by Zoe Heller
The waiter came and took our orders. Sue wanted lasagna. (She’s an awful glutton, Sue.) Sheba was considering a salad, but when she heard me ask for minestrone, she decided to have the same. This maddened Sue, you could tell. And when the waiter walked away, she gave me a look of simpering reproof. “What you were saying just now, Barbara—about not trying to please the pupils? I’m afraid I can’t let that go. I have to disagree with you there. There’s nothing wrong with making the kids happy, you know. When they’re happy, they’re receptive, and when they’re receptive, they learn. I believe, quite passionately, that creating the right sort of warm environment for learning is three quarters of what teaching is all about.”
It had been a long time since I had actually heard any of Sue’s claptrap. It was just as idiotic as I remembered.
“Hmm. That’s very interesting, Sue,” I said. “But then of course you have your marvellous instruments to help you sooth the savage beast … . You do still have your banjo, don’t you?”
Sue gave me a look. “Yes, I do actually. But it’s not a question of the instrument per se …”
“No, no, of course.”
“Oh, I wish I could play something,” Sheba said. “My parents made me take piano when I was a girl, but …”
“Sheba, I didn’t know that!” Sue’s tone suggested mild outrage that any detail of Sheba’s biography should, at this stage, remain unknown to her.
“Yes. Only until I was twelve, though. After that, they gave up. I was truly, truly untalented …”
“Oh no!” Sue protested. “There’s no such thing! You and I must try some duets together. It’d be such fun!”
Sheba laughed. “You don’t understand, Sue. It was the piano teacher who suggested I stop. I have no musicality at all. I live in dread of being asked to clap along to music in a public place.”
“Really?” I said. “Same here.”
“Rubbish,” Sue said, ignoring me. “I’m not going to let you get away with this, Sheba. You just had the wrong teacher.”
“No, take my word. I was a lost cause,” Sheba said. She turned to me. “Were you made to play an instrument too, Barbara?”
“Afraid so.” I nodded. “Recorder.”
“Well, the recorder hardly counts,” Sue said with a quick, high laugh. “That’s like saying you studied the tambourine …”
“Oh no, surely not,” Sheba said. “Aren’t there world-class recorder players, just like there are world-class cellists and whatever ?”
Sue frowned. “Well, yes …”
The waiter arrived now with my and Sheba’s soup. “How scrummy!” Sheba exclaimed, tasting hers. “What a good idea this was, Barbara.”
Across the table, I could feel Sue giving me the evil eye. I smiled and shrugged and blew on my soup to cool it. I was beginning to enjoy myself.
The Christmas holidays came. Sheba and her family spent Christmas Day at home, where they were joined by her husband’s ex-wife and his two children by that marriage. I journeyed to Eastbourne, as I always do, to spend a few days with my younger sister, Marjorie. Marjorie and her husband, Dave, are devout members of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. They and their children-twenty-four-year-old Martin and twenty-six-year-old Lorraine—spend most of Christmas Day serving soup to homeless people as part of the church’s “outreach” programme. I stay in bed, watching television. I’m all for tolerating people who believe in fairy stories, but I do draw the line at joining in with the delusion. My sister and I have a tacit understanding about my nonparticipation in religious activities. She is prepared to put up with it, so long as I keep up the desultory pretence that I am feeling “poorly.” I have spent so many Christmases at her house lying on the front room sofa, pretending to sip lemon and honey drinks, that by now my niece and nephew regard me as a more or less permanent invalid.
I returned to school for the new term feeling somewhat low. Holidays always tend to put me in a brown study. I had not written the new report for Pabblem, so I was forced to go to him and lie about “a family problem” that had prevented me from giving it my full attention. I had hopes that he would grow impatient at this stage and give up on the assignment. But no such luck. After making me grovel for a bit, he granted me a month’s extension.
