by Zoe Heller
Here, I’m afraid, I must take issue with Ma Connolly. I would have had the cheek. Had the genders of the principals in this affair been reversed—had Sheba been a man engaging in an illicit affair with a fifteen-year-old girl—I would have been just as wary of apportioning simple “predator” and “victim” labels to the two parties. Goodness knows, I have seen quite enough concupiscent girls in my time to be familiar with the sexual manipulation of which young females are capable.
But as regards the general public view on these matters, Mrs. Connolly is surely right—there is a discrepancy in the way that the public judges the sexual misbehaviour of men and women. Oh, the official response to Sheba is very severe. They all say that she has committed a “despicable” crime. But behind their hands, they’re smirking. When I was in the pub the other night, buying cigarettes, Sheba’s face appeared on the television screen for a second; immediately, a great roar of salacious laughter went up around the bar. “Dirty girl,” I heard one man say to his friend. “Wouldn’t mind a bit of that myself.” It’s hard to imagine Sheba’s male equivalent eliciting such a ribald reaction.
Male sex offenders are never funny. They get all the righteous rage—the hatchet-faced housewives baying for blood outside the courthouse; the politicians competing for who can be most sickened. Which is odd, really, given that paler versions of their despised urges are so ubiquitous—so cheerfully sanctioned—in the male population at large. Don’t the scientists now go so far as to suggest that the attraction of older men for younger women is an evolutionary instinct—a reflex encoded in male biology? When a lecherous middle-aged man ogles a teenager’s bottom, are we not now encouraged to believe that he is actually doing his bit for the species—responding to the physical symptoms of fecundity, as nature has programmed him to do?
But perhaps that’s it. Perhaps the vehemence with which we respond to men’s sexual transgressions is proportionate to how discomfitingly common we know those transgressive urges to be. A woman who interferes with a minor is not a symptom of an underlying tendency. She is an aberration. People don’t see themselves, or their own furtive desires, in her. According to evolutionary science, an affair like Sheba’s is nothing more than a freakish lay-by on the grand motorway of human survival. That’s why men in pubs can afford to laugh at her.
Is it so much better, though, to be laughed at than to be feared? Being a public monster must be—well, monstrous. But becoming the punch line of a smutty joke is no pleasure either. And evil at least has some heft. Mrs. Connolly is anxious lest Sheba “benefit” from the double standard. But I doubt very much that Sheba’s comic oddity will actually earn her more lenience from the court. In all likelihood, she’ll receive exactly the same punishment as a man. The guardians of gender equality won’t stand for anything else. In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.
6
The last Friday in March marked something of a turning point in my relations with Sheba. I have given the date one gold star. The lunch hour was extended that day by half an hour so that the staff could assemble in the headmaster’s garden to have their photograph taken. This annual staff portrait is one of the traditions instated under Pabblem’s rule. Pabblem, who likes to have evidence—faked up, if necessary—of what a cheerful, raucous ship he runs, uses the portrait on the front cover of the school newsletter. In order to offset the expense of the photographer, he also “strongly encourages” each staff member to buy a minimum of two souvenir prints at a grossly inflated price.
Friday was a white-skied, drizzly day, and there was quite a bit of muttering from the teachers as they began trailing down the path to Pabblem’s enclosure. “Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” Bill Rumer said, prompting a round of appreciative titters from his cronies. “Ooh, this is so bloody boring,” Elaine Clifford whined a little later, as she pushed a grubby pink comb through her hair. (Staff complaint at St. George’s is never very fiery or subversive. On the contrary, it tends to suggest a certain pleasure in the cosy predictability of things being unsatisfactory.)
Pabblem finally put in an appearance at 12:30. He was closely pursued by Phelps and Jenkins, both of whom were carrying benches borrowed from the gym. It is one of Pabblem’s many vanities to believe that he is a “visual person,” and every year he has a new concept for how the staff should be posed. One time, he had us all lie down on the grass while the photographer clambered onto the playground shed for an aerial shot. Another time, he tried in vain to get everyone to jump in the air at the same time. Mrs. Freeble, who teaches domestic science, landed awkwardly and had to be sent to the A & E with a fractured toe. This year Pabblem had hit upon the idea of drafting in a few of the younger and more photogenic children from the lower school. The staff was to perch on the gym benches, while Pabblem stood in the foreground with the children clinging to him in attitudes of spontaneous affection and delight.
