by Zoe Heller
For several minutes Connolly remained outside, knocking and begging to be let in. Sheba grew anxious that someone would walk by and see him. She was just about to give in and open the door when the knocking stopped. Through the window, she saw Connolly trudging away, hunched over against the wind. She sank down into a chair and congratulated herself on her fortitude.
Connolly returned the next day. Sheba had taken the precaution of locking the door, and she did not respond when he called out her name. “I’m going to keep coming back until you let me in,” he shouted before he retreated. And he did come back. He came every day that week. Sheba took to placing chairs against the door for added protection, but in truth there seemed little danger that Connolly would try to break in. He appeared quite content to stand outside bleating for her, and by the beginning of the next week his appetite for even this modest show of dedication had waned. On Monday, Sheba waited for the pleading at the door, but it never came. She was amused by the boy’s lack of endurance and, at the same time, slightly offended. Later, when they had become lovers, she would tease him about his poor performance as a suitor. “Oh yes, you were dying for love of me,” she would say. “Four whole days in a row.”
At first I think she was relieved to have got rid of Connolly. She speaks of having been “elated”—of feeling as though she had stepped back at the last minute from a dangerous precipice. But as time went on and she grew used to being safe again, a certain listlessness seems to have set in. She had been at St. George’s for five months by this stage. To the rest of the staff, it looked as if she were finally getting into the swing of things. She was dressing more sensibly. She seemed to be much more effective in controlling the children. But Sheba was growing increasingly disconsolate. She did not feel that she had become a more competent teacher. On the contrary, she felt that she had surrendered to the “complacency” of the rest of the staff. Her classes had become more peaceful, it was true, but only because she had given up on trying to make the children learn. She had stopped fighting them. She let them wear their personal stereos and read comics in her classes. And if she was no longer even attempting to impart knowledge, what, she wondered, was the point? Connolly had been her one talisman against the drear of St. George’s. Now that she had sent him away, she wasn’t sure why she was bothering with the job at all.
One afternoon, three weeks or so after Connolly had stopped pursuing Sheba, she was walking through the playground when she came upon him and some other fourth-year boys playing soccer. He stopped running when he saw her. His face reddened and he turned away. Sheba walked on quickly, but she was much affected by this surprise encounter. Connolly had looked awful, she thought. Tormented. She wondered whether she had not treated him unfairly. What had he done, after all, but confess a schoolboy crush?
Over the following days, she began working out possible compromises on what she called “the Connolly situation.” She would allow Connolly to visit her, on a strictly platonic basis, once a week. No, once a fortnight. Perhaps there would be no limit on the number of times he could visit her, but she would restrict their conversation to matters relating to art. Then one day—I’ve been unable to ascertain the exact date, but it seems to have been in early March—Connolly came to her again. She was just leaving her studio when he ran up to her and thrust a note into her gloved hand. Without uttering a word, he rushed away again. Inside the tightly folded square of paper, Sheba found a terse, handwritten plea to meet him on Hampstead Heath the following night at 7:00 P.M.
She studied the note for a long time. Despite its brevity, it had evidently cost Connolly much effort. He wrote in an agonised scrawl—upper and lower cases mixed together. In various places, he had torn the paper with the pressure of his pen. She found herself curiously agitated by his bad penmanship. How, she wondered, was he ever going to survive out in the world?
For the next twenty-four hours, Sheba debated whether or not to go to the heath. On the afternoon of the proposed meeting, she had made up her mind against. Clearly, the boy still had romantic designs on her. The only sensible thing, she told herself, was to stay away. But as soon as Richard arrived home that evening, she heard herself telling him that her old school friend Caitlin was up from Devon for the night and that she had made plans to see her. She felt she had to see Connolly, she says; she had to explain to him, in person, why their friendship could not continue. Readers will have to judge the credibility of this rationale for themselves. To me, it has always seemed a little suspect. Surely Sheba had provided the boy with enough explanation at this point? I am hard-pressed to believe that any woman—even one with Sheba’s highly advanced capacity for self-deception—could have set off for such a meeting truly believing that her sole mission was to deliver a refusal.
