Lilla's Feast (16 page)

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.

And then the tide turned just a little in Lilla’s favor. Perhaps as a result of his well-connected father pulling some strings for his son, Ernie’s posting was moved from Calcutta to Kashmir, India’s mesmerizingly scenic mountain kingdom in the foothills of the Himalayas and both a holiday destination for British expatriates and home to some of the best hunting, shooting, and fishing in the British Empire. He was delighted. “A prime billet for a man of my rank,” he wrote to Evelyn, in anticipation of the hours of recreation that lay ahead. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am & so will poor little Lily be when she hears the news.” She must have been. Kashmir was a long way from the charms of her twin in Calcutta. And there was a fighting chance that she might be allowed out to India a little sooner.

The climate in mountainous Kashmir was the reverse of that in the rest of India. Whereas by April Calcutta had grown unbearably hot—a breeding ground for disease entirely unsuitable for a young baby—in Kashmir a cool gentle spring was just beginning. So, although there was no question of Lilla going out to meet Ernie in Calcutta the following March when her baby would be only a couple of months old, there could be no objection to her going out to Kashmir then.

But March was still the best part of a year away. To the twenty-year-old Lilla, it seemed like eternity. She may have professed to Barbie to be “quite consoled” to “having another infant,” but it was far from truth. In order to keep herself busy, she immersed herself in the practicalities of Ernie’s move, trying to look after him from afar and writing to him “all my spare time.” She suggested that he look for a house outside Kashmir’s capital: “It would be most unwise to live in Srinagar this winter as the house could not possibly be dry.” She asked him to buy “only camp furniture” until she arrived and could take charge of their new home, their first proper home. “I am sure I will be able to make the house quite nice and pretty, without any expense.” Ernie’s enthusiastic replies urging her not to “be discouraged, sweetheart” by their prolonged separation made Lilla feel closer to him than she had ever been. “Oh if I had my Ernie,” she wrote, “how happy I should be.” She longed to feel him hug her again, as he had done in those last few days in England. Even just touch her. But whenever his letters launched into a lengthy description of his new life in his new home or of his job organizing the visits of both Lords Curzon and Kitchener, India’s viceroy and military commander in chief, respectively, to Kashmir that year, she felt him slipping out of reach.

For a while, Lilla persevered. But as she packed his “winter garments” to send out to Kashmir—“he did not take any thick things with him, thinking he was to remain in Calcutta”—I think something in her began to crack. Perhaps folding his heavy tweed coats while the July sunshine beat in through the windows made the distance between them seem irrecoverably large and she could hardly bear to close the trunk lid. As Ernie’s possessions disappeared from her sight behind a row of heavy brass locks, it was as though she were packing their relationship away. KASHMIR, the label on the trunk read. The other side of the world.