PENGUIN BOOKS
NOTES ON A SCANDAL
‘Outstanding, brilliantly understated and blackly funny’ Daily Telegraph
‘The best novel I’ve read in the past twelve months. With this one book Heller joins the front ranks of British novelists, right up there with Amis and McEwan’ Edmund White
‘Stunningly good’ Anne Robinson
‘Wicked and wonderful social satire’ Glamour
‘Sinister and surprising, distinctly chilling with pin sharp observations. A highlight in the year’s fiction, a classic of emotional imprisonment’ Daily Express
‘Compelling, dark, sexy’ Observer
‘A beautifully crafted piece, subtly characterized, with verbal felicities on every page’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A sympathetic portrayal of the isolation at the heart of human consciousness, Notes on a Scandal finds an elegant balance between dark comedy and tragedy, and concludes on a satisfyingly sinister note’ Observer
‘I read it twice. Has the epic quality of Greek tragedy and does what good fiction is supposed to do: remind us what fools we are as we lumber through our lives. It would be sad if it wasn’t funny; funny if it wasn’t sad’ Guardian
‘Deliciously perverse, laugh-out-loud-funny’ Vogue
‘The most gripping novel of the year. You leave this extraordinary book utterly shaken, with new knowledge of the human heart’ Nuala O’Faolain
‘Heller elevates a tabloid-worthy tale of obsession into an intense, witty, literary page-turner. She brilliantly teases out the details of the scandal and fleshes out the increasingly sinister Barbara, who rivals Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley in spine-chilling creepiness’ Entertainment Weekly
‘Deeply convincing, grimly realistic portrayal of loneliness and repression’ New Statesman
‘Wickedly funny, a sly satire. Heller writes in a brand of social satire reminiscent of British masters like Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark… not only very funny and original, but also demonstrates shrewdness, intelligence and nerve in tackling a difficult and tricky subject, and carrying it off’ Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal
‘A nuanced portrait of the power plays in unbalanced relationships… shares many qualities with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. A tartly readable portrait of terminal neediness, as sharp and merciless as any of Zoë Heller’s columns’ Los Angeles Times Book Review
‘Highly addictive… a funny, unnerving, acutely intelligent novel of psychological suspense’ New York Observer
‘The perfect “smart” book for beach reading’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘Insightful, piercing… utterly brilliant’ Booklist
‘[A] clever novel of social commentary and dangerous obsession… Heller offers a piercing look at a basic human failing: it’s easier to criticize others than to look honestly at ourselves’ People
‘Equally adroit at satire and at psychological suspense, Heller charts the course of a predatory friendship and demonstrates the lengths to which some people go for human company’ New Yorker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zoë Heller’s first novel, Everything You Know, was published by Viking in 1999. She writes a column for the Daily Telegraph and was Columnist of the Year for 2002. She lives in New York.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Viking 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004
1
Copyright © Zoë Heller, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–90191–6
For Larry and Frankie
1 March 1998
The other night at dinner, Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed. I had heard most of it before, of course, there being few aspects of the Connolly business that Sheba has not described to me several times over. But this time round, something new came up. I happened to ask her if anything about the first embrace had surprised her. She laughed. Yes, the smell of the whole thing had been surprising, she said. She hadn’t anticipated his personal odour and if she had, she would probably have guessed at something teenagey: bubble gum, cola, feet.
When the moment arrived, what I actually inhaled was soap, tumble-dried laundry. He smelled of scrupulous self-maintenance. You know the washing-machine fug that envelops you sometimes, walking past the basement vents of mansion flats? Like that. So clean, Barbara. Never any of that cheese and onion breath that the other kids have…
Every night since we came to Eddie’s house, Sheba has been talking to me like this. She sits at the kitchen table looking out on the green darkness of Eddie’s garden. I sit across from her, watching her nervous fingers score ice-skating loops in the plastic tablecloth. It’s often pretty strong stuff she tells me in that newsreader’s voice of hers. But then, one of the many things I have always admired about Sheba is her capacity to talk about low things and make them seem perfectly decent. We don’t have secrets, Sheba and I.
The first time I saw him undress, you know what I thought of, Barbara? Fresh garden vegetables wrapped in a clean white hanky. Mushrooms fresh from the soil. No, really. He was edible. He washed his hair every night. Imagine! It was limp with cleanness. The vanity of adolescence, probably. Or no – perhaps the anxiety of it. His body was a new toy still: he hadn’t learned to treat it with the indifferent neglect of adults.
