Emma. Alexander McCall Smith
set Emma off with renewed weeping. ‘All my friends,’ she sobbed. ‘Betty Slazenger,’ the name being uttered as if it were redolent of painful disaster, as are the names Titanic, Gallipoli, or the Somme.
‘Rosie’s sister?’ asked Miss Taylor.
Emma nodded miserably. ‘And Pippa. Harry. Ellie.’
‘You’ll see them again,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘You needn’t lose touch. Isabella still sees Rosie Slazenger and Kitty, too, I believe.’
Emma wept not just because she was leaving her friends, she wept because it was the end of a world – the brief, temporary world of school that we never feel is brief or temporary until it is suddenly over. But her regret did not last for long as Miss Taylor had planned a busy summer for her: they enrolled, as fellow students, on a three-week course sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum, The English House through Three Centuries. They went together on a fortnight’s trip to Florence and Siena – a trip to which Mr Woodhouse was eventually persuaded to accept and finance, after a great deal of anxious hand-wringing and warning about the dangers of travelling in Italy, where the men, he said, were predatory to a degree that ‘we in England simply cannot comprehend’; where the drivers were ‘quite without concern for other road users’; and where ‘even the politicians were either certifiably insane or unashamedly criminal’.
They returned to England unscathed by any of these dangers – although Emma did have her bag snatched in Florence by a dwarf on a motor scooter (‘I warned you, my dear; I warned you,’ said Mr Woodhouse). It was not this incident, though, that stuck in Miss Taylor’s memory, but something altogether different – something that showed a side to Emma’s character that people often did not see, but that, in Miss Taylor’s view at least, was the real Emma. Within us all, thought the governess, there is often more than one person, more than one self. She had even discussed the subject with Emma – there was no point talking to Isabella about such matters, as she was given to yawning ostentatiously, though genuinely, when matters of the mind were raised. Emma, though, had listened as Miss Taylor told her about Plato’s famous chariot.
‘The chariot is the soul,’ she said, shaking her finger gently into the ether as if to pinpoint the insubstantial. ‘The chariot, you see, is driven by a charioteer but is pulled by two horses – one dark and one light. The dark horse represents all the brute appetites – concupiscence and so on …’ She paused. ‘Concupiscence is to do with lust.’
Emma closed her eyes. Was concupiscence really what they called lust in Edinburgh?
‘Anyway,’ continued Miss Taylor, ‘the two horses that pull the chariot are of opposite inclination. The light horse is to do with the finer things: awareness of others, generosity, civilisation – the finer side of our natures, in other words. The job of the charioteer is to harness the energy of the dark horse and to make sure that the light horse is not pulled downwards by its companion.’
Emma looked at her governess, imagining her, like Boadicea, in command of a chariot. And then something had occurred that distracted them: a telephone rang, and Miss Taylor for a moment or two seemed to be thinking about whether to ignore it or answer it, her chariot for an instant poised between the choice of ascending or descending. It ascended and she went to answer it, but it was the end of the chariot conversation.
And then, in Siena, on their Italian trip, while Miss Taylor sat at a table in the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, looking down on to the bowl of the shell, Emma detached herself from her governess for a few minutes while they were waiting for their order of coffee to be fulfilled; and found herself in a small side street lined with shops selling Sienese ceramics. One shop window had caught her eye for the sheer beauty of a bowl that it was displaying. This bowl was white and lemon-yellow in its colouring. Around its sides were glazed figures of young men in Renaissance costume picking fruit, while a troubadour plucked at a stringed instrument. A hunting dog, its back arched, as the backs of such dogs so often are, pranced ready for the pursuit of some creature not shown. Emma stopped and stared, and then entered the shop hesitantly.
Fifteen minutes later she was back with Miss Taylor, who remonstrated with her, as the coffee was getting cold.
‘I began mine. I couldn’t wait.’
Emma ignored her cup. ‘You have to come with me,’ she said. ‘I have to show you something.’
Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘I’m not leaving until I have finished my coffee. You can’t just leave such a beautiful place and dash off somewhere on a whim.’
She waited impatiently until Miss Taylor was able to accompany her back to the shop. The window now had a large space where the bowl had been.
‘These places …’ began Miss Taylor, but was silenced by the effusive greeting of the proprietor.
‘It is here,’ he said. ‘Then I will pack it and send it over for you. We guarantee its safe arrival.’
‘Safe arrival of what?’ asked Miss Taylor.
The bowl was produced and placed on the glass surface of the counter. ‘Eccolo!’ said the proprietor.
Miss Taylor reached out and touched the rim. ‘You understand,’ she muttered.
‘It’s for you,’ said Emma. ‘It’s for you, from me.’
It transpired that she had spent her entire spending allowance on the gift and during the remainder of their trip to Italy she would be able to buy nothing except essentials.
‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Cadit quaestio.’
There was no arguing with the finality of cadit quaestio, and Miss Taylor, who had introduced the phrase, of course knew that. She knew, too, that there was a time to accept gifts, even the most extravagant ones, and to cherish them. She reached out and took Emma’s hand and knew, at that moment, what the true nature of her young charge was. But then she thought of the chariot and the two charioteers, and she lowered her eyes and hoped.
Once back, there was university to think about, and the challenges of the decorative arts course at the University of Bath on which she had been offered a place. The choice of Bath had surprised Mr Woodhouse, who said that he had not even known there was a university there. Miss Taylor had been more encouraging, even if she had her reservations; she would have preferred St Andrews, which was, she pointed out, a mere six hundred years older. ‘Not that these things matter all that much,’ she said, in such a way as to indicate that they mattered a great deal.
For others, though – and this included her teachers at Gresham’s – Bath somehow seemed a natural place for Emma to choose, although it would be difficult to say exactly why this was so. ‘She’s that sort of girl,’ said the English teacher enigmatically. ‘She’ll fit.’ And then, as an afterthought, expressed as if only to herself, ‘Perhaps she has Bathos.’ This reference eluded the chemistry teacher, who simply remarked, regretfully, ‘She never grasped chemistry. I tried, you know, but she never grasped it.’
The course was certainly ideal: Emma had long been interested in patterns, whether in wallpaper, carpets, or in clothing. For her fourteenth birthday she had been given a book on the work of Edward Bawden, and had responded immediately and instinctively to his pictures of the English countryside – all plough horses and wayside pubs with suspended board signs; all fields of wheat and old-fashioned tractors; all open skies and wispy clouds. She tried to imitate his style, and that of Ravilious and the Nashes, succeeding sufficiently to be encouraged by her art teacher to persist; but what she really liked were Bawdenesque fabrics and wallpapers. She could gaze at these for hours, luxuriating in triangles and trompe l’oeil.
She had not given much thought to the need to work – Mr Woodhouse had never mentioned the subject to his daughters – but Emma was far from lazy and she felt that if she had a destiny it was in working with designs like these. She could start off as an interior decorator and progress to designing her own curtains and wallpaper; she would create fabrics for sofas and bedspreads. It was ambitious, but clear enough, at least, for her to