Emma: A Modern Retelling

17

Emma decided to visit Harriet the following day. She had toyed with the idea of leaving matters exactly where they stood, but it seemed to her it would be better to put Harriet off Philip before she learned of his lack of interest in her. This would be easily achieved, she felt: Harriet had shown herself to be remarkably malleable, and a few words of advice, judiciously chosen, would undoubtedly be enough to bring the whole thing to an end.

She had not yet decided exactly what she would have to say to Harriet. It had occurred to her that she might tell her that Philip was already involved with somebody else – possibly even that he was already married – but that, she realised, would simply be untrue, and she did not tell lies. Far better, then, to tell the truth about Philip – that he was a flawed character, which was true and could be put to Harriet in perfectly good faith. There might be an issue as to why Emma had changed her view so quickly, but this could be explained as a falling of scales from the eyes, as sometimes happened, even to the best judges of character.

She had phoned Harriet to let her know she was coming. Harriet explained that she was teaching earlier in the morning, but would be free from eleven-thirty. ‘Will you be driving over in your Mini Cooper?’

Emma bit her tongue. Oh, silly, silly girl! ‘Yes,’ she said with as much patience as she could muster.

‘I’d love to go for another spin in it some time. I’d love that.’

‘I’m sure we can do that, if not today, then some other day.’

‘Thank you.’

By the time Emma parked the Mini Cooper outside Mrs Goddard’s house, she knew exactly what she was going to say, and how she would say it. She waited in the car until she saw Harriet returning from the teaching block, then she got out and approached her friend.

‘You said you wanted to go for a spin in the Mini Cooper,’ said Emma. ‘How about now?’

Harriet was enthusiastic. ‘Ooh, I’d love that. I’ll just get my hat.’

Emma, wondering why Harriet would need a hat to go for a drive in the Mini Cooper, returned to the car and cleared the various newspapers and unopened letters cluttering the passenger seat. Then Harriet returned, sporting a wide-brimmed straw hat around the crown of which a garland of spring flowers, fashioned out of coloured fabric, had been carefully wound. The flowers were of different sorts: freesias, daisies, tiny rosebuds.

Emma had decided that she would deliver her news while driving the car. Harriet would be in her territory then, and would not wish to argue with the driver. She would also have to listen just as long as Emma wished to continue, since the drive and the advice could well end up being coterminous.

By the time they set off, Emma had already introduced the subject.

‘I’m so glad that everybody enjoyed themselves so much last night,’ she said. ‘Or just about everybody did.’

‘Oh, I think it was everybody without exception,’ said Harriet pertly. ‘I didn’t see anybody looking downcast.’

‘Not from where you were sitting,’ said Emma.

Harriet, who had been gazing out of the passenger window, turned to face Emma. ‘But I really don’t think anybody was unhappy. I really don’t. The party only broke up because your poor father was so tired. That’s all it was. Otherwise, I think it could have gone on for ages.’

‘I’m not sure that would have been a good thing,’ said Emma. ‘Then the guests with a drink problem would have had the chance to drink even more.’

It took Harriet some time to respond to this. Emma could see she was thinking, torn, no doubt, between curiosity and discretion. Curiosity won out. ‘With a drink problem? Surely none of your guests …’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Emma. ‘You’d be surprised.’

Harriet looked away again. ‘Mrs God likes a drink, but I don’t think she has an actual problem, you know. And she has lots of other really good qualities. She’s generous: she’s been very kind to me, and to loads of other people too. She bought a ticket to Portugal for one of the students who needed to get home because his mother was ill. She didn’t ask him to pay her back.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of Mrs God,’ said Emma.

‘Oh.’ Harriet paused. And then, she said, ‘Who, then?’

‘I’m not sure if I should tell you. It’s not that I don’t trust you to keep it to yourself – I do, it’s just that … Oh, all right. Have another guess.’

‘Miss Bates?’

‘Miss Bates!’

‘Well, she sometimes looks a bit red.’

‘That, Harriet, is what she would call rouge – in other words blusher. Somebody like Miss Bates would use a lot of it. Rouge and cologne. No, not Miss Bates.’

They turned a corner, rather too fast, and the Mini Cooper listed to the side. ‘Oops!’ said Harriet.

‘It’s Philip Elton, I’m sorry to say.’

They had come to a stop sign, where the lane on which they had been driving joined a larger, busier road. Emma drew in to a rough, informal parking place that had been used as a temporary campsite. There were several old refrigerators and piles of rubbish.

