‘You tile everything,’ she explained. ‘From floor to ceiling. Or rather you do it in stone, or one of these new stone-effect surfaces. Limestone looks very nice. Then you have the shower in one corner and nothing between it and the rest of the room. No glass partition – nothing.’

‘Limestone?’ asked Miss Taylor. ‘Remember “In Praise of Limestone”? And that line about why we love it – precisely because it dissolves in water?’

‘These days —’ Emma began.

Miss Taylor interrupted her. ‘I should hate to have a new bathroom that was visibly dissolving before my eyes. It would be disconcerting, to say the least.’

‘Limestone bathrooms don’t dissolve,’ said Emma patiently. ‘It would take hundreds of years. That poem was about limestone landscapes.’ She cast a firm glance in Miss Taylor’s direction: there were occasions on which the governess could deliberately obfuscate.

‘Conventional bathrooms are boring,’ she said. ‘One bath. One loo. One basin. That’s very … how shall I put it? One-dimensional.’

‘I should hate to be one-dimensional,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘But, on a serious note, I do like the idea of these wet rooms.’

‘Wet rooms are serious,’ said Emma. ‘They give you a sense of freedom. You move from zone to zone within the room in a very fluid way.’

Miss Taylor had nodded. This, obviously, was what one learned in Bath – where they should know about such things, of course, with their long experience of spas. And Bath was evidently the place where one learned to talk about something as simple as showers and basins in a way that implied great sensitivity – great multi-dimensionality. I shall miss Emma, she thought. I shall miss this young person whom I have had such a hand in creating. And with that, she felt a pang of remorse. It is never easy to let go of another life.

A few days later, Emma came into her room, after knocking on the door, as she had always done, and after Miss Taylor had called out entrez! as she had done from that very first day in the Woodhouse household nearly twenty years ago. She called out entrez! because that was what a governess should do – long generations of her profession had called out entrez!

Emma had found Miss Taylor with her suitcases laid out on the floor, the doors of her wardrobe wide open.

‘You’re packing?’

Miss Taylor nodded. ‘Yes. James is bringing the Land Rover over tomorrow.’

She’s going away in a Land Rover, thought Emma. She stared at the suitcases; two were empty, ready for filling, while one was already packed with what Miss Taylor had always called her underthings. She imagined the underthings being loaded into a vehicle that was normally used to convey dogs and fence posts and the like. Her gaze moved to the open wardrobe. There were only eight or nine dresses there, she noticed. Did Miss Taylor have so few dresses?

‘Will three suitcases be enough?’ she asked. ‘I could lend you mine. I brought four back from Bath.’

Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘Thanks, but I think three will be adequate. I’ve always travelled with only three suitcases. One for …’

‘Underthings,’ supplied Emma.

‘Yes, one for underthings. One for dresses. And then one for shoes, belts, and so on. I have a few papers as well, and those can go in with the shoes.’

Emma wondered what the papers were, and Miss Taylor, it seemed, knew what she was thinking. Seventeen years could do that; could bring about unspoken understandings between two minds. Words were not always necessary.

‘One doesn’t need all that many documents in this life,’ said Miss Taylor, moving over to the wardrobe to take out the first of the dresses. It was cotton lawn with a curious paisley pattern; very old-fashioned, thought Emma – it would not look out of place in a clothing museum.

‘I saw something just like that dress in the Fashion and Textile Museum in London,’ Emma said. She spoke without thinking. Miss Taylor’s hand froze, just as she reached for the dress.

Emma noticed, and became flustered. ‘They had modern things too,’ she said hastily. ‘High fashion. Everything. It’s quite a place.’

Miss Taylor resumed her task. Slipping the dress off its hanger, she held the fabric briefly to her cheek, to feel it, as if to embrace it.

‘You said you don’t need many papers,’ Emma blurted out, eager to move on from museums. ‘I suppose we don’t, do we? A birth certificate? A passport – if we want to go somewhere.’ She paused. ‘My father hasn’t got an up-to-date passport, you know.’

Miss Taylor moved across the room to the suitcase and laid it carefully in the suitcase. ‘No? I suppose he hasn’t gone anywhere for a long time.’

‘Not even to London,’ said Emma. ‘Or Norwich, for that matter.’

‘Some people don’t like to travel,’ she said. ‘And one can understand. Travel can be very vexing these days. All those people.’ Us, she thought; we are those people.

‘He doesn’t go anywhere because he’s anxious,’ said Emma.

‘Yes, he’s anxious. But that, you know, is because he loves you so much. He’s worried about you. He’s worried about me. He’s worried about the house. He won’t let go of things. He wants everything to remain the same.’

‘I know,’ said Emma. ‘Your leaving us – even to get married – is quite hard for him to accept.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘But I’m not exactly going far. I expect we’ll see each other every day. I can come round every morning. It’ll take me no more than twenty minutes to walk here, after all.’

Emma conceded that this would be possible. But it would not be the same, she pointed out. It would not be the same going off to sleep at night knowing that Miss Taylor would be taking to her bed in an entirely different house. ‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ she said. ‘I just am.’

They stood and looked at each other across the half-empty suitcases.

‘And I’m going to miss you too,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I’m going to miss you, even if I see you every day. Does that sound odd to you?’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘It doesn’t sound odd, because I think that’s exactly what I’m going to feel.’

