Read Online Lilla's Feast by Frances Osborne - Free Book Online Page B

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