In Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women (c.1623-24), which I wrote about here, women are presented as their own worst enemies. At the centre of the play is the character Livia, who engineers the downfall of two young women, Bianca and Isabella, persuading them to embark on dangerous sexual relationships (Bianca’s adulterous and precipitated by a rape, Isabella’s incestuous) which bring about their downfalls and ultimate demise. In her dying breath Bianca, realising what Livia has done, laments ‘the deadly snares / That women set for women’.
Depressingly, the idea of women destroying – or seeking to destroy – other women is not confined to Jacobean revenge drama. From the feuding sisters Goneril and Regan in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), to Lucy Steele’s rivalry with Elinor Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and the conflict between the abandoned wife and the new lover in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), conniving and competitive women are littered through English literature. And perhaps even more depressingly, it is often a man who is the cause of their rivalries and feuds.
Zoe Heller’s 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal also explores female rivalry, but from a different angle. The novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and subsequently made into a film starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench (2007), focuses on the dark side of a friendship between two women, Sheba Hart and Barbara Covett, who both teach in the same North London comprehensive school.
Narrated by Barbara, the novel tells of the scandal in which Sheba becomes embroiled soon after arriving at the school to teach Art when she embarks on an affair with a 15 year-old pupil, Steven Connelly. But the novel is also an account of another type of scandal – a scandal of a friendship seared by jealousy and possessiveness.
The novel opens with a prologue, beginning at the end of the story: Sheba is separated from her husband and children, following the discovery of her affair, and is living with Barbara in her (Sheba’s) brother’s house whilst he is in New Delhi for work. Barbara has adopted the role of carer and confidant to the distressed Sheba; as she tells the reader when Sheba is reminiscing about her first kiss with Connelly: ‘I don’t say much on these occasions. The point is to get Sheba to talk’.
However, Barbara’s presentation of herself as Sheba’s supportive friend is not all it appears. She tells the reader in the opening chapter that ‘this is not a story about me’, but in fact the story is all about Barbara: her sense of her own superiority and disdain for others (particularly her teaching colleagues), her infatuation with Sheba and her desire for Sheba to love and need her, as much as she needs Sheba.
Chapter 1 opens with Barbara recalling the day she first met Sheba, writing about the event as though it were a romantic encounter: ‘The first time I ever saw Sheba…’. She pays careful attention to what Sheba was wearing – ‘purple shoes’ – and to the details of her physical appearance – ‘Her hair was arranged in one of those artfully dishevelled up-dos: a lot of stray tendrils framing the jaw…’. Her attraction for Sheba intensifies in the course of that first day; when Sheba is introduced in the staff room by the Deputy Head who shouts out ‘“Our new pottery teacher”’, Barbara is immediately caught up in a whirl of passion and desire: ‘Pottery. I repeated the word quietly to myself. It was too perfect: I pictured her, the dreamy maiden poised at her wheel, massaging tastefully mottled milk jugs into being.’
But Barbara has rivals for Sheba’s affections: her colleagues (male and female), Sheba’s husband and children, and Connelly himself. Barbara’s resentment at Sheba’s failure to place her at the centre of her life builds up, and eventually leads to her revealing Sheba’s illicit affair to a colleague, a betrayal that Sheba remains blissfully unaware of even at the end of the novel.
Barbara’s complicated feelings about Sheba, and her rivalry with others for her affection, manifests itself at one point through food. Early in the novel, Barbara encounters Sheba, with another teacher, Sue, having lunch at a local Italian cafe (a detail that suggests the author has little awareness of the reality of the state schoolteacher’s day!). The reader is already aware of Barbara’s disdain for Sue – whom she refers to as ‘Fatty Hodge’ – and her distress that Sheba has struck up a friendship with her. When Sheba invites Barbara to join them for lunch she agrees, but it is clear to the reader that Sue’s presence is causing her much annoyance: ‘Shut up, shut up, I thought, as she chuntered on. Shut up, you boring cow. Let Sheba speak.’ And when it comes to ordering food Barbara is delighted when Sheba makes the same choice as her: ‘The waiter came and took our orders. Sue wanted lasagne. (She’s an awful glutton, Sue.) Sheba was considering a salad but when she heard me ask for minestrone, she decided to have the same. This maddened Sue, you could tell.’
It’s difficult to believe that soup could be the cause of so much friction, but there you are.
Minestrone is a classic Italian vegetable soup, one that I learnt to make on a walking and cookery holiday in Tuscany a decade ago. Every region in Italy has its own version of minestrone, with slight variants; so consider my recipe below as the Scouse version, making good use of the vegetables in my weekly organic box.
A JEALOUS FRIEND’S MINESTRONE
Ingredients (serves 4-6):
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped
2 celery stalks, finely chopped
1 leek, sliced
3 medium potatoes, peeled but whole
1 tin chopped tomatoes
8 basil leaves
1.5 – 2 litres vegetable stock
1 tin borlotti beans, drained
1 courgette, sliced
1 handful runner beans, cut into approx 4cm slices
1/4 cabbage shredded
100g soup pasta
Method:
Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat, add the onion and cook for about 10 minutes until soft and translucent.
Add the garlic, carrots, celery and leek and cook for another 10 minutes.
Add the potatoes, tinned tomatoes and basil and cook gently for 15 minutes.
Season the mixture, then pour in 1.5 litres of stock, bring to the boil, then cover the saucepan, reduce the heat and let the mixture simmer gently for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
After 2 hours, add the borlotti beans, courgette, runner beans and cabbage. If the potatoes are still whole, press them against the side of the saucepan with the back of a wooden spoon so they break up into large chunks. Add more stock if needed. Bring the soup to the boil and add the pasta, cooking until it is al dente.
Serve in a soup bowl with a swirl of extra virgin olive oil and a handful of grated parmesan.
