“For God’s sake, Sheba,” he said when she came in. “This is the limit. It was bloody irresponsible of you not to phone. I already have one teenager to deal with. I don’t need two.”
“Please …,” Sheba said. She was still in her coat. Her hands were prickling in the sudden warmth.
“Please, what?” Richard demanded.
“Just … please.” She leaned wearily against the door.
“I’m
so
sorry to bother you,” Richard said.
“Of course
you’re much too busy to be bothered with trifling family matters. Let’s just cut the talk from now on and deal with our daughter by slapping her about …”
“Oh!” Sheba said. She walked across the room and sat down on the sofa. “I knew you’d punish me for that.”
Richard folded his arms. “Actually, I’ve been very careful to avoid expressing any opinion until I could hear your account.”
Sheba lay back on the sofa and looked at the ceiling. “Wise judge!” she said.
Richard and Sheba did not attend any parties on New Year’s Eve. They had talked of having people round for a small supper. But they both agreed now that neither of them was feeling up to playing host. Polly went out to a concert in Brixton, and the remainder of the family had a quiet dinner at home.
I had no celebrations to go to myself, but that was as expected. Over the years, I have created my own traditions for the high days and holy days. This New Year’s, as on every New Year’s for the last decade, I brought in a bottle of sherry and spent the evening getting slightly sozzled while rereading Jane Austen’s
Persuasion.
Sheba and I spoke a few times on the phone in the first week of the new year. On each occasion, she seemed to me to be borderline hysterical. Connolly was still not returning her calls, and she was finally confronting the possibility that she had been dumped. She speculated obsessively about the possible reasons for Connolly’s loss of interest. Had she become repulsive to him? Or was there a new girlfriend? Did that little tart
she had seen outside his house have anything to do with it? Since I had no useful contribution to make to these rambling enquiries, I mostly kept quiet.
The only other subject that Sheba showed interest in discussing during this period was Bangs—whether or not he had proof of her affair, whether or not he was going to report her. By this stage, I was feeling more sanguine about Bangs. With each day that passed, the threat he posed seemed to me to grow less credible. I began to suspect that I had exaggerated my indiscretion in his flat. I hadn’t said
that
much, after all. And what I did say he may well not have believed. “Bangs is not a boat rocker,” I told Sheba over and over. “Bangs wouldn’t say boo to a goose.” To which Sheba would always reply with pathetic eagerness, “Oh, do you think so, Barbara? Do you really think so?”
O
n the Sunday evening before school term began, I came back from the launderette to find the light blinking on my answering machine. Most unusually, there had been three calls while I’d been out. On the first two, Sheba repeated my name a couple of times in a rather sepulchral whisper and then hung up. On her third try, she left a longer message: “Barbara? Where are you? Barbara? Pabblem called me this evening. He knows. I think he knows. He wants me in at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. He said a serious charge had been made against me regarding inappropriate conduct with a pupil. Please, please, Barbara, call me as soon as you get this.”
She picked up straightaway when I rang back. She had been keeping the portable phone by her side. “I’m having a meltdown,” she said. She was in the middle of making the evening meal, and the children were near, so she spoke quietly. “Bangs must have said something, the bastard. What am I going to do? Tell me what to do.”
“You don’t know it was Bangs,” I said. “It could have been anyone. It could have been Polly—”
“Oh, who bloody cares! The point is, what am I going to do?”
“Listen to me,” I said, trying not to sound too anxious. “You
have to get your story straight. Have you said anything to Richard?”
“No, he’s not back yet. What on earth would I say in any case?”
“No, well don’t. Don’t say anything. This is all going to blow over. When you see Pabblem tomorrow, you’ll tell him that you are friendly with Connolly, that you’ve given the boy help with his artwork from time to time, that you have
had no physical contact with him whatsoever
. You must be adamant about that. Be outraged.”
“But what if Bangs has seen us together somewhere?” Sheba objected. “What if he has proof?”
“I don’t think he has,” I said carefully. “I think he would have told me that. And even if he
did
see you two somewhere, it’s still his word against yours. Tell Pabblem that Bangs has a thing for you—that this is his revenge for being rejected by you.”
In spite of herself, Sheba laughed. “I can’t believe this is happening, Barbara,” she said when her laughter trailed off.
“Neither can I,” I said. “But it’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”
I didn’t really believe that. I knew well enough that trouble was on its way. But I could never have predicted quite how rapidly the trouble would arrive. A little less than an hour and a half after Sheba got off the phone with me, her doorbell rang. She was up on the top floor at the time, giving Ben his bath. Richard shouted out from his study for Polly to answer the door and then, when Polly did not reply, Sheba heard him swearing lightly as he stomped down the stairs himself. She didn’t hear anything else for a while after that, and she assumed that the
caller had been a Girl Guide or a Jehovah’s Witness. Then, she became aware of raised voices downstairs. She left Ben in the bath and went out onto the landing. She could hear a woman’s voice below and the bass rumble of Richard.
