Emma: A Modern Retelling

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mr Woodhouse had reconciled himself to Isabella’s choice. His attempt to marry her off had succeeded, of course, but not in the way he had imagined. He had wanted her to find a husband in order to protect her, and she had done just that, with alacrity and determination, although not alighting upon quite the sort of husband he had envisaged for her. Still, it could have been worse; and the most important consideration, he knew, was her happiness. John Knightley made her happy. She adored him, and as far as Mr Woodhouse could make out, this adoration was fully reciprocated. And he accepted that the fact that he had a tattoo was far less important than the fact that they were both happy. His tattoo, moreover, was a relatively discreet one, and not something that people would necessarily notice, although it was a pity, Mr Woodhouse felt, that the best man should choose to mention it in his speech.

  Immediately after the wedding she informed him that she was three months pregnant, and that she was expecting twins. Emma, who was sixteen at the time, greeted this news with delight, but proclaimed, quite spontaneously, ‘Not for me! I’m never going to get myself pregnant! Yuck!’

  She addressed this to Miss Taylor, who was surprised by the vehemence of her reaction. ‘But it’s a wonderful thing to have children,’ she said. ‘You love children – I’ve seen you with those little girls in the village shop.’

  ‘Children, yes,’ said Emma. ‘But pregnancy, no. All that …’ She assumed an expression of disgust. ‘All that fumbling.’

  Miss Taylor smiled. ‘You shouldn’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘That’ll take care of itself. The important thing is to meet a young man whom you love. Once that happens, and I hope it does, then everything else – fumbling, and so on – will seem quite natural.’

  Emma shook her head vigorously. No, Miss Taylor did not understand; how could she – at her age? ‘I don’t ever want to get married,’ she announced. ‘Never. Never. Not in a thousand years.’

  Miss Taylor was tolerant. ‘Millennia come round so quickly, Emma.’ She smiled again. ‘I’ve already experienced one in my lifetime. And you may think that of marriage now, you know, but one’s views do change.’

  ‘Mine won’t,’ said Emma, with conviction. She was certain; she knew what lay ahead of her: she would continue to be pretty, clever, and rich. That did not include getting married: pretty, clever, and rich people did not have to bother with such things.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘There are other lifestyles. There is a great deal to be said for being single.’ And she thought: Exactly what? Not having to worry about another person; not having to accommodate a partner’s wishes; not having to tolerate the slow, gravitational decline of the flesh into middle age and beyond, into that territory of sleepless nights and infirmity; not having to listen to familiar views on the same things, time after time? Not having to have to, in short. And yet, she thought, if I had to choose between being a governess and having a man …

  Emma, having pronounced, now looked thoughtful. ‘Of course, I quite see how lots of other people want to get married. I can see how it’s fine for them. In fact …’

  Miss Taylor waited. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s probably rather fun to help other people find the right person. Yes, I think it must be.’ An idea had entered her mind. It was unbidden, but it excited her, and had to be expressed. ‘You, for example, Miss Taylor … What about you and James Weston?’

  This was not an area into which Miss Taylor felt they should stray. She was, after all, Emma’s governess, and there were boundaries to be observed, no matter how easy and familiar their relationship had been. ‘Leave me out of it,’ she said sharply. ‘Cadit quaestio.’

  ‘Cadit quaestio,’ muttered Emma, under her breath. ‘Sed quaestio manet.’ She had asked her Latin teacher at school for a suitable rebuttal to cadit quaestio, and she had said that one might retort: But the question still remains, and that could be rendered sed quaestio manet. That was to put it simply, she explained. Simpliciter. Emma loved Latin because it gave her a sort of power. At school she had tossed a Latin phrase at a boy who had been staring at her in a disconcerting way, and he had been crushed – there was only one word for it: crushed.

  Over the next couple of years, Isabella was more or less constantly pregnant; so much so that Mr Woodhouse found it embarrassing to have to answer enquiries as to how his elder daughter was. The usual answer to this now was simply ‘pregnant’ or ‘pregnant again’ but this began to sound almost faintly disapproving – as if he were somehow censorious of her single-handed efforts to redress the demographic imbalance. He disapproved of excessive fecundity on the grounds that over-population inevitably created conditions in which microbes flourished. ‘The more there are of us,’ he said, ‘the more we invite the spread of infection. Superfluous human population leads to environmental degradation, and that leads to unhealthy water sources. That, in turn, encourages the proliferation of water-borne disease.’

  He wrote about this in a letter to the local paper, and the editor obliged by printing his letter prominently under the heading: ‘A Warning’. He had hoped that this would lead to a lively debate in the columns of the newspaper, but it did not. There had been one or two letters on the subject, including one from a reader who said: ‘But this is nature’s way, surely, of putting us in our place. And roll on the day when the next flu epidemic leads to a major culling of our species.’ That had drawn more responses than Mr Woodhouse’s original contribution. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ wrote one correspondent in the newspaper. ‘You have access to antibiotics. What about all those poor people who don’t have any antibiotics? What about them?’

