What Was She Thinking? Read Online Free PDF

between two third-year girls, one of whom was accusing the other of putting chewing gum in her hair. For the next three quarters of an hour or so, Sheba’s attention was taken up with keeping the girls physically apart from one another. It was not until she sent one of the girls to the head of the third year that things settled down and she had an opportunity to notice the other children in the room. There were now three girls and six boys present, all of whom, according to the teachers’ notes that they had brought with them, were attending H.C. as punishment. They returned Sheba’s gaze with reflexive surliness. Only one boy, at the very back of the room, sat working quietly. Sheba remembers being touched by his childlike posture of concentration—the way his tongue was peeping out from his mouth and his left arm was curled protectively around his labours. This was Steven Connolly.
    A little while later, when she had issued the usual reminder about assigned tasks having to be completed by five o’clock, she got up and wandered over to where the boy was sitting. He winced slightly when he saw her approaching and drew himself
upright. “What?” he said. “I’m not doing nothing wrong.” From across the room, Sheba had assumed he was a second- or third-year pupil. But at close range he seemed older. His upper body had a solid, triangular look. His hands and forearms were unexpectedly large. She could see the beginnings of bristle on his chin.
    Sheba has always maintained that Connolly is a terrifically attractive boy and, to be fair to her, several female newspaper columnists have made observations to similar effect. (“Glowering and exotic” one woman in the Mail called him a few weeks back.) I don’t see it, I must confess. I have never been physically drawn to any of my pupils, of course, so I may not be the best person to assess the boy’s charms, but I rather think that if my tastes had run in that direction, I would have fixed upon someone a little prettier: a delicate-boned, downy-faced boy in the lower school perhaps. Connolly is not pretty in the slightest. He is a coarse-looking fellow, with lank hair the colour of pee and a loose, plump-lipped mouth. His nose, owing to a childhood accident (an ardent game of kiss-chase, an unanticipated pothole) is quite badly off-centre. His eyes are heavy-hooded and so downturned as to bring to mind a tragedy mask. Sheba insists that he has superb skin, and it is true, I suppose, that he has been spared the sort of suppurating carbuncles to which boys of his age are prone. But what she refers to as his olive complexion has always struck me as rather dingy. I can never lay eyes on the boy without wanting to give his face a good going-over with a hot flannel.
    On Connolly’s desk, Sheba saw a torn-out magazine advertisement for a sale at Harrods. It was illustrated with one of those highly stylised pen-and-ink sketches of a woman in a fur stole: all hourglass waist and scornful expression. Connolly was
copying the image into the back page of his maths workbook. Sheba assured him she had not come over to tell him off. She just wanted to see what he was up to. His sketch was good, she said. The embarrassment, or perhaps the pleasure, caused by this praise made him squirm. (Sheba remembers him twisting his head from side to side, “like a blind person.”) “But you know,” she went on, “you don’t have to copy things. Why don’t you draw something from life? Or even your imagination?” Connolly’s face, which had momentarily softened under flattery, closed up again. He shrugged irritably.
    Sheba struggled to correct herself. “No,” she said. “Because, I mean, I bet you could do really brilliant things. This is very, very good.” She began asking him a few questions about himself. What was his name? How old was he? She expressed some disappointment that he wasn’t in her pottery class. What option was he taking instead?
    Connolly looked stricken when she