Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  ‘Are you coming to church, Arthur?’ she asked one Sunday, noticing he wasn’t quite dressed for the purpose.

  ‘Would you like me to go?’

  ‘I should like you to like to go, but I don’t want you to go because you think I should like you to go.’

  Breakfast, when the ‘boys’ were at Tremans, was a staggered affair, as they wandered down at all hours of the morning. Ben breakfasted early, then saw to her correspondence, sorting it into piles on little black leather boards with legends embossed in gold letters, Unanswered, Secretary, Destroy. Arthur suggested there should be one for Unreceived Letters, for those that were difficult or dangerous to answer. Next, she fell to a detailed reading of the newspapers, but all this was interspersed with many short walks, usually with Lucy, and in all weathers, even though her joints were beginning to ache. Undeterred when local gamekeepers put a wattle fence across a track that led through some exceptionally good woodland cover, Ben bought a small tool-chest with saw, mallet and chisel, and together with Lucy reasserted her right of way by destroying the barrier. Repeatedly. She made one or two overtures towards joining local committees, gave bible-classes in Horsted Keynes, and visited distressed families, but charity and good works in the village were more Lucy’s realm. However, Ben did once serve single-handedly as the ‘Orchestra’ when Lucy held a tea dance on the lawn.

  London was closer than it had been from Winchester, with a railway station easily reached at Horsted Keynes. There were numerous trips to the little house on Barton Street, and – after Lucy’s brother-in-law Randall Davidson was himself elevated from Bishop of Winchester to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1903 – nights spent, once again, at Lambeth Palace. The Davidsons came down every summer for long stays in the country. Visitors arrived at Tremans in droves – in 1901 alone, sixty people signed the visitors’ book, and that was by no means a remarkable year. Ben’s old friends the Duchess of Bedford and Lady Henry Somerset were there frequently, and Ethel Smyth dropped by. Tan came down from Lincoln to stay from time to time. Ben’s favourite brother, Henry Sidgwick, died in 1900, but Ben was close friends with his widow Eleanor (‘Aunt Nora’, the sister of A. J. Balfour, who became Prime Minister in 1902). She, too, was a regular visitor. She had been Principal of Newnham College at Cambridge, and played a leading role in the Society for Psychical Research, which Henry had helped found. Freed from Edward’s disapproval (at least in a corporeal sense) Ben renewed her interest in the occult – to the clear disapproval of Randall Davidson. A visiting medium determined that Tremans was haunted, and saw dwarfish figures dressed in brown running nimbly around table legs in the upstairs parlour. Ben took to visiting a spiritualist in Croydon, who after one séance walked back with her to the station and described Edward walking to one side (apparently indulgent of Ben’s dabbling), Hugh’s spirit guide – a French abbé, wearing his name and the date 1732 on a label – between them, and Zola, the French writer, in front.

  Cousins of Lucy’s came to Tremans, too – tall, effusive, and a touch vulgar. They called her ‘Loo’ and showed their uvulas when they laughed. There were also new friends, including the usual sprinkling of ladies besotted with Ben, such as a Miss Frere, of whom Arthur’s somewhat irritated recollection was of ‘an ear and the rim of a cheek, her face being set towards Jerusalem – i.e. M.B.’. All ended up in long conversations with Ben, on the lawn or at the fireside. A young American friend of Arthur’s, expecting a dowdy and austere hostess, was agreeably surprised. ‘But it’s astonishing!’ he said to Arthur in the smoking room. ‘Here is your mother, living in a remote country place, getting on in years, who has all the freshness of youth, has everybody and everything at her fingers’ ends, and holds her own in argument from American politics to Greek metaphysics – and what is more keeps a poetical touch on life all the time. How is it done?’ The young man may, though, have been the same American who persisted in cornering Ben and whose ceaseless stream of talk made her feel ‘as if I had been listening to bagpipes for a week’.

