“She is my friend, yes.”
He looked at me meaningfully.
“Is there something you …?” I began.
“No, I won’t beat about the bush, Barbara,” he said. “It’s been brought to my attention that you may have known about Sheba’s relationship with Steven Connolly for some time.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
There was a heavy silence.
“Brian Bangs tells me that you spoke of the relationship to him before Christmas. Is that or is that not the case?”
“I advised Brian of my suspicions, that is true.”
“Oh? Brian seemed to think you were more than suspicious. He seems to think you were pretty certain.”
“Well, he’s wrong.”
“Very well. But did it not occur to you to share your suspicions with one of your senior colleagues? With me?”
“No. As I say, they were only suspicions. I am not a gossip.”
“You are aware, of course, that Sheba’s conduct with this boy is a criminal offence? A very serious one?”
“I am aware of that.”
“Are you also aware that failure to pass on information about a criminal offence may be construed as criminal in itself?”
“I see what you are insinuating, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken. I had no information to pass on. As I have explained, I am not in the habit of trading in unsubstantiated rumour.”
“And yet you were happy to pass on an ‘unsubstantiated rumour’ to Brian?”
“Look …,” I began.
Pabblem stood up now. “You and I don’t get along, do we Barbara?” he said. “It’s not for want of trying on my part, I think. I’ve certainly tried. I know you’ve been unhappy with my leadership of St. George’s. I know you find my way of doing things a little”—he made a quotation gesture with his fingers—“newfangled. But I think you’ll admit that I’ve made a real effort to see your point of view. Haven’t I? Wouldn’t you admit that?”
I looked out of the window at the headmaster’s garden. A lone sparrow was pecking hopefully at the sheet of ice covering the birdbath.
“I think we’ve both tried to be civil with one another,” I said.
“Yes, and it’s still not working between us, is it?”
“We’re not obliged to be friends,” I said.
Pabblem walked around his desk and crouched down next to my chair. “I’ll tell you the truth, Barbara. I find myself in a bit of a bind here. I am extremely reluctant to believe that you acted as Sheba’s accomplice—”
“Excuse me—”
“And yet,” he said, raising his voice, “and yet I am under a very clear obligation to pass on any relevant information regarding my staff to the police. It’s a tricky situation. You can see …”
“I wasn’t an accomplice. I have done nothing wrong,” I said.
He laughed and stood up. “Come on, Barbara! If you tell me you didn’t know about Sheba, then I believe you. But you must understand that, if you stay with us, I shall have to put the police in touch with you. As long as you’re a member of my staff, I need to be sure there’s not even a
semblance
of wrongdoing …”
“This is nonsense …”
“ … It shouldn’t be a big problem, talking to the police about this. Not if you really didn’t know. I just thought it might be something you’d want to avoid. So I’ve been wondering—”
“But look—”
“Please!” Pabblem held up a hand. “Let me finish, Barbara!” He paused for a moment, before continuing. “As I say, I’ve been wondering how I might help you out. It occurs to me that this might be a good opportunity for us to take stock … to, you know,
reconsider
your role here at St. George’s. Since you are of an age—forgive me—at which retirement is a plausible option, I’m thinking, well … perhaps that might be the best course of action for you now.”
I stared at him. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you have two choices—”
“One choice, two alternatives, I think you mean.”
“Whatever.” Pabblem shrugged. “I’m offering you a dignified exit.”
Not trusting my own composure, I did not reply.
“Look,” he continued, “you needn’t decide now. It’s a big decision. Why don’t you go away and have a think about it?”
He planted himself against the door as I got up to leave. “I’m glad we had this talk, Barbara. You’ll let me know what you decide, won’t you? ASAP?”
I did not reply, and he remained standing in front of the door. “Can we agree on, say … tomorrow afternoon as a deadline?”
Finally I nodded, and he moved to one side. “Atta girl,” he said.
I was halfway down the corridor when he called out to me again. “By the way, Barbara, have you had a chance to look at this?” I turned to see that he was holding up a copy of “Where We Go Wrong.” I shook my head. “Oh, Barbara!” he said, cheerfully. “Tut tut! Do try and give it a read. There are some very exciting things in it, if I say so myself.”
