Alexander Smith - Emma - A Modern Retelling

The size of the lawns around Hartfield meant that a mechanical lawnmower was required. For years Sid, who helped with the farm and with some of the tasks associated with the garden, had used an ancient petrol-driven lawnmower that he pushed before him on creaky and increasingly dangerous handles. Mr Woodhouse had decided to replace this, and had looked into the possibility of a small tractor under which was fitted a powerful rotary blade. This would enable Sid to sit on a well-sprung seat as he drove the lawnmower up and down the lawn, leaving behind him neat stripes of barbered grass.

The tractor brochure portrayed this scene as a rural idyll. A contented middle-aged man sat on his small tractor, a vast swathe of well-cut grass behind him. The sky above was blue and cloudless; in the distance, on the veranda of a summer house, an attractive wife – at least ten years younger than the man on the lawnmower – waited to dispense glasses of lemonade to her hard-working husband. But Mr Woodhouse was not so easily fooled. What if you put your foot just a few inches under the cover of the blade? What if you fell off the tractor because the ground was uneven – not everyone had even lawns – and your fingers, or even your whole hand, were to get in the way of the tractor and its vicious blade? Or what if a dog bounded up to greet its owner on the tractor and had its tail cut off? The woman dispensing lemonade so reassuringly would shriek and run out, only to slip under the lawnmower and be sliced like a salami in a delicatessen. It was all very well, he told himself, trying to avoid these possibilities and pretending that nothing like that would happen, but somebody had to think about them.

The enthusiasm that Isabella and Emma felt for Miss Taylor proved to be infectious. Although Mrs Firhill had misgivings about the governess and the pace with which she introduced her changes, she found it hard to disapprove of a woman who, in spite of a tendency to state her views as if they were beyond argument, was warm and generous in her dealings with others. The conviction that she was right – the firm disapproval of those she deemed to be slovenly in their intellectual or physical habits – was something that Mrs Firhill believed to be associated with her having come from Edinburgh.

‘They’re all like that,’ a friend said to her. ‘I’ve been up there – I know. They think the rest of us very sloppy. They are very judgemental people.’

‘I hope that it doesn’t rub off on the girls,’ said Mrs Firhill. ‘But I suppose it will. There’s Emma already saying cadit quaestio – and she’s only six.’

‘Oh, well,’ said the friend. ‘Perhaps it’s the best of both worlds – to be brought up Scottish but to live somewhere ever so slightly warmer.’

Mrs Firhill nodded – and thought. There was already something about Emma that worried her even if she was unable to put her finger on what it was. Was it headstrongness – a trait that you found in certain children who simply would not be told and who insisted on doing things their way? Her cousin Else’s son had been like that, and was always getting into trouble at school – unnecessarily so, she thought. Or was it something rather different – something to do with the desire to control? There were some children who were, to put it simply, bossy, and little girls tended to be rather more prone to this than little boys – or so Mrs Firhill believed. Yes, she thought, that was it. Emma was a controller , and it was perfectly possible that Miss Taylor’s influence would make it worse: if you were brought up to believe that there was a very clear right way and wrong way of doing things, then you might well try to make other people do things your way rather than theirs.

Once Mrs Firhill had identified the issue, the signs of Emma’s desire to control others seemed to become more and more obvious. On one occasion Mrs Firhill came across her playing by herself in the playroom, Isabella being in bed that day with a heavy cold. In a corner of the room was the girls’ doll’s house – an ancient construction that had been discovered, dusty and discoloured, in the attic. Now with its walls repainted and repapered, the house was once again in use, filled with tiny furniture and a family of dolls that the girls shared between them. Long hours were spent attending to this house and in moving the dolls from one room to another in accordance with the tides of doll private life that no adult could fathom.

Unseen by Emma, Mrs Firhill watched for a few minutes while Emma addressed her dolls and tidied their rooms.

‘You are going to have stay in your room until further notice,’ she scolded one, a small boy doll clad in a Breton sailor’s blue-and-white jersey. ‘And you,’ she said to another one, a thin doll with arms out of which the stuffing had begun to leak, ‘ you are never going to find a husband unless you do as I say.’

Mrs Firhill drew in her breath. It would have been very easy to laugh at this tiny display of directing behaviour, but she felt somehow that it was not a laughing matter. What she was witnessing was a perfect revelation of a character trait: Emma must want to control people if this was the way she treated her dolls. Bossy little madam , thought Mrs Firhill. But then she added – to herself, of course – without a mother . And that, she realised, changed things.

‘Boarding school?’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary, do you? Not for your girls.’

Mr Woodhouse shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The conversation he was having with the governess was taking place in his study – his territory – and he would have imagined that he would have had the psychological advantage in such surroundings. It was a large room, furnished with a substantial desk, and to speak to somebody from behind such a desk surely must confer some degree of authority on one’s pronouncements. He had read somewhere that Mussolini had a very large desk indeed, placed at the end of an exceptionally long room. This meant that visitors had to walk for some distance before they even reached the dictator, by which time if they had not already been intimidated when they entered the room they certainly would be by the time they reached his desk. And it was not just dictators who were keen on such tactics: there were several democratically elected presidents who were known to use elevator shoes, to stand on strategically placed boxes to gain height, or to insist when group photographs were being taken on being placed next to those shorter than themselves. He generally needed none of this, being secure enough in his estimation of himself, but Miss Taylor had a knack of making him feel perhaps slightly less than authoritative, as she was doing now, even in his own study.

‘I think that their mother would have expected it,’ he said. It was sheltering behind his late wife – he knew that – but it would be hard for her to argue with a pious concern for the feelings of the girls’ mother.

‘But she may well have changed her views,’ retorted Miss Taylor. ‘Had she lived, that is; I was not suggesting that views can change after one has crossed over, so to speak. Things have changed since … since her day. And both of them are perfectly happy where they are. Why send them off to some wretched boarding school, some Dotheboys Hall? What’s the point of having children if you then just send them away?’

Mr Woodhouse looked out of the window. It was all very well for Miss Taylor to barge in and give her opinions on this tricky issue, but she was Scottish and did not understand the nuances of English life. Highbury, their village, was the embodiment of England; and there was a social order, complete with nuanced expectations, that she could not be presumed to understand. The local primary school was perfectly adequate for young children – and Miss Taylor was right to say that the girls were happy there – but now that they were getting older, there arose the highly charged question of boys. If they went to the local high school, then they would simply become pregnant; Mr Woodhouse was sure of that. That was what happened at the local high school. They would meet the wrong sort of boy whose sole ambition would be to make any girl whom he met pregnant.