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

by Zoe Heller

  “All right,” Bangs said in a tight voice. “Don’t go on.”

  “Don’t get angry,” I said. “I’m only the messenger—”

  “All right! Just shut up!” he shouted. “Shut up, will you?” He stepped towards me. I could see the beadlets of sweat on his nose. “Sheba likes me,” he said quietly. “I know she does.”

  There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness—seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middleclass lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realised—how their seeds might have sprouted little green shoots of weirdness, or even, with the right sort of antinurture, blossomed into full-blown lunacy. It occurred to me now, as I watched him sink down into his beanbag, that Brian Bangs was one of these people.

  This realisation, if nothing else, ought to have deterred me from saying what I said next. But it didn’t. “Oh, Brian,” I cooed, “don’t tell me you have entertained hopes of reciprocation? That’s so sweet, Brian …”

  Bangs put his fingers in his ears like a little boy. “Shut up!” he exclaimed. “I know she’s married. I thought …”

  “Well … but it’s not just that she’s married. I mean … the truth is, Brian, you don’t fit her type.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong there,” he said, shaking his head confidently. “Sheba’s not a snob. She’ll talk to anyone, Sheba.”

  “I wasn’t referring to social class, Brian. It’s not that you’re not posh enough …”

  “What then? What do you mean?”

  “It’s just … Oh, nothing.” I chuckled.

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s more a question of age. Sheba likes younger men, you know. Much younger men.” I paused a moment. “I mean, you are aware of her unusually close relationship with one of the fifth-year boys?”

  Bangs’s face seemed briefly to inflate before crumpling in on itself. “No,” he whispered.

  Chance is everything, isn’t it? I so nearly didn’t go to Bangs’s flat, and then, when I did, I so nearly left before I said anything damaging. It seems to me that an enormous amount of vice—and virtue for that matter—is a matter of circumstance. It’s entirely possible that if my cigarettes had run out sooner, or if Bangs hadn’t been quite so provokingly abject, Sheba would never have been betrayed at all. Evil will out, my mother used to say, but I rather think she was wrong about that. Evil can stay in, minding its own business for eternity, if the right situation doesn’t arise.

  After I left Bangs’s flat I stood in the street, trying to collect myself. I wanted to go home—bury myself under my blankets, block out the fact of what I had just done. But then I remembered Portia. Poor Portia! I went to get my car and drove to the vet’s dangerously fast.

  “She’s not at all well, I’m afraid,” the vet said as soon as I was shown into his surgery. “The radiation doesn’t appear to have been as effective as we had hoped.” He looked at me with the principled indifference that people in positions of medical authority affect when delivering bad news. “She’s a very sick girl.”

  “But you said she was going to outlast me,” I murmured. I had the momentary, childish hope that I could shame him into reverting to his earlier, cheerier prognosis.

  “Well, these things are not always easy to predict,” he said defensively.

  “Can you operate?” I asked. “How long has she got?” (How smoothly we slip into the idiom of hospital melodrama!)

  The vet grimaced. “No, there would be no point in operating. The X rays show the tumour to be pretty big. In a human, you could cut out a chunk of colon and give the patient a colostomy, but obviously that wouldn’t be appropriate here.”

  “Cats can’t have colostomy bags,” I said dumbly.

  “That’s right,” the vet said. He was standing in an odd way, as if he’d forgotten his natural stance. He probably thought I was going to make a scene. “So,” he went on, after a short pause, “the question is, what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Is she in a lot of pain?”

  “At this point, yes, a fair amount I would say.”

  We both looked at Portia. Her chest was rising and falling like the Sleeping Beauty they used to have in Madame Tussaud’s. “Could you give her something for it?” I asked. “For the pain?”

  “Yes, that’s possible. I … look, I can give you something, but I have to be honest with you, I don’t think medicating her is the long-term solution here. To completely cancel the pain, we’d probably have to drug her so much she’d be semicomatose anyway.”

