She looked at Emma. ‘We get the occasional American missionary coming to the door. They’re usually very polite young men from Utah and they wear peculiar underpants. Did you know that, Emma? Those very courteous and well-behaved young men wear unusual underpants called temple garments. I’ve never seen them, of course, because those young men are quite unlike our own youths who wear their underpants half outside their trousers. You’ll have noticed that – who could miss it? – those young men with their underpants showing. They aren’t even builders. Builders are entitled to wear visible underpants; it goes with the job. Perhaps that’s the great service the American missionaries could do us. Rather than converting us to anything, they could get our young men to tuck their underpants back inside, where they should be. That would be a great achievement and we’d all be so grateful to them for doing it.’
Harriet came into the room. She smiled at Emma. ‘I’m so glad you two have met,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ said Mrs Goddard. And then, to Emma, ‘You must come and have supper with us some day. I’ll make a special cake.’
Emma noticed that this invitation caused Harriet to give Mrs Goddard what appeared to be a warning look.
‘Emma is very busy,’ said Harriet. ‘She has a lot to do, Mrs God.’
‘Oh well, some day,’ said Mrs Goddard. ‘Now you two should go off and enjoy yourselves.’
In the car on the way out of the disused airfield, Emma remarked to Harriet that she very much liked Mrs Goddard. ‘She’s not at all as I imagined her,’ she said. ‘To be called Mrs Goddard and to have an English Language school conjures up a very different image.’ She paused. ‘And I heard you call her Mrs God.’
‘That’s short for Goddard,’ said Harriet.
‘I see.’ Emma bit her lip. ‘It’s just that it sounds a bit odd. I read somewhere or other about a man who heard a massive peel of thunder above him and said – he was a bit camp – “Oh, there goes Miss God up to her tricks again!” And just as he said it, there was a massive bolt of lightning and he was struck down dead.’
‘What a terrible thing,’ said Harriet. ‘But I’m not being in any way disrespectful. I’d never laugh at God.’
‘No,’ said Emma. ‘Why risk it?’
‘She’s very kind,’ said Harriet. ‘She was my mother’s best friend. She’s the only friend of my parents I know.’
‘That’s sad,’ said Emma.
‘Yes, maybe. But she makes up for it.’
‘And Mr Goddard?’ asked Emma.
‘I never met him,’ replied Harriet. ‘I wish I had. All she ever said to me about him was “I gave my husband his freedom.” That’s what she said.’
Emma was intrigued. ‘I wonder what that means.’
‘I asked,’ said Harriet. ‘And all she replied was “Existential freedom”. I didn’t understand, I’m afraid.’
Emma referred to the invitation to supper. ‘You seemed worried about that. Do you mind my asking why?’
Harriet hesitated before answering. ‘It’s the cake,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t think she should go round offering her cake to people. I’ve told her that before.’
They had reached the end of the airfield road and Emma turned the Mini Cooper on to the main road back to Highbury. ‘What’s wrong with her cake?’
Harriet looked out of the window. ‘She puts something in it,’ she muttered.
‘Oh,’ said Emma.
When visitors came to Hartfield, Mr Woodhouse would usually entertain them in his library – a large, untidy room on the north side of the house – while Emma would see her guests either in the kitchen or in the small sitting room she had taken over when she had left university. This room had been her mother’s, and had been kept almost as a shrine to the late Mrs Woodhouse, as people do when they cannot find the heart to change a room that had been used by somebody who has grown up and gone away, or died. Emma and Isabella had understood this, and as children had rarely entered the room that to them was one of the few reminders that they had of their mother. Now, however, Emma had begun to use it, and had slowly begun to stamp her own personality on the room. The shelves were beginning to fill with her books; the small writing desk by the window had started to be covered with her laptop and papers – such as they were. A sketchbook lay opened on the sofa table.
‘I didn’t know you drew,’ exclaimed Harriet. ‘May I take a look?’
Emma put down the teapot and made a careless gesture of dismissal. ‘I’m hopeless,’ she said. ‘I wish I could draw better.’
Harriet repeated her question. ‘May I look?’
