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

by Zoe Heller

  Her relationship with her mother had never been good, she said. Eddie had been the favourite child. She had always been made to feel that she was a failure. “I didn’t go to Oxford, that was the thing. And then I completely messed up by marrying someone who didn’t go to Oxford. Mummy has always spoken about Richard in this commiserating tone—as if it’s generally understood that in the great egg-and-spoon race of spouse getting, he’s a third prize. She’s an enormous intellectual snob, Mummy. A lot of wives of academics are, but in Mummy’s case it’s particularly pathetic. She’s got absolutely nothing to be snobby about. Her only adult accomplishment is having organised children’s walking tours of ‘Historical North London’ in the early seventies. And, even then, her friend Yolande did most of the research.” We both laughed at this.

  “The thing is,” Sheba went on, “Mummy essentially pities anybody who wasn’t married to Ronald Taylor. When Daddy was alive, she clung to this idea that Richard hero-worshipped him. She made a great thing of fending Richard off as though, had she let down her guard for a second, he would immediately have started slobbering over Daddy and trying to get his autograph or something. It was mad. I mean, economics bores Richard, and he couldn’t have cared less about Daddy. But you couldn’t tell Mummy that. Whenever Daddy told an anecdote, she would place a heavy palm on Richard’s knee, as if to console him for the miserable misfortune of not being Saint Ronald.”

  “Do you think,” I asked Sheba, “that your mother will approve of me?”

  “What?” Sheba looked startled. “Oh, don’t worry about that. She’ll hardly notice you. She’ll be much too busy getting at me.”

  Mrs. Taylor’s “little cottage” on the outskirts of Peebles was in fact a Georgian manor house with a couple of acres of land for its backyard. Sheba and I were standing in the driveway, getting our bags out of the car, when Mrs. Taylor emerged on the front doorstep. “Ah, I thought I heard you,” she said. “Come in! I’ve just made tea.” She was dressed in a shapeless Aran sweater and stirruped ski pants that had gone baggy at the knees. Her beaky face was framed by a Joan of Arc pudding bowl.

  “This is Barbara, my friend from work,” Sheba said.

  Mrs. Taylor nodded at me coolly. Her eyes were vast and staring. “Hello,” she murmured.

  We carried our bags up the stairs and into the front hall.

  “Was the journey absolutely bloody?” Mrs. Taylor asked.

  Sheba shrugged. “No, no, not too bad.”

  She was looking at Polly’s Doc Marten boots, which were lying underneath the coatrack. “She’s upstairs in her room,” Mrs. Taylor said, following Sheba’s gaze.

  “Which one’s that?” Sheba seemed vaguely taken aback to find that Polly had already been allocated her own room.

  “The attic,” her mother said. “I’ve had the walls repapered a marvellous tartan. Polly took one look at it and said that was where she wanted to stay.”

  “What’s she doing?” Sheba asked.

  “Sleeping,” Mrs. Taylor said. “Golly, how she sleeps! I’d quite forgotten about the amazing phenomenon of adolescent torpor.”

  Sheba grimaced. “She never let me sleep at three in the afternoon,” she whispered as her mother turned and began walking away down the hall.

  “Now, darling,” Mrs. Taylor was saying, “let me get you a cup of tea and we can have a nice chat before she wakes up.” She led us into her living room—a chilly, rather depressing place with grubby-looking kilims on the walls. There were one or two good pieces of antique furniture, including a nice dresser, but everything else in the room seemed to have been purchased from office supply shops. Mrs. Taylor advanced suddenly on her daughter and plucked, in a rather hostile fashion, at her waist. “Is that a new belt?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sheba said. “I got it at a shop round the corner from us. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Hmm,” Mrs. Taylor said. “You’re not wearing a slip again. You’ll have to borrow one of mine if we go out. I don’t want you frightening Clem in the post office. Now sit down, dear, and let me get you some tea.”