She walked down the flight of stairs to the next landing and leaned over the balustrade to see what was going on. The front door was still open and, in the entrance hall, a short blond woman in a thick coat and woolly hat was standing, wagging her finger at Richard. “Don’t you talk to me like that,” Sheba heard her say. “I’ve got proof. It’s your wife that’s the liar.”
Here it is
, Sheba thought.
The calamity has come
. Her impulse was to flee—to dash across the landing into her bedroom and lock herself in the bathroom. She was actually turning to retreat when the woman looked up and saw her. “You!” she shouted. “Are you her? Come down here.”
Polly came out into the hall now, from the living room. “What the hell is going on?” she asked her father indignantly.
“Get out!” Richard roared. “Go back inside!” For once, Polly had no rejoinder. She glanced briefly up at her mother and then went back into the living room.
Sheba stood still, looking down at the woman’s fierce, red face.
Later on, she would come to see how much of the mother there was in the son: the brown complexion, the bullish physique, the tragedy mask eyes. At that moment, though, the woman’s features seemed so alien and hostile that Sheba was momentarily persuaded she wasn’t Connolly’s mother after all.
“You’re scared now, aren’t you?” the woman jeered. “Come on—get down here. I want to talk to you.”
It was electrifying, she says, to have a stranger shouting
commands at her in her own house. Richard was peering up at her too now, his face very pale next to the woman’s. Sheba could tell from his bewildered expression that he had not yet understood. He still regarded himself as in league with his wife against this dumpy intruder in their hallway.
I have only a few minutes left of my old life,
she remembers thinking, as she began walking down the stairs.
“The headmaster rang us today,” Mrs. Connolly said. “He wants us to come in and see him tomorrow about Steven. Won’t say why on the phone. I say to Steven, ‘What can he want to see us about?’ And he starts
crying
. Sobbing his heart out. I got it out of him. He’s told me everything. I’ve even seen those dirty letters you’ve been sending—”
“Now hang on a minute—” Richard said.
“No, Richard,” Sheba interrupted.
“That’s right,” Mrs. Connolly said. “You can’t deny it, can you? Why don’t you tell him what you’ve been doing with my son?”
“You must control yourself,” Richard said. “There’s a child in the house.”
Sheba suddenly remembered Ben, still sitting in his cooling bath. “Polly!” she shouted. “Come upstairs and watch your brother.”
Mrs. Connolly’s mouth silently opened and closed like a fish’s maw. “Don’t be telling
me
to control myself! I’ve got kids too, you know.”
Polly emerged from the living room again. “Could someone please tell me what’s going on?” she demanded.
“Shut up, Polly, and go upstairs,” Richard said.
Polly trudged sullenly past Sheba.
Sheba was standing on the last step of the staircase now. Tears were coursing down her face.
“That’s right, cry,” Mrs. Connolly said, “you perverted bitch.”
“I’m sorry,” Richard broke in. “I’m going to have to …” He put his hand on Mrs. Connolly’s arm and tried to turn her towards the front door. But she writhed away from him. “Evil cow!” she screamed at Sheba.
There was a brief struggle, in the course of which Richard’s spectacles fell to the floor and Mrs. Connolly’s hat came askew. “Don’t … you … touch … me!” she screeched at Richard. For a moment, the three of them—Sheba, Richard, and Mrs. Connolly in her tipsy hat—stood still.
Then Richard bent down to retrieve his spectacles. He was putting them back on and had just begun to say something to Mrs. Connolly in the fruitily appeasing tone that Sheba calls his “Come now” voice when Mrs. Connolly made a running lunge at Sheba.
The contact lasted only a few seconds, but when Richard pulled Mrs. Connolly off, she was holding a surprisingly large amount of Sheba’s hair in her hand.
“No more!” Richard roared. He took hold of Mrs. Connolly’s shoulders. There was scuffling and shouting. Sheba stood clutching the hall table, sobbing. She recalls, with some amazement, seeing Richard clasp Mrs. Connolly from behind and attempt to carry her, in an awkward bear hug, to the door. Mrs. Connolly’s crepe-soled winter boots dragged on the hall carpet like a corpse’s.
After the door slammed, there was a tiny window of silence, and then the doorbell began to ring. Richard stood with his back to the door, breathing heavily. Sheba sat on the floor. They
stared at one another across the hallway, listening to the long, urgent alarms of the bell and, just audible beneath them, the muffled opera of Mrs. Connolly screaming on the front step.
