Emma

He was momentarily speechless. He had not imagined that the person he had invited for interview would end up lecturing him on how to behave, and for a moment he toyed with the idea of ending their meeting then and there. He might say: ‘Well, if that’s the sort of household you think you’re coming to …’ or, ‘My idea was that I should be employing somebody to teach the girls, not me.’ Or, simply, ‘If that’s the way you feel, then shall I run you back to the railway station?’

But he said none of this. The reality of the situation was that he had two young daughters to look after and he needed help. He could easily get some young woman from the village to take the job, but she would almost certainly feed them pizza out of a box and allow them to watch Australian soap operas on afternoon television. He knew that would happen, because that was what girls from the village did; he had seen it, or if he had not exactly seen it, Mrs Firhill had told him all about it. And even she was not above eating an occasional piece of pizza from a box; he had found an empty box a few weeks previously and it could only have come from her. This young woman, by contrast, was a graduate of the University of St Andrews, spoke French – as any self-respecting governess surely should do – and had a calm, self-assured manner that inspired utter confidence. He had to get her; he simply had to. So, after a minute or so of silence during which she continued to look at him unflinchingly, he mumbled an apology. ‘You’re right. Of course you’re right …’

To which she had replied, ‘Yes, I know.’

He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him short. ‘As it happens, I think this job would suit me very well. What I suggest is a three-month trial period during which you can decide whether you can bear me.’ And here she smiled; and he did too, nervously. ‘And whether I can bear you. Once that hurdle has been surmounted, we could take it from there.’ She paused. ‘I do like the girls, by the way.’

He showed his relief with a broad smile. ‘I’m sure that’s reciprocated,’ he said.

Mrs Firhill had been on hand to help with the encounter and had shepherded the girls into the playroom while this discussion with Miss Taylor took place. Mr Woodhouse could tell from his housekeeper’s demeanour that she approved of Miss Taylor, and in his mind that provided the final, clinching endorsement of the arrangement. Accepting Miss Taylor’s suggestion, he called the girls back into the room and explained to them, in Miss Taylor’s presence, that she would be coming to stay with them and that he was sure that they would all be very happy.

‘But we’re happy already,’ said Isabella, giving Miss Taylor a sideways glance.

‘Then you’ll be even happier,’ said Mr Woodhouse quickly. ‘But now, Miss Taylor, we must all have a cup of tea. I prefer camomile myself, but we can offer you ordinary tea if you prefer.’

‘Camomile has some very beneficial properties,’ said Miss Taylor.

Mr Woodhouse beamed with pleasure.

The briskness with which Miss Taylor moved into Hartfield surprised Mr Woodhouse – she arrived, with several suitcases of possessions, within a week of her interview – but it was as nothing to the speed with which she reorganised the lives of the two girls. In spite of her earlier enthusiasm for the appointment, Mrs Firhill took the view that she was moving too quickly: ‘Children don’t like change. They want things to remain the same – everybody knows that, except this woman, or so it seems.’ These were dark notes of caution, uttered with a toss of the head in the direction of the attic bedroom that Miss Taylor now occupied, but the housekeeper, too, was in for a surprise; neither Isabella nor Emma resisted Miss Taylor, and from the very beginning embraced the ways of their governess with enthusiasm. The new regime involved new and exotic academic subjects – French and handwriting were Miss Taylor’s intellectual priorities – as well as a programme of physical exercise and, most importantly, riotous, vaguely anarchic fun. A bolster bar was erected in the nursery, under which soft cushions were arranged. The girls were then invited to sit astride each end of this bar, armed with down-stuffed pillows. The game was to hit each other with these pillows until one of them was dislodged and fell on to a cushion or occasionally the bare floor below. In order to level the playing field that age tilted in Isabella’s favour, Emma was allowed to use two hands, while her sister was required to keep one behind her back. White feathers flew everywhere like snowflakes in a storm, and the shrieks of laughter penetrated even Mr Woodhouse’s study, where he sat engrossed in the latest crop of scientific papers in the dietary and nutritional journals to which he subscribed.

He was bemused by the changes that he saw about him, by the constant activity, by the new enthusiasms. He watched as scrapbooks filled with cuttings from magazines and papers; as cut-out dolls found their way on to every table; as rescued animals and birds took up residence in shoe-boxes lined up at the base of the warmth-dispensing Aga; as the current of life, which had grown so sluggish after the death of his wife, now began to course once more through the house. He welcomed all of this, even if it failed to relieve his own anxiety. It was all very well to be cheerful and optimistic when one was the girls’ age, but what if you were getting to the age – as he was – when life for the immune system became much more challenging? There were dangers all about, not least those identified by the medical statisticians, whose grim work it was to reveal just how likely it was that something could go wrong. And every time he contemplated the results of new research, there was the task of adjusting his regime to increase his level of exercise – or reduce it, depending on the balance of benefit between coronary health and wear and tear on the joints; to increase the number of supplements – or decrease it, depending on whether a novel product, attractive in itself, was likely to react badly with something that he was already taking. Such balancing was an almost full-time job, and left little time for other pursuits, such as the assessment of engineering risk – a task that he was well qualified to carry out but that could be inordinately demanding if one took it seriously, as Mr Woodhouse certainly did.

