For the problem with Ernie’s great passions was that, once they had subsided, change his mind was often what he did.
I wish Lilla had stopped her husband from charging back to Bedford. But she didn’t. As soon as Ernie had decided that Lilla should join him in India, perhaps still riding the crest of a wave of born-again love, he wanted to head back to Bedford. His ebullience must have made him feel that nothing could touch him now. That living again with his mother-in-law would no longer make him feel like “a bear with a sore head.” That he no longer needed to incur the small expense of paying for his family’s food in London when he could live with the Eckfords in Bedford for no cost at all.
On January 18, 1903, Ernie and Lilla arrived back at Alice Eckford’s house in Bedford.
And everything that had just started to go so right began to go wrong.
Of course it was a mistake to go back there. Within days, the old animosity between Ernie and Alice Eckford reared its head. And probably caught by the trough that always follows a wave, Ernie once again, as Laura put it, found Alice “a pest” and “could not endure living with her.” He immediately reverted to his earlier intention of leaving Lilla in England and using his three months’ leave every three years to come home, spending just one month with her. “I should kick against that arrangement if I were Lily,” wrote Laura to her younger brother Evelyn, as she took her sister-in-law’s side, too.
Lilla, now, would certainly have tried to kick. Tried everything she could to change his mind, to drag him away from her mother’s house. One of Ernie’s letters mentions a plan for him, Lilla, and their baby to spend a month playing golf at St. Andrews—freezing and damp in February, but at the other end of Britain from Alice. They didn’t go. Ernie must have decided it was too expensive. He was not to be moved either from his money-saving plan to leave Lilla in England or from a house in which he could live for free during his last weeks in the country. Instead, he grated around the house in Bedford, his unexplained resentment of Alice growing rawer by the day. Inch by inch, the gap between her and her husband that Lilla had managed to snap shut so briefly cracked its way open again. Lilla felt the strength she had found in London being ground away by the friction between her husband and her mother. I imagine her lying on her bed in the daytime. Hugging her knees to her chest. Curled up in a ball. And then some news began to filter back from India that must have made the blood in her veins run cold.
Mama Howell had been staying in Calcutta as Barbie slowly recovered in the hospital. The Howell clan in India had descended upon her for Christmas. Ada was still with her and Barbie in Calcutta, and their husbands had come down from Shillong. Ernie’s elder brother, Auberon, and his new wife, Bob, had come down from Kohima, another hill station, where he had been drafted into the civil administration from the Indian army. Even Evelyn, the youngest Howell sibling, had traveled right across India from Peshawar. For most of them, it was the first time that they had seen one another, and their mother, in two or three years. But as soon as Christmas was over, they had all dispersed back to their posts. Alone in Calcutta—apart from Barbie, who was still in the hospital— Mama began to make some social calls.
One of her first stops was Toby Elderton and Lilla’s twin sister, Ada. After an extended stay in Chefoo, the Eldertons had at last come to India. A day or two after Christmas, they arrived in Calcutta. Toby had been Ernie’s best man. Politeness decreed that Mama should see Lilla’s sister. She met them for lunch.
It was a roaring success. “They are a very jolly couple,” wrote Mama. And Ada, despite looking “exactly like Lily,” to the extent that Barbie’s Indian ayah from Shillong thought she was Lilla “turned up again with a new husband,” quickly met her approval: “She is very pretty and well dressed.” Mama arranged to meet them for dinner the following night.
And so it went on. Shortly, it seemed as if Mama’s enthusiasm for Lilla’s twin and her husband knew no bounds. Unlike Ernie, Toby faced few money worries in Calcutta. For a start, as a naval captain, he held a far higher rank than Ernie’s army captaincy and therefore received a better salary. He also had enough money of his own not to have to blink at what he and Ada spent. So, after staying in a “grand hotel,” paying an extravagant “18 rupees a day for one bedroom”—as Mama gushed in her letters home—he and Ada rented a large house in a fashionable suburb of Calcutta. She sketched a floor plan of the magnificent house—“The Grange, Alepore”—and enclosed it. Within a couple of weeks, it was decided that Barbie would move in with the Eldertons before going back to England with Mama. And the week after that—just about the time that Ernie and Lilla had returned to Bedford and Ernie had reverted to his plan of going to India alone—Mama’s letters began to reach England.
