What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel

by Zoe Heller

  “This is outrageous,” I said. “Come on, you and I are going back to sort this out.”

  “Oh,” Lila said. “I don’t know, Barbara. He’s not in a good mood. Let’s not have a blow-up.”

  Sheba looked at me uncertainly.

  “Do you want to be escorted everywhere by this friend of Richard’s?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Come on then.”

  I took her hand and led her across the street, back up to the house. Lila loped along reluctantly behind us.

  In the hallway, we met Hugh Beckwith. He was wearing his gardening jeans and carrying secateurs. He looked vaguely mortified at having his house hijacked by someone else’s marital drama. “Hello, hello!” he shouted with slightly batty good humour as he galloped up the stairs. Then Richard emerged from the kitchen.

  I hadn’t seen Richard in a while. He seems gaunter and greyer these days. Adversity has lent some dignity to his fatuous features.

  “What’s she doing here?” he asked, pointing at me.

  “I called her,” Sheba said.

  He tossed his head. “Oh for God’s sake! This is difficult enough.”

  “Look, Richard. I don’t want to make trouble,” I said. “If you think that Ben and Sheba need a chaperone, perhaps I can be of—”

  Richard snorted. “You? I don’t think so.”

  I sharpened my tone. “Sheba does have a right to see her son, you know.”

  “And I have a right to insist that she is chaperoned by someone I trust,” Richard said. “Last week, she went missing with him for more than two hours. Lila and Hugh were absolutely freaked out.”

  “We were, yes,” Lila murmured, sheepishly.

  “I’ve taken legal advice on this, Barbara,” Richard said, “so don’t try it, okay? Frankly, I would have a very good case for denying her any contact with Ben.”

  “Where is he now?” Sheba asked.

  “Upstairs, playing,” Richard said. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to look directly at his wife.

  “You’re punishing her, Richard,” I said. “You can’t really believe she would abscond with Ben …”

  Richard gave an angry smirk. “There are very few things I consider impossible anymore. I would have thought it was obvious why I might doubt Sheba’s fitness to be in sole charge of a little boy.”

  Sheba gasped and grabbed at Richard’s hand. “Oh, Richard, please! What are you implying? You don’t—”

  Richard flinched from her touch. “For Christ’s sake! I don’t need to justify myself to you!”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “we should come in and discuss this?”

  Richard shook his head. “This isn’t a negotiation. She accepts Megan, or she cannot leave the house with Ben. Simple as that.”

  Sheba was crying noisily now, and for a moment all of us—Richard, Lila, and I—stood looking at her.

  “Can she at least talk to this Megan, before she makes her decision?” I asked Richard.

  Richard hesitated. Then he seemed to relent. He glanced at Lila. “I’m sorry … would it be all right? Do you mind?”

  Lila shook her head. “No, no, of course not.”

  We followed her through the doorway into a large kitchen.

  At the table, a young woman with her hair in a plait was sitting reading the newspaper. She regarded us with cool curiosity as we trooped in.

  “Megan, Sheba wants to talk to you before deciding on whether she’ll take Ben out today,” Richard said.

  “Sure,” Megan chirped magnanimously, as if her permission had been asked.

  “Please. Sit down,” Lila said. “There’s coffee on the stove. I’ll just go and check on Ben and Polly. Do call if you need me.”

  “Polly’s here?” Sheba said, as Lila hastened from the room.

  “Yes,” Richard said.

  “Well, maybe she could be the chaperone,” Sheba said, suddenly excited.

  “She doesn’t want to see you,” Richard cut in.

  Sheba looked as if she had been smacked.

  I pulled out a chair. “Come on, Sheba.” She sat down obediently, facing Megan, and I sat next to her. Megan smiled brightly. At the time, I thought she was anxious to show that she wasn’t afraid. But, in retrospect, I think she was just slightly dense.

  “So, come on,” Richard said impatiently, after a while, “what do you want to ask her?”