E
ddie rang yesterday to let Sheba know that he and the family will be returning from India in a week. Sheba relayed the news with such glazed-eyed indifference that I was sure I had misheard her. “A week?” I repeated. We have always known that Eddie would be back in June, but I suppose I had been counting on some last-minute reprieve.
“Yes,” Sheba said idly. “He wanted to know how the garden was doing. Have you been watering it at all, Barbara?”
“Don’t worry about the bloody garden,” I said. “What about us?”
Sheba looked at me, startled. Then she shrugged.
“Do you think there’s any chance he’d let us stay on for a bit?” I asked.
“Oh no,” Sheba said. “I don’t think so. He told me to leave the keys on the kitchen table when I go.”
“And where, pray tell, does he think you’ll be going? What are we going to do?”
Sheba said nothing.
“Are you listening to me, Sheba?” I said. “We can’t camp on the streets—”
“Oh God, oh God,” she cried suddenly. “Don’t shout at me. I can’t bear it.”
There was silence in the room.
“Ohh,
you mustn’t mind me,” I said after a moment. “I’m just a worrywart, you know that. We’ll work something out.”
“No, no,” she said, suddenly remorseful. “I oughtn’t to have snapped at you.”
“Not to worry,” I said.
She shook her head. “Poor Barbara. I must be a nightmare to live with these days.”
“Nooo,” I said, getting up to put on the kettle. “Not at all.”
After we had had some tea and I judged her to have recovered from her little outburst, I went to the shops to get something for our dinner. I left her lolling in an armchair in the living room, watching television. But, when I returned an hour or so later, she was lying on the living room floor and her eyes were red from crying. I thought at first that she had been mulling over our impending homelessness. But then I saw that she had been reading something. Spread out before her on the carpet was my manuscript.
I am usually scrupulous about putting my writing away. But Sheba has been so self-absorbed, so incurious about her surroundings of late that I guess I had allowed my precautions to become a little lax. The previous night, instead of taking the manuscript up to bed with me and putting it under my mattress as usual, I had placed it on the bookshelf, inside one of Eddie’s large photographic volumes.
“You told Bangs,” Sheba said when I walked in. Her voice was trembling slightly.
I put down my shopping bags. “What?”
“You told Bangs about me and Connolly.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Stop it!” Sheba screamed. “Don’t lie to me. I’ve read it all in … in … your little
diary.”
She scrambled up from her prone position and brandished the manuscript at me. “What is this? What are you doing with this?”
“Sheba … don’t get het up. It’s something I’ve been writing … .” I began.
“I see that. How dare you?
How dare you?
What are you planning to do with it? Sell it and make a million?”
“I … I thought it would be useful to put everything down. I thought it might help with the court case.” I stepped forward to try to wrest the manuscript from her, but she darted away.
“Help?” she said. “To hear about me buying thongs and … and … hitting my daughter? What a wicked, wicked person you are! You betrayed me! You told Bangs.”
“For goodness’ sake, Sheba,” I said. “You would have been found out anyway. Your own daughter knew you were up to something. And the letters! How could you have expected not to be caught?”
Sheba stared at me. “What an idiot I’ve been to trust you. All that filth and lies you’ve been writing …”
“There are no lies in there, Sheba. There’s nothing in there that you didn’t tell me yourself.”
She made a strange, guttural noise of exasperation. “You’re mad! How did I never see it before? You’re mad! You really believe this stuff is the truth. You write about things you never saw, people you don’t know.”
“Well, that’s what a writer does, Sheba.”
“Ohhh,
you’re a writer now?” She began to laugh. I lunged
forward to get at the manuscript, but she danced away again, holding it high above her head.
“Look, Sheba,” I said, “you haven’t read it properly. You can’t get the idea of it from just flicking through it. I’m writing in your defence.”
“What absolute shit!” she exploded. “You’re not defending me. You’re exploiting me, that’s what’s going on here. All this time, you’ve been pretending to be my friend and what you’ve really wanted is, is
material
…”
“And how do you think it’s been for
me
?” I said, suddenly angry myself. “Acting as your bloody lady-in-waiting …”
She wasn’t listening, though. “Those awful things you write about my family,” she went on. “About Richard. How much you must hate us! I suppose that’s the spinster’s consolation, isn’t it? Examining the machineries of other people’s marriages and pointing up the flaws.”
