T
he 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, when she came through the gates on a bicycle—an old-fashioned, butcher-boy model with a basket in the front. Her hair was arranged in one of those artfully dishevelled up-dos: a lot of stray tendrils framing the jaw, and something like a chopstick piercing a rough bun at the back. It was the sort of hairstyle that film actresses wear when they’re playing sexy lady doctors. I can’t recall exactly what she had on. Sheba’s outfits tend to be very complicated—lots of floaty layers. I know she was wearing purple shoes. And there was definitely a long skirt involved, because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger of becoming entangled in her spokes. When she dismounted—with a lithe, rather irritating little skip—I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material.
Fey
was the word that swam into my mind.
Fey person,
I thought. Then I locked my car and walked away.
My formal introduction to Sheba took place later the same day when Ted Mawson, the deputy head, brought her into the staff room at afternoon break for a “meet and greet.” Afternoon
break is not a good time to meet schoolteachers. If you were to plot a graph of a teacher’s spirits throughout the school day, afternoon break would be represented by the lowest valley. The air in the staff room has a trapped, stagnant quality. The chirpy claptrap of the early morning has died away, and those staff members who are not milling about, checking their timetables and so on, sprawl in lugubrious silence. (To be fair, the sprawling is as much a tribute to the shoddy construction of the staff room’s three elderly foam sofas as an expression of the teachers’ low morale.) Some of the teachers stare, slack-shouldered, into space. Some of them read—the arts and media pages of the liberal newspapers mainly, or paperback editions of the lower sort of fiction-the draw being not so much the content as the shield against having to converse with their colleagues. A great many chocolate bars and instant noodles in plastic pots are consumed.
On the day of Sheba’s arrival, the staff room was slightly more crowded than usual, owing to the heating being on the blink in Old Hall. (In addition to its three modern structures—the Gym, 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’s original, Victorian incarnation as an orphanage.) That afternoon, several teachers who might otherwise have remained skulking in their Old Hall classrooms during break had been driven to seek refuge in the staff room, where the radiators were still operative. I was off in a far corner when Mawson ushered Sheba in, so I was able to watch their slow progress around the room for several minutes before having to mould my face into the appropriate smile.
Sheba’s hair had become more chaotic since the morning. The loose tendrils had graduated to hanks and, where it was meant to be smooth and pulled back, tiny, fuzzy sprigs had reared up, creating a sort of corona around her scalp. She was a very thin woman, I saw now. As she bent to shake the hands of seated staff members, her body seemed to fold in half at the waist 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 our Eng. 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 curtains drawn?” I heard her ask. Ted Mawson rubbed his hands, nervously.
“Oh,” Antonia said, “so the kids can’t look in at us and make faces.”
Bill Rumer, the head of chemistry, who was sitting next to Antonia 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 they can smash each other up—do their raping and pillaging—and we’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 posturing cynicism about the pupils, but Bill is the chief offender. He is a rather ghastly character, I’m afraid—the sort of man who is always sitting with his legs aggressively akimbo, offering a clearer silhouette of his untidy crotch than is strictly decent. One of the more insufferable things about him is that he
imagines himself tremendously naughty and shocking—a delusion in which women like Antonia are all too eager to conspire.
“Oh,
Bill,”
Antonia said now, pressing her skirt against her thighs.
“Don’t worry,” Bill said to Sheba, “you’ll get used to the gloom.” He smiled at her magnanimously—the grandee allowing her into the little enclosure of his bonhomie. Then, as his eyes swept over her, I saw his smile waver for a moment.
Women observing other women tend to be engrossed by the details—the bodily minutiae, the clothing particulars. We get so caught up in the lone dimple, the excessive ears, the missing button, that we often lag behind men in organising the individual features into an overall impression. I mention this by way of explaining why it was only now, as I watched Bill, that the fact of Sheba’s beauty occurred to me. Of course, I thought. She’s very good looking. Sheba, who had been smiling fixedly throughout Bill and Antonia’s droll exchange, made another nervous adjustment to her hair. As she raised her long, thin arms to fuss with the chopstick hair ornament, her torso lengthened and her chest was thrust forward slightly. She had a dancer’s bosom. Two firm little patties riding the raft of her ribs. Bill’s eyes widened. Antonia’s eyes narrowed.
Sheba and Mawson continued on their journey around the room. The change that took place in the teachers’ faces as they set eyes on Sheba confirmed my appraisal of Bill’s appraisal. The men beamed and ogled. The women shrank slightly and turned sullen. The one exception was Elaine Clifford, a St. George’s alumnus who teaches lower school biology. Assuming what is her characteristic stance of unearned intimacy, Elaine stood very close to Sheba and began to blast her with impudent chatter. They were only a few feet away from me now. After a
moment, Mawson turned and beckoned to me. “Barbara!” he shouted, cutting off Elaine in midstream. “Do come and meet Sheba Hart.”
I stepped over and joined the group.
“Sheba is going to be teaching pottery,” Mawson said. “As you know, 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 scarlet appeared on each of Sheba’s cheeks.
“This is Barbara Covett,” Mawson went on. “She’s one of our stalwarts. If Barbara ever left us, I’m afraid St. George’s would collapse.”