Her account was wending back to familiar terrain. I must have heard the hair rhapsody at least fifteen times in recent months. (I’ve never cared for Connolly’s hair, myself. It’s always struck me as slightly sinister – like that spun-fibreglass snow that they used to sell as Christmas tree decoration.) Still, I kept giving her the cues.
‘And were you nervous, when you were kissing him, Sheba?’
Oh no. Well, yes… Not exactly. [Laughter] Can you be nervous and calm at the same time? I remember being quite relieved that he wasn’t using his tongue. You do need to know someone a bit, first, don’t you? It’s too much otherwise. All the slobber. And that slightly embarrassing sense of the other person trying to be creative in a limited space… Anyway, I relaxed too much or something, because the bike fell – there was this awful clatter – and then, of course, I ran away…
I don’t say much on these occasions. The point is to get Sheba to talk. But even in the usual run of things I tend to be the listener in our relationship. It’s not that Sheba is cleverer than me. Any objective comparison would have to rate me the more educated woman, I think. (Sheba knows a bit about art – I’ll give her that; but for all her class advantages, she is woefully ill-read.) No, Sheba talks because she is just naturally more loquacious and candid than I am. I am circumspect by nature and she… well, she isn’t.
For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi – such an aberration in their workaday mendacity – that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on. ‘To be completely honest,’ they say, or ‘To tell you the truth,’ or ‘Can I be straight?’ Often they want to extract vows of discretion from you before going any further. ‘This is strictly between us, right?… You must promise not to tell anyone…’ Sheba does none of that. She tosses out intimate and unflattering truths about herself, all the time, without a second thought. ‘I was the most fearsomely obsessive little masturbator when I was a girl,’ she told me once when we were first getting to know each other. ‘My mother practically had to Sellotape my knickers to me, to stop me having at myself in public places.’ ‘Oh?’ I said, trying to sound as if I were used to broaching such matters over coffee and a KitKat.
It’s a class characteristic, I think – this insouciant frankness. If I had had more contact with posh people in my life I would probably be familiar with the style and think nothing of it. But Sheba is the only genuinely upper-class person I’ve ever known. Her throwaway candour is as exotic to me, in its way, as a plate in an Amazonian tribesman’s lip. She’s meant to be taking a nap at the moment. (She’s not sleeping well at night.) But I can tell, from the creaking of the floorboards overhead, that she’s pottering about in her niece’s room. She often goes in there in the afternoons. It was her bedroom when she was growing up, apparently. She’ll spend hours at a time handling the little girl’s things – reorganizing the vials of glitter and glue in art-kits, making inventories of the dolls’ plastic shoes. Sometimes she falls asleep up there and I have to go and wake her for dinner. She always looks rather sad and odd, sprawled out on the pink and white princess bed, with her big, rough feet dangling over the edge. Like a giantess who has blundered into the wrong house.
This place belongs to her brother, Eddie, now. After Sheba’s father died, Sheba’s mother decided it was too big for one person and Eddie bought it from her. Sheba is bitter about that, I think. It isn’t fair, she says, that just because Eddie is rich, he should have been able to buy their shared past for himself.
Eddie and his family are away in New Delhi at the moment. The American bank he works for has posted him there for six months. Sheba rang him in India when her trouble started, and he agreed to let her stay in the house until she found something permanent. We’ve been here ever since. It’s anyone’s guess what we will do when Eddie returns in June. I gave up the lease on my little flat some weeks ago and Sheba’s husband, Richard, is in no danger of taking us in, even temporarily. We probably don’t have enough money to rent a new place and, besides, I’m not sure that any landlords in London would have us, right now. I try not to worry, though. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as my mother used to say.
This is not a story about me. But, since the task of telling it has fallen into my hands, and since I play a minor role in the events I am going to describe, it is only right that I should offer a brief account of myself and my relationship to the protagonist. My name is Barbara Covett. (From time to time one of my colleagues will call me ‘Barb’ or, even less desirably, ‘Babs’, but I discourage it.) Until I retired this January, I had been living in Archway, north London, and teaching History at St George’s, a comprehensive school in the same neighbourhood, for the last twenty-one years. It was at St George’s, a little less than eighteen months ago, that I met Bathsheba Hart. Her name will probably be familiar to most of you by now. She is the forty-two-year-old pottery teacher recently charged with indecent assault on a minor, after being discovered having a sexual affair with one of her students – a boy who was fifteen years old when the affair began.
