“A French lady is visiting,” she hisses in my ear before she sits down at the breakfast table.
For a moment I’m confused—three of our number being from Bordeaux—and then I catch her meaning. “Deo gratias,” I intone.
No seventh child prodigy, then; or not this year, at least.
She reads aloud from today’s packet of Bensoniana. Martin’s just finished the three volumes of Carlyle’s French Revolution. The girls have been playing secret games with their dolls that the boys mockingly call—from the single line they’ve overheard—How Sweet Are the Affections of These Innocent Babes. Nellie writes to her mother in Dog Latin, Darlingus superbus, and defends herself against a charge of kicking Fred in the nose during a game of Sieges: I only put my foot against his face and pushed.
That makes us all hoot.
In my room, I look at myself in the tarnished glass. Pearly.
We visit the synagogue, to satisfy our curiosity; boil eggs in the hot springs; go to the opera and smirk at the bad acting. I glimpse this woman as she could have been if she’d never come under the patriarch’s chill influence.
The two of us are taking exercise in the elegant Walking Room at the Kurhaus, peeking into the Casino, poking fun at the greedy faces of the gamblers. But suddenly Minnie’s voice goes flat. “Every letter from home gives me such a pang, Ellen, I can hardly bear to slit the envelope.”
“Has your husband been losing his temper again?”
She nods. “With Maggie, for asking the butler what he’d do if there were a revolution. Edward forgets to be patient with petty faults, such as untidy eating. He does love the children,” she goes on after a pause, as if I’d said otherwise. “Every morning he reads aloud to them from the Greek Testament while he’s shaving.”
Heaven spare me such love.
“I suppose I feel for them because I married him when I was only a child in understanding, just eighteen. Or should I say, Edward married me?” she wonders. “He was thirty, and my cousin. He’d picked me out seven years earlier.”
“When you were . . . eleven?” I am incredulous.
“He was impressed by my recitation of one of the Lays of Ancient Rome. He told my mother I was a fine bud and he’d make me his wife if I bloomed accordingly. He was so handsome, intellectual, pious, absolute . . .”
On the evidence of the photograph on her dressing table, the man’s distinguished-looking, at best, with drooping, reproachful eyes.
“Edward shaped me. I read what he prescribed. He taught me arithmetic, doctrine, architecture, geography, metre, German,” says Minnie. “When he took me on his knee and proposed, I only cried and tied a knot in my handkerchief, but he took that as a yes.”
I’m appalled.
All this happened long ago, I remind myself. Her voice has the fatalistic cadence of a legend.
November winds: we lock arms as we walk, so our ballooning skirts won’t push us off the path.
The bonds draw tighter. We talk about it but indirectly, eyes on the lashing treetops. Minnie calls what’s happening a kindling, a fascination, a yearning, a restless tingling.
I say less. Perhaps because—I suspect—I feel more. If I were to put words to it, we’d be in deep waters indeed.
We’ve driven two days to reach this tiny chapel, to stand side by side before the altarpiece. (The tedious Mrs. Mackenzie wanted to come along, but I told her the carriage was too small.)
The Madonna’s dressed all in red, an unusual colour for her, and her hair flows free, more like a Magdalene’s. The Infant on her lap, scarlet roses blooming all around them, but one huge white one beside her to symbolise her purity. “See the goldfinches?” I almost touch the paint; the pastor clears his throat behind us.
“Usually she only has eyes for her son,” Minnie observes, “but here—”
“Yes,” I say, gratified by her quickness, “the two of them are looking in different directions.”
“Almost as if the baby wants to wriggle out of her grasp.”
“Or she out of his.”
Minnie laughs under her breath at my sacrilegiousness.
Our room at the hotel is barely bigger than the bed. We draw together the moment the candle’s out, her head pillowed on my breast. A restless night, no sleep. So wild a fusing, I can hardly bear it.
