Emma: A Modern Retelling

9

Miss Taylor broke the news to Mr Woodhouse and Emma at breakfast, two weeks after the dinner party. They were all in the morning room at Hartfield – a room that, particularly during the summer, caught the early sun. As a general rule breakfast was taken in silence, a practice that Mr Woodhouse liked, as it gave him the opportunity to read the newspaper undisturbed. He had once breakfasted in the Savile Club in London where a sign on the members’ table, placed there only in the morning, advised Conversation Not Preferred. This had appealed to him, and occasionally, when his reading of the paper was interrupted by some observation from Emma or Miss Taylor, he would mutter ‘Savile Club’ before he answered.

On this occasion, though, the importance of the announcement was sufficient to suspend any rule, and to discourage conversation after such a bombshell would have been impossible, even at the Savile Club itself.

‘There is something I need to tell you,’ began Miss Taylor.

Mr Woodhouse, concealed, moved his newspaper slightly so that he could see past it to the governess. Emma, who had been reading a magazine, looked up.

‘Something really rather significant,’ Miss Taylor continued. ‘At least to me.’

Emma exchanged a glance with her father, who now lowered his paper somewhat reluctantly, with the air of one who is being disturbed in the execution of some important task. His eye had been caught by a report in the paper of a move to use viruses, rather than antibiotics, against bacteria. It was something that he had long been advocating, and he was pleased to see that his views were being mirrored in public-health circles.

‘You may have noticed that James Weston and I have been seeing a bit of each other over the last few weeks,’ said Miss Taylor.

Mr Woodhouse frowned. He had not noticed this, and he tried to remember whether there had been any particular increase in his neighbour’s visits. James came to the house from time to time – sometimes on social visits, which were always appreciated, and sometimes on business connected with the farm. It made sense for them to share, and when some unusual piece of equipment was required, if one had it the other was always welcome to make use of it. What had Sid taken over to Randalls recently? A rotavator, he thought; those always came in useful when the kitchen garden was being prepared for the summer, and Randalls had rather a large kitchen garden, he seemed to remember. But had Miss Taylor been involved in any of that? She was usually indifferent to what was happening agriculturally, and he could not imagine her becoming involved with James in that respect.

Miss Taylor was now looking at Emma, as if for support. Emma smiled encouragingly; she, at least, had understood what was coming. And it was her doing, she thought. I did this.

‘So,’ went on Miss Taylor, ‘we have decided that we should become engaged.’ She paused, allowing her announcement a brief moment to sink in. ‘He has asked me to marry him, and I have agreed.’

There was complete silence. In Emma’s case, this was from sheer astonishment at the fact that this had come about so quickly; in Mr Woodhouse’s case, it was from disbelief. This could not be happening. Miss Taylor was his secretary. She had lived at Hartfield for years and years; it was as if she had always been there, always. And then he thought: What will happen to me?

Having decided that the news had been given enough time to sink in, Miss Taylor went on to elaborate. ‘We see no reason to delay matters unduly. We haven’t quite decided on a date yet, but it will be sometime this summer. We don’t want anything big – just a small wedding, a few friends. We won’t even be going away on honeymoon, or at least not just yet. We may go off somewhere warm in November, or even December. We haven’t decided.’

Mr Woodhouse thought: December? But what about Christmas? Was she seriously contemplating spending Christmas without them, when every year – every year without fail – she had been in charge of the turkey and that ridiculous Scottish pudding she liked – figgy pudding, or whatever it was? Was she now proposing to forget about all that, just like that, and go off with James to some tawdry warm spot that would be full of all sorts of people exposing themselves to entirely unnecessary and harmful solar damage, which they would surely regret later on, even if their vitamin D levels were boosted …?

Miss Taylor took a deep breath. This, for her, was the difficult part. ‘In view of this,’ she said. ‘We have decided to live together. I shall be moving to Randalls next week.’

At his end of the table, Mr Woodhouse dropped his newspaper. At her end, Emma beamed with pleasure. Sex. Miss Taylor and James Weston. Delicious thought: the absurd is always so tasty.

Mr Woodhouse opened his mouth to speak. At first he stuttered, and neither Emma nor Miss Taylor could work out what he was saying, but then he cleared his throat and began again.

‘This is all very sudden,’ he said.

Miss Taylor seemed to relax, now that her announcement had been made. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does seem sudden. But then, if one comes to think of it, any announcement of that sort is bound to seem sudden. It involves, you see, a transition. At one moment one is not engaged, and then the next moment one is. That, I think, is largely inevitable, given the nature of engagement.’

Mr Woodhouse shook his head. ‘Well, I must admit that I don’t really know what to say.’

Emma now joined in. ‘You could start with “congratulations”,’ she said. ‘Congratulations, Miss Taylor.’