‘Of course. But, as I say, I’m useless.’
Harriet turned the pages of the sketchbook with almost reverential care. ‘They’re very good,’ she said. ‘You’re not useless at all. They’re fantastic.’
Emma came to Harriet’s side and looked over her shoulder. ‘I went to drawing classes in Bath,’ she said. ‘For about two years. They encouraged us if we were doing the design course. I suppose you need to be able to sketch out your design ideas and it helps if you can draw.’
‘Which you obviously can,’ said Harriet, gazing in admiration at a watercolour still life in which ink had been used for emphasis. ‘I like that combination of watercolour and ink. It’s very delicate.’
‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘Ink by itself is really hard. You can’t shade with it. But it goes well with watercolours.’
Harriet turned a page. ‘Who’s he?’ she asked, pointing to a pencil sketch of a young man seated in a kitchen.
‘That’s Mark,’ said Emma. ‘He was my friend’s boyfriend.’
‘He looks nice,’ said Harriet. ‘He’s got big eyes. I like people with big eyes.’
Emma smiled. ‘What big eyes you’ve got, Grandma.’
‘What?’
‘I was just thinking about Little Red Riding Hood,’ said Emma. ‘You know how the wolf’s dressed in Grandma’s clothes and Little Red Riding Hood sees his great sharp teeth … All the better to eat you with, my dear!’
Harriet gave a shiver. ‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘I get scared really easily, Emma.’
‘All right,’ said Emma. ‘No nursery rhymes. Most of them are pretty scary, aren’t they? They’re all about cruelty. Miss Taylor used to read to us from a book called Struwwelpeter. Did you ever come across it?’
Harriet put down the sketchbook and took her cup of tea from Emma. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘If you think that Little Red Riding Hood was scary, you should look at Struwwelpeter. There’s the story of a little boy who sucked his thumb and had it chopped off by the Suck-a-Thumb Man. He had a large pair of tailor’s scissors and he cut off children’s thumbs. The picture showed the blood.’
Harriet shuddered. ‘I’m glad I never read that.’
‘In fact,’ Emma continued, keeping her gaze on Harriet, ‘I read somewhere that the story of the Suck-a-Thumb Man is really all about castration. Little boys understand that, even though it’s never spelled out to them; little girls don’t. They think it’s about thumbs.’
Harriet shuddered again. ‘Oh,’ she said.
They sat down with their tea. Emma looked at Harriet across the rim of her cup. Botticelli, she thought. She’s exactly like one of those women in his Spring painting. Or is she Venus herself, floating on her shell? She would draw Harriet. She had to.
Harriet had said something that Emma did not catch because she was thinking about Botticelli. ‘What?’
‘I was wondering about when you were going to start your practice? Remember? You told me that you were going to do design or decoration, or whatever you call it.’
‘In the autumn,’ said Emma. ‘I’m working on a website. I’m going to get those sample books – fabrics and wallpapers and so on. There’s quite a lot to do.’
‘You’re so brave,’ said Harriet. ‘Starting your own business is really brave.’
Emma shrugged. ‘There’s not much risk for me,’ she said.
‘I
’m lucky. I’ve got somewhere to live and Pops pays the bills.’
‘That’s really lucky,’ said Harriet.
Emma was studying her friend. Had it occurred to her, she wondered, that she might find herself in a similar position?
‘It’s quite hard for us these days,’ she said. ‘We have to—’
Harriet interrupted her. ‘We?’
‘Us girls. Women. We have to work. Guys have always had to do that, I suppose, but now it applies to us too. Unless one’s, well, unless one’s lucky.’
‘You mean unless you get married?’
Emma shook her head. ‘Oh, it’s not that simple. Most women have to run the house, look after the kids, and work.’
‘I know,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s really unfair.’
