It was at St George's, a little less than eighteen months ago, that I met Bathsheba Hart. Her name will probably be familiar to most of you by now. She is the forty-two-year-old pottery teacher recently charged with indecent assault on a minor, after being discovered having a sexual affair with one of her students - a boy who was fifteen years old when the affair began. This is a strange novel, because it isn't really about what it first appears to be about. The narrator, Barbara Covett, is a lonely history teacher who lives with her cat. She tells the story of a fellow teacher, the beautiful Sheba, who is attacked by the media after having an affair with one of her students, the 15-year-old Steven. But the book isn't really about Sheba's forbidden relationship with a boy; it's more about Barbara's strange relationship with Sheba. Barbara tries to tell the story of Sheba's affair with Steven in a matter-of-fact way, constantly remembering to remind the