Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Houses were viewed, and rejected, in Basingstoke and Haslemere. Half-hearted efforts dragged on through the summer and autumn, though Lucy did find a London pied-à-terre, a little Queen Anne house at 5 Barton Street, just within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. By Christmas even Henry James had come to hear that all was not well with Ben and that she ‘had some need of change of residence’. It was Lucy who, paging through Country Life one afternoon, finally found the house – largely Jacobean, part Carolean, with manageable acreage, a bowling green and cherry orchard, reached down an avenue of Scots pines, near the village of Horsted Keynes in Sussex. It was called Tremans.

  In the spring of 1899, the removal men once again arrived at the house in St Thomas Street, to load up Ben and Lucy’s bed, the mahogany wardrobes, the comfortable ottoman and Addington chapel organ, the statue of Rameses the Great. Ben had just turned fifty-eight. She was moving into her final home. The twentieth century was about to begin.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tremans – or Treemans, Tremaines or Treemaynes, as it had been known at various times in its history – was not thirty miles from London yet seemed remote from the world, like a spellbound house in a fairy tale. The countryside around it was furrowed into ridges, threaded by quiet streams, darkened by pine forest that melted into pasture and dipped into lonely valleys. A dusty road ran the mile or so from Horsted Keynes to the avenue of Scots pines that formed the approach, but the house itself was screened behind an immense and ancient yew hedge.

  To one side of the firs, a bank of rosemary bushes, broom and peonies reached up to the bowling green, tussocky and long untended, but in the spring a ray of daffodils. Below it, at the end of the avenue, an iron gate between two high posts crowned with stone balls opened to a lawn, surrounded by beds that in their season bore begonias and scarlet salvias, pools of blue gentians and forget-me-nots. A pink rambler and purple clematis fought for supremacy over the pilasters of the gateway, and ivy crept between bricks of the old stone wall that protected the kitchen garden from chill north winds. Over the wall, beyond knots of fragrant herbs, meadowy grassland ran down to a cherry orchard and a chain of little fish-ponds. Woodpeckers nested in the orchard, pheasants on the bowling green; great tits pecked about the stone walls, robins peeped from the hedges, at night owls hooted, it seemed, from every copse and crevice.

  TREMANS

  The house itself was a tumble of styles – Elizabethan brickwork, Jacobean outgrowths, a dignified Carolean façade that rose through three storeys of expansive windows, topped by a little cupola. A fantastical array of mismatched chimneys sprouted from roofs at different levels. Tremans was ample, impressive, and possessed of extraordinary allure. ‘It doesn’t seem like a place to live in, but a place to go and see,’ said Beth.

  Three curved stone steps climbed from the front lawn to a large door, but by the time Ben and Lucy took Tremans, the main entrance had been moved to a more convenient door, around the corner of a little Elizabethan promontory, flanked by a stone-walled wing with mullioned windows. Inside, the house was low-ceilinged with wood-panelled parlours, its rooms faintly fragrant of woodsmoke in winter and lilac in summer, most with big tiled fireplaces bearing Tudor mouldings. The wide oak staircase was so seasoned that no creak ever betrayed a passing foot; smaller stairways ran hither and thither, to airy attics, turning odd corners, rising and dipping, some ending almost where they had begun. There were sitting rooms and anterooms, recesses, cupboards and bedrooms a-plenty; it was a house ‘full of lobbies and useless spaces and little mysteries, strange lofts and obscure passages’. Yet even here, the family furniture of four decades and the objets that Edward had accumulated filled the place to the brim.

  THE CURIOUS TALE OF ARCHBISHOP BENSON’S FUNERAL

  8 July 1899

  The monument to Archbishop Benson was unveiled today by HRH The Duchess of Albany at Canterbury Cathedral. The fine Gothic design is by Mr T. G. Jackson R.A. and the figure by Mr Thomas Brock R.A. It was a day of sweltering heat, made even more intense by flashes of magnesium from photographers’ flares. The station was lined with red carpeting and an escort of lancers met Her Royal Highness, who was representing Her Majesty The Queen. Thirty bishops were present. During the ceremony, thunder boomed and rumbled like a bourdon pedal. Hailstones fell, as big as eggs. There were addresses by the Lord Chancellor and Lord Mount Edgcombe. Mrs Benson prayed alone on the steps of the monument, and was then presented to Her Royal Highness, who held both her hands in hers and talked quietly for some moments. Then the Archbishop of York read a lesson, and while he was so doing there came a terrific peal of thunder and a great rumbling in the roof, followed by a cataract of water. The Cathedral had been struck by lightning.

