What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel, Page 4

  Throughout the first half of winter term, I had been building up my confidence to tackle Sheba on the matter of class discipline. In the final week before the half-term holiday, I believe I might have done so. But on the Monday morning of that week, I became aware of a new development—one so unexpected and disappointing that it quite stopped me in my tracks.

  I was standing in my classroom during the second period, which I happened to have free that day, when through the window I glimpsed Sheba walking across the playground from the science block towards Old Hall. She was with Sue Hodge, the head of music. Until this moment, I had been unaware that the women knew each other. But something in Sheba’s body language—a certain animation in her gestures—suggested to me now that they were on quite familiar terms. They were walking close to one another, so close that Sue’s overstuffed canvas handbag was bumping against Sheba’s skinny hip. Sheba didn’t seem to notice this. She was laughing at something that Sue was saying, throwing back her head so that I could see her long, white neck and the two dark pinholes of her nostrils. Sue was laughing too. She’s a big woman, and mirth tends to have a rather unseemly effect on her. Together, they made a sound raucous enough to penetrate the windows of my classroom. Ha ha ha. After a few moments, I grew fearful that they would catch me spying and I drew the curtains.

  I am not an alarmist by nature, and I was careful not to draw any dramatic conclusions from the scene I had witnessed. But on Thursday, I overheard Bob Baker the science teacher remark in a rather catty way to Antonia Robinson that Sheba appeared to have “chummed up” with Hodge. One recent afternoon, Bob said, Sue had put Sheba’s bike in the back of her car and given her a lift home.

  This was confirmation of my grimmest suspicions. Sheba had picked Sue Hodge to be her intimate. Sue Hodge! Had it emerged earlier in the term, I might have assumed that this liaison was a mistake: another one of those short-lived pacts dictated by exigency rather than true fellow feeling. But given how long Sheba had maintained a stately separateness from the rest of the staff, the friendship had to be acknowledged as a considered and deliberate choice on her part. My initial shock swiftly gave way to indignation. For weeks Sheba had saved herself, fended off all advances, only to succumb to this ridiculous creature?

  I used to run into Sue Hodge quite a lot. Being smokers, we both tended to nip off at lunchtimes for a fag at La Traviata, the Italian cafe down the road from St. George’s. We never sat together. There was something of a froideur between us, dating from an occasion a few years earlier when Sue had caught me sniggering over one of her class work sheets entitled “Dem Bones: The Cultural Roots of the Negro Spiritual.” Sue is a frightfully pretentious woman—always making the children do expressive dances to Pink Floyd and singing “American Pie” with them, playing her horrid little banjo. Underneath all that free and easy hippie malarkey she is actually the most awful prig—the sort of woman who wears Lady-Lite panty liners every day of the month, as if there is nothing her body secretes that she doesn’t think vile enough to be captured in cotton wool, wrapped in paper bags, and thrust far, far down at the bottom of the wastepaper bin. (I’ve been in the staff toilet after her and I know.)

  Also—and this was what made Sheba’s interest in her particularly incomprehensible—Sue is terrifyingly dull. A living anthology of mediocre sentiments. A woman whose idea of an excellent bon mot is to sidle up to someone on a hot summer day and bark, excitedly, “Hot enough for ya?” Many years ago, before the Negro spirituals incident, I had the misfortune of spending half an hour waiting with Sue at the 74 bus stop. At some point she actually turned to me and declared, in the halting, exultant manner of a person who was just then minting a delicious epigram, “You wait—when the bus finally comes, there’ll be five of them right behind it.”

  On the Friday of that week, I was sitting at my usual lunchtime table at La Traviata when Sue arrived with Sheba. They were whooping and guffawing about something as they entered the restaurant. The imminence of the holiday had apparently put them in exuberant spirits. Or perhaps, I thought, a certain kind of self-conscious hilarity was the signature mood of their friendship. Even after they had sat down, they continued to break out periodically in giggles. Sue kept glancing around the restaurant, as if to make sure that their riotous fun was receiving sufficient attention. To avoid providing any gratification on that score, I took out a book and began to read. Although I hardly looked in their direction for the duration of my meal, I continued to be aware of their laughter. By the time I left the restaurant, there were five cigarette stubs in the little tin ashtray on my table, and my mood was dark.