  “I see.” It was possible, I realised, that I would cry after all. “So you … you would advise putting her to sleep right now?”

  “Well …”

  The door opened, and the vet’s assistant looked in. Portia shifted slightly at the sound. “Give us a minute,” the vet said, and the assistant, shooting me a deferential glance, backed out again. He must have told her.

  There was a pause. “I understand,” I said. “It wouldn’t be fair to keep her hanging on. I know that. I’m just wondering … the thing is, I don’t want to just, you know … put her down now. Would it be all right if I took her home for the night? To say good-bye? You could give her something to soothe her and I’d bring her back in tomorrow. Would that be okay?”

  He nodded, relieved. The old bag wasn’t going to make a fuss. “That would be fine,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll give her some morphine. That should make her a lot more comfortable.” He pressed a little buzzer, and the assistant came back in.

  While the two of them prepared the injection, I thought of something Sheba had told me once about taking her children for their infant shots. They had always been unheeding up until the very last moment, she said, and then, when the needle pierced their skin, a terrible look of surprised accusation would come over their faces. “Very grown-up, it was. As if they were saying, ‘Et tu, Mummy?’” Portia was not up to that sort of recrimination. She hardly flinched when the needle went in. And when I picked her up to put her back in her cage, she didn’t resist at all, just issued a low, stoned yowl and allowed herself to be slid in.

  On the way back to the flat, I picked up some sausages and a half pint of cream at LoPrice, and when I got home I made a little bed of cushions and blankets in the kitchen so that Portia could lie comfortably and watch me while I cooked. I chopped the sausages into very small pieces and then fried them in butter—an old treat. But all of this was more for my benefit than for Portia’s. It was obvious that she wasn’t well enough for an extravagant last supper. When I laid the sausages before her, she remained motionless, gazing at them dully. I watched her for a bit, and then I bent down and picked her up. There was a pale murmur of displeasure here, but no struggle. I took her into the bedroom and tried sitting cross-legged on the bed with her in my lap. She wasn’t happy with this, so I let her arrange herself on the eiderdown and then I curled myself around her, very gently scratching her under her chin. Her eyelids fell but did not quite close—her customary, slightly creepy expression of pleasure—and presently she began to purr.

  Then, at last, I did cry. Although, because mourning—even for dumb animals—is never the focused, unadulterated business we pretend it to be, my tears were only partly for Portia. Once the engine of grief was revved up, it began ranging, as grief tends to, about the crowded territory of my other discontents and regrets. I cried from guilt and remorse that I had not been a better, kinder pet owner (all the times I had rubbed Portia’s nose in her own mess when she didn’t make it to the litter box). I cried because I had dealt what seemed to me an almost certainly fatal blow to my friendship with Sheba. I cried because I had been desperate enough to consider a liason with a ludicrous man who collected baseball jackets and even he had rejected me. I cried because I was the sort of woman at whom girls in the hairdresser’s giggle.
I cried, finally, at the indignity of my crying, the sheer stupidity of being a spinster blubbing in her bedroom on a Saturday night.

  It didn’t take very long. After about five minutes, the self-consciousness that preys on the lone weeper crept up on me. I began observing the rhythms of my sobs and the damp tracks that my tears had made in Portia’s fur. Shortly after that, my commitment to my own misery began to wane, and I stopped being able to focus. In the end, I turned on the television and, for half an hour before I fell asleep, I watched the evening news, utterly dry-eyed.

