Lilla's Feast (10 page)

Almost as soon as Lilla and Ernie returned to Calcutta, Ernie fell ill. In the days before penicillin—antibiotics were not mass-produced until 1941—even a mild infection could rapidly become life-threatening. Ernie’s health deteriorated quickly. Within a couple of weeks, he had grown drawn and thin. The army medics took one look and ordered him to England on sick leave. The conditions in India were renowned for being inhospitable to good health. He was not to return for twelve months.

Lilla and Ernie, Calcutta, January 1902

Ernie, with all the good grace of a bad invalid, would have been furious. He had been hoping for promotion to the rank of major, which would bring him not only some prestige but also a much-needed increase in pay, and this sick leave was going to set it back at least a year. Unwilling to attribute the course of events to pure bad luck, his temper must have flared, scalding Lilla in its path as he, once again, started to push her away. So, just as Lilla received news that Ada and Toby had been ordered to remain in Chefoo for several more months, long enough to justify a visit home, a visit during which she would be able to talk to Ada face-to-face, she found herself wrenched in the opposite direction as she and Ernie set sail for London.

The sea journey took almost a month. Ernie was sick and cabin-bound from the start. By the time the ship reached Southampton, Lilla was two and a half months pregnant and probably had waves of nausea rocking through her, too. To make matters worse, after encountering Ernie’s sisters in India, she was terrified of meeting the rest of her husband’s family in England.

LONDON, FEBRUARY 1902

Ernie’s parents, Arthur and Laura Howell, were wealthy enough to retire to England after a career in India. They had based themselves in London, where Ernie’s intellectual father could spend his days playing whist at the Athenaeum—a club set up for “individuals known for their scientific or literary attainments” and whose members have ranged from Darwin and Dickens in the nineteenth century to Churchill and Eisenhower in the twentieth. In 1902, its eighteen-year waiting list meant that its green leather armchairs were full of elderly members being waited on hand and foot as they browsed their way through the library’s legendary seventy thousand books.

The Howells rented a house in Kensington Gardens Square, in the middle of the then relatively new area of Bayswater, which was fashionable with their colonial set. The house, number 5, is now the center-piece of a Best Western hotel that occupies the block. The front door, were it still to open, would lead you straight into the bar. Yet the six-story building still towers above the square’s gardens. And the now defunct doorstep still bears the original slippery black-and-white-patterned tiling that must have swirled under Lilla’s eyes as she waited, giddy with exhaustion, while Ernie pulled the bell.

Mama and Papa: Laura Russell Howell and Arthur Pearse Howell, Ernie’s parents

By the time Laura Howell, known to the family as Mama, reached the door, she had already worked up a considerable degree of irritation with the new arrivals. Ernie had failed to telegraph ahead that he was on his way—“I don’t wonder Mama was annoyed at Ernie and Lily’s sudden arrival,” wrote Barbie, “it was stupid of E not to wire.” His turning up on the doorstep was therefore quite unexpected, meaning that absolutely no preparations had been made. Mama Howell was generally said to have been one of those who “ruled India with an umbrella,” and she did not take to “casual visitors.” With a great flurry, the servants were diverted from whatever the task at hand and instructed to open up another dank bedroom and make it ready. Only then did she acknowledge the arrival of her son—whom she had not seen since his last visit home two years beforehand—and his “Chinese” bride, Lily.

Mama and Papa Howell were already worrying that Ernie’s marriage might have been “not quite prudent.” They knew their son’s tendency to rush headlong after the latest thing to take his fancy and feared that he had once more done just that. In the months before he met Lilla, his letters home had been full of lonely assertions that the task of finding a wife “is an awful lottery.” And, on one occasion, he had made the desperate suggestion—ignoring Indian army regulations that forbade soldiers from marrying before thirty (until then, they were supposed to be married to their regiment)—that “all unmarried men over 25 years of age should be taxed.” However, loneliness and the sexual frustration of bachelorhood were part and parcel of empire life. Even if you were married, you could easily be posted to “a place where one never sees a soul week in week out and there is absolutely nothing to do but walk along the same bit of road evening after evening” and you would simply find yourselves feeling lonely together.

In his parents’ view, Ernie should have calmly accepted the status quo and waited to meet somebody suitable with whom to make “an Indian life.” “Suitable” meaning somebody whose parents they knew or, even better, whom they had introduced Ernie to themselves. “Suitable” also meaning having enough money. Actually having it. Not somebody you assume is wealthy, but because you have been “not quite prudent,” turns out not to be. Like Lilla.

First they would have received a hurried wire announcing that Ernie was marrying a local businessman’s teenage daughter in a holiday resort in China—making them fear that, not reason, but sexual attraction (although they would never have uttered those words) had driven his decision. The gushing letters that followed—explaining that Lilla was not rich, but pretty—confirmed their suspicions. And by the time Lilla and Ernie arrived in London, Mama Howell would have received—albeit only just—Barbie’s and Ada’s letters detailing Christmas in Shillong. What she read about Lilla and how she fussed around a grumpy Ernie fueled her fears. And, like all mothers, her sympathies lay firmly with her son. She believed that he had made a terrible mistake.

