by Zoe Heller
“Excuse me?” I said. “Speak up, please.”
He raised his head. “Steven Connolly, Miss,” he said. His voice still had a trace of boy in it—a scraping clarinet tootle.
I went through the usual process with the boys—cold outrage, warm threats, admonitions to “shape up.” I suppose that I laid it on a bit thick for Sheba’s benefit. As I spoke, Connolly kept his eyes on the floor, occasionally lifting his head to glance stealthily at Sheba. “Look at me when I am speaking to you,” I told him.
Did I sense anything sexual in his attitude towards her then? Possibly. But dealings with male pupils of that age are rarely without some manner of sexual undertow. A secondary school is a kind of hormonal soup. All those bodies pressed in on one another—bubbling with puberty and low-level, adolescent fantasy—are bound to produce a certain atmosphere. Even I, a woman in my early sixties, and by common consent no oil painting, have been known to prick the testosteronal curiosity of my fifteen-year-old charges from time to time. It is something to which one becomes inured. Very rarely, sexual tension will be released in a small explosion of some sort—a groping, a threat. There was one occasion, back in 1982, when an absolutely evil little fellow in the third year named Mark Roth assaulted the young woman who was coming in at the time to give French conversation. (He was apparently on top of her when her screams alerted a staff member who happened to be walking by.) But that was a singular case. For the most part, the sexual angst of the school’s student population is nothing more than an indistinct background hum: so much white noise.
After I was done lecturing the boys, I accompanied them back into the classroom and watched them settle down to their assigned tasks. My handling of this episode had not been altogether tactful. School etiquette demands that, where one’s moral authority with the children is demonstrably greater than that of a fellow staff member, one should endeavour to play down the fact. Instead, I had gone out of my way to flaunt my superior disciplinary skills. I went over to Sheba, who was standing at the front of the room. “Don’t hesitate to call me if these two give you any further problems,” I told her. I assumed that she would be peevish. But as I walked away she came after me, with a wide smile on her narrow face. At the door she leaned into me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Thank you son much for saving me, Barbara,” she whispered. I was too taken aback to say anything. In fact, it was not until I had walked out into the hall and closed the door behind me that I remembered some sort of response might have been expected.
4
I was late for Pabblem, of course. When I walked into his office, he was kneeling on his special backless, ergonomic chair, emanating a prissy sort of dissatisfaction. “At last!” he cried when he saw me. He proceeded to wish me good afternoon with the rather too careful politeness of someone who has plans to be nasty. “Please …” He gestured to a chair (nonergonomic, standard issue) on the other side of his desk. I sat down. The school’s administration centre is housed in an ugly, L-shaped annex to the science block, and Pabblem’s office, which is at the very end of the annex, looks out onto a modest square of grass and flower beds known as the headmaster’s garden. That afternoon, Phelps, the school caretaker, and Jenkins, his depressed assistant, were in the garden installing a birdbath. I was able to track their comically incompetent manoeuvres over Pabblem’s shoulder as he spoke.
“Good week?” Pabblem asked.
I nodded. I wasn’t going to waste any energy being charming.
“Good, good,” he continued. “I see you have a cup of coffee already, so now … let’s get to it.”
Just a fortnight before, three other members of the history staff had taken eighty fourth-years on a field trip to the cathedral at St. Albans as part of the term’s project on churches. While they were there, a group of about fifteen children had escaped their supervision and gone on a shoplifting rampage through the town centre. A few boys had been caught in the act and taken to the local police station, where charges were pressed. The following day, Pabblem had been inundated with complaints and threats from St. Albans shop owners, and later in the week the school had been informed by the St. Albans town council that it was banned from ever visiting St. Albans again. I had not been present on the outing but, as the most senior staff member on the history faculty, I had been charged by Pabblem with writing a report on the incident. My official brief had been to account for the “breach in discipline” and to offer suggestions for how such problems might be avoided in the future. My real task was to state for the record that no responsibility for this regrettable episode could possibly be attributed to Pabblem’s leadership. The finished report, which I had dropped off with Dierdre Rickman that morning, had omitted, somewhat ostentatiously, to perform either function.