  14

  In the days immediately following my lunch date, I went over what I had said to Bangs countless times, trying to calculate the likelihood of his passing the information on to anyone else. The afternoon on which I buried Portia, I returned to my flat and composed at least three confession letters to Sheba, all of which I ended up burning in the kitchen sink. My depression returned now, freshly invigorated by guilt. I found myself plagued by a slew of minor health problems. At night, when I got into bed, my right leg would twitch and judder uncontrollably for hours at a time, making sleep a greater challenge than usual. I acquired a constant, low-level headache. Shortly after I arrived in Eastbourne for the Christmas holidays, my chin broke out in a spotty rash and my toenails became infected with an unsightly fungus. Clearly, these were psychosomatic responses to stress. But at the time I was convinced that they were the wages of sin, retribution for my betrayal of Sheba. I was encouraged in this superstitious interpretation by the fact that none of the remedies recommended by the local Eastbourne chemist appeared to have the slightest impact on my ailments. On Christmas Day, one of my blackened toenails fell off, and I wept hysterically in Marje’s downstairs toilet, convinced that I had become leprous.

  Polly ran away from home on Boxing Day. I was still down at my sister’s at the time, and I didn’t pick up Sheba’s message until I returned to London the next day. As soon as I heard Sheba’s voice saying, “There’s a bit of a crisis here,” I assumed the worst. It was something of a relief, I confess, to discover a few moments later that Polly was missing.

  I called back immediately.

  “Oh, Barbara!” Sheba said when she came to the phone. “I’m sorry to have alarmed you. Everything’s okay. Polly’s been found. The silly girl ran away to her grandmother’s. I’m flying up to Scotland tomorrow to collect her.”

  She was going alone, she said. Richard was staying behind in London to look after Ben. I asked her if she wanted me to accompany her, and at first she declined. Her mother was not someone she imposed on friends, she said, unless absolutely necessary. But then we talked a bit more and she began to have second thoughts. It would be nice to have company, she mused. And, of course, it would be helpful to have my car. Did I really not mind? No, no, of course I didn’t.

  When I went to pick her up at the house in the morning, she looked rather haggard and puffy-eyed. On the street, before we got into the car, I stopped and took her hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Oh, it’s all going to be all right. She’s just in a state. Ten years from now, we’ll remember this as a stage.”

  “No, not about Polly,” I said. “I meant I was sorry about what happened between us. In your basement. I’m afraid I was upset about Portia.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Forget about it. How is your hip now?”

  “Fine. But …” I pinched my nose in an effort to stop the tears from coming. “Well, Portia died, you know. I had to have her put down just before Christmas.”

  “Oh, Barbara!” She took my hands as if to pull me into an embrace.

  “Yes, it’s very sad,” I said, holding her off. “But there it is.”

  “I’m so sorry, Barbara.”

  “Come on.” I opened the car door. “Let’s be off.”

  I had come with the intention of telling her about Bangs. I knew that it had to be done. But, sitting in the car, I could feel my courage slipping away. The prospect of her anger made me weak. How to even start? There is something I must tell you, Sheba … . I couldn’t.

  “What’s up with your chin?” Sheba asked, as we drove through West London. She leaned across to examine my rash. “Is it an allergic reaction to something?”

  “No, no,” I murmured, batting her away. “I’m just run down, that’s all.”

  “God, I know how you feel. I’m exhausted.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “You must have been worried to death …”

  “Well I was, yes,” Sheba said. She paused. “Of course I was also up very late last night with Steven.” She grinned naughtily.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I did a rather dangerous thing,” she went on. “I sneaked him into the house after Richard and Ben had gone to bed. We were in the basement together for an hour.”

  I glanced at her, less astonished at the risk she had taken than at the evident satisfaction with which she reported it. “Steven was wearing a hideous sweater that his parents had given him for Christmas,” she went on blithely. “Powder blue. V-neck. Horrid …”

  “Please, Sheba,” I said. “Can we not talk about Connolly now?”

  She shrugged. “Fine.”

  “No, I don’t mean to be—”

  “No, no. I understand. I shan’t mention him again.”

  She gazed out of the side window.

  “You know,” I said at length, “I had lunch with Bangs the other day.”

  “Oh?” Sheba looked at me. “When?”

  “On the Saturday before term ended. He—”

  “On the weekend? Barbara!”

  I blushed. “No, well, he—”

  “No, that’s great, Barbara! Did you have fun?”

