Emma: A Modern Retelling

7

James Weston toyed with the idea of turning down the invitation to dinner at Hartfield. It was for a Friday evening, and Friday was the night on which he regularly went to a nearby gym for a session with his personal trainer, Ken. Ken was highly sought-after as a personal trainer and had only taken James on as a favour for Mr Perry, who had helped him set up his practice by lending him the money for the hefty insurance premium he was obliged to pay. (‘You’d be surprised at what people can do to themselves on the rowing machines,’ Ken had said one day, shaking his head in disbelief.) So when Mr Perry put in a good word for James he could hardly refuse to fit him in.

Ken, it transpired, was happy to reschedule their appointment.

‘Don’t let things slip, but,’ he said. He had a disconcerting habit of adding but to the end of each sentence; a linguistic quirk that betrayed his Northern Irish origins.

‘I’ll go on Saturday,’ promised James. ‘I’ll make up for it.’

‘Good,’ said Ken. ‘You can lose twelve per cent of your fitness in twenty-four hours, but.’

James was in his mid-fifties, but still very fit, having been a distinguished rugby player in his earlier years, coming close one season to being selected to play for England against Wales. That selection did not materialise, and an injury to his knee brought his sporting career to an end, but he had maintained at least some of his training programme and had continued to go to the gym several times a week. His blood pressure was accordingly low – something that Mr Woodhouse had been very interested to hear about, and that he took pleasure in discussing with his friend whenever he saw him. Whereas most of us might make a general enquiry about the health of a friend when we met, Mr Woodhouse liked to hear precise details, rather to James’s embarrassment.

‘You’re extremely fortunate,’ Mr Woodhouse said when he came across his friend in the village on the day before the dinner party. ‘What’s your resting heart rate at the moment?’

James Weston shrugged modestly. ‘It’s not too bad, I suppose.’

‘No, come on. What is it?’

James realised that an answer was expected. ‘Forty-eight, as it happens,’ he said. ‘The gym, you see—’

‘Forty-eight!’ exclaimed Mr Woodhouse. ‘You know what mine is? Seventy-eight. Yes, I’m afraid that’s the case. Seventy-eight to your forty-eight.’ He paused, looking at James with undisguised admiration. ‘And your blood pressure?’

James sighed. ‘It’s OK.’

Mr Woodhouse was not to be fobbed off. ‘Go on. Let me hear the worst.’

‘One hundred and ten over sixty-five,’ muttered James.

Mr Woodhouse was tight-lipped. Then he said, ‘I was one hundred and thirty-five over ninety this morning. I took it twice. Same result each time.’

James was tactful. ‘Sometimes you need to recalibrate the sphygmomanometer,’ he said. ‘They can give very inaccurate readings if you don’t calibrate them correctly.’

‘But I have recalibrated it,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘Twice. I’m afraid it’s accurate.’

‘Oh well,’ said James, ‘you could perhaps do a bit more exercise – that helps to lower blood pressure. How about coming to the gym some day?’

Mr Woodhouse did not respond.

‘You might find it enjoyable,’ went on James.

Mr Woodhouse looked away. ‘I have so much to do,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where the time goes, but I doubt if I could find time to go to the gym.’

‘Then nobody’s forcing you,’ said James.

Although they did not have much in common when it came to resting heart rate and blood pressure, Mr Woodhouse and James had something very much in common in that both had suffered the loss of their wives. In James’s case, his wife had died of a malignant tumour that had been diagnosed far too late for anything to be done about it. They had one child – a boy called Frank – who had been slightly over two when she died. James had taken his wife’s death very badly, and had struggled to look after Frank, who had a milk and egg allergy – later grown out of – and who had been obliged in his early years to eat a closely supervised diet. A relative who lived in Yorkshire came forward and offered to take Frank off his hands. In his grief and his helplessness, James accepted the offer, and so Frank went off to stay with Mr and Mrs Churchill, where he quickly settled in. James visited him from time to time, and on each of these occasions the Churchills were worried that he would reclaim his son. At the end of each visit, though, seeing Frank so happily settled, James forbore to take him home. Eventually it was agreed that Frank would stay with the Churchills and that they would give him their name. ‘He can always revert to being Frank Weston,’ they assured his father. ‘Let him choose what he wants to be later on. And names are not so very important, are they?’

