by Zoe Heller
Afterwards, they did get into the bed, which was dressed with the sort of quick-dry, poly-cotton sheets that gave Sheba the shivers. Connolly propped himself up with pillows. And then he got up again and began fumbling in the dresser next to his bed. At length, he produced a single, slightly flattened cigarette, and a box of matches. “Nothing like one afterwards, is there?” he said. Sheba remembers having to suppress a smile at his studied postcoital nonchalance.
They lay quietly for a bit, listening to the tiny noises Connolly made as he blew smoke rings. Sheba remarked that her daughter liked to do the same thing when she was smoking, and Connolly seemed interested by this. He began asking questions about Polly. Did Sheba let her smoke in the house? Did they argue a lot? Why was she at boarding school? At a certain point, Sheba interrupted his questioning to kiss him and tell him how handsome he was. Connolly grimaced. “All right, all right. Calm down,” he muttered. He never responded well to compliments, Sheba says. They brought out something mean in him. A scornful look of satisfaction would cross his face, as if he had tricked her into giving up something that she hadn’t intended to.
Connolly wanted to ask more questions about Polly, but Sheba, growing impatient with the subject, suggested he tell her about his family. Did he think that his mother and father were happy together?
“They’re all right,” Connolly said. The terse defensiveness with which he had spoken when they first entered the house had now returned.
“‘All right’?” Sheba teased him. “What does that mean?”
He choked slightly on his cigarette, and then, still coughing, he said stubbornly, “I mean, all right. They get on okay.”
“Do you think they still have sex?”
He paused. Something happened around his mouth, Sheba recalls. “Don’t ask me to say bad things about my parents,” he said.
Sheba began to protest but then stopped. “Bad things” were precisely what she had been angling for, she realised. It was no use trying to coax him into that sort of conversation. He didn’t have the vocabulary for it. It offended some atavistic, workingclass code of family loyalty.
They were both silent for a time, and then Sheba asked Connolly to tell her about his previous sexual experience. She had an idea that this lubricious topic would lighten the mood.
Connolly put her off at first, saying things like “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
But she persisted. “No, come on,” she said. “Have you slept with many girls? Women?”
He paused and then held up a palm.
“Five?” she asked.
“Yeah. Not including you. And none of them as sexy as you.”
Sheba asked what ages his five lovers had been. Again, Connolly resisted answering her. Again, she pressed. At length, he said, “You’re my first old lady, if that’s what you mean.”
She poked at him in protest. “Oi. Enough of that.”
“And I’m your first lickle boy, aren’t I?” he went on.
Sheba was repulsed by his baby voice. “Yes, you are,” she murmured.
He laughed and licked at her arm. “Don’t like that, do you?”
“What?” She was trying, she says, not to show him how much he was irritating her.
“Talking about your age and that,” he said. He paused, apparently weighing up whether he dared to utter what he had in mind. He giggled again. “You’re worried your vadge has gone loose.”
She had heard him say ugly things before, she says—things about people at school that had taken her aback with their angry vulgarity. But she had always dismissed these comments as experimental swagger. He had never before aimed his hatefulness at her.
“What a disgusting remark,” she said. She gave him a strong kick that sent him sprawling half off the bed. From the look on his face as he clambered back in, she thought at first that he was going to strike her. But he didn’t. He just lay down and gave an odd sigh. She wanted to say something else to him. She was still furious. But she could think of nothing impressive enough, so she turned on her side, with her back to him. The bed was really too small for this sort of gesture and, in order not to let any part of her body touch his, she had to press herself against the cold exterior wall.
It is a mark, I suppose, of how enslaved Sheba had become to the boy, or at least to some idea of the boy, that this ugly incident did not lead to the relationship’s demise. She did not leave his house. She did not tell him that she was unable to continue a relationship with a foul-mouthed, foul-minded child. She stayed and sulked and threatened to leave. And then, presently, when he roused himself to make a grudging apology for his behaviour, she forgave him. He begged her not to “have the hump,” she recalls. He told her that she was beautiful, that she was the “best girlfriend” he’d had. And this, it seems, was enough.