  “It wasn’t like that. It was just a casual thing.”

  “You are a sly dog. No wonder I haven’t heard from you lately!”

  I hit the steering wheel in irritation. “For goodness’ sake, Sheba, don’t patronise me! I’m not quite so desperate as to regard Bangs as a potential boyfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  “No, the only reason I bring it up at all, is that …” I paused. She was half turned in her seat now, looking at me intently. “The thing is, I got the sense that Bangs knows about you and Connolly.” I hadn’t planned this last-moment evasion. I surprised myself with it. But even as I was urging myself to stop, go back, correct the lie, Sheba’s mouth and eyes were growing round.

  “What? No! How could he?” she whispered.

  Tell her the truth, I ordered myself. Tell her what you did.

  But she was already speaking again, in an anguished, fearful rush. “What do you mean ‘got the sense’? Did he say he knew?”

  “I … I don’t know how he knows or exactly what he knows,” I said, “but he dropped some heavy hints that he knew something.” Too late, now. Can’t go back.

  “What hints? What did he say? Tell me.” Sheba clapped her hand to her forehead and kept it there. In spite of myself, I was mildly gratified by her horror.

  “Well, he said something about ‘our mutual friend’ having ‘an unusual relationship’ with one of the pupils.”

  “Fuck! Was it clear he meant me?”

  “Who else would he have meant?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before now? What did you say?”

  “Oh, I played dumb, of course. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “Tell me exactly what he said. How did he bring it up?”

  “I can’t give you line-for-line dialogue, Sheba. We were eating lunch and talking generally about school, and then he said something like ‘I notice that our mutual friend seems to be very close to one of the pupils.’”

  “He said ‘close to’? Or ‘unusual relationship’? Which one? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this before, Barbara.”

  “Er, both I think. He said, ‘close to’ and then I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and then he said, ‘Well, our friend is conducting a rather unusual relatio
nship with one of the fifth-years.’ Something like that.”

  “What sort of tone did he use? Did he seem disapproving?”

  “Well, he didn’t seem delighted about it.”

  “Oh God. Oh Christ. Did you get the feeling he had proof? Or was it just a hunch of his?”

  “I couldn’t say, Sheba. He seemed pretty sure. Look, I didn’t tell you until now because I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Worry me! What were you thinking?”

  “I wanted you to have a nice Christmas—”

  “Oh, Barbara. Oh fuck. This is bad.”

  “I know.”

  “How did he find out? Do you think he’s going to tell?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say he was going to. But, Sheba, I think you really do have to consider putting a stop to this thing, now.”

  Sheba pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Bloody fucking Bangs,” she said.

  The plane to Scotland was full of people returning home for New Year’s, and the mood onboard was festive. We were made to wait half an hour on the runway, during which time several passengers broke out flasks of whiskey and began singing. Behind the galley curtains, even the flight attendants were taking sneaky sips from little paper cups. Sheba, visibly agitated by the news I had just imparted, found the general gaiety irritating. When the captain came on the Tannoy to give a chatty explanation for the delay and to thank us for our patience, she turned to me and said with uncharacteristic vehemence, “Why is he thanking me? I’m not being patient.”

  Soon after the plane took off, a female flight attendant came tinkling down the aisle with a trolley, offering sandwiches and drinks. “Meat or cheese?” she asked Sheba. Sheba queried the identity of the meat—“Is it beef, or, or what?” she asked—but the flight attendant only sighed. “That’ll be cheese, then,” she said and dumped a triangular, plastic pack on Sheba’s tray table. “She’s drunk,” Sheba hissed angrily as the woman walked away.

  We took a taxi from Edinburgh to Peebles. This was an extravagant thing to do, but Sheba said that the train would be too slow. She was in a hurry now to get back to London and talk to Connolly. In the cab, I tried to distract her by asking about her mother. She was not very forthcoming at first, but after some coaxing she became quite animated on the subject.