The news of Ada’s newfound popularity with the Howells hit Lilla like a punch in the stomach, knocking the last remnants of breath out of her. Ada, whom she hadn’t seen since her wedding day. Ada, without whom her life had turned upside down. Ada seemed to be the daughter-in-law that Ernie’s family wanted. Not her.
The news continued to flow. There were dinners with the Eldertons, picnics with the Eldertons, hotel recommendations given by the Eldertons. Each new tidbit that Ernie read out from a letter must have cut into Lilla more deeply. And then came the final blow. Mama arranged that, when Ernie returned to India, he would move into the Eldertons’ house in Calcutta. “Truly it is a comfort,” ended Mama, “to think Ernie has got a decent home at last, poor child.”
It was a terrifyingly perfect solution. Ernie could both save money and be looked after if he lived with Toby and Ada. It made it senseless for Lilla to go to Calcutta, too. But for Lilla, even worse than the prospect of a life alone was the prospect of a life alone while Ada had Ernie. Ada, who was identical to her in every way but . . . but what? But for whom things appeared to go so right. But whose every success seemed to mark another of Lilla’s failures. But who always had something—something indefinable, something hard to put your finger on—that Lilla didn’t. And who now, even though Lilla was doing all she could to keep him herself, was going to have her husband, as well.
Lilla still loved Ernie very much. To love somebody who has said and done so many awful things to you sounds silly, certainly weak. But Lilla was very young. Not even twenty-one. And the whole course of her life depended on winning him back before he left for India.
He was due to set sail in mid-March, just one month away.
She had either to work out what annoyed him so much about her mother and resolve it if she could or persuade him to leave the Bedford house so that she could again weave the magic that had worked so well before.
He insisted they couldn’t afford to do the latter.
But by now, all of Ernie’s brothers and sisters were on Lilla’s side.
“When I think how fortunate Ada & Barbie & I have been in our marriages,” Laura wrote to Ernie’s youngest brother Evelyn, “I can’t help feeling most awfully sorry for poor Lily. I’m afraid there’s no denying the fact that Ernie is selfish, very much so, & that the trials of matrimony have caused a rapid evaporation of his affection. . . . I am afraid that Lily stands a poor chance of much happiness in her married life, poor child—she is only 20!” And, at this point, cool, calm, scientific Laura decided to intervene and talk to Ernie: “I hope I shall not do more harm than good.”
“Rub it into Ernie well,” replied Evelyn. “I have not much right to talk but the words ‘for richer, for poorer, for better & for worse, in sickness and in health’ are not mere rhetoric but are a standard one should try & live up to however difficult it may be.”
Desperate to escape the house during the day, Ernie had started to bicycle over to see Laura in Cambridge, taking the train back to Bedford in the evening. Laura tried to talk him around, but “like most attempts of that kind it was a failure.” What she did manage to do, however, was discover why Ernie had taken against Alice Eckford so strongly.
Ernie told Laura that he was convinced that Alice Eckford had �
��caught” him out in China, ensnaring him into a mistaken marriage with Lilla. “I am thankful,” wrote Laura, “that Mama did no ‘catching’ for any of us.” Back then, “catching” was rife. One of the by-products of empire life was a social ritual known as the Fishing Fleet. British women who had failed to find a husband at Home went on a tour of India. Out there, the shortage of unmarried women and abundance of unmarried men was thought to raise their stakes in the mating game. The “fish” were torn between the attractions of the “fleet” and their awareness that the systemic imbalance between the sexes made them liable to be “caught.”
Being caught was feared like venereal disease. It was a risk inherent in expatriate bachelordom, to be avoided at all costs. The pervading view was that the best wives were to be found in Europe. The women who had to travel east to find a husband were regarded as second best.