  Sheba opened her mouth and then closed it again. She turned to me, helplessly.

  “Have you met Ben before today?” I asked Megan.

  She glanced at Richard. He nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I’ve been helping Richard out here and there, for the last month or so.”

  “Oh! How nice for Richard. Doing what?”

  “Just, you know, keeping the house tidy, making sure Ben’s okay …”

  “You’re one of Richard’s students?” I asked.

  “Well, sort of,” she replied, “Richard’s my thesis supervisor.”

  At this, I felt Sheba’s knee pressing heavily against mine.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “None of your fucking business!” Richard shouted. “I won’t have this. I’m not letting you interrogate her. She hasn’t done anything wrong, you know.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You told me I could ask her questions. This is hardly the third degree …”

  “Keep your bloody nose out of this, okay, Barbara? This has absolutely nothing to—”

  “Okay!” Sheba interrupted. “Okay!” She raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’ll take her. I’ll take her. Only no more shouting. Please, let’s just go.”

  After that, Richard went upstairs to fetch Ben and, for a few minutes, we three women were left alone at the kitchen table.

  Megan continued smiling at us in her vapid way.

  “So,” I said, “Richard’s your thesis supervisor, eh?”

  She nodded.

  “Uh-huh. And what’s your thesis about, then?”

  She smiled. “The modern romantic novel, actually. Mills & Boon books and bodice rippers and all that. It’s sort of about reading reactionary texts in a subversive way.”

  There was a silence, and then Sheba let out a great yelp of laughter. Megan and I both jumped.

  Before anyone could say anything more, Ben burst into the room. “Hoola! Hoola! Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!” Following him in, Richard shot me a nasty glance. “I think you can go now, Barbara,” he said.

  Pompous bastard.

  9

  Sheba is very morose this morning. She ate hardly anything at breakfast, and immediately afterwards she went off and secreted herself in the living room “to do some work.” She’s been complaining about missing her studio lately, so the other day I brought home an enormous sack of modelling clay for her. She was rather snooty about it at first, despite the fact that I’d nearly broken my back getting it in and out of the car. It isn’t the stuff she’s used to working with apparently. But she has started using it. When she left the living room this morning to go for a pee, I had a quick glance in there to see what it is she’s working on. It looked to be a model of a mother and child, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t have much of a chance to inspect it before Sheba came charging back from the loo and slammed the door in my face.

  Sheba has often told me that she thinks there’s a rhythm to married life, an ebb and flow in the pleasure that a couple take in one another. The rhythm varies from couple to couple, she says. For some couples, the seesaw of affections takes place over a week. For others, the cycle is lunar. But all couples sense this about their life together—the way in which their interest in one another builds up and recedes. The happiest couples are the ones whose cycles interact in such a way that when one of them is feeling jaded, the other is ardent, and there is never a vacuum. Now that Sheba and I are living together, I wonder whether this theory might apply to us. If Sheba is being moody and difficult at the moment, perhaps that’s just because it’s her turn to be.
Perhaps the shifts will change soon and it will be my time for some attention.

  According to my notes, the next big gold-star event on Sheba’s time line occurs at the beginning of June. This was when Polly got thrown out of school. I was over at Sheba’s on the evening they got the news. We had just finished an early dinner, and Richard was trying to persuade Sheba that they should buy a warehouse he’d seen for sale in the East End.

  “No!” Sheba protested in pretend horror. “Darling, we’ll end up in the poorhouse!”

  “But it’s a marvellous investment, Sheba,” Richard said. “We could take out a second mortgage on this place to finance renovations and we’d end up with a beautiful loft for peanuts.”

  Richard’s real estate ambitions were a frequent source of semijoking debate in the Hart household. Richard saw himself as a frustrated entrepreneur. He was always champing at the bit to get into the housing market—to buy low, sell high, make easy money. It maddened him that he and Sheba had sat on the sidelines throughout the real estate boom of the nineties. But the Highgate house, for which Sheba’s father had provided the down payment, represented their only equity, and Sheba adamantly refused to gamble with it.

