Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  At dinner, Mrs Gladstone was dressed rather curiously ‘as a bride, in a long white lace veil and a flowing lace robe’. The Archbishop sat between her and the Gladstones’ daughter, Mary Drew, who was ‘struck by his wellness’, and they talked of Ireland, the Armenian massacres, and the Queen. Stimulated by the visit, Edward was still ‘very bright and full of talk’, when he went up to bed, keeping Mary awake until past midnight.

  Next morning, the tempest had abated and Hawarden was blanketed in snow. Mary went with Edward and Mary Drew to early Communion. That day, down in Truro, the last service in the large wooden building that had been Edward’s temporary cathedral was in progress. The new church was ready, and the big shed that had stood in for it was to be demolished. Over breakfast at Hawarden Castle, talk again turned to the Papal Bull, and before morning service, Edward slipped off to his dressing room to work, not noticing when Mary came up to check on him, and having to be hurried along so as not to be late. Mary and Mrs Gladstone walked on ahead. Mr Gladstone had a cold, and stayed at home. The Archbishop walked slowly with Mary Drew, resting frequently along the way. In church, he took the former Prime Minister’s place alongside Mrs Gladstone. Standing for the Exhortation, he raised a hand to his eyes, looking up towards a window as if testing his sight. Kneeling for the Confession, he sunk, his head falling on his prayer book. During the Absolution several people came to his aid and carried him unconscious from the church. They laid his body on the sofa in the rectory library. Edward died before the service was over.

  PART THREE

  BEN

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  All day, Mrs Benson stayed at the Hawarden Rectory, as if she could not believe what had happened, nor could she pull herself away. Again and again she went into the library. Hawarden lay still under its blanket of new-fallen snow, but the sky was a hazy blue. The library blinds had not been closed, and sun soaked in through the windows. At last, in the evening, she went back up to the Castle. ‘It was a soldier’s death,’ said Mr Gladstone to her. Mrs Gladstone offered a magnificently embroidered white pall for the coffin. Two years later, it would be used for the same purpose at the lying-in-state and funeral of her own husband.

  At Addington, on Sunday afternoon, Fred was having tea with Beth. He had thought of joining his parents at Hawarden, but his old nurse had said: ‘Nay, don’t you go away today, you be here for when your Papa and Mama get back. Have a quiet Sunday, you and me.’ A telegram arrived from Mrs Gladstone. It read: ‘Your father passed over quite peacefully this morning. Can you come with Maggie?’ At first, Fred thought Mrs Gladstone was merely telegraphing that his parents had arrived after a comfortable crossing from Ireland, but then the import of ‘Can you come with Maggie’ dawned on him. He could not get through to Chester that day, but spent the night in London and went up with his sister by an early train on Monday morning.

  On receiving his telegram at Eton, Arthur, characteristically, turned his attention to himself and feared he was about to have a nervous breakdown. The fact that his presence was required to agree to funeral arrangements forced him to rally, and he, too, set off for Hawarden, meeting Hugh at Euston Station. Hugh said he felt ‘as if the roof were gone’.

  The Archbishop’s body was taken in procession to the nearest station on Wednesday morning, and on to Canterbury to be buried. His funeral was held that Friday. In his will, which ran to a full 4,000 words, Edward showed his customary obsession with detail as he dispensed his worldly goods, down to the last silver cup, miniature, manuscript or print. His children were left £5,750 each, though Fred’s sum was reduced by an amount equivalent to the value of objects he already made use of, and a codicil deprived Arthur of £1,000 for money his father had advanced him. Maggie received £500 more than her brothers. Any of Edward’s effects or household items the children chose to keep, were to be valued and deducted from their share – except for Maggie, whose choices were to be her absolute property. Various relations and friends were rewarded with an engraving, a book, or some item of personal remembrance. Lucy Tait was among them – yet some of Edward’s oldest and closest friends were ignored. The bulk of his books were to be divided between the Archbishop’s Library at Lambeth Palace and any son who took holy orders. To his wife, Edward left £500 payable immediately upon his death, his clothes (customarily left to a butler or valet), wines and housekeeping provisions, and the residue of his estate after various gifts, bequests, and small legacies to servants had been made. At almost every mention of her name, he added the stipulation ‘so long as she remains my widow’, as if unable to relinquish control over her, even in death. To Wellington College, Truro Cathedral and the poor of Lambeth, the Archbishop left nothing at all.