The one bright spot at this time was Sheba, who continued to show me great kindness. With increasing frequency, I joined her and Sue for lunch at La Traviata. It was not the easiest of threesomes. Sue resented my intrusion, and she never missed an opportunity to distinguish her relationship with Sheba as the one of greater warmth and importance. One of her more transparent tactics was to point up how much older I was than she and Sheba. She once asked me, with a straight face, if I had fond memories of “the Jazz Age.” On another occasion, she paused in midsentence to explain to me that Bob Marley was “a famous Jamaican singer.” Really, though, she played the game all wrong. Her tactics were so crude that she only did herself harm. Sheba couldn’t help but see how jealous she was. I sat back and kept quiet, content to watch while Sue dug her own grave.
According to my notes, Sheba had no further contact with Connolly after the disastrous H.C. encounter until a couple of weeks into spring term. She was in her studio one afternoon, tidying up the mess that had been left by her last class of the day, when he slouched in with his sketch pad. Sheba glanced up and then continued what she was doing.
Connolly stood hesitantly in the doorway, watching her. “Miss?” he said, after a few moments. “I brought some stuff to show you, Miss.”
Sheba turned and stared at him. “And why would I bother looking at your work,” she asked, “when you have been so rude and unpleasant to me?”
Connolly groaned and rolled his eyes. “Oh, go on, Mii-iss,” he said in a singsong. “I was only having a laugh.”
Sheba shook her head. That was not good enough, she told him. He could not expect her to treat him like a grown-up—to devote her precious time to him—if he behaved like a child. “And I’m not sure what you’ve told your friend Jackie about me,” she added angrily, “but I didn’t like his attitude either.”
“I haven’t told him nothing!” Connolly exclaimed.
Sheba was taken aback by the way this sounded. She wanted to object that there was “nothing” to tell. And yet she was relieved—there was no denying it—to hear him assure her of his discretion.
Connolly began to say something more before trailing off hopelessly.
“What?” Sheba asked.
“It’s just … I can’t be nice to you in front of the other kids,” he told her. “They’d think I was a poof.”
Sheba laughed, and Connolly stared at her, pleased to have been funny without trying. “You’re nutty, Miss,” he said approvingly.
After that, things became easier between them. Connolly suggested that he help her clear up the classroom, and Sheba accepted the offer. The boy had as good as apologised, she told herself; it would be childish of her to hold a grudge. Connolly proceeded to race about the room, picking up bits of paper and clay with great energy. When the room was tidy, he sat down at her desk and began looking through a book of paintings by Manet. Sheba directed him to a double-spread reproduction of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. It was a very famous painting, she told him, and had caused a great scandal when it was first shown. She half-expected him to giggle at the naked ladies, she says. But when she looked at him, his expression was one of reverent attention.
“The physical ideal for women was quite different in those days,” she observed. “These ladies wouldn’t make it into Playboy, I don’t think.” She was gabbling slightly, she noticed. She did not want there to be silence in the room.
Connolly nodded and continued to look at the picture without saying anything. Sheba gazed at his studious profile. From this angle, with his drooping eyes and his swerving, flattened nose, he had something of an old prizefighter about him, she thought. Except, of course, that his skin was so golden and impeccable. She had a powerful urge to put her hand to his cheek.
“What kind of woman … ,” she began.
Connolly turned to her. “What, Miss?”
“Nothing,” she said, quickly. “It’s gone out of my head.” She had been going to ask him what sort of woman he liked. What kind of female figure he found most attractive. But, recognising the gross impropriety of the question, she had stopped herself just in time.
Soon afterwards, she told him he’d have to push off. She had a pile of work to get through before she went home, she said. Connolly was reluctant to go and asked whether he might stay and sit quietly while she worked. But Sheba was anxious to be rid of him now. She told him firmly that she needed to be on her own. He shrugged then, and said he would be back on Friday. They parted amicably.
