by Zoe Heller
He prepared to leave. Sheba told him to drop by with his sketches whenever he wanted. “Perhaps the next time you come,” she added, “we’ll have a go at making something with clay.” Connolly nodded but made no other response, and Sheba feared that she had overstepped the mark. When Connolly didn’t show up on the following Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, she took it as confirmation that she had.
The next Friday, though, just as Sheba was loading the kiln, Connolly reappeared. He had been unable to come earlier in the week, he explained, because he had been tied up with detentions. Sheba, determined not to be overbearing this time, shrugged and said she was glad to see him. He had brought more of his sketches, and they sat for a long time examining his work before chatting more generally about school and other matters. He stayed with her for almost two hours. Towards the end of his visit, Sheba was discussing the science of kiln temperatures when he interrupted her to comment on how nicely she spoke. She didn’t need to be a teacher, he told her earnestly. She could get a job “doing the weather on the telly, or something.” Sheba smiled, amused by his gaucheness. She would keep the career tip in mind, she told him.
When he returned the next week, he did not bring his sketch pad. He hadn’t got round to any drawing that week, he said. He had just dropped in for a chat. Sheba, who was pleased that he no longer needed the pretext of seeking her artistic advice in order to visit her, welcomed him warmly. There was a book of Degas reproductions lying on her desk—she had brought it in hoping to charm her second-year girls with ballerinas—and, when Connolly picked it up, she encouraged him to look inside.
He began leafing through the book, stopping every now and then to let Sheba paraphrase the commentary on a particular painting or sculpture. She was very pleased with his response to a painting entitled Sulking. Reading from the book, she informed him that the relationship between the man and the woman in the picture was mysterious and that nobody knew for sure which one of them was meant to be the sulker.
After looking at the picture again, Connolly declared that there was no mystery—the man was clearly the sulking party. The woman was bending towards him, trying to get something from him, and his hunched, irascible posture indicated his displeasure. Sheba was impressed by this analysis, and she congratulated Connolly on being an acute observer of body language. After he had gone, she found herself chuckling aloud. Connolly’s special needs teacher would have been very shocked, she thought, if he could have seen his learning-disabled pupil chattering so enthusiastically about Degas!
As time went on and Connolly’s visits became routine, he was emboldened to volunteer more of his insights about art and his ideas about the world. Sometimes, when he and Sheba were talking or looking at pictures, he would get up suddenly and go to the studio window to comment on the shapes of the clouds, or the purplish colour of the early evening sky. Once, in what was surely a rather desperate moment, he even stroked the nubby mustard material of the studio curtains and pronounced it “an interesting fabric.”
It is pretty clear to me that there was a strong element of calculation in these little bursts of wistfulness and wonderment. By which I do not mean to imply that the boy was cynical exactly. Simply anxious to please. He had observed that Sheba liked him best when he was saying sensitive things about paintings and so on, and he was beefing up his moony ponderings accordingly. If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical. Connolly was doing as all people do in such situations—tricking out his stall with an eye to what would best please his customer.
For a long time, though, Sheba didn’t see any of this. It did not occur to her that Connolly’s schoolboy profundities, or his “passion” for the kiln, were anything other than heartfelt. And when, at last, it did occur to her, she seems to have been touched rather than disillusioned. To this day, she furiously defends Connolly’s “brilliance” and “imagination.” If he did affect interests that weren’t his, she says, the pretence demonstrated “a very sophisticated social adaptiveness” on his part. The school is embarrassed by the idea that Connolly might be clever, she claims, “because they’ve always written him off as dim.”
The school has never written Connolly off as dim, of course. The fact that he has been identified as a special needs pupil—that he receives help for his dyslexia—indicates quite the contrary. No one on the staff has ever been quite as excited about his intellectual capacities as Sheba, it is true. But, then, the plain fact is that Connolly is not a very exciting boy. He is a perfectly average boy in possession of a perfectly average intelligence.
