Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  From the moment Barbie arrived in the city, things began to improve. She was taken to Eden Hospital, where, said Ada, “they had a nice, airy room waiting for her.” The doctors there diagnosed an abscess but said that, as she appeared to be recovering, they would not operate. The abscess burst, and Barbie, shrunken to 84 pounds, began to recover.

  For the first time in three months she was able to hold her son, who had been looked after by a nurse in Shillong.

  Not surprisingly, he would be the only child Barbie would have.

  BEDFORD, ENGLAND, LATE NOVEMBER 1902

  As Barbie recovered in Calcutta, Ernie’s mind drifted back to his own family. To Lilla, it must have seemed like a double miracle. Barbie had been all but dead and Ernie all but lost to her and their tiny son, but now both had been brought back. Not only was dear Barbie getting quite well, but for the first time in months, Lilla could see the front and not only the back of Ernie’s head. He was talking to her. And even if he hadn’t yet turned his attention to her in the same way that he had fixed it on Barbie, at least he was focusing on their child.

  The first item on Ernie’s agenda was his son’s christening, and on the last Sunday in November, Arthur was christened in Bedford. He was given two middle names: Howard, after his godfather, Howard Hill, a cousin of Ernie’s; and, strangely, as it was not Lilla’s real name, Eckford. I remember Arthur teaching me his names when he stayed with us one Christmas in our cottage in Wales. Arthur Howard Eckford Howell. “My initials spell aheh! That’s almost a word,” he said. Eckford, he told me then, was his grandfather’s surname. And as I remember this scene—Arthur, Grandpa, his hair still reddish rather than gray, in a faded olive green cardigan and shirt and tie, always a shirt and tie, standing in front of the theatrical dark pink sofa in our drawing room and bending down to match my eight-year-old height, his hands gripping his legs just above the knee to keep his balance—it dawns on me that maybe Arthur never knew about Jennings. Or did he just choose to ignore him? As Lilla or Ernie—and, at this time, any decision was probably Ernie’s—chose to do. Maybe Ernie was trying to rewrite the history that had turned his rich sweetheart into a not-so-rich wife. Trying to encourage Andrew Eckford to overlook the difference between his own children and his stepchildren. Anyhow, what seems important now, a century later, is that christening his son Eckford may just have made Ernie a little better disposed toward Lilla. If only because he hoped Arthur might one day inherit some money.

  The christening was a success. “It went off very well,” wrote Papa Howell to his youngest son, Evelyn, who was, as Papa had been, in the Indian Civil Service, stationed in Peshawar, in North-West Frontier Province. This was, and still is, an area infamous for the guerrilla warfare raged by its local tribes, the Pathans, who make the most of the rugged mountain terrain to resist any form of outside control.

  Lilla, who was “going on well but still a sad invalid,” must have begun to feel a glow of approval penetrate the thick cloud around her head. Two and a half months after having her baby, the torrent of hormonal change and exhaustion that had been raging through Lilla’s body would have been ebbing, the world around her beginning to appear less distorted. And as she began to focus again, the picture that emerged must have shocked her into action. Ernie was cooing over his son’s pram and writing to his sisters that “Arthur is so pretty that people stop his pram in the street and admire his pretty colouring.” But in just a month’s time, in January, his yearlong sick leave would be up. Her husband was going back to India. And he was still insisting on leaving her behind.

  If Ernie left without her, or without even agreeing that she should follow him shortly, their marriage would be as good as over. Lilla would be stuck with her family in England. When the Eckfords returned to China, she would either have to stay alone with the Howells or face the public humiliation of returning to Chefoo having clearly been abandoned by her husband. Divorce was still completely socially unacceptable. So she wouldn’t even be free to find someone else. She would spend the rest of her life as a single mother of one.

  Then, just as Ernie was about to pack his bags, he failed his medical. He would now remain in England until March.

  That gave Lilla two more months to turn the situation around.

  Somewhere deep inside her, a fighting spirit stirred.