To no one but Pabblem’s surprise, the children proved to be a terrible drag on the proceedings. For a good fifteen minutes the assembled staff sat on the cold benches, pressing their blue hands between their clenched thighs, while the three little girls and one boy who had been chosen expressed their entirely reasonable objections to sitting on Pabblem’s shoulders, or crouching behind him with their heads poking through his legs.
After a while, a break was called. Pabblem and the children went off to one side with the photographer to rehearse poses, and we were allowed to get up and stretch our legs. I stood with a few other teachers watching Pabblem yank the children about with increasingly terse commands: “Stand here! Like this! Hold my hand!” and at one point I made a facetious remark. Sheba, who was standing behind me, responded with a loud hoot of laughter, and Pabblem looked up angrily. I gazed innocently at the sky. I was in particularly bad odour with Pabblem at this time, having recently handed in a revised version of the St. Albans report that he had deemed even less satisfactory than the first. At our last, fraught meeting, he had informed me of his decision to scrap my report and to incorporate some of my “less contentious material” into a longer paper that he would author himself. This paper, he told me, was going to be a farreaching examination of all discipline issues currently facing St. George’s. It would be a big project, but he hoped to have it finished in time for the summer term staff conference. Its provisional title was “Where We Go Wrong.”
The photo session resumed and, after some more unpleasant wrangling, the children were eventually pressed into service, but by the time we were released we had only three quarters of an hour left before afternoon classes began. As the teachers began to leave, Sheba came over. She apologised for causing trouble with her noisy laughter, and then she invited me to join her and Sue at La Traviata for a quick bite. The three of us walked over together.
“I have something to announce,” Sue said, when we were sitting down in the restaurant.
“You’re leaving St. George’s,” I said.
“No,” Sue said, glancing at me sourly. “Come on, Sheba, can you guess?”
“Oh, Sue, I’m terrible at guessing,” Sheba said. “What is it?”
“Well, you must promise not to tell anyone else, because I’m still, you know, keeping it quiet, until—”
“You’re pregnant,” I interrupted.
Sue’s fat face fell. “How did you know?”
“You are?” Sheba said. “Oh, that’s wonderful news, Sue!”
Sue began beaming again. “Not quite three months yet, so it’s still a secret. But you must have noticed how chunky I’m getting!”
Sheba paused, diplomatically. In truth, the early stages of pregnancy had made no discernible difference to Sue’s Pantagruelian bulk. With or without a baby, she was a fatso. “You look terrific,” Sheba said. “Incredibly well!”
Sue proceeded to prattle on at some length about baby names and nursery decoration plans and other maternity-related matters. I tuned out for a while. When I tuned back in, she was discussing l
abour. “Listen to this,” she said in a scandalised voice. “Ted is against me having a natural delivery.”
“Well,” said Sheba, “good for Ted.”
Sue blinked. “No, I mean, he’s got a point. Obviously. I bet you were sensible and took the epiwhotisit the first time they offered.”
“No, actually,” Sheba said. “When Polly was born, I was in labour for twenty-four hours without anything. I’d read all the books about the unnecessary interventions of modern medicine. And there was an element of keeping up with Richard’s first wife, Marcia, who had delivered both her girls with a midwife in a birthing pool. I was slightly letting the side down even being in hospital. I wanted to cave during the final stretch and have the drugs, but by then it was too late. They said it would harm the baby, so I had to bloody well go through with it.”
“And how”—Sue was speaking now in the hushed tones she reserved for sensitive issues—“how was it with Ben?” She shot me a look. Clearly, she had heard accounts of my staff room faux pas regarding Sheba’s son.
“Oh, Ben was an incredibly easy birth,” Sheba said. “I was determined to have the epidural that time round. I went into the hospital at three in the afternoon, and at 10:00 P.M. I was playing Scrabble with Richard in the main ward when one of the nurses came up and took a look at me and said, ‘Oh, my God, you’re ten centimetres dilated. That baby’s coming!’ They whisked me straight into the labour room, and about twenty minutes later he was born. So no epidural that time either.”
