Something in his voice made Sheba think that he was about to cry. She couldn’t be sure, because he had his head down. “Steven,” she said. “This isn’t …” She paused, uncertain of how to go on. “This just … it won’t do!” She straddled her bike, preparing to mount it.
“I can’t help it,” Connolly said, looking up. “I swear, I can’t help myself.”
Sheba had been right. There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, Steven,” she said. She was about to reach out her hand and pat his shoulder when his face suddenly came pressing in at hers.
Sheba says I couldn’t possibly understand what it feels like, after twenty years of faithful marriage, to be kissed by someone other than your husband; to feel the pressure of a stranger’s mouth on yours. “Things fall asleep in a marriage,” she told me once. “They have to. You have to lose that mad sexual alertness you had when you were out in the world on your own. All these years with Richard, I don’t think I’ve ever consciously suppressed anything. I’ve always been so
grateful
to be married—so relieved that I would never have to be naked in front of a stranger again. But I’d forgotten how exhilarating it is to expose yourself … to be a little scared. As soon as Steven kissed me, it all came back in an instant. The, you know,
high
of it. I was amazed at how I could have lived without that for so long.”
It must have been a pretty comic sight—the little suitor reaching on tippy-toe for his middle-aged mistress, the bike smashing to the ground. But the farcical element of their first embrace seems never to have occurred to Sheba. If it has, she has never mentioned it. She has spoken about the warmth of Connolly, the soap smell of him, the bristle at the back of his neck, the texture of his jumper, and any number of other tedious details connected with this first embrace. But never about how immensely
silly
the whole thing must have looked.
In the immediate aftermath of the bicycle’s collapse, there was confusion and speechless embarrassment. Connolly tried to help Sheba up, but she waved him away. She remembers looking around to see who might have witnessed their kiss. An elderly woman with a wicker shopping basket on wheels was staring at them rather malevolently as she hobbled by. But that was all.
“Can I see you properly?” Connolly asked, even as she was still righting herself.
“No,” Sheba said. She held her bike in front of her, defensively. “No. Look … Stop it now, please.” She got on her bike.
“Miss,” Connolly pleaded. But she only shook her head and rode away.
That night, as she was preparing the evening meal and giving Ben his bath, she kept up a low, terrified murmuring.
Oh no, oh no, oh no. What am I doing? What am I doing?
She was still trying to convince herself that she was blameless. She wanted to believe that she had done nothing wrong, that she had not yet gone beyond the pale. When she glimpsed herself in a mirror,
she was amazed to see how flushed and happy she looked. “Did you go for a run today?” her husband asked her at dinner that night. “You seem awfully rosy.”
It was somewhere around this time that a chemistry teacher called Heidi Greening mentioned to a few staff members that she had seen one of the fourth-year boys slipping into Sheba’s studio on several occasions at the end of the school day. Heidi was an unpopular woman, with a reputation for sucking up to Pabblem. No one was particularly interested in her information. Marian Simmons did mention something about it to Sheba, I believe, but Sheba responded with such innocent and goodnatured ease—made it so clear that there was nothing untoward in Connolly’s visits—that the matter was quickly forgotten.
I
’m writing this late on Saturday night. I ought to be in bed, but I haven’t been able to get any writing done all week and if I don’t put in a few good hours of work now, I’m going to get horribly behind in my schedule. I was planning to grab a few quiet hours this morning when Ben came to the house for his weekly visit. But Sheba got it into her head at the last minute to take him to the pictures and, since it was raining, I ended up being roped into driving them. We had a rather jolly time, actually. The film was some old Disney rot, but Ben loved it. And that made Sheba happy, which made me happy. Ben really is a dear little boy. Everybody has been very concerned about how he would deal with the current situation. But, touch wood, he seems to be coping amazingly well. He misses his mother, of course. He still doesn’t completely understand why she has gone to live in Uncle Eddie’s house, and there are often tearful scenes when Richard comes to pick him up. But, generally speaking, he’s a cheerful old sausage.
Sheba and Richard have always been keen not to baby Ben and, in the present instance, they have tried to be as honest and straightforward with him as possible. He hasn’t been told
everything.
But he’s been told a surprising amount. He knows that
his mummy is in trouble for being friends with one of her pupils. Today, in fact, he was asking Sheba some rather tricky questions about why he wasn’t allowed to meet her friend. Sheba, perhaps stretching the honesty policy too far, said that even
she
wasn’t allowed to see her friend anymore. “Oh,” Ben said. “Does that make you sad?” Yes, Sheba said. It did make her sad. There was a long, thoughtful pause. And then Ben said, “Do you like your friend more than Daddy?” Sheba hesitated for a moment, but in the end, to my relief, she said no.
