Notes on a Scandal Book

When the new teacher first arrives Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba Hart is special and before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent of course but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out and Sheba's life falls apart Barbara is there... ; ; Extract from Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller ; ; The first time I ever saw Sheba was on a Monday morning early in the winter term of 1996. I was standing in the St George's car park getting books out of the back of my car when she came through the gates on a bicycle - an old-fashioned butcher-boy model with a basket in the front. Her hair was arranged in one of those artfully dishevelled up-dos: a lot of stray tendrils framing the jaw and something like a chopstick piercing a rough bun at the back. It was the sort of hairstyle that film actresses wear when they're playing sexy lady doctors. I can't recall exactly what she had on. Sheba's outfits tend to be very complicated - lots of floaty layers. I know she was wearing purple shoes. And there was definitely a long skirt involved because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger of becoming entangled in her spokes. When she dismounted - with a lithe rather irritating little skip - I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material. Fey was the word that swam into my mind. Fey person I thought. Then I locked my car and walked away. ; ; My formal introduction to Sheba took place later the same day when Ted Mawson the deputy head brought her into the staffroom at afternoon break for a 'meet and greet'. Afternoon break is not a good time to meet schoolteachers. If you were to plot a graph of a teacher's spirits throughout the school day afternoon break would be represented by the lowest valley. The air in the staffroom has a trapped stagnant quality. The chirpy claptrap of the early morning has died away and those staff members who are not milling about checking their timetables and so on sprawl in lugubrious silence. (To be fair the sprawling is as much a tribute to the shoddy construction of the staffroom's three elderly foam sofas as an expression of the teachers' low morale.) Some of the teachers stare slack-shouldered into space. Some of them read - the arts and media pages of the liberal newspapers mainly or paperback editions of the lower sort of fiction - the draw being not so much the content as the shield against having to converse with their colleagues. A great many chocolate bars and instant noodles in plastic pots are consumed. ; ; On the day of Sheba's arrival the staffroom was slightly more crowded than usual owing to the heating being on the blink in Old Hall. (In addition to its three modern structures - the gym the arts centre and the science block - the St George's site includes two rather decrepit red-brick buildings Old Hall and Middle Hall which date back to the school's original Victorian incarnation as an orphanage.) That afternoon several teachers who might otherwise have remained skulking in their Old Hall classrooms during break had been driven to seek refuge in the staffroom where the radiators were still operative. I was off in a far corner when Mawson ushered Sheba in so I was able to watch their slow progress around the room for several minutes before having to mould my face into the appropriate smile. ; ; Sheba's hair had become more chaotic since the morning. The loose tendrils had graduated to hanks and where it was meant to be smooth and pulled back tiny fuzzy sprigs had reared up creating a sort of corona around her scalp. She was a very thin

When the new teacher Sheba first arrives Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. Before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent of course but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide in.