Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  As an identical twin, Lilla would have found it very hard to imagine living without Ada. When she was with Ada, she felt complete, safe. Alone, it was as though some part of her was missing, tucked away in the purse that Ada had carried off with her.

  Lilla had plenty of admirers that summer.

  If she wanted, she could go to India, too.

  Lilla met Ernie Howell through Toby. Ernie was a stockily handsome, fiery, reddish-haired man with solid-muscle shoulders almost as broad as he was tall—which was not very. His blue eyes blazed, and even from his photographs you can see he exuded a very physical energy that matched Lilla’s own.

  Ernie and Toby were good friends. Ernie was, at thirty-two, a few years younger than Toby but still a dozen years older than Lilla. He and Toby had worked together on the Boxer campaign. Ernie, a supply and transport captain in the British-run Indian army, had liaised with Toby, a captain in the supply and transport division of the Indian navy. They’d even sacked the Forbidden City together, Ernie walking off with the great prize of one of the extravagantly embroidered thick silk cloths that had covered a mandarin’s chair in the council chamber. (It still hangs in the English bedroom of one of my cousins today.) And, crucially, once the military occupation of China came to an end that autumn, Ernie, like Toby, would be going back to India—to the great naval port of Calcutta, where Toby was expecting to be sent, too.

  Ernie probably didn’t stand a chance. That summer, Lilla must have perfected her way of taking a man’s hand gently in hers and looking at him expectantly, as though the next thing he uttered would be the most wondrous words she had ever heard. And then, in an endearing stammer, whispering back.

  Within days, Lilla’s wide-eyed enthusiasm and whispered promises reeled Ernie in. Ernie had been looking for a wife. “An unmarried man is a ship without ballast,” he’d written home barely a few months before. And Lilla, it clearly seemed to him, was just the ballast he needed. Upon his arrival in Chefoo, Ernie must have been rapidly entranced by the charms of the Eckford women. Skirts rustled around him like paper-thin brown leaves parted by a gentle breeze. Smiles and twinkling eyes surfaced in front of him as the Eckfords’ engulfing armchairs and abundant wine threatened to lull him to sleep. Before he realized that he was thirsty, a drink was by his hand. Before he had a chance to feel hungry, plates of cakes, biscuits, sandwiches floated around the room. He sat through feast after feast at their shining dining-room table. He watched Lilla playing the piano after dinner and must have hummed along as Alice sang. He would have noticed how every room was arranged so that it both caught the eye and welcomed a visitor in, with a sense of style lacking in his own family of intellectuals and civil servants scattered around the globe. Wherever he went in the Eckford house, he would have been surrounded by tantalizing smells—flowers, scented woods, baking cakes. Seen how every dark corner had been brought to life with hand-painted friezes of flowers. He must have quickly realized that Andrew Eckford was the biggest taipan in Chefoo. And Lilla had such a pretty little face. A way of looking at him that would have made him want to grab her.

  Ernie Howell

  Ernie was an impetuous man, easily enthused by new passions. He had been a wild and out-of-control child, I’ve always been told, frequently clambering onto the roof of whichever Indian home his parents were living in at the time and refusing to come down. At the age of ten, he had been so enchanted by his first sea voyage that he had immediately decided that his future lay with the navy and insisted on going to a naval school the following year. When, at fifteen, he had failed to pass the navy’s entrance exam, he had rushed to sign up for the merchant navy as a sea cadet. It was only then that he discovered he suffered from appalling seasickness. He had to resign and join the Indian army instead.

  Here in Chefoo, Ernie was quickly dazzled by Lilla, “a charming young woman,” he wrote. “She really loves me for myself.” “She is only 19,” he continued; and “very pretty. She is very musical and plays the violin beautifully. . . . She is good as gold—no nonsense about her and quite unspoilt by contact with modern society. We shall be as happy as the day is long.”

  Rushing like a dog out of the starting trap, he proposed.

  Lilla accepted.