Why, then, was Sheba moved to such an extravagant estimation of his virtues? Why did she insist on seeing him as her little Helen Keller in a sea of Yahoos? The papers will tell you that Sheba’s judgement was clouded by desire: she was attracted to Connolly and, in order to explain that attraction, she convinced herself that he was some kind of a genius. This is reasonable enough. But it is not the whole story, I think. To completely understand Sheba’s response to Connolly, you would also have to take into account her very limited knowledge—and low expectations—of people of his social class. Until she met Connolly, Sheba had never had any intimate contact with a bona fide member of the British proletariat. Her acquaintance with that stratum did not—and still doesn’t—extend much beyond what she has gleaned from the grittier soap operas and the various women who have cleaned her house over the years.
Naturally, she would deny this. Like so many members of London’s haute bourgeoisie, Sheba is deeply attached to a mythology of herself as street-smart. She always howls when I refer to her as upper class. (She’s middle she insists; at the very most, upper-middle.) She loves to come shopping with me in the Queenstown street market or the Shop-A-Lot next to the Chalk Farm council estates. It flatters her image of herself as a denizen of the urban jungle to stand cheek by jowl in checkout queues with teenage mothers buying quick-cook macaroni in the shape of Teletubbies for their children. But you can be quite sure that if any of those prematurely craggy-faced girls were ever to address her directly, she would be frightened out of her wits. Though she cannot say it, or even acknowledge it to herself, she thinks of the working class as a mysterious and homogeneous entity: a tempery, florid-faced people addled by food additives and alcohol.
Little wonder that Connolly seemed so fascinatingly anomalous to her. Here, in the midst of all the hostile North London yobs, she had found a young man who actually sought out her company, who listened, openmouthed, when she lectured him on Great Artists. Who proffered whimsical aperçus about the curtains. Poor old Sheba regarded Connolly with much the same amazement and delight as you or I would a monkey who strolled out of the rain forest and asked for a gin and tonic.
Connolly understood all this, I think. I don’t mean that he would have been able to articulate, or even to consciously formulate, the role that class played in his relationship with Sheba. But that he sensed the anthropological dimension of Sheba’s interest in him and played up to it, I have no doubt. When describing his family and home to Sheba, he seems to have been at pains to leave her naïve notions of prole mores intact. He told her about his family’s holiday caravan in Maldon, Essex, about his mother’s part-time job as a dinner lady and his father’s job as a taxi driver—but he omitted to mention that his mother held a college diploma or that his father was a history buff with a special interest in the American Civil War. These facts, now that they have emerged in the papers, are so astounding to Sheba—so at odds with the cartoon thugs she had been encouraged to envisage—that she chooses either to ignore them or to dismiss them as lies. In a recent newspaper interview, Connolly’s mother mentioned that, when her children were young, she and her husband often played them recordings of Swan Lake and Peter and the Wolf. Sheba threw the paper down when she got to this bit. Mrs. Connolly was lying, she said—trying to make her son’s home life seem more wholesome and happy than it was. “Steven’s father hits him, you know,” she shouted at me. “He beats him. She doesn’t mentio
n that, does she?”
This accusation is based on something that Connolly told Sheba once, at the beginning of their relationship. Sheba has spoken of this conversation often because Connolly’s claim about his father’s violence—true or not—prompted her first gesture of intimacy towards the boy. It was at the end of winter term. Connolly had come to see her in the studio, and the two of them were looking out of the window at the darkening playground, discussing the possibility that it might snow. Connolly mentioned that snow always put his father in a bad mood. When Mr. Connolly “had the hump,” he added, he often hit him. Sheba was not particularly surprised by this admission. She had watched several made-for-television dramas about domestic violence and considered herself well-acquainted with council-house brutality. She murmured something consoling to Connolly. And then she reached out and rubbed his head. When her fingers came away, strands of his hair rose up with them in an electric spray. Sheba laughed and made a lighthearted comment about the static in the air that day. Connolly closed his eyes and smiled. “Do that again, Miss,” he said.