On our return, Minnie finally draws up her chart of Expenses to Date, and is horrified to find it comes to almost ten pounds. By return of post, the headmaster excoriates her.
“The ridiculous little presents for the children—they only cost a few shillings! And my sealskin coat was specially recommended by Dr. Malcolm to keep out the cold,” she wails. “But I suppose Edward has a right to be cross about our trips. The driver, the room, the tips . . .”
“Does he expect you to pass a winter in the Rhine Valley and see none of its greatest works of art?”
“Not the whole winter,” she corrects me. “He wants me home by December.”
Next month. Like a horse kicking me in the chest.
The man writes to say he’s been offered a most prestigious position: Chancellorship of Lincoln Cathedral. “The cloistered life, instead of noisy boys. It would suit Edward so much better,” says Minnie, frowning over his diagram of the house and grounds.
“A step to greater things,” says Mr. Christopher Benson, spreading his marmalade thin. “Mark my words, my brother will be a bishop one of these days.”
“This pays just half his current salary, mind you,” Minnie murmurs.
I press my lips together so as not to burst.
Her husband accepts the job, of course. He expects her back by Christmas, for the last festive season in their old home. He must think she has nothing to keep her here. Does he not understand her at all?
Minnie loses all the ground she’s gained since September. Sick stomach, difficulty swallowing, generally prostrated. Every morning, she wakes and wishes she were still asleep. “I feel as if I am in mourning for I don’t know what. Like a deep well, and I can’t climb out.”
At my prompting she appeals to Dr. Malcolm.
He writes to the husband himself to say that the news of this great move has brought on a relapse, and to counsel patience.
If you insist on my premature return, Minnie writes, at my dictation, I only fear you’ll find me a poor incapable creature, entirely unfit to be your helpmeet in the years ahead.
A reprieve. Minnie rallies, and starts to eat better. She comes to my room almost every night.
I’ve done no work on my book for months, and I find I care not a whit whether it ever sees print. I enjoy this Christmastide more than any I can remember since I was a child.
Minnie’s extraordinary progeny write to say they’re mounting theatricals of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Fred’s founded a museum for his collections of butterflies, eggs, fossils and coins, which his mother may see if she wears a hat like a proper lady visitor.
They’re getting along perfectly well without her. They have their grandmother, their nurse, each other.
But Minnie broods. “When school’s out, and they’re all at home with their father, Martin’s stammer gets worse, and if I’m not there to intercede—”
“Like your namesake,” I point out. “Mary, shielding sinners from the wrath of God.”
Her smile is sorrowful.
When it’s dark we wrap up well and go to the market to see the lit-up, spinning Weihnachtspyramide with its rows of carved figures. Back at the boarding house, we help make hundreds of star and bell-shaped biscuits, and a gingerbread house.
Minnie and I sit up drinking too much mulled wine. “I’ve never been responsible for my own life,” she says, staring into the dying fire.
“You were passed from mother to husband like a parcel,” I point out.
“He’s a great man, and I’m not worthy of him. I married him out of awe, respect, cowardice, even,” she says, very low. “Not love.”
I gather up her hands and kiss them.
On Thre
e Kings Day, the garlanded tree is taken down, and Minnie bursts into tears over a note from Fred that says We miss Lady Abracadabra.
Then she opens the one from her husband, which commands her to come home.
“I feel literally torn in two,” she cries. “I’ve neglected those who are dear to me.”
It comes out in a growl. “Am I not dear to you?”
“How can you ask that? I’ve enjoyed Wiesbaden—enjoyed you—so much. Too much. But I owe it to my children, to my husband . . .”
I open my mouth and it all spills out. “The man’s a nit-picker and a prig. It’s a case of natural incompatibility: a free spirit yoked to a Puritan. A marriage that ought never to have happened.”
Face in her hands. “What’s done is done.”
“Done by trickery! He got a little girl into his power before she had a chance to contemplate any other future. He’s overstrained a highly intelligent woman to the breaking point by domestic care and ceaseless childbearing.”
