It is a nice question as to when exactly Sheba became conscious of having amorous feelings for Connolly or, indeed, became conscious of his having amorous feelings for her. I have pressed her on many occasions for specificity on this issue, but her responses are maddeningly inconsistent. At times she will insist that she was guilty of nothing more than maternal fondness for Connolly and was utterly “ambushed” when he first kissed her. At other times she will coyly volunteer that she “fancied” him from the start. I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment. But it seems clear that, during these early days, Sheba was not very honest with herself about her feelings for the boy. The hairstroking episode is a case in point. On her way home that evening, she felt troubled, she says. Unsettled. She kept going over what had just happened in her studio and telling herself that there was nothing to fuss about. She had ruffled the boy’s hair, for goodness’ sake. Just as an auntie might. But why, then, she wondered, was she feeling so shifty? Why was it necessary to reassure herself? Things that are truly innocent don’t need to be labelled as such. If everything between her and the boy was
so simple and aboveboard, why had she never mentioned his visits to Sue? She was feeling guilty about it. She was!
Had Sheba pursued this interrogation of herself with any rigor, things might have turned out very differently. But almost as soon as the promising line of enquiry had been opened, she abruptly shut it down. She had not mentioned Connolly to Sue, she told herself, because Sue would have been bound to respond with unnecessary anxiety. She would have said that the after-school meetings were “inappropriate.” And Sheba absolutely knew that they weren’t. What did it matter what other people might think, as long as
she
knew that the thing was harmless? People were hypervigilant these days, because of child abuse. In the rush to guard against the sickos, the world had gone slightly mad. There were people who wouldn’t take pictures of their naked children anymore, for fear of being reported to the police by the man at the developer’s. Surely she wasn’t going to succumb to that sort of craziness and become her own tyrannous Neighbourhood Watch? She had ruffled his hair. His hair. She had only wanted to comfort the boy, she told herself. Perhaps she would have been less inclined to make the gesture with another, less appealing pupil. But what of that? She couldn’t expect herself to be oblivious of what the kids looked like and smelled like. She spent all day confronting their corporeal reality: inhaling their farts, gazing, with pity, upon their acne. Some of them were vile looking and some were attractive. What kind of saint wouldn’t notice the difference? Any pleasure she took in Steven’s physical self was no more or less suspect than the pleasure she had once taken in the plump, velvety bodies of her own babies. A sensuous pleasure certainly, but far from sensual.
One Friday afternoon, not long before the Christmas holidays, Connolly appeared at a Homework Club that Sheba was minding. The two had not encountered each other in a public setting since they had become friends, and Sheba felt somewhat uneasy. Connolly arrived late, in the company of a skinny, grinning boy called Jackie Kilbane. According to the notes that they handed in, they had been caught earlier in the week sharing a cigarette together in the school’s crumbling outdoor lavatories. They were now serving a fortnight’s worth of hour-long detentions. Sheba detected something sly and furtive in Connolly’s manner as he stood before her desk. When she smiled at him, he would not meet her eye.
As soon as he and the Kilbane boy had been registered, they retreated to the back of the room, where they began tipping back on their chairs and whispering. Sheba could not make out what they were saying, but she had an uncomfortable sense that it was obscene in nature and connected, in some way, to herself. The suspicion grew when Kilbane got up and approached her desk to ask for more paper. Kilbane is an unpleasant boy with an ugly, yellow face and an insolent, insinuating attitude. A thin line of fur skulks on his upper lip, like a baby caterpillar. He gave Sheba the creeps. As she burrowed in the desk drawer for paper, he seemed to be standing uncomfortably close to her chair, but only when she sat up did it dawn on her that he was attempting to look down her shirt. She handed him a sheet of paper and sharply ordered him back to his desk. “All right, all right,” he said mockingly, as he strolled away. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Sheba glanced at Connolly. He had been watching this exchange intently. As he met her eye, there was a hard, unfriendly look on his face.