Sheba looked at me carefully. She was about thirty-five, I estimated. (She was actually forty, about to be forty-one.) The hand that she held out to be shaken was large and red and somewhat coarse to the touch. “How nice to be so needed,” she said, smiling. It was difficult to distinguish her tone, but it seemed to me that it contained a note of genuine sympathy—as if she understood how maddening it might be to be patronised by 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 concerning this place, Sheba,” Mawson continued, “you must ask Barbara. She’s the St. George’s expert.”
“Oh, smashing. I’ll remember that,” Sheba said.
People from the privileged orders are always described as having plums in their mouths, but that wasn’t what came to mind when I heard Sheba speak. On the contrary, she sounded
as if her mouth were very empty and clean—as if she’d never had 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, as if inflamed, and speckled with black stubble. I do hate it when women don’t keep their personal grooming up to scratch. Better the full, bushy Frenchwoman’s growth than that squalid sprinkling of iron filings. “They’re so pretty!” Elaine said of the earrings. “Where d‘you get ’em?”
Sandy Pabblem, the headmaster, is very keen on having former pupils like Elaine on staff. He imagines it reflects well on the school that they should wish to return and “give something back.” But the truth is, St. George’s alumni make exceptionally poor teachers. It’s not so much that they don’t know anything about anything. (Which they don’t.) Or even that they are complacent about their ignorance. (I once heard Elaine blithely identifying Boris Yeltsin as “the Russian one who doesn’t have a thingy on his head.”) The real issue is one of personality. Invariably, pupils who come back to teach at St. George’s are emotionally suspect characters—people who have surmised that the world out there is a frightening place and who have responded by simply staying put. They’ll never have to try going home again because they’re never going to leave. I have a vision sometimes of the pupils of these ex-pupils, deciding to become St. George’s teachers themselves—and these ex-pupils of ex-pupils producing more ex-pupils, who return to St. George’s as teachers, and so on. It would take only a couple of generations for the school 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 seed pearls. Her face was longish and thin, her nose ever so slightly crooked at the tip. And her eyes—no, not so much the eyes as the eyelids—were prodigious: great beige canopies fringed with dense lash. Like that spiky tiara that the Statue of Liberty wears.
“This is Sheba’s first teaching post,” Ted said, when Elaine had stopped talking for a moment.
“Well, it’ll certainly be a baptism by fire,” I remarked.
Ted laughed with excessive heartiness and then abruptly stopped. “Okay,” he said, glancing at his watch, “we ought to get on, Sheba. Let me introduce you to Malcolm Plummer …”
Elaine and I stood watching for a moment, as Sheba and Mawson 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 her affront. “Well, I think she’s nice,” she muttered.
During her first couple of weeks at school, Sheba kept very much to herself. At break times, she often stayed in her pottery studio. When she did come into the staff room, she usually stood alone at one of the windows, peeking round the curtains at the playground outside. She was perfectly pleasant to her colleagues, which is to say she exchanged all the standard, weatherbased pleasantries. But she did not automatically gravitate to another female teacher and start swapping autobiographies. Or put her name down to join the St. George’s contingent on the next march against government spending cuts. Or contribute to sarcastic group discussions about the headmaster. Her resistance to all the usual initiation rituals aroused a certain amount of suspicion among the other teachers. The women tended to the opinion that Sheba was “stuck up,” while the men favoured
the theory that she was “cold.” Bill Rumer, widely acknowledged as the staff expert on such matters, observed on more than one occasion that “there was nothing wrong with her that a good boning wouldn’t cure.”
I took Sheba’s failure to forge an instantaneous friendship as an encouraging sign. In my experience, newcomers—particularly female ones—are far too eager to pin their colours to the mast of any staff room coterie that will have them. Jennifer Dodd, who used to be my closest friend at the school, spent her first three weeks at St. George’s buried in the welcoming bosoms of Mary Horsely and Diane Nebbins. Mary and Diane are two hippies from the maths department. They both carry packets of “women’s tea” in their handbags and use jagged lumps of rock crystal in lieu of antiperspirant. They were entirely ill-suited—temperament-wise, humour-wise, worldview-wise—to be Jennifer’s friends. But they happened to get to her first, and Jennifer was so grateful for someone being nice to her that she cheerfully undertook to ignore their soy milk mumbo jumbo. I daresay she would have plighted her troth to a Moonie during her first week at St. George’s, if the Moonie had been quick enough off the mark.
Sheba displayed no such new girl jitters and, for this, I admired her. She did not exempt me from her general aloofness. Owing to my seniority at St. George’s and the fact that I am more formal in manner than most of my colleagues, I am used to being treated with a certain deference. But Sheba seemed to be oblivious of my status. There was little indication, for a long time, that she really saw me at all. Yet, in spite of this, I found myself possessed by a strange certainty that we would one day be 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 the awful, Mid-Atlantic “Hiya” that so many of the staff favour.) And another time, walking from the Arts Centre after an assembly, we shared some brief, rueful comments about the choral performance that had just taken place. My feelings of connection to Sheba did not depend upon these minute exchanges, however. The bond that I sensed, even at that stage, went far beyond anything that might have been expressed in quotidian chitchat. 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 take time for us to form a friendship. But when we did, I had no doubt that it would prove to be one of uncommon intimacy and trust—a relationship
de chaleur,
as the French say.