  In order to fully convey the effect that this episode had upon my spirits, I should explain that, some years ago, I was dealt a very severe blow when my friend Jennifer Dodd announced that she wanted no further contact with me. She and I had been extremely close for more than a year, and there had been no warning of this volte-face. I was bewildered. She had recently taken up with a young man—a painter and decorator who had been doing some work on her sister’s house in Richmond—but she insisted that he was not the cause of her sudden change of heart. Beyond some mysterious references to my being “too intense,” she refused to furnish any explanation for her decision. When I attempted to plead my cause, she clammed up, and the more I cajoled and questioned, the colder and more unpleasant she became. In the last conversation we ever had, she actually threatened to take out a legal injunction against me if I did not leave her alone. And then one Saturday, about six weeks later, I was sitting on the train, going to do some Christmas shopping in the West End, when Jennifer and her new beau boarded at Mornington Crescent.

  They sat on the other side of the car, just a few seats down from mine. As soon as she spotted me, Jennifer turned her head and looked in the other direction. But the young man—Jason was his name—proceeded to stare at me in an insolent and challenging fashion. He was a shiny-faced, empty-eyed sort of chap, with one of those “developed” bodies that men acquire from heaving dumbbells about in gyms. The one time we had met previously, I had taken great pains to be polite to him and, afterwards, I had communicated my misgivings to Jennifer in the gentlest manner possible. So it was unclear why he should now be adopting this aggressive posture towards me. Not wanting to appear intimidated, I returned his stare with an icy glare of my own. And then, evidently in some sort of fury, he turned to Jennifer, grasped her by her shoulders, and kissed her. The aim, it seems, was to assert his proprietorial rights over my friend. When he finally released her, he fixed me with a horrible smile and made an obscene gesture—right there in the crowded carriage, in front of everyone. I could hardly believe it. When the train drew into the next station, I fled. For half an hour after that, I sat on a bench on the Goodge Street platform and wept.

  Watching Sue snuggle up to Sheba at La Traviata, I was reminded of all this unpleasantness, and the recollection acted as a kind of alarm. My relationship with Jennifer had been a good deal more important and profound than any nascent feelings of affection I might have been harbouring for Sheba. But the hurt that she had inflicted had been the same sort of hurt that I was experiencing now. My mistake with Jennifer had been to attribute to her an intelligence that had never really existed. For the last six weeks, I realised, I had been making the same mistake with Sheba. Thank God that she had revealed her true colours at this juncture, before I had invested any more of my feelings! Once again, I told myself, I had made an error of judgement. Sheba was not my soul mate. Not my kindred spirit. She wasn’t, in fact, my sort at all.

  After the half-term holiday, I desisted from all the little genialities with which I had been attempting to semaphore my goodwill towards Sheba. I deliberately allowed my warm feelings to curdle into contempt. Occasionally, I confess, I went too far and stooped to some slightly childish insults. I would cough with suppressed laughter when Sheba was speaking to someone. Or I would do a dramatic double take when she walked into the staff room, to indicate my disapproval of her attire. Once, when th
e hem of her skirt was hanging down at the back, I made a great show of presenting her with a safety pin in front of several colleagues.

  None of these petty gestures brought me much solace. Sheba did not rise to my provocations. Mostly, in fact, she didn’t seem to notice that she was being provoked. She blushed the time I gave her the safety pin. But then she smiled and thanked me profusely, as if she hadn’t registered my animus at all.

  Eventually, in desperation, I tried a more forthright attack. Sheba came into the staff room early one morning, before the start of classes, and stood next to me at the kitchenette counter, rinsing out one of the tannin-stained cups that were designated for general use. Most of the St. George’s staff members brought in their own mugs from home, but for some reason Sheba never bothered. I was about to comment sardonically on the dubious hygiene of her drinking vessel when Brian Bangs, the maths teacher, pushed in between us. “Hallo, ladies!” he boomed. “Good weekend?”