Sheba felt betrayed. She had thought him special, and here he was exchanging spitballs, plotting with his horrid friend to get a peek at her chest. At the same time, she registered a definite twinge of—what was it? Excitement? Titillation? For a split second, she found herself imagining what it would be like to lie beneath him, to have his hands on her. She shook her head in fright. She ought not to have been so easy and sweet with him, she told herself. Now, she would have to draw back.
Towards the end of the first half hour, Kilbane and Connolly started play-fighting with one another—rolling around on the floor while the rest of the H.C. group screamed encouragement. Neither of them responded, she says, when she got up from her desk and stood over them, ordering them loudly to stop. Finally, she threatened to send for Mr. Mawson if they did not immediately desist and accompany her outside. This worked. The boys got up from the floor, still laughing, and trooped out into the corridor. But once Sheba had closed the classroom door and was facing the two of them, she was at a loss. Her one thought had been to remove them from their encouraging audience. Now that she had done so, she struggled to find her next gambit.
I happened to be walking through Middle Hall, on my way to a meeting with the head, when Sheba and the two boys emerged. I heard Sheba’s voice, shrill with admonition, before I saw her. And then, when I turned the corner, I spotted the little confrontational knot at the far end of the corridor. Sheba’s feet were planted firmly in the ten to two position, as if in preparation for a plié. Her hands were on her hips. She looked like the tarot card symbol for wrath. The boys, who were well versed in the postures of this teacher-pupil tableau, were slouching against a wall, their hands thrust deep into their pockets.
Given that I was already in danger of being late for Pabblem, and given that my relations with Sheba had reached such a difficult pass, I was tempted to ignore whatever contretemps she was having with the two boys and simply walk on. But as I drew nearer, I distinctly heard the taller boy call her a “silly cow.”
“What was that?” I said sharply. Whatever my personal feelings towards Sheba, I was obliged to address the boy’s incivility. It would have been a dereliction of duty to do otherwise.
The three of them looked around at me. Sheba had a slightly wild look in her eye and the telltale patch of scarlet on each cheek.
“Are these boys giving you trouble, Mrs. Hart?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so, Miss Covett,” Sheba said. There was a quaver in her voice. “They’ve been talking and generally creating a disturbance since the beginning of H.C. And now they’ve started fighting.”
Together, we studied the two boys. The taller one, Kilbane, had been in one of my bottom-stream history classes the year before. He was known to his classmates as Lurch. The one with the blond hair I did not know. He was not as confident as Kilbane and, when I asked him his name, he spoke it quietly to the floor.
“Excuse me?” I said. “Speak up, please.”
He raised his head. “Steven Connolly, Miss,” he said. His voice still had a trace of boy in it—a scraping clarinet tootle.
I went through the usual process with the boys—cold outrage, warm threats, admonitions to “shape up.” I suppose that I laid it on a bit thick for Sheba’s benefit. As I spoke, Connolly kept his eyes on the floor, occasionally lifting his head to glance stealthily at Sheba. “Look at me when I am speaking to you,” I told him.
Did I sense anything sexual in his attitude towards her then? Possibly. But dealings with male pupils of that age are rarely without some manner of sexual undertow. A secondary school is a kind of hormonal soup. All those bodies pressed in on one another—bubbling with puberty and low-level, adolescent fantasy—are bound to produce a certain
atmosphere.
Even I, a woman in my early sixties, and by common consent no oil painting, have been known to prick the testosteronal curiosity of my fifteen-year-old charges from time to time. It is something to which one becomes inured. Very rarely, sexual tension will be released in a small explosion of some sort—a groping, a threat. There was one occasion, back in 1982, when an absolutely evil little fellow in the third year named Mark Roth assaulted the young woman who was coming in at the time to give French conversation. (He was apparently on top of her when her screams alerted a staff member who happened to be walking by.) But that was a singular case. For the most part, the sexual angst of the school’s student population is nothing more than an indistinct background hum: so much white noise.
