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else. If everybody was so reverent of the institution of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed? Perhaps, she said, the more plausible
explanation lay with the kind of man she had consorted with. Most of Richard’s friends were academic types, and they were all terrified at the thought of being considered sleazy. If they flirted, it was always an arch, joking sort of thing. Even when they told you that your dress was nice, they put it in quotation marks, to avoid any misunderstandings.
    There had been one fellow, several years before, a visiting professor of linguistics from Finland who accompanied her home from the opera one night after Richard had been forced to retire early with food poisoning. He had made a fairly unambiguous pass at her as she was getting out of the cab. But even that had come to nothing. Sheba said that she had sensed something resentful about him, as if he begrudged her for having the power to attract him. The moment she resisted—or hesitated, actually—he had become very nasty and rude. He had suspected all along that she was “a tease,” he told her. Only Connolly, who was either too young or too obtuse to appreciate the outrageousness of his ambition, had dared to reach out to her with any charm or persistence. He hadn’t been scared of her, or angry with her. He didn’t tie himself in rhetorical knots trying to be equal to her beauty. When he looked at her, it was as if he were gobbling her up, she said. “Like a peach.”
     
     
    Throughout the first half of winter term, I had been building up my confidence to tackle Sheba on the matter of class discipline. In the final week before the half-term holiday, I believe I might have done so. But on the Monday morning of that week, I became aware of a new development—one so unexpected and disappointing that it quite stopped me in my tracks.
    I was standing in my classroom during the second period, which I happened to have free that day, when through the
window I glimpsed Sheba walking across the playground from the science block towards Old Hall. She was with Sue Hodge, the head of music. Until this moment, I had been unaware that the women knew each other. But something in Sheba’s body language—a certain animation in her gestures—suggested to me now that they were on quite familiar terms. They were walking close to one another, so close that Sue’s overstuffed canvas handbag was bumping against Sheba’s skinny hip. Sheba didn’t seem to notice this. She was laughing at something that Sue was saying, throwing back her head so that I could see her long, white neck and the two dark pinholes of her nostrils. Sue was laughing too. She’s a big woman, and mirth tends to have a rather unseemly effect on her. Together, they made a sound raucous enough to penetrate the windows of my classroom. Ha ha ha. After a few moments, I grew fearful that they would catch me spying and I drew the curtains.
    I am not an alarmist by nature, and I was careful not to draw any dramatic conclusions from the scene I had witnessed. But on Thursday, I overheard Bob Baker the science teacher remark in a rather catty way to Antonia Robinson that Sheba appeared to have “chummed up” with Hodge. One recent afternoon, Bob said, Sue had put Sheba’s bike in the back of her car and given her a lift home.
    This was confirmation of my grimmest suspicions. Sheba had picked Sue Hodge to be her intimate. Sue Hodge! Had it emerged earlier in the term, I might have assumed that this liaison was a mistake: another one of those short-lived pacts dictated by exigency rather than true fellow feeling. But given how long Sheba had maintained a stately separateness from the rest of the staff, the friendship had to be acknowledged as a considered
and deliberate choice on her part. My initial shock swiftly gave way to indignation. For weeks Sheba had saved herself, fended off all advances, only to succumb to this ridiculous creature?
    I used to run into Sue Hodge