  Chapter 6

  MELTING BITTER LEMONS

  THE ECKFORD HOUSE, BEDFORD, ENGLAND, DECEMBER 1902

  Determination flooded back into Lilla. It thawed her stiff limbs, her frozen face and jaw, leaving her free to speak her mind. What she needed to do was cast some of that old Eckford magic over Ernie. She needed to cook for him, arrange a house for him, pamper him. Show him that she was worth taking to India whatever the cost. And that it wouldn’t cost much. Slowly—still prone to great bouts of tiredness— but up, functioning, moving again, she set to work, gently guiding her mother’s English cook through making a curry and cooking rice until it was just so. Making rich liver pâtés, folding in lashings of Grand Marnier and cream. Baking pastries with crusts crisped to not-quite-burned, their biscuity and hot jam smell seeping out under the kitchen door, dissolving into a featherweight crumbling crunch at first bite.

  This was the first time, the very first time, since their marriage that Lilla had been able to look after Ernie in this way. She probably hoped, almost expected, that as soon as she waved her wand, he would turn back toward her, his eyes glinting with desire again.

  But Ernie didn’t flicker. He perhaps noted that Lilla was about and dressed, her hair up, earrings on, a hint of makeup. He would have helped himself to the plates of pastries that appeared in the drawing room at teatime, sat down to Lilla’s curries at dinner and bantered a little with Andrew Eckford about the progress of politics and the sporting events, with which, I guess, as neither of them was working at the time, they were filling their days. But, from all he said later, his shoulders remained raised, his expression sullen, emanating a general dissatisfaction with affairs as he muttered about his return to India and his irritation that it was delayed. And whenever Alice, his mother-in-law, drew close to him, he must have drawn in his breath. When she spoke to him, I can see him freezing, his fingers clenched in an arc over the wide arms of his chair.

  When Lilla noticed this, she would have felt a rush of both relief and fear. Relief that Ernie’s irritability was not her fault alone. Fear that some hidden agenda had set her husband against her mother and that it would ultimately drive him away. Alice was not the easiest of characters. She was voluble, extravagant, and strong. Even the word overbearing probably plays her down. But the intensity of Ernie’s dislike of her mother sent a shiver down Lilla’s spine. Somewhere, somehow, at some stage, something had clearly gone very wrong between them. And if Lilla couldn’t work out what it was, then she had to take Ernie away. So when Edith and Dorothy Eckford came down with measles in Bedford and Papa Howell invited Ernie and Lilla to remove their baby from the infected house and move back into Kensington Gardens Square with him, she leaped at the chance.

  LONDON, JANUARY 1903

  Papa Howell welcomed his son’s young family into the house with open arms. Since Mama had gone to look after Barbie in India, he must have been rattling about the house alone and was now pleased to have company. “Ernie, Lily and the infant are with me at 5 KGS and it is very nice to have them. The baby is splendid and never cries—at least I never hear him which comes to the same thing.”

  For Lilla, returning to the Howells’ house in London—no longer heavy and pregnant, her every move no longer watched by Mama— must have felt like arriving in a new and different place. Now that she wasn’t lugging a leaden belly from floor to floor, the six stories of the house were not an interminable ladder to climb, but a mountain to conquer. She must have swept up the stairs, her long skirt rustling over each step, shaking the dust off old photograph frames, pushing the curtains right back to let in an extra chink of light. By the time she had reached the top and opened the doors and windo
ws of the empty bedrooms, flapping the dust sheets in the air like great flags, she would have felt as though she were breathing cool, clear, fresh air again, not the choking London smog.

  Then, just as she had longed to do all those months beforehand, she rewrote the shopping list. And rather than follow the usual practice of handing it over to the servants in the house, who would arrange to have the food delivered, Lilla surprised both Ernie and his father by setting off to the shops herself in what Papa describes in a letter to Ada Henniker as “quite the German Haus Frau fashion.” The German hausfrau—who took legendary pride in running her own home rather than delegating everything to the servants—being completely alien to the Howells’ way of living.