After I was done lecturing the boys, I accompanied them back into the classroom and watched them settle down to their assigned tasks. My handling of this episode had not been altogether tactful. School etiquette demands that, where one’s moral authority with the children is demonstrably greater than that of a fellow staff member, one should endeavour to play down the fact. Instead, I had gone out of my way to flaunt my superior disciplinary skills. I went over to Sheba, who was standing at the front of the room. “Don’t hesitate to call me if these two give you any further problems,” I told her. I assumed that she would be peevish. But as I walked away she came after me, with a wide smile on her narrow face. At the door she
leaned into me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Thank you son much for saving me, Barbara,” she whispered. I was too taken aback to say anything. In fact, it was not until I had walked out into the hall and closed the door behind me that I remembered some sort of response might have been expected.
I
was late for Pabblem, of course. When I walked into his office, he was kneeling on his special backless, ergonomic chair, emanating a prissy sort of dissatisfaction. “At last!” he cried when he saw me. He proceeded to wish me good afternoon with the rather too careful politeness of someone who has plans to be nasty. “Please …” He gestured to a chair (nonergonomic, standard issue) on the other side of his desk. I sat down. The school’s administration centre is housed in an ugly, L-shaped annex to the science block, and Pabblem’s office, which is at the very end of the annex, looks out onto a modest square of grass and flower beds known as the headmaster’s garden. That afternoon, Phelps, the school caretaker, and Jenkins, his depressed assistant, were in the garden installing a birdbath. I was able to track their comically incompetent manoeuvres over Pabblem’s shoulder as he spoke.
“Good week?” Pabblem asked.
I nodded. I wasn’t going to waste any energy being charming.
“Good, good,” he continued. “I see you have a cup of coffee already, so now … let’s get to it.”
Just a fortnight before, three other members of the history
staff had taken eighty fourth-years on a field trip to the cathedral at St. Albans as part of the term’s project on churches. While they were there, a group of about fifteen children had escaped their supervision and gone on a shoplifting rampage through the town centre. A few boys had been caught in the act and taken to the local police station, where charges were pressed. The following day, Pabblem had been inundated with complaints and threats from St. Albans shop owners, and later in the week the school had been informed by the St. Albans town council that it was banned from ever visiting St. Albans again. I had not been present on the outing but, as the most senior staff member on the history faculty, I had been charged by Pabblem with writing a report on the incident. My official brief had been to account for the “breach in discipline” and to offer suggestions for how such problems might be avoided in the future. My
real
task was to state for the record that no responsibility for this regrettable episode could possibly be attributed to Pabblem’s leadership. The finished report, which I had dropped off with Dierdre Rickman that morning, had omitted, somewhat ostentatiously, to perform either function.
“First of all,” Pabblem said, “I want to thank you for your hard work on this paper.” (Pabblem always calls the reports he commissions “papers,” as if life at St. George’s were a perpetual summit of international AIDS doctors.) “Whatever objections I am about to raise,” he went on, “I want you to know, they do not diminish my appreciation of your effort.” He paused here, to allow me to thank him for his Solomon-like fair-mindedness. When I remained silent, he gave a small, fake cough and continued. “I must be frank with you, Barbara. When I read your paper, I was a bit confused. Ultimately, I’m afraid, I was disappointed.”
There was a sudden loud buzzing in the room. Pabblem sighed as he leaned forward to press a button on his intercom. “Yes?”
“Colin Robinson’s on the line,” Dierdre Rickman’s voice announced.
“I can’t talk to him now,” Pabblem said irritably. “Tell him …” He ran his fingers through his thin, red hair. The harried chief executive. “No, wait. Put him on.”
He picked up the telephone and shrugged at me apologetically. “Colin? Hi!”
