Emma: A Modern Retelling

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Now injured innocence returned. ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Knightley.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Knightley,’ he snapped.

  ‘But that’s who you are,’ she replied. And then smiled sweetly. ‘It’s fond, I promise you. It’s not formal.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘I have to go, I’m afraid. Somebody’s coming to see me at Donwell.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to keep you,’ said Emma.

  He showed no signs of leaving. ‘All I’d be interested to know is this: what have you got against Robert Martin?’

  Had Emma not answered, George’s departure might have been less acrimonious. But she did answer.

  ‘He’s not up to her,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  It took a few moments for this to sink in. Then he said, ‘I simply don’t believe what I’m hearing. Not up to her? Not up to Harriet Smith?’

  She was too far committed, and decided to stand her ground. ‘No, he isn’t. He’s a sort of waiter in a B&B. You may think that’s fine, but I don’t. If she went off with him – and just think of it for a moment – if she went off with Robert Martin, what would she become? I’ll tell you. She’d be working in the parental B&B with him, that’s what.’

  George drew in his breath. ‘He hasn’t asked her to marry him, for God’s sake. He’s asked her to a meal in a Chinese restaurant. And, anyway, what exactly is wrong with working in a B&B?’

  Emma laughed. This was a mistake.

  ‘Oh, you think that’s funny,’ said George, his voice rising. ‘What do you do, Emma Woodhouse? What useful contribution do you make to society?’

  He regretted it the moment he said it. He was surprised, too, at the pain this exchange caused him. He was prepared to have an argument when the occasion called for one, but he did not want to argue with Emma, because … He was not sure why. Because he was fond of her? How fond? he asked himself.

  ‘And you?’ she retorted. ‘What do you do?’

  There was something in her tone that made him want to fight back. ‘I run a farm – quite a successful one, in fact. It provides three people with a job.’ Now there were short, angry phrases. ‘I am responsible for that. I also run the house, which provides two jobs and a lot of work for local tradesmen.’ He knew he sounded pompous, but he could not help himself.

  ‘I run this house,’ retorted Emma.

  ‘And Robert Martin, whom I happen to know, is a perfectly decent young man. That girl is nothing out of the ordinary, Emma. She’s not exactly Einstein.’

  Emma hesitated, uncertain as to whether or not to mention Harriet’s C in drama. She decided against it. ‘Einstein!’ she retorted. ‘And him?’

  ‘What makes her so special? Go on, tell me; I’m waiting. What makes her better than him?’

  ‘She’s gorgeous,’ said Emma. ‘That’s point one. And sweet. That’s point two. And she could do far better than this boring young man from a two-star B&B. Point three.’ She paused. ‘Yes, two-star. I looked it up.’

  George moved towards the door. He looked agitated, and his face was flushed red. ‘Has it occurred to you that you’re a snob?’

  The insult did not seem to disturb Emma unduly, but it had a surprising effect on him. The effect was erotic, and it was all he could do to prevent himself gasping.

  Emma was smiling, as if she were enjoying the affray. ‘Because I want something better for my friend? That makes me a snob, does it?’

  He opened the door, struggling to cope with his conflicting – and disturbing – feelings. His Land Rover was outside. Emma noticed that there was mud splashed across the front of the vehicle. ‘You should wash your car,’ she said.

  He shot her an injured glance, and walked out of the door. Halfway to the vehicle, he turned and called out to her. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I’m very sorry.’

  Emma came out of the house towards him. ‘And I’m sorry too. I don’t want to fight with you. I really don’t.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘I think sometimes you’re a bit harsh on people – that’s all.’

  ‘I was just trying to protect Harriet.’

  He stared at her. ‘Were you?’ He answered his own question immediately. ‘All right, you were. I just think you’re wrong about Robert Martin. Let’s leave it at that.’

  Her relief was evident. ‘Yes, let’s leave it at that.’ She smiled at him. ‘You know, I could wash your poor Land Rover for you. Sid has got one of those high-pressure thingies. I rather like using it. The water goes round and round in a circle, shoots out. I could get the mud off.’