When Frank was eight, the Churchills left Yorkshire for Australia. The reason for their emigration was that Mr Churchill’s great-uncle had left him a wine estate in Margaret River, a choice wine-growing area in Western Australia. The estate was one of the earliest and best-established estates in the area, a much better proposition than the smaller, bijou wineries that were set up after the region became fashionable. This inheritance, fortunate as it might have appeared to those who were unaware of the Churchills’ circumstances, led to days of agonising indecision and heart-searching. The prospect of going to Western Australia, to live in one of the most attractive parts of the state, on an established and prize-winning wine estate, was almost irresistible to the oenophile Mr Churchill. He had sampled his great-uncle’s wine, several cases of which had been despatched to him with each harvest, and the thought of taking charge of an estate that produced such a fine product was an immensely attractive. He knew that there was a good wine-maker on the estate, and a manager who could run the place perfectly competently, but he feared that having a distant owner would inevitably lead to problems. If he lived there, he could take personal charge of the business, and could bring his own agricultural skills to bear on the enterprise. And at the time that the news came through of his inheritance, the skies over the Churchill farm near Ripon were particularly low and grey. Western Australia, which Mr Churchill had visited shortly after he had graduated from Cirencester, had wide, empty skies, filled with light and, as he remembered it, birdsong. The contrast was just too tempting; he had to go; he just had to.

But if they went, what would become of Frank, to whom he and his wife had become as attached as if he were their own son? While James might be have been happy enough to allow Frank to stay with them in Yorkshire, would he agree to their removing him from the country altogether and taking him to Western Australia, which was about as far away from anywhere as one could get – far away, even, from Melbourne and Sydney, let alone England?

For days the Churchills debated with themselves as to what they should do. Eventually they plucked up the courage to approach James, who listened gravely to their description of the estate and their enumeration of the attractions of Western Australia. Mr Churchill came to an end and glanced at his wife. Their fate, they knew, was in James’s hands. If he said no, and refused to allow Frank to go with them, they would probably stay in Ripon.

‘But of course you must go,’ said James. ‘Imagine how young Frank will love it. What a wonderful start for any boy.’

They could hardly believe his generosity. ‘It’s an awful long way away,’ said Mr Churchill. ‘I can’t imagine that we shall be back in England every year.’

‘No, I doubt if you would,’ said James. ‘But then I might come out to see Frank one of these days – who knows? He’ll have the time of his life out there. The Australians are such a positive and cheerful people. He’ll become an Australian, no doubt, which is a fate that I would gladly wish on anyone.’

‘So we should go?’

‘Of course you should. Of course.’

They left a few months later. Frank was brought to James to say goodbye, and they spent a long time talking about Western Australia and what the boy might expect there. Then, when it was time to go, James embraced his son briefly and stiffly. He was in tears, and did not wish the boy to see him cry. So he turned away, and the boy looked at him reproachfully, thinking that he was being rebuffed.

‘Your daddy is very sad,’ whispered Mr Churchill. ‘Australia is a long way away.’

Although relatively few people in Highbury had actually seen the young Frank Churchill, this did not mean that people in the village and its surroundings did not know all about him. James Weston had spent his youth in Highbury and his later prowess on the rugby field had been a source of local pride. Nobody from the area had achieved prominence in anything very much – if one discounted Mr Woodhouse, of course, and his obscure invention – so to have somebody almost picked for the English rugby side was something of a distinction. James was popular, too, for his genial, friendly nature, and for the fact that he never appeared to make any uncharitable remarks. In the country, where memories of ancient insult can be long, this was something sufficiently unusual to be a matter of remark. ‘Dislikes nobody, he does,’ said one local, adding helpfully, ‘Nor he don’t.’ No disentanglement of double negatives was required to understand this sentiment: James’s amiable smile and courteous nod of the head to those he met in the street was enough to make that meaning quite clear.

People were aware at the time of the handing over of the young Frank to the Churchills, but nobody disapproved, or, if they did, nobody voiced any criticism of the sorrowing widower. It was a tragedy, people felt, that the young and popular Mrs Weston should die so suddenly, and how could her husband – how could any man – cope with a two-year-old, particularly a two-year-old who was sickly with some food issue? It made complete sense, everyone agreed, for the late wife’s sister-in-law to step in and take over, particularly since the Churchills were known to be so wealthy. In the country one of the most important measures of worth is simple acreage, uncomplicated by any other issue, and even if their land was in distant Yorkshire, they were said to possess over seven hundred acres of good arable fields and two thousand of grazing. For a young boy to be taken in by such a family was, in country eyes, good fortune on a major scale, and for a father to allow such a thing was not an indication of lack of care for a child but indeed the complete opposite.

