Lilla's Feast (24 page)

Only the wedding never happened. Ten days after Lilla’s arrival in Basra, Malcolm was dead.

I can’t tell you how he died. Records from that time are thin on the ground. There is no consular register for deaths before 1920. Nor does Malcolm’s name appear in the hospital death lists. He must have died suddenly, before he could be moved into a cast-iron hospital bed. I rather wonder whether, having been plied with so much rich food by Lilla, his heart simply packed itself in.

Lilla must have reeled with shock, the fetid Basran air sticking in her throat. The picture she had dreamed up of her life with Malcolm—a soft fusion of grand garden parties and tender moments—crumbled in front of her eyes. He’d been snatched from her, and in the outrage that real grief brings, Lilla must have shaken with anger against her invisible enemy. She was only thirty-seven, and both a husband and a fiancé had died on her, abandoned her. And probably still burning with a chemical combination of shock, anger, and grief, a few days later, she found herself following a funeral cavalcade instead of stepping up an aisle clutching a bouquet.

RATTRAY-On the 27th Nov., at Basrah, Mesopotamia. LT.-COLONEL MALCOLM MacGREGOR, RATTRAY. D.S.O., R.A.M.C., second son of the late Andrew and Susan Rattray, of Portobello, Midlothian, aged 50.

Malcolm’s coffin perched on the braided shoulders of four colonels. A 300-strong guard of honor—far larger than the one that would have welcomed her and Malcolm as they left the church after their wedding— walked ahead. It was a formidable procession. Perhaps the grandest moment of Lilla’s life. And the most tragic. When they reached the dusty cemetery, Lilla would have seen that the crosses marking the rows of the dead from the war were already beginning to weather. Malcolm was placed in the next empty space, a mound of crumbling earth piled on top of him. A white marker was plunged into the earth at his feet. Peering at the picture of it in the back of Lilla’s black album, I can just make out the characters—
17F
—scrawled at the top.

And that was all that was left of the man whom Lilla had so wanted to be her husband.

Lilla must have been bundled on a boat back to England shortly afterward. I imagine her wandering the decks, numb with grief, old, rancid-tasting memories bubbling back, remembering bouncing up and down on that bed, the pain, the miscarriage, and that searingly guilty feeling of relief as she had headed out to Kashmir. Was that it? Had she brought this all on herself? No, no, no, she must have wanted to scream. Life wasn’t like that; you couldn’t just give up and say nothing would ever work. You had to go on. Go on she would.

But the pain from Malcolm’s death was far from over.

Back in England, Lilla would have gone straight to her mother’s house on Crystal Palace Park Road. And it was there that she must have learned that Malcolm—who had already changed his will in her favor before leaving for Basra—had left her the substantial sum of £10,000 (worth £200,000 today). That would have felt like a lot of money back then.

Lilla wasn’t poor, but this would certainly make life easier. And she wouldn’t have to depend on her brothers quite so much. It must have made her feel that Malcolm hadn’t been snatched from her quite so abruptly. That, in a way, she had managed to marry him first.

Then, just as she was coming back to earth, steadying her feet, planning how she’d live alone, Malcolm’s family contested the will. It was all, they claimed, a mistake. There was no way that he could really have intended to leave his money to this woman he hadn’t married. She was just some upstart from China who had clearly been after Malcolm’s money, and should be stopped.

The rejection, I’m told, cut through Lilla like a knife. She must have felt herself shrinking back to the nervous nineteen-year-old cowering upstairs in her in-laws’ house in Kensington Gardens Square. She hadn’t been good enough for the Howells. Now she wasn’t good enough for the Rattrays. But Lilla had come a long way since she had married Ernie, and however much it hurt, she wasn’t going to let herself be made to feel small again. Summoning every ounce of inner strength that she could find, she shot back at the Rattrays. “Take the money if you want it,” she told them. “It’s not how I want to remember him.” Refusing to discuss the matter further, she signed the money over. And, as if running from her emotions, she took to the road.

It wasn’t easy to track Lilla through the next decade. There were no momentous events, no more collections of letters. Just an endless pitter-patter of anecdotes and childhood sightings by her nephews and nieces who are still alive today. One remembered Lilla telling her off for being rude to her governess in Shanghai. Another remembered Lilla bringing her daughter, Alice, to stay in Tientsin the same summer that a typhoon had nearly swept them all away on the beach in the seaside resort of Peitaiho. Then there were recollections of Lilla coming to the rescue when her younger sister Edith started to go blind. Lilla escorted Edith and her two children back to England, via North America. There was Alice’s wedding in England in 1925—to a man called Havilland de Sausmarez, who had nine sisters, not a single one of whom ever married amid the dearth of bachelors after the First World War—Lilla must have been in Britain then. And yet more photographs show Lilla in India, Lilla in France, Lilla in England—their dates revealing how often she visited each place.

Lilla spent these years, like the world around her, in a frenzy of perpetual motion. The West was bouncing back from the horrors of the First World War, and the twenties were beginning to roar. Lilla roared with them. Her feet barely touched the ground. Perhaps she was trying to keep up with Ada—the pictures I have often show Lilla standing beside her twin—as Toby was posted to Malta, then Constantinople, in increasingly grand naval roles. And when Toby wasn’t working, he took Ada to Biarritz, where they rented a house and entertained and gambled and danced in considerable style.