“It was the way he had been taught to speak,” she says now. “He didn’t mean to offend me. He was trying to be funny. It was awful, I know. I’m not defending it. There are drawbacks to having a relationship with a boy like Steven. But he was so remorseful. And, and … I would have felt so silly, ending the whole thing over a figure of speech.”
11
I found out about Sheba’s affair in November. It had been going on for a little over eight months at that point and, though Sheba was not aware of it, it was already in its decline. The occasion for the revelation—which I have marked with two gold stars on the time line—was Guy Fawkes night. Sheba had invited me to join her family for dinner. Afterwards, the plan was to go to Primrose Hill to see the fireworks. Never having been much of a fireworks fan, I expressed some reservations about participating in the second part of the evening. But Sheba was insistent. “Oh please, Barbara,” she begged. “I need the moral support.”
The Hart household was under some stress. Richard and Sheba’s efforts to place Polly in a new school had been unsuccessful. The schools that Polly deemed acceptable didn’t want her and vice versa. As a stop-gap measure, a tutor had been hired. Sheba’s mother was paying. Richard made hearty jokes about Polly being “home schooled.” But it was not a very satisfactory situation. The tutor came for three hours a day and, for the rest of the time, Polly lounged about the house making her parents miserable. Sheba had lost almost half a stone in weight.
Guy Fawkes fell on a Wednesday night. As Sheba had requested, I went over to the house early. Polly let me in. “Hi,” she said coldly before walking away. I followed her into the living room, where she and Ben were lying on the floor, watching television.
“What’s this then?” I said, gesturing at the cartoon that was on. Ben grunted a response that I couldn’t hear. “What?” I asked. Polly glanced up at me. “Mum’s in the kitchen,” she said.
I found Sheba leaning on the kitchen counter, gazing hopelessly at the steaks she had bought for dinner. “They look awful, don’t they?” she said. “I only bought them yesterday. Do you think they’re off?”
The meat laid out on the butcher block did look awful. It was slimy and had a dreary purple hue—the kind you get when you mash all the plasticine colours together. I sniffed at it gingerly. “I can’t tell.”
Sheba groaned. “Great. I’ve got the ex coming and I’m serving rotten steak.” She went to the kitchen door. “Polly!” she shouted. “Darling, could you lay the table please? Marcia and the girls will be here soon.”
She turned back to me. “Richard invited them without asking me. And now, of course, Marcia’s car isn’t working, so she’s summoned Richard to go and collect them. Why she couldn’t take a taxi …” She trailed off as Polly slouched into the kitchen.
“Are you slagging off Marcia again?” Polly asked rhetorically.
Sheba, standing with her back to her daughter, gritted her teeth and said nothing.
“What were you screaming at me about?” Polly asked.
“I wasn’t screaming, darling,” Sheba said. “I was just asking you to lay the table. Dad is going to be back soon.”
“Ew,” Polly said, po
inting at the steaks. “Is that what we’re eating tonight?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Sheba said. “Come on, Polly. Be a love and lay the table.”
“Not now. After the cartoons are over,” Polly said.
“No, now, please, Polly.”
Polly rolled her eyes theatrically as she flounced out of the kitchen. “I’m not your bloody maid, you know.”
Sheba looked at me and made a face. “Oh, Barbara, you can’t imagine what she’s being like,” she whispered.
Actually, I felt that I probably could.
“She is beastly to everybody,” Sheba went on. “Even to Richard. When she’s not hitting him up for money. With me, she is breathtakingly rude—treats me as if I were some slightly embarrassing maiden aunt. Her two new phrases are ‘charming,’ uttered with great sarcasm, whenever either of us dares to get angry with her, and ‘Fucking A.’” Sheba paused, searching for more evidence of her daughter’s awfulness. “Oh—and she’s smoking joints in her bedroom at night.”
I shook my head sympathetically.