“First of all,” Pabblem said, “I want to thank you for your hard work on this paper.” (Pabblem always calls the reports he commissions “papers,” as if life at St. George’s were a perpetual summit of international AIDS doctors.) “Whatever objections I am about to raise,” he went on, “I want you to know, they do not diminish my appreciation of your effort.” He paused here, to allow me to thank him for his Solomon-like fair-mindedness. When I remained silent, he gave a small, fake cough and continued. “I must be frank with you, Barbara. When I read your paper, I was a bit confused. Ultimately, I’m afraid, I was disappointed.”
There was a sudden loud buzzing in the room. Pabblem sighed as he leaned forward to press a button on his intercom. “Yes?”
“Colin Robinson’s on the line,” Dierdre Rickman’s voice announced.
“I can’t talk to him now,” Pabblem said irritably. “Tell him …” He ran his fingers through his thin, red hair. The harried chief executive. “No, wait. Put him on.”
He picked up the telephone and shrugged at me apologetically. “Colin? Hi!”
During the short conversation that ensued, Pabblem leaned his head to one side and clamped the phone between his shoulder and ear, freeing his hands to pat the tidy piles of documents on his desk into more perfect symmetry. I could feel goose bumps rising up on my arms as I watched his white hands make their prim, fussing gestures. I gazed out of the window. Phelps and Jenkins were still engaged in their mysterious charade with the birdbath. “Great, yes. That’d be t’rific …” Pabblem was saying. “Colin, you’re a star …”
When Pabblem first came to St. George’s, seven years ago, the school board hailed him as “the breath-of-fresh-air candidate.” The staff were thrilled. He was thirty-seven at the time—the youngest head the school had ever employed—and, unlike his predecessor, the melancholy Ralph Simpson, he was said to be “very big on communication.” In his former post as deputy head at a school in Stoke Newington, he had created a drama department and an award-winning “neighbourhood ecology project.”
Since that time, Pabblem has certainly fulfilled his promise as an innovator. Thanks to him, St. George’s now boasts a daily salad alternative on the canteen menu and an annual magazine of creative writing called The Shiner. (The logo is a portrait of a little boy with a black eye.) There is also an annual “Day of Subversion”—a day on which all roles are reversed and the pupils get the chance to teach their teachers. (Pabblem joins in the fun by adopting the persona of “Lord of Misrule” and touring the classrooms wearing a jester’s cap.)
Yet, even among staff members who like this sort of thing, Pabblem is not a popular headmaster. Beneath his easygoing exterior, he has turned out to be a thoroughly pedantic man—a a petty-minded despot obsessed with staff punctuality charts and compulsory staff “bull sessions” and time-wasting, bureaucratic folderol in all its manifestations. At least once a term, Pabblem makes the entire staff attend a special lecture given by some sour-faced young person from the education authority. Because he is a progressive bully, the subjects are always things like Meeting the Challenge of Diversity, or Teaching the Differently Abled. Shortly before Sheba came to the school, he set up a system called Morale Watch, which requires all staff members to fil
l out a weekly report card on their mental and spiritual health. (Any admissions of dissatisfaction are rewarded with agonising follow-up interviews, so naturally everyone always fills in the cards with slavish avowals of personal joy.) The original Pabblem boosters try to save face by saying that power has transformed Pabblem. My own sense is that power has merely given opportunity to an unpleasant, Gauleiter tendency that was always there. Either way, no one says he is fresh air anymore.
When Pabblem had finished his phone conversation, he buzzed back through to Dierdre—“No more calls unless they’re urgent.” Then he turned to me. “Okay!” He held up my report. “So, Barbara, I think I am right in saying that you were asked to write an analysis of how discipline broke down on the St. Albans trip and, if possible, to offer some suggestions for how we might improve our security procedures on future excursions of this sort.”