Since it first came to light, Sheba’s case has received nigh on unstinting media coverage. I try to keep up with all of it, although, frankly, it’s a pretty depressing task. There was a time when I placed a certain amount of trust in the integrity of this country’s news organizations, but, now that I have seen at close hand the way in which reporters go about their business, I recognize how sadly misplaced that trust was. Over the last fortnight, I must have spotted twenty errors of fact about Sheba’s case, in the newspapers alone. On Monday of this week, some bright spark at the Daily Mirror described Sheba as a ‘buxom bombshell’. (Anyone who has ever so much as glanced at her knows that she is as flat as the Fens.) And yesterday, the Sun ran an ‘exposé’ on Sheba’s husband, in which it was claimed that Richard, who lectures in Communications Theory at City of London, is ‘a trendy prof who gives sexy seminars on how to read dirty magazines’.
In the end, though, it’s not the carelessness or even the cheerful mendacity of the reporting that astounds, so much as the sanctimony. Good Lord, the unrelenting sanctimony! I understood, when all this came out, that there was going to be a fuss. I did not expect Sheba to receive sympathy. But I could never have predicted the hysterical prurience of the response. The titillated fury. These reporters write about Sheba as if they were seven-year-olds confronting the fact of their parents’ sexuality for the first time. ‘Despicable’ is one of their big words. ‘Unhealthy’ is another. Sheba’s attraction to the boy was ‘unhealthy’. Her marriage was ‘unhealthy’ too. The boy had had an ‘unhealthy’ interest in winning her approval. Any species of sexual attraction that you can’t find documented on a seaside postcard fails the health test, as far as these people are concerned. Any sexual arrangement existing outside the narrow channels of family newspaper convention is relegated to a great, sinister parenthesis of kinky ‘antics’. Journalists are educated people, aren’t they? College graduates, some of them. How did their minds get so small? Have they never desired anyone outside the age range that local law and custom deemed suitable? Never experienced an impulse that fell outside the magic circle of sexual orthodoxy?
It was the papers that finally did Sheba and Richard in, I believe. After she was given bail the two of them tried to soldier on for a while. But it was too much – too much for any couple – to bear. When you think of the reporters camped outside their house, the awful headlines every day – ‘Sex Teacher Passes Her Orals With Flying Colours’, ‘Teacher Takes Keen Interest In The Student Body’ and so on – it’s a wonder that they lasted as long as they did. Just before Sheba made her first appearance in the magistrate’s court, Richard told her that her presence in the house was making the children’s lives a misery. I believe he thought this was a kinder rationale for throwing her out than his own feelings of revulsion.
That was when I stepped in. I put Sheba up for a week or so in my flat and then, when she got Eddie to let her stay in his house, I came with her. How could I not? Sheba was so pitifully alone. It would have taken a very unfeeling individual to desert her. There is at least one more pre-trial hearing – possibly two – to be got through before the case goes before the Crown Court and, frankly, I don’t think Sheba would make it on her own. Her barrister says that she could avoid going to the Crown Court altogether, if she pleaded guilty to the charges. But Sheba won’t hear of it. She regards a guilty plea – even one that includes a clear denial of ‘coercion, duress or bribery’ – as unthinkable. ‘There was no assault and I’ve done nothing indecent,’ she likes to say.
In becoming Sheba’s caretaker these last few weeks, I have inevitably drawn some of the media glare to myself. It seems to be a source of some amusement and discomfort to the journalists that a respectable older woman with nearly forty years’ experience as an educator should choose to be associated with Sheba. Every single reporter covering this case – every single one – has made a point of describing, with varying degrees of facetiousness, my handbag: a perfectly unexceptional, wooden-handled object, with a needlepoint portrait of two kittens on it. Clearly, it would suit them all much better if I were off somewhere with the other jowly old biddies, boasting about my grandchildren, or playing bingo. Not, at any rate, standing on the doorstep of a rich banker’s house in Primrose Hill, defending the character of an alleged child-molester.