  ‘Mud sticks,’ said Mr Knightley.

  She did not hear him. ‘What?’

  ‘I said: mud sticks.’

  He got into the Land Rover, waved – unenthusiastically, thought Emma – and drove off. She had not felt it during their sparring, but now she felt the rawness that followed from the argument. Disagreements, even with people she knew, made her feel like that – shocked, perhaps, at the animus that can lie behind mere words. She was surprised, though, by the intensity of her dismay over the fact that George had expressed disappointment in her. Why should she care what he thought? Why should she bother if she had somehow fallen short of whatever standards he had mentally created for her? It was as if she had been moved in some way by the encounter, and that made her feel uneasy in a way that she neither expected nor fully understood. It was unease, yes, but it was something else, she thought – and she was not quite sure what that something else was.

  Turning round, she went back into the hall. Her father was there, standing under the non-Canaletto, but looking at his daughter rather than at the painting.

  ‘You look like a Doge, Pops,’ said Emma.

  Mr Woodhouse frowned. Doge? ‘Did you and George have some sort of disagreement?’

  ‘A very small one,’ said Emma. ‘About nothing.’

  ‘I heard raised voices, you see. I wondered if it was Sid shouting at somebody. You know how he shouts at people sometimes.’

  ‘We weren’t shouting,’ Emma reassured him. ‘We were having a heated discussion.’

  ‘About what?’

  Emma shrugged. ‘A Chinese restaurant. Nothing important.’

  Mr Woodhouse was gazing at her affectionately. ‘You’re a very odd girl, Emma. But you’re my little darling, aren’t you? You’re your daddy’s darling, and I’m really proud of you.’

  ‘Unlike your other daughter?’ teased Emma. ‘Unlike my fecund sister?’

  ‘I’m proud of her too.’ The look of satisfaction faded. ‘Although she lives in London.’

  ‘You never know, Pops. People who live in London often come to their senses and move out. Isabella could do the same.’

  Mr Woodhouse shook his head. ‘She won’t. And all my little grandchildren will talk like cockneys. All drop their h’s and swallow the ends of words.’ He shook his head again. ‘So much for education.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with education, Pops. It’s the culture. That’s what happens. Isabella herself is losing her h’s. When she comes here for the weekend, I find them all over the place once she leaves. Loads of them. Dropped with utter abandon.’

  ‘You’re teasing me,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘These things are serious.’

  ‘You’re right, Pops. Now, how about a little walk round a few of our acres? You need to take more exercise, you know. You have to keep your brain in good shape.’

  He crossed the hall and took her arm. ‘You’re right. A little walk would do us both good. Although …’ He stepped aside to allow her through the door first.

  ‘Although what?’

  ‘Although when it comes to the brain,’ he said, ‘we would probably be spending our time better if we sat down to a plate of smoked salmon.’

  ‘Oh come on, Pops, I thought that was an old wives’ tale: fish being good for the brain and all that. It’s the sort of thing you hear Mrs Firhill saying.’

  Mr Woodhouse wagged a finger at he
r. ‘She may be right, you know. Omega-three oils. Has it ever occurred to you that Mrs Firhill might be right?’

  ‘No,’ said Emma. ‘It hasn’t.’ But then she thought: Listen to me!

  She turned to face her father. He was looking at her with amusement in his eyes, but with a trace of sorrow, too, perhaps.

  ‘No, maybe she is right.’

  ‘Mrs Firhill?’

  ‘Yes, maybe she is right … about fish …’ She hesitated, before adding, ‘And other things too.’

  He reached out and took her hand, silently.

  12

  Emma had given some thought to how she might invite Philip Elton and Harriet Smith to tea at the same time without making the invitation look suspicious. She wondered whether she could persuade Harriet to join her on a small, impromptu committee to raise money for a suitable charity, and then ask Philip to address them on the relative merits of the various local charities. As a vicar, he could be expected to know all about charities, even if, as Emma suspected, he was not excessively charitable himself. That would bring the two of them together without raising Philip’s suspicions; if Harriet herself suspected anything, that would not matter – her compliance, Emma thought, could be assumed: Harriet was not one, she thought, to make any sort of fuss.