“Actually … ,” I began. Pabblem held up a palm, to silence me.
“But you didn’t … ,” I said.
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “Hang on, Barbara, let me finish. Whatever exact phrases I used, I think I made it pretty clear that I was looking for a practically oriented paper on school control issues. What you have handed in is, well … an attack on the St. George’s history syllabus.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘practically oriented’ … ,” I began.
Pabblem closed his eyes. “Barbara,” he said. “Please.”
Presently, he opened his eyes again. “I think you’ll agree, Barbara, I run a pretty relaxed ship here. I am very open to different approaches and ideas. But you know and I know that this report is not what I asked for. Is it?” He moistened his index finger on his tongue and began flicking through the pages of the report. “I mean, really, Barbara.”
I stared at him blankly. “I thought what I wrote was very much to the point,” I said.
He gazed, frowning, into the middle distance for a moment, and then he pushed the report across the desk to me. “Look at that,” he said. It was open to the last page, which was headed “Conclusion.”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I wrote it.”
“No, no, I want you to read it again. From my point of view. I want you to consider whether this is the sort of thing that enhances my ability, as a headmaster, to respond to the St. Albans crisis.”
“I am prepared to believe that you didn’t find it helpful. I don’t need to read it again.”
“Barbara.” Pabblem leaned forward in his chair and smiled, tightly. “Please do as I ask.”
Odious little man! I crossed my legs and bent my head to read.
All the way down the margin of the page, Pabblem had printed triplets and sometimes quadruplets of miniature exclamation points and question marks. The final paragraph had so excited or enraged him that he had highlighted the entire thing with yellow fluorescent ink:
Gavin Breech, whom I regard as the ringleader of the shoplifting expedition, is a very nasty little fellow: angry, violent, and, I would hazard, a bit mad. I doubt that he is susceptible to any of the rehabilitation procedures provided by St. George’s. Our best bet, in my opinion, would be to expel him. I stress, however, that this course of action does not guarantee an end to such incidents. The periodic eruption of unruly, and even criminal behaviour in our student body would seem to be a fact of school life for the foreseeable future. Given the socioeconomic profile of our catchment area, only a fool would imagine otherwise.
“Well?” Pabblem said when I looked up. “Is that a helpful contribution?”
“I think it could be,” I said. “You asked me to offer suggestions, and I did. I wrote what I truly believe.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Pabblem banged his white fist on the desk.
There was a silence, during which he smoothed back a strand of hair that had fallen into his eye. “Look, Barbara,” he went on in a quieter voice. “By commissioning you to write this paper, I was giving you an opportunity to make your mark on things.” He smiled. “If attacked with the right kind of creative thinking, this is the kind of project that turns a teacher into deputy head material …”
“But I don’t want to be a deputy head,” I said.
“That aside,” he said, the smile vanishing from his face, “the sort of despair you preach here has no place at St. George’s. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to have another go at this.”
“So you’re censoring me.”
He laughed, mirthlessly. “Come on, Barbara, let’s not be childish. I’m giving you a chance to improve on your first effort.” He got up from his chair and walked to the door. “The holidays are coming up. That should give you a good chunk of time to think about this. If you could have a new draft back to me at the start of next term, that’ll be fine,” he said.
“If you don’t like what I have to say, why don’t you give it to someone else?” I asked.
He opened the door. “No, Barbara,” he said firmly. “I want you to do this. It’ll be a good learning experience for you.”
The following Monday, as I was being shown to a table at La Traviata, someone held out an arm like a tollgate to bar my way. It was Sheba, sitting in a booth with Sue. “Barbara!” she said. “I’ve been looking for you! I wanted to thank you again for helping me out on Friday.”
I shrugged. “You’re quite welcome.” Then I gestured to the waiter who was showing me to my table. “I should go.”
