‘Perhaps not,’ said Miss Taylor; and then added, ‘Pity.’

Over dinner, the conversation would naturally include Mr Woodhouse, who never seemed happier than when he had the company of both Emma and Miss Taylor at the same time. These exchanges over the dining-room table often dwelled on obscure and sometimes very technical issues arising from whatever it was that Mr Woodhouse had been reading that day. On days when Scientific American was delivered to Hartfield, this might result in debates about immunology or astronomy; The Economist could lead to discussions of the rights and wrongs of liberal capitalism (Mr Woodhouse was an opponent of the greed that free markets encouraged) or to discussions of energy policy. Emma was not greatly interested in such topics, but was prepared to listen to her father, sometimes chiding him for some factual error or misjudged conclusion, while Miss Taylor, who knew about a surprising range of subjects, was more willing to engage.

Occasionally their dinner conversation was prompted by something that Miss Taylor had read or heard on the radio. At the beginning of that summer, shortly after Emma had returned from Bath, an article in The Scots Magazine about the remote St Kilda Islands had triggered one such discussion. Mr Woodhouse was interested in the evacuation of the few remaining islanders in the late 1930s, and said that he had always believed that this had been inevitable given the number and variety of germs that would have thrived on islands that were so heavily populated by flocks of seabirds. ‘I gather that infant mortality was a problem for them,’ he said. ‘And frankly I’m not surprised.’

It was not this issue, though, that occasioned the intense debate that evening, rather it was one of the photographs that accompanied the article in The Scots Magazine. Miss Taylor had been so struck by this photograph that she had shown it to both Emma and her father. The picture was of one of the high stone columns that rose out of the sea around the main island. Here and there along the side of the column were patches of grass clinging to the rock at an angle of forty five degrees – as hostile and impossible an environment as could be imagined, but home, it seemed, to a hardy breed of sheep that had lived there untended by any shepherd since the islanders left.

‘Poor creatures,’ said Emma. ‘Imagine living at that angle, hundreds of feet above the sea. It’s cruel.’

‘Very uncomfortable,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Of course they’ll eventually have legs of different lengths, to cope with the angle, but that would take thousands of years, I imagine. Evolution doesn’t happen overnight. Poor things.’

‘Poor things?’ echoed Miss Taylor. ‘Those sheep, I imagine, are perfectly happy.’

‘They can’t be,’ protested Emma. ‘Would you be happy living at that angle on a tiny patches of grass? With gales? With everything tasting of salt?’

‘They may not be ideal surroundings,’ Miss Taylor conceded. ‘But they don’t know any better, do they? They have no idea of gentle meadows in which sheep may safely graze, as Bach would have us believe.’

‘Bach?’ asked Mr Woodhouse. ‘What’s Bach got to do with it?’

Miss Taylor looked at him. This was the reason, she thought, why I could never marry him, even if he were to ask me. It would be like marrying somebody who spoke an entirely different language. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The point I was making is this: if you know no better, then you are happy with what you have. Those sheep have no idea that life may be any different from what they experience. Therefore they are happy or unhappy to the same degree as any sheep are, whatever their circumstances. I cannot imagine that the Duke of Northumberland’s sheep are any happier than those St Kilda sheep.’

Mr Woodhouse looked puzzled. ‘The Duke of Northumberland?’ It was a most irritating habit of hers, he thought: bringing into a discussion people who had no business in it – Bach and the Duke of Northumberland: what light could they possibly throw on the issue of these unfortunate sheep?

Miss Taylor smiled. ‘I mention the Duke of Northumberland as an example of somebody whom one might imagine has contented and well-looked-after sheep. I do not know if that is the case; I simply assume it.’ She paused. ‘I believe that those St Kildan sheep are not unhappy for the same reason that I am not unhappy with my lot.’

Emma frowned. ‘But in your case you know that you could be happier than you are.’

Miss Taylor turned to her. ‘Do I? Do you really think so?’

Emma did not reply for a moment. But then she realised that she knew the answer to this; she felt it. ‘Everybody can be happier than they are,’ she said. ‘They may not know it – yes, I accept that – but that doesn’t mean to say that they can’t be made happier. Other people can make them happier; other people can arrange happiness for them.’

She was sure that she was right. She had not given the question much thought before this, but this discussion – this rather ridiculous discussion about sheep – had brought the matter into sharp focus for her. And just as she worked out what she thought about this, she realised, too, that this was something she could do with her life. She could make people happier by helping them to find happiness. It was very simple, really; all that was required was a willingness to take the initiative and show people where they should look. And as for those poor sheep on their cruel Hebridean columns, if only she had a boat she would take them away to some flat part of Scotland, some level lowland where they might live without fear of falling into the sea; where there was lush green grass and sunlight on their backs. She would take them in her small boat; she would be their shepherdess, their saviour.

She changed the subject. ‘Dinner,’ she said abruptly. ‘I think that I would like to have a dinner party.’

Mr Woodhouse put down his knife and fork. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve been away for so long and don’t want to get out of touch with people around here. You know how it is. You need to see people to keep in touch with them.’

