Lilla's Feast by Frances Osborne Page A

with their colonial set. The house, number 5, is now the center-piece of a Best Western hotel that occupies the block. The front door, were it still to open, would lead you straight into the bar. Yet the six-story building still towers above the square’s gardens. And the now defunct doorstep still bears the original slippery black-and-white-patterned tiling that must have swirled under Lilla’s eyes as she waited, giddy with exhaustion, while Ernie pulled the bell.

    Mama and Papa: Laura Russell Howell and Arthur Pearse Howell, Ernie’s parents
    By the time Laura Howell, known to the family as Mama, reached the door, she had already worked up a considerable degree of irritation with the new arrivals. Ernie had failed to telegraph ahead that he was on his way—“I don’t wonder Mama was annoyed at Ernie and Lily’s sudden arrival,” wrote Barbie, “it was stupid of E not to wire.” His turning up on the doorstep was therefore quite unexpected, meaning that absolutely no preparations had been made. Mama Howell was generally said to have been one of those who “ruled India with an umbrella,” and she did not take to “casual visitors.” With a great flurry, the servants were diverted from whatever the task at hand and instructed to open up another dank bedroom and make it ready. Only then did she acknowledge the arrival of her son—whom she had not seen since his last visit home two years beforehand—and his “Chinese” bride, Lily.
    Mama and Papa Howell were already worrying that Ernie’s marriage might have been “not quite prudent.” They knew their son’s tendency to rush headlong after the latest thing to take his fancy and feared that he had once more done just that. In the months before he met Lilla, his letters home had been full of lonely assertions that the task of finding a wife “is an awful lottery.” And, on one occasion, he had made the desperate suggestion—ignoring Indian army regulations that forbade soldiers from marrying before thirty (until then, they were supposed to be married to their regiment)—that “all unmarried men over 25 years of age should be taxed.” However, loneliness and the sexual frustration of bachelorhood were part and parcel of empire life. Even if you were married, you could easily be posted to “a place where one never sees a soul week in week out and there is absolutely nothing to do but walk along the same bit of road evening after evening” and you would simply find yourselves feeling lonely together.
    In his parents’ view, Ernie should have calmly accepted the status quo and waited to meet somebody suitable with whom to make “an Indian life.” “Suitable” meaning somebody whose parents they knew or, even better, whom they had introduced Ernie to themselves. “Suitable” also meaning having enough money. Actually having it. Not somebody you assume is wealthy, but because you have been “not quite prudent,” turns out not to be. Like Lilla.
    First they would have received a hurried wire announcing that Ernie was marrying a local businessman’s teenage daughter in a holiday resort in China—making them fear that, not reason, but sexual attraction (although they would never have uttered those words) had driven his decision. The gushing letters that followed—explaining that Lilla was not rich, but pretty—confirmed their suspicions. And by the time Lilla and Ernie arrived in London, Mama Howell would have received—albeit only just—Barbie’s and Ada’s letters detailing Christmas in Shillong. What she read about Lilla and how she fussed around a grumpy Ernie fueled her fears. And, like all mothers, her sympathies lay firmly with her son. She believed that he had made a terrible mistake.
    To Lilla, London must have appeared even less welcoming than Calcutta. Arriving in February, she would have found it as damp and dirty as Calcutta and cold to boot. Whenever she ventured out into the perpetual half-light—a result of the thick smog