During the short conversation that ensued, Pabblem leaned his head to one side and clamped the phone between his shoulder and ear, freeing his hands to pat the tidy piles of documents on his desk into more perfect symmetry. I could feel goose bumps rising up on my arms as I watched his white hands make their prim, fussing gestures. I gazed out of the window. Phelps and Jenkins were still engaged in their mysterious charade with the birdbath. “Great, yes. That’d be t’rific …” Pabblem was saying. “Colin, you’re a star …”
When Pabblem first came to St. George’s, seven years ago, the school board hailed him as “the breath-of-fresh-air candidate.” The staff were thrilled. He was thirty-seven at the time—the youngest head the school had ever employed—and, unlike his predecessor, the melancholy Ralph Simpson, he was said to be “very big on communication.” In his former post as deputy head at a school in Stoke Newington, he had created a drama department and an award-winning “neighbourhood ecology project.”
Since that time, Pabblem has certainly fulfilled his promise as an innovator. Thanks to him, St. George’s now boasts a daily
salad alternative on the canteen menu and an annual magazine of creative writing called
The Shiner.
(The logo is a portrait of a little boy with a black eye.) There is also an annual “Day of Subversion”—a day on which all roles are reversed and the pupils get the chance to teach their teachers. (Pabblem joins in the fun by adopting the persona of “Lord of Misrule” and touring the classrooms wearing a jester’s cap.)
Yet, even among staff members who like this sort of thing, Pabblem is not a popular headmaster. Beneath his easygoing exterior, he has turned out to be a thoroughly pedantic man—a a petty-minded despot obsessed with staff punctuality charts and compulsory staff “bull sessions” and time-wasting, bureaucratic folderol in all its manifestations. At least once a term, Pabblem makes the entire staff attend a special lecture given by some sour-faced young person from the education authority. Because he is a progressive bully, the subjects are always things like Meeting the Challenge of Diversity, or Teaching the Differently Abled. Shortly before Sheba came to the school, he set up a system called Morale Watch, which requires all staff members to fill out a weekly report card on their mental and spiritual health. (Any admissions of dissatisfaction are rewarded with agonising follow-up interviews, so naturally everyone always fills in the cards with slavish avowals of personal joy.) The original Pabblem boosters try to save face by saying that power has transformed Pabblem. My own sense is that power has merely given opportunity to an unpleasant, Gauleiter tendency that was always there. Either way, no one says he is fresh air anymore.
When Pabblem had finished his phone conversation, he buzzed back through to Dierdre—“No more calls unless they’re
urgent.” Then he turned to me. “Okay!” He held up my report. “So, Barbara, I think I am right in saying that you were asked to write an analysis of how discipline broke down on the St. Albans trip and, if possible, to offer some suggestions for how we might improve our security procedures on future excursions of this sort.”
“Actually … ,” I began. Pabblem held up a palm, to silence me.
“But you didn’t … ,” I said.
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “Hang on, Barbara, let me finish. Whatever exact phrases I used, I think I made it pretty clear that I was looking for a practically oriented paper on school control issues. What you have handed in is, well … an attack on the St. George’s history syllabus.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘practically oriented’ … ,” I began.
Pabblem closed his eyes. “Barbara,” he said. “Please.”
Presently, he opened his eyes again. “I think you’ll agree, Barbara, I run a pretty relaxed ship here. I am very open to different approaches and ideas. But you know and I know that this report is not what I asked for. Is it?” He moistened his index finger on his tongue and began flicking through the pages of the report. “I mean,
really,
Barbara.”
I stared at him blankly. “I thought what I wrote was very much to the point,” I said.
He gazed, frowning, into the middle distance for a moment, and then he pushed the report across the desk to me. “Look at that,” he said. It was open to the last page, which was headed “Conclusion.”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I wrote it.”
“No, no, I want you to read it again. From my point of view.
I want you to consider whether this is the sort of thing that enhances my ability, as a headmaster, to respond to the St. Albans crisis.”
“I am prepared to believe that you didn’t find it helpful. I don’t need to read it again.”
“Barbara.” Pabblem leaned forward in his chair and smiled, tightly. “Please do as I ask.”
Odious little man! I crossed my legs and bent my head to read.