“Oh, but won’t you sit with us?” Sheba smiled at me brightly. Sue, sitting opposite her, drummed her chubby fingers on the Formica table and frowned.
“Well … ,” I said.
“Oh, please do,” Sheba said. “We haven’t ordered yet.”
Clearly, she had not been informed about the cold war between Sue and me. This came as both a relief and a vague disappointment. Was it possible that I had never even come up in their conversations?
“Are you sure?” I said. “I don’t want to barge in on you …”
“Don’t be silly,” Sheba said.
“All right then.” I turned to the waiter. “I’ll sit here, thanks.”
“Smashing!” Sheba shifted over to make room for me on her side of the booth. Sue lit a cigarette. Her expression suggested the kind of deeply private, strictly incommunicable anguish of someone who has just slammed the car door on her thumb.
“Barbara was completely marvellous the other afternoon,” Sheba said, as we all examined the chalkboard menu on the wall above us. “I was on the verge of going loony with two of my H.C. boys. And she came along and saved the day.” She turned to me. “I hope I didn’t make you late for the head.”
I shook my head. “I wish you had. Our meeting certainly didn’t deserve promptness.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “It didn’t go well then?”
“He didn’t like the report he made me write about the St. Albans business,” I said.
“What did you write?” Sue asked.
I provided a precis. By the time I finished, Sheba was laughing. “Goodness, you are brave. Was he fearfully angry with you?”
“In his ineffectual, gingery way, yes.”
She laughed again. “He is a bit of an idiot, isn’t he? The other day, he cornered me in the headmaster’s garden and asked me for my opinion of his spring planting plans. I thought it sounded awfully gaudy—endless tulips, you know-but I’m afraid I wasn’t nearly as courageous as you. I said it all sounded lovely. He looked so pathetically pleased! It is maddening the way men do that—ask questions to which you are bound to reply with a lie.”
Sue giggled appreciatively.
“Actually,” Sheba went on, frowning now, “I take that back. That’s terribly mean-spirited of me. I’m sure I frequently fish for compliments myself …”
“Oh, no,” Sue broke in. “It’s true. Men are such babies. They need to be told how bloody marvellous they are all the time. They’re insecure, that’s the thing. They need their egos stroking, don’t they?”
I waited for her to stop,
so that Sheba could finish what she’d been about to say. But she kept talking. “Women are too canny to be taken in by flattery. If Ted says something nice to me, I know he’s after a bit of nooky. That’s the other thing. Men are such dogs, aren’t they? Brains between their legs!”
I have never enjoyed this kind of women’s talk—the hopelessness of the other sex and all that. Sooner or later, it always seems to degenerate into tittering critiques of the male member. So silly. So beneath women. And, funnily enough, the females who go in for this low-grade misandry are usually the ones who are most in thrall to men. I glanced at Sheba. She was listening to Sue’s chatter with apparent interest. Was this the sort of conversation that had seduced her into becoming Sue’s companion?
“Believe me,” Sue was saying, “when Ted tells me, ‘Yes, you look lovely, dear,’ I always know when he’s lying. Whereas if I tell Ted he looks like a Greek god, he falls for it, hook, line, and sinker …”
Ted was Sue’s live-in companion. In the days when we were still on amiable terms, she used to refer to him as her lover or, worse still, her old man. Shut up, shut up, I thought, as she chuntered on. Shut up, you boring cow. Let Sheba speak. Presently she did.
“Well, you may be right, Sue,” Sheba said. “But sometimes I think it’s more my problem. It’s not as if I’m obliged to give the answer that Pabblem or whoever is looking for. Maybe I’m just blaming him for my own lily-liveredness. Why do I always need to tell people what they want to hear? My husband says that I have a lot of empathy, but I’m afraid that’s just a nice way of saying that I want to please everybody.”
“Well, don’t be trying to please the pupils,” I said, mindful of her discipline problems. “That way disaster lies.”