This pleased Mr Woodhouse a great deal. He never dared confess his vision of Emma’s future, which involved her staying at Hartfield forever, and not just for this final summer. She could have her design consultancy there – or whatever it was that she wanted to do – but she would stay in the house with him and Miss Taylor. Why go elsewhere? Why go and live in London in a house with two bedrooms – if you were lucky – when you already had a house with eleven? He could not see why anybody would want to do that; he simply could not understand the cast of mind that led people to live in what he saw as urban chicken coops.

‘Of course you must have a dinner party,’ he said. ‘Whom will we invite?’

‘The locals,’ said Emma. ‘George Knightley, of course.’

She spoke almost without thinking, but now she wondered why she had mentioned George and why she had said ‘of course’. Was it because she knew her father liked him, and she wanted to make sure that he would feel involved in the dinner party? Possibly. Or was it something else? Recently she had found herself thinking quite frequently of George Knightley. He had crossed her mind when she drove her Mini Cooper over to the garage to arrange for a service. She had imagined what it would be like to be George and to be getting up in the morning and deciding what to do with your day. Would he shave before he took a shower, or did he shave after his shower but before breakfast? Or perhaps he took a bath; there were some people who looked as if they took showers and some who looked as if they took baths. He was a shower person, she thought, because he always looked so well groomed and energetic; bath people were more … more dishevelled perhaps, less ready to go for a long run or do twenty press-ups on the ground. It was a pointless, ridiculous thing to think about, but it occupied her mind for a full ten minutes. And afterwards she had felt quite uncomfortable – as if somehow she had been there with him, watching him.

Then she had thought of him again when she lay in bed the other night, waiting for sleep to overtake her. She suddenly saw his face; she saw him looking at her and smiling, and she smiled back in the dark, a smile seen by nobody else, of course, not even by herself in a mirror, a passing smile, but a smile nonetheless. It was as if they were greeting each other; as if they were complicit in some unspoken exchange. The real George Knightley was available enough – she saw him reasonably frequently, and they chatted amicably, but this particular understanding did not pass between them in those real encounters – it was something more private, and the more pleasurable for that. Miss Taylor had said something about those sorts of thoughts; she had spoken once of the memories that people bring out and savour, unwrapping them with all the care with which one uncovers some tangible souvenir, some cherished object. And now, quite suddenly, she thought of George with that sort of pleasure.

‘Emma?’

Her father brought her back to the present.

‘Sorry. Yes, the dinner party. George Knightley, and then Miss Bates. And Philip Elton too, in spite of Byzantine history and the Holy Ghost and all that sort of thing.’ She made a face. ‘He’s a bit of a pain, but let’s not be judgemental.’

Philip Elton was the new young vicar who had recently been appointed to the parish of Highbury on a part-time and non-stipendiary basis, the diocese being too poor and the congregation too small to support a full-time clergyman. He was what was called a young fogey: a young person with the old-fashioned tastes and attitudes of one much older. Some young fogeys, of course, could not afford the well-made clothes and expensive shoes that successful young fogeydom demands, but Philip Elton could. A childless uncle had left him an office block in Ipswich along with a portfolio of flats in Norwich, and this provided him with a more than adequate income. A degree from Durham was followed by a brief period in theological college and an unsuccessful year teaching in a boys’ boarding school. He had then enrolled for a part-time postgraduate degree in Byzantine history at the University of East Anglia, at the same time looking for a vicar’s position in an undemanding parish. He was now twenty-seven, and would soon have his Ph.D. He had no intention, though, of competing for an academic post, as his financial circumstances made that unimportant. An independent Byzantine historian could be perfectly happy living in a vicarage with seven bedrooms and a comfortable study. His duties as a non-stipendiary priest were hardly onerous: belief had waned, even in the country areas, and his congregation never numbered more than twenty. There were weddings to conduct, of course, because there were many who preferred the attractive parish church to the utilitarian shabbiness of the register office; and there were funerals, too, attended by many who were unaccustomed to ritual and who sang the twenty-third psalm out of tune, with puzzlement in their voices at the unfamiliar, lost language.

Mr Woodhouse smiled. ‘Vicars are allowed to go on about the Holy Ghost,’ he said, and then added, ‘He’s actually called the Holy Spirit these days. Holy Ghost is very old hat.’

Emma shrugged. ‘Same difference,’ she said. ‘And then we should invite James Weston. Obviously he has to come.’

‘An excellent list,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Le tout Highbury.’

Emma looked past her father, out through the window behind him. The names were so familiar to her and yet now, for the first time, she thought of them in an adult way; not just as parental friends and acquaintances, but as people open to her speculation and scrutiny. It was interesting.

Her father had said something, but she had not taken it in because she was thinking again.

‘What?’

‘I said that there was a young woman Miss Bates was speaking about, a Harriet Smith, I believe. We might invite her in order to balance numbers a bit.’

Emma smiled. ‘How quaint. Nobody balances numbers any more.’

‘Don’t condescend to me, Emma.’

‘Sorry, Daddy. Yes, by all means invite la Smith.’

Miss Taylor pursed her lips. ‘To call somebody la Smith is similarly condescending. You don’t even know her, Emma.’

Emma made an insouciant gesture. ‘I’m crushed,’ she said, adding extravagantly, ‘like a clove of garlic in a garlic press.’

‘There’s interesting new evidence about garlic,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Apparently the active ingredient in garlic significantly reduces the risk of heart disease and dementia. We’ve always known that, of course, but there’s powerful new evidence pointing that way. Most encouraging.’