“Ellen—”
“Tyranny, I call it.” I fish up a phrase from the Divorce Court reports. “Mental cruelty. And now he chooses to cut his income in two, and orders you back to run his household on a fraction of the resources, with a wrecked constitution . . .”
Her face is screwed up like paper. “I’ve been asking God—”
“I say Love is God.” The words come up in my throat like shards of glass.
She and I hold each other, then, so tightly our arms will be bruised tomorrow.
The rains of February, chill and interminable. Minnie almost boasts of her tossings and turnings, dizzy spells and pukes.
I go to Dr. Malcolm. “Just until Easter,” I suggest. (Beg.) “Until the weather warms and we see a few roses in her cheeks.”
“Miss Hall,” he says, not unkindly, “why do you think Mrs. Benson came to Wiesbaden?”
“To get better.”
He corrects me: “To be restored to what she was, only more fit to take up the great work of wifehood and motherhood again.”
My mouth twitches. “You said she needed a holiday from her life.”
“The very definition of a holiday is that it ends. There comes a moment when only a sharp tug on the reins will work the final cure.”
“She’s not a donkey!”
“I’ve known women recover overnight, in the event of a child’s illness, a husband’s bankruptcy or death, as if the crisis has produced a miracle,” he adds.
I shut my eyes for a moment and savour the image: Edward Benson struck down by an apoplexy over his notes on St. Cyprian.
We walk arm in arm below trees barely stippled with green. Under all her softness, I’m coming to realise, Minnie’s as hard as nails. “I did marry him, Ellen.”
“Stop saying that. As if for a moment I could forget.”
“There’s no going back. I mean . . . no going back on that vow, no turning back time.”
“Don’t pretend you would if you could!” What mother would wish her own children unmade? And such children, too: the fusion of his cold brilliance and her fire.
Two tears, a pair of perfect plumb lines down Minnie’s face. They make a Pietà of her. “I married him and there’s no getting away from that.”
“You’re already away,” I roar. “The hardest part is over.” I play my last card, like some sweat-soaked gambler lingering too long at the table. “You’re here, aren’t you? With me. All you have to do is stay.”
Minnie steps back, to fix her glossy eyes on mine. “Ellen, I’m going home.”
I avert my face. Did I ever have a chance? She grew up already belonging to him. Six hoops of steel grapple them together. How Sweet Are the Affections of These Innocent Babes.
“But I have an idea,” she says softly. “Edward’s offered to pay the expenses of a travel companion. What if it were you?”
I flinch. “What good would it do me to deliver you over like some hostage?”
“We could take our time, and see some pictures. A little European tour of our own. And there’d be no need for you to rush off, when we got to England. Couldn’t you stay a while?”
So Minnie imagines me tucking myself into the household? I’d have to make myself indispensable and learn Bensonian ways. Might I trouble mine host / For another slice of toast?
Salt, wet shame at the back of my eyes, and the worst of it is, I nod. Hope is flaring up already; is the man oblivious enough to let me into his house, to allow me the best part of his wife? “Write and ask him,” I say hoarsely.
Our musical evenings always end with “Since First I Saw Your Face.” “What? I that loved and you that liked,” Minnie sings sweetly:
Shall we begin to wrangle?
No, no, no, my heart is fast,
And cannot disentangle.
The headmaster’s—no, beg pardon, the Chancellor’s answer comes by the end of February. He believes Mrs. Mackenzie would be a more suitable companion.
So he’s not that blind, then. I could pluck out the man’s drooping eyes.
Minnie claims to be sorry, so terribly sorry. (Not sorry enough to say no to him, though.) I’ve been an entertainment, I see that now. One of the winter pastimes of Wiesbaden. All part of her cure.
She keeps singing in the evenings, right up until the last one, when her and Mrs. Mackenzie’s trunks are packed. I only play the piano, which can be performed in any state.
