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

by Zoe Heller

  I stared at her. “Whatever you want to call it. Sheba. He’s very, very young. And you don’t even like younger men. You told me yourself, you go for older men.”

  “I know. It is odd, isn’t it?” She spoke with an airy detachment, as if we were discussing a philosophical conundrum quite remote from her own life. “But then,” she said, “these labels we give our sexual feelings, they’re so silly, aren’t they? As if our tastes were that easily categorised or that unchanging. It’s like men saying they’re breast or leg men. I mean …” She let the sentence trail off.

  “You’re right, of course,” she went on after a moment. “He is awfully young. But I can see now that boyhood has a very distinct charm. You know when feminists get angry about older men chasing younger women? I never could get behind all that. I always sympathised with the old goats. And now I’m glad I did, because I see for myself what it is that can drive you mad about a beautiful young body. I can stroke and nuzzle Steven for hours and I’ve never had quite enough. It’s like I want to … to … penetrate him.”

  “No.” I raised my hand. “Please.”

  She laughed, honkingly again. “I don’t mean, you know, literally, with one of those ridiculous dildos. The fantasy is more that I would burrow up inside him, somehow. Or be swallowed by him. It’s similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you’d kill it …” She folded her arms. “Oh,” she said with a smile, “you think me very depraved.”

  I shook my head. She was speaking to me as if I were some withered old woman who had forgotten what lust was. She didn’t want me to understand, I saw now. She was enjoying the idea of being incomprehensible.

  “This isn’t just about you,” I said. “You have children. Have you considered them?”

  Her face changed then. “I know it, Barbara. I know I’m being a terrible person. I think about ending it all the time.”

  “Stop thinking and just do it, for God’s sake.”

  Sheba made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Please don’t lecture me. It won’t do any good. Being in love is a condition, isn’t it? It’s like being depressed. Or like being in a cult. You’re basically underwater—people can talk to you about life on dry land, but it doesn’t really mean anything …”

  “What are you talking about love for?” I said. “Don’t be a bloody idiot.”

  “Why are you talking like that?”

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  “No, I mean the swearing. You never swear.”

  “Look, Sheba, please. Don’t start saying you love him. This isn’t love.”

  “I’m not sure I could categorise what this is. People always want to boil these things down, don’t they? I want to recapture my lost youth. He wants experience. I’m forcing him into it. He’s forcing me into it. He feels sorry for me. I feel sorry for him … . But it’s never that simple, is it?”

  I shook my head. “This is madness. You’re making it into something it’s not. It’s all in your mind.”

  Sheba was about to protest, and then she laughed. “But isn’t that the worst place it could be?”

  I had an urge to slap her, to put my hands about her neck and shake her like a doll. “Stop it! This is so … I mean, do you have a single shared interest? Beyond the sex, I mean?”

  “Oh, I can’t be doing with all that,” Sheba said. “I’ve read the women’s magazine quizzes too, you know—‘The Confusion of Sex and Love’ and ‘Are You Mistaking Your Orgasm for the Real Thing?’ I know about all that stuff, and I’m telling you, I think it’s nonsense. I don’t even know what it means. I mean, who invented the distinction? Isn’t it arbitrary? Can’t we just say I feel something very powerful for Steven?”

  “More powerful than you feel for Richard? For your family?” I was shouting now.

  “Yes!” Sheba shouted back. “No! I mean … yes, actually. Yes.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, absorbing this admission.

  “As powerful, in any case,” she added, quietly, after a bit. “Right now. I mean, of course it’s physical. And no, we don’t have ‘shared interests.’ What do you think? He’s sixteen. Our shared interest is us. Why shouldn’t that be enough? I’m not planning to marry him.”

  “Well, I’m grateful for that small residue of clear-sightedness … . You’ve considered the fact that he is probably boasting about this to his friends?”

  “Yes, I’ve considered it. But he’s not.”

  “How can you possibly be so sure?”