She rode to the heath on her bicycle. The country was undergoing quite a cold snap that month, but she pedalled so furiously that, by the time she reached the park entrance, she was perspiring beneath her sweater. She chained her bike to the railings and walked up the path to the pond. It was a large place for such an assignation, and she felt sure that she and Connolly would miss each other. She remembers being struck by the depth of her own disappointment. Then, without warning, Connolly appeared before her. He seemed younger and smaller than usual that evening, she says. As always, he was insufficiently dressed for the weather. He expressed surprise that she had turned up. He had been sure, he said, that she would “chicken out.” Sheba explained gravely that she was there only because she had been worried by the tone of his note. There was no hope of anything happening between the two of them, she said.
Connolly responded to this with unexpected equanimity. He nodded, understandingly, and suggested that they walk together for a bit. Sheba refused. That wouldn’t be a good idea, she said. Then a man with a dog appeared on the path and glanced at the two of them curiously. Sheba changed her mind. There was no harm in a stroll, she thought. Connolly was behaving so sensibly, it was bound to be all right.
As they set off up the path, Connolly promised not to “try anything on.”
“I should hope not!” Sheba said, amused by his presumption.
But even as she said it, it occurred to her that perhaps he would try something on. Perhaps, she thought, he had plans to rape her. She kept walking anyway. She had begun to feel strangely detached from the proceedings. “I was sort of watching myself,” she recalls. “Smiling at what a silly I was being. It was as if I had become my own rather heartless biographer.”
As they approached an area of the heath that was more densely wooded, Connolly turned to her, clasped her hands in his, and began walking backwards, into the trees, pulling her along with him. “Come on. In here,” he said.
“What are you doing?” Sheba asked. There was indignation in her voice, but she allowed herself to be pulled. It was much darker than it had been on the path, and she could barely see Connolly’s face. A fairy-tale image came to her of a goblin dragging a princess back to his forest lair.
They continued to walk for another minute or so, and then, just as Sheba was about to protest again, Connolly stopped and released her from his grip. They were standing in a little clearing. He grinned at her. “We can be private here,” he said. He sat down on the ground and took off his jacket. “Look,” he said, spreading it out next to him, “you can sit on this.”
“You’ll freeze,” Sheba objected. But Connolly didn’t reply; he just sat, looking at her.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “I’m not going to sit down. It’s just not on.” Connolly made a suit-yourself gesture and lay back on the ground. “Come on, Steven, you’re going to catch pneumonia like that,” Sheba said.
He was silent. His eyes were shut. She looked down at him, feeling sillier and sillier. After a while, he opened his eyes. “Fuck, it is cold, isn’t it?” he said. This made her laugh.
“I’m afraid I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I’m going to go back now.”
“No you’re not.” Connolly sat up. There w
as a twig in his hair.
She remembers smiling at him, knocking her arms against her sides like a little girl. Finally, with a hopeless shrug, she sat down.
They did not have sex on this occasion. It was far too cold, according to Sheba, and she was far too anxious. I know that they kissed. And Connolly must have lain on top of her at some point because, in speaking of this encounter, Sheba has mentioned having been astonished by how “light and narrow” he was. (She was accustomed, no doubt, to her husband’s more substantial girth.) I also know that at a certain point in the proceedings Sheba asked something woe-struck and rhetorical along the lines of “What are we doing?” To which Connolly responded with a terse reassurance in the vein of “Don’t worry about it.” Sheba remembers thinking at the time that he sounded terribly grown-up and capable. She knew he was neither, of course. But she seems to have taken comfort in the illusion.
Going home that night, Sheba was convinced that she would not be able to face Richard without presenting some physical manifestation of her sin. She pictured herself dissolving in tears. Fainting. Spontaneously combusting. But when she arrived at her house, she surprised herself with how expertly she dissembled.