  Arthur, who had absented himself from the fuss and difficulties of both house-hunting and the move, came down to Tremans from Eton in July, and was plunged at his first sight of it into ‘speechless delight’. He was captivated, he wrote in his diary, by its very Englishness. There was something in its manor-house grandeur that made Tremans an appropriate seat for a family of the status he felt the Bensons had attained – though the socially conscious Arthur admitted sorrowfully to himself: ‘We have got a middle-class taint about us. We are none of us aristocrats in any way.’

  The house was large and expensive to run. Lucy helped Ben bear the cost of the lease, and Arthur and Fred also augmented her funds, financial support that grew burdensome as time went on – their mother never having quite gained the knack of economical living. Lucy adored Tremans from the start, and she was ‘invigorated by village life and country people’. Hugh also took to the house immediately, though his early engagement with local life, while on a visit with a fellow clergyman (also in his thirties), went no further than buying pea-shooters and peas at the village shop, and spending the evening shooting down corks on the lawn. Beth was installed in a room in the attic furnished with remnants from the Wellington College nursery and hung with pictures of her boys, Master Arthur, Master Fred and especially Master Hugh (they were never ‘Mr’ to Beth). From here she made occasional forays to supervise the folding of the linen, or – with no babies to nurse – to carry Maggie’s Persian cat Persis, like an infant on one arm. Children who visited Tremans, often taken by Maggie to see if there were fairies near the fish-ponds, marvelled also at ‘a visit to that realest fairy of all – old Beth the fairy nurse, with her snow-white hair and twinkling black eyes which saw everything, old Beth who lived in a room upstairs, and. . . who was of fabulous age’.

  TREMANS

  For Ben, moving to Tremans was indeed an act of self-sacrifice. Life was even quieter than it had been in Winchester; she longed for the city and, unlike Lucy, was neither invigorated nor revivified by what the countryside had to offer. Even Hugh noticed. ‘The world is divided into two classes,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘those who like people and those who like things. It has come to us as a good classification at home. My mother yearns continually for town, and loves eleven hundred people; and all the rest of us love the country, and cocks and hens, and small events on the lawn like the dog digging a hole, and discuss them as if they were the pivots on which the world moved.’ When Ben told one friend that she had settled at Horsted Keynes, she received a shocked response: ‘What have you done?’

  Ben far preferred the little London house that Lucy had rented in Barton Street. It was tiny – the whole of it would have gone into one tower at Lambeth Palace, but, ‘I feel at home in it,’ she wrote to Maggie, while up in town. ‘I LOVE the surroundings. I feel we are in exactly the spot – in the heart of real London. . . The Abbey has become our Chapel.’ The move to Tremans had been made entirely for Maggie’s sake but she was determined to ‘throw myself into Tremaines [sic]’ and to make it a success. ‘I am full of hope and heart, and please God we will have a dear time there and love the place well,’ she said to Maggie, before they moved. Even stronger than her own disaffection with country life, Ben knew, was Fred’s. On the day she signed the leas
e for Tremans, she confessed in her diary: ‘I feel deeply heavy hearted for down at bottom lies the deep sadness that Fred is not with us in all this.’ After Edward died, Fred had promised to live with her, but he would not be happy, she felt, with ‘no-one about and no amusement and no employment’.