Miss Taylor nodded. ‘Thank you. I’m very happy with the way things have turned out.’

‘He’s such a nice man,’ said Emma. ‘I’ve always thought that you and he would make a really good couple.’ She hesitated, smiling coyly at Miss Taylor. ‘In fact, I seem to recall that I even suggested this to you.’

Miss Taylor did not react to this revelation, but Mr Woodhouse did. ‘You?’ he said. ‘You said …’

‘All I said was that I thought James and Miss Taylor would make a good couple. That’s all. I wasn’t exactly Nostradamus, predicting things and so on.’

‘What’s Nostradamus got to do with this?’ snapped Mr Woodhouse. And when Emma declined to elaborate on the connection, he picked up his paper and folded it. This was to absorb the emotion that he felt. He had to do something; he could not sit there and see their world collapse without at least doing something with his hands.

‘Well, Pops,’ said Emma. ‘You are going to congratulate Miss Taylor, I hope.’

Miss Taylor came to his rescue. ‘Your father, quite understandably, has been surprised by my news.’ She gave him a sympathetic look. ‘And of course I can understand that.’

Mr Woodhouse pouted. ‘Of course I want to congratulate you,’ he said. ‘I’m very happy for you.’

This was said with great misery.

Miss Taylor turned to Emma. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Your father has said congratulations.’

‘From his heart,’ muttered Emma, unheard by the others.

Mr Woodhouse now seemed to recover some of his composure. ‘You say that you’ll be moving to Randalls?’ His emphasis on the word Randalls seemed to carry with it the inference that no sensible person could contemplate such a move.

‘That is James’s house,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘It will become, I have reason to believe, our matrimonial home.’ Her stressing of the words matrimonial home was similarly weighty. Nobody could criticise anybody, surely, for moving to a matrimonial home.

Mr Woodhouse digested this information. ‘But Randalls,’ he said, after a while, ‘is in a parlous state. It has been for years.’ He paused, looking down at his folded newspaper with renewed misery. ‘In fact, I’m surprised that the house itself is still standing.’

This brought a spirited response from Miss Taylor. ‘Oh, no,’ she exclaimed. ‘James has done a great deal to it recently. The roof has been substantially repaired. He’s had a lot of work done on that this spring.’

‘But what about the walls?’ retorted Mr Woodhouse. ‘What use is a roof if your walls are unreliable? If your walls go, your roof goes. That’s just my opinion, but I believe that many will share it.’

‘Oh come on, Pops,’ said Emma. ‘James’s walls are pretty solid. They’ve been standing for the last two hundred years or so.’

‘Precisely,’ said Miss Taylor, glad of this support from Emma.

‘Miss Taylor would not become engaged to a man with questionable walls,’ said Emma brightly. ‘That would be a very foolish thing to do, wouldn’t it, Miss Taylor?’

Miss Taylor was not sure how to take this. ‘I don’t think I’d judge anybody by his walls,’ she said.

‘Well, there’s a dangerous view of things,’ said Mr Woodhouse.

‘I honestly don’t think we should be talking about walls anyway,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Walls are irrelevant.’

‘Of course, there are Chinese walls,’ interjected Emma.

Mr Woodhouse looked at his daughter with irritation. He did not see what bearing China had on this.

He addressed himself to Miss Taylor. ‘You can hardly say that walls are irrelevant,’ he protested. ‘But be that as it may, what about bedrooms? How many bedrooms has Randalls got? Three? Four?’

Miss Taylor was on firmer ground here. ‘Eight,’ she said. ‘It is hardly a suburban bungalow.’

Mr Woodhouse shrugged. ‘You’ll be moving from eleven bedrooms to eight. That’s three fewer.’

‘But one only needs one,’ said Miss Taylor.

Mr Woodhouse seized on this. ‘But what if somebody comes to stay? What then?’

‘Well, we’ll actually have seven left over,’ said Miss Taylor calmly. ‘We could no doubt fit a visitor in.’

Emma now decided to change the subject. ‘If you’re going to be doing any redecorating,’ she said. ‘I wonder whether I could help.’

‘Of course,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I’d come straight to you. And yes, we shall be doing some redecorating, I imagine.’

‘James’s house is very masculine,’ said Emma.

‘Well, he is a man,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised if men live in masculine houses.’ She paused. ‘But there is always room for improvement.’

Mr Woodhouse was not interested in this talk of decoration. ‘I do hope you will come and see us,’ he said. ‘Emma and I shall be sitting here worrying about you, I imagine.’

‘But Randalls is only a mile away,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I shall be able to look out of my window and see you. If I use binoculars I shall probably be able to make out exactly what you’re doing. I might even be able to lip-read, which will mean that you will have to be careful not to talk about me.’ Even as she said this, she realised that binoculars would not be necessary; Mr Woodhouse always did the same thing, and Emma did very little. But she could hardly give voice to this conclusion.