Richard had waited up for her. He was lying on the sofa, watching Arts Tonight. He held up his hand in greeting when she entered the living room but continued squinting at the television. I’ve seen Richard watching television once or twice. He has a particular way of turning his head away from the screen and peering at it, sidelong. Sheba says that this has something to do with his bad eyesight. But to me it’s always seemed a fitting manifestation of Richard’s generally superior attitude: it is as if he is trying, in his pompous way, not to let the telly know that he’s interested.
“God, you won’t believe what crap these people are talking,” he said. They were quiet for a moment, watching the panel discussion. After a while he turned to her. “Did you have a nice time?” he asked.
Sheba pretended to inspect split ends in the mirror. “No, not really,” she replied. “It was pretty dull, actually.” She hadn’t planned to say that, but somehow, when it came to it, grumpiness seemed easier to pull off than enthusiasm.
“Oh dear,” Richard said. He was only half listening.
“I think I’m going to go to bed,” Sheba said.
He humphed absently. Then, just as she grasped the door handle, he looked up again. “So how’s Caitlin?” he asked.
“Oh, okay,” Sheba said. “A bit lumpy and mumsy these days.” She beamed out silent apologies to her innocent friend.
“Well,” Richard said, yawning, “that’s what life in the provinces does to a person.”
“Yes,” Sheba said. “Probably.” She paused a moment and then, when Richard did not reply, she opened the door. “Okay, I’m off upstairs,” she said. “I’m knackered.”
When Richard came up to the bedroom half an hour later, Sheba kept her eyes shut and concentrated on breathing like a sleeping person. He got undressed, and then he read for fifteen minutes. When at last the book slipped from his hand and he began to snore, she remembers feeling strangely let down. Aggrieved almost. She hadn’t wanted to arouse his suspicion, of course. But she couldn’t help feeling that an evening of the sort she had just experienced deserved a less muted conclusion. It would have been nice, she remembers thinking tipsily, as she drifted into sleep, if she could have confided in her husband about her adventure.
The next day, at the end of school, Connolly came to her studio again. There was a brief, awkward struggle when he first walked in. And then Sheba changed her mind and let him kiss her.
“You know, Steven,” she said, after a while, “it’s very, very important—incredibly important—that we keep this secret. You haven’t said anything to anybody, have you?”
He assured her, indignantly, that he had not. “I mean,” he added, “apart from my mates and that.”
Sheba looked at him, thunderstruck. He looked back at her for a long moment. Then he laughed. “Fooled ya,” he said.
Sheba was quiet. She put her hands on his shoulders and studied his grinning face. She told him never to joke about this. She told him that it could be very difficult keeping a secret and that, one of these days, he might feel tempted to confide in someone, but that even if he thought the person trustworthy—even if they swore on their mother’s grave not to tell—he was never to say anything.
“I’m not like that,” he protested. “I wouldn’t grass on you.”
“Grass on us,” Sheba corrected him. “You would be in a lot of trouble, too, you know.” She knew this was probably untrue, but she thought it best to give him as much incentive as possible for keeping quiet.
Connolly stood before her, twisting his head from side to side just as he had done the first time they met. “Come on,” he said gruffly, “let me kiss you.”
Shortly after that, they repaired to the far end of the room and there, behind the kiln, they engaged in their first act of sexual intercourse. “Everyone’s always asking, ‘How could she? What made her take the risk?’” Sheba said to me, once. “But the truth is, Barbara, doing that kind of thing is easy. You know how you sometimes have another drink even though you know you’re going to have a hangover tomorrow? Or, or, you take a bite of a doughnut, even though you know it’s going straight to your thighs? Well, it’s like that. You keep saying No, no, no until the moment when you say, Oh bugger it. Yes.”
