Free What Was She Thinking? by Zoë Heller

wasn’t going to waste any energy being charming.
    “Good, good,” he continued. “I see you have a cup of coffee already, so now … let’s get to it.”
    Just a fortnight before, three other members of the history
staff had taken eighty fourth-years on a field trip to the cathedral at St. Albans as part of the term’s project on churches. While they were there, a group of about fifteen children had escaped their supervision and gone on a shoplifting rampage through the town centre. A few boys had been caught in the act and taken to the local police station, where charges were pressed. The following day, Pabblem had been inundated with complaints and threats from St. Albans shop owners, and later in the week the school had been informed by the St. Albans town council that it was banned from ever visiting St. Albans again. I had not been present on the outing but, as the most senior staff member on the history faculty, I had been charged by Pabblem with writing a report on the incident. My official brief had been to account for the “breach in discipline” and to offer suggestions for how such problems might be avoided in the future. My real task was to state for the record that no responsibility for this regrettable episode could possibly be attributed to Pabblem’s leadership. The finished report, which I had dropped off with Dierdre Rickman that morning, had omitted, somewhat ostentatiously, to perform either function.
    “First of all,” Pabblem said, “I want to thank you for your hard work on this paper.” (Pabblem always calls the reports he commissions “papers,” as if life at St. George’s were a perpetual summit of international AIDS doctors.) “Whatever objections I am about to raise,” he went on, “I want you to know, they do not diminish my appreciation of your effort.” He paused here, to allow me to thank him for his Solomon-like fair-mindedness. When I remained silent, he gave a small, fake cough and continued. “I must be frank with you, Barbara. When I read your paper, I was a bit confused. Ultimately, I’m afraid, I was disappointed.”
    There was a sudden loud buzzing in the room. Pabblem sighed as he leaned forward to press a button on his intercom. “Yes?”
    “Colin Robinson’s on the line,” Dierdre Rickman’s voice announced.
    “I can’t talk to him now,” Pabblem said irritably. “Tell him …” He ran his fingers through his thin, red hair. The harried chief executive. “No, wait. Put him on.”
    He picked up the telephone and shrugged at me apologetically. “Colin? Hi!”
    During the short conversation that ensued, Pabblem leaned his head to one side and clamped the phone between his shoulder and ear, freeing his hands to pat the tidy piles of documents on his desk into more perfect symmetry. I could feel goose bumps rising up on my arms as I watched his white hands make their prim, fussing gestures. I gazed out of the window. Phelps and Jenkins were still engaged in their mysterious charade with the birdbath. “Great, yes. That’d be t’rific …” Pabblem was saying. “Colin, you’re a star …”
    When Pabblem first came to St. George’s, seven years ago, the school board hailed him as “the breath-of-fresh-air candidate.” The staff were thrilled. He was thirty-seven at the time—the youngest head the school had ever employed—and, unlike his predecessor, the melancholy Ralph Simpson, he was said to be “very big on communication.” In his former post as deputy head at a school in Stoke Newington, he had created a drama department and an award-winning “neighbourhood ecology project.”
    Since that time, Pabblem has certainly fulfilled his promise as an innovator. Thanks to him, St. George’s now boasts a daily
salad alternative on the canteen menu and an annual magazine of creative writing called The Shiner. (The logo is a portrait of a little boy with a black eye.) There is also an annual “Day of Subversion”—a day on which all roles are