  Without its visitors (even, much of the time, with them) Tremans remained a house of women – Ben and Lucy in their big mahogany bed, Maggie in her room with quaint recesses; often Nettie, too, on one of her long visits, and Beth in her room in the attic, from which, as time went on, now often fretful and tearful, she seldom stirred. Into this well of oestrogen – for weekends, on holiday, to write books – came Ben’s sons, hardly renowned for their excess of testosterone, and they frequently brought guests of their own. These friends were, as Fred put it, a most heterogeneous collection. Hugh produced some rather strange visitors, clerics, mostly, with the oddest habits of behaviour. Arthur brought denizens of his literary world – Percy Lubbock and the writer and critic Edmund Gosse, both of whom became his lifelong friends. There was an Eton colleague, the ‘picturesque’ H. E. Luxmoore, ‘in a low collar and Liberty-fabric tie, knickerbockers, and stockings that showed his small feet and, in the evening, a brown velvet dinner-jacket’, and later a Cambridge undergraduate George Mallory, eventually famous for tackling Mount Everest, but then a sublimely decorative young man, much captivated by Arthur. Ben developed a discreet passion for the delicately featured youth. ‘Mr Mallory is here,’ she wrote once to Hugh, ‘such a dear boy looking so absolutely young – and Oh isn’t he “pretty”! I like him immensely but I want to call him by his Christian name, and don’t know it – and Arthur is so exquisitely polite to him, that if I did, I mightn’t dare to use it.’

  Fred brought a series of comparably decorative young men, often someone no one had seen or heard of before, generally very much younger than he and flattered by a famous novelist’s attentions; one such was Wilfred Coleridge, a descendent of the poet, just eighteen and fresh out of Eton. ‘He is a cheerful creature,’ said Arthur, ‘not very attractive, with an odd rather assured manner; he admires Fred devotedly, and Fred seems to have an affection for him, half paternal half sentimental. He is always with him and yet seems to snub him a good deal in a jovial way.’ Fred’s young men and Arthur’s young men, if they were at Tremans simultaneously, appear to have had little to do with each other, and between the brothers, what Arthur once termed ‘the homo sexual question’ was simply not discussed – not, at least, until some decades later.

  In addition to his alluring friends, Fred embarked upon a series of handsome young valets, much to Ben’s disapproval, as she thought he was getting above his station. ‘A footman! My! That’s his Lady Charles,’ she quipped, referring to one of Fred’s London ‘Earls and Countesses’, Lady Charles Beresford. More seriously, she commented: ‘His manservant really sticks in my throat. . . A strong young man, with all his income to make should scarcely go about with a man do you think.’ Fred had to ask Mrs Moss the cook to teach the first of his valets, Sidney, some simple breakfast dishes, though breakfast-making skills might have been expected to be a prerequisite of the young man’s profession.

  FRED RECOLLECTS THE CONVERSATIONAL FLOW OF LADY CHARLES BERESFORD,

  once the focus of a great Society scandal and in later life renowned for her auburn wig, pink-blancmange dress sense and startlingly haphazard make-up, with clouds of face powder and eyebrows in unexpected places

  I’ve read the manuscript you sent me. Where are my dogs? Blackie, come here at once, and don’t make nuptials with Orange among the petunias. I read it in bed last night, and Blackie was lying on my chest, so that when I giggled he fell off. . . The turquoise brooch? No, don’t bother : they’ll find it. Let’s have lunch. . . Did you go to the opera last night? Tristan: such a bore! And the love-duet! it was time for their golden wedding before they got to the end. . . Yes: Tristan! How marvellous! Why does nobody love like that now? and for heaven’s sake let’s go in out of this awful sun. It ought to be electric light. Where is Orange?. . . Have you seen Maisie? I am told she has gone into deep mourning over Tim’s death like a widow. Of course everybody knew, but she needn’t remind them: so silly to dot the i’s when the man’s dead, and the i’s have all been dott
ed again and again already. But crape, swathed in crape, like a crow, and almost tumbling out of her box last night at the Liebestod. . .