Or perhaps Lilla was trying to move so fast that she couldn’t be compared to her twin. So fast that nobody, not even she, had a chance to notice she had neither a home nor a husband. At times it seems as though she was even trying to outpace time itself. Time that was nudging her past forty, toward fifty. Time that would—if she let it—make her feel old when, as the postwar world boomed and Charlestoned its way through the 1920s, Lilla’s photographs show a woman who felt she still had a lot of life to live. She had abandoned her widow’s weeds and rib-cage-clenching corsets for the new and liberating fashions of long cardigans, wraparound dresses, and knee-length skirts, which, for the first time, showed off those amazing legs. Still in black, with a few splashes of white à la Coco Chanel, she posed coyly, wearing long strands of pearls waiting to be twisted in her fingers. She had “men around her like butterflies,” her nephews and nieces said. And in every city, treaty port, or cantonment, she found a new admirer, a lonely old widower or bachelor, drifting through the expatriate routine. She promised to write and did. When she wasn’t on the move, she was at a writing desk dashing off girlish letters to dozens of men all over the world. “My letters keep them alive,” she used to whisper.

Lilla in the 1920s

When Ernie’s younger brother, Evelyn, became resident in Kashmir and made Arthur his aide-de-camp, Lilla followed. Instead of a fishing hut in Bandipur, she stayed this time in the rambling mock-Tudor residency in Srinagar, surrounded by lawns just too bright and vegetation far too lush to carry off the intended illusion of living in England. They went up-country to the Kashmir Lilla remembered. They picnicked by lakes and on hills. Lilla waved Evelyn and Arthur off over the same craggy white mountain passes that Ernie had crossed. When they had disappeared from sight, her mind must have wandered back to her time there with Ernie. To that time when she had an adoring, if flawed, husband and a perfect little fishing hut of a home.

In 1927, Toby was posted to China as principal sea transport officer of a 20,000-strong naval-based Shanghai Defence Force. The failure of the Boxer Uprising nearly thirty years beforehand had set in motion a great struggle of ideas among the Chinese of how best to turn their country into a modern nation-state. A series of anti-imperial uprisings had culminated in the 1911 overthrow of the five-year-old Puyi, China’s “last emperor,” and the trademark red walls of the imperial palace—the Forbidden City—were symbolically repainted a violent blue.

The following year, a thoughtful-looking, young Western-trained doctor called Sun Yat-sen, who had masterminded most of these anti-imperial uprisings from abroad, declared himself the first, and provisional, president of the Republic of China and set about organizing elections. But within a few months, his National People’s Party, the Kuomintang, had been overthrown by the head of China’s army, General Yüan Shih-k’ai. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, who came from a poor family and had been educated in mission schools, the pugnacious-faced Yüan (in China, the surname is put before the first name) came from a long line of senior government officials. At the age of twenty-one, he had followed the practice of sidestepping the taxing traditional examinations to become an official by buying himself a position.

Yüan’s visions for China included developing an independent judiciary as the best means of bringing an end to the deeply irritating extraterritoriality of foreigners and economic reforms such as improving agricultural yields and low-interest loans—all under his own dictatorial rule. But within three years, he had died of kidney failure, and China fell under the rule of a sequence of local warlords—many of them Yüan’s former henchmen—who had little desire either to reunify or to modernize the country.

The effect of all this on the treaty-port community had been minimal. Bearing in mind the antimissionary campaign of the Boxer Uprising, as a precaution, missionaries in the more distant outposts were called back to base during the 1911 revolution. But after that, as Frances Wood puts it, “the uncertainties of warlord rule were, for foreign residents, not very different from previous uncertainties.” And most treaty porters bothered about only their local warlords.

But by the 1920s, things had changed. In 1919, it was revealed that plans for the Versailles peace treaty included handing over China’s Shantung province to Japan. And on May 4 of that year, the Chinese mounted widespread demonstrations against the proposal. They felt particularly aggrieved as they had sent tens of thousands of men to dig trenches on the western front during the First World War, and this term of the peace treaty seemed an exceptionally poor way for the Allies to show their gratitude. Perhaps because Japan had been occupying the former German concessions in the area since the outbreak of the war, the Allies went ahead with the award, and thus earned the enmity of the Chinese. Then, at the Washington Conference of 1921–22, perhaps equally unwisely, the Allies proceeded to alienate Japan by taking Shantung back. If they had deliberately tried to incite war between the two countries, they couldn’t have done it any better.

Sun Yat-sen had then started to reconstruct his dream for a unified, modern China, setting up a Kuomintang, or Nationalist, government in Canton, in the south of the country. This government had the support of the newly formed Communist Party, and, perhaps remembering all too clearly how Sun Yat-sen’s previous attempt at holding power had ended, this time it exercised military rule. The force backing it was known as the National Revolutionary Army, whose leader was an ambitious man called Chiang Kai-shek, who, like Yüan, had been born into a wealthy family. Instead of purchasing an official title, Chiang had gone to a military academy in Japan at the age of twenty-one. A photograph of him in military uniform, taken as he rose to power in his midthirties, shows him long and lean, with the steady gaze of a man utterly confident of his own ability.

Sun Yat-sen didn’t live to see his dream realized. In late 1924, he fell ill, and by March 1925, he had died of liver cancer. Just two months later, a series of Chinese worker protests and strikes against foreign employers provided the encouragement the Nationalists needed. And in 1926, the new leader of the Nationalist Party—perhaps unsurprisingly, its military commander, Chiang Kai-shek—started to lead his troops out of southern Canton in a move to unify China known as the Northern Expedition.