Prior to this incident, Sheba had occasionally wondered about the extent of Connolly’s sexual experience. Fourth-year males at St. George’s vary pretty widely in their level of sexual sophistication. Some are still at the stage of giggling about “the come tree” in the headmaster’s garden (a cyclamen so called because its scent bears an alleged resemblance to the smell of semen). Some brag about receiving “blow jobs” and “finger-fucking” girls. And then there are others who make convincing reference to their experience of sexual intercourse. Sheba had no way of knowing for sure where Connolly fit on this spectrum, but she had been inclined to place him at the innocent end of the scale. Not technically a virgin, perhaps, but still fundamentally inexperienced. Now, something about his smile—the confident way he commanded her to touch him again—made her revise her original estimation.
Sheba declined to repeat the gesture. It was time for her to go home, she told him. She put on her coat and the funny Peruvian hat that she was wearing that winter. Then she locked up the studio, and the two of them walked through the playground to the car park together. Even though she told him not to bother, Connolly hung around while she undid the lock on her bicycle. When they got out on the street, they paused awkwardly, unsure of how to effect their farewells. Sheba resolved the matter by prodding Connolly abruptly in the ribs and jumping onto her bike. “Bye then!” she cried as she rode away. When she glanced behind her, she saw that he was lingering on the pavement where she had left him. She waved and, after a moment, he waved mournfully back.
It is a nice question as to when exactly Sheba became conscious of having amorous feelings for Connolly or, indeed, became conscious of his having amorous feelings for her. I have pressed her on many occasions for specificity on this issue, but her responses are maddeningly inconsistent. At times she will insist that she was guilty of nothing more than maternal fondness for Connolly and was utterly “ambushed” when he first kissed her. At other times she will coyly volunteer that she “fancied” him from the start. I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment. But it seems clear that, during these early days, Sheba was not very honest with herself about her feelings for the boy. The hairstroking episode is a case in point. On her way home that evening, she felt troubled, she says. Unsettled. She kept going over what had just happened in her studio and telling herself that there was nothing to fuss about. She had ruffled the boy’s hair, for goodness’ sake. Just as an auntie might. But why, then, she wondered, was she feeling so shifty? Why was it necessary to reassure herself? Things that are truly innocent don’t need to be labelled as such. If everything between her and the boy was so simple and aboveboard, why had she never mentioned his visits to Sue? She was feeling guilty about it. She was!
Had Sheba pursued this interrogation of herself with any rigor, things might have turned out very differently. But almost as soon as the promising line of enquiry had been opened, she abruptly shut it down. She had not mentioned Connolly to Sue, she told herself, because Sue would have been bound to respond with unnecessary anxiety. She would have said that the after-school meetings were “inappropriate.” And Sheba absolutely knew that they weren’t. What did it matter what other people might think, as long as she knew that the thing was harmless? People were hypervigilant these days, because of child abuse. In the rush to guard against the sickos, the world had gone slightly mad. There were people who wouldn’t take pictures of their naked children anymore, for fear of being reported to the police by the man at the developer’s. Surely she wasn’t going to succumb to that sort of craziness and become her own tyrannous Neighbourhood Watch? She had ruffled his hair. His hair. She had only wanted to comfort the boy, she told herself. Perhaps she would have been less inclined to make the gesture with another, less appealing pupil. But what of that? She couldn’t expect herself to be oblivious of what the kids looked like and smelled like. She spent all day confronting their corporeal reality: inhaling their farts, gazing, with pity, upon their acne. Some of them were vile looking and some were attractive. What kind of saint wouldn’t notice the difference? Any pleasure she took in Steven’s physical self was no more or less suspect than the pleasure she had once taken in the plump, velvety bodies of her own babies. A sensuous pleasure certainly, but far from sensual.