  Bangs is a rather pitiful man. He sports a more or less permanent shaving rash, and he is always very, very nervous. Even his most minor conversational sallies have an agonised, overmeditated quality, and he tends to pitch his voice one or two uncomfortable decibels above the standard register. Talking to him is rather like attempting to converse with a school play. I nodded at him curtly, but Sheba was more magnanimous. “Hello, Brian,” she said. “Not a bad weekend, thanks. And yours?”

  “Oh great, yeah,” Bangs replied. “I went to Arsenal on Saturday.”

  “Yes?” Sheba said.

  “Great match,” Bangs said. “Yeah, terrific …”

  Sheba nodded.

  “We won Liverpool three—nil,” Bangs shouted woodenly. He made a fist and punched the air triumphantly. “Yesss.”

  “Ahh.” Sheba was now concentrating on squashing a tea bag against the side of her cup. “How satisfactory.” She spooned out the tea bag, poured in some milk.

  “That’s … that’s a lovely blouse you have on,” Bangs said. He was pointing, rather rudely, at Sheba’s chest.

  “What?” Sheba was momentarily nonplussed. She picked up a corner of her blouse, as if to remind herself of what she had on, and gazed at it skeptically. “Huh. Well, thank you.”

  “Is it new, then?” Bangs said quickly.

  “No, I’ve had it for years, actually.”

  “Yeah? Is that right? Well, it doesn’t look old at all. It’s dead nice. You should wear it more often.”

  “Oh … okay,” Sheba said, laughing.

  I had finished making my tea. Elaine Clifford and a French teacher called Michael Self approached the counter now, to prepare their instant coffee. But I remained where I was, listening with a kind of irritated fascination to the exchange between Sheba and Bangs. It amazed me that Sheba would bestow kind attention on such a cretin while ignoring me.

  “So, em—what do you think of my shirt?” Bangs was saying. He stepped back from us and, with his hands on his hips, made two twirling rotations in imitation of a fashion model. It was the kind of larky behaviour that men like him—ungainly, fundamentally without comic gift—are best advised to avoid.

  The garment for which he was seeking Sheba’s approval was a sky blue office shirt with a stiff, white collar and one large breast pocket on which a designer logo had been emblazoned. Judging from the symmetrical fold marks that scored his chest, it was a brand-new purchase.

  Sheba put down her mug and examined Bangs gravely. “Oh yes,” she said. “Lovely.” She wasn’t at all convincing. She spoke as if she were praising a child’s potato print. But Bangs responded to her approbation with undoubting, ingenuous delight. “Yeah? You like it?”

  “Yes,” Sheba said. “It’s great. Very smart.”

  “I wasn’t sure about … the collar and everything, you know. I thought it might be a bit flash for me.”

  “Oh no,” Sheba said. “It’s a great shirt.”

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. The two of them were twittering away at each other as if I didn’t exist. I groped for something with which to reassert my presence. “Your children are educated privately, aren’t they, Sheba?” I blurted.

  Sheba leaned towards me with a smile, holding a cupped hand to her ear. “Sorry, Barbara,” she said, “what was that?”

  “I said, you send your children to private schools, don’t you?” It sounded a good deal more hostile than I had intended. There was a silence. “Isn’t that right?” I added.

  Bangs and Elaine and Michael looked at me, startled. Then all three of them smirked. At this stage, everyone on staff knew about Sheba’s two children attending private schools—the French teacher Linda Preel had got it out of her early on in the term—but no one had yet confronted her on the issue. They were all too sissy. Personally, I have no quarrel with private education. My first job in teaching was at a fee-paying school in Dumfries and, had it not been for certain personal difficulties that I experienced with staff members at that institution, I might well be teaching there still. For my simple-minded colleagues, however, private education is a sin, pure and simple. It’s up there with fur coats and fox hunting, on their all-time top ten list of Things They Reelly Reelly Disapprove Of.