  It’s hard to say whose the mistake was. Was Ernie, already in his thirties, old enough to know better than to follow some impulsive affection or believe that he could transplant this domestic bliss to a tougher life in India? Or should the nineteen-year-old Lilla have been more discerning in her choice? Should she have waited, as Ada was doing, for a lengthy courtship to run its course, allowed a while for any difficulties to bubble to the surface, a while to get to know each other before they were both plunged in at the deep end, miles away from home?

  But life, especially when it comes to love or lust or whatever you want to call the forces propelling Lilla and Ernie toward each other, doesn’t always happen as it should. They didn’t have time to wait. Ernie was likely to have to leave China any day—even before Toby.

  Lilla and Ernie were married in St. Andrew’s Church, Chefoo, on October 16, 1901. For all the swiftness of the wedding’s organization, it was a full-blown affair. Alice Eckford was determined to show her daughter off at her best. Lilla wore a dress of “rich white satin, the skirt and bodice trimmed with chiffon,” said the North China Daily in an article headed “Hymen at Chefoo.” A long train trailed behind, made out of such obviously expensive silk that no decoration was needed. The bridal bouquet consisted simply of “white chrysanthemums, tuberoses, and maiden-hair fern.” The church was filled to overflowing with white flowers and palms. The bridesmaids, all Lilla’s sisters—the younger Edith and Dorothy and the as-yet-unmarried Ada—carried “white flowers in dainty baskets and wore gold cash bracelets, a gift of the bridegroom.” Alice herself may have gone a little over the top. Her blue-gray silk dress was trimmed with black lace and solid beads of jet. Her headdress was a concoction of black and gold net “trimmed with autumn foliage.” Andrew Eckford—no mention in the North China Daily of “stepfather,” no mention of Charles Jennings at all—gave Lilla away. Toby Elderton was best man.

  The reception was held at the Cornabé Eckford offices, known by the firm’s Chinese hong, or trading, name of Hokee. Lilla and Ernie’s 250-odd wedding presents were spread out on display. Tall silver coffeepots and squat silver teapots. Heavily engraved silver punch bowls and telegraph-pole candlesticks. Silver toast racks, mustard pots, salt-cellars, and ice buckets. And photograph frames of such delicate silver lace that they looked as though they might crumble between your finger and thumb.

  Lilla and Ernie’s wedding. Standing, left to right: Toby Elderton, Ada, Reggie, Ernie, Vivvy’s wife Mabel, Vivvy. Seated: Andrew Eckford, Lilla, Alice. At front: Edith, Dorothy.

  But by the time the wedding party went outside to be photographed, some of the day’s gloss must have started to wear thin. The picture I have shows a cross-legged Edith and Dorothy sulking in the front row. Alice sits behind with a terrifyingly stern expression on her face. Ernie, standing, stares impatiently to the side, as if he can barely wait to be away. And Lilla looks quite miserable. Almost as if she is about to dissolve into tears.

  Something must have gone wrong.

  But the North China Daily tells us only that, shortly afterward, “amid hearty cheers and showers of rice and shoes,” Ernie whisked Lilla off to the smaller seaside resort of Tungshin, a couple of miles down the coast.

  Two days later, they set sail for Calcutta.

  Chapter 3

  A “ NOT QUITE PRUDENT ” MARRIAGE

  CALCUTTA, INDIA, NOVEMBER 1901

  Calcutta was the political and trading capital of British-run India and many, many times the size of Chefoo. Grand municipal buildings and smooth-carved statues of generals towered over narrow streets packed with rickshaws and open carts overflowing with fruit, bags of rice, and chickens, live and dead. Vast steamers sailing to and from every corner of the world jostled for space with the city’s debris in its
dark-watered, dark-smelling harbor on the Hooghly River. Even on land, Calcutta was crowded. Houses were jam-packed together as in the oldest quarters of medieval cities. Property was so expensive that even many of the British living there could barely afford it.

  As their ship eased into Calcutta’s harbor, Lilla would have been burning with excitement. Arriving in a new city is always exciting, and this was the beginning of her marriage, the greatest adventure of her life. In any case, whatever happened next had to be better than the past three weeks at sea. Ernie’s seasickness meant that he had spent the entire journey green and grumpy. Now that they were reaching dry land, Lilla must have assumed that her husband’s ill humor was over and that a protracted honeymoon was about to begin.