“Well … ,” Sue began, but Sheba carried on talking.
“As soon as he came out, they took him off to the side, like they do, to wash him and whatever. They were talking away—how lovely he was, what a pretty boy. And then they all started whispering. I was saying, ‘What? What is it?’ But they wouldn’t answer. And then the doctor went over, and there was a lot more murmuring. I started screaming, ‘What is it?’ And, eventually, the doctor came to me and said, ‘Sheba, I’m afraid your baby has Down’s syndrome.’”
I glanced at Sue. Her mouth was a crinkly line of distress. Her eyes were watery.
“Afterwards,” Sheba continued, “Richard said he had been almost relieved, because by that point he’d been convinced the baby was seriously deformed—a Cyclops or something. I wasn’t relieved at all. I kept saying there had to be a mistake. We hadn’t had the amnio. I wasn’t a high risk for that sort of thing, and we always said the amnio was a bad idea because, what were we going to do if they did find a defect? Exterminate the child because it wasn’t up to scratch?”
She paused and looked around the restaurant.
“I mean,” she said, “I still think that. But at the time, I don’t think I’d considered the full … I was just so confident that there wouldn’t be any problem. I kept saying to them, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ But obviously they weren’t. And when they gave him to me, I could see immediately that he was different. I was sort of disgusted with him, actually … . Isn’t that terrible? But I was. I just kept thinking, He’s a mistake. He shouldn’t have been born. I was terribly depressed for the first month. And then, I went the other way. At about ten weeks I became quite euphoric. He was smiling all the time, and I convinced myself that he was actually cleverer—quicker—than other babies …”
She looked up at Sue and me now. “Oh God!” she cried. “Don’t look so glum! Please! This is a happy day! I didn’t mean to be a downer.” Both of us grinned obediently.
“Don’t stop,” Sue said. “Please. You’re not being a downer at all.”
But Sheba shook her head. “Enough childbirth for one day, I think,” she said.
On the way back to school, Sue popped in at the chemist, leaving me and Sheba to walk the last five hundred yards to the school gates on our own. The morning grey had given way, in the sudden English fashion, to a brilliant, gelid afternoon. On the patches of street that weren’t in shadow, you could feel the sun warming your hair. “I hope it didn’t upset you, talking about Ben and … everything,” I said.
“No, no, not at all.”
“It’s just, I feel embarrassed about that topic because of, you know, what I said to you that time in the staff room …”
Sheba stopped and squinted at me in the sunlight. “Oh, Barbara, that was much worse for you than for me. You fret too much. How were you to know? Listen, I once told a joke about a one-legged man to a colleague of my husband’s who really had only one leg. He was sitting down at a table when I first walked in so I didn’t realise.”
“God,” I said. We both laughed.
After our laughter had faded, we walked for a while in silence. I was just beginning to worry about not having anything to say when Sheba held out her arms, flung back her head, and made a happy, stretching sound. “Ohhhh, how lovely to have the weekend,” she said. She shut her eyes for a moment and, when I glanced at her, I saw her amazing lashes lapping like fronds at her cheeks.
“Are you going away?” I asked tentatively.
“Noooo,” she said, opening her eyes. “Not going away. Not getting out of bed unless I absolutely have to. I’ve told Richard I’m determined to do absolutely nothing.”
“Oh, that sounds marvellous,” I said. It did sound marvellous—having a life so busy and full that doing nothing was an aspiration. But Sheba misinterpreted the envy in my tone.
“Oh dear, are you going to be very hectic?” she asked.
I considered an array of possible answers, opting at last for what I told myself was medium truth. “Not especially,” I said. “Bits and bobs, you know …”
We lapsed into silence again. I could hear the prim tip tap of my heels on the pavement. I ordered myself to talk: For God’s sake, say something, you catatonic bitch. But nothing came.
Then Sheba spoke. “Listen, would you like to come to dinner on Sunday?”
Surprise made me stupid. “What, with you?”