After Ben had gone home, Sheba went into a bit of a decline. She often does after his visits. I tried to comfort her, but she quickly grew impatient with my efforts. “You don’t understand,” she said to me. “You don’t understand what it is to be a parent of a child like Ben. He has so much against him in life, as it is. And now he doesn’t even have his mother.”
It is irritating when Sheba talks this way—as if she were a passive victim of fate, rather than the principal architect of her own suffering. It’s a little late in the day for her to start acting the stricken mother. She ought to have been thinking of Ben’s welfare back when she was first batting her eyelids at Connolly. I resisted the impulse to say as much, however, and contented myself with urging her to get an early night.
The day after Connolly kissed Sheba for the first time, he came to her studio. As soon as he entered, she stood up from her desk and ordered him to leave. There was nothing more to say, she told him. She was flattered that he liked her, but she could have nothing more to do with him.
Connolly pleaded. At one point, she says, he asked her to meet him outside school. “I won’t lay a finger on you if you don’t want me to,” he promised.
Sheba bridled at this. “Of course I don’t want you to, Steven. For goodness’ sake.” She strode over to the doorway where Connolly was standing.
“Miss, please … ,” he whined.
“No,”
Sheba said and shut the door in his face. There was something thrilling about doing that, she recalls. She had never played the
belle dame sans merci
before.
For several minutes Connolly remained outside, knocking and begging to be let in. Sheba grew anxious that someone would walk by and see him. She was just about to give in and open the door when the knocking stopped. Through the window, she saw Connolly trudging away, hunched over against the wind. She sank down into a chair and congratulated herself on her fortitude.
Connolly returned the next day. Sheba had taken the precaution of locking the door, and she did not respond when he called out her name. “I’m going to keep coming back until you let me in,” he shouted before he retreated. And he did come back. He came every day that week. Sheba took to placing chairs against the door for added protection, but in truth there seemed little danger that Connolly would try to break in. He appeared quite content to stand outside bleating for her, and by the beginning of the next week his appetite for even this modest show of dedication had waned. On Monday, Sheba waited for the pleading at the door, but it never came. She was amused by the boy’s lack of endurance and, at the same time, slightly offended. Later, when they had become lovers, she would tease him about his poor performance as a suitor. “Oh yes, you were dying for love of me,” she would say. “Four whole days in a row.”
At first I think she was relieved to have got rid of Connolly.
She speaks of having been “elated”—of feeling as though she had stepped back at the last minute from a dangerous precipice. But as time went on and she grew used to being safe again, a certain listlessness seems to have set in. She had been at St. George’s for five months by this stage. To the rest of the staff, it looked as if she were finally getting into the swing of things. She was dressing more sensibly. She seemed to be much more effective in controlling the children. But Sheba was growing increasingly disconsolate.
She
did not feel that she had become a more competent teacher. On the contrary, she felt that she had surrendered to the “complacency” of the rest of the staff. Her classes had become more peaceful, it was true, but only because she had given up on trying to make the children learn. She had stopped fighting them. She let them wear their personal stereos and read comics in her classes. And if she was no longer even
attempting
to impart knowledge, what, she wondered, was the point? Connolly had been her one talisman against the drear of St. George’s. Now that she had sent him away, she wasn’t sure why she was bothering with the job at all.
One afternoon, three weeks or so after Connolly had stopped pursuing Sheba, she was walking through the playground when she came upon him and some other fourth-year boys playing soccer. He stopped running when he saw her. His face reddened and he turned away. Sheba walked on quickly, but she was much affected by this surprise encounter. Connolly had looked awful, she thought. Tormented. She wondered whether she had not treated him unfairly. What had he done, after all, but confess a schoolboy crush?
Over the following days, she began working out possible compromises on what she called “the Connolly situation.” She
would allow Connolly to visit her, on a strictly platonic basis, once a week. No, once a fortnight. Perhaps there would be no limit on the number of times he could visit her, but she would restrict their conversation to matters relating to art. Then one day—I’ve been unable to ascertain the exact date, but it seems to have been in early March—Connolly came to her again. She was just leaving her studio when he ran up to her and thrust a note into her gloved hand. Without uttering a word, he rushed away again. Inside the tightly folded square of paper, Sheba found a terse, handwritten plea to meet him on Hampstead Heath the following night at 7:00 P.M.
She studied the note for a long time. Despite its brevity, it had evidently cost Connolly much effort. He wrote in an agonised scrawl—upper and lower cases mixed together. In various places, he had torn the paper with the pressure of his pen. She found herself curiously agitated by his bad penmanship. How, she wondered, was he ever going to survive out in the world?
