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

by Zoe Heller

  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. He ignored her and remained standing. Shortly thereafter, another boy joined him. Having looked Sheba up and down, this lad—it was James Thornham, I think—announced to the class, in a sardonic monotone, that their teacher had “little tits.” Even as the class was showing its appreciation for this witty observation, yet another boy stood up on one of the worktables and began chanting, “Show us your tits.” Apparently this met with a derisive response from some of the female class members, who called upon the boy in question to “show his willy” and made offers of a magnifying glass for the purpose.

  Sheba was having to hold back her tears by this stage. She sternly enjoined the class to settle down, and for a moment, to her surprise, there was semi-quiet. She was starting to introduce herself again when a girl of Southeast Asian parentage, whom Sheba had identified as one of the more demure and well-behaved pupils, leaned back in her chair and shouted, “Oi! Miss is wearing a see-through skirt. You can practically see her knickers!” The entire class broke out in cheers. “Miss, how come you’re not wearing a slip? … Come on, Miss, show us your tits … . Miss, Miss, where d’you get that skirt? Oxfam?” Sheba did begin to cry now. “Please,” she kept shouting above the din. “Please. Would you please stop being so beastly for a minute?”

  At the time, I was aware of none of these particulars. But I received a general idea of Sheba’s troubles from the gleeful staff room hearsay. The word on Sheba was that she was a short fuse type. An exploder. One lunchtime, a fortnight into term, I overheard Elaine Clifford describing what one of her second-years had told her about Sheba. “The kids go wild on her apparently,” Elaine said. “She, like, begs them to be good. And then the next thing, she loses her rag. Curses at them. Bloody this and F that. All sorts.”

  This worried me a good deal. The head tends to be pretty soft on cursing. But, strictly speaking, uttering expletives in the presence of the children is a sackable offence. It is not so uncommon for teachers—particularly inexperienced ones—to start out negotiating with unruly pupils and then, when that approach fails, to resort abruptly to anger. But, in most cases, these transitions have an element of calculated or affected ferocity. The teacher is performing rage. If children see someone like Sheba truly losing control—shouting, swearing, and so forth—they are delighted. They sense, not incorrectly, that a victory has been won. I wanted very much to take Sheba aside and tell her, tactfully, where she was going wrong. But I was shy. I didn’t know how to broach the matter without seeming like a busybody. So I kept my own counsel and waited.

  In Sheba’s third week at the school, a geography teacher called Jerry Samuels was patrolling the property for truants when he passed the Arts Centre and heard what sounded like a riot inside Sheba’s hut. When he went in to investigate, he found the studio in uproar. The entire second-year class was having a clay fight. Several of the boys were stripped to the waist. Two of them were endeavouring to topple the kiln. Samuels discovered Sheba cowering, tearfully, behind her desk. “In ten years of teaching, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he later told the staff room. “It was Lord of the Flies in there.”

  2

  You never appreciate what a compost your memory is until you start trying to smooth past events into a rational sequence. To make sure that I maintain maximum accuracy in this narrative, I have started putting together a time line of Sheba’s year at St. George’s. I store it-along with the manuscript—under my mattress at night. The time line is just a little thing on graph paper, but I believe it’s going to be very useful. Yesterday, I bought a packet of stick-on gold stars at the newsagent’s. I shall be using these to mark the truly seminal events. I’ve already used a star, for example, to indicate the first time that Sheba and I spoke in the staff room. After that, there’s a bit of a blank until Sheba’s fourth week at St. George’s, which is when, if my calculations are correct, she met Connolly for the first time.

  The occasion for this meeting was a session of the school’s Homework Club. Notwithstanding her difficulties in maintaining order, Sheba was expected to participate in the full range of staff duties—playground patrol, canteen shift, and, perhaps most daunting of all, Homework Club supervision. Haitch Cee, as it is known to the pupils, is held in a Middle Hall classroom every weekday, between the hours of 3:30 and 6:00 P.M. It was set up a few years ago by the head, with the official purpose of “providing a quiet working environment for those who might have difficulty finding one in their own homes.” It is a deeply unpopular institution among the staff, mainly because it tends to double as a dumping ground for children who have received detentions. Club supervisors usually find themselves having to deal with the school’s worst pupils at a point in the day when those pupils are at their most restive and difficult.

  There were ten children in the Homework Club on the afternoon that Sheba was supervising. Immediately after she began taking attendance, a violent dispute broke out between two third-year girls, one of whom was accusing the other of putting chewing gum in her hair. For the next three quarters of an hour or so, Sheba’s attention was taken up with keeping the girls physically apart from one another. It was not until she sent one of the girls to the head of the third year that things settled down and she had an opportunity to notice the other children in the room. There were now three girls and six boys present, all of whom, according to the teachers’ notes that they had brought with them, were attending H.C. as punishment. They returned Sheba’s gaze with reflexive surliness. Only one boy, at the very back of the room, sat working quietly. Sheba remembers being touched by his childlike posture of concentration—the way his tongue was peeping out from his mouth and his left arm was curled protectively around his labours. This was Steven Connolly.