An hour and a half later, as she was wheeling her bike out of the school car park, she found him waiting for her on the street. It was six o’clock, and the main road that runs along the west side of the school grounds was busy with rush-hour traffic. All the children—even Homework Club attendees—had gone home. Sweet wrappers and crisp packets—remnants of the afternoon exodus—were skittering about the pavement in the purplish dusk light. Sheba smiled hello to Connolly and asked what he was doing there. He winced, as if it pained him to say it. “Waiting for you.”
She knew right then what was going to happen, she says. It came to her, as these things sometimes do, in a perfect and fully formed revelation. He had a crush on her; he had been developing this crush for some time. She had encouraged it or, at the very least, failed to discourage it. Now, he was going to declare himself, and she—because she could think of no other feasible reaction—was going to affect amazement and horror.
“What did you want to see me about?” she asked him. “You know, Steven, if you need to talk to me about anything, you can do it in school.”
She started walking fast, wheeling her bicycle beside her.
Connolly trotted to keep up. No, he said, shaking his head, he couldn’t tell her in school.
“Well, then,” Sheba said, “you have to arrange a—”
“I really like you,” he interrupted.
She was silent.
“I think about you all the time. I was—” He gazed at her unhappily.
Sheba smiled. “I’m glad you like me,” she said, maintaining her tone of teacherly brusqueness, “but I can’t talk to you now. I have to get home.”
“It’s more than liking,” Connolly objected impatiently.
They had reached an intersection. Sheba hesitated. Her way home was to the left, down a long shopping street called Grafton Lane. She needed to get rid of the boy—she couldn’t have him trailing her all the way to her house—yet it seemed callous to abandon him there on the street corner. After a moment, she made the left turn and continued to walk with him, past the cheap shoe shop with wire baskets of cut-price slippers crowding its forecourt; past Dee-Dar, the tatty Indian restaurant where St. George’s teachers held their staff dinners; past the post office and the chip shop and the ancient chemist’s with dusty boxes of Radox in the window. Connolly was quiet for a while. And then, in a sudden rush, as if he had been holding his breath, he said, “I’m really into you, Miss.”
Something in his voice made Sheba think that he was about to cry. She couldn’t be sure, because he had his head down. “Steven,” she said. “This isn’t …” She paused, uncertain of how to go on. “This just … it won’t do!” She straddled her bike, preparing to mount it.
“I can’t help it,” Connolly said, looking up. “I swear, I can’t help myself.”
Sheba had been right. There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, Steven,” she said. She was about to reach out her hand and pat his shoulder when his face suddenly came pressing in at hers.
Sheba says I couldn’t possibly understand what it feels like, after twenty years of faithful marriage, to be kissed by someone other than your husband; to feel the pressure of a stranger’s mouth on yours. “Things fall asleep in a marriage,” she told me once. “They have to. You have to lose that mad sexual alertness you had when you were out in the world on your own. All these years with Richard, I don’t think I’ve ever consciously suppressed anything. I’ve always been so grateful to be married—so relieved that I would never have to be naked in front of a stranger again. But I’d forgotten how exhilarating it is to expose yourself … to be a little scared. As soon as Steven kissed me, it all came back in an instant. The, you know, high of it. I was amazed at how I could have lived without that for so long.”
It must have been a pretty comic sight—the little suitor reaching on tippy-toe for his middle-aged mistress, the bike smashing to the ground. But the farcical element of their first embrace seems never to have occurred to Sheba. If it has, she has never mentioned it. She has spoken about the warmth of Connolly, the soap smell of him, the bristle at the back of his neck, the texture of his jumper, and any number of other tedious details connected with this first embrace. But never about how immensely silly the whole thing must have looked.
In the immediate aftermath of the bicycle’s collapse, there was confusion and speechless embarrassment. Connolly tried to help Sheba up, but she waved him away. She remembers looking around to see who might have witnessed their kiss. An elderly woman with a wicker shopping basket on wheels was staring at them rather malevolently as she hobbled by. But that was all.
“Can I see you properly?” Connolly asked, even as she was still righting herself.
“No,” Sheba said. She held her bike in front of her, defensively. “No. Look … Stop it now, please.” She got on her bike.