Mr Woodhouse suddenly rose to his feet. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough breakfast. I have rather a lot to do.’

He had nothing to do; Emma knew that, and so did Miss Taylor, but they sensed that his world had been thrown into disarray by that morning’s announcement, and he needed time.

‘Of course,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘You should get on with it.’

With Mr Woodhouse out of the room, Emma felt that she could talk freely. ‘I’m really thrilled,’ she said. ‘I had more or less given up on the idea that you would get married.’

‘So had I,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I’m very lucky.’

‘Is he well off?’ asked Emma. ‘I’ve never really thought about him in those terms, but I suppose that Randalls is worth quite a bit, even if it has only eight bedrooms.’

‘I imagine he has enough,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I’ve never discussed it with him.’

‘Well, he can’t live on air,’ said Emma. ‘He had a business in London, didn’t he?’

‘With his brothers. He sold it, I believe.’

‘Well, he probably invested the proceeds and lives off those. You won’t have to worry.’

Miss Taylor nodded. ‘It’s one of the nice things about getting married at this stage of life. It solves a number of problems.’

Emma nodded. ‘I won’t need to, of course.’

‘Need to what?’

‘I won’t need to get married for financial reasons. I shall have enough not to worry.’

Miss Taylor smiled. ‘But you may want to get married for other reasons.’

Emma shook her head. ‘I doubt it. Why should I? I have everything I need.’

Except love, thought Miss Taylor, although she loved Emma, and Mr Woodhouse loved her too; but that was not the same thing. That was a different sort of love – a comfortable, unthreatening love of long standing; a form of love that was far removed from passionate, romantic love. And that made her think: Do I know what romantic love is? Is that what I feel? Yes, she thought. Yes. I feel that when I see James, when I think of him. I do. I feel exactly that.

She looked at Emma with fondness. ‘I think you’ll find somebody who’ll stir you.’

Emma made a face. ‘That is not a particularly appealing metaphor, if I may say so. I have no desire to be … stirred.’

‘Perhaps it’s an unfortunate word,’ conceded Miss Taylor. ‘I think that it is men who are stirred – women perhaps not.’

‘Men are aroused, rather than stirred,’ remarked Emma. The remark was made carelessly; Emma did not always think. She blushed.

Miss Taylor laughed. ‘Let’s move on,’ she said. ‘There is a limited amount that one can say about men, I’ve always felt. More to the point: I have plans for the kitchen at Randalls. And for the bathrooms, too. Would you like to hear about them?’

At first, Emma found herself unable to decide whether Miss Taylor’s announcement of her imminent departure fell into the category of bad news or simply that of dramatic news. There was, she felt, a crucial difference: bad news usually had no redeeming features, whereas dramatic news often did. Eventually she decided that this was clearly dramatic rather than bad news because of the clear joy and excitement that the prospect of marriage had brought to Miss Taylor and also, she assumed, to James. And it was, after all, what she had herself contrived at; she was sure that she had planted the idea in Miss Taylor’s mind and that without that intervention on her part it would never have occurred to the governess to signal to James – as she surely must have done – that she was receptive to his overtures. So this really was a triumph on her part – an achievement that might cost her companionship but could still bring considerable satisfaction. Even when Miss Taylor had gone to live at Randalls, Emma was confident that her old governess and friend would naturally turn to her for support and advice in the running of her new home. Already, in their discussion of bathrooms, Emma had succeeded in interesting her in wet rooms, of which she previously been largely ignorant, Edinburgh not being a place noted for that sort of thing.

‘You tile everything,’ she explained. ‘From floor to ceiling. Or rather you do it in stone, or one of these new stone-effect surfaces. Limestone looks very nice. Then you have the shower in one corner and nothing between it and the rest of the room. No glass partition – nothing.’

‘Limestone?’ asked Miss Taylor. ‘Remember “In Praise of Limestone”? And that line about why we love it – precisely because it dissolves in water?’

‘These days —’ Emma began.

Miss Taylor interrupted her. ‘I should hate to have a new bathroom that was visibly dissolving before my eyes. It would be disconcerting, to say the least.’

‘Limestone bathrooms don’t dissolve,’ said Emma patiently. ‘It would take hundreds of years. That poem was about limestone landscapes.’ She cast a firm glance in Miss Taylor’s direction: there were occasions on which the governess could deliberately obfuscate.

‘Conventional bathrooms are boring,’ she said. ‘One bath. One loo. One basin. That’s very … how shall I put it? One-dimensional.’

‘I should hate to be one-dimensional,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘But, on a serious note, I do like the idea of these wet rooms.’

‘Wet rooms are serious,’ said Emma. ‘They give you a sense of freedom. You move from zone to zone within the room in a very fluid way.’

