Relationships Between Teachers and Students
The principal theme of the novel is relationships occurring between teacher and student, particularly "illicit" sex between the two. The main relationship is between Sheba and Connolly, when she is his pottery teacher, and he is her under-age student but continues after his sixteenth birthday, the legal age of consent in the United Kingdom. The theme of teacher-student sex then becomes more of an ethical question than a legal one as the reader is compelled to decide whether it is their gap in age that makes their relationship wrong, or the fact Sheba is in a position of authority and therefore abusing that by allowing their relationship to continue. Within Sheba and Connolly's relationship there are other questions, such as whether or not Connolly was the predator rather than Sheba, and the arbitrary age at which it is decided a child becomes able to become sexually active by choice is the only factor that blurs this uncomfortable reality.
Sheba and Connolly are not the only student-teacher sexual relationship in the book; Sheba's husband was her professor at art school and she dropped out of school after their marriage; this relationship introduces another moral dilemma as it questions whether this, too, was predatory behavior by the professor, despite Sheba being in her early twenties the age gap between them almost as wide as that between Sheba and Connolly. Sheba's husband is clearly attracted to his students as his new girlfriend, after the marriage breaks down, is also one of his students, with the gap between their ages even wider than that of his wife and her teen lover.
Failures in the Modern Education System
When she is not detailing Sheba's affair to the reader, Barbara is detailing the nightmare that is teaching at St. George's school. Having been teaching for over thirty years, she is uniquely placed to observe the way that education has changed and become less important than showing children that the teachers are their friends and not the fierce authority figures they once were. The school principle is particularly eager to blame the faculty and the education system for the terrible behavior of the kids and when Barbara suggests expelling a young man who is the instigator of most of the serious trouble, her suggestions are rejected and she is asked to re-write the report. The theme of the downward slide in education, and the increased importance of what the school is seen to do rather than what it actually does, also plays into showing how the relationship between Sheba and Connolly would have been far less likely to happen twenty years ago as there was far more respect for the teaching staff and far less leeway for pupils to be unruly or treat the teacher as an equal.
Loneliness
The chief motivation for Barbara in clinging so tightly to her friendship with Sheba is loneliness. She admits throughout the novel to being quite crashingly lonely and her main frustration with Sheba on a personal level is that she does not seem to comprehend just how lonely Barbara is. For her part, Barbara often seems to confuse loneliness and the state of knowing how alone one is, and doesn't realize that Sheba is lonely as well, often taking second place to her husband's academic work and not really fully connected to the friends they have as a couple. Barbara's loneliness caused her to rather jealously tell Bangs about the affair between Sheba and Connolly; Bangs' loneliness caused him to imagine that Sheba is interested in him.