The purchase of a new lawnmower was an example of just how complicated this could be. Hartfield was surrounded by extensive lawns that gave way, to the east, to a large shrubbery, much loved by the girls for games of hide-and-seek. Those games themselves had been the cause of some anxiety, as it was always possible that hiding under a rhododendron bush might bring one into contact with spiders, for whom the shade and dryness of the sub-rhododendron environment might be irresistible. Spiders had to live somewhere, and under rhododendron bushes could be just the place for them.

Mr Woodhouse had heard people saying that there were no poisonous spiders in England. He knew this to be untrue, and had once or twice corrected those who made this false assertion. On one occasion he had gone to the length of ringing up during a local radio phone-in programme when a gardening expert had reassured a caller that there were no spiders to worry about in English gardens.

‘That’s unfortunately untrue,’ said Mr Woodhouse to the show’s host. ‘There are several species of spider in England that have a very painful bite. The raft spider, for instance, or the yard spider can both administer a toxic bite that will leave you in no doubt about having encountered something nasty.’

The host had listened with interest and then asked whether Mr Woodhouse had ever been bitten himself.

‘Not personally,’ came the answer.

‘Or known anybody who’s been bitten?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Well then,’ said the host, ‘I don’t think we need worry the listeners too much about what they might bump into in their gardens, do you?’

‘Oh, I do,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘A false sense of security is a very dangerous thing, let me assure you.’

His concern over spiders was fuelled by the information the Sydney funnel-web spider, known to be one of the most dangerous spiders in the world, had taken up residence in the London Docks and was apparently thriving in its new habitat. That did not surprise Mr Woodhouse at all, who had long thought that the ease with which goods and people could now be transported about the world was an invitation to every dangerous species to take up residence in places where they had previously been unknown. It was inevitable, he thought, that at least some travellers from Australia would bring in their luggage spiders that had taken refuge there while their suitcases were being packed. If bedbugs could do it – and they did – then why should spiders resist the temptation? He shook his head sadly; the green and pleasant land of Blake’s imagining would not be green and pleasant for long at that rate. And if spiders could do it, what about sharks, who had to swim no more than a few extra nautical miles to arrive at British beaches? Or snakes, who had only to slither into a bunch of bananas in Central America to arrive within days on the tables of people thousands of miles away? And what if they met, en route, an attractive snake of the opposite sex? Before you knew it you would have a deadly fer-de-lance population comfortably established in Norfolk. That would give those complacent gardening experts on the radio something to think about.

‘Nonsense,’ snapped Miss Taylor when he raised the issue of spiders under rhododendron bushes and queried whether the girls might not be banned from going into the shrubbery to play their games. ‘We cannot wrap ourselves in cotton wool; just imagine what we would look like. Moreover, girls and spiders have co-existed for thousands of years, as is established, I would have thought, by the continued survival of the two species: the British girl and the British spider. Cadit quaestio.’

The expression, cadit quaestio – the question falls away – was one that Miss Taylor often used when she wished to put an end to a discussion. It was virtually unanswerable, as it is difficult to persist with a question that has been declared no longer to exist – anybody doing so seems so unreasonable – and it was now being used by the girls themselves, even by Emma. She had difficulty getting her tongue round the Latin but had nonetheless recently answered ‘cadit quaestio’ when he had asked her whether she had taken her daily fish-oil supplement.

The size of the lawns around Hartfield meant that a mechanical lawnmower was required. For years Sid, who helped with the farm and with some of the tasks associated with the garden, had used an ancient petrol-driven lawnmower that he pushed before him on creaky and increasingly dangerous handles. Mr Woodhouse had decided to replace this, and had looked into the possibility of a small tractor under which was fitted a powerful rotary blade. This would enable Sid to sit on a well-sprung seat as he drove the lawnmower up and down the lawn, leaving behind him neat stripes of barbered grass.

The tractor brochure portrayed this scene as a rural idyll. A contented middle-aged man sat on his small tractor, a vast swathe of well-cut grass behind him. The sky above was blue and cloudless; in the distance, on the veranda of a summer house, an attractive wife – at least ten years younger than the man on the lawnmower – waited to dispense glasses of lemonade to her hard-working husband. But Mr Woodhouse was not so easily fooled. What if you put your foot just a few inches under the cover of the blade? What if you fell off the tractor because the ground was uneven – not everyone had even lawns – and your fingers, or even your whole hand, were to get in the way of the tractor and its vicious blade? Or what if a dog bounded up to greet its owner on the tractor and had its tail cut off? The woman dispensing lemonade so reassuringly would shriek and run out, only to slip under the lawnmower and be sliced like a salami in a delicatessen. It was all very well, he told himself, trying to avoid these possibilities and pretending that nothing like that would happen, but somebody had to think about them.

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.’

Mr 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.