  A little while later, when she had issued the usual reminder about assigned tasks having to be completed by five o’clock, she got up and wandered over to where the boy was sitting. He winced slightly when he saw her approaching and drew himself upright. “What?” he said. “I’m not doing nothing wrong.” From across the room, Sheba had assumed he was a second- or third-year pupil. But at close range he seemed older. His upper body had a solid, triangular look. His hands and forearms were unexpectedly large. She could see the beginnings of bristle on his chin.

  Sheba has always maintained that Connolly is a terrifically attractive boy and, to be fair to her, several female newspaper columnists have made observations to similar effect. (“Glowering and exotic” one woman in the Mail called him a few weeks back.) I don’t see it, I must confess. I have never been physically drawn to any of my pupils, of course, so I may not be the best person to assess the boy’s charms, but I rather think that if my tastes had run in that direction, I would have fixed upon someone a little prettier: a delicate-boned, downy-faced boy in the lower school perhaps. Connolly is not pretty in the slightest. He is a coarse-looking fellow, with lank hair the colour of pee and a loose, plump-lipped mouth. His nose, owing to a childhood accident (an ardent game of kiss-chase, an unanticipated pothole) is quite badly off-centre. His eyes are heavy-hooded and so downturned as to bring to mind a tragedy mask. Sheba insists that he has superb skin, and it is true, I suppose, that he has been spared the sort of suppurating carbuncles to which boys of his age are prone. But what she refers to as his olive complexion has always struck me as rather dingy. I can never lay eyes on the boy without wanting to give his face a good going-over with a hot flannel.

  On Connolly’s desk, Sheba saw a torn-out magazine advertisement for a sale at Harrods. It was illustrated with one of those highly stylised pen-and-ink sketches of a woman in a fur stole: all hourglass waist and scornful expression. Connolly was copying the image into the back page of his maths work
book. Sheba assured him she had not come over to tell him off. She just wanted to see what he was up to. His sketch was good, she said. The embarrassment, or perhaps the pleasure, caused by this praise made him squirm. (Sheba remembers him twisting his head from side to side, “like a blind person.”) “But you know,” she went on, “you don’t have to copy things. Why don’t you draw something from life? Or even your imagination?” Connolly’s face, which had momentarily softened under flattery, closed up again. He shrugged irritably.

  Sheba struggled to correct herself. “No,” she said. “Because, I mean, I bet you could do really brilliant things. This is very, very good.” She began asking him a few questions about himself. What was his name? How old was he? She expressed some disappointment that he wasn’t in her pottery class. What option was he taking instead?

  Connolly looked stricken when she asked this and muttered something that Sheba couldn’t make out.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Special needs, Miss,” he repeated in a croak.

  Contrary to some of the reports that have since emerged, Connolly was not “backward” or “retarded.” Along with a good 25 percent of St. George’s students, he had been identified as having “literacy issues”—difficulties with reading and writing—and was therefore eligible for daily special needs sessions in the remedial department. On questioning the boy further, Sheba discovered that special needs also prevented him from participating in art classes. She told him that she was surprised about this and suggested that something might be done to rectify the situation. Connolly was shrugging noncommittally when Sheba was suddenly called away. One of her second-year charges was attempting to burn a first-year with a disposable lighter.

  That night, she says, she remembered her brief interaction with Connolly and put a little note in her diary reminding herself to enquire about the possibility of rejigging his timetable. It was wrong, she felt, that the boy should be prevented from pursuing a subject—perhaps the only subject—for which he had some aptitude. She wanted to help.

  Such do-gooding fantasies are not uncommon in comprehensive schools these days. Many of the younger teachers harbour secret hopes of “making a difference.” They have all seen the American films in which lovely young women tame innercity thugs with recitations of Dylan Thomas. They, too, want to conquer their little charges’ hearts with poetry and compassion. When I was at teacher training college, there was none of this sort of thing. My fellow students and I never thought of raising self-esteem or making dreams come true. Our expectations did not go beyond guiding our prospective pupils through the three Rs and providing them with some pointers on personal hygiene. Perhaps we were lacking in idealism. But, then, it strikes me as not coincidental that, in the same period that pedagogical ambitions have become so inflated and grandiose, the standards of basic literacy and numeracy have radically declined. We might not have fretted much about our children’s souls in the old days, but we did send them out into the world knowing how to do long division.

  Sheba never did succeed in having Connolly’s remedial schedule altered, of course. She went as far as going to see Ted Mawson, who is responsible for devising the school timetable. But Mawson brusquely dismissed her request, explaining that designing simultaneous timetables for thirteen hundred children was “like playing three-dimensional chess” and that if he started dithering over this one’s lost art class or that one’s missed woodwork, he would never get the job done. Anxious not to be difficult, Sheba apologised profusely. “This is a comprehensive school,” Mawson told her in a jokily reproachful tone as she backed out of his office, “not the bloody lycée.” Sheba seems to have been rather outraged by this last comment, detecting in it a dig at her privileged naïveté. At the time, she promised herself to pursue the matter further—with the head if necessary. But she never did. Other things came up, she says. She got too busy. Or perhaps, one conjectures, like so many would-be reformers before her, she simply lost interest.