  TELEGRAM FROM HER MAJESTY QUEEN VICTORIA TO MRS BENSON

  I am stunned by the awful news. My heart bleeds for you; but my own sorrow is great, for I was so fond of the dear, kind, excellent Archbishop. A terrible loss to us all.

  In an instant, the world in which Mary Benson had shone so brilliantly existed for her no longer. The ‘necklace for glory & beauty’ that had been her life at Lambeth had its string cut, and the beads were scattered, rolling far from reach. It was as if she had never imagined this moment, never prepared for it. The child-bride who had gradually forged a role and a meaning from her lot was, in the end, the Archbishop’s wife, without precedence. All that had appeared to be hers, she had because of Edward. ‘All the beauty of the past life together, the home we made, the dignity and glory of it, the fellowship and the humour, the conspiracies, the discussions, the beating keen pulsating life, the splendid web. . . All this is over, with one touch,’ she wrote in her diary in November, and a few weeks later: ‘All over – all over – rings in my ears.’ ‘The ship of my mother’s purposes and activities in life slipped its moorings,’ wrote Fred. ‘It slid away from the busy quay-side and, as if grounding on some remote and barren shore, left her to disembark on an emptiness, a nothingness.’

  The Archbishop’s widow was also homeless. Back at Lambeth Palace, Lucy came to share the big carved wooden bed in which Ben had given birth to all her children, an arrangement that would last for the rest of Ben’s life. Around them, the past was being put into packing cases. Ever since Ben and Edward married, they had lived in houses that were not their own, and Edward had never bought any property that might one day serve as a home. Yet the furniture and possessions had accumulated. The paintings and plate, the porcelain and engravings, the mahogany wardrobes and heavy carved tables had built up over the decades into a wealth of chattels sufficient to fill a palace. To fill two palaces. There were magnificent showpieces as well as much-loved stalwarts – the altar-panel sideboard from Wellington College, the comfortable ottoman, the bronzed dessert dishes from the working-men’s bible class in Lincoln, the wheezy harmonium. All had to be removed within weeks, and the welfare of some thirty servants attended to.

  Arthur retreated to Eton, still concerned for his state of mind. Hugh, now twenty-five, suffered a severe attack of rheumatism, and Maggie was expected at an archaeological dig in Egypt, long since arranged. It fell to Fred to dismantle the ‘huge mournful house so lately humming’ room by room until it ‘lay moribund, with the last drops of its life-blood, as far as our family affairs went, dripping from it’. His mother, he wrote, was blank, numbed, as if in a trance – ‘Everything was over, and nothing new had yet begun.’ Ben found her twenty-nine-year-old son ‘as tender as a child, as loving and as strong as a husband, and as sensitive as a woman,’ and was deeply touched when ‘he told me one evening he could never marry he loved me too much’. Yet she remained strained and dislocated, unable to bring herself to dispose of furniture or even the smallest objects with associations of the past. It was decided that she and Lucy should go with Maggie to Egypt.

  The party set off towards the end of November. Hugh, whose rheumatism made a winter in England inadvisable, followed shortly afterwards. Fred remained for a month to wind up family affairs, and then he joined them.


  The women, with Hugh at their heels, crossed to Paris, then meandered down through Venice and on to Luxor. Maggie, who had bridled at the ‘older sister’ role her father had assigned to Lucy when Nellie died, was sourly jealous of Lucy’s status as Ben’s intimate and bedmate – but Egypt was her territory. There, Maggie was in her element, and with the other women feeling unsure of themselves in such a foreign country, she could assert a certain dominance. At the dig at the Temple of Mut, from the back of her large white donkey, jingling the piastres in her moneybags and with her faithful sidekick Mohammed panting along behind with a flywhisk, Maggie ruled over her workforce with the buffalo-hide whip and a few phrases of Arabic. She was already acquainted with regular visitors to Luxor and commanded a bemused respect among the male archaeologists. Back at Pagnon’s Hotel she continued to play the priestess. She would dismiss Ben’s attempts at buying a scarab with a contemptuous: ‘Forgery: mafish mish-mash’, or urge the family into playing their old word games, while Lucy, not as quick as the others and unable to think of rhymes, fell asleep. Obediently, Ben and Lucy would follow to watch Maggie work the dig, or she would lead them on expeditions across the Nile and into the desert. Fred lost himself in his own archaeological projects. Hugh distressed his mother by being ‘curious & difficult & rude’, or cheerfully went out shooting, returning with the occasional spoils of quail or a jackal. December unfolded into January.

