Lilla's Feast (11 page)

And then a wire arrived from Shillong, bringing sad news that added to the household’s uneasiness.

Ada Henniker’s son, Jack, had died. As the letter that later arrived from Barbie explained, he had had a “high fever and convulsions for nine whole days then nothing for 24 hours but his strength was gone & he couldn’t rally—poor scrap, he had made such a plucky fight. . . . How horribly final death is—one felt almost relieved and thankful to think at last he was in no pain and had no more to go through.”

Ada was distraught. What made the matter even worse was that she felt guilty for not having wanted a baby so soon after getting married. All of the Howell sisters—and Lilla and her twin, too—wanted few children. Having a large family was regarded as physically tough, each process of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing taking its toll on a woman’s body, aging her prematurely and possibly shortening her life span. There were contraceptives. Condoms and diaphragms had been mass-produced since the invention of the rubber vulcanization process in the mid–nineteenth century. Even spermicides were available. Yet in the early twentieth century, respectable doctors would still have nothing to do with such things, and fewer than one in six married English couples were using them—those who were tended to be from the better-off, better-educated families. Even then, contraceptives seem only to have been used once you already had children, as a means of stopping yourself from having more. It might have been socially acceptable to let nature take its course and then decide not to have any more children. But using contraceptives to prevent you from having any children in the first place perhaps implied a scandalous interest in sex for pleasure only. Ironically, it was a pleasure that the heaviness of the condoms and diaphragms probably removed altogether, leaving people unwilling to use them for this reason, too. In any case, the norm, even for the astonishingly well-educated Howell sisters, seems to have been to cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Ada Henniker had therefore been furious to find herself pregnant within weeks of her wedding and had spent most of her pregnancy wishing her bump would go away. After Jack was born, she had spent several weeks regarding her new baby as a “horrid little wretch” before conceding that he was “not nearly as ugly as most.” Now she felt that his death was her punishment.

Mama and Papa Howell were sympathetic but philosophical. It was terribly sad, so distressing for both Ada and Barbie, all of them. Yet such things were part and parcel of Indian life. Frustrated by his inability to do anything to help his sister, however, Ernie’s concern, like most of his passions in life, would have been dramatic. After all his poor sister Ada had been through during and after the baby’s birth, nobody else’s troubles were worth a thought. Not even his pregnant wife’s.

Lilla was terribly upset, though her tears over Ada’s baby would have been hiding other emotions. She still adored Ernie, but his attention was now entirely focused on events in Shillong. And, as Lilla remembered the umpteen times that she had resented her own expanding waistline, she must have begun to fear that Ada’s “punishment” would also be hers.

Barbie, Ernie’s other Shillong-based sister, certainly feared this. Barbie, too, was “booked,” as the Howells called it, and her baby was due a month after Lilla’s. Barbie had married three weeks after Ernie and Lilla and, until the death of little Jack, had also been horrified to find herself pregnant so soon: “I was hoping against hope,” she wrote to her family in England. And as she sat in India, talking her sister into believing that her son’s death was not her fault, she found herself “fighting the superstition” that her child would die as well.

Out in Shillong, the grating sadness of baby Jack’s death refused to go away. The month that it took for the post to reach India by boat from England meant that, for “weeks and weeks” afterward, Barbie had to open her sister’s mail to filter out letters responding to Jack’s photographs that had been sent home a few weeks beforehand. “The first ones arrived the morning he died,” she wrote. “And yesterday a parcel from home came with pretty bits of embroidered material for his frocks—it nearly made me cry. . . . I couldn’t believe that a baby could leave such a blank. . . . We were always picturing him at different ages— a little redheaded fellow rolling about.”

The lag in time between the child’s death and the arrival of letters written while he was still alive made Barbie feel “such a terribly long way from it all,” just as “if any star were to be extinguished it would go on shining for us for ages and ages.”

The one subject that Barbie didn’t feel detached from was her family’s dissatisfaction with Lilla. Ernie’s married life had become such a topic of conversation in the letters that flew among his parents and his scattered siblings that, even a month’s post away, Barbie ended up feeling quite involved. It may have been the fact that they were both pregnant, that they had married within weeks of each other, or perhaps Barbie was simply more generous than her siblings. But whatever the reason, Barbie took up the position of Lilla’s firmest, indeed only, supporter among the Howells.

Expressing this support, however, was difficult. It was one thing for the Howells based in England to send news of developments to isolated family members living abroad, but it was another entirely to send an opinion in writing back to 5 Kensington Gardens Square. In families strewn across the empire, letters could rarely afford to be personal. Instead, they were public property, and a new letter would be read aloud after dinner, left lying around, or passed among family members and friends who wanted to catch up on news. So anything that Barbie wrote back to London ran the risk of being discovered by Lilla.

But the moans about Lilla rumbled on, and Barbie could no longer remain silent. She wrote to her elder sister, Laura Harmer. Laura was another Cambridge graduate, who had walked away with a glittering double First—the highest grade achievable in natural science. Not that, being a woman, she had been allowed to collect her degree. She had married another scientist and still lived in the university town, so she was close enough to events in London to be able to influence what was happening, yet far enough from Lilla to make writing safe. Laura was also, quite rightly, regarded by the rest of her family as terrifyingly bright. Among the Howells it was thought sad but inevitable that she had given up her scientific career when she married and had children— her husband was the eminent scientist Sidney Harmer, later knighted for his discovery of protozoa, tiny single-cell organisms. Laura herself found it hard: “I find that domestic chores—when they take the form of curtains and turning out drawers—all day simply reduce one’s brain to a pulp and make it impossible to think intelligently on any subject.” Laura, like most of her family, was clearly not designed for domestic chores. My father tells me how her husband, Sidney, “a scientist second only to Alexander Fleming,” was so perpetually half starved by the household’s meager meals that every lunchtime he disappeared into the bushes to eat cheese sandwiches with the gardeners.

