‘This choir?’ she said.

‘It was nothing special. There were one or two people in it who had really good voices, but I wasn’t one of them, I’m afraid.’

Miss Bates now found her voice. ‘But you were, Jane, you were. Mr Whitehead always said that you had a lovely voice. He always said that, and he should know.’

‘He was being kind,’ said Jane. ‘I really wasn’t all that good.’

‘Was it a church choir?’ asked Emma.

Jane shook her head, but did not expand, at least at first. Then, after a minute or so, she said, ‘It was when I was at university.’

Emma had assumed that Jane had not been to university; Miss Bates had said that she had not bothered with examinations because she was above them, and one did not get to university without at least some qualifications.

‘I didn’t realise …’ she began, and then tailed off.

Jane looked at her politely. ‘Realise what?’

‘I thought that you didn’t go to university.’

‘But I did,’ said Jane. ‘Not that it’s all that important. I know lots of people who never went to university and who have done just fine afterwards.’

‘Me, for instance,’ said Miss Bates.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Jane.

Emma looked at Miss Bates. She had not done just fine. She had done nothing, as far she could work out, and then she had made matters worse by losing all her money on the insurance market. How could she possibly think that she had done well? She shifted her gaze to Jane. ‘Where were you?’ asked Emma. She imagined that the answer would be some safe, provincial place: Nottingham, perhaps, or even Durham, at a pinch.

‘Not far from here,’ said Jane.

Jane seemed unwilling to expand, and again Emma found that the other young woman’s reticence only served to enflame her curiosity. Proximity suggested that it was the University of East Anglia in Norwich, or possibly the University of Essex at Colchester, which was a little further away.

‘Norwich?’ she asked. ‘I knew quite a few people who went there.’

‘No,’ said Jane. ‘Not Norwich.’

When Emma realised that Jane was not going to offer any further information, she decided to be direct. There was no reason for Jane to be so coy, she thought; it was frustrating for others – surely she understood that.

‘Where then?’ she said.

‘Cambridge,’ said Jane.

Emma had not expected this, and it took her a moment or two to absorb the information. She frowned. You had to have A levels to get into Cambridge – and impressive ones at that; yet Jane, according to Miss Bates, had been above all that.

‘I was under the impression you needed As to get into Cambridge,’ she said.

Jane looked down at the floor. ‘Yes, you generally do.’

Miss Bates was smiling benignly. Emma now turned to her. ‘I thought you said that Jane didn’t take any A levels.’

Miss Bates did not stop smiling. ‘Did I really? Oh, I do get things wrong. I’m sure that Jane got whatever it was she needed for a place at Cambridge – although heaven knows what that is. I thought they took you if you were good at rowing or something like that, but that might just apply to the young men. I suppose they have to make sure that you’ve got plenty of brains as well. It’s all very well knowing how to row, but you must have some idea where to row to. It would be no good at all having a whole lot of nice young men rowing around in circles, would it?’

Emma turned back to Jane. ‘What did you study?’ she asked.

‘Music,’ she said. ‘Mostly the history of music, but quite a bit of theory too.’

‘Bach, and people like that,’ interjected Miss Bates. ‘Jane knows an awful lot about Bach. All I know is that there were several Bachs. There was only one Mozart, of course, but there were any number of Bachs. I’m not sure which one was which; they all sound much the same to me.’

Emma ignored all this. ‘Which college were you at?’ she asked.

‘St John’s.’

Emma swallowed. The University of Bath was below Cambridge in the pecking order of universities, and this disclosure that Jane had been at St John’s, studying Bach and singing in a choir, made her feel that her own experience of the department of design at the University of Bath was distinctly inferior. She was not accustomed to intellectual inferiority, and she felt it keenly. Of course it occurred to her that Jane might not have got to Cambridge solely on the basis of examination results; she was an orphan, and that would count for a lot in the admission process. Cambridge colleges liked orphans, she imagined: there were plenty of meritorious people who had the misfortune to have two parents, but lacking the cachet of being an orphan they could hardly expect to find a place at Cambridge. Perhaps, she thought, there were people who disposed of their parents purely in order to obtain a place at a prestigious university; that was going a bit far, she told herself, and Jane, so thoroughly wholesome-looking in her white linen blouse, would hardly have gone to those lengths to become an orphan and thereby get into St John’s. No, Jane would certainly not have a past like that, although … She hesitated. Somebody had given her a piano – an expensive one at that – and that could only mean that she had a secret; people who received pianos as gifts almost always had something to hide. Somewhere there was a secret, and she decided at that moment that she would find it out. It might take some time, but Jane Fairfax was there for three months and that, surely, was quite enough time to discover the truth, whatever that should turn out to be.