Connolly kept whispering something in her ear that first time behind the kiln. It was something urgent but muffled, and Sheba had to ask him to repeat himself several times. It was only when he reared back from her impatiently and almost shouted that his words finally made sense. “Miss,” he was saying, “is it all right if I come in you, Miss?”
When I first heard this anecdote, it rather confirmed my skeptical assumptions about the kind of sex one might expect to have with a fifteen-year-old. But Sheba didn’t intend it that way. She was offering the story as an illustration of Connolly’s charming, rough-edged gallantry. She has not furnished me with many details regarding the mechanics of her and Connolly’s intimacy, but often, when referring to their lovemaking, she rolls her eyes coyly or makes little gasping noises. I think it is safe to say that she found the physical side of their relationship satisfactory. I once asked her, rather irritably, how a boy of Connolly’s age and limited experience could possibly have known what he was about, sexually speaking. But she only smiled and wagged her finger at me. “Ah, that’s what is so marvellous about the young,” she said. “They make such quick studies, don’t they?”
I might as well admit here and now that any notional damage done to Connolly’s psyche by his affair with Sheba has never been of much concern to me. I don’t argue with the necessity of there being a law against teachers doing what Sheba did. Clearly, it is not good for any institution’s morale to have staff members fraternising—fornicating—with their juniors. But I certainly don’t subscribe to any sentimental notion about the innocence of everyone under the arbitrarily imposed age bar of sixteen years. The people of Britain danced in the streets when the thirty-two-year-old heir to the British throne became engaged to a nineteen-year-old. Is there so much difference between nineteen and fifteen—between thirty-two and forty-one-to warrant the profoundly different reaction in this case? The sorts of young people who become involved in this kind of imbroglio are usually pretty wily about sexual matters. I don’t mean just that they’re sexually experienced—although that is often the case. I mean that they possess some instinct, some natural talent, for sexual power play. For various reasons, our society has chosen to classify people under the age of sixteen as children. In most of the rest of the world, boys and girls are understood to become adults somewhere around the age of twelve. They enter puberty and then start doing whatever the adults in their part of the world happen to do—work in factories, hunt bears, kill people, have sex. We may have very good reasons for choosing to prolong the privileges and protections of childhood. But at least let
us acknowledge what we are up against when attempting to enforce that extension. Connolly was officially a minor, and Sheba’s actions were, officially speaking, exploitative; yet any honest assessment of their relationship would have to acknowledge not only that Connolly was acting of his own volition but that he actually wielded more power in the relationship than Sheba. I don’t think for a minute that he has suffered lasting hurt from his experiences with an older woman. On the contrary, I believe that he’s had a rather thrilling ride. Heresy, I know. But there. It’s what I think.
When Sheba’s story first broke, a chap from the Evening Standard wrote an article in which he alluded to unsubstantiated rumours of Connolly’s sexual experience prior to his affair with Sheba. He went on to pose the question “What redblooded fifteen-year-old wouldn’t welcome a roll in the hay with Sheba Hart?” It was a brave, honest piece, I thought, but it brought forth a glut of sanctimonious articles protesting the journalist’s supposedly frivolous treatment of a serious matter. The Press Council ended up issuing a rebuke and, by way of apology, the Standard published a response piece by Connolly’s mother. The article, which I have kept, had the headline “Boys Need Our Protection Too.” This was its first paragraph:
Sheba Hart’s alleged sexual affair with my son—who was fifteen years old when it began—was recently described in these pages as “a stroke of good luck for Master Connolly.” (“Every Schoolboy’s Fantasy,” February 20, 1998). As Steven’s mother, I am deeply offended by this sort of lighthearted attitude to Mrs. Hart’s alleged crime. I find it mind-boggling that anyone should consider the sexual abuse of a minor a laughing matter. I can only suppose that Mrs. Hart is benefitting from society’s double standards when it comes to sex. If Steven had been a girl, I don’t think anyone would have been making jokes and I don’t think anyone would have had the cheek to question his innocence.