Friendship is supposed to be about sharing

gzlaser

TOO many beautiful sayings are about friendship.

Some say friendship is the most important ingredient in the recipe of life. Others find it more significant to life than love itself, because love risks changing into obsession, but friendship is never anything but sharing. British writer Zoe Heller's 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, however, presents a kind of friendship that is not quite that healthy.

The narrator of this disquieting novel is Barbara Covett, a history teacher in her 60s in a high school in north London. When Sheba Hart, a beautiful woman in her 40s joins the faculty to teach art, Barbara is drawn to her and goes to all lengths to reach out for friendship.

Barbara's effort pays off at last and the two become close. Sheba soon tells Barbara her secret that she's having an affair with one of her students. The illicit relationship soon comes out into the daylight. Sheba faces charges of child molestation and Barbara generously offers help and support. She takes Sheba in when she's driven out by her husband.

The newspapers are running sensational stories about Sheba's \"sexual deviance\", so Barbara decides to write her own version of \"notes on the scandal\" to defend her friend and set things right.

But this is not a moving story about \"a friend in need is a friend indeed\". Nor is it, as Barbara claims, a truthful account of what happens between Sheba and her student.

As Barbara's narrative unfolds, the book turns out to be about something more depressing than a middle-aged woman's infatuation with a teenage boy. Barbara's inner world slowly wells up in her writing and overwhelms the surface plot of sex with a minor that frames the book.

\"This is not a story about me,\" Barbara says. But of course it is, and this story can be summarized by a single word: \"loneliness\". Although she's been at the school for 20 years, Barbara hasn't made a single friend among her colleagues.

Underlining her detachment is a touch of narcissism – somehow she thinks she's above other people. But, behind the cool facade, Barbara is a single woman who lives with her cat and fights an endless battle against loneliness: \"You dole out little treats to yourself–slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, 'I cannot do this any more. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next 15 hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery'.\"

So, Barbara believes she's found a kindred spirit in Sheba: Both of them are misfits at the high school, with Sheba being singled out by her elegant beauty and her upper-middle class background.

Barbara's obsessive nature quietly seeps into her account of how she manages to win Sheba's friendship through well-devised gestures, conversations and patient plotting to destroy Sheba's friendship with another female colleague.

Barbara's life begins to revolve more and more around Sheba as the latter is drawn farther and farther away from her by a 15-year-old boy. Babara's jealousy eventually causes Sheba's downfall which, for Barbara, is bliss – she can now have Sheba completely to herself.

Notes on a Scandal is a great literary effort probing the inner world of a defective personality. It's now a major movie starring British actresses Judi Dench as Barbara and Cate Blanchett as Sheba, with a different yet equally unsettling ending.