  Of course she had already lost one valuable opportunity for this particular piece of matchmaking. This had come at her dinner party, at which they had both been guests, but at that stage her plans for Harriet had been inchoate and the seating plan had not brought them directly together. She tried to remember whether the two of them had exchanged any words at all that evening, but she could not recall seeing them talking to each other. He must have seen her, though; no man could sit near Harriet Smith at a dinner table and fail to notice that he was in the presence of exceptional physical beauty. And if he had noticed her in that way – which he must have done – then she would not have much work to do. All that would be required of her was the facilitating of a meeting; nature – passion – call it what you will – could be expected to do the rest.

  Emma decided not to bother with a pretext; she would simply invite both of them to tea, though not at exactly the same time – Harriet would be invited slightly early, so that certain ideas might be placed in her head, and then twenty minutes or so later Philip Elton would arrive. If either felt manipulated, then so be it; resentment would in due course be replaced by gratitude as each of them realised what the occasion had led to. In Philip’s case this would be an introduction to a young woman far more attractive than he could normally have expected to encounter; Philip, for all his interest in Byzantine history and his good looks, was not exciting company, and his boring conversation and irritating views would limit his social opportunities. So he would be grateful, thought Emma. And then, as far as Harriet was concerned, the financial problems that so constrained her would be convincingly solved: Thailand, India, and indeed all those places in which well-funded gap years might be spent, would suddenly be open to her, along, of course, with rather better clothes – and shoes, it must be said – than she had up to now been able to afford. Many women made such a bargain and endured the consequences stoically and with good humour, putting up with tedious and opinionated men in exchange for material comfort. Emma would never do that herself, of course; but she had no need to – she was well off; so well off, in fact, as not to require a man at all.

  ‘Oh, I’d love to come to tea with you, Emma,’ enthused Harriet over the telephone. ‘It’s just what I need. We’ve just said goodbye at Mrs Goddard’s to a whole lot of students and I’m feeling a bit flat.’

  ‘Off to the railway station?’ said Emma. ‘Well, at least they’ll know how to ask the way.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Harriet, and then, after a short pause, added, ‘I hope they do. I’m a bit worried about some of them. One of them couldn’t get the hang of the future tense and spoke entirely in the past. I’m really worried about him.’

  ‘It could be difficult,’ agreed Emma. ‘He probably won’t get very far.’

  ‘Yes. I never really found out much about him. We had lots of conversations but I’m not quite sure whether he was talking about things that he had done a long time ago or whether they were things that he wanted to do.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Emma. ‘Would you like me to fetch you?’

  ‘In your Mini Cooper?’

  ‘Yes. I can bring that.’

  Harriet was excited. ‘Oh, that would be so nice, Emma. I’ve never been in a Mini Cooper.’

  ‘Well, now’s your chance,’ said Emma, rolling her eyes at her friend’s naïve enthusiasm; she was just like a ten-year-old schoolboy eager for a ride in a fast car. ‘I’ll come over to Mrs Goddard’s at three.’

  ‘You know where it is, don’t you?’ said Harriet. ‘At that disused airfield. There’s a sign that says Hangars and then there’s one that says Mrs Goddard’s Academy of English. You follow that road. I live with Mrs Goddard in the building that’s labelled Principal’s House. It used to be the officers’ mess in the days when the RAF were here.’

  Emma looked thoughtful as she put down the phone. If she had any lingering doubts about her intervention, these were now dispelled by the thought of Harriet’s current circumstances. To be living on a disused airfield – what a fate for anybody, even if it would be precisely the sort of domestic circumstances to secure a place at an ancient university. And the company … Presumably when the students went away, as they had just done, Harriet was left alone with Mrs Goddard, with whom she would have to make conversation in the evening over dinner. There was no Mr Goddard, as far as Emma knew, and she imagined the two of them sitting at the table, facing each other, searching for subjects to talk about while swallows and house martins, tiny Spitfires perhaps, dipped and swooped in the dusk about the eaves of the old officers’ mess and the crumbling control tower.