  Sheba shrugged. “I’m not always. But mostly I am. It’s complicated. In some ways, I trust him more than anybody. He has a hardness about him, but also this enormous vulnerability … . I can’t bear—literally can’t bear—to think of him in pain of any sort. I weep with rage at the thought. I think I feel more of what people call maternal instinct for him than I do for Polly.”

  “But, Sheba …”

  “I know this is indefensible behaviour, Barbara. I just have to do it. I want to do it.”

  “Do you want to be caught? Is that it? The danger of the thing?”

  “No!” she exclaimed, wringing her hands in exasperation. “No. I can’t tell you why I’m doing this. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know. That’s sort of the point of these kinds of experiences, isn’t it? That they can’t be reduced? There have to be some mysteries—I don’t mean holy moly ones, but mysteries of human behaviour—that can’t be fathomed.”

  When I left, an hour or so later, Sheba embraced me warmly on the front doorstep and we arranged to speak further the next day. I was friendly enough. But the moment I was in the car, anger began to seep out like acid from a battery. It wasn’t just the dreadful folly of Sheba’s actions—the squalor of what she was now involved in—that upset me; it was the immense duplicity that she had so casually revealed. We had spoken of the deceit that she had been practising on Richard, on her children, on the school, even. But nothing had been said by either of us about her deceit of me. It hadn’t occurred to her to apologise for that. Did our friendship mean anything to her? Or had it been a diversion device all along—a way of throwing the staff off the scent of the real scandal? All those months, when I had imagined we were so close, she had been making a mockery of me.

  At a traffic light on Highgate Hill, I noticed that the little girl in the backseat of the car in front of mine was staring at me with very round eyes. For the last minute or so, I realised, I had been smacking my steering wheel repeatedly. When I looked down, there was a large, shiny, red indentation on the heel of my palm.

  Back at my flat, I sat in the living room, eating a Swiss roll and chain-smoking while I considered the evening’s revelations. For upwards of an hour, I was fully determined to go into school the next day and tell Pabblem everything. I had no great concern for Connolly’s moral welfare. My assumption then—as now—was that the boy was quite capable of fending for himself. My desire to tell Pabblem was entirely motivated by fury.

  Slowly, however, as the cigarettes and the Swiss roll dwindled, my rage began to evaporate. Of course I was not going to tell Pabblem. Sheba had behaved very poorly towards me, that was certain. But she hadn’t meant to hurt me. Evidently she had wanted to tell me from the start. She had not been operating with a clear mind. Obviously not. She was having a sexual affair with a pupil, for goodness’ sake.

  It was 2:00 A.M. when I got up to prepare myself for bed. My face looked tired and green in the bathroom mirror. Sheba is my friend, I told my reflection. She needs me now. Portia sat on the side of the tub, observing my teeth-brushing with her usual hauteur. I spat and rinsed, and put on my cold cream. Who else will help her, if I don’t? In the bedroom, I slipped on my nightdress and removed the decorative pillows from my bed. The landlord’s dog was whining in the backyard. From one of the neighbouring streets, I could hear the drunken shouts of young people. Portia had followed me in now and was winding herself around my legs. I peeled back the counterpane and climbed into bed. Come
on. Buck up. True friendrhip weathers this sort of crisis. Portia jumped up and stalked about for a bit, testing out potential sleeping spots with her claws. She committed, finally, to lying heavily—and hotly—across my calves. I set my alarm and turned out the light. Through a gap in the curtains, a moonbeam shone glamorously on Portia, like a spotlight. Sheba contra mundum, I announced to the still, dark room.

  12

  It is Easter, and Sheba and I have come down to the seaside to spend a few days with my sister’s family. The Harts usually have a lot of people over to their house at Easter; Sheba does a big baked ham, and there’s an egg hunt in the garden. This year, for obvious reasons, that was out of the question, so Richard has taken Polly and Ben to stay with friends in Shropshire. Sheba was terribly distraught when she found out that she would not be spending Easter with her son, and I did try intervening with Richard on her behalf, but he was in one of his vindictive moods and wouldn’t hear of altering his plans. Sheba became very low after that and spent hours and hours locked in her room, working on her sculpture. In a slightly desperate effort to cheer her up and take her mind off things, I decided to bring her to Eastbourne.

