When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba is special, and before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent, of course, but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there...
What Was She Thinking?
Notes on a ScandalBy Zoe HellerBlackstone Audiobooks
Copyright © 2006 Zoe Heller
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780786148059Chapter One
The first time I ever saw Sheba was on a Monday morning,early in the winter term of 1996. I was standing in the St.George's car park, getting books out of the back of my car, whenshe came through the gates on a bicycle-an old-fashioned,butcher-boy model with a basket in the front. Her hair wasarranged in one of those artfully dishevelled up-dos: a lot ofstray tendrils framing the jaw, and something like a chopstickpiercing a rough bun at the back. It was the sort of hairstylethat film actresses wear when they're playing sexy lady doctors.I can't recall exactly what she had on. Sheba's outfits tend to bevery complicated-lots of floaty layers. I know she was wearingpurple shoes. And there was definitely a long skirt involved,because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger ofbecoming entangled in her spokes. When she dismounted-witha lithe, rather irritating little skip-I saw that the skirtwas made of some diaphanous material.
Fey was the word thatswam into my mind.
Fey person, I thought. Then I locked mycar and walked away.
My formal introduction to Sheba took place later the sameday when Ted Mawson, the deputy head, brought her into thestaff room at afternoon break for a "meet and greet." Afternoonbreak is not a good time to meet schoolteachers. If you were toplot a graph of a teacher's spirits throughout the school day,afternoon break would be represented by the lowest valley. Theair in the staff room has a trapped, stagnant quality. The chirpyclaptrap of the early morning has died away, and those staffmembers who are not milling about, checking their timetablesand so on, sprawl in lugubrious silence. (To be fair, the sprawlingis as much a tribute to the shoddy construction of the staffroom's three elderly foam sofas as an expression of the teachers'low morale.) Some of the teachers stare, slack-shouldered, intospace. Some of them read-the arts and media pages of the liberalnewspapers mainly, or paperback editions of the lower sortof fiction-the draw being not so much the content as theshield against having to converse with their colleagues. A greatmany chocolate bars and instant noodles in plastic pots are consumed.
On the day of Sheba's arrival, the staff room was slightlymore crowded than usual, owing to the heating being on theblink in Old Hall. (In addition to its three modern structures-theGym, the Arts Centre, and the Science Block-the St.George's site includes two rather decrepit redbrick buildings,Old Hall and Middle Hall, which date back to the school'soriginal, Victorian incarnation as an orphanage.) That afternoon,several teachers who might otherwise have remainedskulking in their Old Hall classrooms during break had beendriven to seek refuge in the staff room, where the radiators werestill operative. I was off in a far corner when Mawson usheredSheba in, so I was able to watch their slow progress around theroom for several minutes before having to mould my face intothe appropriate smile.
Sheba's hair had become more chaotic since the morning.The loose tendrils had graduated to hanks and, where it wasmeant to be smooth and pulled back, tiny, fuzzy sprigs hadreared up, creating a sort of corona around her scalp. She was avery thin woman, I saw now. As she bent to shake the hands ofseated staff members, her body seemed to fold in half at thewaist like a piece of paper. "Our new pottery teacher!" Mr.Mawson was bellowing with his customary chilling good spirits,as he and Sheba loomed over Antonia Robinson, one of ourEng. lit women. Sheba smiled and patted shyly at her hair.
Pottery. I repeated the word quietly to myself. It was too perfect:I pictured her, the dreamy maiden poised at her wheel,massaging tastefully mottled milk jugs into being.
She was gesturing at the windows. "Why are all the curtainsdrawn?" I heard her ask. Ted Mawson rubbed his hands, nervously.
"Oh," Antonia said, "so the kids can't look in at us and makefaces."
Bill Rumer, the head of chemistry, who was sitting next toAntonia on one of the foam sofas, snorted loudly at this. "Actually,Antonia," he said, "it's so we can't look out at them. So theycan smash each other up-do their raping and pillaging-andwe're not required to intervene."
Antonia laughed and made a scandalised face.
A lot of teachers at St. George's go in for this sort of posturingcynicism about the pupils, but Bill is the chief offender. Heis a rather ghastly character, I'm afraid-the sort of man who isalways sitting with his legs aggressively akimbo, offering aclearer silhouette of his untidy crotch than is strictly decent.One of the more insufferable things about him is that heimagines himself tremendously naughty and shocking-a delusionin which women like Antonia are all too eager to conspire.
"Oh, Bill," Antonia said now, pressing her skirt against herthighs.