  Mr Woodhouse had shaken his head over this letter. When would people learn that antibiotics were useless against viruses, and that penicillin would not have made all that much difference to the ravages of Spanish Influenza – other than helping with incidental pulmonary infections? He had tried to explain the matter to Mrs Firhill on numerous occasions, but the message had never got through, and she continued to say that the best treatment for a cold was a course of antibiotics.

  But that issue, serious though it was, was only incidental to the main question of overpopulation, to which his very own daughter was contributing so enthusiastically. The first pregnancy brought twins: two boys, and they were followed at the shortest possible biological interval thereafter by a further set of twins, this time girls. While this enthusiastic breeding programme was being pursued in London, back in Norfolk Emma continued to attend Gresham’s. At last the time came for her to leave, and she was driven away from the school one afternoon, zeugmatically, in floods of tears and the silver Mercedes.

  ‘I feel so silly, crying like this,’ said Emma.

  ‘It’s not silly at all,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I cried when I left school in Edinburgh. I cried when I left St Andrews. It would be unnatural not to cry in such circumstances. It would demonstrate, I think, a certain indifference to separation – from place, from friends.’

  This set Emma off with renewed weeping. ‘All my friends,’ she sobbed. ‘Betty Slazenger,’ the name being uttered as if it were redolent of painful disaster, as are the names Titanic, Gallipoli, or the Somme.

  ‘Rosie’s sister?’ asked Miss Taylor.

  Emma nodded miserably. ‘And Pippa. Harry. Ellie.’

  ‘You’ll see them again,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘You needn’t lose touch. Isabella still sees Rosie Slazenger and Kitty, too, I believe.’

  Emma wept not just because she was leaving her friends, she wept because it was the end of a world – the brief, temporary world of school that we never feel is brief or temporary until it is suddenly over. But her regret did not last for long as Miss Taylor had planned a busy summer for her: they enrolled, as fellow students, on a three-week course sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum, The English House through Three Centuries. They went together on a fortnight’s trip to Florence and Siena – a trip to which Mr Woodhouse was eventually persuaded to accept and finance, after a great deal of anxio
us hand-wringing and warning about the dangers of travelling in Italy, where the men, he said, were predatory to a degree that ‘we in England simply cannot comprehend’; where the drivers were ‘quite without concern for other road users’; and where ‘even the politicians were either certifiably insane or unashamedly criminal’.

  They returned to England unscathed by any of these dangers – although Emma did have her bag snatched in Florence by a dwarf on a motor scooter (‘I warned you, my dear; I warned you,’ said Mr Woodhouse). It was not this incident, though, that stuck in Miss Taylor’s memory, but something altogether different – something that showed a side to Emma’s character that people often did not see, but that, in Miss Taylor’s view at least, was the real Emma. Within us all, thought the governess, there is often more than one person, more than one self. She had even discussed the subject with Emma – there was no point talking to Isabella about such matters, as she was given to yawning ostentatiously, though genuinely, when matters of the mind were raised. Emma, though, had listened as Miss Taylor told her about Plato’s famous chariot.

  ‘The chariot is the soul,’ she said, shaking her finger gently into the ether as if to pinpoint the insubstantial. ‘The chariot, you see, is driven by a charioteer but is pulled by two horses – one dark and one light. The dark horse represents all the brute appetites – concupiscence and so on …’ She paused. ‘Concupiscence is to do with lust.’

  Emma closed her eyes. Was concupiscence really what they called lust in Edinburgh?

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Miss Taylor, ‘the two horses that pull the chariot are of opposite inclination. The light horse is to do with the finer things: awareness of others, generosity, civilisation – the finer side of our natures, in other words. The job of the charioteer is to harness the energy of the dark horse and to make sure that the light horse is not pulled downwards by its companion.’

  Emma looked at her governess, imagining her, like Boadicea, in command of a chariot. And then something had occurred that distracted them: a telephone rang, and Miss Taylor for a moment or two seemed to be thinking about whether to ignore it or answer it, her chariot for an instant poised between the choice of ascending or descending. It ascended and she went to answer it, but it was the end of the chariot conversation.

  And then, in Siena, on their Italian trip, while Miss Taylor sat at a table in the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, looking down on to the bowl of the shell, Emma detached herself from her governess for a few minutes while they were waiting for their order of coffee to be fulfilled; and found herself in a small side street lined with shops selling Sienese ceramics. One shop window had caught her eye for the sheer beauty of a bowl that it was displaying. This bowl was white and lemon-yellow in its colouring. Around its sides were glazed figures of young men in Renaissance costume picking fruit, while a troubadour plucked at a stringed instrument. A hunting dog, its back arched, as the backs of such dogs so often are, pranced ready for the pursuit of some creature not shown. Emma stopped and stared, and then entered the shop hesitantly.

  Fifteen minutes later she was back with Miss Taylor, who remonstrated with her, as the coffee was getting cold.

  ‘I began mine. I couldn’t wait.’

  Emma ignored her cup. ‘You have to come with me,’ she said. ‘I have to show you something.’

  Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘I’m not leaving until I have finished my coffee. You can’t just leave such a beautiful place and dash off somewhere on a whim.’

