What Was She Thinking? (13 page)

Authors: Zoë Heller

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: What Was She Thinking?

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I
t’s Saturday morning, and I have the house to myself. If I’m disciplined and don’t go out to buy the papers, I should be able to put in a good three or four hours on the book before Sheba comes back. Today is her day for seeing Ben. For the last couple of weeks, Richard has insisted that she conduct her visitations, as he calls them, at the Hampstead home of the Beckwiths—old friends of Sheba’s parents. The official reason for this arrangement is that it’s more convenient for Richard to drop Ben off there, but the real reason, I suspect, is that it spares Richard unpleasant confrontations with Sheba. He always makes sure to be long gone from the Beckwiths’ by the time that Sheba arrives.

Now, to work. I should have started long ago, but I had to call Sheba’s mother to ask for money, and that little chore ended up taking forty-five minutes. Since Sheba stopped living with Richard and stopped working, the monthly sum she receives from the Taylor family trust has become her sole source of income. It’s a pittance: barely enough to cover the grocery bill, let alone extras. Sheba badly needs a new pair of shoes at the moment. And, sooner or later, she’s also going to have to buy
some clothes for court. She can hardly be wafting in before a magistrate in one of her transparent, hippie getups.

But Mrs. Taylor isn’t too bothered about any of this. When I had finished explaining the reason for my call, she gave a nasty laugh. “Does Sheba know you’re calling me?” she asked. “Because she’ll tell you, dear, I’m not in the habit of subsidising her wardrobe.”

“Look,” I replied, “Sheba is walking around with holes in her shoes. It’s not as if I’m asking for frivolities. You’re
still
her mother, you know.”

“Oh,” she said, tittering. “Thank you for reminding me. So, let me get this straight. You’re handling Sheba’s budget, now? That’s handy. Will you be wanting me to buy
you
a new pair of shoes also?”

“Mrs. Taylor,” I said, “I am perfectly capable of supporting myself, thank you very much. I have worked for thirty-five years as a teacher, and I can assure you that my retirement pension, while by no means generous, is perfectly adequate for my needs.”

That shut her up a bit. After a lot of hemming and hawing, she said she’d put a cheque in the post next week.

It’s hard to believe that it’s come to this. Sheba going about like a bag lady, her mother and Richard treating her like Typhoid Mary. Back when I was first getting to know her, Sheba seemed to me invincibly happy, a modern wonder of contentment. Her life with Richard—the dinner parties, the French holidays, the house buzzing with colleagues and children and ex-wives and family friends—was the stuff of newspaper Living sections. There was always a noisy group excursion in the offing: a picnic in Regent’s Park, a walk through Highgate Cemetery, a trip to the Bethnal Green Children’s Museum. It was rare for me to see Sheba alone. Once, when Richard took Ben to the swimming
baths for the afternoon, Sheba and I went to a Dürer exhibition together. And another time she drew my portrait in the studio while Ben and Richard were playing Monopoly upstairs. (Radio 4 was on, I remember, and Sheba told me, as she stared frowningly over the easel, that I had “tremendous bones.”) Most of the time, though, I was obliged to share her.

Early on in our friendship, I remember, she invited me to Ben’s twelfth birthday party. I went, anticipating something along the lines of the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey affairs of my youth, but when I got there the front door was wide open and the house was filled with parents reclining on sofas, drinking wine, and listening to Richard’s jazz records. “Oh, helleh,” they drawled when I wandered in. A small crowd had gathered around the kitchen door and, when I looked in, I saw Richard laid out on the kitchen table. Sheba was standing over him, dressed in surgical scrubs and mask. She was “operating” on him for the entertainment of the ten excited little boys and girls sitting in front of her. “Now,” she was saying in a heavy German accent, “vee hev extracted ze eyeballs! I shall allow each of you a short time to examine zem. Please to pass zem on to your neighbour promptly ven you hev finished.” The children wriggled and squealed as two large, peeled grapes were passed among them. “I do hope you hev all vashed your hends,” Sheba said. “Oh, you heven’t? Ah vell, not to mind … . Oh my! Look, my assistant Dr. Barbara Babinski has arrived. Come along now, Barbara, I need you to help me pull zis liver out.”

