Lilla's Feast (15 page)

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.

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.