Emma: A Modern Retelling

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The enthusiasm that Isabella and Emma felt for Miss Taylor proved to be infectious. Although Mrs Firhill had misgivings about the governess and the pace with which she introduced her changes, she found it hard to disapprove of a woman who, in spite of a tendency to state her views as if they were beyond argument, was warm and generous in her dealings with others. The conviction that she was right – the firm disapproval of those she deemed to be slovenly in their intellectual or physical habits – was something that Mrs Firhill believed to be associated with her having come from Edinburgh.

  ‘They’re all like that,’ a friend said to her. ‘I’ve been up there – I know. They think the rest of us very sloppy. They are very judgemental people.’

  ‘I hope that it doesn’t rub off on the girls,’ said Mrs Firhill. ‘But I suppose it will. There’s Emma already saying cadit quaestio – and she’s only six.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said the friend. ‘Perhaps it’s the best of both worlds – to be brought up Scottish but to live somewhere ever so slightly warmer.’

  Mrs Firhill nodded – and thought. There was already something about Emma that worried her even if she was unable to put her finger on what it was. Was it headstrongness – a trait that you found in certain children who simply would not be told and who insisted on doing things their way? Her cousin Else’s son had been like that, and was always getting into trouble at school – unnecessarily so, she thought. Or was it something rather different – something to do with the desire to control? There were some children who were, to put it simply, bossy, and little girls tended to be rather more prone to this than little boys – or so Mrs Firhill believed. Yes, she thought, that was it. Emma was a controller, and it was perfectly possible that Miss Taylor’s influence would make it worse: if you were brought up to believe that there was a very clear right way and wrong way of doing things, then you might well try to make other people do things your way rather than theirs.

  Once Mrs Firhill had identified the issue, the signs of Emma’s desire to control others seemed to become more and more obvious. On one occasion Mrs Firhill came across her playing by herself in the playroom, Isabella being in bed that day with a heavy cold. In a corner of the room was the girls’ doll’s house – an ancient construction that had been discovered, dusty and discoloured, in the attic. Now with its walls repainted and repapered, the house was once again in use, filled with tiny furniture and a family of dolls that the girls shared between them. Long hours were spent attending to this house and in moving the dolls from one room to another in accordance with the tides of doll private life that no adult could fathom.

  Unseen by Emma, Mrs Firhill watched for a few minutes while Emma addressed her dolls and tidied their rooms.

  ‘You are going to have stay in your room until further notice,’ she scolded one, a small boy doll clad in a Breton sailor’s blue-and-white jersey. ‘And you,’ she said to another one, a thin doll with arms out of which the stuffing had begun to leak, ‘you are never going to find a husband unless you do as I say.’

  Mrs Firhill drew in her breath. It would have been very easy to laugh at this tiny display of directing behaviour, but she felt somehow that it was not a laughing matter. What she was witnessing was a perfect revelation of a character trait: Emma must want to control people if this was the way she treated her dolls. Bossy little madam, thought Mrs Firhill. But then she added – to herself, of course – without a mother. And that, she realised, changed things.

  3

  ‘Boarding school?’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary, do you? Not for your girls.’

  Mr Woodhouse shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The conversation he was having with the governess was taking place in his study – his territory – and he would have imagined that he would have had the psychological advantage in such surroundings. It was a large room, furnished with a substantial desk, and to speak to somebody from behind such a desk surely must confer some degree of authority on one’s pronouncements. He had read somewhere that Mussolini had a very large desk indeed, placed at the end of an exceptionally long room. This meant that visitors had to walk for some distance before they even reached the dictator, by which time if they had not already been intimidated when they entered the room they certainly would be by the time they reached his desk. And it was not just dictators who were keen on such tactics: there were several democratically elected presidents who were known to use elevator shoes, to stand on strategically placed boxes to gain height, or to insist when group photographs were being taken on being placed next to those shorter than themselves. He generally needed none of this, being secure enough in his estimation of himself, but Miss Taylor had a knack of making him feel perhaps slightly less than authoritative, as she was doing now, even in his own study.