To Lilla, London must have appeared even less welcoming than Calcutta. Arriving in February, she would have found it as damp and dirty as Calcutta and cold to boot. Whenever she ventured out into the perpetual half-light—a result of the thick smog that hung around the streets—the fumes would have clung to her, woven their way into her clothes, penetrated every pore of her skin. As an Englishwoman from abroad, Lilla should have regarded London as the capital of her imperial universe. Instead, she must have found it gray, bland, and uniform compared to Shanghai or even Calcutta. She would have missed the bustle of the foreign cities, their not-quite-right British- or European-ness, their vivid colors, pungent spicy smells, and chaotic singsong of human cries. Shanghai and Calcutta might have been intended to emulate London’s finer qualities, but, as far as Lilla was concerned, the copies were a great improvement on the original.

And, here in London, she still longed for a home, even just a kitchen of her own, but the beastly question of expenses growled on. Rather than resort to the “misery of squalid lodgings in the Hereford Road,” as Barbie describes the temporary accommodations on offer to expatriates returning to London on leave, Ernie insisted on staying in the house in Kensington Gardens Square. Like the Howell sisters’ houses in Shillong, it must have struck Lilla as horribly uncomfortable. But far worse than physical discomfort was the loss of privacy.

In Calcutta, she and Ernie might only have been living in a boarding house, but nobody—apart from an inevitably slightly curious Mrs. Bridges, no doubt offering Lilla endless cups of tea—had intruded into their lives. But in London, if Lilla tried to cheer up her in-laws’ house by bringing back flowers, tearing off the excess green leaves, cutting the stems to just such a height and angle, and arranging them in elegant, simple displays, she would have been told that she was far too extravagant. Her mother-in-law must have seemed to be always right behind her, looking over her shoulder, telling Ernie what to do, taking him off shopping with her, checking that he was comfortable, asking him what he’d like to eat, making Lilla feel redundant as a wife. Or, even worse, making her feel that Ernie would rather be married to his mother.

Although number 5 Kensington Gardens Square had a kitchen within Lilla’s reach, it would certainly not have been at her disposal. Its boundaries were prowled by a cook doubtless selected for her ability to satisfy the Howells’ taste for parsimony. Lilla yearned to make some mouthwatering, gooey cake whose sweet smell would float up from the basement, reminding Ernie of how happy they could be. She yearned to find the courage to make a dash for it and tiptoe downstairs to the ill-lit basement room, search the gray cupboards for flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate powder, or lemon—anything with which to bake something sweet. And dreaded being caught midway by the Howells’ cook, or even Mama.

At dinner each evening, Lilla struggled with overdone vegetables and drying meat surrounded by the Howells’ endless colleagues from India and a bevy of maiden aunts recounting stories about the old days and life in the Raj—the revelation that Lilla was from China producing at best an “Ah, I see” and a mention of pigtails and bamboo. When it was just the family at home, the conversation wandered to the achievements of the Howell relations, the progress of the army officers and academics in their ranks, and the occasional inquiry as to whether there were any scientists in Lilla’s family.

Whenever Lilla was forced to respond to these seemingly unanswerable questions, her stutter welled up, trapping her few words in the roof of her mouth—anything she said only disappointing Ernie. Every word she uttered broadcast what she didn’t know, hadn’t seen, what she found difficult to understand. And now that her husband was with his parents, the stark contrast her conversation provided with theirs made her attentions seem more irritating than ever to Ernie. His disapproval radiated across the table, as chilling as the damp London air, as he drew away from her, shuffling his chair closer to whichever parent he was sitting next to, as if changing sides.

Tears of frustration threatened to bubble out of Lilla’s eyes. She longed to cook Ernie the curries that he complained of missing, brighten up the gloomy house—tidy up the piles of periodicals, for a start—buy a couple of comfortable chairs and rearrange the furniture so that you could have a jolly natter around the fire instead of sitting alone with a book in a corner of the room. Longed to repaint the peeling gray kitchen and throw more light into its basement room. Rewrite the weekly shopping list, ordering juicier cuts of meat and less-battered vegetables from a better greengrocer down the road.

Yet, as in Calcutta, being a wife, looking after her husband in the way that she had been brought up to do, remained a fantasy. The only space Lilla and Ernie had to themselves was their bedroom. She would fluff up the thin pillows, drape a Chinese shawl over the worn velvet chair, and wait for Ernie’s footstep on the stairs after he had finished his cigar with Papa. Here was the sole place where she could still act as a wife, even though she was growing increasingly large. As the weeks passed, her waist expanded rapidly, her stomach bulged, and her breasts grew heavy and too tender to touch. As much as she thought Ernie handsome, even found his withdrawal from her a magnet that made her want to be with him more, nature would have made his desire wane. The pretty little thing that he had swept up out of her easy, voluptuous household in China was becoming an awkward and unhappy matron whose presence hung around his neck like an ill-fitting collar.

Lilla must have read her husband’s thoughts in the furrow of his eyebrows, the strained curve of his shoulders, and the peremptoriness of his touch. Watched him slip away from her like a ghost, his warm flesh dissolving to leave a cold, hard stranger in her bed. Lain awake, struggling to find a comfortable position, yearning for a single gulp of Chefoo air that would clear her head, the salty smell of the sea, a bowl of wet noodles, anything that would take her home, and yearning more than anything to see her twin, Ada. Closeted up with Ernie’s family in London’s sodden twilight, the confusion that Lilla had felt in India began to turn into despair. “They called me the little white loaf,” she whispered years later, the tears still hanging at the back of her eyes.