It was intoxicating to be included in this raucous domesticity. Not perfect happiness. Perfect happiness would have been something else. But still, such fun! Jennifer once told me about a Hindu temple in a remote part of southern India that she had visited in her student days. It had seemed fantastic to her—
impossible—that such exotic scenes of worship took place on the same planet as her own prosaic life in Barnstable. Back in England, whenever she thought of the sari-clad women dipping themselves in the murky temple pool and lighting incense for Ganesh, she was half persuaded that she had made them up. That was how I felt about Sheba’s household. When I walked to my car at the end of an evening spent there, I would have to fight the childish instinct to whirl around and check that the house was still standing—that it hadn’t disappeared into the ether, like some fairy illusion. Later, as I lay in bed, I would try to imagine the Harts settling down for the night: each family member journeying to and from the bathroom—the swosh of toothbrushes, the shouts up and down the staircase, the yelps of laughter, and then the noise slowly dying out until the only sounds in the house were the murmur of bedsheets and the
flup flup
of book pages being turned. Sooner or later, I always grew incredulous. This was all make-believe, wasn’t it? Surely the family ceased to exist when I wasn’t there?

I would have bet everything I owned that Sheba was faithful to Richard. The marriage was not perfect by any means. Richard condescended to Sheba, as he condescended to everybody. And whenever he got a little tired, or felt the spotlight shift momentarily from himself, or had one of his opinions challenged too vigorously, he tended to lapse into petulant babyishness. (He was like the king in the A. A. Milne rhyme: not a fussy man, but he
did
like a little bit of butter on his bread.) Sheba was too observant not to see these failings. But for her Richard’s pettiness and vanity were necessary components of his intelligence—the fault lines in his character that gave him pathos and made him “human.” She had grown up with Ronald Taylor for a father. The rules for being a handmaiden to a great,
pompous man were more or less instinctive to her. It seemed genuinely to pain her when Richard’s behaviour inspired hostile reactions in others.

Once, after a dinner at which he had been particularly obnoxious and garrulous, she took me aside in the kitchen. “Oh, please don’t hate him, Barbara!” she whispered. She was slightly drunk.

“I don’t hate him,” I said.

“I
know
he can be a bore,” she went on, “but underneath, he’s so sweet. He’s had a very tough life. Did you know that, without his glasses, he’s legally blind? His mother was an awful woman, and she never got him the glasses he needed when he was little and when the hospital gave him a patch for his left eye, she didn’t make him wear it … . Oh, it’s not funny!”

I had been smiling at the thought of Richard’s self-pitying diatribes against his mother.

“I don’t think it’s funny,” I said.

“No, well you shouldn’t,” Sheba said.
“Please
forgive him when he behaves like a buffoon. He’s very dear, really.”

Once or twice, I recall her saying something a little wistful about having got married so early. But she was always careful not to blame Richard. If she had missed out on opportunities, it was nobody’s fault but her own, she insisted. Richard was the reason their marriage worked so well, she said. He had made her “a much nicer person.” He had helped her “grow up.” “Richard’s been through it once before,” she told me, “so he’s much wiser about married life than I am.”

Once, I suggested to her that she ought to turn her pottery into a proper commercial enterprise. “You could sell your stuff to department stores,” I told her. “It’d go for a bomb.”

“No, no,” she said, waving the suggestion away, “if I’d been
going to do something like that—start my own business—I should have started earlier.”

“Well it’s not too late,” I argued. “You’re hardly an old lady, you know.”