  Marjorie took some persuading. She and Dave are not accustomed to entertaining celebrity deviants in their home. When I first called to propose the visit, she said she’d have to “pray on it” before giving me an answer and I didn’t hold out much hope. But she ended up consulting with her pastor, Des, and he was of the opinion that God would want Marjorie to hold out the hand of friendship to a sinner. The night we arrived, Marjorie got me in the hallway and assured me in an urgent whisper, “Jesus is very pleased that Sheba is here.”

  Marjorie and I were both brought up in the Church of England, but neither of our parents was remotely pious, so it’s a mystery where Marjorie got her religious gene. She was introduced to the Seventh-Dayers in her late teens by Ray, a chap she was dating at the time. Ray ended up going off to Saudi Arabia to work for an oil company, but Marjorie stayed with the church after he left, and eventually she started going with Dave, another member of the congregation. They’ve been married for going on thirty years now, and their life is entirely church-centred. Every room in their house is crammed with religious bric-a-brac. They own at least twenty plaster models of Jesus Christ (beatific infant Jesus in porcelain nappies; he-man Jesus with biceps, knocking over stalls in the Temple; thirty-something Jesus lolling gloomily in Gethsemane). Over the dresser in their bedroom, there’s a deliciously bad rendering of the Last Supper with all the disciples sporting pompadours and levitating slightly. And in the front room, where Sheba and I are sleeping, there’s a six-by-four-foot poster of a harbour at sunset, captioned with a quotation from Matthew: “‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will make you fishers of men.’” In honour of Easter, my sister has improvised a Passion tableau on top of the telly: a gilt crucifix, encircled by ten china Easter bunnies wearing tam-o’-shanters.

  This is my sister’s real attachment to God, I think: the accessories. Years ago, before she married Dave, we travelled to Europe together one summer and paid a visit to Lourdes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her as happy as when she was trolling through the Lourdes gift shops. She liked the amputees and spastics lining up to be dangled into puddles of holy water. She enjoyed the sing-alongs and the torchlit processions. But it was the trinkets, the T-shirts, the gewgaws that really popped her cork. It’s a shame, I often think, that Marjorie didn’t end up a Catholic. She would have got such a charge out of rosary beads.

  I’ve been slightly worried about how Sheba would react to the setup down here. I can’t imagine that she’s had much interaction with believers before now. But, so far, everything seems to be going smoothly. She professes to be enchanted by my sister and brother-in-law. “How happy you are,” she keeps telling them, as she floats about the house in her nightie. And while I may detect a tinge of de haut en bas in the pronouncement, Marjorie and Dave are terribly flattered. “Isn’t she pretty?” Marje stage-whispers whenever Sheba turns her back. “Doesn’t she talk nicely?” Even Dave, a man of legendarily few words, has conceded gruffly that the pictures of Sheba in the paper “don’t do her justice.”

  Yesterday morning Sheba further ingratiated herself by making a special request to join the family at the Good Friday morning service. Marjorie nearly wet herself with excitement. I didn’t go, of course. I was careful to remain “asleep” until they were all safely out of the house. Then, when I was quite sure that no one was coming back for a forgotten pair of gloves, I got up and gave the front room a bit of a tidy. It was while I was sprucing things up that I came across Sheba’s handbag.

  I had no intention of going through Sheba’s stuff but when I caught a glimpse of the chaos inside the bag, I couldn’t resist giving it a little spring clean. The rubbish that Sheba hangs on to! Fistfuls of loose coins. A blemish-covering stick that has lost its top, covered with bits of fluff. Several grubby-looking Polo mints. A couple of tampons that have begun to mushroom out from their torn plastic wrapping. Right at the bottom, half-hidden by the bag’s torn lining, I found an envelope containing a sheaf of battered photographs.