It was not that James Weston was penniless, but at that time there was not a great deal of spare cash. His own father had been an army officer who had purchased one of the village houses when he left his regiment, the Royal Signals, extended it by the addition of a large conservatory, and had then led a reasonably comfortable life on a combination of his army pension and a small income from the sale of a family catering concern in Norwich. James had been something of an afterthought in that marriage – there were three much older brothers – and he had lost both parents by the time he was nineteen. His older brothers were by that time working in London, and doing rather well in a distribution business they had set up together. They put James through the remainder of his university course in business studies, and made him their junior partner when he was ready to join them a few years later. They were enthusiastic in support of his rugby career, giving him plenty of time off for training and touring and always attending any game in which he played. They were generous, too, in making over to him the house in Highbury – he was the only one keen to keep links with the village; when he went there for weekends, as he often did, none of them ever joined him. After his marriage, James took up permanent residence in the Highbury house, commuting to London during the week for work – a lengthy journey that he was prepared to undertake in order to allow his wife and, in due course, young son to live a more comfortable country existence.

The death of his wife ended this rural idyll, and although he kept the house in the village after Frank had gone to the Churchills, he now moved to London, to a small flat in Maida Vale. In his misery, he threw himself into his work, and into the task of coaching a boys’ rugby team in Wimbledon. He emerged from his grief, of course, but loss had left its mark and it was more than five years before he felt capable of entering into a new relationship. This was with a woman who worked for a medium-sized London legal firm. She was an expert in bankruptcy law and had just become a partner. They began to live together in her flat, and were happy enough for ten years before she suddenly disclosed to him that she wanted to live by herself again. He suspected initially that there was somebody else involved – a fact that she vigorously denied, and truthfully, as it turned out; she had simply fallen out of love with him.

James reverted to his bachelor existence. He was now a senior figure in rugby-training circles, and this took up much of his spare time. He was generous, too, with his donations to a training programme he had set up to foster interest in the sport among young offenders. As one of his brothers later remarked, ‘OK, some of them played a bit too rough, but he saved goodness knows how many boys from prison. Ten? Twenty? Who knows? Better to assault somebody on the rugby field than on the street. Far better.’

At the age of forty-seven, James was able to achieve an ambition that he had nursed for over ten years. Randalls, a small estate – not much more than two hundred acres – had come on the market after its owner, a successful commodities trader, had lost interest in it. The trader had bought it to impress his friends, but had discovered that he had the wrong sort of friends for this purpose. To begin with, they had been happy to leave London for the weekends and enjoy his hospitality, but he found that after one visit they did not accept further invitations. ‘Very quiet,’ one of them had said. ‘And very flat.’ The remark about flatness was passed without irony, and without any nod in the direction of Noel Coward; it summed up, though, the view in those particular circles that there was not much to be seen in that part of the country – the flatness of the topography saw to that – and certainly not much to do.

Randalls came on to the market at exactly the right time for James. The distribution firm that he owned with brothers was facing take-over by a rival, and they had received a remarkably large offer for a controlling share in the company. They hesitated, but only for a short time: the offer allowed them all to remain active in the firm for five years, although none of them would need to do so. With his share of the sale, James could purchase Randalls, spend as much as he needed to improve the house and outbuildings, and have enough to live on very comfortably for the rest of his life.

The purchase made, he withdrew from the firm altogether and returned to Highbury. He was not one to retire early, and Randalls kept him busy. The previous owner had neglected the land, and it was not in good condition. James went on a fencing course and began to tackle the task of replacing the fences. Once the paddocks were secure, he purchased a flock of Suffolk sheep and a small number of cattle. He used help from the village, taking on a man called Sid, who was in due course also to work for Mr Woodhouse, dividing his time between the two places. They got on well together and gradually began to get Randalls back into shape. ‘You can’t ignore the land,’ said Sid, reflecting on the commodity trader’s bad husbandry. ‘You ignore the land and you know what happens? The land ignores you. That’s what it does, I tell you.’

‘You know something?’ said Sid to his wife. ‘You know that James Weston has a son? Did you ever hear that?’

‘I heard something,’ she replied. ‘They say that when his wife died he went to pieces. Couldn’t do anything, and couldn’t look after the baby. Who can blame him? Poor man.’

‘Well, that baby was a boy,’ said Sid. ‘He went off up Yorkshire way somewhere and then off to Australia. He came back when he was sixteen – visited his father, but went back to Australia.’