The fleet’s nets were tightly spun. In the early twentieth century, dating was unheard of. A British man in India who wanted an alternative to the institutional brothels had to find a married woman to have an affair with or else marry himself. To a man who had not seen an available European female face for a couple of years, the fleet women were tempting bait. Rushed to the altar by, shall we say, considerations other than lifelong companionship, many a foolish man, it was whispered, awoke on his honeymoon to realize that he had made a mistake. Looking for somebody to blame for his error, he accused his wife, or her accompanying mother, of entrapping him.
Ernie felt that he was one of these men. Within days of talking to Laura, he wrote a letter to Evelyn. Evelyn’s self-confessed “not much right to talk” was the result of having broken off his own engagement in India. Luckily, his ex-fianceé had decided not to sue him for breach of promise, as she could have done—possibly winning damages of several hundred pounds (worth tens of thousands of pounds today). Ernie wrote:
Well, I must congratulate you on what I cannot help describing as a most fortunate escape. You are indeed well out of that business. . . . Matrimony is not all that it is painted. Mothers in law are pests and no peace and no pocket money is the usual cry of the Benedict. It is very easy to get into but, like the lobster pots, a rare game to get out of. Matrimony under the most favourable circumstances, as pictured in the marriage service, is no doubt a most excellent institution, but alas such ideals are rarely met with nowadays. So as regards your future, take my tip and thank Heaven you have option of taking it. Don’t marry for money but only where money is, as the waters of matrimony do not flow smoothly unless there are banks on both sides. The genus spinster in the east is a deception “don’t you ’ave none of ’em.” Go to Cairo or St. Moritz at the right time of year and make the best of your chances. Girls swarm in England and you can have a selection from a vast crowd. If you want to marry and don’t marry well at home, well you have only got yourself to blame. Once bitten twice shy and so I feel quite confident as to your future. There is no snare so dangerous as the matchmaking Mama with daughters to dispose of, accompanied by a host of blessings and a box of old clothes.
Shortly afterward, Ernie followed this up with:
Take Bacon’s advice, I wish I had done so, and limit your expenditure to half your receipts and you will soon save enough to enable you to go home & take your place in the best society and with any sort of fortune you ought to land a nice fish with golden scales to keep you company for life. I married for love solely, which you very nearly did, and I was not wise in my generation—in fact I was a fool. There is no such fatal disease as the insane desire to support someone else’s daughter.
Ernie’s letters are appalling. His would-be gold digging is certainly as calculating as the baiting of the Fishing Fleet. Even if Alice Eckford did, and she probably did, let Ernie assume that Lilla was richer than she was to encourage him to propose, what he wrote still makes him immensely dislikable. However different the world was then, thinking and writing that you shouldn’t have married someone you loved just because they didn’t have enough money, that you should only marry “a nice fish with golden scales,” is horrid.
It is especially horrid when that is what Ernie thought about dear, sweet, elegant Great-Granny. Thinking about how desperate she must have felt back then still makes me want to cry. She was desperate for Ernie. But all Ernie was, was this.
On the last day of February, Lilla finally persuaded Ernie away from Bedford to stay with Laura. From there, they went on to London, where they joined Papa, who had returned from St. Moritz—and was therefore buying the food again—to await Mama’s arrival from India. Ernie was going to sail for India in a fortnight, just after Mama was due to return from Calcutta. And Lilla’s in-laws might now have been on her side, but it was up to Lilla herself to turn her husband’s plans around.
The manipulation of emotions is not a rational, button-pressing affair for which single causes can be identified and held to account. Instead, moods and opinions sway with circumstances, with a little bit of thinking this and a little bit of seeing that. Now that Lilla had taken Ernie away from her mother—whose every word made Ernie think that he should never have married her in the first place—she had to convince him yet again that having her with him in India would make his life wonderful and wouldn’t cost him a bean.
