“I said, you send your children to private schools, don’t you?” It sounded a good deal more hostile than I had intended. There was a silence. “Isn’t that right?” I added.
Bangs and Elaine and Michael looked at me, startled. Then all three of them smirked. At this stage, everyone on staff knew about Sheba’s two children attending private schools—the French teacher Linda Preel had got it out of her early on in the term—but no one had yet confronted her on the issue. They were all too sissy. Personally, I have no quarrel with private education. My first job in teaching was at a fee-paying school in Dumfries and, had it not been for certain personal difficulties that I experienced with staff members at that institution, I might well be teaching there still. For my simple-minded colleagues, however, private education is a sin, pure and simple. It’s up there with fur coats and fox hunting, on their all-time top ten list of Things They Reelly Reelly Disapprove Of.
Sheba turned to me with a slightly puzzled look on her face. “Yes,” she said. “My daughter is at boarding school, actually. She was at Maitland Park Comp for a bit, but she didn’t like it there much.”
“I see,” I said. “And your son? Has he also stated an objection to state school oiks?”
Sheba smiled evenly. “Well, Ben goes to a special place.”
“Ahhh!” I interrupted. “A
special
place.”
“Yes.” Sheba paused. “He has Down’s syndrome.”
Elaine’s and Michael’s expectant grins sagged. Bangs went puce.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, I …”
Sheba shook her head. “Please, don’t be.”
Elaine and Michael and Bangs had reorganised their expressions into maudlin frowns of sympathy. I wanted to slap them.
“No, sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean that I was sorry …”
“I know.” Sheba stopped me. “It’s just one of those bits of information to which there is no good response.”
There it was again—the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.
I would like to say that I was ashamed of myself. I am certainly ashamed now. But what I felt at the time was rage: the boiling rage of defeat. After this incident, I stopped trying to goad Sheba and stayed away from her. Sometimes, if we ran into each other in the school corridor, I would acknowledge her with the slightest inclination of my head. But more often I gazed stoically into the middle distance and hurried past.
T
he irony of my having agonised over Sheba’s friendship with Fatty Hodge, when all the time she was preparing to fornicate with a minor, does not escape me. It is sad and rather galling to reflect that I wasted all that time on the mystery of Sue’s allure while the much more lethal liaison was brewing away beneath my nose. I am not prepared, however, to say that my concerns were altogether misdirected. It seems to me that if Sheba had made a wiser choice of girlfriend—if she had chosen me over Sue from the start—it is quite possible that she might have avoided the Connolly imbroglio. I do not mean to exaggerate the beneficial effects of my friendship or, for that matter, the deleterious influence of Sue. I have always been careful to avoid simple, catchall explanations for what Sheba did, and it would certainly be foolish to off-load the responsibility for her actions onto anyone else. But if, at this very challenging period in her life, Sheba had been receiving the emotional support of a sensible adult, I do believe she would have been a good deal less tempted by whatever specious comforts Connolly had to offer. In fact, when I look back on this period, I am struck not by the inappropriateness of my anxieties concerning Sheba but, on the
contrary, by how accurately I had intuited her vulnerability. All the anguish I felt about her and Hodge—all the frustration I felt at being shut out of her life—is revealed, now, to have been very much
au point.
I alone, of all her friends and family and colleagues, it seems, had sensed her desperate need for guidance.
Right after half term, Connolly came to Sheba’s studio again. She was alone in the hut at the end of the school day, collecting up some animal figurines that her first-years had made, when he appeared. He had some pictures that he wanted to show her, he said. It had been raining on and off throughout the day. His hair was sticking close to his head, and there was a sweet smell of damp clothes about him. When he came closer, she caught a whiff of his breath, and that smelled sweet too--candied almost, Sheba thought. They sat down and looked at his sketches—all of which, in deference to her advice, he had drawn from life models. Then they examined some of the first-years’ pandas and lions, laughing together at the particularly clumsy ones. At a certain point, Sheba started trying to explain the principles of glazing. She was impressed by how attentively he listened. He seemed interested, she thought. Interested and eager to learn. This, she told herself, was what she had hoped teaching would be.
Shortly before Connolly left that afternoon, he looked up at a British Museum poster of an ancient Roman urn and remarked on how odd it was to think of an actual person—“a real bloke, thousands of years ago”—creating the artefact. Sheba glanced at him warily. Until now, none of the children had shown the slightest interest in her posters. Connolly’s comment was so much the sort of sentiment that she had wanted to inspire that she half-suspected him of mocking her. “It does your brain in, doesn’t it?” he added now, flicking at his fringe. His face
yielded no trace of satirical intent. “Yes,” she replied, eagerly. “Yes.