One Friday afternoon, not long before the Christmas holidays, Connolly appeared at a Homework Club that Sheba was minding. The two had not encountered each other in a public setting since they had become friends, and Sheba felt somewhat uneasy. Connolly arrived late, in the company of a skinny, grinning boy called Jackie Kilbane. According to the notes that they handed in, they had been caught earlier in the week sharing a cigarette together in the school’s crumbling outdoor lavatories. They were now serving a fortnight’s worth of hour-long detentions. Sheba detected something sly and furtive in Connolly’s manner as he stood before her desk. When she smiled at him, he would not meet her eye.
As soon as he and the Kilbane boy had been registered, they retreated to the back of the room, where they began tipping back on their chairs and whispering. Sheba could not make out what they were saying, but she had an uncomfortable sense that it was obscene in nature and connected, in some way, to herself. The suspicion grew when Kilbane got up and approached her desk to ask for more paper. Kilbane is an unpleasant boy with an ugly, yellow face and an insolent, insinuating attitude. A thin line of fur skulks on his upper lip, like a baby caterpillar. He gave Sheba the creeps. As she burrowed in the desk drawer for paper, he seemed to be standing uncomfortably close to her chair, but only when she sat up did it dawn on her that he was attempting to look down her shirt. She handed him a sheet of paper and sharply ordered him back to his desk. “All right, all right,” he said mockingly, as he strolled away. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Sheba glanced at Connolly. He had been watching this exchange intently. As he met her eye, there was a hard, unfriendly look on his face.
Sheba felt betrayed. She had thought him special, and here he was exchanging spitballs, plotting with his horrid friend to get a peek at her chest. At the same time, she registered a definite twinge of—what was it? Excitement? Titillation? For a split second, she found herself imagining what it would be like to lie beneath him, to have his hands on her. She shook her head in fright. She ought not to have been so easy and sweet with him, she told herself. Now, she would have to draw back.
Towards the end of the first half hour, Kilbane and Connolly started play-fighting with one another—rolling around on the floor while the rest of the H.C. group screamed encouragement. Neither of them responded, she says, when she got up from her desk and stood over them, ordering them loudly to stop. Finally, she threatened to send for Mr. Mawson if they did not immediately desist and accompany her outside. This worked. The boys got up from the floor, still laughing, and trooped out into the corridor. But once Sheba had closed the classroom door and was facing the two of them, she
was at a loss. Her one thought had been to remove them from their encouraging audience. Now that she had done so, she struggled to find her next gambit.
I happened to be walking through Middle Hall, on my way to a meeting with the head, when Sheba and the two boys emerged. I heard Sheba’s voice, shrill with admonition, before I saw her. And then, when I turned the corner, I spotted the little confrontational knot at the far end of the corridor. Sheba’s feet were planted firmly in the ten to two position, as if in preparation for a plié. Her hands were on her hips. She looked like the tarot card symbol for wrath. The boys, who were well versed in the postures of this teacher-pupil tableau, were slouching against a wall, their hands thrust deep into their pockets.
Given that I was already in danger of being late for Pabblem, and given that my relations with Sheba had reached such a difficult pass, I was tempted to ignore whatever contretemps she was having with the two boys and simply walk on. But as I drew nearer, I distinctly heard the taller boy call her a “silly cow.”
“What was that?” I said sharply. Whatever my personal feelings towards Sheba, I was obliged to address the boy’s incivility. It would have been a dereliction of duty to do otherwise.
The three of them looked around at me. Sheba had a slightly wild look in her eye and the telltale patch of scarlet on each cheek.
“Are these boys giving you trouble, Mrs. Hart?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so, Miss Covett,” Sheba said. There was a quaver in her voice. “They’ve been talking and generally creating a disturbance since the beginning of H.C. And now they’ve started fighting.”
Together, we studied the two boys. The taller one, Kilbane, had been in one of my bottom-stream history classes the year before. He was known to his classmates as Lurch. The one with the blond hair I did not know. He was not as confident as Kilbane and, when I asked him his name, he spoke it quietly to the floor.