Maybe she impressed the finality of parting upon him. Maybe she opened his eyes to the fact that he would miss seeing his son grow up. Would be unlikely to have any more children. Maybe in those last two weeks in London, Lilla simply recast her spell, drowning Ernie’s resistance in rich gravies, thick spicy sauces, and ladles and ladles of cream, luring him back to her side. I wonder when she worked out that her sensuous cooking for her husband was a way of making love? As would become clear, she certainly worked some other, more private, tricks upon him. Appealed to the instinct that had rushed him to the altar and made him a father within a year of the wedding.
A fortnight later, Mama returned to find Ernie impervious to suggestions that he should live in India alone. At the last minute, he delayed his departure by almost a week. He took Lilla back to Bedford. On March 18, they had “a tearful parting” at which even Ernie seems to have shed a few watery drops. He “was very cut up at parting from Lily and the little son,” wrote Barbie, who had just returned to England with Mama. It was agreed once again that Lilla and Arthur should follow Ernie in October, after “the hot weather.” The Howells, whose sympathy for Lilla— Mama perhaps excepted—was now as fervent as their antipathy had been just a couple of months beforehand, were thrilled. Ernie, wrote Papa, “went away in capital spirits.” From Port Said, Ernie even wrote to his mother asking her to look after Lilla while he was away: “dear little soul, I am sure that she feels parting with me dreadfully.”
Lilla had caught Ernie’s coattails as he disappeared through the door and pulled him back into a full embrace. She and Ernie would spend just six months apart, and then they would be together. For a few short days, Lilla, although missing Ernie dreadfully—she “does not yet realise,” wrote Papa, “that such partings are almost a condition of Indian life”—must have felt that she was on top of events. And then, almost as soon as she appeared to have made everything all right, her world again turned on its head.
At times it seems that whatever Lilla did, however hard she tried, something would always trip her up before the finish line. This time, it was the very act of winning her husband back that had caused her downfall.
A few days after Ernie’s departure, Lilla was already feeling unwell—or as Barbie put it, “very seedy.” At first, the Eckfords and the Howells simply assumed that she was finding it hard to cope with Ernie’s leaving. But within a couple of weeks, Lilla had worked out what the matter was. She was pregnant.
The baby was due in late November or early December. There was no way that Lilla would be traveling to India in October that year—or even before the temperature began to rise the following spring. That meant she would have to wait until India’s cool weather the following year. Now, in spite of everything that she had
done, Lilla still might not see Ernie for another year and a half. A year and a half must have seemed an impossibly long time to her then—would he, could he, still love her after all that time? And even more painful for Lilla was the fact that, for all that time, Ada would be with him instead. It was as though Lilla were a child again, fighting to keep up with Ada, who was offered everything first. Ada, whom the Howells seemed to prefer. Whom Ernie might learn to prefer, too.
Lilla realized that if she wanted to hold on to the fragments of her life that she had just sewn back together, she had to go to India sooner than the autumn of the following year. And by now, she had learned the hard way that the only person who could give her the life she wanted was herself.
She determined to take matters into her own hands.
Chapter 7
IN THE LAP OF THE GODS
BEDFORD, SUMMER 1903
Sometimes we do things that we know are wrong. When it appears that every other avenue is closed to us. And when the consequences of doing nothing, of letting Fate push us along the seemingly downhill path she has mapped out, look worse than any possible retribution for the transgression itself.
Back then, with Ernie heading toward her twin’s clutches, with the prospect of not seeing him for such a long time that he might forget that he loved her, and again faced with the possibility of becoming an abandoned wife stranded in gray England, the consequences of doing nothing were that intolerable for Lilla.
She did try to persuade everyone to let her follow Ernie out to Calcutta as the weather was cooling in September and have the baby there. Ernie’s family thought she was mad. She had been very ill with her last child, and they didn’t yet believe that she was fully recovered. “I do not think she should travel until she is quite fit again,” wrote Laura. Even Alice, who usually batted so hard on her daughter’s side, who was firmly of the belief that a wife should always be with her husband, thought Lilla was not well enough to go.
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