“Sheba, how can you say that? I have only ever—”
“Don’t tell me what I can say!” she shrieked. “I’m the Most Hated Woman in Britain! There’s every chance I’m going to end up in prison! I can say whatever I want!” She was staggering about the room now like a crazy person.
“Sheba!” I shouted. “I lost my job because of you! Think about that! I have suffered too, you know. We’re in this together, you and I. If we’re going to get through this, we have to find a way—”
“What?”
she snarled. “What
is
all this ‘you and I’? ‘In this together.’ You’re insane! Richard was right. He always said you were an incubus.”
“I’m sure he did. Richard was always jealous of me—” I broke off, seeing Sheba’s eyes widen with outrage.
When she spoke again, her voice was low and menacing. “You have such delusions of grandeur, don’t you? It’s fascinating. You actually think you’re somebody. Listen. Let me tell you something. You’re
nothing
. A bitter old virgin from Eastbourne.
You aren’t fit to shine Richard’s shoes.
”
F
orty-eight hours have passed since Sheba uttered her last hateful words to me. I left the house soon afterwards, and when I returned, a few hours later, she had gone upstairs, taking the manuscript with her. She has been holed up in her bedroom ever since, refusing to come out, refusing to talk to me or to eat the food that I prepare for her. She emerges only to go to the toilet and to make snacks for herself when she knows I’ve gone to bed. I find her little messes in the kitchen in the morning. Late last night, I was awakened by the sound of her crying—howling, in fact. It went on for hours. I grew so alarmed at one point that I nearly called Richard. She stopped eventually, sometime around dawn, but my nerves this morning are absolutely shattered.
Luckily I have housework to keep me occupied. Eddie will be here in a few days, and I’ve been Hoovering and dusting and washing like a dervish to get the house shipshape in time. I’ve grown to rather love this house, I realise. The time we have spent here has been terribly sad, of course. But terribly intense too and even wonderful in its way. I keep staring at things, willing myself to remember them: the faded blue dressing gown that Sheba is always leaving draped across the sofa; the antique Moroccan tiles in the kitchen; the velvet-clad hangers
in the closets. Of course, memory is not really as obedient a faculty as that. You can’t consciously decide what is going to adhere. Certain things may strike you at the time as memorable, but memory only laughs at your presumption.
Oh, I’m never going to forget this
, you say to yourself when you visit the Sacré-Coeur at sunset. And years later, when you try to summon up an image of the Sacré-Coeur, it’s as cold and abstract as if you’d only ever seen it on a postcard. If anything unlocks the memory of this house for me, years from now, it will be something—some tiny, atmospheric fragment—of which I’m not even aware at the moment. I know this, and yet still I persist in making my little inventory, trying to nail down my recollections: the queer taste of the herbal toothpaste that Eddie’s wife uses; the long finger-shadows that the trees in the street cast on the living room floor in the afternoons; the steamy sweetness of the bathroom after Sheba has been in there.
Mrs. Taylor rang at 10:30, to announce that she is off in two weeks, to stay with friends in France. She’ll be gone for a month, perhaps more. Sheba’s infamy is taking a terrible toll on her, she said. She “can’t bear being in Britain another moment.” Seeing my opportunity, I leaped in. Would it be possible, I asked, for Sheba and me to stay at her place while she was gone? She
hated
that idea, you could tell. But she’d already admitted that the house was going to be empty, so it was hard for her to say no. She raised all sorts of objections, naturally. Surely there were other, more convenient places for us to stay? Surely Sheba wanted to be near Ben? Surely we wouldn’t be able to handle her temperamental boiler? But, in the end, she had to bite the bullet. As long as we have
absolutely no other alternative
, she is prepared to let us stay in her house for no longer than a month. I got off the phone awfully pleased with myself.
Since then, various hitches in my brilliant plan have occurred to me. For one thing, I’m not sure if the terms of Sheba’s bail will allow her to travel so far. And, even if they do, Sheba may refuse to let me go with her. I have been trying to prepare myself for this possibility, but the thought is intolerable. How will Sheba ever manage on her own? Who will do the shopping and cook her meals? Who will make sure she showers every day? I’m not sure I can bear it if I have to go back to being on my own again.