The first time I ever saw Sheba was on a Monday morning, early in the winter term of 1996. I was standing in the St. George's car park, getting books out of the back of my car, when she came through the gates on a bicycle-an old-fashioned, butcher-boy model with a basket in the front. Her hair was arranged in one of those artfully dishevelled up-dos: a lot of stray tendrils framing the jaw, and something like a chopstick piercing a rough bun at the back. It was the sort of hairstyle that film actresses wear when they're playing sexy lady doctors. I can't recall exactly what she had on. Sheba's outfits tend to be very complicated-lots of floaty layers. I know she was wearing purple shoes. And there was definitely a long skirt involved, because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger of becoming entangled in her spokes. When she dismounted-with a lithe, rather irritating little skip-I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material. Fey was the word that swam into my mind. Fey person, I thought. Then I locked my car and walked away.

My formal introduction to Sheba took place later the same day when Ted Mawson, the deputy head, brought her into the staff room at afternoon break for a "meet and greet." Afternoon break isnot a good time to meet schoolteachers. If you were to plot a graph of a teacher's spirits throughout the school day, afternoon break would be represented by the lowest valley. The air in the staff room has a trapped, stagnant quality. The chirpy claptrap of the early morning has died away, and those staff members who are not milling about, checking their timetables and so on, sprawl in lugubrious silence. (To be fair, the sprawling is as much a tribute to the shoddy construction of the staff room's three elderly foam sofas as an expression of the teachers' low morale.) Some of the teachers stare, slack-shouldered, into space. Some of them read-the arts and media pages of the liberal newspapers mainly, or paperback editions of the lower sort of fiction-the draw being not so much the content as the shield against having to converse with their colleagues. A great many chocolate bars and instant noodles in plastic pots are consumed.

On the day of Sheba's arrival, the staff room was slightly more crowded than usual, owing to the heating being on the blink in Old Hall. (In addition to its three modern structures-the Gym, the Arts Centre, and the Science Block-the St. George's site includes two rather decrepit redbrick buildings, Old Hall and Middle Hall, which date back to the school's original, Victorian incarnation as an orphanage.) That afternoon, several teachers who might otherwise have remained skulking in their Old Hall classrooms during break had been driven to seek refuge in the staff room, where the radiators were still operative. I was off in a far corner when Mawson ushered Sheba in, so I was able to watch their slow progress around the room for several minutes before having to mould my face into the appropriate smile.

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