"Don't worry," Bill said to Sheba, "you'll get used to thegloom." He smiled at her magnanimously-the grandee allowingher into the little enclosure of his bonhomie. Then, as hiseyes swept over her, I saw his smile waver for a moment.
Women observing other women tend to be engrossed by thedetails-the bodily minutiae, the clothing particulars. We getso caught up in the lone dimple, the excessive ears, the missingbutton, that we often lag behind men in organising the individualfeatures into an overall impression. I mention this byway of explaining why it was only now, as I watched Bill, thatthe fact of Sheba's beauty occurred to me. Of course, I thought.She's very good looking. Sheba, who had been smiling fixedlythroughout Bill and Antonia's droll exchange, made anothernervous adjustment to her hair. As she raised her long, thin armsto fuss with the chopstick hair ornament, her torso lengthenedand her chest was thrust forward slightly. She had a dancer'sbosom. Two firm little patties riding the raft of her ribs. Bill'seyes widened. Antonia's eyes narrowed.
Sheba and Mawson continued on their journey around theroom. The change that took place in the teachers' faces as theyset eyes on Sheba confirmed my appraisal of Bill's appraisal.The men beamed and ogled. The women shrank slightly andturned sullen. The one exception was Elaine Clifford, a St.George's alumnus who teaches lower school biology. Assumingwhat is her characteristic stance of unearned intimacy, Elainestood very close to Sheba and began to blast her with impudentchatter. They were only a few feet away from me now. After amoment, Mawson turned and beckoned to me. "Barbara!" heshouted, cutting off Elaine in midstream. "Do come and meetSheba Hart."
I stepped over and joined the group.
"Sheba is going to be teaching pottery," Mawson said. "As youknow, we've been waiting a long time to replace Mrs. Sipwitch.We feel tremendously lucky and pleased to have got her."
In response to these words, a small, precise circle of scarletappeared on each of Sheba's cheeks.
"This is Barbara Covett," Mawson went on. "She's one of ourstalwarts. If Barbara ever left us, I'm afraid St. George's wouldcollapse."
Sheba looked at me carefully. She was about thirty-five, Iestimated. (She was actually forty, about to be forty-one.) Thehand that she held out to be shaken was large and red andsomewhat coarse to the touch. "How nice to be so needed," shesaid, smiling. It was difficult to distinguish her tone, but itseemed to me that it contained a note of genuine sympathy-asif she understood how maddening it might be to be patronisedby Mawson.
"Sheba-is that as in Queen of?" I asked.
"No, as in Bathsheba."
"Oh. Were your parents thinking of the Bible or of Hardy?"
She smiled. "I'm not sure. I think they just liked the name."
"If there's anything you need to know about anything concerningthis place, Sheba," Mawson continued, "you must askBarbara. She's the St. George's expert."
"Oh, smashing. I'll remember that," Sheba said.
People from the privileged orders are always described ashaving plums in their mouths, but that wasn't what came tomind when I heard Sheba speak. On the contrary, she soundedas if her mouth were very empty and clean-as if she'd neverhad a filling.
"Oh! Love your earrings!" Elaine said now. She reached out,like a monkey, to finger Sheba's ears and, as she raised her arms,I caught a glimpse of her armpits, which were violently pink, asif inflamed, and speckled with black stubble. I do hate it whenwomen don't keep their personal grooming up to scratch. Betterthe full, bushy Frenchwoman's growth than that squalidsprinkling of iron filings. "They're so pretty!" Elaine said of theearrings. "Where d'you get 'em?"
Sandy Pabblem, the headmaster, is very keen on having formerpupils like Elaine on staff. He imagines it reflects well onthe school that they should wish to return and "give somethingback." But the truth is, St. George's alumni make exceptionallypoor teachers. It's not so much that they don't know anythingabout anything. (Which they don't.) Or even that they arecomplacent about their ignorance. (I once heard Elaine blithelyidentifying Boris Yeltsin as "the Russian one who doesn't havea thingy on his head.") The real issue is one of personality.Invariably, pupils who come back to teach at St. George's areemotionally suspect characters-people who have surmised thatthe world out there is a frightening place and who have respondedby simply staying put. They'll never have to try going homeagain because they're never going to leave. I have a vision sometimesof the pupils of these ex-pupils, deciding to become St.George's teachers themselves-and these ex-pupils of ex-pupilsproducing more ex-pupils, who return to St. George's as teachers,and so on. It would take only a couple of generations for theschool to become entirely populated by dolts.
