Emma begins an affair with Phil

Emma Morley begins an affair with Phil Godalming after the collapse of her engagement, turning an already emotionally charged workplace relationship into a clandestine romance. The affair’s beginning is presented not as a sudden escape from consequence but as a chain of choices: an unwanted ring, Emma’s refusal to marry, a breakdown in Phil’s office, and a kiss on the journey home from dinner.

Background and the Broken Engagement

The affair began the September after a disastrous holiday in Corfu, where an engagement ring had appeared in a calamari dish. Emma told her fiancé that they wanted different things. The rest of the fortnight passed amid sunburn, sulking, self-pity, and anxiety about whether the ring could be returned; to Emma, the ring itself seemed to radiate melancholy. Her mother, Sue Morley, had welcomed the proposal and was furious when Emma came home unhappy, but accepting it would have felt like giving in. Emma’s idea of marriage was partly shaped by novels, which had taught her that a woman should not cave in to it.

From the Office to the Taxi

The change in Emma and Phil’s relationship comes during a routine meeting in Phil’s office. Emma bursts into tears; Phil comes from behind his desk, puts an arm around her, and presses his mouth to the top of her head. After work, he takes her to a gastropub he has heard about, where they share rib-eye steaks and goat’s-cheese salad. Their knees touch beneath the wooden table as Emma lets her feelings spill out. After two bottles of wine, the transition from comfort to intimacy seems almost a formality: a hug becomes a kiss in the taxi home.

The next evidence of their new relationship is an envelope left in Emma’s pigeonhole. In it, Phil writes that he cannot stop thinking about her, says he has felt this way for years, and asks when they can talk. The message gives the encounter an apparent history beyond that evening, although it reaches Emma as a written declaration after the kiss has already crossed the boundary between friendship and affair.

Secrecy, Guilt, and the Affair’s Meaning

Emma had learned to associate adultery with television dramas of the 1970s and with a world of Cinzano, Triumph TR7s, cheese-and-wine parties, golf, and yachts. Once involved, she finds the familiar conventions of secrecy—looks exchanged, hands held under tables, and caresses in the stationery cupboard—less remote than she had imagined. Lust, she discovers, is potent when entangled with guilt and self-loathing.

The affair also becomes a fact of Emma’s working life: Phil is her boss, and their intimacy occupies the same institutional setting as her everyday duties. In a later scene, she retrieves her underwear from beneath a desk while Phil’s domestic life presses audibly into the room; she thinks of herself as his mistress, a word she finds repellent and servile. The affair has resolved Emma’s immediate uncertainty about marriage without freeing her from its consequences. Its beginning thus joins emotional comfort and desire to secrecy, an unequal workplace relation, and Emma’s growing estrangement from the life she finds herself living.