Phillip Godalming

Phillip Godalming is the headmaster of Cromwell Road Comprehensive School and a teacher Emma Morley regards as principled, passionate, and sometimes pompous. His striking black beard gives him an instantly recognizable presence, but his defining contradiction is less visual: he occupies a position of authority in the school while conducting a clandestine affair with Emma, one of his senior colleagues. As the excitement fades, the school’s familiar rooms become the setting for a relationship Emma increasingly finds difficult to reconcile with the life she wants.

Identity and Presence

Phillip first appears through Emma’s sharply comic impression of him: his exceptionally black, neatly trimmed beard dominates his face, while his blue eyes seem to peer out from it. The image is so immediate that beard is the first word that comes to Emma’s mind when she sees him. His authority is unmistakable—he is the headmaster—but he also has a jaunty, informal manner when he enters after hours and asks how things are going. The contrast between his imposing appearance and easy schoolroom sociability makes him a familiar, vivid presence in Emma’s working life.

At a school production, Phillip is uneasy as he asks Emma what to expect. She cannot predict whether the evening will go well; he admits a preference for Sweet Charity and wonders why the school could not stage it instead. The exchange shows his involvement in the school’s theatrical life, but also his difference from Emma, who has invested herself in the production at hand. His response to her work is not simply administrative: as the evening approaches, he tells her she looks beautiful. Emma’s vintage floral dress and modest make-up are part of the moment, but it is the unexpected personal attention that throws her. The headmaster’s compliment briefly unsettles the professional boundary between them.

Teacher and Headmaster

Emma sees Phillip as a good teacher: earnest, passionate, and principled, though inclined to pomposity. He has nice eyes and can be funny. The seriousness he brings to teaching is underscored by the contrast between his public role—speaking at assembly about a charity fun run—and the intensity and language Emma encounters in private. To her, these sides of him are difficult to square. Even her recollection of their sexual relationship can turn on the incongruity of the schoolteacher who addresses an assembly behaving in a way she would not expect from that public figure.

Phillip’s position also shapes the affair’s setting and its risks. Emma is the Deputy Head of English and Theatre Studies at the school, and Phillip is her headmaster. Their encounters take place in the institution where they work, after the school day has ended. The same corridors and rooms that signify professional responsibility become private spaces in which their relationship must remain concealed. The affair is therefore bound to the workplace not only by their roles but by the physical routines of school life: locked offices, institutional furniture, cleaners, and the quiet building after hours.

Affair with Emma Morley

The affair begins the previous September, after Emma’s disastrous holiday in Corfu and the end of her engagement. By the summer, it has lasted nine months. Emma recalls periods when she thought she might be in love with Phillip: walking and talking on a clear autumn evening in a secluded part of Hackney Marshes, or sharing the closeness of the school carol service after drinking mulled wine. Those memories give the relationship a tenderness and ordinary companionship that complicate her later embarrassment. She has experienced an almost obsessive sexual infatuation, something new in her life, and Phillip has been an earnest, intense lover—at times more intense than she wants.

That attraction does not make the circumstances easy for Emma. Phillip is forty-four, and she notices the softness of his body beneath his heavy beard; her account holds physical reservation alongside desire rather than smoothing the two into a romantic ideal. By the end of the nine months, the excitement has ebbed. She waits outside the boys’ toilets while he washes with institutional soap, acutely conscious of being his deputy head and his mistress. She wishes she could be with friends or with a lover she could acknowledge to other people. The secrecy has become not a thrilling exception but a source of guilt and humiliation.

Secrecy and the School Setting

The affair’s after-hours routine makes the institution an uncomfortable measure of its limits. In one encounter, Phillip lays down again and nuzzles Emma’s neck after making a sexual innuendo. She rebukes the meaninglessness of the remark and wonders why sex, even when enjoyable, leaves her so ill-tempered. They lie still in the eerie quiet of the school at the end of term. He has taken a foam cushion from the office armchair to make the arrangement more considerate, but it remains an improvised comfort amid carpet, plastic chairs, and laminated tables. Emma’s wish for furniture that does not stack turns a small practical detail into a precise image of how little room the affair gives her to feel at ease.

Their concealment continues beyond the encounter. Phillip takes a call from Fiona about domestic choices—pasta or stir-fry, television or a DVD—while Emma retrieves her underwear from beneath the desk. She dresses and looks out through dusty blinds at the pink light on the science block. The ordinary details of his home life arrive directly into the room where Emma is his secret lover. She thinks of herself as a mistress, a word she finds repulsive and servile, and wishes she were elsewhere: in a park, on a beach, or in a European city square. The contrast between those imagined open spaces and the airless institutional room makes her dissatisfaction concrete.

Characterization and Significance

Phillip is presented through a tension between public virtue and private conduct, but the evidence does not reduce him to a simple hypocrite. Emma genuinely values his commitment as a teacher and can find him funny; she sometimes believes she is in love with him. At the same time, his marriage and their workplace secrecy place her in a role she resents. His considerate gesture with the office cushion and his intimate attentions exist alongside the restricted, uncomfortable conditions of their meetings. The relationship’s emotional meaning is therefore uneven: what may contain affection and attraction for Emma also leaves her feeling hidden and diminished.

Their final routine in the school corridor sharpens that imbalance. Phillip washes, takes Emma’s hand with a still-damp hand, then discreetly lets it go as they emerge outside. He locks the main door and sets the alarm; they walk to his car at a professional distance, his leather briefcase occasionally striking the back of her shin. The gestures restore the boundary the affair has crossed: hand joined, then dropped; lovers leaving together, yet keeping space between them. Phillip’s character matters less as an isolated portrait than as the center of this contrast between earnest public identity and secret private arrangement, and between Emma’s moments of infatuation and her growing wish to be somewhere else.