The only possible explanation that the journalists can find for my having voluntarily associated myself with Sheba’s debauchery is that I am, in some as yet shadowy way, debauched myself. In the weeks since Sheba’s arrest, I have been required, on several occasions, to speak to reporters on her behalf and, as a result, I am now known to readers of the Sun as ‘the saucy schoolteacher’s spin-doctor’. (Those who know me can attest to what an unlikely candidate I am for such a soubriquet.) My naive hope, in acting as Sheba’s spokeswoman, has been to counter some of the sanctimonious hostility towards my friend, and to shed a little light on the true nature of her complex personality. But alas, my contributions have done no such thing. Either they have been cruelly and deliberately distorted, or gone unnoticed in a torrent of lies propagated by people who have never met Sheba and would, very likely, not have understood her even if they had.
This is chief among the reasons why I have now decided to risk further calumny by writing my own account of Sheba’s downfall. I am presumptuous enough to believe that I am the person best qualified to write this small history. I would go so far as to hazard that I am the only person. Sheba and I have spent countless hours together over the last eighteen months, exchanging confidences of every kind. Certainly, there is no other friend or relative of Sheba’s who has been so intimately involved in the day-to-day business of her affair with Connolly. In many cases, the events I describe here were witnessed by me personally. Elsewhere, I rely upon detailed accounts provided by Sheba herself. I am not so foolhardy as to claim for myself an infallible version of the story. But I do believe that my narrative will go some substantial way to helping the public understand who Sheba Hart really is.
I should acknowledge straightaway that, from a moral point of view, Sheba’s testimony regarding her conduct is not always entirely reliable. Even now, she is inclined to romanticize the relationship and to underestimate the irresponsibility – the wrongness – of her actions. What remorse she expresses tends to be remorse for having been found out. But, confused and troubled as Sheba still is, her honesty remains utterly dependable. While I may dispute her reading of certain events, I have found no cause to doubt the factual particulars of her account. Indeed, I am confident that everything she has told me regarding the how, when and where of this affair is, to the best of her knowledge, true.
It’s getting on for six o’clock now, so it won’t be much longer. In half an hour – an hour at the most – Sheba will come down. I’ll hear her shuffling on the stairs first and I’ll put my writing away. (Sheba doesn’t yet know about this project of mine. I fear it would only agitate her at the moment, so I’ve decided to keep it a secret until I’m a little further along.) A few seconds later, there she’ll be in the living-room doorway, in her nightdress and socks.
She’s always very quiet at first. She’s usually been crying. It’s my job to cheer her up and bring her out of herself, so I try to be very upbeat. I’ll tell her about something funny that happened at the supermarket today, or make a bitchy remark about the neighbour’s yappy dog. After a bit, I’ll get up to start preparations for supper. With Sheba, I’ve found, it’s best not to push things. She’s in a highly nervous state at the moment – extremely sensitive about being ‘pressured’. So I don’t ask her to come into the kitchen with me. I just go in and begin clattering. She’ll wander about in the living room for a while, humming to herself and fiddling with things and then, after ten minutes or so, she will invariably relent and slope in after me.
I don’t cook anything fancy. Sheba’s appetite isn’t up to much and I’ve never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven and watches me while I work. At a certain point, she usually asks for wine. I have tried to get her to wait until she’s eaten something, but she gets very scratchy when I do that, so these days I tend to give in straightaway and pour her a small glass from the carton in the fridge. You choose your battles. Sheba is a bit of a snob about drink and she keeps whining at me to get a grander sort. Something in a bottle, at least, she says. But I continue to buy the cartons. We are on a tight budget these days. And for all her carping, Sheba doesn’t seem to have too much trouble knocking back the cheap stuff.
Once she’s got her drink, she relaxes a bit and starts to take a little more interest in what I’m saying. Sometimes, she even asks for a job and I’ll give her a tin to open or some cheese to grate. Then, quite abruptly, as if we had never dropped the subject, she’ll start talking about Connolly.
She doesn’t seem to tire of the story. You wouldn’t believe how many times she is willing to go back over the same small event, examining its details for clues and symbols. She reminds me of one of those Jewish fellows who devote years of their lives to analysing a single passage in the Talmud. She’s always amazing to watch. So frail these days, and yet, when she’s talking, so bright-eyed and erect! Sometimes she gets upset and there are tears. But I don’t believe that the talking harms her. Actually, I think it does her good. There is no one else to whom Sheba can say these things. And it helps her, she says, to describe it all, exactly as it was.
