Lilla's Feast (19 page)

Ada’s baby was due in July, Lilla’s in August. Ada must have conceived during Lilla’s visit, and Lilla within days of seeing Ernie again.

For all her enthusiasm, her passion, for Ernie, Lilla was not happy to be pregnant either. “I wonder if you will be very much surprised,” she wrote to Barbie, “to hear that I am in the ‘family way’ again. Oh dear dear poor little me. Such is life—well, it can’t be helped and I am trying to make the best of it.” At least, unlike Ada, she didn’t have to go back to England for the birth in a desperate attempt to keep the child alive. Nevertheless, her memories of life immediately after Arthur had been born would still have been raw. And after what she thought she had done to her last baby, she must have been terrified that some great hand of Fate would wreak revenge.

As spring turned into summer, social life in Bandipur took off. The British in India who were free to leave their posts flocked north to Kashmir to escape the baking heat in the rest of the country. Once there, they toured the countryside, and Ernie and Lilla’s cottage became a stopping place along the way. “We have been very gay,” wrote Lilla on the first of July, “this last week having people to nearly every meal, in fact the whole of June we have had guests.” Yesterday, she continued, “we had two ladies to breakfast, for lunch and tea a Captain Steepnagle & the nurse who went to Gilgit. For dinner some R.A.M.C. [Royal Army Medical Corps] man, this sort of thing is my daily program.” Luckily perhaps, for Lilla, they had no spare bedrooms, and their visitors were limited to meals that, even seven and a half months’ pregnant, she could still produce—by ordering in ingredients from Srinagar, twenty miles away—with a flourish.

The odd visitor, however, did stay the night. A “Prince Pedro of Or-leans,” wrote Lilla, turned up late one evening on his way back through the mountains to Gilgit. He collapsed at the door, too ill to move. Lilla put him up in a tent for two days until he could travel to a doctor. After the isolation of the winter, Lilla found all these visitors diverting but hard work, and she looked forward to being snowed in with Ernie once more: “I shall be quite glad when the autumn comes and we are by ourselves again.”

Summer brought more work for Ernie, too. “This is my busy season,” he wrote. Throughout the winter, he had made occasional forays to Srinagar. Now, in addition to organizing any official visits, he had to make the most of the warm weather to check the passes and trails north through the Himalayas toward Russian-occupied Afghanistan. India was a prized possession of the British Empire, a vast, wealth-creating machine envied by the world’s other great nations—especially by imperial Russia, whose own vast empire stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific in one solid block, whisking tantalizingly close to India itself. For decades, Britain had feared a potential Russian invasion through the Himalayas. And while their two armies had faced each other across the mountains, young British and Russian heroes had galloped around the Central Asian mountains and deserts in disguise, gathering information and converting local tribes to their cause in a glamorous escapade known as the “Great Game.” A game in which Ernie was now playing a very minor role.

Ernie’s task was to work out the best way, if any, to take an army through the mountains. He set off on one expedition to Gilgit with a team of Kashmiri guides, donkeys, and ponies. They climbed a thousand feet at a time, along paths so narrow that when one pony knocked into the overhanging cliff and stumbled, it disappeared down the hill-side to its death. He crossed torrential rivers on terrifying footbridges, making the mistake of looking down at the water swirling beneath him. “I had to turn back.” The party climbed to 14,500 feet, and, even in July, the slopes were covered in thick snow through which they skidded their way down, unloading the animals and rolling the bundles down the hill. When he returned, his white-skinned hands and face had been sunburned a deep red.

At the end of July, Lilla spent a few days in Srinagar visiting the vacant assistant resident’s house where she would give birth the following month. In a postcard to her cousin Lulu Covil, she still sounds upbeat. “Awfully hot,” she scribbled. “Just seen the house we are going to next month, lovely place—best love yrs L.H.” A few days later, Ada Elderton gave birth to another girl in England. “All Ada and Toby can knock up between them is another petticoat,” mocked Ernie from one of his mountain camps. “I hope my Pilili will be man enough to knock out another man.” But, after gritting her teeth and barely uttering a whimper through her hours of labor—leading Ernie naively to write “never was there a child born with such ease”—Lilla gave birth to a girl in the last week of August.