  ‘I think that their mother would have expected it,’ he said. It was sheltering behind his late wife – he knew that – but it would be hard for her to argue with a pious concern for the feelings of the girls’ mother.

  ‘But she may well have changed her views,’ retorted Miss Taylor. ‘Had she lived, that is; I was not suggesting that views can change after one has crossed over, so to speak. Things have changed since … since her day. And both of them are perfectly happy where they are. Why send them off to some wretched boarding school, some Dotheboys Hall? What’s the point of having children if you then just send them away?’

  Mr Woodhouse looked out of the window. It was all very well for Miss Taylor to barge in and give her opinions on this tricky issue, but she was Scottish and did not understand the nuances of English life. Highbury, their village, was the embodiment of England; and there was a social order, complete with nuanced expectations, that she could not be presumed to understand. The local primary school was perfectly adequate for young children – and Miss Taylor was right to say that the girls were happy there – but now that they were getting older, there arose the highly charged question of boys. If they went to the local high school, then they would simply become pregnant; Mr Woodhouse was sure of that. That was what happened at the local high school. They would meet the wrong sort of boy whose sole ambition would be to make any girl whom he met pregnant.

  He wondered if he could explain his fear to the governess, who was staring at him intently, as if trying to fathom the nature of his unsettling suggestion that the girls might be sent away.

  Miss Taylor now spoke. ‘How long have I been here now? Almost three years, have I not?’

  He nodded. She had become a fixture in their lives, and it seemed as if she had been there for much longer than that. And he hoped, quite fervently, that she would be there for much longer – indefinitely, really, as it was hard to imagine Hartfield without her now.

  ‘Well,’ continued Miss Taylor, ‘it would be a pity if I were to drop out of their lives after all that time, simply because they’ve been sent off to boarding school.’

  Mr Woodhouse gasped. ‘But there would be no need for that,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t need to leave.’

  ‘I don’t see what the point of my remaining would be,’ said Miss Taylor coolly. ‘My role here is as governess. As governess, I must emphasise. I would have nothing to do were the place to be devoid of children.’

  ‘But there’d be the holidays,’ objected Mr Woodhouse. ‘They would need supervision during the holidays.’

  ‘Mr Woodhouse,’ said Miss Taylor reprovingly, ‘surely you wouldn’t expect me to sit about for months on end with nothing to do.’

  He was about to say, ‘But that’s exactly what I do myself …’ but he stopped. He could not contemplate her leaving, and it had now occurred to him that there was a way in which this could be avoided.

  ‘May I suggest a compromise?’

  ‘I don’t see what compromise there can possibly be,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Either they go to boarding school, or they do not. You weren’t going to suggest that I accompany them? I’m not sure that that would be viewed with favour by the school concerned.’

  M
r Woodhouse laughed. ‘You going off with them and sleeping in the dorm with the rest of the girls? Eating your meals in the school refectory? Playing hockey? Hah!’

  She looked at him with disdain. ‘Very droll,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you could tell me what this compromise is.’

  ‘There’s a school in Holt,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘That’s not far, as you know. You will have seen it. Gresham’s.’

  ‘I could hardly miss it,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I do not go about with my eyes closed, Mr Woodhouse.’

  ‘They take day pupils,’ he continued. ‘I could drive them there in the morning, and then you could pick them up late afternoon.’

  Miss Taylor looked thoughtful. ‘It has a very good academic reputation, I believe.’

  ‘Exceptional. And some very distinguished people went there. Benjamin Britten, the composer, for example.’

  ‘My tastes are a bit more robust,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘That’s a personal view, of course. There are those who like Britten, but what he has to say about Venice would hardly encourage one to visit the place …’

  ‘And then there was Donald Maclean,’ mused Mr Woodhouse. ‘He was at Gresham’s too, and became a very well-known spy.’