The first time I ever saw Sheba was on a Monday morning, early in the winter term of 1996. I was standing in the St George’s car park, getting books out of the back of my car when she came through the gates on a bicycle – an old-fashioned, butcher-boy model with a basket in the front. Her hair was arranged in one of those artfully dishevelled up-dos: a lot of stray tendrils framing the jaw, and something like a chopstick piercing a rough bun at the back. It was the sort of hairstyle that film actresses wear when they’re playing sexy lady doctors. I can’t recall exactly what she had on. Sheba’s outfits tend to be very complicated – lots of floaty layers. I know she was wearing purple shoes. And there was definitely a long skirt involved, because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger of becoming entangled in her spokes. When she dismounted – with a lithe, rather irritating, little skip – I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material. Fey was the word that swam into my mind. Fey person, I thought. Then I locked my car and walked away.
My formal introduction to Sheba took place later the same day when Ted Mawson, the deputy head, brought her into the staffroom at afternoon break for a ‘meet and greet’. Afternoon break is not a good time to meet schoolteachers. If you were to plot a graph of a teacher’s spirits throughout the school day, afternoon break would be represented by the lowest valley. The air in the staffroom has a trapped, stagnant quality. The chirpy claptrap of the early morning has died away and those staff members who are not milling about, checking their timetables and so on, sprawl in lugubrious silence. (To be fair, the sprawling is as much a tribute to the shoddy construction of the staffroom’s three elderly foam sofas as an expression of the teachers’ low morale.) Some of the teachers stare, slack-shouldered, into space. Some of them read – the arts and media pages of the liberal newspapers mainly, or paperback editions of the lower sort of fiction – the draw being not so much the content as the shield against having to converse with their colleagues. A great many chocolate bars and instant noodles in plastic pots are consumed.
On the day of Sheba’s arrival, the staffroom was slightly more crowded than usual, owing to the heating being on the blink in Old Hall. (In addition to its three modern structures – the gym, the arts centre and the science block – the St George’s site includes two rather decrepit red-brick buildings, Old Hall and Middle Hall, which date back to the school’s original, Victorian incarnation as an orphanage.) That afternoon, several teachers who might otherwise have remained skulking in their Old Hall classrooms during break had been driven to seek refuge in the staffroom where the radiators were still operative. I was off in a far corner when Mawson ushered Sheba in, so I was able to watch their slow progress around the room for several minutes, before having to mould my face into the appropriate smile.
Sheba’s hair had become more chaotic since the morning. The loose tendrils had graduated to hanks and where it was meant to be smooth and pulled back, tiny, fuzzy sprigs had reared up, creating a sort of corona around her scalp. She was a very thin woman, I saw now. As she bent to shake the hands of seated staff members, her body seemed to fold in half at the waist like a piece of paper.
‘Our new pottery teacher!’ Mr Mawson was bellowing with his customary, chilling good spirits, as he and Sheba loomed over Antonia Robinson, one of our Eng Lit women. Sheba smiled and patted at her hair.
Pottery. I repeated the word quietly to myself. It was too perfect: I pictured her, the dreamy maiden poised at her wheel, massaging tastefully mottled milk jugs into being.
She was gesturing at the windows. ‘Why are all the curtains drawn?’ I heard her ask.
Ted Mawson rubbed his hands, nervously.
‘Oh,’ Antonia said, ‘so the kids can’t look in at us and make faces.’
Bill Rumer, the head of Chemistry, who was sitting next to Antonia on one of the foam sofas, snorted loudly at this. ‘Actually, Antonia,’ he said, ‘it’s so we can’t look out at them. So they can smash each other up – do their raping and pillaging – and we’re not required to intervene.’ Antonia laughed and made a scandalized face.
A lot of teachers at St George’s go in for this sort of posturing cynicism about the pupils, but Bill is the chief offender. He is a rather ghastly character, I’m afraid – the sort of man who is always sitting with his legs aggressively akimbo, offering a clearer silhouette of his untidy crotch than is strictly decent. One of the more insufferable things about him is that he imagines himself tremendously naughty and shocking – a delusion in which women like Antonia are all too eager to conspire.
‘Oh Bill,’ Antonia said now, pressing her skirt against her thighs.
‘Don’t worry,’ Bill said to Sheba, ‘you’ll get used to the gloom.’ He smiled at her magnanimously – the grandee allowing her into the little enclosure of his bonhomie. Then, as his eyes swept over her, I saw his smile waver for a moment.