Emma laughed. ‘Fairness doesn’t come into it, Harriet. The world has never been fair. It wasn’t fair when women couldn’t work, back in the old days. Then you had to get married or you were done for. You ended up being a domestic worker of some sort – a kitchen maid or something like that. If you came from a middle-class background you could be a governess or a lady’s companion perhaps. It was harsh.’ She thought of Miss Taylor. She had never asked her why she had become a governess; it had always struck her as simply being Miss Taylor’s destiny, in the way in which so many people just seem destined to do what they do or to be what they are. She was destined to be Emma; her father was destined to be Pops – poor, worrying, generous Pops; Sid was destined to be Sid, with his rotavator and his trailer that he used to cart firewood and manure about the place.
‘Well, it’s better now,’ said Harriet. ‘We have choices.’
Emma looked doubtful. ‘Have we? Such as?’
‘We can do the jobs we want to do. We can qualify to do various things. We can have a career.’
Emma conceded grudgingly. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘That may be true – to an extent. But there’s one choice you’ve left out.’
Harriet waited for her.
‘You’ve left out the possibility of leaving it all up to men.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Emma looked out of the window. The thought had occurred to her that she should not interfere, but it was only a passing notion, and was discarded. ‘I mean that one can let men pay the bills.’ She paused. Harriet was listening. ‘You can still find men who are prepared to look after women. There are still a few women who don’t have to work.’
‘They stay at home? Men do the work?’
Emma shrugged. ‘That’s a simple way of putting it. You could say that it’s an exchange. Men might have the money. Women exchange their … their friendship for practical support. They look after the men emotionally. They cook for them and so on. In return, men worry about the bills. Don’t you think that sounds like a fair exchange?’
Harriet did not require much time to think. ‘I do,’ she said.
‘It’s not as if you’re committed to the man forever,’ said Emma. ‘Men can be a temporary fix.’ She smiled, and noticed that Harriet smiled too. ‘They don’t mind, of course. Everybody knows where they stand.’
She was suddenly aware that she had lost Harriet’s attention. The other young woman was looking out of the window.
Emma followed her gaze. A woman in blue dungarees was digging in a flowerbed. ‘That’s Mrs Sid,’ said Emma. ‘She’s the one who does the garden for us. She’s really good with flowers – she knows all the botanical names. I can’t remember them. They go in one ear and out the other.’
‘She looks strong,’ said Harriet.
‘She is. She’s very nice too. She’s married to Sid. He’s a sweetie; he works on the farm.’
Harriet watched as the gardener tossed weeds into a trug. ‘What’s her name?’ she asked.
Emma frowned. ‘I’m not sure. I suppose she’s got one. We just call her Mrs Sid because she’s married to Sid. She doesn’t mind. We’ve always called her that.’ She paused. ‘Mrs Firhill’s called Betty. I know that. Betty Firhill – not that I’d ever dream of such familiarity. She’d faint if I called her Betty – and so would I. Both of us would be out stone cold.’
Harriet had noticed something else. ‘There’s somebody coming up the drive. There’s a car.’
Emma affected surprise. ‘Is there? Oh, that’s Philip Elton’s car. It’s a BMW Something-something. I don’t know exactly what, but it’s very expensive.’
Harriet smiled. ‘But I thought he was the vicar.’
‘Only part-time. And he’s a sort of voluntary vicar. They call them non-stipendiary or something like that. It means that he doesn’t get paid.’
‘But he’s young. So how can he afford a BMW Something-something if they don’t pay him?’
Emma explained about the office block in Ipswich and the flats in Norwich. Then she added, ‘He’s quite well off.’ And then, ‘He’s not too bad, actually. If you don’t mind him going on about Byzantium, he can be quite nice.’
She realised that Harriet did not know where Byzantium was. And then she realised that, witty and well informed though she was, she was a bit hazy on the subject herself. Justinian, Constantinople and … and …
The truth of the matter was that Philip Elton, although relatively well off, was not nearly as wealthy as people generally believed. He did indeed own an office block in Ipswich, and he owned it outright, just as he owned the portfolio of flats in Norwich. These properties brought him rents, but they were nowhere near as large as those imagined by Emma, and were offset by expenses that sometimes made him wonder whether he would not be better off disposing of the properties altogether.