Ernie could scarcely conceal his disappointment. His marriage had seemed to him so perfect that Lilla’s failure to give him a second son knocked him for a loop. “Lily is satisfied and so I don’t like to grumble,” he confided to Barbie. “I want the child called Esmé,” he added. He lost out, however, even on this. Lilla overruled him, calling their daughter Alice, after her mother. And hot on the heels of this came another blow. He received orders to move. His time in Kashmir was over.

Ernie must have begun to curse his luck. First a daughter. Then her being named after his mother-in-law, of whom, however his feelings for Lilla had changed, he can scarcely have been fond. Now Kashmir—the posting of a lifetime—cut short. To make matters worse, he would have felt that he had only himself to blame. Throughout the past year, he had been plagued by a recurring eye infection that, at times, had led Lilla to write his letters for him. Then, unable—despite Lilla’s best efforts—to face another claustrophobic winter in the hills, he had asked for two months’ leave over the following January and February. The response from headquarters had been brief. Move to a new post. And at the beginning of October, as soon as Lilla’s confinement was over, she found herself packing up their little fishing hut in Bandipur and heading south to the desert city of Lucknow.

Chapter 8

THE TABLES TURN

LUCKNOW, INDIA, OCTOBER 1904

It is not often that lovers swap roles. Usually, the pattern formed at first—one person chasing, the other aloof—sticks fast. Just as you think that a change is about to happen—the lover drawing back for once, the beloved starting to fuss around—some small circumstance takes a turn. And they both revert to type. The beloved clambers back onto his or her pedestal, reprising a moody gaze at a more appealing horizon. The lover scurries around, picking up the debris, trying to mend the broken this and that into some pretty object that will make the loved one smile.

Not so with Ernie and Lilla. In England, Ernie had decided to give his marriage another chance. In Kashmir, he had fallen in love again. And even though he and Lilla were now being hurled out of their mountain paradise and down onto the hot, dusty, Indian plain, Ernie found himself increasingly dependent on the wife he had once tried to abandon.

As Ernie’s spirits sank, Lilla swept him up under her wing, soothing his injured pride at losing Kashmir with comfort food. She could conjure up the smoky atmosphere of an English gentlemen’s club by smearing anchovies onto hot toast dripping with melted butter. She knew how to keep cheddar on a high shelf in their larder until it was stale enough to darken and crack, then melt it into browned onions to make cheese on toast with a rich, earthy tang. Surrounded by mountains of Indian rice, she could curry sardines and rice together, spooning the fishy, mushy, oily mixture onto a bed of fried apples. She chopped ham, hard-boiled eggs, and parsley into tender cooked rice, tossing the sizzling ingredients into a creamy kedgeree. She simmered long-grain Patna rice and tomatoes until softened into an Italian risotto. I think she must have lulled Ernie’s anger with himself, with his eyes, with the system that had sent another man to take his coveted place in Kashmir, in a smooth, rich, buttery haze of food.

Lucknow made as stark a contrast with Bandipur as India could provide. Instead of nestling among the cool, clear pinnacles of Kashmir, Lucknow sits surrounded by the flat horizons of the vast Ganges Plain. Even in winter, the temperatures are as hot as a northern European summer; and between April and June, the heat can soar to a stifling 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And unlike remote, peaceful Bandipur, Lucknow was a former Muslim capital of India. Its buildings were a riot of golden domes, turquoise arched ramparts, and ivory inlaid mosaic. As Rudyard Kipling puts it in his novel
Kim,
“No city—except Bombay, the queen of all—was more beautiful in her garish style than Lucknow.” Embroidered silks were piled up inside the doorways of its shopping streets whose air was thick with a rich, intoxicating perfume, a perfume that carried with it deep memories of unrest.