  ‘I see. Neither of those would have made very good husbands, I think …’ She gave him a wry glance. ‘One would not want one’s husband to defect to the other side, would one?’

  Mr Woodhouse looked puzzled. He thought that there might be something subtly humorous about her remark, but he was not quite sure what it was. The other side? Moscow? That was a bit obvious. ‘Well, it’s all different now,’ he said. ‘We would not be sending them there to find a husband. There’ll be plenty of time for that, later on.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘There are those who believe that is what universities are for.’

  She rose to leave. She was not one to prolong a conversation once a decision had been made. ‘I’m not at all sure that Emma will be the sort to want a husband,’ she said quietly. ‘Isabella, yes. She definitely will. And sooner rather than later, I think. She’s probably thinking of boyfriends more or less now. I know I’m talking about a twelve-year-old girl here, but character, Mr Woodhouse, is formed at a very early stage in our lives, and there are some girls who, even though only just twelve, give very clear indications of what lies ahead in the amorous department. I have seen it, Mr Woodhouse. I have seen it all before.’

  Mr Woodhouse seemed lost in thought and did not pursue with her what she had said. This suited Miss Taylor, as she was not very sure herself what she would say if he were to press her on her judgement of his daughters’ characters. She was sure enough of her assessment of Isabella, but when it came to Emma she was a good deal less confident. There was something very unusual about Emma, who was, she felt, considerably more complex and therefore more interesting than Isabella. That was not to be dismissive of the older sister; Isabella was a pleasant enough girl and Miss Taylor was sure that she would be a social success, particularly with boys. It was much more difficult to make such a prediction in Emma’s case. She was a pretty child and that would guarantee the attention of friends – the beautiful, Miss Taylor had noticed, are seldom lonely, unless they choose to be. But it seemed to her that Emma had depths that might well be lacking in Isabella and girls like Isabella. There was something about her …

  An aesthetic awareness? Was that it? Shortly after she had first arrived at Hartfield, Miss Taylor had become aware of Emma’s interest in how things looked. There had been a curious incident in which Emma had ventured into her governess’s room and started to rearrange the toiletry items set out on the dressing table. These included two silver-backed brushes – one a clothes brush and the other a hairbrush – that had been given to Miss Taylor by her aunt in Aberdeen. ‘Scottish silver,’ the aunt had said. ‘The very best silver there is.’ Miss Taylor had wondered about that: how could Scottish silver possibly differ from all other sorts of silver? Silver, surely, was silver, wherever it came from. But that was not the point: the real point was the large ornate letter T engraved on the backs of the brushes.

  Now these brushes sat alongside an eau-de-cologne dispenser in the form of a squat bottle of thick-cut glass, a tortoiseshell comb, a bottle of nail-varnish remover, and a small Wemyss Ware bowl containing cotton-wool buds. For the average young child, such a collection would have been a positive invitation to fiddle, to take tops off, to press and spray things. The eau-de-cologne dispenser would have been the greatest temptation, closely followed by the cotton-wool buds. But this was not what happened with Emma, who spent ten concentrated minutes moving the items about the dressing table until they were placed in a position that appeared to satisfy her.

  ‘You’re very busy,’ said Miss Taylor as she observed what was happening.

  ‘They must be beautiful,’ said Emma.

  ‘What must be beautiful, Emma?’

  ‘Things.’

  Miss Taylor smiled. ‘But they are beautiful, these things of mine. Those lovely silver brushes, for instance – they’re very pretty, aren’t they?’

  The young Emma nodded. ‘Like this,’ she said, moving the brushes to the side. ‘They go there. These go …’ She shifted the eau-de-cologne dispenser to the centre of the table. ‘There. Right shape.’