‘Look at all that rubbish,’ remarked Emma. ‘This is not to criticise travellers, it’s just to say: look at all that rubbish.’

Harriet sounded distressed. ‘Philip?’ she said.

Emma switched off the engine of the Mini Cooper. ‘I know it sounds extraordinary. After all, he is a vicar, and an expert in Byzantine history. Neither of these things is particularly associated with drink – I know that. But then all sorts of people drink too much – you’d be surprised.’

‘But he didn’t have all that much,’ objected Harriet. ‘Three glasses of wine, maybe four. That was all.’

Emma sighed. ‘But what did he have before we even got into the dining room, Harriet? I’ll tell you: three gins. Three large gins. I saw him. I’m not making this up – in fact, I promise you: three large gins. Straight down.’

Harriet appeared to be digesting this information. Emma pressed on with her attack. ‘Now you see, Harriet, if you start off with three large gins in your bloodstream and then you have four generous glasses of wine. What then? You’re drunk. You’re certainly not fit to drive, which I may say, he did.’

‘I suppose …’

‘Yes, you are, Harriet. You’re drunk. And then to drive a car in that state is criminal. You could cause awful damage to somebody else. Everybody knows that – except, it seems, Philip. Or perhaps he does know it and simply doesn’t care.’ She watched the effect of her words. They were hitting home now. ‘People who know that they could be harming somebody else and just don’t care – you know what they are, Harriet? They’re psychopaths.’ She paused, amazed by her own effrontery.

‘Surely not …’

It was too late to retract. ‘No, surely yes. Psychopaths are people who have a personality disorder, Harriet, and they don’t care what the impact of their acts will be. They’re prepared to hurt other people in whatever way takes their fancy. They’re prepared to kill people at the drop of a hat. Many of the top Nazis were psychopaths, Harriet. Goering, Goebbels. You know, it’s a funny thing, and probably no connection with anything – probably just a complete co-incidence – but I’ve always thought that Philip looks extraordinarily like Josef Goebbels. Odd, that.’

She could hardly believe she had said this. It was that ridiculous. It was outrageous – but it was so easy to say; so easy, the words just tumbled out.

Harriet had taken off her straw hat and was twisting it in her discomfort. One of the flowers, a tiny linen daisy, came off and tumbled to the floor of the Mini Cooper.

‘And there’s something else, Harriet. I didn’t want to tell you, but I feel that as your friend – your particular friend – I can’t let you remain in ignorance. And so I’ve decided to tell you. Are you prepared for this?’

Harriet nodded her head. She looked miserable.

‘In his inebriated state, just before he left – drove off while unfit to drive – Philip manhandled me into the garden. He took my arm and hauled me off.’

Harriet gasped. ‘No!’

Emma closed her eyes briefly, as if trying to obliterate a painful memory. ‘Then he tried to get me down to the ground. I said, “No, no, you mustn’t,” or words to that effect, and I was able to fend him off. But he actually made a pass at me, Harriet. Although you and I know that he’s keen on you, he was still prepared to tell me that he entertained a passion for me, Harriet – for me, your friend! He’s … he’s indiscriminate.’

Harriet gasped. ‘He didn’t hurt you, I hope.’

‘Just a slight bruise on my arm,’ said Emma. ‘Nothing much.’

‘What happened then?’

‘After I had refused him, he went off in a real rage. He said something about talking to me being enough to sober anybody up – a really nasty remark – and then he got into that BMW Something-something of his and went off in a shower of stones. I saw the marks on the driveway the next morning and went over them with one of Mrs Sid’s rakes so that my father wouldn’t see them and say, “What’s all this?” and I would have to answer – because I do tell the truth, Harriet – “That was where the vicar made his escape after propositioning me.” Sorry to be so brutally frank, Harriet, but there are occasions when one has to tell the truth.’

Harriet reached across to Emma and held her arm tenderly. ‘Poor, poor you. Well, at least you’re safe and sound. It could have been far, far worse.’

‘It certainly helps to have the support of a good friend,’ said Emma. ‘Thank you, Harriet.’

‘And to think he might have seen my portrait,’ said Harriet.

‘Oh well,’ said Emma quickly. ‘Let’s just put the whole thing out of our minds. You know, Harriet, there’s a lot to be said for denial.’ She paused, and laid her own hand upon her friend’s hand. ‘So why don’t you put on your lovely straw hat again and we can continue our little journey without a thought of anything – or anyone – unpleasant, such as Philip Elton?’

Harriet replaced the hat.