  Lilla seems to have more or less decided to be besotted with Ernie, just as she had seen Ada was with Toby. But once she had made this decision, her feelings for Ernie appear to have taken on a life of their own. Part of this was probably sexual. Ernie’s photographs show him to have been handsome—strikingly handsome, really quite a hunk, with those powerful shoulders and that square-cut jaw. And part, I’m sure, was because it gave her a role to play, and she longed to weave around him the magic that her mother had shown her and create a cozy nest for them to snuggle into. Homemaking, after all, was what her new career as a wife was about. It was a role that Lilla had spent her nineteen years trying to learn how to carry out to perfection. But now that she was married, she couldn’t even have a go at it. She and Ernie didn’t have enough money to rent a house in Calcutta.

  That one respect in which Andrew Eckford had held back from treating his stepchildren fully as his own now reared its head. All his capital in Cornabé Eckford was destined for the two children he had had with Alice, his blood descendants, Edith and Dorothy. Not Lilla. Far from being an heiress with the right to a share in a prosperous China trading firm, as Ernie must have originally assumed, Lilla was only a step-daughter. Ernie would have been told this by Andrew Eckford when he went to him to ask for Lilla’s hand in marriage. But at this late stage, it would have been embarrassing for Ernie—cruel of him, even—to pull out of his courtship of Lilla. In any case, he must have been desperate by then to marry and bed her. So Ernie had steamed ahead with his proposal. Nonetheless, Lilla’s lack of money was enough of an issue for Ernie to feel that he needed to justify it to his family: “She is not wealthy. I don’t believe in rich wives for poor men. I should hate to have to ask my wife for money.” I think that, as he wrote this, he genuinely, perhaps again impetuously, believed that Lilla’s lack of money wouldn’t be a problem.

  I wish he had been right.

  But I fear that the reason that everyone looks so miserable in that wedding photograph was that the ugly questions of finance and unmet expectations were already causing trouble.

  Rather than rent a modest house outside the city and commute in each day, Ernie decided it would be better to live centrally. He took a room for them in a boardinghouse run by a woman called Mrs. Bridges, at number 14 Chowringhee—a thoroughfare in the center of the city. In the daytime, he went to his office. In the evenings, he would have often gone to his club or to the officers’ mess—places where, when he was still a bachelor, he had been able to spend all his evenings, drinking without restraint. But now that he was married, Ernie was discovering that somehow his army captain’s wages didn’t stretch as far as they had before. And the knowledge that, while he was with his friends, his wife was sitting at home with nothing to do must have produced a distinctly irritating feeling of guilt.

  Living in lodgings was quite different from how Lilla had expected her married life to be. Where was the house—the apartment, even— that she would make a pleasure to look at inside and out? That she would fill with soft furniture, and chairs not so deep that it was hard to stand up. Where she would scatter pretty sketches, tactile sculptures, objects that caught the eye. Serve three steaming courses for every meal, and if guests, then four. Afterward, play the piano gently, unless the company called for a song.

  In a bedsit in Calcutta, living like this was just a dream. And I am sure Lilla tried to dream it, thinking through how she’d arrange a sitting room—the chairs at just such an angle, the side tables carefully strewn with plants and books. At least the fresh flowers she could do for real, balancing great bunches of bright, exotic, nameless blooms on the tiny table in the corner of their room until Ernie complained that they were in his way. And there would have been a piano in the parlor downstairs. Slightly clunky, but playable. If Ernie came back at a reasonable hour, she could play for him until he stood up and said he’d had enough. But cooking—leaning over a steaming pan, sprinkling crinkly fragments of dried herbs, dipping a spoon slowly into a thick sauce, tasting sweet and sharp, smooth and crunchy—she had to imagine. I can see her standing there in a tiny rented bedroom trying to picture herself between a stove piled high with pots and pans and a kitchen table groaning with crisp, earthy vegetables and the sharpest of knives, her hands moving as she dreams of peeling apples with insides like half-frozen snow, of slicing onions whose rubbery skin catches her knife before letting it crackle through the layers, of the gentle fizz of a simmering stew, its heat prickling her face as she breathes in its vapor to see whether it is done. And then the images flicker and vanish, leaving her staring out of a small window at a brown-gray sky, the stench of the gutter making her cough.

