Flighty, hippie-ish pottery teacher Sheba Hart and spinster English teacher Barbara Covett seem like an unlikely pair, probably because they are. Sheba is an upper-class woman married to an older man with whom she has two children, while Barbara has lived her whole life with only a cat for a companion. Sheba is open and intuitve and Barbara is an inflexible rule-follower. Their teaching styles too are quite different. Sheba struggles to maintain control over her students, let alone teach them anything, while Barbara’s classroom is a tight ship.
Odder still is the thing that has brought them so close: Sheba’s affair with a student. When Sheba asks Barbara for advice on handling a “crush” a student has developed on her, she neglects to mention that she’s already reciprocated his advance.
Notes On a Scandal is written in retrospect from Barbara’s perspective as she details the story of Sheba’s affair and her downfall. Barbara is a fascinating narrator, unreliable in the sense that she doesn’t seem to realize just what she’s revealing. Like so many crazy people, she thinks she’s the only sane person around. As she elucidates her campaign to get closer to Sheba and all the ways she’s inserted herself into her new friend’s life, the reader comes to understand that Barbara doesn’t get how strange her own behavior is.
Barbara is a fascinating character, though. She is stunningly perceptive about her own experience, writing frankly of the pain of the pain of loneliness and the limits of her personality. And yet there remains this huge blind spot when it comes to Sheba. It’s a bleak look at what we will do, and what we will believe, for the sake of the people we decide to become friends with.