Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part VI

This article in the series inspired by Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone has more to say about Richard the Wizard and his mother. 

Richard is the son of Lady Arabel Higgins. He is an illiterate young soldier; he is also a powerful wizard.

His mother’s attitude towards him is strange: she both knows and doesn’t want to know that he is a magic person.

Lady Arabel’s denial and dissociation

Lady Arabel is very unhappy about Richard’s difference from other boys. Although she knows that he isn’t normal, she is in denial of what he really is. She refuses to accept that he has occult powers. She complains about her friend’s always bringing Richard’s name up whenever anything tiresome or out of the way happens:

“One would think you considered the poor boy a wizard.”

Lady Arabel pretends to notice nothing when Richard performs his magic:

“The wizard's mother obviously had great difficulty in not noticing the phenomena connected with her son, and she wore a striving smile and a look of glassy and well-bred unconsciousness whenever anything magic happened."

She talks a little nervously on very insipid subjects throughout the supper party at which Richard manifests his powers. When Richard does something so spectacular that she can’t possibly ignore it, she turns scarlet and murmurs that he is so merry and ingenious.

It is not only Richard’s magic that Lady Arabel refuses to see. When Sarah Brown tells her that Richard has gone to visit his ‘True Love’, Lady Arabel says, “You are quite mistaken, and I must beg of you to be careful how you repeat idle gossip about my son.”

It is the truth not idle gossip, but she just won’t accept it.

Lady Arabel finally admits the truth

It is the last straw for Lady Arabel when Richard, who has just returned from visiting his ‘True Love’, informs her that she is now a grandmother:

"’It is too cruel. Is this my son? I meant so well, and all my life I did the things that other people did, the natural things. Except just once. And for that once, I am so cruelly punished.... I am given a son who is no son to me, who says only things I mustn't understand ... who does only things I mustn't see....’ She paused, and, taking her hands from her face, looked round aghast at Richard ...’faery son’ ..." 

And now she has a faery grandson too!

Stella Benson and her mother

Stella Benson’s mother was unsympathetic towards Stella. Perhaps she wanted a normal, healthy daughter and couldn’t accept her as she was; perhaps she ignored Stella’s success as a writer. Maybe she thought that Stella was no daughter to her.

Maybe it was this rejection and lack of understanding that inspired the character of Lady Arabel.

Richard, Sarah Brown and his True Love

Richard the Wizard makes what seems to non-magic people a strange choice in Peony, the woman he calls his ‘True Love’. It seems like a mis-match when it comes to their very different social classes and other factors such as her age, appearance and Cockney speech, but he sees her very differently from the way non-magic people do.

Peony attracts magic people. A magic child brought her and Richard together. Richard has never met anyone else like her. She is the only one whose voice is more beautiful than silence.

Although he gives Sarah Brown a job on his farm, helps to heal her pain and gives her a ride on his white horse, Richard has little personal interest in Sarah, who in his mother’s eyes would be slightly more suitable for him as she is closer to his class.

Sarah is affected by him for a while, but realises that there is no future in it:

“Yet she felt again the magic feeling of meeting him, and dreamt of all the things that might have happened, and that might yet happen, yet never would happen, between him and her."

“Now this ride home, through the Enchanted Forest, on a tall horse, with Richard walking beside her, was the most perfect hour of Sarah Brown's life. 

Sarah Brown knew that her dream and Richard's could never meet. The fact that he was thinking of someone else all the way home was not hidden from her.”

Chalk and cheese

The way that Richard feels about Sarah Brown is not too different from the way that Angela the Witch feels about the mayor who pursues her and the collection of people who attend the weekly gatherings: there is nothing there for them.

Stella Benson says something profound that summarises it very well:

“You cannot really stir up magic people with ordinary human people.”

Just as Lady Arabel wants a real son and not one who seems like a changeling, magically-inclined people want someone of their own kind. Both sides want to be with people who do not seem like incomprehensible aliens.

Richard has no idea why his mother is so upset when she hears that she is now a grandmother. Perhaps one of the reasons he is with Peony is that she is rather like a mother to him, a mother who understands and accepts him in a way that Lady Arabel never did. 

We hear nothing more about them, so will never know whether or not Lady Arabel Higgins eventually gives up wanting real people and comes to accept her son, daughter-in-law and grandson as the magic people they are.