  Lilla’s days stretched emptily ahead of her. Some people might have been happy to idle away the hours reading the newspapers or strolling in Calcutta’s botanical gardens, but Lilla loathed to waste time. She felt that she always needed to be improving something, creating something from scratch, something useful, or something that would last. Up until the final years of her life, when she came to believe that heaven was her next stop, Lilla wasn’t terribly religious. Agnostic at best. But if anything was a sin in her book, it was idleness.

  Yet without a home to decorate and a kitchen to run, and missing the twinly competitiveness that used to drive her through the day, Lilla was at a loss as to how to fill her time. Even wandering along the shopping streets must have been frustrating. The flip side of Ernie’s great passions for life was a tendency to blow his top at the slightest provocation, and often in the direction of Lilla. Each time she bought anything at all he would erupt, saying that they couldn’t afford it. Lilla found herself sidestepping an ever-increasing list of activities that provoked him, staring longingly through the windows at all sorts of delights—cushions, lampshades, silks, and dresses—that back in China she would have bought without hesitating. Lilla hadn’t even been four years old when Alice married Andrew. She cannot have remembered money ever being an issue before.

  Nor did she have any real friends to visit. The wives of some of Ernie’s colleagues came by, but Lilla had so little in common with the older, more India-entrenched army wives that the conversation soon ran dry. For all Calcutta’s superficial similarities to Shanghai—the incessant shouting, the spicy smells, the scuttling pace at which everybody rushed around—Lilla would have been beginning to realize that British India was a very different place from China. Even though, of all the cities in India, Calcutta was the most cosmopolitan, the most business-oriented, it was still governed by layers of terribly British officialdom in a way that China simply wasn’t.

  For a start, there were the armed forces, the Indian army and Indian navy, in which Ernie and Toby served. At first, it appeared strange that they were Indian in name when they were so British in nature—the three thousand most senior officers were British. But it rapidly became clear that, unlike in China, where the foreigners lived perched on the edge of the continent in treaty ports while the rest of the country was left to carry on more or less as usual, in India it was quite the reverse. The British Raj—as Britain’s rule of India was known—had attempted to permeate every pore of Indian life, every village.

  Like the treaty ports, the Raj had its own civil service. Yet again, whereas Chinese Customs concerned itself on
ly with China’s muddy harbors and convoluted trading terms, the Indian Civil Service— known as the ICS—aspired to regulate nearly every aspect of what the British saw as Indian life. Chinese Customs ignored, insofar as it could, Chinese life outside the treaty ports, and, in any case, it reported to the Chinese government in Peking. The ICS, on the other hand, piloted education systems and ran courts of law throughout the entire country. It reported to Whitehall, in London. It was so busy monitoring, regulating, and reporting that governing the region—supposedly providing a mere support system for the business of bringing money home—had become a primary industry in itself. And this reverence for bureaucracy spilled over into everyday life. The British in India were a conformist caste. Things were done by the book, in the right way. British was best.

  Lilla was British in name, but she’d been born in China. And, barring a couple of years of so-called education in England and on the Continent, she’d grown up there. True, the British had been predominant, had even stuck together to a certain degree, formed an Anglo-Chinese culture of their own. Anglo-China, however, was not introspective, quite the opposite. It was surrounded by a melting pot of Western nationalities. Most of them had their own stakes in the place. Many of them took part in the fairly lax self-government. And all of them openly pinched the best from one another’s cultures. Whether it was the latest trimmings from French fashion, heart-opening notes of Italian music, foaming pitchers of malty German beer, the treacly sponge of Austrian cakes, or mind-numbing Russian vodka, it all blended into a single treaty-port way of doing things—the newer the better. When treaty porters deferred to a greater power, they did not look to London, they looked to Shanghai. And who you were or where you stood in the general run of treaty-port life depended simply on how well you were doing in business.