Emma. Alexander McCall Smith
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lovely silver brushes, for instance – they’re very pretty, aren’t they?’
The young Emma nodded. ‘Like this,’ she said, moving the brushes to the side. ‘They go there. These go …’ She shifted the eau-de-cologne dispenser to the centre of the table. ‘There. Right shape.’
That was not the only incident of that nature. Miss Taylor soon realised that the furniture in Emma’s room, along with the pictures on her wall, rarely stayed in the same position for more than a few weeks on end. There were three chairs in the room and they were shifted about with regularity: under the window, beside the wardrobe, at the end of the bed, and then back to the window. Similar things happened in the rest of the house, although that was less noticeable. However, Mr Woodhouse once commented that somebody seemed to have moved two of the pictures in his study, swapping their position.
‘I can’t see why Mrs Firhill feels it necessary to dictate what I look at,’ he said over breakfast.
‘There are others who may have a tendency to rearrange things,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I don’t think that Mrs Firhill has views on what pictures go where.’
Emma, busy with her bowl of cereal, said nothing.
‘Well, I wish they wouldn’t,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Why can’t people leave well alone?’
Miss Taylor thought about a reply to that. He was right, of course, but only to an extent: there were too many people who imagined that there was some sort of duty incumbent on them to change things. These people were often unwilling to leave things as they were, which could be irritating. Yet if nothing were ever changed, she mused, then wouldn’t life be rather dull? She was distracted from this rather interesting question by the thought that some people not only liked to interfere with the way that inanimate things – possessions and paintings and the like – were disposed, but also liked to change the way in which people themselves were arranged. She glanced at Emma, who now looked up from her cornflakes and smiled at her.
Later that day, Miss Taylor said to Emma, halfway through their French lesson, ‘Tell me, Emma, why do you like to move things about? I’m not scolding you, darling, I’m just curious to know.’
Emma stared at the book they were reading. It was the adventures of Babar the elephant, in the original French. The three young elephants, Pom, Flora, and Alexander, were in peril and she wanted to continue with the story.
‘To make them happier,’ she said. ‘Now can we carry on reading?’
The girls settled in well at Gresham’s and both Miss Taylor and Mr Woodhouse became accustomed to their daily school run. In the mornings Isabella and Emma were driven to Holt in a mud-bespattered Land Rover that was normally used for farm work; in the afternoon, Miss Taylor, who insisted on wearing motoring gloves, cut a fairly dashing figure as she drove to collect them in a silver-coloured Mercedes-Benz that had belonged to Mr Woodhouse’s father.
With the girls at school for more of the day, Miss Taylor initially found that time hung heavily on her hands. But after she enrolled for a number of Open University courses, she discovered that the study and essay-writing that these entailed filled the gaps in her day. Mr Woodhouse encouraged her in this, and insisted on making available a fund for the purchase of textbooks and other materials needed for her studies. In her first year she completed two courses on Medieval Spanish History along with a course on the Trade Routes of the Ancient Middle East. In her second, she achieved a particularly high mark in both Classical Culture and Civilisation and the Dance and Drama of Restoration England, and then embarked on a more advanced course on the Art of the Baroque.
For the girls she was by this time very much a stepmother in all but name, her relationship with Emma being particularly close. But while most stepmothers encounter resentment on the part of their stepchildren, she did not. This resentment is based on the feeling that the stepmother is harsh and unkind: a pattern so common as to attract a name – the Cinderella Syndrome, Cinderella having been the victim of an egregiously unpleasant stepmother and stepsisters. Just as Cinderella did, the stepchild pines for the mother who would have treated her better, and resents the usurpation by the stepmother of her place in her father’s affections. At Hartfield, important elements in this psychological equation were missing: Miss Taylor was anything but unfeeling – in fact, she regularly and unapologetically indulged the girls. But then she was not married to their father – who had no interest in any relationship with her other than as an appreciative employer and, in a sense, friend. Without those complications, a fully blown psychopathology could hardly get started, and there was nothing to mar the reasonable, loving relationship that the two girls enjoyed with their governess. It was to Miss Taylor that they turned for advice; it was she who comforted them when they encountered the torments that beset any adolescence; it was she who looked after them and gave them the love that their own mother would have given them had she survived.
Shortly after her seventeenth birthday, it was decided that Isabella should not remain at school any longer. Most of her contemporaries were to spend a further year at Gresham’s, but in Isabella’s case it was felt that there was no point in persuading her to study for examinations that she had no desire to sit and that she would evidently not pass. She wanted to go to live in London and find work there. She had met somebody on a train who said that she could find her a job with a firm of fine-art auctioneers that specialised in providing employment for the daughters of county families. She would not be paid very much, she was warned, but that was not the point; she had a regular income from her mother’s estate that would be more than enough to pay the rent and ordinary living expenses, and her father, she felt, would provide for any luxuries. London, with its plays and its parties, beckoned; it was as if its lights, bright and seductive, penetrated into the country even as far as Hartfield itself, lighting the winding way to the distant city.
Mr Woodhouse, of course, felt that London was highly dangerous.
‘I cannot understand,’ he said to his daughters when Isabella first mentioned her desire to go there. ‘I just cannot understand how anybody would wish to live in London. I can see why people might wish to go in for the day – to see what’s on at the Royal Academy or the Science Museum or whatever. Perhaps even to do a bit of shopping. But to live there?’ He shook his head in disbelief at the inexplicable nature of such a choice.
‘But …’ began Isabella.
She did not get far. ‘The very air is sixth-hand,’ continued Mr Woodhouse. ‘Just think of it: when you breathe in places like London you’re taking in air that has already been in and out of goodness knows how many lungs.’
‘Twelve,’ said Emma. ‘Strictly speaking – if each person has two lungs and the air is sixth-hand.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Twelve lungs. Imagine the microbial load, and the viruses …’
‘But viruses are everywhere, Father,’ said Isabella. ‘We learned that in biology at school. Miss Parkinson – you should have seen her.’
Emma giggled. ‘Old bag.’
‘A very good teacher, I believe,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘And obviously aware of viruses – which is a good thing.’
Isabella smiled. ‘She said that we need to be exposed to a few viruses in order to build up our immune system. She said that the rise in the number of people with allergies is partly to do with the fact that everybody is eating over-purified food.’
‘Should we eat dirty things?’ asked Emma. ‘Should we wash the crockery maybe only once or twice a week?’
Mr Woodhouse tried to smile at this suggestion, but he found the whole discussion acutely painful: one should not talk about microbes lightly, he felt; it was an invitation to disaster. Of course microbes could not hear what they were saying, but it seemed somehow foolish to talk about them as if they were not there.
‘There may be a smidgeon of truth in what Miss Parkinson says,’ he conceded. ‘You do need to be exposed to a certain level of microbial activity, but London goes way, way beyond that.’ He paused. ‘No, I cannot see living in London as anything but