‘You look so lovely in that,’ said Emma. ‘The shape is just right. It really suits you.’

‘Mrs God gave it to me,’ said Harriet.

Emma smiled. ‘A divine gift. How fortunate you are, Harriet, to have Mrs God on your side.’

Harriet had reached a decision. ‘Philip Elton’, she said, ‘is history.’

‘Byzantine history,’ agreed Emma.

They both laughed.

They drove off. As she steered the Mini Cooper along a lane bordered on each side with hawthorn hedges, Emma told herself that she had not told a single lie. Not one. Philip really had drunk three gins; the fact that she had given them to him did not detract from the truth of that. Then, it was incontestably the case that he had driven on top of all that alcohol. And he had tried to get her to sit on the grass and declared his passion for her. Everything she had said was completely true.

But then again, it was not, and she suddenly knew it. She thought of what she had said, and she felt an abrupt sense of shame, the feeling that one has when one realises that one has committed a social solecism or caused grave offence. I said some terrible things, she told herself. No, I didn’t – what I said was true. But the rationalisation, the attempt to put the best possible light on what she had said did not work. Her shame increased. Psychopath – she had called him a psychopath and Harriet, naïve, gullible Harriet, had believed her. She had plied him with drink and then described him as a drunkard. She had been responsible for his intoxicated driving. Her fault. Her fault. But then she only wanted to protect Harriet, and that made it legitimate, didn’t it? There was a big difference between twisting the truth a bit to harm somebody and doing the same thing to protect somebody. Everybody knew that, didn’t they? She decided that they did, and she felt slightly better.

The assessment of summer that year varied widely. It was a ‘passable summer’, said Mrs Sid. Her runner beans were doing very well, and her salad vegetable bed was ripening nicely, but she was not at all pleased with her Victoria plums (measly) and her apples (very few, very few). From the perspective of Mr Woodhouse, the summer was a good one, and rather better than the previous year. He judged the seasons by the incidence, throughout the world, of major weather disasters. He was a close observer of hurricanes in the Caribbean, following the daily bulletins of the American hurricane-tracking service. Any sign of unusual activity – an unexpected typhoon, a delay in the arrival of rains, an unusual pattern of heat-encouraged bush fires in Australia, was taken as further evidence of global warming, a subject in which he had a strong interest. That summer there had been little: the earth’s weather seemed to be unusually stable, with comfortable high-pressure zones settling over the Atlantic and over Europe, bringing sunshine and soft breezes to Norfolk, and in particular to Highbury and Hartfield. Such cloud as there was seemed benign and friendly: little patches of cotton-wool cumulus drifting lazily across a blue sky; the occasional wisp of high stratus, but no ominous mares’ tails; nothing that would disturb the rambler or the swimmer.

For Philip Elton the good weather was neither here nor there. He found no cause for satisfaction in days of comfortable sunshine, which in no way mirrored his angry and embarrassed mood. The main cause of his embarrassment was the aftermath of Emma’s dinner party. It was not the fact that he had made a fool of himself on the lawn, resulting in his firm rebuff – that was a painful enough experience – but it faded into insignificance beside what subsequently happened. That was the real disaster of the evening.

After he had shot down the Hartfield Drive in the BMW Something-something, Philip had made his way home at considerable speed. The speed limit for most of the journey was either forty miles an hour, where the road was narrow and winding, or occasionally sixty, where it became more substantial. Philip exceeded the limit on both sections, but it was not this that was to prove his undoing. That came when, travelling at a rather low speed in order to negotiate a tricky bend in a lane, he misjudged the curve of the road and ended up in a ditch. No damage was done to the car, and he himself suffered no injury. Had he been given the opportunity to reverse back on to the road he could have extricated himself from the ditch and resumed his journey, with nobody have been any the wiser. He did not get that opportunity, though, for the first car on the scene – just a minute or two after he had toppled into the ditch, was a car from the police station at Holt, driven by Sergeant Tom Mayfield, returning from a call to investigate a burglary attempt in a nearby village. In the passenger seat of the police car was Constable Martin Horsley, who was not only tired but was suffering from toothache caused by an area of sensitivity in one of his teeth.

‘Hello,’ said Sergeant Mayfield as they rounded the corner. ‘What have we here?’

‘A Beemer Something-something,’ replied Constable Horsley. ‘And I don’t think it’s going anywhere. My God, my tooth!’

‘Get yourself to the dentist first thing tomorrow,’ snapped Sergeant Mayfield. ‘And I don’t want to hear any more of your precious tooth. I’m pulling over. That fellow’s lights are still on.’