Women observing other women tend to be engrossed by the details – the bodily minutiae, the clothing particulars. We get so caught up in the lone dimple, the excessive ears, the missing button, that we often lag behind men in organizing the individual features into an overall impression. I mention this by way of explaining why it was only now, watching Bill, that the fact of Sheba’s beauty occurred to me. Of course, I thought. She’s very good-looking. Sheba, who had been smiling fixedly throughout Bill and Antonia’s droll exchange, made another nervous adjustment to her hair. As she raised her long, thin arms to fuss with the chopstick hair ornament, her torso lengthened and her chest was thrust forward slightly. She had a dancer’s bosom. Two firm little patties riding the raft of her ribs. Bill’s eyes widened. Antonia’s narrowed.
She and Mawson continued on their journey around the room. The change that took place in the teachers’ faces as they set eyes on Sheba confirmed my appraisal of Bill’s appraisal. The men beamed and ogled. The women shrank slightly and turned sullen. The one exception was Elaine Clifford, a St George’s alumna who teaches lower school Biology. Assuming what is her characteristic stance of unearned intimacy, Elaine stood very close to Sheba and began to blast her with impudent chatter. They were only a few feet away from me now.
After a moment, Mawson turned and beckoned. ‘Barbara!’ he shouted, cutting off Elaine in mid-stream. ‘Do come and meet Sheba Hart.’
I stepped over and joined the group.
‘Sheba is going to be teaching pottery,’ Mawson said. ‘As you know, we’ve been waiting a long time to replace Mrs Sipwitch. We feel tremendously lucky and pleased to have got her.’
In response to these words, a small, precise circle of scarlet appeared on each of Sheba’s cheeks.
‘This is Barbara Covett,’ Mawson went on. ‘She’s one of our stalwarts. If Barbara ever left us, I’m afraid St George’s would collapse.’
Sheba looked at me carefully. She was about thirty-five, I estimated. (She was actually forty, about to be forty-one.) The hand that she held out to be shaken was large and red and somewhat coarse to the touch. ‘How nice to be so needed,’ she said, smiling. It was difficult to distinguish her tone, but it seemed to me that it contained a note of genuine sympathy – as if she understood how maddening it might be to be patronized by Mawson.
‘Sheba – is that as in Queen of?’ I asked.
‘No, as in Bathsheba.’
‘Oh. Were your parents thinking of the Bible or of Hardy?’
She smiled. ‘I’m not sure. I think they just liked the name.’
‘If there’s anything you need to know about anything concerning this place, Sheba,’ Mawson continued, ‘you must ask Barbara. She’s the St George’s expert.’
‘Oh, smashing. I’ll remember that,’ Sheba said.
People from the privileged orders are always described as having plums in their mouths, but that wasn’t what came to mind when I heard Sheba speak. On the contrary, she sounded as if her mouth were very empty and clean – as if she’d never had a filling.
‘Oh! Love your earrings!’ Elaine said now. She reached out, like a monkey, to finger Sheba’s ears and, as she raised her arms, I caught a glimpse of her armpits which were violently pink, as if inflamed, and speckled with black stubble. I do hate it when women don’t keep their personal grooming up to scratch. Better the full bushy Frenchwoman’s growth than that squalid sprinkling of iron filings. ‘They’re so pretty!’ Elaine said of the earrings. ‘Where d’you get ’em?’
Sandy Pabblem, the headmaster, is very keen on having former pupils like Elaine on the staff. He imagines it reflects well on the school that they should wish to return and ‘give something back’. But the truth is, St George’s alumni make exceptionally poor teachers. It’s not so much that they don’t know anything about anything. (Which they don’t.) Or even that they are complacent about their ignorance. (I once heard Elaine blithely identifying Boris Yeltsin as ‘the Russian one who doesn’t have a thingy on his head’.) The real issue is one of personality. Invariably, pupils who come back to teach at St George’s are emotionally suspect characters – people who have surmised that the world out there is a frightening place and who have responded by simply staying put. They’ll never have to try going home again because they’re never going to leave. I have a vision sometimes of the pupils of these ex-pupils deciding to become St George’s teachers themselves – and these ex-pupils of ex-pupils producing more ex-pupils who return to St George’s as teachers, and so on. It would take only a couple of generations for the school to become entirely populated by dolts.
