Top marks for a chilling tale

The "scandal" in Zoe Heller's new novel is the stuff of a tabloid editor's wet dream. Within six months of joining the staff of an inner-city London school, pottery teacher Bathsheba Hart begins an affair with a pupil named Steven Connolly, whose vaguely precocious artistic talent she seeks to encourage and refine. Sheba, fey and attractive in her floaty, see-through frocks, is 41 and married to a pompous London University lecturer 20 years her senior.

Coarsely handsome Connolly, the son of a black-cab driver from the local council estate, is 15 and an inevitable contradiction of sexual innocence and foul-mouthed bravado, with the "edible" body of a clear-skinned adolescent like "fresh garden vegetables wrapped in a clean white hanky".

This is no steamy tale of schoolyard seduction, however. The "notes" are composed by neither party to the main action, but by Sheba's older friend and colleague Barbara Covett, the school's resident spinster, who decides in the aftermath of the affair's explosive discovery to redress the pious-yet-titillating press coverage with her own "factual" account of who did what to whom, and when.

As she tells the tale, hardboiled Barbara, a history teacher, inevitably reveals more about herself and her own motives than she does those of Sheba Hart. Notes on a Scandal deals briskly with the business of illicit romance and under-age sex, and takes as its real subject the loneliness and anger of an ageing, childless, chain-smoking school marm, made bitter by an austere upbringing (well conveyed in a handful of telling anecdotes) and by years of thankless grind in the classroom.

A confidante to her colleagues - "the number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own" - Barbara lapses time and again into semi-confessional mode herself, exposing her own furtive and obsessive approach to the business of love and relationships.

An undercurrent of subtle malice, cleverly controlled by Heller, who never allows Barbara to appear simply hateful, flows throughout her account of Sheba's private crisis and public disgrace - though it's not until the book's end that we understand-fully the magnitude of the older woman's treachery towards her younger friend.

Heller sustains the narrative at a steady, suspenseful trot in politely formal prose that mirrors Barbara's tight emotional repression. Though her portrait of north London is at times curiously old-fashioned - do state schools in Holloway have pottery teachers? Does any season ticket holder at Highbury talk about going "to Arsenal on Saturday"? - the plot rarely strays from a basic level of credibility.

Connolly is something of a cipher, romanticised by Sheba and reviled by Barbara, who thinks him an unattractive chancer in it for the thrill - but the women are excellent, both in their own ways leading ambiguous, self-deluded lives and acting with no more maturity than the teenagers they teach. Heller does Barbara's miserable solitude and biting envy particularly well: "They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters ..."

Hardly a romp behind the bike sheds, then, and certainly no study of gender-inverted paedophilia. Instead Heller observes an intriguing personal crisis through the eyes of a rather sinister old lady - and leaves us chilled, not thrilled.