  SKETCHES FROM HUGH’S EGYPTIAN DIARY: THE BENSON FAMILY CARAVAN AND DISEMBARKING FROM THE STEAMER

  Under her parasol at the dig, or in the hotel garden at Luxor, Ben pondered her life. For forty years she had devoted herself to Edward, abnegated her own desires to what Arthur called his father’s ‘ardent and emphatic personality’, to ‘his depressions, his impatience, his insistence on small details, his easily provoked discontent, the crushing character of his displeasure’. Edward had always been the centre and focus of all life about him. Ben’s attention was concentrated on reassuring him, contriving for him, placating him, pleasing him. ‘I had to originate nothing,’ she noted in her diary in Luxor. ‘I seem to have been only a series of respondings – and no core – but there must be a core. . .’ Fred remarked of his mother that her devotion had been given solely to his father’s convenience, and not to his work itself, that ‘she had absolutely no individual life of her own: she had neither artistic nor literary taste that absorbed any part of her. . . All her enthusiasm and energy was at the service of others.’ She had played the role of dutiful wife to extremity, and allowed her self to be pared away to nothing. ‘There is nothing within, Good Lord,’ Ben wrote, ‘no power, no love, no desire – no initiative – he had it all and his life entirely dominated mine. Good Lord, Good Lord – give me a personality – break the cords a little. . . let me live.’

  Yet what, Ben asked herself, was the next step? Something was required of her, but ‘what is it?. . . What can I do?. . . this personality established, this freedom given – what then?. . . I have never had time to be responsible for my own life. In a way I feel more grown up now than I ever have before – strange, when for the first time in my 55 years I am answerable to nobody. No-one has the right to censure my actions, and I can do what I like. What a tremendous choice!’

  In capitals in her diary, Ben noted that she had lived all her life ‘in FEAR’, and that now she wanted to replace it ‘with LOVE’. She even wondered whether she might not in this moment draw closer to Edward, as if the union that had not entirely worked on Earth might be repaired now that he was in Heaven. Ben had many a long talk with Lucy, who was often hard on her – as critical as Edward might have been – or would offer such maxims as ‘Live from salvation not for it’. On some days she would feel uplifted by ‘this sun, this air, these sunsets and glories of the sky’, exclaiming ‘Lord I want to live’ or ‘I desire love & life’. Yet on others the quest seemed hopeless, and she would feel ‘all knocked to pieces’, or ‘entirely routed & defeated & undone’. She was over-eating, and began once again to worry about her diet. Soon, there were further troubles to concern her, and anxiety – that ‘arch-enemy of her soul’ – resumed its grip. In mid-February Hugh caught a slight chill. He recovered, and set off for Palestine alone. It then seemed that he had passed his cold on to Maggie, but she did not rally as quickly, and succumbed to an infection of the lungs. Her condition worsened, and the doctor diagnosed pleurisy.

  After Maggie’s lungs were drained, she began gradually to recover, but a few days later, on a Sunday morning, she was found in a faint, her face and hands tinged blue. She had suffered a heart attack. The doctor said bluntly that there was no hope. He had not reckoned on Maggie’s steely will. As Ben and Fred sat at her bedside, Maggie drifted back into consciousness muttering ‘Father, make me better,’ and after a few minutes, ‘I’m a little better,’ and ten minutes later, quietly: ‘I’m better, I’m better.’ Within days she was well enough to be placed – bed and all – on a paddle steamer for Cairo. Luxor was growing too hot, and the family decided that a move to the genteel oasis of Helouan, near the capital, would aid Maggie’s convalescence.

  Fred went ahead on a faster boat to prepare the way, but when Ben arrived with Lucy and Maggie on the steamer, she was met by a messenger with the news that Mr Fred had been taken from his boat on a stretcher, directly to Helouan. He had caught typhoid, swimming in the Nile at Luxor while Maggie was ill. To Ben it appeared that not only her husband, but two more of her children were to be taken from her, and then, just as Fred began to edge out of danger, Lucy fell ill with typhoid, too. She was so close to death that her sister Edith, wife of Randall Davidson (a Benson family friend, now Bishop of Winchester), was sent for. On 23 February, Ben wrote in her diary: ‘Worse and worse – all is gone.’ She scored a diagonal cross through the rest of the blank page, and did not pick up the diary again for months.