Barbie wrote to Laura:

And now as this is a “strictly private” epistle and only written to be burned at once (—promise—) after you’ve read it, I will say what I have frequently thought but have never ventured to hint at to Mama as I know how her letters get bandied about through the family—why is everyone so hard on poor Lily—including Ernie! Poor Lily, she may not be a prodigy of wisdom, but she is such a baby still—I do think Mama and everyone seem hard on her. What do you think about her and Ernie? Are they a happy couple? I do hope so. But he writes of her so funnily one doesn’t know what to think.

Laura’s reply has been lost. However, the complaints about Lilla continued to reach Shillong. A month later, Barbie wrote to Laura again:

It makes me awfully angry to hear the groans over poor Lily—I do call it so horribly unfair and it makes me very cross with Ernie, who was certainly no susceptible infant when he married her but a man with his eyes very wide open indeed—or ought to have been. Well, well of course you understand all this is not for publication in the family but I am sure you agree with me. No-one can be more awake to the horrors and folly—esp out here—of “reckless and improvident marriages.”

It was about this time that Ernie must have first told Lilla that, when he returned to India, he intended to leave her behind with his family. To those used to “Indian life,” this was not so unusual. The country’s raging heat and outbreaks of disease often led husbands to leave their wives and young children in England for long periods at a time. Ernie, though, was talking about repeatedly going out alone for three years at a stretch and piling together his one month’s annual leave in order to squeeze in a quick trip home, then leaving her behind again and again. As it took a month to travel each way, that left just a month with Lilla in England—once every three years. At a time when divorce was unheard of, Ernie was suggesting a very thinly veiled long-term separation. And all because, as he must have made clear, keeping her and the baby with him in India would be, in his book, too expensive.

To be told by your husband, when you are nineteen years old, pregnant, and far from home, that your company is not worth the cost of living together must be just about as emotionally devastating as it gets. It must also have been terrifying for Lilla. If Ernie left her and their baby alone with his family, what would become of her?

Lilla clearly realized that this was a problem she could no longer hide.

And when, on the other side of the world, Alice Eckford read a cry for help that must have brought tears of frustration to her eyes, she didn’t hesitate to act. She packed up the house, and, six weeks after sailing out of Shanghai, she arrived in England in a glittering caravan of silk and lace. With her came Andrew—who must have decided to take another year’s leave, now that Vivvy and Reggie were old enough to help run the firm in his absence—and their two teenage daughters, Edith and Dorothy, trailing behind.

As if trying to make her family as appealing as possible to Ernie’s, Alice rented a house in Bedford, a market town bursting with retired empire builders, civil servants, and army officers—and within visiting distance of both Papa and Mama in London and Laura in Cambridge. Then she filled it to overflowing with fine oriental furniture, spices, and endless gratuitous cakes, setting up an extravagant family camp that shouted out that money was not an issue.

And she made it clear that she intended to stay.

Chapter 5

“ POOR LITTLE LILY ”

BEDFORD, EARLY SUMMER 1902

I have been scrabbling through boxes and drawers, through albums and battered cardboard folders, looking for a photograph of the Eckfords’ drawing room in Bedford. I am sure that I have seen one somewhere. An almost wide-angled-lens view across a square room, taken from the corner opposite the door. Perhaps it is in one of the many dusty photograph albums that were lent by relations or that surfaced from the deep vaults of all those libraries and universities. As I turned the pages a little too eagerly, I may have glimpsed the picture almost subconsciously, and the image has imprinted itself on my mind.

It is a large, lightly decorated room. Instead of being draped with the dark velvets and brocades of a century ago—every curtain pelmet, stuffed cushion edge, and sofa skirt weighed down with heavy fringes and tassels—the Eckfords’ drawing room is light, fresh, modern. But then, that was Alice’s, and Lilla’s, style. The sofas and big armchairs are upholstered in pale fabrics. There are three or four dark wooden armchairs with cream, almost white, seats and backs. Great ferns, or palms, reach into the room from its corners, their long, thin, pointed leaves dangling down like fingers aching to stroke the shining objects that glitter around the room. Or the cheek of a passerby. And, in between the sofas and armchairs, there are maybe a dozen dark, thickly lacquered side tables. Standing against the calm palette of the walls are three-quarter-height painted Chinese cupboards with moonlike circles drawn around their strange brass locks. A couple of Japanese screens covered in figures telling epic tales of love and heartbreak, half concertinaed, frame the set. Their resined scent fills the room, seeping out from deep inside the wood, bringing years of memories with it.

In sharp contrast to the minimalism of the color scheme, every surface is crammed with photographs in thick silver frames, carved wooden figures and demigods. There are embroidered laces and linens—some so bright that they appear snatched from the seamstress’s hands, others so faded and thin that they look as though they would fall apart if taken out of their frames. Curving porcelain vases and bowls too fragile—the china almost transparent—to pick up but whose ridges rise and fall under your fingertips, so that their painted surfaces seem to leap out at you. And hanging on the walls are more framed embroidery samplers, pen-and-ink drawings by Chinese artists and watercolor landscapes by Western hands, but again of Chinese scenes.

This was a room in which you could hear the breathy whisper of opulence. Even the thick, silk curtains—the material shipped over on great rolls from Shanghai—were as pale as the walls, their richness one that you felt as your arm brushed past a surface firm from the sheer weight of the fabric. This was a room in which Alice intended to make it quite clear to Ernie and his family that the Eckfords were not just colonial traders whose daughters could be picked up and dumped at will, but a force to be reckoned with. Little did she realize just how impervious to her efforts her daughter’s in-laws would be.