Emma begins an affair with Phillip Godalming

Emma Morley’s affair with Phillip Godalming begins in the wake of a broken engagement and turns a moment of distress at work into a clandestine relationship. Its course is marked from the outset by opposing forces: the thrill of being intensely desired and the guilt, secrecy, and growing discomfort of becoming a married man’s mistress.

The abandoned engagement

The affair follows a disastrous holiday in Corfu, where an engagement ring placed in a serving of calamari becomes the emblem of a proposal Emma cannot accept. She tells her fiancé that they want different things, and the remaining fortnight passes in sunburn, sulking, self-pity, and anxiety over whether the jeweller will take the ring back. The ring sits in their hotel-room suitcase, seeming to radiate the sadness of a future Emma does not want.

Back home, Emma’s mother, who knows about the proposal and has practically bought her wedding dress, responds with weeks of anger and complaint. That pressure makes Emma question her decision, but accepting the proposal would feel like surrender. Her literary idea that one should never cave in to marriage helps her hold to the refusal, though it does not spare her uncertainty.

From consolation to affair

The relationship with Phillip Godalming takes shape during a routine meeting in his office, when Emma bursts into tears. He comes from behind his desk, puts an arm around her, and presses his mouth to the top of her head. The gesture carries the sense of a long-awaited admission, but it is followed not by a declaration of commitment but by a transition into secrecy.

After work, Phillip Godalming takes Emma to a gastropub. They eat rib-eye steaks and goat’s cheese salad; when their knees touch beneath the large wooden table, Emma lets her feelings out. After a second bottle of wine, the hug becomes a kiss in the taxi home. A brown internal envelope appears in her pigeonhole afterward, with a message about the previous night, his inability to stop thinking about her, and the need to talk. The sequence makes the affair feel less like a single impulsive kiss than the culmination of emotion that had already been waiting for a way out.

The life of secrecy

Emma’s picture of adultery comes from 1970s television dramas and their middle-class props and rituals. In practice, she finds the affair’s furtive looks, hands held beneath tables, and encounters in the stationery cupboard unexpectedly familiar. Lust, intensified by guilt and self-loathing, proves more potent than the distant caricature she had associated with adultery.

For a time, the secrecy sits alongside moments of apparent tenderness: walks and conversation in a secluded part of Hackney Marshes on clear autumn evenings, or laughter at the school carol service after mulled wine, their hips touching. Emma sometimes thinks she is in love with Phillip Godalming. She regards him as a principled, passionate teacher who can be funny, though pompous; at forty-four, he is also much older than she is. His earnest intensity as a lover can be appealing and uncomfortable in equal measure, a private contrast to the teacher who addresses the assembly about a charity fun run.

Disillusionment at school

Nine months after the affair begins, its excitement has faded. On a beautiful summer evening, Emma waits outside the boys’ toilets while Phillip Godalming washes with institutional soap, and wonders why she is still there instead of with friends or with a lover she can acknowledge openly. The narration names the imbalance plainly: he is the Deputy Head of English and Theatre Studies, and she is his mistress. What once offered an escape from the dead end of an unwanted engagement now leaves Emma embarrassed by the role and the conditions under which the relationship exists.

When Phillip Godalming emerges, he takes Emma’s hand, then discreetly lets it go as they step outside. He locks the school’s main door and sets the alarm; they walk to his car in the evening light at a professional distance, his leather briefcase occasionally striking the back of Emma’s shin. Their careful separation in public condenses the affair’s changed meaning: intimacy persists, but it must be hidden within the institution where it began.