Emma: A Modern Retelling

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘She is effectively now in Bath for more weeks of the year than she is here,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘In my view that means that she now lives in Bath. And anyway, she’s eighteen, and an eighteen-year-old does not need a governess.’

  He looked at her with dismay. ‘But eighteen is so young,’ he said. ‘Remember what we were like at eighteen? We knew so little.’

  Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘That’s not the way eighteen-year-olds look at it. When you’re eighteen you imagine you know everything. An eighteen-year-old will not accept guidance, I can assure you.’

  ‘But Emma doesn’t have a mother,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘You’re the closest thing she’s had to a mother since my wife died. If you were to leave …’ He left the sentence unfinished; even this hypothetical talk of departure made him feel bereft.

  ‘But I can’t sit here and pretend to be a governess when both my charges have grown up,’ she said. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It’s your Presbyterian background,’ muttered Mr Woodhouse.

  She stared at him. ‘What has the Church of Scotland got to do with it? I frankly do not see the connection.’

  ‘If you were a Catholic,’ said Mr Woodhouse, ‘you would have no difficulty with the idea of sitting around and doing nothing. That has never been a problem for Catholicism; it is only the Protestant outlook that makes us feel guilty about not being busy.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ she began, ‘this is nothing to do with John Knox, or Calvin for that matter.’

  ‘I beg you to stay,’ he continued, ‘I beg you, Miss Taylor. If you were to leave, then Emma would feel that a vital part of her home life was lost to her. I know that sounds extreme, but it really is true. You represent stability to her. You represent home.’

  She stared down at the floor, avoiding his anguished gaze. It would be easier to stay than to leave; she would not have all the bother of looking for a new job – who wanted governesses these days? – and she had to concede that Hartfield was extremely comfortable. The salary was generous, too, and since she did not have to pay for her board – or for anything else for that matter – it would enable her to continue to build up her savings, now standing at a total of eighty-seven thousand pounds. Reading that figure, recorded on her quarterly statements of account, filled her with pleasure: a governess had to look after herself and to ensure that she did not find herself, at sixty, penniless and homeless. And that meant saving, and not indulging oneself in non-essentials, unless, of course, a husband should materialise and bring with him financial security. But husbands, she reflected, did not appear that easily; there were plenty of women who lived in hope that a husband might suddenly descend; that they might draw back the curtains one morning and see, standing outside their window, a husband; or that they might take a seat on the train to work and find themselves sitting next to … a husband. That happened, of course, for some, but for others it did not, no matter how hard they wished, and no matter how much they deserved a husband.

  Mr Woodhouse suddenly brightened. ‘I’ve had an idea,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought I needed a secretary.’ He looked at Miss Taylor with the air of one about to make an important announcement. ‘You could be my secretary – the pay and conditions would be exactly the same, but the job description would be different. You would not have to worry about being governess to a young woman who was away much of the time.’ He made a gesture of supplication. ‘Please say yes, Anne.’

  She had been about to concede, with a suitable show of reluctance, that she should continue as governess, but this new secretarial post – which she knew was almost certainly a sinecure – would do as well.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I accept.’ She paused. ‘What will the duties be?’

  For a few moments he looked blank, but then he smiled and said, ‘Secretarial.’

  She nodded. There was no need to discuss the matter further, as everything, she imagined, would be exactly the same as it always had been. And that, of course, was what Mr Woodhouse wished for above all else, and what Miss Taylor, for want of anything better, was prepared to accept.

  6

  It made no difference to Emma, of course: when she came back during university breaks Miss Taylor was there, as she always been. And this continued throughout the four years of her degree course, which passed, she thought, as if the whole experience were some sort of pleasant dream. Norfolk, Bath; Bath, Norfolk; Bath again, and then Norfolk. There were saliences, of course: Paris for two months one summer, attending a course on the history of French décor during la belle époque, but then back to Norfolk, and then Bath; Edinburgh, another summer for a month, accompanied by Miss Taylor, for an internship with an interior-decoration firm, and then a blissful three weeks working with two university friends as a chalet girl in Morzine; then Bath once more and, before she was ready for them, her final examinations, and Norfolk again.