‘Where did you hear all that, Sid? Gossip down at the pub?’

Sid shook his head. ‘He told me himself. We were sitting in the Land Rover – finished some fencing and having a spot of lunch. He had a couple of Melton Mowbray pies – delicious they were – and he started talking about this son of his, Frank. He said that he’s twenty-four now and that he thought he might be coming over to see him again. Then he went all quiet for a while. He sat there. So I just ate my Melton Mowbray pie and let him get on with his thinking.’

‘Guilt, maybe.’

‘Odd, that’s exactly what he said. He said to me, “Sid, I feel bad that I let that boy go.” I said to him, “But, Mr Weston, you couldn’t have brought him up, you being by yourself. Far better for a boy to have a stepmother.” He listened to me all right, and I think he was pleased that I said that, but then he said, “I feel that I let him down. When I saw him after he went up to Yorkshire he seemed so settled and content that I didn’t have the heart to take him away from them. But I think maybe I should have.” ’

Sid’s words to James were comforting; the reassurance of those around us that we have done the right thing almost always helps, although it may not, as in this case, remove the underlying anxiety that we have acted selfishly or foolishly, or even perversely. It was not the first time that James had discussed his feelings for having abandoned – the word that kept cropping up in his mind – his infant son. Shortly after the Churchills had left for Australia, his brother, Edward, had come across him at his desk in their London office, sitting staring into the distance as if he were a man in a trance. Edward had assumed that it was daydreaming, and had smiled at the thought that his younger brother was mentally re-enacting some triumph on the rugby field. But when he looked more closely, he noticed the tears in James’s eyes. Pride, he thought, or perhaps regret at a missed try – so much could be invested in that heroic sprint towards the touchline, and yet it could all go wrong as a last-ditch tackle brought one to the ground in an undignified heap of limbs and torsos.

He had approached him, and that was when he realised that expression on his brother’s face was one of sorrow; that the tears were ones of pain rather than of pride. In the ensuing conversation there came to the surface emotions that had been concealed for too long. Edward was understanding, and at the end had suggested his brother see somebody who had helped him with a flying phobia that had made business trips a nightmare.

‘She’s a psychotherapist,’ he said. ‘Not a psychiatrist. I’m not saying you need a shrink. She sits and listens and then she explains it all.’ He paused. ‘I’ll take you. It’s sometimes hard to go on your own. I’ll do it.’

Edward had accompanied his brother to make the introduction. Then he had left him, and James found himself seated on the other side of the psychotherapist’s desk, embarrassed at where he was, unable to bring himself to speak.

Gently she coaxed it out of him. ‘I stopped myself thinking about it,’ he said. ‘Every time it came into my mind, I said, It didn’t happen. But it would always come back to me, this thought: I gave away my son. I gave him away.’

‘And your dreams?’

He had not mentioned those – not to Edward, nor to her.

‘Yes, I dreamed about playing with him. I dreamed that he was there in the flat. I dreamed that I was taking him to school.’

‘Of course you would.’

She told him something that she knew every patient liked to hear – that he was not alone, that there were others. ‘I have somebody who comes to see me because she gave her baby away in adoption,’ she said. ‘Now she wants her back, but, as you know, you can’t do that. And there are others. I’ve had people coming in here – not just women, men too – who have felt guilty about abortions, about the fact that they disposed of something they now feel was the beginnings of a baby. Not an easy subject, and not one we like to talk about. But some of these people feel regret, and it can haunt them. What you’re experiencing is not all that different from what they feel.’

James listened, but did not say anything.

‘Every case is different, though,’ she continued. ‘Some people act selfishly. They give a child up for adoption because they can’t be bothered with it. By no means everyone is like that, but some are. You didn’t do that, did you? From what you tell me, you gave Frank up because you couldn’t cope. You were bereaved – it was entirely understandable. And then, later on, when you could have taken him back, you realised that he had a much better life with your wife’s relatives. That wasn’t a selfish decision – it was quite the opposite, in fact.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, I do – and I think most people would look at it that way. Most of us are quite selfish when it comes to our children, you know. We want things from them: love, the satisfaction of seeing them do well, and so on. Plenty of parents don’t think just of their child’s best interest. Oh, they may pay lip service to it, but they really think of themselves, of what they get from parenting.’