I took the opportunity, while Sheba was explaining her jewellery,to examine her face more closely. The earrings were beautiful, as it happened: delicate little things made of gold and seedpearls. Her face was longish and thin, her nose ever so slightlycrooked at the tip. And her eyes-no, not so much the eyes asthe eyelids-were prodigious: great beige canopies fringedwith dense lash. Like that spiky tiara that the Statue of Libertywears.
"This is Sheba's first teaching post," Ted said, when Elainehad stopped talking for a moment.
"Well, it'll certainly be a baptism by fire," I remarked.
Ted laughed with excessive heartiness and then abruptlystopped. "Okay," he said, glancing at his watch, "we ought toget on, Sheba. Let me introduce you to Malcolm Plummer ..."
Elaine and I stood watching for a moment, as Sheba andMawson moved off. "She's sweet, isn't she?" Elaine said.
I smiled. "No, I wouldn't have said sweet."
Elaine made a clicking noise with her tongue to indicate heraffront. "Well, I think she's nice," she muttered.
During her first couple of weeks at school, Sheba kept verymuch to herself. At break times, she often stayed in her potterystudio. When she did come into the staff room, she usuallystood alone at one of the windows, peeking round the curtainsat the playground outside. She was perfectly pleasant to her colleagues,which is to say she exchanged all the standard, weather-basedpleasantries. But she did not automatically gravitate toanother female teacher and start swapping autobiographies. Orput her name down to join the St. George's contingent on thenext march against government spending cuts. Or contributeto sarcastic group discussions about the headmaster. Her resistanceto all the usual initiation rituals aroused a certain amountof suspicion among the other teachers. The women tended tothe opinion that Sheba was "stuck up," while the men favouredthe theory that she was "cold." Bill Rumer, widely acknowledgedas the staff expert on such matters, observed on morethan one occasion that "there was nothing wrong with her thata good boning wouldn't cure."
I took Sheba's failure to forge an instantaneous friendship asan encouraging sign. In my experience, newcomers-particularlyfemale ones-are far too eager to pin their colours to the mastof any staff room coterie that will have them. Jennifer Dodd,who used to be my closest friend at the school, spent her firstthree weeks at St. George's buried in the welcoming bosoms ofMary Horsely and Diane Nebbins. Mary and Diane are twohippies from the maths department. They both carry packets of"women's tea" in their handbags and use jagged lumps of rockcrystal in lieu of antiperspirant. They were entirely ill-suited-temperament-wise,humour-wise, worldview-wise-to be Jennifer'sfriends. But they happened to get to her first, and Jenniferwas so grateful for someone being nice to her that she cheerfullyundertook to ignore their soy milk mumbo jumbo. I daresayshe would have plighted her troth to a Moonie during her firstweek at St. George's, if the Moonie had been quick enough offthe mark.
Sheba displayed no such new girl jitters and, for this, Iadmired her. She did not exempt me from her general aloofness.Owing to my seniority at St. George's and the fact that I ammore formal in manner than most of my colleagues, I am usedto being treated with a certain deference. But Sheba seemed tobe oblivious of my status. There was little indication, for a longtime, that she really saw me at all. Yet, in spite of this, I foundmyself possessed by a strange certainty that we would one daybe friends.
Early on, we made a few tentative approaches to one another.Somewhere in her second week, Sheba greeted me in the corridor.(She used "Hello," I was pleased to note, as opposed to theawful, Mid-Atlantic "Hiya" that so many of the staff favour.)And another time, walking from the Arts Centre after anassembly, we shared some brief, rueful comments about thechoral performance that had just taken place. My feelings of connectionto Sheba did not depend upon these minute exchanges,however. The bond that I sensed, even at that stage, went farbeyond anything that might have been expressed in quotidianchitchat. It was an intuited kinship. An unspoken understanding.Does it sound too dramatic to call it spiritual recognition?Owing to our mutual reserve, I understood that it would taketime for us to form a friendship. But when we did, I had nodoubt that it would prove to be one of uncommon intimacy andtrust-a relationship de chaleur, as the French say.
In the meantime, I watched from afar and listened withinterest to the gossip that circulated about her in the staffroom. For most of the staff, Sheba's dignified self-containmentacted as a sort of force field, repelling the usual impertinentenquiries about home life and political allegiance.
Continues...
Excerpted from What Was She Thinking?by Zoe Heller Copyright © 2006 by Zoe Heller. Excerpted by permission.
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