  When Arthur, Fred or Hugh were down at Tremans, afternoon walks and cycle tours stretched farther afield. After Arthur took to motoring, he would bowl them all across the countryside in his car, then send Ben and Maggie (who despite her recovery could still not walk very far) on ahead with the driver; meanwhile he, Lucy and whoever else had been persuaded to come took a brisk hike through the countryside, to be met some miles later in time to drive home in the magnificent green motor for the sacred hour of tea, at five o’clock. With the family at home, evenings were taken up with whist, parlour games and ‘fine arguments’. The old word and literary games resurfaced. One evening Maggie read out a gentle satire on Lucy, Fred a parody of Keats, Ben a funny essay on growing old, and Hugh a series of nightmarish adventures that recalled the gory stories he had told as a child. Even Lucy contributed a poem of her own. Ben, who had once shared an evil-smelling pipe with Fred, and sometimes had a cigarette with Hugh or Fred after dinner, out of sight of Lucy who disapproved of smoking quite as fiercely as Edward had, also composed a little verse poking fun at Fred’s habit.

  TO WHOM DID FRED WRITE AFTER DINNER?

  A poem by Mary Benson

  Mysterious, secret, dark as night –

  The names of all his friends.

  He only says ‘I go to write’,

  And there my knowledge ends.

  I pry not, I – I only feel

  Whenever he comes back O!

  That through his letters loudly peal

  The pleasures of Tobacco.

  Family talk of an evening was, Arthur noted, ‘remarkably good – very brisk, humorous, fanciful; and even serious. Arguments are sustained with force and ingenuity. . . It might appear forced and smart, like the crackling of thorns. But perhaps it is saved from that by a vein of poetry. Lucy talks less than we do: but argues with greater tenacity; and her laugh is delightful.’ Lucy had, Arthur noted elsewhere, ‘great and gentle decisiveness. . . a pleasant touch of amicable combativeness, and a firm grasp of practical issues’. Maggie may have found a new ‘sphere’ outdoors, and Ben might be the animating spirit of Tremans, but Lucy ran life there, and held sway over Ben.

  The old Queen died in 1901, and the dissipated Prince of Wales – dubbed ‘Edward the Caresser’ by some in his private circle – succeeded her as King Edward VII, ending a long and noisy wait in the wings. ‘Most people pray to the Eternal Father,’ he had quipped, ‘but I am the only one afflicted with an Eternal Mother.’ Arthur thought the new monarch ‘bourgeois, ungraceful, small-minded, gross’ and said caustically of the Coronation that it ‘was to the King, I fear, the Apotheosis of Buttons not the consecration of life to service’. The tone at Court changed quickly. Attending a special command performance at Windsor Castle of J. M. Barrie’s comedy Quality Street, in 1902, Arthur observed that the old Victorian atmosphere had gone completely. ‘It is much more genial, considerate, equal – it lacks the grim and ugly stateliness of the old time; but it also lacks dignity. When it was said that the Queen is coming – that she wd receive, courtiers ran about like frightened hens – and were horribly afraid of her, knowing she would notice everything. Now, no one could be exactly afraid of the King!’ Not just the Court, but the country as a whole was undergoing a massive shift of gear. A long and (to the British) surprisingly difficult war against the Boers in South Africa had unsettled firm convictions of imperial might. Women were becoming increasingly vociferous in demanding the vote. Money was beginning to barge ahead of breeding in the corridors of power. It was an age of millionaires, Arthur conceded to the Duchess of Bedford in a conversation at Tremans, with the old despots being replaced by a ‘tyranny of wealth’, and to many the new King epitomized the brash new times.

  These swirling currents of change swept past Tremans. Ben regretted this, but was not sufficiently fired by any fervour of her own to involve herself in politics. ‘How the Political Situation thickens,’ she wrote to Hugh during a period of worker unrest and a government crisis. ‘I wish I was in the middle of it all – or at any rate were Watching on a Hill with a Staff and having messages coming and going.’ Ben had loved talking with politicians, but she remained disengaged from politics. She was in touch, but old-fashioned – and conservatively disapproving of Ethel Smyth’s increasing involvement with the movement for women’s suffrage. Ethel, who was to compose ‘The March of the Women’, the anthem of the Suffragette Movement, argued fiercely with Ben on the subject – on one occasion, in the little revolving summerhouse, growing so vehement on the Church’s attitude to the struggle that she felt moved later to write to Ben and apologize. This drew a characteristic response: ‘Now you speak of it I do remember a few stormy moments in the Shelter that day, but my dear, you never were given to understatement, were you?’