All the way down the margin of the page, Pabblem had printed triplets and sometimes quadruplets of miniature exclamation points and question marks. The final paragraph had so excited or enraged him that he had highlighted the entire thing with yellow fluorescent ink:
Gavin Breech, whom I regard as the ringleader of the shoplifting expedition, is a very nasty little fellow: angry, violent, and, I would hazard, a bit mad. I doubt that he is susceptible to any of the rehabilitation procedures provided by St. George’s. Our best bet, in my opinion, would be to expel him. I stress, however, that this course of action does not guarantee an end to such incidents. The periodic eruption of unruly, and even criminal behaviour in our student body would seem to be a fact of school life for the foreseeable future. Given the socioeconomic profile of our catchment area, only a fool would imagine otherwise.
“Well?” Pabblem said when I looked up. “Is that a helpful contribution?”
“I think it could be,” I said. “You asked me to offer suggestions, and I did. I wrote what I truly believe.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Pabblem banged his white fist on the desk.
There was a silence, during which he smoothed back a strand of hair that had fallen into his eye. “Look, Barbara,” he went on in a quieter voice. “By commissioning you to write this paper, I was giving you an opportunity to make your mark on things.” He smiled. “If attacked with the right kind of creative thinking, this is the kind of project that turns a teacher into deputy head material …”
“But I don’t want to be a deputy head,” I said.
“That aside,” he said, the smile vanishing from his face, “the sort of despair you preach here has no place at St. George’s. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to have another go at this.”
“So you’re censoring me.”
He laughed, mirthlessly. “Come on, Barbara, let’s not be childish. I’m giving you a chance to improve on your first effort.” He got up from his chair and walked to the door. “The holidays are coming up. That should give you a good chunk of time to think about this. If you could have a new draft back to me at the start of next term, that’ll be fine,” he said.
“If you don’t like what I have to say, why don’t you give it to someone else?” I asked.
He opened the door. “No, Barbara,” he said firmly. “I want you to do this. It’ll be a good learning experience for you.”
The following Monday, as I was being shown to a table at La Traviata, someone held out an arm like a tollgate to bar my way. It was Sheba, sitting in a booth with Sue. “Barbara!” she said. “I’ve been looking for you! I wanted to thank you again for helping me out on Friday.”
I shrugged. “You’re quite welcome.” Then I gestured to the waiter who was showing me to my table. “I should go.”
“Oh, but won’t you sit with us?” Sheba smiled at me brightly.
Sue, sitting opposite her, drummed her chubby fingers on the Formica table and frowned.
“Well … ,” I said.
“Oh, please do,” Sheba said. “We haven’t ordered yet.”
Clearly, she had not been informed about the cold war between Sue and me. This came as both a relief and a vague disappointment. Was it possible that I had never even come up in their conversations?
“Are you sure?” I said. “I don’t want to barge in on you …”
“Don’t be
silly,”
Sheba said.
“All right then.” I turned to the waiter. “I’ll sit here, thanks.”
“Smashing!” Sheba shifted over to make room for me on her side of the booth. Sue lit a cigarette. Her expression suggested the kind of deeply private, strictly incommunicable anguish of someone who has just slammed the car door on her thumb.
“Barbara was completely marvellous the other afternoon,” Sheba said, as we all examined the chalkboard menu on the wall above us. “I was on the verge of going loony with two of my H.C. boys. And she came along and saved the day.” She turned to me. “I hope I didn’t make you late for the head.”
I shook my head. “I wish you had. Our meeting certainly didn’t deserve promptness.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “It didn’t go well then?”
“He didn’t like the report he made me write about the St. Albans business,” I said.
“What did you write?” Sue asked.
I provided a precis. By the time I finished, Sheba was laughing. “Goodness, you
are
brave. Was he fearfully angry with you?”
“In his ineffectual, gingery way, yes.”
She laughed again. “He is a bit of an idiot, isn’t he? The other day, he cornered me in the headmaster’s garden and asked me for my opinion of his spring planting plans. I thought it sounded awfully gaudy—endless tulips, you know-but I’m afraid I wasn’t nearly as courageous as you. I said it all sounded
lovely.
He looked so pathetically pleased! It is maddening the way men do that—ask questions to which you are bound to reply with a lie.”