Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  In comparison, British social life in India was a labyrinthine affair, a complex equation of rank, military or civil, family background, and income. The British in India defended their respectability—an attribute at risk merely by being in India and not England—with a ferocious set of prejudices. Principal among these was a general feeling of superiority over, even a suspicion of, those from less prestigious parts of the British Empire. This meant everywhere except India. When it came to China, they drew a deep breath. China was certainly interesting, possibly adventurous, but best kept at arm’s length. It wasn’t even a question of being less smoky gentleman’s club and more smoggy East End barrow boy—it wasn’t even officially part of the empire. China, and Lilla with it, was off the scale. And Lilla’s foreign status was aggravated by Ernie’s decision to call her not Lilla, but the more oriental-sounding Lily.

  Waiting for Ada to join her in the noisy, dusty, clammy city where every corner revealed an unfamiliar street and her clothes stuck to her skin as the dirt fought its way into her eyes and nostrils, Lilla must have felt all the loneliness of a stranger surrounded by thousands of people. The rest of her family was back in Chefoo, all together, preparing for Ada’s December wedding. It must have been terribly hard for Lilla even to think about it. Not once in her nineteen years had she ever been so far from Ada for so long, and now she would even miss her wedding. She couldn’t go. It would take at least three weeks to return to Chefoo, if she left now—almost as soon as she’d arrived in Calcutta. She’d only just make it. Besides, Ernie would make a fuss about the expense, and it would hardly look right to abandon her husband just one month into their marriage. So be it. Ada would be coming to Calcutta with Toby soon. Two months apart were worth it if it meant more time together afterward.

  Lilla must have desperately tried to find something to distract her during the wait for Ada. And perhaps for a lack of anything concrete to busy herself with, I think she decided to focus herself entirely on Ernie—and his qualities expanded to fill her empty hours.

  Ernie knew the city in which Lilla felt so lost like the back of his hand. And the rest must have followed—his heavy build making her feel quite protected when she stood close to him, his thick mustache tickling her upper lip reassuringly whenever he kissed her. Shortly, Ernie must have become her whole world, unable to do wrong and knowing exactly what was right and what was ill-advised. And when he lost his temper with Lilla, it was only, I fear she thought, because he wanted to discourage her from imprudent behavior. The more frequent Ernie’s outbursts of temper, the more Lilla found herself looking up to him, trying to anticipate what might please him and avoid what would not. And as Ernie was the one who was busy, the one with things to do, she was the one who had to seek his attention. The more she had to seek, the more her dependence on him must have evolved into something stronger. If she made her way through the streets against a tide of crowds and carts to meet him for lunch, Ernie, who would rather have been surrounded by his fellow officers in the mess, would only have told her that they couldn’t afford the extravagance of eating out—leaving her reduced to waiting for him to return at night.

  It wasn’t as if Lilla wasn’t keen on the idea of sex. Quite the contrary. Sex—or, rather, the vague promise of it—was an integral part of Lilla’s charm. However, before her wedding night, she would have known little of its reality. When it came, it may have been a shock.

  In his thirties, Ernie would have been sexually experienced. However, barring the luck of an affair with an already married woman—and Ernie was far too Britishly proper to do such a thing—this experience would have been limited to business propositions, most of them in the Indian army’s regulated brothels. A series of purely functional episodes. Eager by nature, he must have approached Lilla with a combination of unbridled enthusiasm and well-honed functionality, as Lilla struggled to work out what she should do. It can’t have been the great romantic experience she had hoped for.

  Nor can it have been what Ernie had hoped for either. If their private life had taken off, if Lilla had known how to twist Ernie around her little finger in bed rather than simply flirt with him as though she did, the nightly passion would have made up for everything else that was bothering him. For the cooling reality of everyday life. For the burden of having to look after somebody who didn’t appear to fit into his Indian world. And, most important of all, for the unexpected shortage of money that was curbing his old freedom to do just as he pleased.

  Instead, quite early on, Ernie began to retreat from Lilla, his regression marked by the increasingly violent outbursts of temper that Lilla still talked about at the end of her life. And instead of standing her ground in the face of her husband’s flashes of anger, she made the terrible, naive, teenage mistake of—as one of her husband’s sisters would put it—“giving way to Ernie too much—she simply purrs around him like a kitten.” And the more she purred, the more capricious Ernie grew. The more capricious he grew, the less happy he became, with being as he put it “saddled” with a wife, and the more he blamed Lilla for his general feeling of discontent.

  Lilla clung to the belief that if she looked after Ernie enough, he would love her in the end. And she fussed around him like an army of handmaidens.

  This was not what her mother had taught her. Spoil your husband, Alice would have said, don’t crowd him. But Alice was a long way away. And Lilla was too alone, a twin too unused to being alone, to realize what she was doing wrong. In pursuing Ernie, she succeeded only in driving him farther away. The farther he withdrew, the greater the air of desperation that must have surrounded Lilla’s efforts. And the more desperate Lilla’s efforts, the greater the distance that Ernie must have wanted to put between them. And as she pursued, Lilla was unwittingly turning a potentially solvable financial problem into something that would threaten to destroy her marriage. Potentially solvable because had Lilla then quietly asked Andrew for help—“quietly” because Ernie, out of embarrassment, would have forbidden it if consulted—things might have run just a little more smoothly at that oh-so-important stage right after the wedding. But she didn’t.

  Eventually, Lilla’s spirits began to waver. Ernie’s remoteness may have made her keener than ever on her husband, but there was only so long that she could go on ignoring his rejection of her. When it began to batter its way in through her eyes, her ears—the way he moved his arm if she touched his skin—she must have started to ask herself whether she would ever succeed in making him love her.

  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 c
hildren 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.