  She did not stop to consider the curious role Miss Taylor occupied. Of course she was no longer her governess, being her father’s secretary, but she realised that he still expected Miss Taylor to accompany her when she went off anywhere. In fact, he had even suggested once that Miss Taylor should go with her to Bath and take up residence there during university terms, ‘Just in case you need her, Emma; it could be useful, don’t you think?’

  She had scotched that quickly. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Daddy! I’m an adult now and just imagine going to university with a keeper! I’d be the laughing stock. I’m not six any more.’

  She knew, though, that the suggestion came not from any distrust he had for her, but from his constant anxiety over her welfare. She knew that he worried about her and that Miss Taylor was meant to keep her safe from whatever it was that he dreaded. She allowed him this; he was her father, and she loved him; it was not his fault that he worried so much. Some people were just worriers, and there were worse things for a parent to be. The father of one of her university friends was a psychopath, she believed; he was a successful politician, but a psychopath nonetheless. If one had to choose between a worrier and a psychopath, she was in no doubt as to which she would choose. And indeed if one had to choose between a worrier and a politician, the same choice might be made. At least my father, for all his peculiar ways, is harmless, she thought. That is all one can hope for in life: that one’s parents are harmless. She was rather proud of that aphorism, and dropped it into a conversation with friends. They looked at her admiringly. ‘You are très clever,’ said one.

  After her finals, she returned to Hartfield.

  ‘The end of Bath,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘And now?’

  ‘I was thinking of finding another internship with a decorator,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some names. But there’s nothing doing, apparently, until the autumn. I have the whole summer. I’ll spend it here, I think. I’ve got tons of reading I want to do.’

  ‘And then you’ll start your own practice?’

  ‘That’s the general idea.’

  Miss Taylor looked thoughtful. ‘Where? London?’

  Emma shrugged. ‘You don’t have to go to London. There’s bags of work outside town.’

  ‘Your father would be pleased if you didn’t go to London.’

  ‘I know. But it’s not because of him – it’s because I think that I can do just as well working in the country. Where do all the people with houses up here go for advice? They don’t want to have to go to London.’

  Miss Taylor said nothing more, and they lapsed into silence. Their relationship was as easy as it always had been, and there were times when they could be together quite comfortably for hours on end without either saying anything to the other.

  ‘What was that you said?’ Emma once asked after they had been sitting together for almost an entire afternoon.

  ‘I don’t think I said anything,’ answered Miss Taylor, looking up from her book. ‘Or at least since about three o’clock which is …’ She consulted her watch. ‘Which is about two hours ago.’

  ‘That’s what I meant,’
said Emma. ‘What did you say? I don’t think I replied.’

  ‘I can’t recall,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Was it something about … No, I can’t remember, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I thought I had views on whatever it was,’ said Emma. ‘But since you can’t remember, then I can’t really give my views.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Miss Taylor; and then added, ‘Pity.’

  Over dinner, the conversation would naturally include Mr Woodhouse, who never seemed happier than when he had the company of both Emma and Miss Taylor at the same time. These exchanges over the dining-room table often dwelled on obscure and sometimes very technical issues arising from whatever it was that Mr Woodhouse had been reading that day. On days when Scientific American was delivered to Hartfield, this might result in debates about immunology or astronomy; The Economist could lead to discussions of the rights and wrongs of liberal capitalism (Mr Woodhouse was an opponent of the greed that free markets encouraged) or to discussions of energy policy. Emma was not greatly interested in such topics, but was prepared to listen to her father, sometimes chiding him for some factual error or misjudged conclusion, while Miss Taylor, who knew about a surprising range of subjects, was more willing to engage.

  Occasionally their dinner conversation was prompted by something that Miss Taylor had read or heard on the radio. At the beginning of that summer, shortly after Emma had returned from Bath, an article in The Scots Magazine about the remote St Kilda Islands had triggered one such discussion. Mr Woodhouse was interested in the evacuation of the few remaining islanders in the late 1930s, and said that he had always believed that this had been inevitable given the number and variety of germs that would have thrived on islands that were so heavily populated by flocks of seabirds. ‘I gather that infant mortality was a problem for them,’ he said. ‘And frankly I’m not surprised.’