  She was right. Fred was miserable at Tremans. The nearest golf course was a seven-mile cycle ride away, life at home proceeded with somnambulant routine, entirely in the company of women. As Fred put it: ‘I wanted golf and games and ease and casual intercourse with those of my own sex.’ ‘Fred hates it,’ Ben exclaimed. ‘One day’s loneliness makes him capricious.’ Fred raged and moped in his room. He lasted four weeks. Finally, Ben wrote, ‘Fred’s depression, culminating in such awful gloom. . . gave me the courage of despair to write him an exhaustive letter setting him free, body and spirit and financially.’ As was so often the case, a family difficulty was tackled avoiding face-to-face confrontation. Ben released Fred from his promise to live with her. He promptly rented a flat in Oxford Street, coming to Tremans at weekends. Once the pressure was off, and Fred could – as his mother put it – spend time ‘playing with his Earls and Countesses’, he, too, became better disposed towards Tremans, and far more than the house on St Thomas Street had ever been, Tremans took on the mantle of a family home. ‘I never knew a house with so friendly an air,’ wrote Arthur. ‘It seemed like a joyful mother of children, glad to enfold us.’

  THE HERO OF A. C. BENSON’S NOVEL THE HOUSE OF QUIET DESCRIBES HIS FAMILY HOME, GOLDEN END

  An ancient manor reached down an avenue of great Scots pines

  The house seen, as I love best to see it, from the avenue on a winter evening, rises a dark irregular pile, crowned with a cupola and the massive chimneys against a green and liquid sky, in which trembles a single star. . . Within all is dark and low. . . There are wide, meaningless corridors with steps up and down that connect the wings with the central building. . . my father was a great collector of books, china and pictures, which, with the furniture of a large London house, were put hurriedly in, with little attempt at order; and no one has since troubled to arrange them. . . below the stairs is a tiny oratory, with an altar and some seats, where the household assemble every morning for a few prayers, and together sing an artless hymn.

  THE NARRATOR OF R. H. (HUGH) BENSON’S NOVEL THE NECROMANCERS DESCRIBES THE LARGE HOUSE WITH TWISTED CHIMNEYS AT THE HEART OF THE TALE

  It is occupied by an elderly widow, her son and her daughter Maggie

  The house, in fact, was one of those that have a personality as marked and as mysterious as of a human character. It affected people in quite an extraordinary way. It took charge of the casual guest, entertained and soothed and sometimes silenced him; and it cast upon all who lived in it an enchantment at once inexplicable and delightful. . . Maggie had fallen in love with the place from the instant that she had entered it. . . There was here a sense of peace and sheltered security that she had hardly known even at school; and little by little she had settled down here. . . with the leisurely, tender life of this place, where it was so easy to read and pray and possess her soul in peace.

  Maggie blossomed at Tremans. She had a beautiful room on the first floor, panelled at one end, with a huge cupboard behind the panelling and with quaint recesses in the walls, but she spent most of her time in the garden. ‘That invincible mind of hers, which had barely dragged itself along under the weight of infirmities and depressions at Winchester, shook off the dust and soared,’ wrote Fred. ‘The keen, kind air which in the heat was bracing, and brisk in the cold, was exactly what her body needed.’ Just as Ben had forecast, Maggie prospered once she had a ‘sphere’. She had in no way lost the aura of being possessed by Edward’s spirit, but her drive to dominate and control found an outlet – at least in the beginning – in organizing life outdoors, and Ben was happy to let her take the reins. Maggie mapped flowerbeds and planted bulbs, designed a sundial as well as a rotating summerhouse that could be turned from wind and sun; she painted a shield for the iron gate and had an oak pediment built to shelter the front door. Always fond of animals, she established hens and cinnamon turkeys, pigeons and peafowl, and wrote a series of musings about her charges, published as The Soul of a Cat, and Other Stories in 1901. She took holidays with Nettie Gourlay – whom Fred found ‘one of the most silent of human beings and quite imperturbable’ – and Nettie in turn spent weeks on end at Tremans.

  Taking her new energies further afield, Maggie established – with the help of another close friend, Gladys Bevan – the St Paul’s Association, a bible-study society for women, in London, and together with the authorities at King’s College there arranged theological lectures for women. She turned to her writing with renewed enthusiasm, working again on The Venture of Rational Faith. While she was doing so, she kept all her other activities in hand by (Ben observed) becoming ‘very good at using help. . . she could keep several people employed – it was like the Japanese plate trick – as many as seven volunteers could be kept going, and each revived with a smart touch when flagging’. In the winter of 1900–1, Maggie was thought sufficiently recovered to be able to return for some weeks to Egypt, together with Nettie and her Aunt Henry Sidgwick. She relaxed her antagonism to Lucy, sharing her love for Tremans and the countryside, and she became more easy-going with Ben.

