New York City serves as a central American base for Emma Harte’s business empire: a place where she oversees far-flung interests in person and where the city’s steel-and-glass skyline becomes an emblem of industrial wealth. The narrative sets its scale against more intimate points of return, especially Pennistone Royal, while showing that the organization’s reach depends on connections among American capital, British manufacturing, and overseas resources.

Corporate Headquarters

Harte Enterprises occupies six floors of a modern office block on Park Avenue in the Fifties. The offices are the living heart of a privately held corporation whose holdings extend across clothing factories, woollen mills, real estate, retail merchandise, and newspapers in England, as well as substantial shareholdings in other British companies. Emma founded the corporation and retains all its shares; its operations remain under her aegis. Harte Stores, by contrast, is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, although Emma is its majority shareholder and board chairman.

The New York interests also have a distinct American base. They include real estate, a Seventh Avenue dress-manufacturing company, and investments in other American industries. Emma’s wider fortune extends beyond these businesses: she owns 40 per cent of Sitex Oil Corporation of America and holds extensive Australian interests in property, mining, coal fields, and a large sheep station in New South Wales. New York is therefore not the whole of her commercial world but a command point within a network that joins different industries and continents.

Emma’s Office and the Manhattan Skyline

Emma’s own office is on the thirtieth floor, with a plate-glass window spanning one wall and opening onto a panoramic view of the city. She sees the skyline as a living image of power, wealth, and American industry. The room’s design extends that impression without making it austere: a massive glass desk on a polished-steel base faces the window, while Mies van der Rohe chairs, slender Italian sofas, rosewood cabinets, and Italian marble tables furnish the space.

The setting also reveals Emma’s deliberate sense of style. Her London executive suite is filled with the Georgian antiques she prefers, but she chose sleek modern furnishings for New York to suit the architecture of the steel-and-glass building. French Impressionist paintings, Henry Moore and Brancusi sculptures, and temple heads from Angkor Wat soften the room’s modern lines. With its subdued blues and greys and sheer curtains, the office seems suspended in the sky above Manhattan’s concrete towers: a private space shaped to command a view of the city and its commercial force.

A Base for Personal Oversight

Emma travels to New York several times a year and remains actively involved in every area of her business empire. Though she trusts the executives to whom she has delegated considerable authority, she also brings a characteristically Yorkshire caution to the work: she prefers to leave nothing to chance and believes her presence should be felt in New York from time to time. The headquarters is thus more than an address for the company; it is where delegation and personal oversight meet.

On one return, Emma arrives with Paula after a tiring trip that has taken her to Texas for board meetings at Sitex’s corporate headquarters in Odessa. She is relieved to be leaving Texas for the relative calm of her own New York offices, though the city greets her with a raw January day, a sharp wind, and a cold that aggravates her hacking cough. After the Cadillac brings them from Kennedy Airport, she makes the company’s thirtieth-floor offices the first stop in her day’s work. Her attention is already fixed on Gaye Sloane, whose increasingly nervous manner has led Emma to suspect a business problem affecting her. New York is where she intends to confront that concern directly.

A Node in Wider Circuits

The city’s corporate role gains meaning from the other places and resources connected to it. Emma’s Yorkshire interests include the woollen mills and clothing businesses that supply major orders; during the First World War, the mill and factory turn out uniforms for government contracts. Her Australian holdings include sheep and other resources, while the New York portfolio includes oil shares and manufacturing. These details place the city within a transnational system of investment and production rather than presenting it as an isolated center of wealth.

The novel also sets New York’s urban and corporate scale against a more personal geography. Looking out from a private aircraft after leaving Texas, Emma recalls the clear Yorkshire sky over Pennistone Royal and anticipates returning to the house, its gardens, and her grandchildren. New York is the working center to which she returns for decisions and oversight; Pennistone Royal is the place she associates with rest and peace. That contrast gives the city a double significance: it is both the visible height of Emma’s power and one demanding station in a life whose business reach repeatedly draws her across the world.