  “If you hadn’t been such a nervous Nelly, we could have made millions by now,” Richard told her that night. He looked at me. “Isn’t that right, Barbara?”

  “Well, maybe it’s a good thing that Sheba is careful,” I said. “She probably knows a thing or two about handling the purse strings. She is an economist’s daughter, after all.”

  “Pfah!” Richard made an impatient gesture. “Sheba doesn’t know a thing about money. Her caution stems from ignorance.”

  The phone rang, and Sheba went next door to answer it. Richard continued to talk. “If Sheba had her way, we’d keep all our money in wads of five-pound notes in the biscuit tin. The thing is, Sheba is scared of money, because she’s never learned how it works …”

  As he went on, I found myself distracted by Sheba’s voice wafting in from next door. “No … look,” she was saying, in an agitated tone. “I’m just sure you’ve got this wrong … . Right … right, no, I understand. But isn’t that rather an extreme measure?”

  Richard smiled complacently “Uh-oh. Sounds like Sheba’s mother … . What can I offer you for pud, Barbara? We have some lovely tangerines.”

  As I was about to reply, Sheba began shouting. “Oh, for goodness’ sake! No, no, I’m sure she’s being absolutely beastly … . Yes, but I’m just … She is only seventeen, you know.”

  Richard’s amused expression faded. “What is it, Bash?” he called out. “Is something wrong?”

  Sheba didn’t reply. “I understand that,” she was saying to the person on the phone. “I’m not talking about tolerance …”

  I got up to clear the plates from the table, but Richard held up a hand to shush me. He was scrunching his eyes in an effort to hear Sheba. “Isn’t it your job to help her through this?” she was asking now. “It doesn’t sound to me as if you’ve made any attempt to help her at all …”

  I sat down again.

  “Bathsheba!” Richard shouted. He got up and went into the other room. “What the hell is going on?” I heard him ask angrily.

  The two of them spoke to one another for a moment or two in low tones. Then I heard Sheba say, in a shrill tone of exasperation, “For God’s sake, Richard! Could you let me talk to the man, please?”

  Richard came walking back, very quickly, into the dining room and began to clear the dinner plates with a lot of clang and slam. He didn’t look at me.

  After a minute or so, Sheba hung up the phone and followed him in. “Bloody school,” she said.

  “How did you leave it?” Richard asked.

  “They want us to go down and get her tomorrow.”

  “Such nonsense!” Richard said.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

  “No, no. Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Sheba said, swinging around and smiling at me. “It’s just Polly’s got herself in trouble at school. They’re expelling her.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “She’s bullying, they say,” Sheba said.

  “Bloody ridiculous,” Richard huffed.

  “What sort of bullying is she accused of?” I asked.

  “You name it,” Sheba said. “Terrorising girls in the lower forms. Extorting money. They say she’s a real little gangster.”

  “It’s all sooo silly,” Richard said.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” Sheba snapped at him.

  Richard looked affronted. But he only said quietly, “Because it is.”

  I stood up. “I should go. If there’s anything I can do …”

  Sheba smiled and patted my shoulder. “Thanks, Barbara. It’s awfully nice of you, but there’s nothing to be done.”

  They drove down to Brighton the next day. They saw the headmistress first and then the school counsellor. These interviews were long and tedious, but Sheba didn’t mind. She was happy to have the confrontation with her daughter delayed, she says. The school counsellor, Mr. Oakeshott, was a nice, rather dim man. He told her and Richard that Polly’s bullying was a behaviour indicating low self-worth and that it was a mistake to take a girl like Polly at face value. Not very far below her rough surface, he said, they would find a lot of “anxiety and self-doubt.”