  Number 5 Kensington Gardens Square stood only a few hundred yards from Whiteley’s, one of the first department stores in Britain. The proprietor, William Whiteley, was known as the Universal Provider and had made his name famous all over the world for being able to supply “everything from a pin to an elephant.” Or, more precisely, anything from a pin to a new haircut to food to coal to a new home—Whiteley’s included a real estate agency, a moving service, and a domestic staff employment bureau—to doctors on call.

  Today the Whiteley’s building—a vast domed affair that looks like a cross between an office block and St. Paul’s Cathedral—towers over Queensway. It is a chain-store-packed shopping mall containing a multiplex cinema, a parade of themed restaurant concessions, and a children’s activity center. I take my children, Lilla’s great-great-grandchildren, there to play. A hundred years ago, however, Whiteley’s stores stood a block farther north, where Whiteley had bought up a row of neighboring shops along the Queen’s Road—as Queensway was known back then—and around the corner on Westbourne Grove. The stores themselves were just the beginning of Whiteley’s property empire. He had also bought up entire streets in the neighborhood in which to house his thousands of staff. And he even ran his own farms outside London from where fresh produce was brought in twice a day.

  Whiteley’s of Bayswater, Westbourne Grove, c. 1900

  In 1903, department stores were relatively new, and regarded as risqué by a society still in the shadow of a repressive nineteenth-century morality that was as prudish as the real, raucous, and half-hidden nightlife around it was not. The abundance of enticing silks and lace in department stores was thought to lure young women into sin. Female customers might be tempted to shoplift. And the shopgirls, thought to be extremely attractive and acquiescent, might be encouraged to earn extra money by performing sexual favors for the gentlemen customers they served. In fact, these beliefs reveal more about the behavior and desires of the male-dominated society that held them than about what actually happened. If anything, department stores were a venue to which sexually desperate men could go in order to rub themselves up against women in the crowd.

  Of all the London stores, Whiteley’s, in particular, was a racy place to visit. Ladies were believed to use its reading room to write letters to their lovers. At one stage, white slavers were rumored to hover in the powder rooms, waiting to grab young women. Moreover, the general suspicion of dangerous sexuality was given some life by William Whiteley’s well-known liaisons with his staff.

  Lilla was clearly unperturbed by these rumors. For her, the store would have held comparatively innocent attractions. One of these was its prices. These were so much lower than the local tradesmen’s that on one Guy Fawkes Night, the area’s angry shopkeepers burned an effigy of William Whiteley himself and they were said to be the perpetrators of the recurrent fires that beset his premises. And Whiteley’s gave Lilla the opportunity to inspect the food she was buying, instead of simply receiving whatever the butcher decided to deliver.

  I imagine Lilla slipping into the store through one of its awning-shaded entrances on Westbourne Grove, and entering an Aladdin’s cave of tantalizing foods. She would have smelled the fruit, searching for just that level of sweetness that would tell her it was ripe, avoiding the more sickly, fermenting odor of pieces that had been on the shelves too long. She would have prodded the fish to see whether the flesh was still firm and good. And eyed the color of the meat to work out just how long ago the blood had stopped pumping around its donor’s veins.

  And then, flaunting convention even further, Lilla didn’t ask for the food to be delivered to her house later, but, as Papa’s letters reveal, she took it back home with her straightaway as if to ensure that she had exactly the meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables that she had paid for and not whatever was left to send on later. She must have had an errand boy trotting behind her, his arms full of oozing brown paper packages tied up with string. Until the Second World War, there used to be a social golden rule that a lady should never be seen in public without a hat and gloves or carrying her own parcels. Breaking this would only have turned Ernie further against her.

  As Lilla’s deep red joints of meat were slapped down onto the kitchen table, the mood in the Howell house must have changed. Instead of the bland, damp, institutional smells that had risen from the basement, reminding Papa and Ernie of their years of boarding-school and mess-hall dining, rich, mouthwatering vapors started to waft up the stairs. I think Lilla determined to cook her way into Papa’s and Ernie’s hearts. She must have heated the oven up to the soaring heights she describes in her recipe book—the kitchen maid shoveling in more and more coal—until she reckoned it hot enough to sear the outside of the joint, sealing the juices inside it. Then opened the oven door again, the hot air blasting out and scalding her face as she slid a cooling bowl of water in to bring the temperature down so that the meat would gently simmer. And when she thought a plain roast might bore the men, she would have had beef and ham, chicken and lamb, chopped and mixed and molded into rolls and loaves and pies . . . praying that even the most fixed of husbands would find them hard to resist.