  Lucy did recover, as did Fred, but Maggie, though much improved, was left with aggravated rheumatism. It was late April 1897 before Ben could at last leave Egypt. Any sense of the visit as a period of rest and renewal after the shock of Edward’s death had long since crumbled. Fred went to Athens, then on to visit his ebullient bachelor friend John Ellingham Brooks on Capri; in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial two years earlier the island had become a refuge for similar young Englishmen appreciative of the handsome and remarkably compliant populace, and eager to take advantage of Italian laws under which sodomy was not a crime. Maggie departed to soothe her aching joints in the waters of Aix. Ben and Lucy returned to England, to find somewhere to live.

  Queen Victoria – to whom white-haired Ben was beginning to bear an uncanny resemblance – was concerned for the widow of her ‘dear, kind, excellent’ Archbishop. She discreetly enquired of the Bishop of Winchester, Randall Davidson (also quite a favourite of hers), whether Mrs Benson was sufficiently provided for. After leaving Egypt, Ben and Lucy had gone to stay with the Davidsons at the Bishop’s palace, Farnham Castle. The Bishop replied that though ‘certainly not rich’, Mrs Benson was reasonably comfortable, would continue to live with Lucy Tait, ‘but where the home will be is not yet settled’. The Queen promptly offered the pair the use of the Royal Lodge in Windsor Park, and Princess Christian wrote to Ben to encourage her to accept, pointing out how convenient it would be to have Arthur so close at hand, at Eton. Arthur examined the Lodge, but pronounced it unsuitable – possibly because it needed modernizing and renovation, having been long unoccupied. Fred said that his mother baulked at the ‘formidable dependence’ that such a tenancy would imply. Ben respectfully declined the offer, and instead she and Lucy took a house in Winchester – a spacious early Georgian mansion, large enough for all the family at holiday-time, which Fred, when he arrived from Capri, found ‘quite adorable’.

  HER MAJESTY QUEEN VICTORIA CELEBRATES HER DIAMOND JUBILEE, 20 JUNE 1897

  Winchester, an eager local lady told Ben, was so very varied in its society: ‘There is the Close, Mrs Benson; there is the County; there is the College; there is the Military. It is q
uite a centre!’ This was clearly no Lambeth. In Egypt, Ben had realized that she was now at liberty to do as she liked, and had foreseen tremendous choices, wanting to break the bonds and live. She relished the sense of ‘affairs swiftly and ardently a-stir’ around her. Instead, she found herself in a charming but essentially provincial town ‘mediaeval in its setting and middle-aged in its actors’, not juggling exciting new possibilities at all, rather mourning ‘the cessation of magnificent stimulus’. The house on St Thomas Street, backing on to the Cathedral Close, was expensive, and although Lucy made a considerable financial contribution (further fanning Maggie’s resentment of her), the cost precluded frequent trips up to London, or excessively lavish entertaining at home.

  Fred returned to England to help with the move. During a particularly hot week in August, van after van brought furniture out of storage to Winchester, until at last – long after the house seemed as full as it could possibly be – a billiard table, the organ from the chapel at Addington, Maggie’s statue of Rameses the Great, and a line of immense mahogany wardrobes, stood in a queue down St Thomas Street, as if awaiting admittance. Ben’s grey parrot, Matilda, made the sounds of corks popping, as if to remind everyone of how thirsty they all were, while the green parrot, Joey, with his squawk of ‘Isn’t it Orfle!’, and his fiendish hatred for people’s fingers, punished the foreman severely for saying ‘Poor Polly!’ and giving him a friendly poke through the bars of his cage. Taffy, the Welsh collie, guarded the hallway and growled, and Maggie’s big black Persian cat, Ra, stalked testily. The household’s first visitor, a canon of the cathedral, arrived in the midst of this, unannounced and unheard, to be nipped on the ankle by Taffy, mauled for his friendly advances to Ra, and after negotiating a drawing room made almost impenetrable by excess furniture, to find Fred playing loudly on the piano, with Joey squawking on his shoulder. The Bensons were perhaps not made for Winchester.