The problem with the office block was that throughout the first thirty years of the building’s existence, very little maintenance had been done on it. Had the block been well built in the first place, that lack of maintenance might not have been too serious, but the original design and construction had been typical of the shoddy standards of the time, with the result that the external concrete panels of the building had been penetrated by water, rendering the cladding unsound. Here and there sections of this cladding had already fallen off, disclosing patches of damp and unsightly wall. This gave the building a neglected look that discouraged tenants; who would want business customers to see them in such shabby premises? As rents plummeted, it became increasingly uneconomic to spend money on repairs, and rents declined even further – a vicious cycle into which rental properties can so very easily fall. Tenants seemed to be unwilling to sign leases for longer than six months, hoping that as their business fortunes improved they would be able to move to more impressive and salubrious offices. No number of assurances by Philip seemed to convince his tenants that remedial work would be done, even when these assertions came in clerical garb. ‘Sorry, vicar,’ one of the tenants replied, ‘I wouldn’t accuse you of actually lying – you being a man of the cloth and all that – but I just don’t believe you.’
The problem with the flats in Norfolk was not dissimilar. Although these were in a respectable enough part of the city, they too had been built at a time when the authorities were keen to encourage new construction and were ready to turn a blind eye to the activities of builders who promised to complete projects quickly. The Norfolk flats looked all right from the outside, but were very badly insulated. As a result, their tenants had to spend considerable sums to heat rooms whose warmth immediately escaped through ill-fitting windows and thin walls.
Philip had commissioned a report on the problem from a firm of surveyors, and this made sombre reading. The cost of insulating each flat to contemporary standards was estimated to be at least fifteen thousand pounds, and although there would be some assistance from the local council, most of the money would have to come from the owner’s pocket. Once again, the deficiency in the properties depressed rents.
The office block and the flats were not the only assets that Philip possessed, but they made up a large portion of his wealth. Unless he could find about five hundred thousands pounds for the necessary repair
s, his property would simply diminish in value until eventually it became worthless. That concentrated his mind. The easiest way of getting money, he decided, was to marry it. That had been done by one of his university friends, who had married the daughter of a transport magnate and now lived in Monaco. Philip heard from him from time to time and was regaled with stories of his sybaritic existence. ‘Getting married,’ he wrote, ‘was the most intelligent move I ever made. I am now blissfully happy, and, incidentally, rich. I thoroughly recommend it. Both states are highly desirable.’
Philip did not think there would be any difficulty in finding a suitable candidate. He had a very clear idea of his own good looks – he had always been aware that women found him attractive, and he had simply accepted it as his due. He was not particularly interested in the opposite sex, although he was far from being a misogynist. People in general did not interest him a great deal, except for himself, perhaps, a subject of considerable fascination to Philip.
He did not think that his life would have to change very much were he to get married. He could continue to do exactly what he was currently doing – working on his thesis on Byzantine History – while his wife, whoever she turned out to be, could run the home, cook, and generally look after him. All that was required of her was that she bring with her a suitable dowry – not that anybody called it that any more – and, if at all possible, a good-sized house.
Such as Hartfield.
Now, having had the front door opened for him by Mrs Firhill, he stood in the hall and looked about him with new eyes. He had been privately dismissive of the paintings on previous visits, but having made a decision as to his future, the contents of the house seemed to be of considerably greater interest. Philip was, in fact, rather well informed about art; he was a regular visitor to the Wallace Collection and the Royal Academy in London, and occasionally paged through the catalogues of the auction houses when an interesting sale was in the offing. He owned few pictures of note himself, other than a small preliminary sketch of Tobias and the Angel by Stanley Spencer and an indifferent Romney portrait of a young boy reading a book; now, looking about him in the hall, he saw that he had perhaps been wrong to dismiss the Woodhouse paintings as being little more than what one would expect in a unexceptional English country house. He knew that the non-Canaletto was merely by a ‘follower of’ an obscure Venetian painter who himself was never more than ‘circle of’ anyone better, so that it was worth, at the most, twelve thousand pounds, but he had no idea that the rather reticent watercolour on the opposite wall was a Nash and that next to it was what appeared to all intents and purposes to be a Ravilious.
Emma: A Modern Retelling Page 16
