Lilla's Feast (8 page)

I wish he had been right.

But I fear that the reason that everyone looks so miserable in that wedding photograph was that the ugly questions of finance and unmet expectations were already causing trouble.

Rather than rent a modest house outside the city and commute in each day, Ernie decided it would be better to live centrally. He took a room for them in a boardinghouse run by a woman called Mrs. Bridges, at number 14 Chowringhee—a thoroughfare in the center of the city. In the daytime, he went to his office. In the evenings, he would have often gone to his club or to the officers’ mess—places where, when he was still a bachelor, he had been able to spend all his evenings, drinking without restraint. But now that he was married, Ernie was discovering that somehow his army captain’s wages didn’t stretch as far as they had before. And the knowledge that, while he was with his friends, his wife was sitting at home with nothing to do must have produced a distinctly irritating feeling of guilt.

Living in lodgings was quite different from how Lilla had expected her married life to be. Where was the house—the apartment, even— that she would make a pleasure to look at inside and out? That she would fill with soft furniture, and chairs not so deep that it was hard to stand up. Where she would scatter pretty sketches, tactile sculptures, objects that caught the eye. Serve three steaming courses for every meal, and if guests, then four. Afterward, play the piano gently, unless the company called for a song.

In a bedsit in Calcutta, living like this was just a dream. And I am sure Lilla tried to dream it, thinking through how she’d arrange a sitting room—the chairs at just such an angle, the side tables carefully strewn with plants and books. At least the fresh flowers she could do for real, balancing great bunches of bright, exotic, nameless blooms on the tiny table in the corner of their room until Ernie complained that they were in his way. And there would have been a piano in the parlor downstairs. Slightly clunky, but playable. If Ernie came back at a reasonable hour, she could play for him until he stood up and said he’d had enough. But cooking—leaning over a steaming pan, sprinkling crinkly fragments of dried herbs, dipping a spoon slowly into a thick sauce, tasting sweet and sharp, smooth and crunchy—she had to imagine. I can see her standing there in a tiny rented bedroom trying to picture herself between a stove piled high with pots and pans and a kitchen table groaning with crisp, earthy vegetables and the sharpest of knives, her hands moving as she dreams of peeling apples with insides like half-frozen snow, of slicing onions whose rubbery skin catches her knife before letting it crackle through the layers, of the gentle fizz of a simmering stew, its heat prickling her face as she breathes in its vapor to see whether it is done. And then the images flicker and vanish, leaving her staring out of a small window at a brown-gray sky, the stench of the gutter making her cough.

Lilla’s days stretched emptily ahead of her. Some people might have been happy to idle away the hours reading the newspapers or strolling in Calcutta’s botanical gardens, but Lilla loathed to waste time. She felt that she always needed to be improving something, creating something from scratch, something useful, or something that would last. Up until the final years of her life, when she came to believe that heaven was her next stop, Lilla wasn’t terribly religious. Agnostic at best. But if anything was a sin in her book, it was idleness.

Yet without a home to decorate and a kitchen to run, and missing the twinly competitiveness that used to drive her through the day, Lilla was at a loss as to how to fill her time. Even wandering along the shopping streets must have been frustrating. The flip side of Ernie’s great passions for life was a tendency to blow his top at the slightest provocation, and often in the direction of Lilla. Each time she bought anything at all he would erupt, saying that they couldn’t afford it. Lilla found herself sidestepping an ever-increasing list of activities that provoked him, staring longingly through the windows at all sorts of delights—cushions, lampshades, silks, and dresses—that back in China she would have bought without hesitating. Lilla hadn’t even been four years old when Alice married Andrew. She cannot have remembered money ever being an issue before.

Nor did she have any real friends to visit. The wives of some of Ernie’s colleagues came by, but Lilla had so little in common with the older, more India-entrenched army wives that the conversation soon ran dry. For all Calcutta’s superficial similarities to Shanghai—the incessant shouting, the spicy smells, the scuttling pace at which everybody rushed around—Lilla would have been beginning to realize that British India was a very different place from China. Even though, of all the cities in India, Calcutta was the most cosmopolitan, the most business-oriented, it was still governed by layers of terribly British officialdom in a way that China simply wasn’t.

For a start, there were the armed forces, the Indian army and Indian navy, in which Ernie and Toby served. At first, it appeared strange that they were Indian in name when they were so British in nature—the three thousand most senior officers were British. But it rapidly became clear that, unlike in China, where the foreigners lived perched on the edge of the continent in treaty ports while the rest of the country was left to carry on more or less as usual, in India it was quite the reverse. The British Raj—as Britain’s rule of India was known—had attempted to permeate every pore of Indian life, every village.

Like the treaty ports, the Raj had its own civil service. Yet again, whereas Chinese Customs concerned itself only with China’s muddy harbors and convoluted trading terms, the Indian Civil Service— known as the ICS—aspired to regulate nearly every aspect of what the British saw as Indian life. Chinese Customs ignored, insofar as it could, Chinese life outside the treaty ports, and, in any case, it reported to the Chinese government in Peking. The ICS, on the other hand, piloted education systems and ran courts of law throughout the entire country. It reported to Whitehall, in London. It was so busy monitoring, regulating, and reporting that governing the region—supposedly providing a mere support system for the business of bringing money home—had become a primary industry in itself. And this reverence for bureaucracy spilled over into everyday life. The British in India were a conformist caste. Things were done by the book, in the right way. British was best.

Lilla was British in name, but she’d been born in China. And, barring a couple of years of so-called education in England and on the Continent, she’d grown up there. True, the British had been predominant, had even stuck together to a certain degree, formed an Anglo-Chinese culture of their own. Anglo-China, however, was not introspective, quite the opposite. It was surrounded by a melting pot of Western nationalities. Most of them had their own stakes in the place. Many of them took part in the fairly lax self-government. And all of them openly pinched the best from one another’s cultures. Whether it was the latest trimmings from French fashion, heart-opening notes of Italian music, foaming pitchers of malty German beer, the treacly sponge of Austrian cakes, or mind-numbing Russian vodka, it all blended into a single treaty-port way of doing things—the newer the better. When treaty porters deferred to a greater power, they did not look to London, they looked to Shanghai. And who you were or where you stood in the general run of treaty-port life depended simply on how well you were doing in business.

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.