  A few days after meeting Connolly for the first time, Sheba found a picture in her pigeonhole. It was a rudimentary pencil sketch of a woman, executed on lined foolscap, in the romantic style often favoured by pavement artists. The woman had vast, woozy eyes and long, long arms that resolved themselves in odd, fingerless trowels. She was gazing into the distance with an expression of slightly cross-eyed eroticism. Ballooning out from her low-cut blouse was a good amount of heavily crosshatched cleavage. In the bottom right-hand corner of the page the anonymous author of the sketch had written in large, unwieldy italics the words FOXY LADY.

  Sheba understood, more or less straightaway, that she was the foxy lady in question, that the picture was intended as a portrait, and that it had been drawn by the blond-haired boy from the previous week’s H.C. She was not alarmed. On the contrary, she was pleased and rather flattered. In the brutal atmosphere of St. George’s, the gesture struck her as eccentrically innocent. She didn’t seek Connolly out to thank him for the drawing. She assumed that, since he had sent it anonymously, any acknowledgement on her part would embarrass him. But she expected that he would, sooner or later, make some approach to her. And sure enough, one day shortly before the half-term break, she found him dawdling outside her studio as she was leaving for lunch.

  Sheba remembers Connolly being poorly dressed for the weather. It was a blowy October day, and he wore only a T-shirt and a flimsy cotton jacket. When he lifted the T-shirt to scratch absentmindedly at his belly, Sheba saw how his pelvic bone jutted out, creating a wide, shallow cavity just above his groin. She had forgotten that about young men’s bodies, she says.

  “Did you get that picture, then?” Connolly asked.

  “What?” she said, feigning surprise. “You mean it was from you?”

  Connolly allowed, coyly, that this might be the case.

  Sheba told him it was a lovely picture and that, if he really had drawn it, he ought to have signed it. “Wait a minute,” she said. She unlocked the door and went back into the studio, where she took the drawing out from the bottom drawer of her desk. “Why don’t you sign it for me now?” she asked.

  Connolly, who was still standing in the doorway, looked at her uncertainly. “Why, Miss?” he asked.

  Sheba laughed. “No reason. I just thought it would be nice. You don’t have to. But usually artists like to take credit for their work.”

  Connolly came over to the desk and looked at the drawing. It was not as good as some of the other things he had done, he told her. He couldn’t do hands. Sheba agreed that hands were very hard and went on to utter some encouraging words about the value of practice and of studying life models. At a certain point, she noticed him gazing at her own hands. She was shy, she recalls, because they were so rough and unkempt. She put the picture down and folded her arms. “I had a word with Mr. Mawson about changing your timetable,” she said. “Apparently it’s not as easy as I thought.” Connolly nodded, unsurprised. “But I haven’t given up,” she added quickly. “I’m definitely going to keep trying, and in the meantime the most important thing is for you to keep drawing.”

  There was a short silence. Then Connolly confessed hesitantly that his picture had been intended as a portrait of her. Sheba nodded and told him that she had guessed as much. The boy became flustered and began to stammer. In a clumsy attempt to put him at his ease, Sheba made a joking comment about the generous bosom he had given her. “Wishful thinking,” she said. But this only exacerbated the boy’s embarrassment. He turned quite purple, apparently, and did not say anything for a long time.

  Sheba was tickled by this episode. It was a novelty, she says, to be so candidly admired. When she first told me this, I remember expressing some incredulity. I could believe that Richard’s affection might have grown complacent over the years, or perhaps just so reliable as not to count. But surely she wasn’t suggesting that she had been lacking admirers before Connolly? Sheba, who made the men in the St. George’s staff room gaga with her flimsy blouses? No, she insisted. That was qui
te different. There had always been men who made furtive google eyes at her, men who made it clear that they found her attractive. But no one, before Connolly, had ever truly pursued her. She used to think it was out of respect for her having a husband. But it had to have been something else. If everybody was so reverent of the institution of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed? Perhaps, she said, the more plausible explanation lay with the kind of man she had consorted with. Most of Richard’s friends were academic types, and they were all terrified at the thought of being considered sleazy. If they flirted, it was always an arch, joking sort of thing. Even when they told you that your dress was nice, they put it in quotation marks, to avoid any misunderstandings.

  There had been one fellow, several years before, a visiting professor of linguistics from Finland who accompanied her home from the opera one night after Richard had been forced to retire early with food poisoning. He had made a fairly unambiguous pass at her as she was getting out of the cab. But even that had come to nothing. Sheba said that she had sensed something resentful about him, as if he begrudged her for having the power to attract him. The moment she resisted—or hesitated, actually—he had become very nasty and rude. He had suspected all along that she was “a tease,” he told her. Only Connolly, who was either too young or too obtuse to appreciate the outrageousness of his ambition, had dared to reach out to her with any charm or persistence. He hadn’t been scared of her, or angry with her. He didn’t tie himself in rhetorical knots trying to be equal to her beauty. When he looked at her, it was as if he were gobbling her up, she said. “Like a peach.”