create a cozy nest for them to snuggle into. Homemaking, after all, was what her new career as a wife was about. It was a role that Lilla had spent her nineteen years trying to learn how to carry out to perfection. But now that she was married, she couldn’t even have a go at it. She and Ernie didn’t have enough money to rent a house in Calcutta.
That one respect in which Andrew Eckford had held back from treating his stepchildren fully as his own now reared its head. All his capital in Cornabé Eckford was destined for the two children he had had with Alice, his blood descendants, Edith and Dorothy. Not Lilla. Far from being an heiress with the right to a share in a prosperous China trading firm, as Ernie must have originally assumed, Lilla was only a step-daughter. Ernie would have been told this by Andrew Eckford when he went to him to ask for Lilla’s hand in marriage. But at this late stage, it would have been embarrassing for Ernie—cruel of him, even—to pull out of his courtship of Lilla. In any case, he must have been desperate by then to marry and bed her. So Ernie had steamed ahead with his proposal. Nonetheless, Lilla’s lack of money was enough of an issue for Ernie to feel that he needed to justify it to his family: “She is not wealthy. I don’t believe in rich wives for poor men. I should hate to have to ask my wife for money.” I think that, as he wrote this, he genuinely, perhaps again impetuously, believed that Lilla’s lack of money wouldn’t be a problem.
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
That one respect in which Andrew Eckford had held back from treating his stepchildren fully as his own now reared its head. All his capital in Cornabé Eckford was destined for the two children he had had with Alice, his blood descendants, Edith and Dorothy. Not Lilla. Far from being an heiress with the right to a share in a prosperous China trading firm, as Ernie must have originally assumed, Lilla was only a step-daughter. Ernie would have been told this by Andrew Eckford when he went to him to ask for Lilla’s hand in marriage. But at this late stage, it would have been embarrassing for Ernie—cruel of him, even—to pull out of his courtship of Lilla. In any case, he must have been desperate by then to marry and bed her. So Ernie had steamed ahead with his proposal. Nonetheless, Lilla’s lack of money was enough of an issue for Ernie to feel that he needed to justify it to his family: “She is not wealthy. I don’t believe in rich wives for poor men. I should hate to have to ask my wife for money.” I think that, as he wrote this, he genuinely, perhaps again impetuously, believed that Lilla’s lack of money wouldn’t be a problem.
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
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