“Miss,” Connolly pleaded. But she only shook her head and rode away.
That night, as she was preparing the evening meal and giving Ben his bath, she kept up a low, terrified murmuring. Oh no, oh no, oh no. What am I doing? What am I doing? She was still trying to convince herself that she was blameless. She wanted to believe that she had done nothing wrong, that she had not yet gone beyond the pale. When she glimpsed herself in a mirror, she was amazed to see how flushed and happy she looked. “Did you go for a run today?” her husband asked her at dinner that night. “You seem awfully rosy.”
It was somewhere around this time that a chemistry teacher called Heidi Greening mentioned to a few staff members that she had seen one of the fourth-year boys slipping into Sheba’s studio on several occasions at the end of the school day. Heidi was an unpopular woman, with a reputation for sucking up to Pabblem. No one was particularly interested in her information. Marian Simmons did mention something about it to Sheba, I believe, but Sheba responded with such innocent and goodnatured ease—made it so clear that there was nothing untoward in Connolly’s visits—that the matter was quickly forgotten.
5
I’m writing this late on Saturday night. I ought to be in bed, but I haven’t been able to get any writing done all week and if I don’t put in a few good hours of work now, I’m going to get horribly behind in my schedule. I was planning to grab a few quiet hours this morning when Ben came to the house for his weekly visit. But Sheba got it into her head at the last minute to take him to the pictures and, since it was raining, I ended up being roped into driving them. We had a rather jolly time, actually. The film was some old Disney rot, but Ben loved it. And that made Sheba happy, which made me happy. Ben really is a dear little boy. Everybody has been very concerned about how he would deal with the current situation. But, touch wood, he seems to be coping amazingly well. He misses his mother, of course. He still doesn’t completely understand why she has gone to live in Uncle Eddie’s house, and there are often tearful scenes when Richard comes to pick him up. But, generally speaking, he’s a cheerful old sausage.
Sheba and Richard have always been keen not to baby Ben and, in the present instance, they have tried to be as honest and straightforward with him as possible. He hasn’t been told everything. But he’s been told a surprising amount. He knows that his mummy is in trouble for being friends with one of her pupils. Today, in fact, he was asking
Sheba some rather tricky questions about why he wasn’t allowed to meet her friend. Sheba, perhaps stretching the honesty policy too far, said that even she wasn’t allowed to see her friend anymore. “Oh,” Ben said. “Does that make you sad?” Yes, Sheba said. It did make her sad. There was a long, thoughtful pause. And then Ben said, “Do you like your friend more than Daddy?” Sheba hesitated for a moment, but in the end, to my relief, she said no.
After Ben had gone home, Sheba went into a bit of a decline. She often does after his visits. I tried to comfort her, but she quickly grew impatient with my efforts. “You don’t understand,” she said to me. “You don’t understand what it is to be a parent of a child like Ben. He has so much against him in life, as it is. And now he doesn’t even have his mother.”
It is irritating when Sheba talks this way—as if she were a passive victim of fate, rather than the principal architect of her own suffering. It’s a little late in the day for her to start acting the stricken mother. She ought to have been thinking of Ben’s welfare back when she was first batting her eyelids at Connolly. I resisted the impulse to say as much, however, and contented myself with urging her to get an early night.
The day after Connolly kissed Sheba for the first time, he came to her studio. As soon as he entered, she stood up from her desk and ordered him to leave. There was nothing more to say, she told him. She was flattered that he liked her, but she could have nothing more to do with him.
Connolly pleaded. At one point, she says, he asked her to meet him outside school. “I won’t lay a finger on you if you don’t want me to,” he promised.
Sheba bridled at this. “Of course I don’t want you to, Steven. For goodness’ sake.” She strode over to the doorway where Connolly was standing.
“Miss, please … ,” he whined.
“No,” Sheba said and shut the door in his face. There was something thrilling about doing that, she recalls. She had never played the belle dame sans merci before.