What Was She Thinking? by Zoë Heller Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

3
     
     
    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