  Arthur was moving in increasingly grand social circles. Gruff and more reticent than his sparkling socialite younger brother, Arthur was nevertheless charming company, and had inherited Ben’s genius at conversation, ‘keeping the stickiest ball nimbly rolling, with the effect that the rest of the talkers got the encouraging impression that they were in peculiarly good form themselves’. After one especially stimulating Windsor lunch party, Arthur had been taken up by Lady Ponsonby, wife of Sir Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria’s private secretary, who had effected all manner of influential introductions. The young Duke of Albany, the Queen’s grandson, was entered for Arthur’s house at Eton in 1894, and Arthur had been drawn into his mother the Duchess’s inner circle. Throughout the 1890s, Arthur published small volumes of verse, and within time he was accepted as an unofficial Poet Laureate to the Court at Windsor, the work of the official incumbent Alfred Austin being so awful that even the Queen and the then Prince of Wales could tell. When Edward Elgar adapted part of his Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 into the finale of a Coronation Ode for Edward VII, the King himself suggested that Arthur should come up with some words. Arthur rather disarmed the composer during one requested rewrite by complaining that the metre was a difficult one, and suggesting that if Elgar ‘could string a few nonsense words just to show me how you would like them to run I would construct it, following the air closely’. Nevertheless, words and tune proved immediately popular, becoming – and remaining – a second national anthem. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ received its premiere at a concert performance at Covent Garden in 1902, sung by the redoubtable Clara Butt, whose voice at times rolled down the slopes of rich contralto into a deeply impressive baritone.

  In the summer of 1903, Arthur was invited to assist Viscount Esher in the editing of Queen Victoria’s letters. The following year he left Eton for Cambridge, where he had been offered a fellowship at Magdalene College, to concentrate on the Queen’s letters, on his poetry, and on writing biographies and novels. Leaving Eton brought him a freedom he had yearned for. ‘I should like to make some younger friends,’ he had written in his diary in January, ‘in a way which is impossible when one is in authority over them. But one schemes and schemes.’ For Arthur, fulfilled desire lay behind glass. His emotions were tightly held back, kept in ‘a carefully locked and guarded strong room’ to which he barely had entry himself. He had been brought up, he thought, ‘to regard all sexual relations as being rather detestable in their very nature, a thing per se to be ashamed of’, regretted that he had ‘never been in vital touch with anyone – never either fought anyone, or kissed anyone’. He lived ‘on the edge of life; on the green margin’, the eternal observer, ever ‘on the edge of Paradise and never quite finding the way in’.

  ARTHUR BENSON VIEWS PARADISE

  . . . while on an evening walk at Eton

  Such a little picture coming back: the lane was still as death, fragrant and cool. Impey’s house loomed up, mostly dark. There was a window lighted up, full of flowers: the room inside still: but just as I came past there came a boy in a nightgown to the window with a candle, put it down; and be
gan to move the flowers, smiling. It seemed so strange to see this, hung like a picture, high in the air: like a window opened to heaven; and yet he was so unconscious that anyone saw him, down in the dark. And then came a further surprise, of which I will not speak, but which I shall not easily forget.

  . . . on a summer’s day in Cambridge

  The flash of the naked body of a bather, up by Byron’s Pool, across the meadow grass and among the trees gave me an indescribable thrill of romance and desire. Winterbottom looked in, very gracious and smiling; and I nearly gave way to a somewhat sentimental impulse; but did not, and left the words unuttered. I have a strong feeling that one must not be silly in friendship – and yet one loses many beautiful things so; if only one could just be natural!

  . . . yet cannot reach it

  Watching two poor lady-birds, who are perambulating the window, one inside one outside, stopping to make signals, and bewildered that they can’t touch the little body that is so close, just beneath their feet. That is a parable.

  FROM A. C. BENSON’S NOVEL BESIDE STILL WATERS

  He could clasp hands with another soul, he could step pleasantly and congenially through the anterooms and corridors of friendship; but as soon as the great door that led to the inner rooms of the house came in sight, a certain coldness and shamefacedness held him back; the hand was dropped, the expected word unspoken.