Miss Taylor moved forward; she hesitated, as she seemed to consider taking another step, but did not. Each was still separated from the other by several feet. A suitcase of underthings lay between them.

‘Darling Emma,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Will you do one thing for me? Just one thing?’

Emma nodded. ‘Of course. Anything.’

‘Will you make an effort?’

Emma frowned. There were times when Miss Taylor sounded like a Scottish school teacher – which she was, when one came to think of it – an old-fashioned Scottish school teacher in high-ceilinged Edinburgh classroom, some Jean Brodie-like figure encouraging her pupils to work hard. But what did she mean by make an effort?

‘Yes. I’ll make an effort.’

‘Good,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘You’ll find that effort will be repaid. Always – or almost always.’

10

It took a few days for Emma to become accustomed to the absence of Miss Taylor. Breakfast, although it had always been a quiet meal, seemed now to be even more silent yet, punctuated only by increasingly audible sighs from Mr Woodhouse from behind his newspaper. These sighs might have been taken as a commentary on the state of the world – his newspaper revealed news that became worse and worse with each succeeding page – but they were not that at all: they were really expressions of regret over Miss Taylor’s departure.

‘Poor Miss Taylor,’ he said. ‘I shall never be able to understand it. She was perfectly comfortable here.’ He fixed Emma with a gaze that was at the same time both concerned and injured. ‘Do you think we should have offered her a better room? Do you think that might have made a difference?’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘It was not a question of her room and how she felt about it. It had absolutely nothing to do with that. She met James. She fell in love.’

This elicited an even deeper sigh from her father. ‘I see no reason for her to have fallen in love; for the life of me, I just don’t. Why fall in love with poor Weston, of all people?’

Emma shrugged. ‘People fall in love with all sorts, Pops. It may seem odd to us, but presumably there are those who think James is attractive. I, for one, think he’s passable – just.’

Mr Woodhouse shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘Poor Weston may have a very low resting heart rate, but can you imagine anybody finding his face appealing – with that nose of his? And his eyebrows? No, I can’t understand how anybody could like such a face. Imagine waking up every morning to see that face on the pillow beside one. Imagine it! What an awful shock it would be.’

‘Miss Taylor might like it,’ said Emma. ‘In fact, I suspect that she would have settled with having any face on the pillow next to her.’

Mr Woodhouse raised his paper and resumed his reading. It was too painful a subject to be discussed any further – at least for him. Miss Taylor was now lost, even if she had telephoned to say that she and James would come for tea at four o’clock that afternoon. It simply would not be the same. He wondered what they would talk about. They would have to talk about something because when people visited you had to say something to them, and they had to say something back to you. It was different when they lived with you; then you could either spend time in silence, not having anything fresh to say, or you could say whatever came into your mind, not expecting any response.

He tried to recall what he had talked to Miss Taylor about, and found it difficult. Of course they had conversed, and done so frequently, but it had never been necessary for him to remember anything of what she actually said, and she, no doubt, had felt the same about his conversation. And yet it had all been so satisfactory – so secure – and now the whole thing was ruined by her going off to Randalls like a headstrong schoolgirl. What could have possessed her? Was it something to do with sex? It had never occurred to him that Miss Taylor might have needs of that nature – why should she? He had always felt that there was a vague primness about Miss Taylor – that was something to do with coming from Edinburgh, of course, but it went further than that. Miss Taylor was asexual – she was pure – and the thought of her harbouring a passion for James Weston of all people was almost inconceivable. Weston! It would be like sleeping with a farmyard animal – all sweat and grunts and … he shuddered. It was uncomfortable even to think of it.

Emma, of course, had other things to think about. She had been surprised at the pleasure that she had derived from bringing Miss Taylor and James together. There was something creative about making a successful introduction – something almost god-like. As a teenager there had been a brief period – no more than six months or so – when she had come under the spell of a visiting chaplain at school. This young man was only there to stand in for the regular chaplain, who was on sabbatical, but in the short time he was at the school, he had enthused a number of the pupils, largely owing to his looks, which would not have been out of place in a catalogue of male models – the sort who wear golf jackets or casual sweaters with such ease and conviction, gazing off in their photographs towards a horizon considerably more exciting than the horizons of most of us. The dreamy interest that Emma, and a score of other girls, had shown in his religious-education class had not lasted beyond his departure, but had meant that for the first time in the history of the school theological discussion among at least some of the pupils had overtaken any debate about some of the more usual subjects of teenage interest (music, the opposite sex, the incorrigibility of parents, clothes, and so on).

Emma remembered in particular a class discussion with this chaplain about the creation of the world and the granting to humanity of free choice.

‘I can’t quite see why God would have made the world in the first place,’ she said. ‘And in particular I can’t see why he should have made it imperfect. Wouldn’t it have been better to avoid all this suffering by just not making it? I mean, why would he?’

The chaplain had smiled. ‘A very good question, Emma.’

And then there had been silence while the pupils awaited the answer.

‘We shouldn’t imagine that the divine mind works in the same way as ours does,’ said the chaplain at last. ‘But even if we do that for a moment, surely it’s possible to imagine the pleasure that comes from setting something off on its course and then watching to see what happens. I’d like that, I think. I’d rather like to get a few lives going and then see how they cope with the challenges.’