  Naturally, I hesitated to look at them. I take no pleasure in violating Sheba’s privacy. But, as Sheba’s unofficial guardian, I have certain obligations that I cannot shirk. The photographs were of Sheba and Connolly as it turned out—all of them taken on a single evening on Hampstead Heath. There were a few not very flattering shots of Sheba sitting on the grass. There were many shots of Connolly clowning about: flexing his muscles in the style of Charles Atlas, sticking out his tongue, turning his upper eyelids inside out. The sight of his banal little face made me quite nauseated. But worse was yet to come. At the bottom of the pile four or five slightly wonky shots showed the lovers together. (Connolly had apparently been holding the camera at arm’s length.) These pictures were of a distinctly lewd character. In two of them, Sheba was topless. In another particularly revolting image—the memory of which I have tried, but failed, to erase from my mind—Sheba was kneeling before Connolly as he exposed himself.

  My hands were shaking as I replaced the photographs in the envelope. Sheba has sworn to me on several occasions that she has destroyed all mementoes of her relationship with Connolly. Yet here she is, still hoarding pornographic snapshots of the boy in her handbag. My instinct was to destroy them, but I could not have done so without alerting Sheba to the fact that I had been going through her things. Reluctantly, I put the envelope back in her bag.

  Sheba returned from church bursting with excitement. What a rewarding experience it had been! Oh, she couldn’t wait to do it again! I kept hoping for a wink or something—some acknowledgement of the absurdity of the situation—but there was nothing. It would be less excruciating, somehow, if Sheba were at all sincere about Marjorie’s church. But she’s in no danger of getting religion. The God business is just a diversion for her—a bit of Marie Antoinetteish dabbling in someone else’s charming rituals. I daresay if my sister and her family had been devotees of the Santeria cult, she would have joined in just as cheerfully, toasting effigies and sacrificing goats.

  Today, partly to please her and partly because the photographs have convinced me that I need to keep a closer eye on her, I accompanied Sheba on her second trip to church. A notice on the bulletin board in the church vestibule referred to the morning service as “the Good Lord A.M.” But when I quietly pointed out this egregious Americanism to Sheba, she didn’t so much as crack a smile. Throughout the sermon and the hymns, she had this horrid, holy little grin on her face. Later on, when Pastor Des called congregants to the front for “the Lord’s Supper,” I was astonished to see her stand up. I thought at first that she was confused and didn’t know what people were lining up for. But she knew, all right. Apparently, she’d taken communion the day before, with my sister.

  After the service, Dave and the kids stayed behind at the church to help with the Easter food kitchen. Marjorie, Sheba, and I walked back home to ge
t the lunch going. Sheba rattled on about how lovely the hymns were and wasn’t Pastor Des a lovely fellow? And then, at a certain point, she started on about love. “Sometimes, I think I’ve been in a kind of trance state the whole of this last year,” she said. “I mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there’s nothing left. That’s the thing about people who believe in God, isn’t it? The love they have for Him never ends. He never lets them down. I read some writer once who said that love—he was talking about romantic love—love is a mystery and, when the solution is found, it evaporates. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time. But now I see how true it is. It’s so spot on, isn’t it?” She gazed at Marjorie, who smiled and remained silent. Throughout this mad little speech, I had been on tenterhooks lest Sheba should say anything to shock or offend my sister. But I needn’t have worried. Poor old Marje had not the slightest clue what Sheba was on about.

  I come now, with no little reluctance, to the events of December 1997. For me, this period constitutes the most painful part of my narrative—not least because, if I am to be entirely truthful, I must confess some very reprehensible behaviour of my own. Having read the following account, some will be inclined to judge me harshly. To them, I say: no judgement you conceive could possibly be harsher than that I have passed on myself. My remorse for my own lapses is infinite. If I seem to take particular care in describing how I came to act as I did, it is not because I hope to exculpate myself, but rather because I wish to be as rigorously and unsparingly truthful as possible.

  December started out a difficult month—for both Sheba and me. Sheba was having problems with Connolly. She sensed that his enthusiasm for the affair was ebbing. His manner with her had grown increasingly offhand, even bored, and on a couple of occasions she had come away from seeing him with the distinct impression that she was being “handled.” She was reluctant to confess these suspicions at first. She had an idea, I think, that to speak them aloud would confer on them some ineradicably official status. But her anguish was too intense to hide for long.