New York-based British columnist and writer Zoe Heller’s second novel was published in the US as What was She Thinking? It appears that the Americans felt Notes on a Scandal would sound like a documentary about a sex scandal. The British felt that What Was She Thinking? would sound like chick-lit. And so the book had different titles on either side of the Atlantic. Both work. And, written in a bitter, obsessive prose far removed from Heller’s insouciant Telegraph columns, the book works. In fact, it works so well that at the end of it one is left with the devout hope that one will never meet a person like its narrator. Barbara Covett, a sixty-something spinster, teaches history at St George’s secondary in north London. Sheba Hart is the new pottery teacher. The daughter of a famous economist, she has had a privileged childhood and is now married to an academic. The painfully lonely, unlikable Barbara, whose dislike for her colleagues is rivalled only by her disdain for her students, has only her cat for company. Barbara watches with intense interest, stalking almost, as Sheba, 20 years younger, tries to settle into her teaching. Soon Barbara is playing the role of the comfortable older friend, visiting the family for dinner, listening to their quarrels, privy to their personal chaos. But it is, after all, a role. Theirs is a strange friendship, and we are never quite sure who is exploiting whom. Even as she copes with an unruly daughter, and a son with Down’s Syndrome, Sheba is getting involved with a 15-year-old student from a council estate. Barbara becomes her only confidante. But it turns out that Sheba has made a mistake in sharing her secret with Barbara, who had hoped to be Sheba’s closest and, indeed, her only friend. This is a story about the balance of power in relationships, about emotional neediness and exploitation, and about the class war that continues to rage in London. Heller first got the idea from the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal about a mother of two who had an affair with a 15 year old. Letourneau is now in prison. But rather than write a straightforward account of such a relationship, Heller chose to write in the very interested, voyeuristic and slightly crazy voice of an even older woman looking for a power equation of her own. Even as we wonder why on earth Sheba gets into this tailspin of a relationship, we are shown Barbara’s far more aberrant behaviour. Although Barbara is a history teacher, her telling of the entire affair is far from objective. Bizarrely, she draws a timeline of her story, and adds gold stars to highlight watersheds in her relationship with Sheba; and she is almost rubbing her hands in glee, witchlike, when the helpless and abandoned Sheba turns to her for help. But we cannot dismiss the old crab altogether: the paragraphs where Barbara describes her cat’s illness with terminal cancer are intensely moving. However unlovable Barbara herself may be, she cares for the dying animal, watching sadly as its face turns into ‘‘a Kabuki mask of despair’’. Darkly funny, Notes on a Scandal reminds one that things are never merely what they seem, and that the possibility of madness lies within each of us.