Exactly
. You’re right. It
does
do your brain in.”
He prepared to leave. Sheba told him to drop by with his sketches whenever he wanted. “Perhaps the next time you come,” she added, “we’ll have a go at making something with clay.” Connolly nodded but made no other response, and Sheba feared that she had overstepped the mark. When Connolly didn’t show up on the following Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, she took it as confirmation that she had.
The next Friday, though, just as Sheba was loading the kiln, Connolly reappeared. He had been unable to come earlier in the week, he explained, because he had been tied up with detentions. Sheba, determined not to be overbearing this time, shrugged and said she was glad to see him. He had brought more of his sketches, and they sat for a long time examining his work before chatting more generally about school and other matters. He stayed with her for almost two hours. Towards the end of his visit, Sheba was discussing the science of kiln temperatures when he interrupted her to comment on how nicely she spoke. She didn’t need to be a teacher, he told her earnestly. She could get a job “doing the weather on the telly, or something.” Sheba smiled, amused by his gaucheness. She would keep the career tip in mind, she told him.
When he returned the next week, he did not bring his sketch pad. He hadn’t got round to any drawing that week, he said. He had just dropped in for a chat. Sheba, who was pleased that he no longer needed the pretext of seeking her artistic advice in order to visit her, welcomed him warmly. There was a book of Degas reproductions lying on her desk—she had brought it in hoping to charm her second-year girls with ballerinas—and, when Connolly picked it up, she encouraged him to look inside.
He began leafing through the book, stopping every now and then to let Sheba paraphrase the commentary on a particular painting or sculpture. She was very pleased with his response to a painting entitled
Sulking.
Reading from the book, she informed him that the relationship between the man and the woman in the picture was mysterious and that nobody knew for sure which one of them was meant to be the sulker.
After looking at the picture again, Connolly declared that there was no mystery—the man was clearly the sulking party. The woman was bending towards him, trying to get something from him, and his hunched, irascible posture indicated his displeasure. Sheba was impressed by this analysis, and she congratulated Connolly on being an acute observer of body language. After he had gone, she found herself chuckling aloud. Connolly’s special needs teacher would have been very shocked, she thought, if he could have seen his learning-disabled pupil chattering so enthusiastically about Degas!
As time went on and Connolly’s visits became routine, he was emboldened to volunteer more of his insights about art and his ideas about the world. Sometimes, when he and Sheba were talking or looking at pictures, he would get up suddenly and go to the studio window to comment on the shapes of the clouds, or the purplish colour of the early evening sky. Once, in what was surely a rather desperate moment, he even stroked the nubby mustard material of the studio curtains and pronounced it “an interesting fabric.”
It is pretty clear to me that there was a strong element of calculation in these little bursts of wistfulness and wonderment. By which I do not mean to imply that the boy was cynical exactly. Simply anxious to please. He had observed that Sheba
liked him best when he was saying sensitive things about paintings and so on, and he was beefing up his moony ponderings accordingly. If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical. Connolly was doing as all people do in such situations—tricking out his stall with an eye to what would best please his customer.
For a long time, though, Sheba didn’t see any of this. It did not occur to her that Connolly’s schoolboy profundities, or his “passion” for the kiln, were anything other than heartfelt. And when, at last, it did occur to her, she seems to have been touched rather than disillusioned. To this day, she furiously defends Connolly’s “brilliance” and “imagination.” If he did affect interests that weren’t his, she says, the pretence demonstrated “a very sophisticated social adaptiveness” on his part. The school is embarrassed by the idea that Connolly might be clever, she claims, “because they’ve always written him off as dim.”
The school has never written Connolly off as dim, of course. The fact that he has been identified as a special needs pupil—that he receives help for his dyslexia—indicates quite the contrary. No one on the staff has ever been quite as excited about his intellectual capacities as Sheba, it is true. But, then, the plain fact is that Connolly is
not
a very exciting boy. He is a perfectly average boy in possession of a perfectly average intelligence.
Why, then, was Sheba moved to such an extravagant estimation of his virtues? Why did she insist on seeing him as her little Helen Keller in a sea of Yahoos? The papers will tell you that Sheba’s judgement was clouded by desire: she was attracted to Connolly and, in order to explain that attraction, she convinced herself that he was some kind of a genius. This is reasonable
enough. But it is not the whole story, I think. To completely understand Sheba’s response to Connolly, you would also have to take into account her very limited knowledge—and low expectations—of people of his social class. Until she met Connolly, Sheba had never had any intimate contact with a bona fide member of the British proletariat. Her acquaintance with that stratum did not—and still doesn’t—extend much beyond what she has gleaned from the grittier soap operas and the various women who have cleaned her house over the years.