I took the opportunity, while Sheba was explaining her jewellery, to examine her face more closely. The earrings were beautiful, as it happened: delicate little things made of gold and seed pearls. Her face was longish and thin, her nose ever so slightly crooked at the tip. And her eyes – no, not so much the eyes, as the eyelids – were prodigious: great, beige canopies fringed with dense lash. Like that spiky tiara that the Statue of Liberty wears.
‘This is Sheba’s first teaching post,’ Ted said, when Elaine had stopped talking for a moment.
‘Well, it’ll certainly be a baptism by fire,’ I remarked.
Ted laughed with excessive heartiness and then abruptly stopped. ‘Okay,’ he said, glancing at his watch, ‘we ought to get on, Sheba. Let me introduce you to Malcolm Plummer…’
Elaine and I stood watching for a moment, as Sheba and Mawson moved off. ‘She’s sweet, isn’t she?’ Elaine said.
I smiled. ‘No, I wouldn’t have said sweet.’
Elaine made a clicking noise with her tongue, to indicate her affront. ‘Well, I think she’s nice,’ she muttered.
During her first couple of weeks at school, Sheba kept very much to herself. At break-times, she often stayed in her pottery studio. When she did come into the staffroom, she usually stood alone at one of the windows, peeking round the curtains at the playground outside. She was perfectly pleasant to her colleagues – which is to say, she exchanged all the standard, weather-based pleasantries. But she did not automatically gravitate to another female teacher and start swapping autobiographies. Or put her name down to join the St George’s contingent on the next NUT march. Or contribute to sarcastic group discussions about the headmaster. Her resistance to all the usual initiation rituals aroused a certain amount of suspicion among the other teachers. The women tended to the opinion that Sheba was ‘stuck up’, while the men favoured the theory that she was ‘cold’. Bill Rumer, widely acknowledged as the staff expert on such matters, observed on more than one occasion that ‘there was nothing wrong with her that a good boning wouldn’t cure’.
I took Sheba’s failure to forge an instantaneous friendship as an encouraging sign. In my experience, newcomers – particularly female ones – are far too eager to pin their colours to the mast of any staffroom coterie that will have them. Jennifer Dodd, who used to be my closest friend at the school, spent her first three weeks at St George’s buried in the welcoming bosoms of Mary Horsely and Diane Nebbins. Mary and Diane are two hippies from the Maths department. They both carry packets of ‘women’s tea’ in their handbags and use jagged lumps of rock crystal in lieu of anti-perspirant. They were entirely ill-suited – temperament-wise, humour-wise, world view-wise – to be Jennifer’s friends. But they happened to get to her first and Jennifer was so grateful for someone being nice to her that she cheerfully undertook to ignore their soy milk mumbo-jumbo. I dare say she would have plighted her troth to a Moonie during her first week at St George’s, if the Moonie had been quick enough off the mark.
Sheba displayed no such new-girl jitters and for this I admired her. She did not exempt me from her general aloofness. Owing to my seniority at St George’s and the fact that I am more formal in manner than most of my colleagues, I am used to being treated with a certain deference. But Sheba seemed to be oblivious of my status. There was little indication, for a long time, that she really saw me at all. Yet, in spite of this, I found myself possessed by a strange certainty that we would one day be friends.
Early on, we made a few tentative approaches to one another. Somewhere in her second week, Sheba greeted me in the corridor. (She used ‘Hello’, I was pleased to note, as opposed to the awful, mid-Atlantic ‘Hiya’ that so many of the staff favour.) And another time, walking from the arts centre after an assembly, we shared some brief, rueful comments about the choral performance that had just taken place. My feelings of connection to Sheba did not depend upon these minute exchanges, however. The bond that I sensed, even at that stage, went far beyond anything that might have been expressed in quotidian chit-chat. It was an intuited kinship. An unspoken understanding. Does it sound too dramatic to call it spiritual recognition? Owing to our mutual reserve, I understood that it would take time for us to form a friendship. But when we did, I had no doubt that it would prove to be one of uncommon intimacy and trust – a relationship de chaleur as the French say.
In the meantime, I watched from afar and listened with interest to the gossip that circulated about her in the staffroom. For most of the staff, Sheba’s dignified self-containment acted as a sort of force-field, repelling the usual impertinent enquiries about home life and political allegiance. But elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid, and there were a few who were not deterred. From time to time, I would spot certain staff members zooming in on Sheba in the car park or playground, stunning her into submission with their vulgar curiosity. They never achieved the immediate intimacy that they were seeking. But they usually managed to extract some piece of information as a consolation prize. It was from these eager little fishwives that the rest of the staffroom learned that Sheba was married with two children; that her husband was a lecturer; that her children were educated privately; that she lived in ‘a ginormous house’ in Highgate.