I asked you leave, you bade me love;
Is’t now a time to chide me?
The Lady Abracadabra sings the couplet vivaciously, that fount of spirit always bubbling up in her.
No, no, no, I’ll love you still
What fortune e’er betide me.
And me, how am I to be cured? I would so much prefer not to love her still; to let this fever fade from memory. Vita brevis, ars longa: painted or carved Madonnas endure longer than real women. I’ll remind myself of that, next time, if there ever is a next time.
Note
For this story about Mary “Minnie” Sidgwick Benson’s time in Wiesbaden (1872–3), I drew on the voluminous Benson correspondence, a retrospective diary Minnie wrote in 1876 and studies of the family by E. F. Benson (Fred), A. C. Benson (Arthur), Brian Masters, David Williams and Martha Vicinus, as well as the sole biography of Minnie, Rodney Bolt’s As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson.
Almost nothing is known about Ellen (or possibly Elizabeth) Hall apart from her relationship with Minnie. That seems to have ended when Hall visited the Bensons in England after Minnie’s return, and Edward asked her to leave.
In 1883 he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. The Bensons had no more children, and Minnie continued to “fall in love” (her phrase) with one woman after another. The last of them, Lucy Tait, moved in with the family in 1890, and shared a bed with Minnie from Edward’s death six years later until Minnie’s in 1918.
READER, I MARRIED HIM
SUSAN HILL
THERE WAS NOTHING THEY did not say about me, no name I wasn’t called. I was abused to my face and behind my back.
But there was truth among the lies. They said I was ambitious, hard and ruthless and would stop at nothing to get what I wanted.
They did not know what that was, of course. How could they? They thought it was simply the King, and the title, because they could never have understood my desperate need to acquire something they had always had and taken for granted, as their birthright. And that was security. Financial. Social. Domestic. Marital. Security was all I ever longed and struggled and schemed for, because since very early and forgotten childhood, I had never had it, and my deepest, my driving fear through it all was that I never would.
Security.
Did I achieve it?
If I did, it was through men, not through my own effort. I realise now that it was always an illusion. Even after that final, dangerous, all-or-nothing throw of the dice, even when I should have felt safe at last and overwhelmingly secure, I knew at heart that I was not. Loser
had lost all.
But I am running ahead. I always run ahead now.
Poverty begot the insecurity, of course, and shame came out of it all. As I grew out of childhood, which does not understand any of this, I became aware that my father was dead and now we were poor. Genteel poverty is the worst of all, because of the contrast. My mother had aspirations. She had some small talents. She could not see herself as poor. But she had to do something about it, use the small talents, and so she embroidered things, modest little nothings, cushion covers and tray cloths, and sold them at a Women’s Exchange Shop. They made very little money. But if there is nothing truly shameful about doing business with a talent for something as genteel as embroidery, my mother’s next attempt to make frayed ends meet was not only a financial disaster, it was a social one. My face burns, even after all these years, when I remember. We had moved into a house converted into apartments and my mother sent around cards, asking the other tenants to dine—and pay for the pleasure. Few came, the cost of the food was more than they paid. We were obliged to go and live with Aunt Bessie. She had been watching and waiting, knowing that everything would go wrong, ready to welcome us.
I loved her. She was better than a mother. She was as dear to me as any woman could be, and she never let me down, even when it was the very thing she should have done.
But even she could not get rid of the shame and insecurity.
So I went to a ball, and why else does a young woman of nineteen go to a ball but to meet a young man?
He was twenty-seven, a naval lieutenant who had his pilot’s wings. He had gold epaulettes and a dashing moustache.
For my part, I had style. I always had style, with or without money. I had a way with me. I discovered that soon enough.
He danced with me. He liked me. He even kissed me.
I had style. I had confidence.
I had an evening wedding, wearing white velvet, with a pearl-embroidered bodice.