  Sheba turned to me with a slightly puzzled look on her face. “Yes,” she said. “My daughter is at boarding school, actually. She was at Maitland Park Comp for a bit, but she didn’t like it there much.”

  “I see,” I said. “And your son? Has he also stated an objection to state school oiks?”

  Sheba smiled evenly. “Well, Ben goes to a special place.”

  “Ahhh!” I interrupted. “A special place.”

  “Yes.” Sheba paused. “He has Down’s syndrome.”

  Elaine’s and Michael’s expectant grins sagged. Bangs went puce.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, I …”

  Sheba shook her head. “Please, don’t be.”

  Elaine and Michael and Bangs had reorganised their expressions into maudlin frowns of sympathy. I wanted to slap them.

  “No, sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean that I was sorry …”

  “I know.” Sheba stopped me. “It’s just one of those bits of information to which there is no good response.”

  There it was again—the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.

  I would like to say that I was ashamed of myself. I am certainly ashamed now. But what I felt at the time was rage: the boiling rage of defeat. After this incident, I stopped trying to goad Sheba and stayed away from her. Sometimes, if we ran into each other in the school corridor, I would acknowledge her with the slightest inclination of my head. But more often I gazed stoically into the middle distance and hurried past.

  3

  The irony of my having agonised over Sheba’s friendship with Fatty Hodge, when all the time she was preparing to fornicate with a minor, does not escape me. It is sad and rather galling to reflect that I wasted all that time on the mystery of Sue’s allure while the much more lethal liaison was brewing away beneath my nose. I am not prepared, however, to say that my concerns were altogether misdirected. It seems to me that if Sheba had made a wiser choice of girlfriend—if she had chosen me over Sue from the start—it is quite possible that she might have avoided the Connolly imbroglio. I do not mean to exaggerate the beneficial effects of my friendship or, for that matter, the deleterious influence of Sue. I have always been careful to avoid simple, catchall explanations for what Sheba did, and it would certainly be foolish to off-load the responsibility for her actions onto anyone else. But if, at this very challenging period in her life, Sheba had been receiving the emotional support of a sensible adult, I do believe she would have been a good deal less tempted by whatever specious comforts Connolly had to offer. In fact, when I look back on this period, I am struck not by the inappropriateness of my anxie
ties concerning Sheba but, on the contrary, by how accurately I had intuited her vulnerability. All the anguish I felt about her and Hodge—all the frustration I felt at being shut out of her life—is revealed, now, to have been very much au point. I alone, of all her friends and family and colleagues, it seems, had sensed her desperate need for guidance.

  Right after half term, Connolly came to Sheba’s studio again. She was alone in the hut at the end of the school day, collecting up some animal figurines that her first-years had made, when he appeared. He had some pictures that he wanted to show her, he said. It had been raining on and off throughout the day. His hair was sticking close to his head, and there was a sweet smell of damp clothes about him. When he came closer, she caught a whiff of his breath, and that smelled sweet too--candied almost, Sheba thought. They sat down and looked at his sketches—all of which, in deference to her advice, he had drawn from life models. Then they examined some of the first-years’ pandas and lions, laughing together at the particularly clumsy ones. At a certain point, Sheba started trying to explain the principles of glazing. She was impressed by how attentively he listened. He seemed interested, she thought. Interested and eager to learn. This, she told herself, was what she had hoped teaching would be.

  Shortly before Connolly left that afternoon, he looked up at a British Museum poster of an ancient Roman urn and remarked on how odd it was to think of an actual person—“a real bloke, thousands of years ago”—creating the artefact. Sheba glanced at him warily. Until now, none of the children had shown the slightest interest in her posters. Connolly’s comment was so much the sort of sentiment that she had wanted to inspire that she half-suspected him of mocking her. “It does your brain in, doesn’t it?” he added now, flicking at his fringe. His face yielded no trace of satirical intent. “Yes,” she replied, eagerly. “Yes. Exactly. You’re right. It does do your brain in.”