  A SCRAP, ON TREMANS WRITING PAPER, DATED 10 JANUARY 1900

  I, Margaret Benson, in full possession of my faculties do hereby declare that for the future, I will go to bed at an Earlier Stage of a really bad cold, especially if Influenza is about – and this I acknowledge to my wise and doting Mother and in conjunction with her

  Signed

  Margaret Benson

  In the midst of her Winchester depression, Ben had written in her diary that the previous forty years of her life were a completed tapestry, and of her determination to fashion the new length put into her hands ‘into a garment of praise, not into a cowl of heaviness’. At Tremans she set about doing that, becoming – in Fred’s words – ‘the whole spirit and inspiration of the place’. Yet her impact was a subtle one. As her children progressed through adulthood, making their very individual marks on the world, she took a quiet role in the background. As Arthur put it, his mother had always ‘evoked rather than dazzled’, and nowhere was that more true than at Tremans.

  Ben’s instinct for spiritual survival was strong. The outward Christian conventions were there – family prayers with the servants, twice daily in the little downstairs oratory off the hall (curiously, also sanctuary to the statue of Rameses the Great) – but it was the idiosyncratic faith she had begun to fashion for herself in Lincoln, her conviction that ‘Love is God’, that sustained her. To a friend she once wrote: ‘Faith is not a bundle of mere spiritual truths, but a condition of the soul which I should describe as eternal life.’ Elizabeth Wordsworth, who had been so irritated by the young Mary Benson, thought that ‘it was not perhaps till after her widowhood that the full beauty of her character came out’.

  Ben’s own sitting room at Tremans was a low-panelled one near the front door, with two windows overlooking the lawn, decorated with some of her favourite pictures. She had a bookcase of her most-loved works, and the well-worn comfortable ottoman – two seats of which were by now entirely unapproachable – against one wall. Behind her own writing chair was an armchair for a visitor, and in one corner stood ‘a sort of blasted tree’ for Joey, the vicious green parrot, who perched on her shoulder whistling his only tune (‘Pop Goes the Weasel’) or laughing hoarsely in her ear as she saw to her letters, and pulled out her hairpins. Joey adored Ben blindly, attacking invaders of her bower in insane rage – Beth did not like him at all, as he was ‘not kind and loving’, a description, observed Fred ‘which but faintly expressed his satanic nature’.

  Ben and Lucy’s bedroom, over the dining room, boasted an enormous fireplace, its fireback representing a chariot and horses, the charioteer in a flying robe. Each morning at seven o’clock, Lucy read to Ben
from the Bible, in such a voice that every vowel could be heard at the other side of the house. Such mighty resonance was possibly employed because Ben was going deaf, though Arthur noted that even in church Lucy responded as though she were talking into a telephone (he had first seen one being used at Windsor Castle: ‘it is very funny to hear this done’). Ben, by contrast, had two tones in prayer, one as if she were telling a ghost story, the other as if she were wheedling with a cat. A little later in the morning, it was Ben’s voice that filtered through the corridors, as she sang a hymn accompanied by the old Addington chapel organ, at household prayers in the downstairs oratory – a good octave lower than the pure contralto she had once been – while half-muffled stentorian tones came from above, as those sons too sluggish of spirit to join her, carolled from their beds.

  Arthur was the most reluctant to join in, not through laziness but from a growing antagonism to the rituals and paraphernalia of orthodox Christianity. Ben’s insistence on compline – communal prayers before bed – riled him the most, ‘the discomfort, the silly idiotic responses, the false sociability of it all’. He baulked, too, at matins in the village church: ‘I get no good out of such a service, I fear; no good at all. . . To sit in silent rows, like sheep in pens, and to cry out suddenly at once, words that we are not thinking about, like ducks in a pool. How very odd it must seem to God that we should think that we please him so.’ Ben, whose own rocky religious path gave her every sympathy for scepticism, had lost none of her motherly ‘tac’.