Sheba did not call me after Mrs. Connolly left. Her hands were full with Richard, I suppose. The next day she chose—wisely enough—to stay at home and skip her scheduled interview with Pabblem. I tried calling her from school several times that morning, but she did not answer. As a result, I was in the dark for much of the day, forced to piece together what had happened from the scraps of frantic gossip being exchanged by my colleagues. Sheba had been found out having an affair with Steven Connolly, people were saying. There had been a fistfight between her and the boy’s mother. It was possible—even probable—that she had seduced other boys. The police had been called in.
At first break I found Elaine Clifford in the staff room, surrounded by a crowd of glinty-eyed teachers, as she relayed the latest dispatches from Dierdre Rickman in the headmaster’s office. At that very moment, she reported, Pabblem was “in conference” with the police and the Connolly family. Sheba had been called in to face the music, but she had refused to come, and the police were now on their way to her house to arrest her. Pabblem was in a terrible state by all accounts. Just an hour ago, he had shrieked at a work experience intern for making his coffee too milky. Dierdre Rickman attributed this behaviour to feelings of guilt and anger. Pabblem could not forgive himself, she said, for the fact that Sheba’s lurid misdeeds had occurred on his watch.
Personally, I doubted this theory. If Pabblem was in a nasty mood, it seemed much more likely that he was wracked with
regret at having lost the opportunity to bully and humiliate Sheba. Had it not been for Mrs. Connolly’s precipitate action—her insistence on barging into Sheba’s home the night before—Sheba would have come to school that morning and Pabblem would have had her in his clutches for at least a couple of hours of thundering interrogation. Now she had escaped him, and there was nothing for him to do but surrender control of the investigation to the police. Poor old Pabblem had been robbed of his sadistic moment.
Somewhere in the middle of Elaine’s performance, Mawson came in to hand out copies of Pabblem’s much-delayed “Where We Go Wrong” report. Pabblem had been scheduled to give an introductory talk at lunchtime about the challenging new ideas contained in its pages, but now, owing to what Mawson called, with redundant discretion, “an unforeseen matter,” he was obliged to cancel. A small cheer went up from the staff when they heard this—succeeded by a loud groan when Mawson announced that a new meeting had been set for the following week. Pabblem, he assured us, was still very much looking forward to hearing staff “feedback” on his proposed initiatives.
On the way back to my classroom, I spotted Bangs scuttling along the ground-floor corridor of Old Hall. His name had not come up yet in any of the staff discussions I had overheard. Everyone seemed to be under the impression that Mrs. Connolly was responsible for uncovering Sheba’s affair. I knew better. His eyes met mine just as he was about to enter the staff toilet. He froze, like a surprised cockroach. His mouth opened to say something, and then he seemed to decide against it. “Little shit!” I hissed as he closed the toilet door behind him.
At around four o’clock, I finally managed to get Sheba on the phone.
“Sheba!” I said when she picked up. “Thank God. I’ve been trying to get you all day. Are you all right?”
“No … well, it’s a pretty awful mess here. As you can imagine.”
“Have you seen the police?”
“Yup. Yup. They came this morning. Richard went with me to the station. There was a lot of stuff they had to do. Fingerprinting and so on. We only got back an hour ago.” I had expected tears and screams, but she was weirdly matter-of-fact. It was the shock, I suppose.
“How is he taking it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’m terribly worried. He’s still not answering …”
“What?”
“Oh, sorry, Richard you mean? He’s … I don’t know.”
“Shall I come over?”
“No, better not. I don’t think Richard wants visitors. And we haven’t spoken to the children yet.”
The next day, there was a small item about Sheba in the
Evening Standard.
It wasn’t much—just a paragraph at the bottom of page four about a North London teacher being charged with indecent assault on a pupil. But I knew then that the floodgates were about to open. I spoke to Sheba briefly at lunchtime. She was even quieter now—almost catatonic. She still didn’t want me to come to the house, so there was nothing for me to do after school but go home and fret.
On Wednesday morning I was called in to see Pabblem. It did not occur to me that he was going to talk to me about Sheba. I assumed that he wanted to discuss the third-years’ special history project on Ireland. According to a rumour floating about at the time, he was hoping to honour the sufferings of
Irish peasants during the potato famine by having the children observe a daylong fast.
There was no preamble to our business on this occasion. Pabblem merely nodded when I entered his office and started talking before I sat down. “As you know, Barbara, Sheba Hart is in quite a bit of trouble.”
I nodded. “Yes, I’m aware of that.”
“Quite a bit.”
“Yes.”
“I gather you’re close to her.”