Emma. Alexander Smith McCall

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Now these brushes sat alongside an eau-de-cologne dispenser in the form of a squat bottle of thick-cut glass, a tortoiseshell comb, a bottle of nail-varnish remover, and a small Wemyss Ware bowl containing cotton-wool buds. For the average young child, such a collection would have been a positive invitation to fiddle, to take tops off, to press and spray things. The eau-de-cologne dispenser would have been the greatest temptation, closely followed by the cotton-wool buds. But this was not what happened with Emma, who spent ten concentrated minutes moving the items about the dressing table until they were placed in a position that appeared to satisfy her.

      ‘You’re very busy,’ said Miss Taylor as she observed what was happening.

      ‘They must be beautiful,’ said Emma.

      ‘What must be beautiful, Emma?’

      ‘Things.’

      Miss Taylor smiled. ‘But they are beautiful, these things of mine. Those 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 СКАЧАТЬ