The two policemen got out of their car and approached the stricken vehicle. As they did so, Philip, who had seen them coming, opened his door and took a deep breath.

‘Thank goodness you’ve turned up,’ he said. ‘I seem to have slipped into this ditch. It’s a tricky corner.’

Constable Horsley shone his torch into Philip’s face. ‘Oh, it’s you, vicar,’ he said. He recognised him as Philip had presided over the funeral of his late uncle. Sergeant Mayfield also knew who he was as they had both spoken at a social-responsibility day at a nearby school.

‘This is a bit of sorry to-do,’ said the sergeant. ‘You been out and about, vicar?’

Relieved to be recognised, Philip was effusive in his explanation. ‘At a dinner party, as it happens. At Hartfield – you know the place – Mr Woodhouse’s house. A jolly good dinner. His cook is Mrs Firhill and her chocolate mousse …’ He stopped. Sergeant Mayfield had taken the torch from Constable Horsley and had played the beam over Philip, from head to toe, as if looking for something.

‘Did you have a drink at all, vicar?’ he asked.

Philip stared at the policeman. ‘A drink?’

‘Yes. Alcohol, you know. Wine, for instance. I’m sure Mr Woodhouse has a good cellar at that big place of his.’

Philip swallowed. ‘A sip or two. With the meal, of course.’

Sergeant Mayfield glanced at Constable Horsley. ‘Of course,’ he said. He then cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, vicar, but there’s a requirement that we breathalyse drivers involved in incidents. It’s the law, you see.’

‘But this isn’t an incident,’ said Philip, his voice wavering. ‘I haven’t hit anything. I just sort of … slipped off the road. It wasn’t my fault.’

Constable Horsley had retrieved the breathalyser kit from the police car and was preparing it for use. ‘If you just breathe into this little tube, vicar. It’s completely painless.’

With fumbling hands, Philip complied. Then he stood by awkwardly while the two policemen considered the result.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Sergeant Mayfield. ‘I’m afraid you’re well over the limit, vicar.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Philip. ‘I really do.’

There was now a note of firmness in Sergeant Mayfield’s voice. ‘Be that as it may, sir, you must accompany us to the station for another test.’

Philip made a strange, moaning sound.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked Constable Horsley.

‘My car,’ complained Philip. ‘I can’t leave my car in the ditch.’

‘You can’t drive, vicar,’ said Sergeant Mayfield. ‘You’re in no fit state. We’ll sort the car out later.’

In silence and in misery, Philip accompanied the two policemen to the police car. He sat morosely in the back seat with Constable Horsley, his hands clasped firmly together, his eyes downcast. ‘What will happen to me,’ he asked, ‘if I’m convicted?’

‘You lose your licence,’ said the constable. ‘No driving for a year, I’m afraid.’

‘Most unfortunate,’ added Sergeant Mayfield from the front seat. ‘You being a vicar and all. Most unfortunate all round.’

And it was most unfortunate. Two weeks later, having pled guilty and therefore been fast-tracked through the criminal-justice system, Philip appeared before the local magistrates’ court and was duly fined and banned from driving for a year. The case was fully reported in the local press under the headline: ‘Boozy Rev Revs Up and Ends in Ditch’. Humiliated and ashamed, Philip decided to take three weeks’ leave pending his bishop’s decision on his future. He had a cousin in London who offered to lend him his flat in Notting Hill while he was in the British Virgin Islands. Philip accepted the offer with relief, and sneaked off to the blissful anonymity of London – by public transport. Slowly he began to recover from the embarrassment and self-reproach that the whole incident had caused him, and found himself drawn into a social life organised by friendly neighbours in Kensington Park Road. It was through them that he met, during his second week in London, a woman who was introduced to him as a popular contestant in a television talent show, Look at Me! She was a dancer and Edith Piaf impersonator, although she was blonde and buxom, and not at all like the French chanteuse. She knew the limits of her talent: these were severe, as she could not really sing, least of all in French, which she sang with the American accent that bad British singers for some reason feel they must adopt. She also misunderstood the words, thinking that ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ was a song about sending one’s apologies for being unable to accept an invitation; she understood very well, though, that her C-list celebrity status was best exploited by finding a man who was capable of supporting her in the style to which she aspired. In conversation Philip had happened to mention the office block in Ipswich as well as the flats in Norwich. She had been listening. He had said nothing about dampness or insulation problems. She was immediately interested.