  I laughed out loud when Sheba recounted this for me. It’s always fascinating to hear bleeding hearts give their soppy rationalisations for delinquency. As far as I can tell, teachers have been congratulating Sheba and Richard for years on having a daughter who is full of grit and spunk, and whatever else it is that modern little girls are meant to be made of. Then, the minute Polly is found guilty of antisocial behaviour, they’re falling over themselves to say that her toughness is merely bravado. Polly is “vulnerable,” they say. She is “anxious.” Well, excuse me—everyone is anxious. What counts, surely, is what you do with your anxiety. The fact that Polly administers Chinese burns to twelve-year-olds in order to get them to surrender their Mars bars isn’t “a behaviour.” It’s a mark of her character, for goodness’ sake.

  When at last it was time to go and collect their daughter, Sheba and Richard were directed to the school sick bay. Polly had been withdrawn from her dormitory and given temporary quarters in the school nurse’s examination room. “So this is where the miscreant lives!” Richard cried cheerfully when Polly came to the door, eating a pear. In defiance of the cold weather, she was wearing a pair of tiny shorts and a T-shirt with the words BITCH GODDESS printed across the chest. Sheba picked up a ball of socks that was lying underneath the nurse’s desk and handed them to her. “You’d better put some more clothes on and hurry up,” she said, with a sternness that she automatically regretted. “I don’t want to be late for Ben.” Polly scowled and began wandering about the room, gathering up her things in a desultory fashion. Sheba thought she looked tired and thin and very beautiful. Her legs appeared to have grown several inches since Sheba had last seen them.

  It has been difficult for Sheba, I think, watching Polly blossom. The way she looks at her daughter sometimes, it’s not entirely friendly. She struggles against the envy. She knows she had her time. But it’s never easy to hand over the crown, is it? I’ve seen her close to tears on a number of occasions, describing the withering of her buttocks or a new knobble of varicose she’s found on the back of her knee. She feels, she says, as if her insides are slowly pushing outward—demanding to be noticed, finally, after all their years of patient service. Welcome to the club, I say. But she doesn’t want to be in the club. She wears a bra to bed every night because, when she was a girl, one of her friends’ mothers told her that this was the way to stop your breasts from falling. Every night! I’ve told her it’s useless. I’ve told her she could spend her entire life horizontal, with her breasts in steel reinforced slings, and they’re still going to end up looking like empty purses. But she won’t take the bra off.

  On the way back to London, it beg
an to rain. Sheba, Richard, and Polly stopped at a motorway service station to get some late lunch. Sheba balked at the idea of eating in the place—too depressing, she said—so Richard left her and Polly in the car and went to get takeout. Sheba and Polly watched him run through the slanted downpour in a defensive crouch. Polly asked to have the radio on, but Sheba told her she wasn’t in the mood for radio din. After that, the two of them sat looking out at the car park, listening to the rain and each other’s breathing.

  Sheba told me a story once about going to visit her mother just after her father had died. The two of them had devilled eggs for lunch in the dining room of the Primrose Hill house. They were trying very hard to be gentle and kind with one another, but it was awkward. After a while, Mrs. Taylor put her fork down and said, “Oh dear, this isn’t much fun, is it?” Sheba began to protest, but Mrs. Taylor shook her head. No, it was a fact, she said. Even when Ronald had been alive, she had always found it harder to get along with her children when he wasn’t there. It was so much easier being a parent when one was performing for another adult. Sheba was terribly shocked by this at the time. “You mean,” she said to her mother, “you were only ever nice to me to show off to Daddy?” But since her own daughter became a teenager, she says she has become increasingly sympathetic to the point that Mrs. Taylor was trying to make. Dealing with her daughter is never easy, but it’s pretty much impossible without the motivation of an audience. If there’s no one about to witness her patience and kindness, she finds herself too weary to tackle Polly’s sullen mystery: “I sit there,” she says, “summoning up the energy to make some jolly assay at conversation, and then I just slump, thinking, Bugger it. Let her stew.”