Lilla's Feast (9 page)

Ada and Toby

Alone in Calcutta, Lilla had nobody to turn to. Even if she had, it would have been hard to admit her marriage was going wrong so soon. The only person she might have been able to open up to was Ada. Ada, whose absence had left Lilla unsteady. Ada, who had Toby doting on her every step. Ada, to whom Lilla could now only write—and then wait six weeks for a reply.

In families spread out around the world at this time, parents, brothers, sisters, even children, usually wrote to one another once a week. With separations often lasting for years at a stretch, letters formed the only relationship they could have. Sadly, I have very few of these from Lilla’s own family. Three, to be precise, all written to the same cousin, Lulu Covil, the daughter of Alice’s sister, Lucy, who had been brought up by their deeply religious uncle and aunt in York. And they are not even letters, just postcard scrawls, kept either for their Technicolor scenes of Chefoo and imperial life or, more likely, because they fell into a pile of papers that someone forgot to throw away. Unlike the Howells, who made a conscious decision to collect their letters as a record of colonial life, it wouldn’t ever have occurred to the Eckfords to do so.

But Lilla and Ada wrote to each other far more often than once a week. Almost every single day that they were apart, they scribbled notes to each other. They both suffered from “written verbal diarrhea.” At the end of her life, Lilla scribbled endless postcards and letters to friends and relations, sending her Christmas cards out as early as November, with her news attached. And she herself admitted in one of the few notes of hers that made it into the Howell collection, “How I love letter-writing!!!”

On the days that the twins didn’t write to each other, it was because they had argued. Or because some more dreadful thing had happened. And there were plenty of those days to come. But still, they must have written thousands and thousands of letters to each other over the course of their long lives.

And not a single one survives. I am assured by everyone that, practical and house-proud, the last thing either Lilla or Ada would have done was keep a letter from her twin once she had read it. It would have gone straight onto the fire to bring a flicker more heat into the room.

At first, I found this deeply frustrating. But even if any letters had survived, I’m not sure that we would have understood them. As Lilla and Ada spoke to each other in a private language, they probably wrote in one, too, to exclude everyone else.

Ironically, in that long, red ballot box of Howell missives in the British Library, there appeared to be more letters than I could possibly want. Dozens and dozens fired off by Ernie’s parents and siblings, all bulging with the information and conversations that make up most of the next five chapters of this book and many more details that I didn’t need. Details of polo matches and promotions, details of day trips and digging in their Indian gardens, and endless details of the to-and-fro that made up their daily lives in the three or four years during which their letters were collected.

The best letters are, perhaps unsurprisingly, those that were never meant to be kept—particularly one between two of Ernie’s sisters that begins with clear instructions to burn it after reading. Instructions that were, thankfully, never followed. But I wonder for how many other, now vanished letters in this saga the same instructions were obeyed. For, of course, anything that really mattered, anything that a recipient wanted to keep secret—the types of conversation that nowadays you would have face-to-face or over the telephone, as e-mail has a terrifying habit of recording itself for posterity—would have been destroyed to prevent anyone else reading it.

Yet even the Howells’ great collection has all too few letters from Lilla in it, particularly during the first year and a half of her marriage. In a way, this seems to accentuate the unfairness of what was about to happen to her. It is as though she wasn’t even given a chance to speak up in her own defense.

In any case, back then in Calcutta, Lilla couldn’t have put her fears in a letter to Ada without feeling a failure. Nor would she have wanted to tell Ada how unhappy she was when her twin was still too far away to do anything about it. It would only have made Ada unhappy, too. Every letter Lilla wrote at this time must have somehow been holding back a cry for help. But by now, Lilla was expecting Ada and Toby to reach India soon, and even if they didn’t stay in Calcutta long, they would certainly pass through. So, terribly alone, with no hint of any guidance or wise words to rely on, she must have decided to wait until she could see her twin.

But plans change. And little did Lilla realize quite how long she would have to wait.

Chapter 4

BURN THIS

INDIA, CHRISTMAS 1901

At Christmas, Ernie and Lilla made the two-day journey north from Calcutta to the east Indian hill station of Shillong. Here, two of Ernie’s sisters lived with their Indian Civil Service and Indian army husbands surrounded by the hypnotic rolling green of endless tea plantations and intoxicating rain that fell around their houses like the bars of a great cage. Barbie Somerset and, confusingly, another Ada, Ada Henniker— the name was in fashion at the time—were an intimidating pair. Barbie had studied modern languages at Girton College, Cambridge, at a time when very few women went to university at all. Ada—who had disconcertingly attractive different-colored eyes—hadn’t been to university, but she was still several years older than Lilla and had the poise and confidence of a fully paid-up member of the Raj. Ernie’s father had been a minor star in the ICS. He had promoted a number of education reforms across the country and had ended his career in some grandeur as acting resident—an ambassador of the British government in India—in the independent Muslim princedom of Hyderabad.