  It was not this issue, though, that occasioned the intense debate that evening, rather it was one of the photographs that accompanied the article in The Scots Magazine. Miss Taylor had been so struck by this photograph that she had shown it to both Emma and her father. The picture was of one of the high stone columns that rose out of the sea around the main island. Here and there along the side of the column were patches of grass clinging to the rock at an angle of forty five degrees – as hostile and impossible an environment as could be imagined, but home, it seemed, to a hardy breed of sheep that had lived there untended by any shepherd since the islanders left.

  ‘Poor creatures,’ said Emma. ‘Imagine living at that angle, hundreds of feet above the sea. It’s cruel.’

  ‘Very uncomfortable,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Of course they’ll eventually have legs of different lengths, to cope with the angle, but that would take thousands of years, I imagine. Evolution doesn’t happen overnight. Poor things.’

  ‘Poor things?’ echoed Miss Taylor. ‘Those sheep, I imagine, are perfectly happy.’

  ‘They can’t be,’ protested Emma. ‘Would you be happy living at that angle on a tiny patches of grass? With gales? With everything tasting of salt?’

  ‘They may not be ideal surroundings,’ Miss Taylor conceded. ‘But they don’t know any better, do they? They have no idea of gentle meadows in which sheep may safely graze, as Bach would have us believe.’

  ‘Bach?’ asked Mr Woodhouse. ‘What’s Bach got to do with it?’

  Miss Taylor looked at him. This was the reason, she thought, why I could never marry him, even if he were to ask me. It would be like marrying somebody who spoke an entirely different language. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The point I was making is this: if you know no better, then you are happy with what you have. Those sheep have no idea that life may be any different from what they experience. Therefore they are happy or unhappy to the same degree as any sheep are, whatever their circumstances. I cannot imagine that the Duke of Northumberland’s sheep are any happier than those St Kilda sheep.’

  Mr Woodhouse looked puzzled. ‘The Duke of Northumberland?’ It was a most irritating habit of hers, he thought: bringing into a discussion people who had no business in it – Bach and the Duke of Northumberland: what light could they possibly throw on the issue of these unfortunate sheep?

  Miss Taylor smiled. ‘I mention the Duke of Northumberland as an example of somebody whom one might imagine has contented and well-looked-after sheep. I do not know if that is the case; I simply assume it.’ She paused. ‘I believe that those St Kildan sheep are not unhappy for the same reason that I am not unhappy with my lot.’

  Emma frowned. ‘But in your case you know that you could be happier than you are.’

  Miss Taylor turned to her. ‘Do I? Do you really think so?’

  Emma did not reply for a moment. But then she realised that she knew the answer to this; she felt it. ‘Everybody can be happier than they are,’ she said. ‘They may not know it – yes, I accept that – but that doesn’t mean to say that they can’t be made happier. Other people can make them happier; other people can arrange happiness for them.’

  She was sure that she was right. She had not given the question much thought before this, but this discussion – this rather ridiculous discussion about sheep – had brought the matter into sharp focus for her. And just as she worked out what she thought about this, she realised, too, that this was something she could do with her life. She could make people happier by helping them to find happiness. It was very simple, really; all that was required was a willingness to take the initiative and show people where they should look. And as for those poor sheep on their cruel Hebridean columns, if only she had a boat she would take them away to some flat part of Scotland, some level lowland where they might live without fear of falling into the sea; where there was lush green grass and sunlight on their backs. She would take them in her small boat; she would be their shepherdess, their saviour.

  She changed the subject. ‘Dinner,’ she said abruptly. ‘I think that I would like to have a dinner party.’

  Mr Woodhouse put down his knife and fork. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve been away for so long and don’t want to get out of touch with people around here. You know how it is. You need to see people to keep in touch with them.’