  “The belt got her in a temper,” Sheba whispered when her mother had left the room. “Mummy never buys new clothes. She thinks it’s vulgar to take an interest in that sort of thing. When I was a teenager and I was first beginning to be interested in makeup and all that, she absolutely tortured me. If I even showered more than once a day, it was a major issue. Excessive hygiene is very lower middle class in her book …”

  “It was such a pity you couldn’t come for Christmas this year,” Mrs. Taylor called out from the kitchen. “We had such a nice time.”

  “Did you?” Sheba called back. She rolled her eyes at me.

  Eddie and his family always go to Peebles for Christmas and Boxing Day, but Sheba hasn’t been up for the last five years. Her excuse is that Richard needs to spend Christmas with his daughters. (Marcia and the girls always go to Richard and Sheba’s for Christmas dinner.) But it is only an excuse. The truth, she says, is that Christmas is far too important a holiday to have it spoiled by her mother.

  There was a long pause, during which we sat listening to Mrs. Taylor clank about with teacups. “You don’t want anything to eat, do you?” she shouted after a bit. Her tone was discouraging, faintly disgusted.

  “No thanks, Mum,” Sheba called back. She turned to me. “Would you like something, Barbara?”

  “No, no. I’m fine …”

  “I haven’t got much in,” her mother went on. “But if you need something, I’ve still got some cold turkey left.”

  “No, no,” Sheba said. “We’re not hungry.”

  There was another long pause. Then Sheba called out, “Mum, I just want to say, I really appreciate your being so great about all this.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Mrs. Taylor reemerged now, bearing a tray. “I love having Polly here. And God only knows, I understand how difficult it is when one’s children decide they hate one.”

  Sheba folded her arms. “I wasn’t aware that Polly hated me.”

  Mrs. Taylor set the tray on the table. “Oh, darling, don’t be touchy,” she said. “Have a biscuit. You’re clearly not her favourite person at the moment. Polly’s going through an absolutely typical teenage stage. You mustn’t take it personally.” She smiled, revealing her rather daunting, tombstone teeth.

  Sheba gobbled up a biscuit furiously.

  “So, are you familiar with this part of the world at all?” Mrs. Taylor asked, turning to me.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve spent some time in Dumfries …”

  “I see.”

  “But no … I don’t know Scotland very well.”

  There was a dank pause. “And do you have children?” she asked.

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “I have a niece and nephew.”

  Mrs. Taylor studied me for a moment in silence and then abruptly turned back to her daughter. “I gather the weather in London has been beastly,” she said.

  “Yes,” Sheba said. “Hailstones, the lot. Actually, I quite like it.”

  “Oh!” Mrs. Taylor pressed her lips together as if to indicate that she thought Sheba was being perverse but that she was not going to be provoked. “I expect Richard finds it very oppressive, though,” she said, still hopeful of finding someone whom the weather was making miserable. “Poor Richard, cooped up in his study. How is the book coming?”

  “Oh, Richard’s all right,” Sheba said. “He’s taking a break from the book right now, to write a conference paper. He bought himself a little portable radiator for the study, so he’s happy as Larry.”

  “My goodness. How grand.” (According to Sheba, one of Mrs. Taylor’s favourite themes has always been the inexplicable extravagance of her daughter and son-in-law’s lifestyle.) “And how’s Ben?”

  “Good,” Sheba said. I could see she was silently gnashing over the radiator comment. “He’s got a”—she evidently decided against telling her mother about Ben’s girlfrie
nd—“a lot of things on at the moment. He’s on very good form.” She sat up. “Look, don’t you think I should go and wake Polly? Let her know I’m here?”

  “No, darling, don’t do that,” Mrs. Taylor said. “She’ll be horribly grumpy if you wake her up.”

  Sheba slumped. “She’s going to be grumpy whatever I do,” she muttered.

  Her mother cocked her head and tutted, “Now, now.”

  Sheba ate another biscuit. And then another.

  Presently, her mother said, “You know she thinks you’re having an affair?”

  Some people live in constant fear of having their secrets found out; others have a kind of arrogant certainty that anything they wish to keep private will remain so. Sheba belongs to the latter group. It amazed her—briefly enraged her, I think—that her daughter should have succeeded in knowing more about her than she had chosen to tell. “Why on earth would she think that?” she asked, laughing. Later, she told me that she had read an article in a magazine about how one could spot liars by watching for certain involuntary expressions and gestures associated with duplicity. In responding to her mother, she had tried very hard to look her in the eye and keep her hands perfectly still.