She saw him several times, and it helped. The dreams of Frank seemed to stop, or changed in such a way that he no longer remembered them. He found himself thinking of the boy less frequently, and, when he did come to mind, his thoughts of him were free of remorse. He wrote to the Churchills and expressed his pleasure that Frank was so happy in Australia. He wrote in such a way that he made them think that their move to the wine estate had been entirely motivated by concern for Frank’s future. He said that he hoped that Frank might be able to come and see him for a brief holiday some time; he made sure to stress that it would be brief, as he did not want the Churchills to read into his invitation any suggestion that this would be the beginning of an effort to get Frank back.

The Churchills returned to England on visits three times during Frank’s childhood – when he was ten, when he was twelve, and then shortly after his sixteenth birthday. On each occasion they offered James as much time with the boy as he wished, and the offer was readily accepted. The first visit was not a particularly long one, but the second was for an entire month, and James took Frank for a full two weeks. They went to Ireland together, and camped for several days on the Dingle Peninsula, enduring rain and flooded fields. Frank was appreciative of everything that his father did, and thanked him profusely, with a formality that James found strangely old-fashioned. The manners came from the school he attended – he had spent his first year at a weekly boarding school in Perth, where such things were still stressed and over-familiarity with adults was as yet unknown.

The trip to Ireland gave him an opportunity to talk to his son about what had happened. They lay in the darkness, listening to the sound of the rain on the roof of their tent; somewhere, in the distance, were waves crashing against rocks.

‘You may wonder why you went to live your uncle and aunt,’ he said. ‘You must have thought it a bit strange.’

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I didn’t think about it because I don’t really remember anything.’

‘It was because your mother died, you see.’

‘I know,’ said the boy. ‘That’s why.’

The conversation faltered at that point, and did not resume. What is the expression? James silently asked himself. What is the expression that pop psychologists use? Or problem-page people? It came to him. Unfinished business. Exactly.

By the time that Frank visited at sixteen, it was too late to talk. The cautious, rather reserved little boy had become something quite different: a gregarious, confident teenager, endowed with blossoming good looks and conscious of his power to charm. A young Adonis, he turned the heads of almost all those who even had so much as a glimpse of him. His wide smile exposed a line of white that contrasted strongly with the olive of his sun tan; a head of blond curls, like that of a Renaissance angel, topped shoulders that were broad for a boy and that gave him an air of strength and firmness. The Churchills paraded him with pride; James stared at him with unconcealed wonder, verging on disbelief. Was this what Australia did?

‘Frank wants to be a geologist,’ Mr Churchill said to James. ‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Of course,’ said James. They consulted him from time to time on matters pertaining to Frank’s education, but he had never sought to interfere.

‘There are plenty of opportunities for geologists in Western Australia,’ continued Mr Churchill. ‘And he could help to run the vineyard too. He’s good at that now. He helped a lot with the last harvest.’

James nodded. Frank’s life lay elsewhere – in the things that sixteen-year-old Australian boys liked to do; in a world of surfboards and freedom. There was no future for him in England, even now that he had Randalls. What were a few acres in Norfolk, bound by hedgerows and lanes, to the trackless ranges of Western Australia; what were his copses to their jarrah forests; Norfolk’s chilly beaches to their sun-drenched coasts? The psychotherapist had suggested all those years ago that he should do two things: one was to enjoy Frank’s good fortune – thereby validating his own, earlier choice – and the other was to envisage a sense of a future for himself. He would do both.

He followed her advice. He found Randalls and began to work on rescuing it from near-ruin. And once he had made progress with that, he started to consider his situation. He had a house; he had a farm; he had a comfortable income. What was lacking? A wife, perhaps? A lover? He had seen the bankruptcy lawyer at a party recently. She had been with her new partner, a man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a rather prominent nose. He had watched her from across the room before she noticed that he was there. He felt nothing; there was no pang, not the slightest one, and that confirmed his feeling that he was ready to find somebody who would not think him unexciting, as she clearly had.

They had talked, struggling to make each other heard in the crowded room.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Absolutely. And you?’

She did not hesitate. ‘Yes. I’m busy.’

‘All that bankruptcy?’

‘Yes. It never ends.’ She looked at him enquiringly. ‘And are you …’

He knew what the unfinished question was. ‘I’m by myself,’ he said. ‘But I’m seeing someone.’

It was a lie, and he never normally lied. He did not know why he should wish to mislead her; it was something to do with pride, he thought. He did not want her pity.

‘I hope she’s right for you,’ she said.

He hesitated. ‘I think she is.’

His hesitation was not caused by doubt, but by the sudden realisation that he knew exactly who it was who was just right for him; it had suddenly occurred to him. Of course she was. Of course.