Texas

Texas occupies a recurring place in the novel as both a landscape that appeals to Emma Harte and a center of the oil enterprise she shares with Paul McGill. Her trips there are not merely excursions: they take her into the business world of Sitex, expose her to conflict over the company’s direction, and connect her experience of Yorkshire with a much larger commercial network.

A landscape Emma recognizes

Emma’s attachment to Texas predates the exhausting business journey that brings her back to New York. She sees the state’s rough, sprawling power as akin to that of her native Yorkshire, a comparison that gives her response to Texas a personal as well as a commercial dimension. The resemblance does not make the two places interchangeable; rather, it offers her a way to understand an unfamiliar region through the qualities of the landscape she knows.

On the return journey from Texas, Emma is weary from several days of contentious meetings at Sitex’s headquarters in Odessa. She is relieved to be leaving the state for the comparative calm of her New York offices, yet her fatigue is not a rejection of Texas. The novel makes the contrast explicit: she has always had a liking for the state, but this particular trip has worn her down. Her return by private Lear jet, owned by Sitex Oil Corporation of America, places the strain of corporate travel alongside the scale and resources of the business that brings her there.

Oil, travel, and commercial reach

Texas enters Emma and Paul’s shared life through oil. Paul’s fields are located in the state, and Emma is interested in the business behind them. After a dinner with Paul, she asks to hear more about his Texas oil fields and the Sydney-Texas Oil Company, treating his new venture as a subject worthy of her attention rather than as a distant part of his affairs. Their conversation establishes that her involvement with the region is tied to both personal intimacy and serious commercial interest.

The couple’s travel makes that connection concrete. They visit the Sydney-Texas Oil Company in East Texas, then continue to West Texas, where Paul buys oil leases in Odessa and Midland. These purchases extend the company’s reach and bring its internal disagreements into focus. Texas is thus not simply a source of oil in the background: it is where decisions about investment and expansion become material, and where Paul’s willingness to commit capital tests the more cautious outlook of his partner, Harry Marriott.

The company’s name, Sydney-Texas Oil Company, also signals a business linking distant regions. Elsewhere in the novel, Australia is proposed as a possible site for sheep-farming investment, while Yorkshire’s wool industry depends on local sheep and suitable water. Texas belongs to a different branch of this expanding commercial world: oil rather than wool, with Emma and Paul’s journeys joining business interests across continents. The evidence does not make Texas part of the Yorkshire textile supply chain; instead, it shows Emma operating across distinct industries and places.

Expansion and opposition

Paul regards the leases in Odessa and Midland as a necessary step in the company’s growth. He believes that expanding beyond existing holdings is vital, and plans to begin drilling before the end of the year. His confidence rests in part on earlier investment decisions, including the purchase of oil tankers, which he considers an asset that has more than repaid its cost. For him, the Texas purchases are another opportunity to put capital behind a larger future for the company.

Marriott objects to the risk. Paul characterizes him as inclined to play safe and unwilling to gamble with what the company has already accumulated; Emma already dislikes Marriott and asks Paul why the new purchases have angered him. Their exchange reveals a disagreement not only about particular leases but about how a wealthy company should treat risk and growth. Paul has majority control of the company, a fact Emma recognizes as protection against Marriott becoming an insurmountable obstacle. The leases therefore connect the Texas landscape to a question of corporate power: who has authority to determine where the company invests and how far it expands.

Texas in Emma’s wider story

Texas recurs at the intersection of Emma’s personal attachments and her business responsibilities. She travels there with Paul, visits the company and its oil-producing region, and returns to the state in the course of work that can leave her physically tired without diminishing her long-standing interest in it. The location also brings Emma into direct contact with the scale of Paul’s enterprise and with the strategic choices that shape its future.

The contrast with Yorkshire gives this commercial geography a personal dimension. Emma’s recognition of a familiar kind of rugged power helps make Texas legible to her, even as the state’s oil business differs from the wool and textile enterprises associated with her home region. Across these journeys, Texas stands for both affinity and reach: a place Emma feels drawn to, and a base from which a business built on investment, travel, and expansion can grow.