  “I don’t know, darling,” her mother said, looking straight back at her. “Female intuition?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Sheba said, “how preposterous. The fact is, Polly comes from a very happy, stable home. She obviously feels she needs something to justify her teenage horridness, so she is now resorting to invention—” She broke off suddenly. Somewhere during her last sentence, she had turned her gaze to the floor and begun massaging a biscuit into dust on the tablecloth.

  Mrs. Taylor studied the destroyed biscuit in silence. “She seems to think that you tell Richard you’ve been working in your studio when you haven’t,” she said. She glanced at me. “Sorry about this, Barbara. Family business. Would you like another cup of tea?”

  Sheba jerked forward into Mrs. Taylor’s startled face. She was wagging her index finger. “No,” she shouted. “No. I won’t tolerate this, Mother. It’s very decent of you to have put Polly up, and I’m glad you’ve developed this new interest in your granddaughter’s welfare, but you haven’t earned the right to start interrogating me. You’re not going to start playing family bloody counsellor at this stage in the game.”

  Mrs. Taylor shut her eyes as if in pain and shook her head slowly. “Darling,” she said, when Sheba had finished, “what is the matter with you?” She looked at me. “I’m so sorry about this.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Mother,” Sheba said. “I’m on to you, all right? I know you think you’ve formed some special bond with Polly now. But I can guarantee you, the only reason Polly came here in the first place was because she knew it was the best way to irritate the shit out of me.”

  Sheba stopped for a moment, as if registering amazement at her own courage. “And I know you’d love to sit here all day,” she continued, “finding out who I’m shagging and ferrying tactful little messages between me and Polly. But it’s not going to happen.”

  Mrs. Taylor was looking away across the room now. Her face was crumpled in dismay. Sheba misread this expression at first. For a moment, she told me later, she was persuaded that her rage had made an impact—that her mother had been listening for once and that some sort of breakthrough had occurred. In one of those mad, split-second vaults of the imagination, she pictured her mother and herself finally hashing out all their old resentments: finding, in the autumn of their relationship, a new, warm way to be with one another. Her mother would come to London on weekends. They would visit galleries together, have fun lunches at Italian restaurants, discuss men, swap recipes …

  Then she caught sight of Polly standing in the doorway.

  “‘Shagging,’ Mum?” Polly said in her stagey, teenager’s deadpan. “‘Shagging’?” She turned on her heel and ran upstairs, slamming the door behind her.

  “Polly, darling … ,” Mrs. Taylor called out, getting up to follow her.

  “No, Mum,” Sheba said grimly. “I’ll go.”

  After she had left the room, Mrs. Taylor and I sat at the table, exchanging embarrassed smiles for a minute or so. Then Mrs. Taylor stood up. “I think I had better go and check on them,” she said.

  I got up to go with her, but she gestured me down again. “No, no. You’re not needed,” she said rudely. I waited for what seemed like a very long time after she had left the room, tapping my fingers on the table. I could not help but regard this latest development with some relief. If Sheba’s own daughter suspected her of adultery, my telling Bangs was surely a less heinous betrayal than I had believed. Who knew how many other people suspected the affair?

  After five minutes or so, I heard shouting coming from the top of the house. I sat for a bit longer, uncertain of what to do, and then I decided to countermand Mrs. Taylor’s orders and go up. As I climbed the stairs (carpeted with a shockingly filthy coir runner), Polly’s screams began to resolve themselves into comprehensible sentences. “You don’t care about me or Ben or Dad,” I heard. And then, “You try to make out that you’re so nice and sweet.” And finally, “You’re a bitch!” On the second floor of the house, I found Mrs. Taylor standing at the foot of a ladder that led to the attic. She turned when she heard me and fixed me with her formidable, poached-egg stare. “Really!” she said. “You’re not wanted …”

  There was no point in debating with her; I simply began to climb the ladder. This was trickier than I had anticipated. The ladder was very steep, and I was wearing a skirt. As I ascended in rather ungainly fashion, I was keenly aware of Mrs. Taylor gazing angrily up at my knickers from below. When I reached the top, my head was poking into a tiny slant-ceilinged room. Sheba stood in one corner. Polly was lying on a bed in another. Mrs. Taylor’s new tartan wallpaper was a lurid shade of red, and everything in the room—including Sheba and Polly—was bathed in its reflective glow.