For all the order that the heavy British garrison imposed upon the town’s surface, underneath it quietly seethed with rebellion against its imperial invaders. Half a century before Lilla and Ernie arrived, Lucknow had cut the deepest wound that the British had suffered in India. In the midst of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the mutineers of Lucknow had besieged the British residency, which was crammed with no fewer than three thousand British and loyal Indians. The siege lasted for eighty-seven days, and the squalor, disease, and starvation far outstripped what the Boxers later achieved in Peking. When British troops eventually came to the rescue, just one thousand—one-third—of those besieged had survived. The building still stands almost as it was found by the British troops in the autumn of 1857, a charred ruin, its walls peppered with cannonball holes.

When Ernie and Lilla arrived in the autumn of 1904, the same mutinous spirit still bubbled through the city. Not that Lilla would have been expected to come into much contact with it. For unlike in Bandipur, where they had lived more or less by themselves—their closest neighbors the local Kashmiri villagers, who were happy, as Ernie had boasted, “to do anything” for Lilla—in Lucknow they found themselves part of the rigidly ordered life of the British cantonment.

Cantonments in India were a little like foreign concessions in China. They were dwelling, shopping, schooling, worshipping, and socializing areas for the British fenced off from the gritty reality of Indian life. They were designed to be self-sufficient worlds, their green lawns and wide tree-lined avenues creating a utopia to comfort even the most homesick souls. But there the similarities ended. For while foreign concessions in China were a base from which to explore—if not the countryside, then at least a flavor of the real China and other foreign concessions—the cantonments in India made themselves as inward looking as they could possibly be. And as the Indian heat stifled the British residents’ bodies, dampening their skin under their tight-fitting clothes, the cantonment way of life carefully starved their minds of the reality of the India outside. There were parks for the children to play in, polo fields for husbands to play on, and social clubs that still managed to convey an air of condescending exclusivity even though they were basically open to any bearer of a white-skinned face.

Lilla can have hardly noticed the sterility of her environment when she arrived. Ignoring her own exhaustion so shortly after having a baby, she had carted two children and a grumpy husband down from the Himalayas and hundreds of miles across the Indian plain. By the time they reached Lucknow, the children were not at all well. Whereas back in Kashmir, Arthur was so rosy-cheeked that one lady who saw him said, Lilla wrote, “he was the healthiest & most English-looking chap she had seen in India. It pleased me very much to hear that,” now things were quite different. “Arthur’s little face is half the size,” she wrote, and baby Alice was far from thriving. Lilla and Mrs. Desmond had tried to feed her “every food under the sun,” eventually having a go with “milk & barley water with mellius [a honey mixture].” Lilla was desperately worried to see her two-month-old daughter so sick. Every cell in a new mother’s body is programmed to obsess over how much her newborn is eating and how much weight he or she is gaining. Even today, mothers with robustly healthy babies can feel helpless if their child skips a meal. Back then, in India, as Lilla knew all too well—from the deaths of little Jack Henniker and her twin’s child—the stakes were high. “It makes me so unhappy to see them, with little white faces,” wrote Lilla, all her maternal instincts painfully sharpened and wondering, perhaps, whether she didn’t deserve to lose a child, too.

No sooner had Lilla started to settle her ailing family into their new home than she was told that they had to move. “To make matters worse we have to turn out of our house—to think of packing once again, it makes me sick—I am so weary of it all.” At least this time it was only to another house in the cantonment. For several exhausting days, Lilla scuttled from one house to the other, repacking the boxes that she had just carefully emptied in the first and organizing the cleaning and preparing of the second. Then, at last, at the end of October, they moved into an imposing house that could not have been less like the beloved fishing hut she had had to leave behind. Her new home was a grand villa with a semicircular veranda that bulged out from its stone facade, supported by half a dozen fat classical columns.