been low, and her being on such intimate terms with the chatelaine of Tehidy could do his position no harm. ‘Yes, she is a princess of a woman,’ agreed Edward, on a journey one day back from Tehidy to Truro, when Mary simply could not stop talking about her friend.

  At Lis Escop, Maggie, now past the age of fifteen, began to shoulder much of the domestic responsibility, as Mary let her attention to her duties slip. ‘Did you possess me, or I you, my Heart’s Beloved, as we sat there together on Thursday and Friday – as we held each other close, as we kissed,’ Mary wondered after one of Chat’s visits, ending another letter: ‘Chat, my true lover, my true love, see, I am your true lover, your true love, Robin.’

  Mary was quite aware of the potential sinfulness of physical love, and wrestled with the contradictions this brought. ‘When one’s heart is fullest, when the physical side of Love asserts itself the most,’ she cautioned Chat, ‘then one must love in mind, that things may be wholesome and well.’ Her faith remained strong, but the struggle to keep ‘love in mind’ never left her, nor could she reconcile how such a holy, sweet gift from God could seem so inseparable from the ‘stain’ of carnal demands. Yet she was beginning to shape a belief that not only incorporated her passion, but was based on it. ‘I love you so, dear,’ she wrote to Chat, early in their relationship, ‘not one whit less than all you will I have, in that mysterious sacramental union where one can have all, and yet wrong no other love.’ Earthly love made possible an understanding of the true nature of God’s glory. What Chat and Mary felt for each other was all part of God’s plan, it cleansed them of past sins, was a rebirth of faith. It was in itself a gift of God, as ‘none could give two souls to each other so closely so sweetly so holily, except the Lord.’ God’s love flowed through them, filled them up: ‘Besides this new welling of water in you to everlasting life, besides all that God has taught me in this, and through you, our lives have been welded here – fused together – united into that union which is both human and divine – human in all the exquisite tender joys of delight in each other, of companionship, of precious intimacy, of our whole nature – divine with that eternal grounded strength and lastingness which nothing can ever shake as long as we have each other in the Lord.’ Inverting the customary text, Mary declared: ‘Love is God.’

  On 16 December 1882, the Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone dispatched a letter to the newest and perhaps the least prestigious bishopric in the land, whose incumbent had held his post for barely five years. ‘My Dear Bishop of Truro,’ the letter began. ‘I have to propose to your lordship with the sanction of Her Majesty, that you should accept the succession to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, now vacant through the lamented death of Archbishop Tait.’ A telegram followed, from the Queen herself, announcing that she would be writing a letter shortly. Edward replied to the Prime Minister begging ‘a few days’ interval’ in which to consult ‘one or two friends who both know my affairs and will counsel me as Christian men’. He asked advice of both friends and colleagues, and wrote a supremely tactful letter to Harold Browne, the Bishop of Winchester, who had been in line for the position, but was considered too old to be offered it. Edward acknowledged that the honour should be Browne’s, but wrote that the Queen had ‘asked the most unworthy of your young brothers to wear it for you and to try to wear it as you would have done,’ and he sought the elderly man’s counsel, forbearance and encouragement, should he vainly attempt this hopeless task. ‘Heard that the Bishop of Truro felt himself overwhelmed at present by the weight of the office I had invited him to accept,’ Queen Victoria noted in her diary. ‘I shall write to him, to urge him to accept.’

  The Queen’s letter arrived just before Christmas, expressing her ‘earnest hope’ that Edward would assume the Primacy, and saying how much both she and her ‘dear husband in byegone [sic] days’, had always had a high opinion of and sincere regard for him. Edward hesitated no longer, and on 23 December wrote letters of acceptance to both Queen Victoria and Mr Gladstone. He planned to make the news known in his diocese on Christmas Day.

  On Christmas Eve, Mary sent Chat a letter. It was written, as was her wont, on a sheet of paper, folded in half. In the top left-hand corner of the outer leaf, Mary urged: ‘Don’t mention this till after 8 o’clock tomorrow morning.’ Below that, she wrote: ‘My darling, Edward asks me to tell you first of anyone in Cornwall that he has accepted the offer. You will know what we are feeling and what it means. Pray for us ___’ To this, Edward added: ‘How shall I ever thank you for all you have been to my wife (and will be!). God bless and keep you. . . ’. Over the page, came a cry from Mary’s heart:

  Sweetheart, now a word which won’t be seen by anyone. My darling, my love bless you – my poor heart is too full to say anything of all that swells up – and I daren’t think of going away from here and you. . . Your sweet and precious gift came last night and I love it so! The two inextricably twined cords, the sweet knot, the dear symbol that will lie so near my heart. The whole mixes in to one dear touch from you to me – so intensely precious and loved – oh my own darling. How I love you!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mary Benson looked about her at Lambeth Palace and despaired. ‘Oh my darling I am quite as miserable as I ever wish to be!’ she wrote to Chat on arriving at her new London home. ‘Physically worn, spiritually empty, mentally incapable – and this huge cold Barrack is Disgusting.’ The residence seemed ‘infinitely long and broad’ and she felt as if she had to walk half a mile down bleak corridors simply to get to the laundry – and then, of course, all her fresh white linens would soon be turning grey. London soot was notorious. Dickens described the city’s smoke ‘lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot as big as full-grown snow flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun’. The residue of half a million fireplaces seeped under doors and through keyholes. It clogged the ancient corbelling of Lambeth Palace with grime, coated cornices, crept in through cracks to cover unattended objects in a shroud of dark dust, and to discolour anything
clean. It even settled on the plants in the garden, so that flowers picked or smelled left nose or fingers smudged black. This was all a far cry from Cornwall.

  London fog, as if a living emanation of the soot, followed similar paths, requiring candles to be lit in the middle of the day, submerging the city in a choking ink – sometimes black, sometimes bottle-green, often dingy yellow or dun brown. Stray patches of fog could be found indoors, lurking eerily in corners of rooms. At times, outdoors, it lifted from the ground but still completely blocked the sun. Then people spoke of ‘day darkness’. When Mary arrived at Lambeth Palace, fog shrouded London some sixty-two days of the year. It did not improve her mood at all.