She shook her head. “No, I know I’m not old. But it is too late. It always was. A few years back, I became terribly righteous and angry about everything I thought I’d sacrificed for my family. I had this idea that if only I hadn’t met Richard and buried myself in marriage so young, I would have done brilliant things, made great sculpture, travelled the world, or whatever. One night I even told Richard that he had ‘deadened my imagination.’ God! And eventually, Richard got so bored with my complaining that he renovated the basement and turned it into a studio for me. He worked out a new timetable with the baby-sitter and everything, just so that I could have three afternoons a week without Ben. He took a lot of trouble and it cost a lot of money, which we couldn’t afford … . And you know what? After all that, I
still
didn’t do anything really. I mean, I made some very pretty plates. I even made a few sculptures. But they weren’t any good. Mostly, I watched daytime soap opera and took naps.” She laughed. “It turns out that Richard and the kids hadn’t been stopping me from doing anything. Quite the reverse. Marriage for me has been a wonderful cover-up for my fundamental lack of drive.”

“You’re terribly hard on yourself,” I said. “You don’t know how things would have turned out if you hadn’t married. The fact is, you
did
miss out on your youth.”

Sheba shook her head again. “No, no, no. If anything, I think I’ve artificially prolonged my youth by being with Richard. I’ve been allowed to stay a child, don’t you see? All my adult life,
I’ve been the younger person, the baby in the group. Our friends, our social life has been with Richard’s generation and not mine. I got old without knowing it, still imagining myself Daddy’s best girl. A few years ago, I suddenly looked around and realised that all those people I was mentally dismissing as older people—Richard people—were in fact my age. Younger, in a lot of cases. Richard had been protecting me from confronting my own middle age.”

And when she said this—when she said all the other nice, loving things about Richard and her family and her charming, sun-dappled life in Highgate—she and the boy were carrying on together. It’s dumbfounding. After that first conversation in her basement, Connolly’s name came up again only once. I asked if she had sorted out her problem with him, and she told me cheerfully that she had done as I had advised. She had “nipped the thing in the bud,” she said. In retrospect, it seems silly of me to have accepted this account so readily. Why did I never bother to ask
how
she had got rid of him? But Connolly was a very peripheral figure in my consciousness back then. If I thought about him at all, it was as an irrelevancy—a tiny mote that had swum mistakenly into Sheba’s charmed atmosphere and been duly expelled. Sheba never
behaved
like a woman who was having an affair. Perhaps she was sometimes a little giddier than the immediate circumstances would seem to warrant. But at the time I rather imagined—I dared, that is, to hope—that this high-spiritedness had something to do with
me.

Just after I wrote that last sentence, Sheba rang me from the Beckwiths’ shouting unintelligible things about Richard and asking me to come and help her. I tried for several minutes,
without success, to find out what was upsetting her. Then I gave up, got into the car, and drove over to Downshire Hill, where the Beckwiths live. When I arrived, Sheba was standing outside on the street, her face mottled by crying. Lila Beckwith was hovering next to her, looking embarrassed.

“He’s got, he’s got … some
woman
in there,” Sheba said, “and, and he says she has to come with us if I go out anywhere.”

“Sheba, it’s not as bad as all that,” Lila said.

“Ben says this?” I asked.

“No.”
Sheba shook her head in frustration. “Of course not.
Richard.”

“What woman? What do you mean?”

“She’s actually a nice girl … ,” Lila began.

“Megan somebody or other,” Sheba interrupted. “Some postgraduate of his. He says I have to have a chaperone if I take Ben out. It’s because last week I took him out for tea at the patisserie on the High Street and didn’t tell anyone where I was going. Lila and Hugh thought I’d run away with him.” She glanced at Lila reproachfully. Lila studied the pavement. “I’ve told Richard it’s ridiculous,” Sheba said, “but he won’t listen. He says I can either accept the chaperone or spend the day indoors with Ben.” She began to cry again.

“This is outrageous,” I said. “Come on, you and I are going back to sort this out.”

“Oh,” Lila said. “I don’t know, Barbara. He’s not in a good mood. Let’s not have a blow-up.”

Sheba looked at me uncertainly.

“Do you want to be escorted everywhere by this friend of Richard’s?” I asked.

“No.”

“Come on then.”

I took her hand and led her across the street, back up to the house. Lila loped along reluctantly behind us.