Emma Bloom—Abraham Portman

Emma Bloom and Abraham Portman were former lovers whose relationship joined the history of Miss Peregrine’s household to Jacob Portman’s family past. Abraham left to fight in the war, promising to return, but never came back to Emma; their letters dwindled over the years, ending with a photograph sent in 1963. The relationship matters not only as a long private heartbreak, but also because Jacob initially approaches Emma as a possible echo of his grandfather and must recognize that her feelings belong to Abraham, not to him.

The relationship and its first disclosure

Miss Peregrine explains that Abraham’s departure for the war had taken the hearts of everyone in the household, but Emma’s especially. She describes Emma and Abraham as admirers, paramours, and sweethearts. The disclosure clarifies why Emma had reacted so sensitively to Jacob’s grandfather: his arrival seemed to raise the possibility of news about Abraham, and perhaps to reopen the pain of his absence.

The revelation also changes Jacob’s understanding of Emma’s reluctance to believe him. He recognizes that she could reasonably fear he had come to deliver bad news about Abraham. Their history, then, precedes Jacob’s arrival and shapes the first encounter between grandson and former sweetheart: Jacob is not merely telling an unfamiliar story about his family, but bringing Abraham’s name back into a household where it carries unresolved feeling.

The letters and the long separation

Jacob discovers the correspondence in a hatbox in Emma’s bedroom. It contains a hundred or more letters from Abraham, many written in the early 1940s while he was serving in the army. Their early exchanges are affectionate and playful; one letter includes a photograph of Abraham posing on a bomb with a cigarette. The letters give physical form to a relationship that Emma had not explained to Jacob and show that Abraham continued writing during his wartime absence.

The correspondence changes with time. Abraham’s letters grow shorter and less frequent, until by the 1950s there is perhaps only one a year. The final envelope is dated April 1963 and contains pictures rather than a letter. Two are photographs of Emma that she had sent to Abraham and that he later returned: one shows her playfully peeling potatoes and pretending to smoke one of Miss Peregrine’s pipes, while another has a sadder tone. The last image Abraham sent her shows him at middle age holding a little girl: Jacob’s aunt Susie, then about four years old.

The photographs make the separation legible through objects rather than explanation. The last image connects Emma’s lost relationship to the family Abraham formed after leaving; after that envelope, the correspondence stops. Jacob wonders whether Emma continued writing without receiving replies and whether Abraham discarded or kept her letters. He also suspects that a letter discovered by his father and aunt in childhood may have led them to believe Abraham had been dishonest. The evidence does not settle what became of Emma’s own letters, but it lets Jacob see how a partial discovery could distort the family’s understanding of Abraham.

Emma’s account of Abraham’s departure

When Jacob asks what happened, Emma reduces the story to its central break: Abraham left, said he loved her, and promised to come back one day, but never did. She recalls that he chose to fight because he believed he could not live with himself if he stayed out of the war while his people were being hunted and killed. He called it his duty. Emma does not claim to know whether he had to go; what she remembers is that duty took him away from her.

During the war she waited and worried, fearing that each letter might announce Abraham’s death. After the war, he told her he could not return, saying that he would lose his mind there and no longer needed Miss Peregrine to look after him because the army had taught him to defend himself. He planned to go to America, make a home for them, and send for her. Emma waited again, but the promised reunion never came. By the time she imagined how long the delay had lasted, she says, she would have been forty had she gone to join him; Abraham had by then taken up with a commoner, and the relationship was over.

Memory, grief, and Jacob’s position

Emma calls the story old and says she no longer recounts it often, yet her later exchange with Jacob shows that the loss remains present. When he suggests that she blames Abraham for being stuck in the household, she rejects the premise and says she does not blame him; she simply misses him. Asked whether she still misses him, she answers that she does every day. Her account distinguishes blame from attachment: the relationship ended, but the feeling did not disappear with it.

As Emma sorts the letters and closes the box, the neatly contained correspondence becomes a record of a history that cannot be neatly put away. Jacob sees pain still apparent beneath her composed features. He considers comforting her, then realizes that her warmth toward him has led him to mistake resemblance and proximity for a new attachment. He understands that he is a stand-in for Abraham in the emotional space between them, and that Emma’s affection is directed toward his grandfather. The recognition puts a boundary around Jacob’s imagined closeness with her and makes the family connection consequential in the present, not merely a story about the past.

Significance in the family history

The romance is revealed in stages: Miss Peregrine names the relationship, Jacob finds its surviving letters and photographs, and Emma supplies the account of Abraham’s choices and her years of waiting. That sequence turns a private history into a reinterpretation of what Jacob knows about his grandfather. The returned photographs and the final image of Susie suggest how Abraham’s life continued beyond Emma, while the unanswered question of Emma’s later letters preserves the limits of what Jacob can recover.

For Emma, Abraham’s departure is both a past ending and an enduring absence. For Jacob, it is a key to her sensitivity and to the danger of confusing himself with the person she once loved. Their relationship therefore binds two generations without making them interchangeable: Jacob can uncover the evidence and hear Emma’s account, but he cannot undo the promise that was never fulfilled or take Abraham’s place.