“We’ve forbidden it,” Sheba went on, “but it’s useless. We have no authority over her at all anymore. Richard’s tried to compromise. He made this rule that she could only smoke pot outside in the garden. But she ignores that too. Her room stinks of the stuff, Barbara. I get high just walking in there. She has a bong sitting in the middle of the carpet, for God’s sake. I’m convinced that the whole house is going to go up in flames one of these nights.”
She stopped and looked back down at the steaks. “Oh bloody hell, we can’t use these. We’ll all end up with botulism.” She picked up the chopping board and slid the meat into the bin. “All right,” she said, with a sigh as she opened the larder door, “I suppose it’ll have to be pasta for dinner.”
Richard came back half an hour later with his ex-wife, Marcia, and his eldest daughter, Saskia. The younger daughter, Claire, had decided at the last minute to stay at home. “Hello, Barbara! Hello, Bash!” Marcia cried when she hobbled into the kitchen. She was wearing a flowing, purple gown, the hem of which dragged on the kitchen floor, picking up the spill from Sheba’s messy chopping. “Oh marvellous! Pasta!” she trilled, peering into the pots on the stove. “That’s just what I feel like—something simple and homey.”
“Well, I had planned to give you steak—” Sheba began.
“Oh no!” Marcia said. “Pasta is just the thing! Carbohydrates. Yummy yum!”
Sheba smiled thinly.
Sheba’s official line on Marcia is that she adores her, that they’re great friends. She is terribly lucky, she says, to have picked a husband with such a nice ex-wife. But there’s something excessive in these protestations of goodwill. Beneath the showy sisterhood, I detect an unacknowledged enmity. If truth be told, Marcia is an awful pain—what with her dimbo daughters and her witchy dresses and her “early onset rheumatoid arthritis.” When Sheba and Richard were newly married, Marcia took Sheba out for coffee and assured her that there were absolutely no hard feelings. “It’s not about families anymore. It’s about tribes,” she said. “I mean, if we were in Africa, Richard would probably be on his fifth wife by now.” Sheba appears to have bought into this tribe nonsense, along with the idea that Marcia is some sort of indispensable clan matriarch. But come on! The woman has been divorced from Richard for almost twenty years. Why is she still hanging around him like a bad smell? If Sheba could ever get rid of this duty she feels to like everybody, I daresay she’d discover that she really quite detests Marcia.
Richard came into the kitchen now, with wine for everybody. “Darling,” Sheba said brightly, “why don’t you take Marcia and Saskia into the living room so they can sit down? And could you ask Polly to lay the table?”
Richard trooped off with his ex-wife and daughter in tow.
A few moments later, we heard him angrily telling Polly to turn the television off. “Stir your stumps, Polly!” we heard him shout, and then Polly’s high-pitched retort: “Why am I the fucking Kunta Kinte around here?”
Dinner was a fraught affair. Saskia announced when the pasta arrived on her plate that it was inconsistent with her diet, and a salad had to be improvised for her. Marcia praised Sheba for her lack of pretension in using supermarket cheddar instead of Parmesan. Sheba snapped at Ben for wiping his face on his jumper. The only blessing was that Polly remained silent. Afterwards, the group split into two—one lot in my car, the other in Richard’s—and we drove to Primrose Hill.
As I say, I have never been a big fan of fireworks displays. All that brightness falling, the sad smoke smell, the finale that is never quite as magnificent as it should be. And then there’s the dispiriting, figurative tendency in modern fireworks. To stand in the cold, watching coloured sparks momentarily take the ragged shape of a smiley face or a drunken script that spells “Happy Holidays” would seem, by any objective standard, to be a very low form of entertainment indeed. Yet appreciating fireworks is one of those things by which one is judged on one’s childlike delight in life. It is perfectly acceptable to hate the circus. But to admit that one finds fireworks tiresome is to render oneself a pariah. I suspect that only the tiniest fraction of the crowd gathered on the top of Primrose Hill was genuinely invested in the spectacle, but we all stayed there for a full, frigid hour, dutifully manufacturing sharp intakes of breath and other symptoms of ingenuous wonderment. All, that is, except Polly, who grasped at the opportunity to press home her alienation by chain-smoking cigarettes and kicking holes in the muddy ground with her boots.
