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to an unwritten tradition that one of the bachelors in town would marry the wife of any man who died out there. And Andrew Eckford proposed to Alice. Andrew was a partner in one of Chefoo’s largest trading firms and therefore one of the wealthiest men in the port. He was as Chefoo establishment as a man could be. His firm even ran the local mail service. Andrew asked Alice to marry him and offered to take on all of her four children. Strangely, Alice turned him down and took her children home—as Victorian expatriates called England. Andrew escorted them all to Shanghai and bought the family tickets on the next steamer out. It would take two months to reach England. He installed them on board and waved good-bye.
    The return to England was not a success. Mrs. Simons had died, her savings exhausted by all those music lessons and boarding-school fees. The few relations who were still around simply didn’t have enough spare cash for Alice and her four children by an unknown and now dead husband. Alice found herself struggling to put food on the table.
    Andrew Eckford turned up on Alice’s doorstep in January 1886. The custom in the treaty ports, and in colonial life in general, was for expatriates to return to their home country on leave every few years— often for a year at a time, as traveling each way could easily take a couple of months. A businessman would leave his firm in his partner’s hands. And Andrew had handed over the reins of his firm, Cornabé Eckford, to Cornabé and taken some leave in order to return to England and pursue Alice.
    It was a year since he had seen her off in Shanghai. He proposed again. This time she accepted. They married in England, and Andrew prepared to return to China. Vivvy and Reggie, aged nine and seven, were sent to boarding school in England, along with thousands of other little boys whose parents worked in the far reaches of the British Empire. Lilla and Ada were still just too young for this, and, in any case, being girls, their education simply didn’t matter as much. They went back to China with their mother.
    As stepfathers go, Andrew Eckford was a good one. He threw himself wholeheartedly into his new family and treated Lilla and Ada—the boys, too—more or less as his own. “More or less” because, in just one respect—one that would turn out to be important for Lilla—he held back. However, then, none of them were old enough to notice or care. Lilla, Ada, Vivvy, and Reggie all called him Father. And within a terrifyingly short space of time, it was as if their real father had never existed. After her misery over losing Charles, Alice seems to have made a decision to start again with Andrew. There were no pictures or mementos of Charles Jennings—not even hidden away in some drawer. He simply ceased to exist. Alice even informally switched her children’s surname to Eckford, extinguishing the evidence of her former, poorer life. The children forgot Jennings, almost forgot that they had ever had another father. He disappeared into the farthest recesses of their memories, surviving only in the traces of his features on their faces.
    Alice continued to run her new family in the same way as before. She sang to her children, and made every effort to convince them of the pleasure of mealtimes—encouraging them to stand on stools in the kitchen, cut raw biscuit dough into animal shapes, lick their fingers for that sweet sugary tingle on their tongues, and vie for the last teaspoonful of butter, eggs, and sugar scraped from the mixing bowl. This time around, however, Alice’s budget was without constraint. Each morning when Andrew wandered into his study, a fresh bunch of flowers would be waiting on the desk. Every month or two, Alice—an avid shopper— would sail south to Shanghai and return with great cases of elegant Chinese and English reproduction furniture; delicate, whispered ink drawings by the Chinese artists everyone was talking about at the time; and