  That was not the only incident of that nature. Miss Taylor soon realised that the furniture in Emma’s room, along with the pictures on her wall, rarely stayed in the same position for more than a few weeks on end. There were three chairs in the room and they were shifted about with regularity: under the window, beside the wardrobe, at the end of the bed, and then back to the window. Similar things happened in the rest of the house, although that was less noticeable. However, Mr Woodhouse once commented that somebody seemed to have moved two of the pictures in his study, swapping their position.

  ‘I can’t see why Mrs Firhill feels it necessary to dictate what I look at,’ he said over breakfast.

  ‘There are others who may have a tendency to rearrange things,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I don’t think that Mrs Firhill has views on what pictures go where.’

  Emma, busy with her bowl of cereal, said nothing.

  ‘Well, I wish they wouldn’t,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Why can’t people leave well alone?’

  Miss Taylor thought about a reply to that. He was right, of course, but only to an extent: there were too many people who imagined that there was some sort of duty incumbent on them to change things. These people were often unwilling to leave things as they were, which could be irritating. Yet if nothing were ever changed, she mused, then wouldn’t life be rather dull? She was distracted from this rather interesting question by the thought that some people not only liked to interfere with the way that inanimate things – possessions and paintings and the like – were disposed, but also liked to change the way in which people themselves were arranged. She glanced at Emma, who now looked up from her cornflakes and smiled at her.

  Later that day, Miss Taylor said to Emma, halfway through their French lesson, ‘Tell me, Emma, why do you like to move things about? I’m not scolding you, darling, I’m just curious to know.’

  Emma stared at the book they were reading. It was the adventures of Babar the elephant, in the original French. The three young elephants, Pom, Flora, and Alexander, were in peril and she wanted to continue with the story.

  ‘To make them happier,’ she said. ‘Now can we carry on reading?’

  The girls settled in well at Gresham’s and both Miss Taylor and Mr Woodhouse became accustomed to their daily school run. In the mornings Isabella and Emma were driven to Holt in a mud-bespattered Land Rover that was normally used for farm work; in the afternoon, Miss Taylor, who insisted on wearing motoring gloves, cut a fairly dashing figure as she drove to collect them in a silver-coloured Mercedes-Benz that had belonged to Mr Woodhouse’s father.

  With the girls at school for more of the day, Miss Taylor initially found that time hung heavily on her hands. But after she enrolled for a numbe
r of Open University courses, she discovered that the study and essay-writing that these entailed filled the gaps in her day. Mr Woodhouse encouraged her in this, and insisted on making available a fund for the purchase of textbooks and other materials needed for her studies. In her first year she completed two courses on Medieval Spanish History along with a course on the Trade Routes of the Ancient Middle East. In her second, she achieved a particularly high mark in both Classical Culture and Civilisation and the Dance and Drama of Restoration England, and then embarked on a more advanced course on the Art of the Baroque.

  For the girls she was by this time very much a stepmother in all but name, her relationship with Emma being particularly close. But while most stepmothers encounter resentment on the part of their stepchildren, she did not. This resentment is based on the feeling that the stepmother is harsh and unkind: a pattern so common as to attract a name – the Cinderella Syndrome, Cinderella having been the victim of an egregiously unpleasant stepmother and stepsisters. Just as Cinderella did, the stepchild pines for the mother who would have treated her better, and resents the usurpation by the stepmother of her place in her father’s affections. At Hartfield, important elements in this psychological equation were missing: Miss Taylor was anything but unfeeling – in fact, she regularly and unapologetically indulged the girls. But then she was not married to their father – who had no interest in any relationship with her other than as an appreciative employer and, in a sense, friend. Without those complications, a fully blown psychopathology could hardly get started, and there was nothing to mar the reasonable, loving relationship that the two girls enjoyed with their governess. It was to Miss Taylor that they turned for advice; it was she who comforted them when they encountered the torments that beset any adolescence; it was she who looked after them and gave them the love that their own mother would have given them had she survived.