At the end of the display there was a terrible crush as the crowd surged towards the park exits. Richard got panicky and tried to get us to stay at the top of the hill until the crowd had dispersed. But it had grown extremely cold by then and everyone was eager to get home, so he was overruled. We descended the path on the north side of the hill without too much trouble, but when we got to the flat where the people on the paths were attempting to move in two directions, the congestion was a lot worse. “Where’s Mum?” Polly said at one point. I looked around. Sheba had disappeared. “Shit!” Richard said. “Look, everyone must hold hands—form a chain—so we don’t lose anyone else.” There was a girlish trill of panic in his voice and, out of pity, I briefly considered obeying his command. But I was walking in between Polly and Marcia, and both of them seemed as disinclined to hold my hand as I was to hold theirs, so happily we all remained detached.
The long, snakey line moved slowly. We were about two hundred yards from the Regent’s Park Road exit when off to my left, beneath the trees, I glimpsed Sheba. She was standing with a young male. I couldn’t see his face—his back was turned to me—but I could see hers; she was talking with great energy. People got in the way, and I lost her for a few seconds. When I found her again, she was alone, walking towards me. I waved to attract her attention: “Sheba!” Catching sight of me, she smiled, and at that moment the boy turned and glanced back at her. He had floppy, blond hair and sad, drooping eyes. Connolly.
Sheba must have registered my startled expression, because she instinctively turned to see what had provoked it. For a split second we both looked at the boy. Then she looked back at me. There was fear in her expression but also something else—a kind of glee or amusement. “Mum!” Ben called out from further up the line. “Where’ve you been, Mum?” Sheba ran to him. I couldn’t hear her reply to his question. I only saw her laughing and shaking her head as she pulled Ben into an embrace.
Sheba was in my car for the trip back home, but so were Ben and Polly. Sheba spent the drive chattering with Ben. Polly and I said nothing. When we arrived back at Highgate, I made noises about going straight home, but Sheba put her hand on mine and urged me to come in. Richard had still not returned from dropping Marcia and Saskia back in Muswell Hill. Polly went straight to the living room and turned on the television. Sheba sent Ben upstairs to bed and told him she would be up in a bit to tuck him in. Then she suggested that we go down to her studio.
Neither of us s
poke until we were in the basement and sitting on her fold-up chairs. I had hoped that Sheba would spare me the indignity of having to ask questions, but after a few moments of silence, during which she stared at the floor, I could bear it no longer.
“That was the Connolly boy I saw you with just now, at the park, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Yes, yes it was.” She looked up at me coyly, from beneath her eyelashes.
“What’s going on, exactly?”
“With Steven you mean?”
“Yes.”
She looked down at her hands. “It’s difficult to say …”
“Just tell me. Is he still bothering you?”
“No, not bothering me. He … I …”
“Please, Sheba. Spit it out. What is your relationship with him?”
She looked at her hands again. “I suppose you’d have to say we’re involved. I mean … we’re having an affair.”
Like an idiot, I gasped. “Are you telling me the truth?”
She nodded.
“How long has it been going on?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A long time …”
“Approximately.”
“Pretty much since that time I told you about—the kiss on Grafton Lane …”
“But that … you said …”
“No, we kissed then. I wasn’t being entirely truthful when I said he only tried.”
“Sheba, this is very, very serious. Do you understand how serious?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“No, Sheba, I mean this is something you could be sent to prison for.”
“I know.” She looked frightened for a moment, and then she laughed. It was quite unlike her usual expression of mirth: a strange, slightly hysterical honking.
“For God’s sake, Sheba,” I said. “I mean, he’s a … I don’t have to say it. He’s a boy.”
“Well, not completely,” Sheba said. “I mean, obviously not a man. But in transition, I think you’d have to say.”