  Papa was the first to fall under Lilla’s spell. Usually fanatically abstemious, as he feared developing his father’s gout, he was hypnotized by the richness of the household’s new food—no doubt piling so much into his long, lean frame that, after dinner, he had to sit quite still for a while, his head spinning. After a day or two, merely the smell of Lilla’s cooking made him dizzy with anticipation. But Lilla’s real route to her father-in-law’s heart was via his purse strings.

  Papa was obsessed with expense and the avoidance of it. “Each of you boys has cost me £2000—at least” (over £100,000 today), he would complain to his sons. One of the reasons he whiled away his days in the Athenaeum may well have been that he could lunch there for sixpence— the equivalent of £1.35 now. A couple of months earlier, Papa had commended Ernie’s decision to leave Lilla and his child behind and live alone in India as a good financial move: “Ernie will escape the heavy expenses of the double establishment, so he really has done very well for himself in the way of escaping the usual consequences of a not quite prudent marriage.” However, now that Lilla’s careful shopping expeditions had cut his household bills dramatically, the same “not quite prudent” daughter-in-law had suddenly become a star. He invited Ernie and Lilla to stay on in the house for as long as they liked. And, as he set off on his annual winter ice-skating trip to St. Moritz, like a true convert, Papa began to preach his new gospel to anyone who might listen.

  “The house is in excellent hands,” he wrote to Evelyn, “and I can now go away with an easy mind.” To his daughter Ada, back in Shillong, he wrote that “Dear Lily . . . proved herself a quite first class purveyor.” Even Mama, to what must have been her great surprise, found herself on the receiving end of her husband’s eulogies: “[Ernie and Lily] get on perfectly with the servants so you can be quite easy about the house.”

  Mama was not as convinced as her husband of her daughter-inlaw’s domestic prowess. “I do hope Lily and the baby did not bring up measles to London with them,” she wrote back upon hearing the news. Happily for Lilla, as Mama was in India, her protests were stuck in the interminable post.

  But Ada—who back in
the summer, when Ernie’s elder brother, Auberon, had become engaged to a wise and worthy-sounding woman known as “Bob” Ramsden, had been quick to comment, “I bet she’s a great contrast to poor little Lily”—had now started to write of Lilla quite fondly: “It is dreadful to think how Barbie and Lily have suffered.” Seeing Barbie so ill seems to have softened Ada toward her young sister-in-law.

  Barbie, however, needed no converting to Lilla’s merits. She simply absorbed Papa’s new approval of her sister-in-law and passed it on. She wrote to Laura in Cambridge, reporting Ernie’s joyous descriptions of Arthur in his pram as if they showed a glimmer of hope that their brother’s marriage might finally have taken a turn for the better.

  Back in England, a few days after Papa’s departure for St. Moritz, Ernie began to soften, too. After fifteen grating months of mock marriage in lodgings and staying with in-laws, it seems to have taken Lilla just a few days of looking after him to begin to win him back. A few days of showing him that she could run a house, pamper her husband, and produce meal after intoxicating meal without spending a fortune. A few days of no mothers-in-law to irritate either of them. No family to show them up. A house more or less to themselves at night. Now, almost four months after giving birth, Lilla’s body would have begun to feel caress-able again. And by now, she had learned or worked out for herself what she should do.

  Shortly after Papa’s departure, in a great rush of newfound enthusiasm for his wife, Ernie agreed that Lilla should join him in India that autumn after the country’s blistering summer heat had subsided.

  When Ernie at last gave in, after almost a year of threatening to leave her behind, Lilla felt the tension flood from her body. I can see her sinking into a chair, wanting to exhale great sobs of relief. And remembering to choke them back—lest Ernie change his mind.