Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

Author:Zoë Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2011-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

9

Sheba is very morose this morning. She ate hardly anything at breakfast, and immediately afterwards she went off and secreted herself in the living room “to do some work.” She’s been complaining about missing her studio lately, so the other day I brought home an enormous sack of modelling clay for her. She was rather snooty about it at first, despite the fact that I’d nearly broken my back getting it in and out of the car. It isn’t the stuff she’s used to working with apparently. But she has started using it. When she left the living room this morning to go for a pee, I had a quick glance in there to see what it is she’s working on. It looked to be a model of a mother and child, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t have much of a chance to inspect it before Sheba came charging back from the loo and slammed the door in my face.

Sheba has often told me that she thinks there’s a rhythm to married life, an ebb and flow in the pleasure that a couple take in one another. The rhythm varies from couple to couple, she says. For some couples, the seesaw of affections takes place over a week. For others, the cycle is lunar. But all couples sense this about their life together—the way in which their interest in one another builds up and recedes. The happiest couples are the ones whose cycles interact in such a way that when one of them is feeling jaded, the other is ardent, and there is never a vacuum. Now that Sheba and I are living together, I wonder whether this theory might apply to us. If Sheba is being moody and difficult at the moment, perhaps that’s just because it’s her turn to be. Perhaps the shifts will change soon and it will be my time for some attention.

According to my notes, the next big gold-star event on Sheba’s time line occurs at the beginning of June. This was when Polly got thrown out of school. I was over at Sheba’s on the evening they got the news. We had just finished an nearly dinner, and Richard was trying to persuade Sheba that they should buy a warehouse he’d seen for sale in the East End.

“No!” Sheba protested in pretend horror. “Darling, we’ll end up in the poorhouse!”

“But it’s a marvellous investment, Sheba,” Richard said. “We could take out a second mortgage on this place to finance renovations and we’d end up with a beautiful loft for peanuts.”

Richard’s real estate ambitions were a frequent source of semijoking debate in the Hart household. Richard saw himself as a frustrated entrepreneur. He was always champing at the bit to get into the housing market—to buy low, sell high, make easy money. It maddened him that he and Sheba had sat on the sidelines throughout the real estate boom of the nineties. But the Highgate house, for which Sheba’s father had provided the down payment, represented their only equity, and Sheba adamantly refused to gamble with it.

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