  She waited impatiently until Miss Taylor was able to accompany her back to the shop. The window now had a large space where the bowl had been.

  ‘These places …’ began Miss Taylor, but was silenced by the effusive greeting of the proprietor.

  ‘It is here,’ he said. ‘Then I will pack it and send it over for you. We guarantee its safe arrival.’

  ‘Safe arrival of what?’ asked Miss Taylor.

  The bowl was produced and placed on the glass surface of the counter. ‘Eccolo!’ said the proprietor.

  Miss Taylor reached out and touched the rim. ‘You understand,’ she muttered.

  ‘It’s for you,’ said Emma. ‘It’s for you, from me.’

  It transpired that she had spent her entire spending allowance on the gift and during the remainder of their trip to Italy she would be able to buy nothing except essentials.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Cadit quaestio.’

  There was no arguing with the finality of cadit quaestio, and Miss Taylor, who had introduced the phrase, of course knew that. She knew, too, that there was a time to accept gifts, even the most extravagant ones, and to cherish them. She reached out and took Emma’s hand and knew, at that moment, what the true nature of her young charge was. But then she thought of the chariot and the two charioteers, and she lowered her eyes and hoped.

  Once back, there was university to think about, and the challenges of the decorative arts course at the University of Bath on which she had been offered a place. The choice of Bath had surprised Mr Woodhouse, who said that he had not even known there was a university there. Miss Taylor had been more encouraging, even if she had her reservations; she would have preferred St Andrews, which was, she pointed out, a mere six hundred years older. ‘Not that these things matter all that much,’ she said, in such a way as to indicate that they mattered a great deal.

  For others, though – and this included her teachers at Gresham’s – Bath somehow seemed a natural place for Emma to choose, although it would be difficult to say exactly why this was so. ‘She’s that sort of girl,’ said the English teacher enigmatically. ‘She’ll fit.’ And then, as an afterthought, expressed as if only to herself, ‘Perhaps she has Bathos.’ This reference eluded the chemistry teacher, who simply remarked, regretfully, ‘She never grasped chemistry. I tried, you know, but she never grasped it.’

  The course was certainly ideal: Emma had long been interested in patterns, whether in wallpaper, carpets, or in clothing. For her fourteenth birthday she had been given a book on the work of Edward Bawden, and had responded immediately and instinctively to his pictures of the English countryside – all plough horses and wayside pubs with suspended board signs; all fields of wheat and old-fashioned tractors; all open skies and wispy clouds. She tried to imitate his style, and that of Ravilious and the Nashes, succeeding sufficiently to be encouraged by her art teacher to persist; but what she really liked were Bawdenesque fabrics and wallpapers. She could gaze at these for hours, luxuriating in triangles and trompe l’oeil.

  She had not given much thought to the need to work – Mr Woodhouse had never mentioned the subject to his daughters – but Emma was far from lazy and she felt that if she had a destiny it was in working with designs like these. She could start off as an interior decorator and progress to designing her own curtains and wallpaper; she would create fabrics for sofas and bedspreads. It was ambitious, but clear enough, at least, for her to find a course that would equip her to do just this. Her friends agreed. ‘Emma Woodhouse Designs,’ said one. ‘Brilliant. The name works, Emma – it really does.’

  Now that Emma was away at university, the question of Miss Taylor’s continuing employment at Hartfield could hardly be avoided. Miss Taylor herself had tried to raise the subject several times even before Emma left, but had been fobbed off by Mr Woodhouse, who either quickly changed the subject or, when more deliberately cornered by the governess, put it off until later that day. Then, of course, he failed to return to it or managed to ensure that he was not around at a time when it could be discussed. It was obvious that he was reluctant for her to leave, and that he simply wanted the normal routine of the house to continue as it always had, even if there was nothing for her to do. There was no reason why he should not continue to pay her – he hardly noticed her salary going out of his account each month, and, anyway, there was not very much for him to spend his money on, given that he rarely, if ever, left the house.

  Disinclination to discuss a subject that needs to be discussed is never
a solution: the topic merely assumes increasing prominence the longer it remains untouched. Every conversation that is then embarked upon, even if on a totally unrelated subject, will be conducted in the fear that it might suddenly be interrupted by the forbidden issue; every pause might be read as a sign that what has been unsaid so far might now suddenly be said. Eventually, of course, the strain tells, and the matter can be put off no more.

  ‘My position,’ blurted out Miss Taylor one morning as she sat at the breakfast table with Mr Woodhouse.

  ‘On what?’ he replied. ‘Your position on what?’ It was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to evade the issue.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘You know what I’m talking about: my position here at Hartfield. You may have observed that Emma is no longer here.’

  There were untapped wells of denial. ‘But she is!’ he exclaimed. ‘She’s away at university during the term, and then she comes back. How can she be said to be away when she always comes back? If I go to London for a day or two and then return, I can hardly be said to be no longer here.’

  It was an improbable example. Mr Woodhouse had not been to London for eight years, and showed no signs of changing his views on the undesirability of ever doing so.