Miss Taylor had nodded. This, obviously, was what one learned in Bath – where they should know about such things, of course, with their long experience of spas. And Bath was evidently the place where one learned to talk about something as simple as showers and basins in a way that implied great sensitivity – great multi-dimensionality. I shall miss Emma, she thought. I shall miss this young person whom I have had such a hand in creating. And with that, she felt a pang of remorse. It is never easy to let go of another life.

A few days later, Emma came into her room, after knocking on the door, as she had always done, and after Miss Taylor had called out entrez! as she had done from that very first day in the Woodhouse household nearly twenty years ago. She called out entrez! because that was what a governess should do – long generations of her profession had called out entrez!

Emma had found Miss Taylor with her suitcases laid out on the floor, the doors of her wardrobe wide open.

‘You’re packing?’

Miss Taylor nodded. ‘Yes. James is bringing the Land Rover over tomorrow.’

She’s going away in a Land Rover, thought Emma. She stared at the suitcases; two were empty, ready for filling, while one was already packed with what Miss Taylor had always called her underthings. She imagined the underthings being loaded into a vehicle that was normally used to convey dogs and fence posts and the like. Her gaze moved to the open wardrobe. There were only eight or nine dresses there, she noticed. Did Miss Taylor have so few dresses?

‘Will three suitcases be enough?’ she asked. ‘I could lend you mine. I brought four back from Bath.’

Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘Thanks, but I think three will be adequate. I’ve always travelled with only three suitcases. One for …’

‘Underthings,’ supplied Emma.

‘Yes, one for underthings. One for dresses. And then one for shoes, belts, and so on. I have a few papers as well, and those can go in with the shoes.’

Emma wondered what the papers were, and Miss Taylor, it seemed, knew what she was thinking. Seventeen years could do that; could bring about unspoken understandings between two minds. Words were not always necessary.

‘One doesn’t need all that many documents in this life,’ said Miss Taylor, moving over to the wardrobe to take out the first of the dresses. It was cotton lawn with a curious paisley pattern; very old-fashioned, thought Emma – it would not look out of place in a clothing museum.

‘I saw something just like that dress in the Fashion and Textile Museum in London,’ Emma said. She spoke without thinking. Miss Taylor’s hand froze, just as she reached for the dress.

Emma noticed, and became flustered. ‘They had modern things too,’ she said hastily. ‘High fashion. Everything. It’s quite a place.’

Miss Taylor resumed her task. Slipping the dress off its hanger, she held the fabric briefly to her cheek, to feel it, as if to embrace it.

‘You said you don’t need many papers,’ Emma blurted out, eager to move on from museums. ‘I suppose we don’t, do we? A birth certificate? A passport – if we want to go somewhere.’ She paused. ‘My father hasn’t got an up-to-date passport, you know.’

Miss Taylor moved across the room to the suitcase and laid it carefully in the suitcase. ‘No? I suppose he hasn’t gone anywhere for a long time.’

‘Not even to London,’ said Emma. ‘Or Norwich, for that matter.’

‘Some people don’t like to travel,’ she said. ‘And one can understand. Travel can be very vexing these days. All those people.’ Us, she thought; we are those people.

‘He doesn’t go anywhere because he’s anxious,’ said Emma.

‘Yes, he’s anxious. But that, you know, is because he loves you so much. He’s worried about you. He’s worried about me. He’s worried about the house. He won’t let go of things. He wants everything to remain the same.’

‘I know,’ said Emma. ‘Your leaving us – even to get married – is quite hard for him to accept.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘But I’m not exactly going far. I expect we’ll see each other every day. I can come round every morning. It’ll take me no more than twenty minutes to walk here, after all.’

Emma conceded that this would be possible. But it would not be the same, she pointed out. It would not be the same going off to sleep at night knowing that Miss Taylor would be taking to her bed in an entirely different house. ‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ she said. ‘I just am.’

They stood and looked at each other across the half-empty suitcases.

‘And I’m going to miss you too,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I’m going to miss you, even if I see you every day. Does that sound odd to you?’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘It doesn’t sound odd, because I think that’s exactly what I’m going to feel.’

Miss Taylor moved forward; she hesitated, as she seemed to consider taking another step, but did not. Each was still separated from the other by several feet. A suitcase of underthings lay between them.

‘Darling Emma,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Will you do one thing for me? Just one thing?’

Emma nodded. ‘Of course. Anything.’

‘Will you make an effort?’

Emma frowned. There were times when Miss Taylor sounded like a Scottish school teacher – which she was, when one came to think of it – an old-fashioned Scottish school teacher in high-ceilinged Edinburgh classroom, some Jean Brodie-like figure encouraging her pupils to work hard. But what did she mean by make an effort?

‘Yes. I’ll make an effort.’

‘Good,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘You’ll find that effort will be repaid. Always – or almost always.’