  This pleased Mr Woodhouse a great deal. He never dared confess his vision of Emma’s future, which involved her staying at Hartfield forever, and not just for this final summer. She could have her design consultancy there – or whatever it was that she wanted to do – but she would stay in the house with him and Miss Taylor. Why go elsewhere? Why go and live in London in a house with two bedrooms – if you were lucky – when you already had a house with eleven? He could not see why anybody would want to do that; he simply could not understand the cast of mind that led people to live in what he saw as urban chicken coops.

  ‘Of course you must have a dinner party,’ he said. ‘Whom will we invite?’

  ‘The locals,’ said Emma. ‘George Knightley, of course.’

  She spoke almost without thinking, but now she wondered why she had mentioned George and why she had said ‘of course’. Was it because she knew her father liked him, and she wanted to make sure that he would feel involved in the dinner party? Possibly. Or was it something else? Recently she had found herself thinking quite frequently of George Knightley. He had crossed her mind when she drove her Mini Cooper over to the garage to arrange for a service. She had imagined what it would be like to be George and to be getting up in the morning and deciding what to do with your day. Would he shave before he took a shower, or did he shave after his shower but before breakfast? Or perhaps he took a bath; there were some people who looked as if they took showers and some who looked as if they took baths. He was a shower person, she thought, because he always looked so well groomed and energetic; bath people were more … more dishevelled perhaps, less ready to go for a long run or do twenty press-ups on the ground. It was a pointless, ridiculous thing to think about, but it occupied her mind for a full ten minutes. And afterwards she had felt quite uncomfortable – as if some
how she had been there with him, watching him.

  Then she had thought of him again when she lay in bed the other night, waiting for sleep to overtake her. She suddenly saw his face; she saw him looking at her and smiling, and she smiled back in the dark, a smile seen by nobody else, of course, not even by herself in a mirror, a passing smile, but a smile nonetheless. It was as if they were greeting each other; as if they were complicit in some unspoken exchange. The real George Knightley was available enough – she saw him reasonably frequently, and they chatted amicably, but this particular understanding did not pass between them in those real encounters – it was something more private, and the more pleasurable for that. Miss Taylor had said something about those sorts of thoughts; she had spoken once of the memories that people bring out and savour, unwrapping them with all the care with which one uncovers some tangible souvenir, some cherished object. And now, quite suddenly, she thought of George with that sort of pleasure.

  ‘Emma?’

  Her father brought her back to the present.

  ‘Sorry. Yes, the dinner party. George Knightley, and then Miss Bates. And Philip Elton too, in spite of Byzantine history and the Holy Ghost and all that sort of thing.’ She made a face. ‘He’s a bit of a pain, but let’s not be judgemental.’

  Philip Elton was the new young vicar who had recently been appointed to the parish of Highbury on a part-time and non-stipendiary basis, the diocese being too poor and the congregation too small to support a full-time clergyman. He was what was called a young fogey: a young person with the old-fashioned tastes and attitudes of one much older. Some young fogeys, of course, could not afford the well-made clothes and expensive shoes that successful young fogeydom demands, but Philip Elton could. A childless uncle had left him an office block in Ipswich along with a portfolio of flats in Norwich, and this provided him with a more than adequate income. A degree from Durham was followed by a brief period in theological college and an unsuccessful year teaching in a boys’ boarding school. He had then enrolled for a part-time postgraduate degree in Byzantine history at the University of East Anglia, at the same time looking for a vicar’s position in an undemanding parish. He was now twenty-seven, and would soon have his Ph.D. He had no intention, though, of competing for an academic post, as his financial circumstances made that unimportant. An independent Byzantine historian could be perfectly happy living in a vicarage with seven bedrooms and a comfortable study. His duties as a non-stipendiary priest were hardly onerous: belief had waned, even in the country areas, and his congregation never numbered more than twenty. There were weddings to conduct, of course, because there were many who preferred the attractive parish church to the utilitarian shabbiness of the register office; and there were funerals, too, attended by many who were unaccustomed to ritual and who sang the twenty-third psalm out of tune, with puzzlement in their voices at the unfamiliar, lost language.