  “Sheba?” I said, peering over the top of the ladder. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Not fucking her!” Polly exclaimed. The crimson cast of her face gave her a dramatic presence. She looked like a little shedevil.

  “Don’t you dare speak like that to one of my friends!” Sheba shouted. I was flattered to hear her so angry on my account.

  “Oh, fuck you,” Polly said.

  Sheba folded her arms. “Please don’t talk to me like that, Polly,” she said.

  “Why not?” Polly demanded.

  “Because it’s not what I deserve.”

  “And what do you deserve then?”

  “Well, a bit of respect for a start.”

  “Yeah?”

  Sheba went over and sat on the bed. Polly swerved away from her. “Piss off!” she shouted.

  Sheba looked over at me and smiled. “You know, Barbara,” she said. “I think this might be easier if we were left alone.”

  “Of course.” I nodded. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

  When I reached the bottom of the ladder, Mrs. Taylor looked at me triumphantly. “I did tell you not to,” she said.

  “Mum?” Sheba called from above.

  “Yes, darling?” Mrs. Taylor shouted.

  “You too please, Mum. If you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, but darling …,” Mrs. Taylor called back.

  “Please, Mum. Just give us a minute.”

  Reluctantly, Mrs. Taylor followed me down the stairs. She had the tread of an ogress. The whole house vibrated as she descended.

  At the first-floor landing, I stopped. “Come along, Barbara,” Mrs. Taylor said as she came up behind me. “I’ll show you where you’re sleeping tonight. I’ve put a camp bed in Ronald’s study for you.”

  “I think I’d better wait here, for a bit,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly, dear, that won’t be necessary.” She grasped at my elbow. “Come on.”

  I stayed where I was. “No, I think I ought to stay. Just in case.”

  Mrs. Taylor studied me
with an expression of irritated surprise. She was not accustomed to being disobeyed. “Just in case what?” she asked coldly.

  “In case I’m needed.”

  “Oh!” She chuckled angrily. “Well, Barbara, I hardly think—”

  The end of her sentence was put off by the commencement of a high-pitched screaming from above. It was Polly. The two of us immediately started up the stairs again—me first, Mrs. Taylor in hot pursuit. When we got to the ladder, there was a brief, somewhat undignified struggle as to who would go first. I won.

  At the top of the ladder, I found Sheba and Polly in roughly the positions that I had left them, except that Polly was now sitting up on her bed, holding her hand to her cheek. When she saw me, she broke off from shrieking for a moment. “She hit me!” she gasped.

  “For God’s sake, shut up, Polly!” Sheba said.

  Polly leaned forward now and made a clumsy effort to claw at her mother’s face. But Sheba was quicker than she was. She grasped Polly by her thin little wrists and held her at arm’s length. For a few moments, the two of them rocked back and forth on the bed, as in some children’s game.

  “Stop it at once. Both of you!” I shouted, but neither of them paid any notice. Sheba, gaining a momentary advantage, pushed Polly back down into a recumbent position on the bed.

  “You cow,” Polly panted. “I hate—” Before she could finish, Sheba swooped down and slapped her again. It looked to me as if she put some force into it. When her hand met Polly’s cheek, there was a distinct and not unsatisfactory thwack, and Polly’s cries seemed to rise at least an octave higher.

  Mrs. Taylor was scrambling off the top of the ladder now. “Sheba!” she shouted. “Sheba! What have you done?”

  Sheba looked at her mother quite blankly, and then she burst into tears. “Oh, bugger you all!” she cried. She walked over to the ladder and began to climb down. I followed her, of course, but when I reached the top-floor landing, she called up to me to leave her alone. Then she ran down the rest of the stairs and, shortly after that, I heard the front door slam.