14

Over the days that followed, Emma thought a great deal about Jane Fairfax. She was impatient to see her again, which rather surprised her, as she had been irritated by Jane’s guarded manner and barely concealed disinclination to open up to her. Every time she had asked her something – and she did not think that her questions about the piano had been too probing – she had been greeted with an evasive or enigmatic reply. The conversation about Cambridge had been typical of that: she had had to prise out of Jane the fact that she had been at St John’s. She wondered why this should be so; was it modesty on Jane’s part? It might have been that she did not wish to draw attention to the fact that she had been at Cambridge, believing – although there was no justification for such a belief – that anybody who had been at Bath would feel envious of those who had gone to Cambridge. If that were so, then her reticence could be construed as consideration, and she deserved credit for it. It was equally possible, though, that Jane had simply not wanted to engage in conversation with somebody whom she considered to be beneath her. That was clearly a less charitable explanation, but could very well be true: some people simply could not be bothered to engage with people with whom they felt they had nothing in common. Perhaps Jane thought that of her; had written her off as a typical county girl who was going to end up decorating people’s drawing rooms with chintz until she married some rather dim young man, a land agent or surveyor perhaps, and who would then have three children and a couple of Labradors. The mere thought of this possibility angered her. How dare she; how dare she imagine that she, somebody who came from … from nothing could condescend to her, to Emma Woodhouse of Hartfield. It takes my breath away, she thought, just to think she considers me to be of no consequence.

Yet any affront she suffered was more than outweighed by the interest that she felt in Jane. She found herself thinking of the other young woman’s piano-playing, and of how confident it had been. She found herself thinking again of the white linen blouse and wondering whether she might not buy one herself. Perhaps she could also look for some of the Indian bangles that had looked so good on Jane’s wrist. She conjured up a mental picture of Jane’s boyish figure and wondered whether she had to follow a diet in order to get that effect or whether it came naturally. Some people could get away with eating anything because their systems burned up the calories before they could get stored as fat. Was Jane like that, she wondered – did she have an efficient metabolism? She could always ask her, of course, and see what her reaction was. ‘Do you have an efficient metabolism, Jane?’ She smiled at the thought. There would be an evasive answer to that, she imagined.

There were other people to think about, though, and these gradually began to replace thoughts of Jane Fairfax. The first of these was Harriet, whom Emma had rather neglected after Jane’s arrival; and the second was Frank Churchill. It was the first who told Emma of the imminent arrival of the second.

Emma had not invited Harriet to Hartfield that day, and was mildly surprised when she spotted her friend talking to Sid near the entrance to the vegetable garden. Seeing her from the staircase window, Emma quickly slipped out of her inside shoes and put on a pair of green waterproof boots.

Harriet saw her as she approached from the side of the house. ‘I just popped in,’ she said. ‘Mrs God was going into London and I decided to take the opportunity of coming with her. She left her car at the railway station.’

‘She must know the way there by now,’ said Emma.

Harriet looked puzzled. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Nothing,’ said Emma. ‘What I meant to say is that I’m really pleased to see you.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ said Harriet. ‘I normally don’t like dropping in on people without any warning. I’m always worried that they might be in the loo, or something like that.’

Emma laughed at the odd, almost juvenile remark. ‘I don’t think that people are too embarrassed about that,’ she said.

Sid was standing by. He was grinning. ‘I used to work for a fellow – he was a pukka earl and all – and he used to telephone people from the loo. They had no idea that he was there, of course, and they had a perfectly normal conversation.’

‘I don’t see why one wouldn’t,’ said Emma. ‘Didn’t kings conduct their court business from the bath?’

‘Yes,’ said Sid. ‘So I believe. There was a programme on the box about it some time ago. They showed how one of those kings, see, would run everything from his bedroom.’

They went inside. ‘I’m glad that you came,’ said Emma. ‘I wanted to find out when you might be free to come to lunch. I thought I’d invite Philip Elton as well. Just the three of us.’ She glanced at Harriet.

‘Oh, but he’s already invited me,’ said Harriet. ‘Or rather, us. He’s invited both of us to have lunch with him at the pub. He asked me to find out when would suit you.’

Emma was momentarily nonplussed. She could understand Philip’s inviting Harriet to the pub, but why would he invite her as well? Her puzzlement, though, was brief. She only had to think about it for a few moments before an obvious answer suggested itself: Philip, for all his good looks and eloquence, may have felt anxious about asking somebody out on what was obviously a date; men like that often suffered from a lack of confidence. Asking both of them was a way of paving the way for the next invitation, which she imagined would be extended only to Harriet.

‘That’s really good news, Harriet,’ said Emma. ‘I could tell he liked you, you know. It was perfectly obvious – right from the beginning.’ She grinned at her friend. ‘Men are so transparent. You can read them like a book.’

‘He’s very kind,’ said Harriet.

Emma would not have chosen that description for Philip, but she was content to let it pass. She thought that he was probably somewhat selfish, but that this defect could be ignored as long as he treated Harriet considerately, which he probably would. What man would not be delighted to have the attention of such an astonishingly beautiful young woman, and what man, in his delight, would not be careful to indulge her financially? This was never going to be a permanent arrangement, and the whole point of it was that Harriet should get her gap year, with a little bit of spoiling thrown in. He was certainly kind enough to provide that, she thought, even if ultimately he was not a person she would saddle anybody with on a permanent basis.

‘How about next Tuesday?’ asked Emma.

Harriet was free, and she thought it would suit Philip too. ‘He said that he had nothing on all next week,’ she said.

Emma made a mental note. Philip had told her father on more than one occasion that he was overworked; the truth, it seemed, was rather different. She had noticed that people often claimed to be busier than they really were; there had been a lecturer at Bath, the aptly named Dr Snail, who had very little, if not nothing, to do and yet who always claimed to be overworked. It was guilt, she thought, that made them protest their busyness.