Naturally, she would deny this. Like so many members of London’s haute bourgeoisie, Sheba is deeply attached to a mythology of herself as street-smart. She always howls when I refer to her as upper class. (She’s middle she insists; at the very most, upper-middle.) She loves to come shopping with me in the Queenstown street market or the Shop-A-Lot next to the Chalk Farm council estates. It flatters her image of herself as a denizen of the urban jungle to stand cheek by jowl in checkout queues with teenage mothers buying quick-cook macaroni in the shape of Teletubbies for their children. But you can be quite sure that if any of those prematurely craggy-faced girls were ever to address her directly, she would be frightened out of her wits. Though she cannot say it, or even acknowledge it to herself, she thinks of the working class as a mysterious and homogeneous entity: a tempery, florid-faced people addled by food additives and alcohol.
Little wonder that Connolly seemed so fascinatingly anomalous to her. Here, in the midst of all the hostile North London yobs, she had found a young man who actually sought out her company, who listened, openmouthed, when she lectured him on Great Artists. Who proffered whimsical aperçus about the curtains. Poor old Sheba regarded Connolly with much the
same amazement and delight as you or I would a monkey who strolled out of the rain forest and asked for a gin and tonic.
Connolly understood all this, I think. I don’t mean that he would have been able to articulate, or even to consciously formulate, the role that class played in his relationship with Sheba. But that he sensed the anthropological dimension of Sheba’s interest in him and played up to it, I have no doubt. When describing his family and home to Sheba, he seems to have been at pains to leave her naïve notions of prole mores intact. He told her about his family’s holiday caravan in Maldon, Essex, about his mother’s part-time job as a dinner lady and his father’s job as a taxi driver—but he omitted to mention that his mother held a college diploma or that his father was a history buff with a special interest in the American Civil War. These facts, now that they have emerged in the papers, are so astounding to Sheba—so at odds with the cartoon thugs she had been encouraged to envisage—that she chooses either to ignore them or to dismiss them as lies. In a recent newspaper interview, Connolly’s mother mentioned that, when her children were young, she and her husband often played them recordings of
Swan Lake
and
Peter and the Wolf
. Sheba threw the paper down when she got to this bit. Mrs. Connolly was lying, she said—trying to make her son’s home life seem more wholesome and happy than it was. “Steven’s father hits him, you know,” she shouted at me. “He beats him. She doesn’t mention that, does she?”
This accusation is based on something that Connolly told Sheba once, at the beginning of their relationship. Sheba has spoken of this conversation often because Connolly’s claim about his father’s violence—true or not—prompted her first gesture of intimacy towards the boy. It was at the end of winter
term. Connolly had come to see her in the studio, and the two of them were looking out of the window at the darkening playground, discussing the possibility that it might snow. Connolly mentioned that snow always put his father in a bad mood. When Mr. Connolly “had the hump,” he added, he often hit him. Sheba was not particularly surprised by this admission. She had watched several made-for-television dramas about domestic violence and considered herself well-acquainted with council-house brutality. She murmured something consoling to Connolly. And then she reached out and rubbed his head. When her fingers came away, strands of his hair rose up with them in an electric spray. Sheba laughed and made a lighthearted comment about the static in the air that day. Connolly closed his eyes and smiled. “Do that again, Miss,” he said.
Prior to this incident, Sheba had occasionally wondered about the extent of Connolly’s sexual experience. Fourth-year males at St. George’s vary pretty widely in their level of sexual sophistication. Some are still at the stage of giggling about “the come tree” in the headmaster’s garden (a cyclamen so called because its scent bears an alleged resemblance to the smell of semen). Some brag about receiving “blow jobs” and “finger-fucking” girls. And then there are others who make convincing reference to their experience of sexual intercourse. Sheba had no way of knowing for sure where Connolly fit on this spectrum, but she had been inclined to place him at the innocent end of the scale. Not technically a virgin, perhaps, but still fundamentally inexperienced. Now, something about his smile—the confident way he commanded her to touch him again—made her revise her original estimation.
Sheba declined to repeat the gesture. It was time for her to go home, she told him. She put on her coat and the funny Peruvian
hat that she was wearing that winter. Then she locked up the studio, and the two of them walked through the playground to the car park together. Even though she told him not to bother, Connolly hung around while she undid the lock on her bicycle. When they got out on the street, they paused awkwardly, unsure of how to effect their farewells. Sheba resolved the matter by prodding Connolly abruptly in the ribs and jumping onto her bike. “Bye then!” she cried as she rode away. When she glanced behind her, she saw that he was lingering on the pavement where she had left him. She waved and, after a moment, he waved mournfully back.