For the next twenty-four hours, Sheba debated whether or not to go to the heath. On the afternoon of the proposed meeting, she had made up her mind against. Clearly, the boy still had romantic designs on her. The only sensible thing, she told herself, was to stay away. But as soon as Richard arrived home that evening, she heard herself telling him that her old school friend Caitlin was up from Devon for the night and that she had made plans to see her. She felt she
had
to see Connolly, she says; she had to explain to him, in person, why their friendship could not continue. Readers will have to judge the credibility of this rationale for themselves. To me, it has always seemed a little suspect. Surely Sheba had provided the boy with enough explanation at this point? I am hard-pressed to believe that any
woman—even one with Sheba’s highly advanced capacity for self-deception—could have set off for such a meeting truly believing that her sole mission was to deliver a refusal.
She rode to the heath on her bicycle. The country was undergoing quite a cold snap that month, but she pedalled so furiously that, by the time she reached the park entrance, she was perspiring beneath her sweater. She chained her bike to the railings and walked up the path to the pond. It was a large place for such an assignation, and she felt sure that she and Connolly would miss each other. She remembers being struck by the depth of her own disappointment. Then, without warning, Connolly appeared before her. He seemed younger and smaller than usual that evening, she says. As always, he was insufficiently dressed for the weather. He expressed surprise that she had turned up. He had been sure, he said, that she would “chicken out.” Sheba explained gravely that she was there only because she had been worried by the tone of his note. There was no hope of anything happening between the two of them, she said.
Connolly responded to this with unexpected equanimity. He nodded, understandingly, and suggested that they walk together for a bit. Sheba refused. That wouldn’t be a good idea, she said. Then a man with a dog appeared on the path and glanced at the two of them curiously. Sheba changed her mind. There was no harm in a stroll, she thought. Connolly was behaving so sensibly, it was bound to be all right.
As they set off up the path, Connolly promised not to “try anything on.”
“I should hope not!” Sheba said, amused by his presumption.
But even as she said it, it occurred to her that perhaps he
would
try something on. Perhaps, she thought, he had plans to rape her. She kept walking anyway. She had begun to feel
strangely detached from the proceedings. “I was sort of watching myself,” she recalls. “Smiling at what a silly I was being. It was as if I had become my own rather heartless biographer.”
As they approached an area of the heath that was more densely wooded, Connolly turned to her, clasped her hands in his, and began walking backwards, into the trees, pulling her along with him. “Come on. In here,” he said.
“What are you doing?” Sheba asked. There was indignation in her voice, but she allowed herself to be pulled. It was much darker than it had been on the path, and she could barely see Connolly’s face. A fairy-tale image came to her of a goblin dragging a princess back to his forest lair.
They continued to walk for another minute or so, and then, just as Sheba was about to protest again, Connolly stopped and released her from his grip. They were standing in a little clearing. He grinned at her. “We can be private here,” he said. He sat down on the ground and took off his jacket. “Look,” he said, spreading it out next to him, “you can sit on this.”
“You’ll freeze,” Sheba objected. But Connolly didn’t reply; he just sat, looking at her.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “I’m not going to sit down. It’s just not on.” Connolly made a suit-yourself gesture and lay back on the ground. “Come on, Steven, you’re going to catch pneumonia like that,” Sheba said.
He was silent. His eyes were shut. She looked down at him, feeling sillier and sillier. After a while, he opened his eyes. “Fuck, it is cold, isn’t it?” he said. This made her laugh.
“I’m afraid I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I’m going to go back now.”
“No you’re not.” Connolly sat up. There was a twig in his hair.
She remembers smiling at him, knocking her arms against her sides like a little girl. Finally, with a hopeless shrug, she sat down.
They did not have sex on this occasion. It was far too cold, according to Sheba, and she was far too anxious. I know that they kissed. And Connolly must have lain on top of her at some point because, in speaking of this encounter, Sheba has mentioned having been astonished by how “light and narrow” he was. (She was accustomed, no doubt, to her husband’s more substantial girth.) I also know that at a certain point in the proceedings Sheba asked something woe-struck and rhetorical along the lines of “What are we doing?” To which Connolly responded with a terse reassurance in the vein of “Don’t worry about it.” Sheba remembers thinking at the time that he sounded terribly grown-up and capable. She knew he was neither, of course. But she seems to have taken comfort in the illusion.
Going home that night, Sheba was convinced that she would not be able to face Richard without presenting some physical manifestation of her sin. She pictured herself dissolving in tears. Fainting. Spontaneously combusting. But when she arrived at her house, she surprised herself with how expertly she dissembled.
Richard had waited up for her. He was lying on the sofa, watching
Arts Tonight.
He held up his hand in greeting when she entered the living room but continued squinting at the television. I’ve seen Richard watching television once or twice. He has a particular way of turning his head away from the screen and peering at it, sidelong. Sheba says that this has something to do with his bad eyesight. But to me it’s always seemed a
fitting manifestation of Richard’s generally superior attitude: it is as if he is trying, in his pompous way, not to let the telly know that he’s interested.