She laughed, although not unkindly. “Yes, me and Richard and Ben. And Polly too. She’s got the day off from school on Monday, so she’s coming down for the weekend.”
Had she asked Sue too, I wondered? She had to have. It was impossible that she would invite me without her. “Oh, but you just said how you were dying to do nothing,” I objected. “You can’t be cooking for me.”
She shook her head. “It’s only dinner. I’d be making it anyway. Believe me, it won’t be anything grand. And I’d love you to meet Ben and Polly.”
“Well I …”
“Come on, Barbara, I insist.”
“All right then. That sounds lovely.”
“Sunday night is good?”
I wondered if I ought to make some nod to the notion of having to consult my diary. But I thought better of it. I didn’t want to risk her glimpsing the white wastelands of my appointmentless weeks.
“Sounds fine,” I said. “Will Sue be coming?” I blushed. It had slipped out before I could stop myself.
Sheba didn’t seem to notice. “No, actually,” she said. “She can’t. She’s going to be in Abergavenny with Ted.”
“Oh, I see.” Had I been considered only after Sue turned the offer down? There was a short silence as I pondered the indignity of being Sue’s understudy.
“You know, I could have the both of you over another time when she’s free, if you’d prefer,” Sheba offered.
“Oh, no!” I said.
“That’s what I thought.” Sheba smiled. “I mean, it’s not as if we’re an unbreakable triumvirate, is it?”
We were at the school gates now. “Okay, look.” She rummaged in her bag and produced a piece of paper and a pen. “Here’s where I live. And here’s my number. You’ll be driving, right? So you should call if you need directions.”
She handed the piece of paper to me, and I gazed dumbly at it in my hand.
“We’re on?” she said.
“Yes, absolutely. We’re on.”
“See you on Sunday, then.”
I stood watching her as she walked away. Her long green cardigan was fl
apping around her in the breeze, and her skirt was clinging to her woollen tights, getting caught up between her legs. She was fiddling, as usual, with her unruly hair. “Damn,” I heard her mutter softly, as she bent to retrieve a hair grip from the ground. I folded the piece of paper on which she had written her address, placed it carefully in the inner pocket of my handbag, and headed slowly towards Old Hall. I kept my head down as I walked, partly so that I could concentrate on replaying the conversation that had just taken place and partly to avoid advertising the foolish smile on my face.
I woke up on the morning of my dinner appointment with Sheba and solemnly promised myself not to start doing anything preparatory until at least midday. It is a great challenge for me not to place inordinate emphasis on this sort of occasion. Any break in my routine—any small variation in the sequence of work and grocery shopping and telly and so on—tends to take on a disproportionate significance. I’m a child in that respect: able to live, psychically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.
By 9:00 A.M., in spite of my vows, I had twice taken my new sandals out of their box to check that they weren’t too tarty. The rest of my outfit, which I had laid out the night before, presented no problems. I had spray-starched my white blouse so it was nice and crisp, and my grey skirt suit from British Home Stores looked as good as new. (It had not left its dry cleaning wrapper since a staff function two years earlier.) The sandals were a worry, though. I had bought them on Saturday at a local boutique in Archway. They were lilac, with tiny bows on the front and a higher heel than I generally wear. Jolly? I asked myself as I stared at them from different angles. Or just cheap? Would they look silly with tights? And, if so, could I get away with bare legs?
At three o’clock, I took a bath. Afterwards, while my hair was drying, I tried getting a fresh perspective on the sandals by walking quickly into the bedroom and catching them, as it were, by surprise. The first time I did this, they looked all right. Pretty. Dainty. Entirely appropriate for a single woman attending a spring supper. Then I did it again. And this time, when I walked into the room, they seemed to sit up and roar mutton dressed as lamb. In an effort to get off the footwear topic, I tried on my grey skirt. But it seemed that I had put on weight since last wearing it and, as I strained to fasten the waistband, one of the buttons pinged off and rolled into the dark, dusty space beneath my dresser. There followed a rather shameful interlude of female madness, which involved me tearing off the skirt and standing on a wobbly chair in the front room, trying to get a full-length view of my naked form in the mirror that hangs over the gas fire.