Inevitably, given the quality of the intermediaries, much of this information arrived in somewhat scrambled form. On one occasion I overheard Theresa Shreve, who teaches Educational Guidance, informing Marian Simmons, head of Lower Sixth, that Sheba’s father was famous. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He’s like, dead now. But he was a very important academic.’
Marian asked what discipline he had worked in.
‘What?’ Theresa said.
‘What was his academic subject?’ Marian clarified.
‘Ooh, do you know, I don’t know!’ Theresa said. ‘He was called Donald Taylor and he invented the word “inflation”, I think.’
Thus did one gather that Sheba’s father was Ronald Taylor, the Cambridge economist, who had died five years before, shortly after turning down an OBE. (His official reason had been that he didn’t agree with the honours system, but the newspapers speculated that he was offended at not having been given a knighthood.)
‘I think you’ll find, Theresa,’ I interrupted at this point, ‘that Mrs Hart’s father’s name was Ronald. He didn’t “invent inflation”, as you say. He devised an important theory about the relationship between inflation and consumer expectation.’
Theresa looked at me with the sullen expression that so many people of her generation wear when one attempts to assail their ignorance. ‘Uh-huh,’ she said.
The other thing that became known in those early weeks was that Sheba was experiencing ‘class control issues’. This was not entirely unexpected. Because Highgate is part of its catchment area, people often assume that St George’s is one of those safe, soft comprehensives, full of posh children toting their cellos to orchestra practice. But posh parents don’t surrender their offspring to St George’s. The cello-players get sent to St Botolph’s Girls or King Henry’s Boys, or to private schools in other parts of London. St George’s is the holding pen for Archway’s pubescent proles – the children of the council estates who must fidget and scrap here for a minimum of five years until they can embrace their fates as plumbers and shop assistants. Last year, we had 240 pupils sit their GCSEs and exactly six of them achieved anything higher than a grade E pass. The school represents – how to put it? – a very volatile environment. Attacks on the staff are not uncommon. The year before Sheba arrived, three Year Eight boys, leaning out of one of the science lab windows, pelted the school secretary, Deirdre Rickman, with Bunsen burners. (Her resulting injuries included a fractured clavicle and a head wound requiring fourteen stitches.)
The boys naturally present the worst problems. But the girls are no picnic either. They’re not quite as disposed to violence, but they are just as foul-mouthed and they possess a superior gift for insult. Not long ago, a girl in my Year Nine class – an angry little virago-in-training by the name of Denise Callaghan – called me, without any apparent forethought, ‘a chewy-faced old bitch’. This sort of thing occurs very rarely in my classroom and when it does I am able, in almost every case, to stamp it out immediately. But for more junior members of the St George’s staff, maintaining basic order is an ongoing and frequently bloody battle. For a novice like Sheba – a wispy novice with a tinkly accent and see-through skirts – the potential for disaster was great.
Later on, I learned the details of what happened in Sheba’s first class. She had been put in what is grandly called the school ‘studio’ – a pre-fabricated hut adjoining the arts centre, which, for some years, since the departure of the last pottery teacher, had been used as a storage room. It was rather dark and musty, but Sheba had made an effort to cheer the place up with museum posters and some geranium cuttings taken from her garden that morning.
She had worked very conscientiously on her lesson plan. Her intention was to begin her first class of Year Nines with a short talk about what pottery was – the primal, creative impulse that it represented and the important role that it played in the earliest civilizations. After that, she was going to let the children handle some clay. She would ask them to construct a bowl – any sort of bowl they liked – and whatever they managed to produce she would fire in the kiln, in time for the next class. When the bell rang for first period, and her pupils began trickling in, her mood was bordering on elation. This, she had decided, was going to be great fun.
She waited until she judged that most of the class was present before standing up to say hello. But as she was introducing herself she was interrupted by Michael Beale – a wiry boy with a sinister, grey front tooth – who rushed towards her from the back of the class, shouting, ‘I fancy you, Miss!’ She chuckled gamely and asked him to take a seat. But he ignored her and remained standing. Shortly thereafter, another