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Notes On A Scandal
Zoe Heller

Chris Wilkinson

Put the words 'sex' and 'child' in the same sentence, and you are likely to have even the most bleeding-hearted of liberals baying for blood. So when schoolteacher Sheba Hart embarks on an illicit affair with fifteen-year-old student Steven Connolly, it is only a matter of time before she is hauled before a frenzied media with an insatiable desire to be shocked.

Protecting Sheba from this tabloid hysteria is her friend and fellow teacher Barbara Covett. Unbeknownst to Sheba however, Barbara is recording all of these events in a journal, and it is through these notes that we learn of Sheba's plight.

In fact, this is a story as much about Barbara as it is about Sheba. Both women are united by their loneliness. Barbara - a spinster in late middle age - has spent her life on the defensive. A jaded teacher, she has long since abandoned what she sees as a naïve and idealistic belief that a teacher can change children's lives. Instead, school has become a daily battle against both the heaving, anarchic mass of adolescence that makes up the student body, and the petty politics of the staff room. She demonstrates a haughty disdain for those around her that borders on extreme arrogance. She can be very candid about her own failings, yet her character is a curious mix of acute self-awareness and extraordinary naivety when it comes to understanding how others perceive her.

By contrast Sheba appears to have it all. She is younger, more beautiful and of a higher social class than Barbara; and she has a husband and a family that provoke great jealousy in her friend. Yet Sheba can be staggeringly naïve. She has always infantilised herself: she married a much older man, and has never fully taken responsibility for her life. A stale marriage has left her aching desperately for the thrill of any male touch. With Connolly, she behaves like a love-struck teenager, as if she were no older than her boy lover. Her subsequent ostracism leaves her entirely dependent on Barbara.

Heller carefully explores the symbiotic relationship of the two women. Barbara provides the stabilising 'motherly' influence that Sheba craves, but also becomes fiercely protective of her own role in the relationship. She cultivates Sheba's dependence on her, and while she is not being consciously manipulative, it is as if she is seeking to control her friend, to possess her and find in her a partner that is so painfully lacking in her own life.

Heller's novel is highly readable, and provides for a compassionate but complex portrait of these two desperate women. She deals deftly with issues of class, desire, and social morality; and for this reason, she certainly deserves her place on the Booker shortlist.