  The reality, it turned out, was somewhat different. When Emma arrived at the Mrs Goddard’s house, she found that the officers’ mess had been painted a cheerful shade of pink, and the garden, which the officers themselves surely must have ignored, had been planted with flowering shrubs. Mrs Goddard, who greeted Emma at the front door, was not the forbidding schoolmistress-type that Emma had imagined, but was a comfortable-looking woman – a bit overweight perhaps – dressed in what seemed to be a kimono, with her hair, which was auburn and frizzy, barely constrained by a striking headband. This headband, perhaps the brightest item of her clothing, featured Native American motifs and had the word How! emblazoned on it.

  ‘So,’ said Mrs Goddard, as she beckoned for Emma to come inside. ‘So, you’re Henry’s daughter.’

  Emma was momentarily taken aback. ‘Yes …’

  ‘I haven’t seen your dad for years,’ said Mrs Goddard. ‘He’s gone all quiet, hasn’t he?’

  Emma was not sure how to respond. ‘He doesn’t get out much,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Such a nice man,’ said Mrs Goddard, shaking her head. ‘Such a pity. Anyway, come in. Harriet’s almost ready. She saw your car coming up the drive and went off to get her things from her room. Want something to drink?’

  ‘I’m driving,’ said Emma.

  ‘Oh no, not something strong. I meant elderflower. I make a really good elderflower cordial, although I say so myself.’

  Emma accepted, and was left alone in what appeared to be Mrs Goddard’s sitting room. It was comfortably furnished, with eastern printed throws draped over the chairs, piles of books and magazines on the floor beside these chairs, and with large, brightly coloured abstract paintings on the walls. It was not what Emma had expected; and nor was Mrs Goddard herself, who now reappeared with two glasses of cordial on a small brass tray.

  ‘It’s delicious,’ said Emma as she sampled the cordial.

  Mrs Goddard smiled. ‘I do blackcurrant as well, but we’ve run out. I make that in the autumn and hope that it lasts me until the following year, but it often doesn’t. Our students love it.’

  ‘You must miss the
m when they go,’ said Emma. ‘Harriet said she did.’

  This pleased Mrs Goddard. ‘I hope they miss us too. Some of them say that they do. We get postcards from all over, and they’re usually very careful with their grammar. You’d expect that, wouldn’t you?’

  Emma glanced about the room. ‘Do you teach them here?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Goddard. ‘We’ve got a classroom block, which is near the students’ accommodation. There’s a language lab there, and a couple of tutorial rooms. Then we have a place for the teachers. We usually have three of them – straight out of university, in most cases. They do their Teaching English as a Foreign Language qualification and then come to us for a few months before they go off to teach English abroad. I regard them as the equivalent of the missionaries we used to send off to all sorts of places to stop the locals dancing. We don’t stop anybody dancing any more, of course. A sign of great progress, don’t you think?’

  Emma smiled. She liked Mrs Goddard.

  ‘Now, of course, there are countries sending missionaries back to us,’ Mrs Goddard continued. ‘We get people coming over from other parts of the world to reconvert the locals here. Some chance! Still, they try, I suppose, and they’re usually very polite about it. They don’t try to stop dancing and things like that. At least, not to begin with. They don’t go up to people and say, “Stop dancing or you’ll go to Hell,” which is what I fear some of our missionaries used to say to those unfortunate South Sea Islanders. Can’t you just see it? The South Sea Islanders would have been having a good dance and then along comes a missionary and says, “Oh, stop dancing, you sinful people!” And the poor South Sea Islanders freeze in mid-step, one foot above the ground, and look at each other in dismay, and the music stops.’

  Mrs Goddard took a sip of her cordial. ‘Of course, they believed that dancing led to other things, and it was the other things that really worried them. Dancing in itself might have been all right as far as the more liberal missionaries were concerned – as long as you didn’t dance too close, but when dancing really got going, then, well, you know the consequences of that.’