Lilla's Feast by Frances Osborne

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.
    Barbie and Ada watched as Lilla struggled to please their brother. They found their new sister-in-law “really quite pretty,” as they wrote to their mother in London, but “so very young, almost a baby.” Neither of them had married until well into their midtwenties and after “seeing something of the world.” The way in which Lilla gave in to their brother’s whims worried them. With a combination of sisterly prescience and a few more years’ experience of life than Lilla, they both sensed trouble ahead.
    Almost as soon as Lilla and Ernie returned to Calcutta, Ernie fell ill. In the days before penicillin—antibiotics were not mass-produced until 1941—even a mild infection could rapidly become life-threatening. Ernie’s health deteriorated quickly. Within a couple of weeks, he had grown drawn and thin. The army medics took one look and ordered him to England on sick leave. The conditions in India were renowned for being inhospitable to good health. He was not to return for twelve months.

    Lilla and Ernie, Calcutta, January 1902
    Ernie, with all the good grace of a bad invalid, would have been furious. He had been hoping for promotion to the rank of major, which would bring him not only some prestige but also a much-needed increase in pay, and this sick leave was going to set it back at least a year. Unwilling to attribute the course of events to pure bad luck, his temper must have flared, scalding Lilla in its path as he, once again, started to push her away. So, just as Lilla received news that Ada and Toby had been ordered to remain in Chefoo for several more months, long enough to justify a visit home, a visit during which she would be able to talk to Ada face-to-face, she found herself wrenched in the opposite direction as she and Ernie set sail for London.
    The sea journey took almost a month. Ernie was sick and cabin-bound from the start. By the time the ship reached Southampton, Lilla was two and a half months pregnant and probably had waves of nausea rocking through her, too. To make matters worse, after encountering Ernie’s sisters in India, she was terrified of meeting the rest of her husband’s family in England.
    LONDON, FEBRUARY 1902
    Ernie’s parents, Arthur and Laura Howell, were wealthy enough to retire to England after a career in India. They had based themselves in London, where Ernie’s intellectual father could spend his days playing whist at the Athenaeum—a club set up for “individuals known for their scientific or literary attainments” and whose members have ranged from Darwin and Dickens in the nineteenth century to Churchill and Eisenhower in the twentieth. In 1902, its eighteen-year waiting list meant that its green leather armchairs were full of elderly members being waited on hand and foot as they browsed their way through the library’s legendary seventy thousand books.
    The Howells rented a house in Kensington Gardens Square, in the middle of the then relatively new area of Bayswater, which was fashionable