To Lilla, Barbie and Ada—the first members of Ernie’s family that she met—would have seemed friendly but daunting. In China, only the cleverest people in Chinese Customs had been to Oxford or Cambridge. In the trading community, the men usually came straight back out to the treaty ports from boarding school in England—where, like Lilla’s brothers, Vivvy and Reggie, they would have been sent by their parents living in China—to launch themselves into business. Lilla had probably never met a woman who had been to university, and she must have rather admired Barbie for having done something that sounded so daring. Even Ada, so at ease with her husband and so familiar with India, must have seemed to Lilla to live on another plane. And Lilla must have rapidly found herself looking up to her sisters-in-law, wishing she could be more like them. Barbie and Ada always had something to say that was funny or clever or simply the right thing. They chattered about the ins and outs and whos and wherefores of Indian life with a familiarity that Lilla couldn’t have imagined ever reaching. There were about twenty thousand British people in India, and Ernie and his family seemed to have grown up with most of them.

As the news of strangers echoed around Lilla like some obscure tribal tongue, she must have watched Ernie nod at his sisters’ every word and begun to wonder if that was what she was up against if she wanted to win her husband around. Would she have to swap her stutter for Barbie’s and Ada’s cool, clear-cut tones reverberating off every hard surface in the dining room? Pull her shoulders back and her chest up farther to gain the inches she needed to match the lanky Howell girls’ height? But when she pictured herself coming out with witty interventions in their conversations and precise answers to the barrage of questions being fired around the table, the image would have seemed as wrong as the reflection of her face in the polished silver spoons on the table, upside down—distorted into an unrecognizable mask. It wasn’t her, couldn’t ever be her, a smooth-talking intellectual making passing references to the latest scientific discovery or novel political thought. She, Lilla, and Ernie’s sisters were inescapably, fundamentally, even divisively, different.

It wasn’t just the years in India or the university education that separated them. Or even the fact that Lilla must have felt she had a pennant reading FROM AN OUTPOST IN CHINA pinned to her hair. No, it was their whole approach to living. To Lilla, soft, silky fabrics that your fingers slid over, tantalizing perfumes that made you open your eyes and search for the source, food that conjured up an appetite even when you thought you had none, laughter, incessant music—all were priorities. The Howells, Barbie, Ada, and Ernie—although Lilla knew, had seen in Chefoo, that her husband enjoyed the things she loved, too—held a far more practical view of life. They seemed, my father assures me from his own experiences staying with them in England years later, to be impervious to their surroundings, their houses as chaotic and uncomfortable as armies of Indian servants allowed. They ate, Lilla must have felt as she picked at barely passable food, merely to survive. Or in order to gather and discuss politics, science, religion—topics that barely surfaced in Chefoo in the way they did here, with everyone expected to have a view on subjects that Lilla knew little about. In the letters that flew between Ernie’s siblings at this time, they talked about the great scientific discoveries that were going to turn the whole world on its head, and the same topics would have dominated their conversations at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were obsessed with education. Early education. Higher education. Education for women as well as men. Ernie’s sisters were part of one of the first generations of British women for whom there were schools that offered an academic education, and the whole concept of educating women was still widely regarded as suspect by the overwhelmingly male establishment. The Howells, however, held the belief that women should—if only by studying and traveling before marriage—avoid being stuck at home with children all their lives. But, as Lilla would have seen, their homes were not a place where anyone would want to linger.

I don’t think it occurred to Lilla that the difference between the Eckford and the Howell styles of living was why Ernie called her extravagant. That, as much as he may have enjoyed creature comforts when they were offered, he clearly wasn’t prepared to fork out for them himself. That he’d rather live as his sisters did instead.

Nineteen years old and fresh from a silk-cushioned life in China, Lilla would have been horrified.

Most of the Howells’ theories about life would have been new to Lilla. They must have sounded exciting, revolutionary almost. In any case, terrifyingly progressive. But it wasn’t her world. She would have quite liked the idea that a daughter of hers would go to university, but Lilla herself had been sent to finishing school, not Cambridge. And, while she was fascinated by everything new, had every intention of being as independent as possible, she still yearned to potter around a house and kitchen.

The one topic of conversation that Lilla could join in on was Ada Henniker’s new son, Jack. But even this would have made Lilla a little uneasy. Jack had been born in October, and Ada had been through a rough time. She had swelled up like a balloon during pregnancy, and in order to heal after the birth, she had had her knees tied together for several weeks. Then she had been given doctor’s orders never to have another child. Lilla, who would just have been beginning to suspect that she might be pregnant herself, must have winced at every word.

In place of having the right thing to say, Lilla continued to fuss around Ernie. Making sure he was comfortable whenever he joked that his sisters appeared not to care. Sending his clothes to the laundry before they were dirty. Bringing him cakes and drinks and sweets in endless succession. And, to what must have been her intense pleasure, embedded in an armchair at his sister’s house, he no longer pushed her away, but settled into her flurry of activity.

Barbie and Ada watched as Lilla struggled to please their brother. They found their new sister-in-law “really quite pretty,” as they wrote to their mother in London, but “so very young, almost a baby.” Neither of them had married until well into their midtwenties and after “seeing something of the world.” The way in which Lilla gave in to their brother’s whims worried them. With a combination of sisterly prescience and a few more years’ experience of life than Lilla, they both sensed trouble ahead.