You Are Not A Stranger Here (14 page)

The thug Miller had stood up and addressed the class.

"Proposition on the floor, gentlemen. Do we want Jevins to continue with the lesson? Show of hands for the nays."

Most of the boys had raised their hands, covering their 139

mouths and tittering. Jevins had just stood there and watched. Then Bennet's alarm clock had rung and the boys had begun stuffing their satchels and heading for the door. Samuel was slow gathering his books; he'd been trying to study for a geography quiz. When he looked up, the room had emptied, except for Mr. Jevins, still at his post. He'd been a foot soldier in World War II, they said, shot off the beach at Dunkirk and sent back over the channel on D-Day. The wrinkled skin beneath his eyes twitched, a tic of the nerves, the expression of defeat unchanged as he stared at his last remaining pupil. Samuel had grabbed his satchel and run from the room. Walking now, back from the playing fields through the dusk with Giles, Samuel could see lights on in the library, where the upper-form boarders would be studying for their entrance exams. At the top of the building he could see the lights still on in Mr. Jevins's apartment, the curtains pulled. For a moment he wondered if the old man lay shut-eyed on the bed or in the green leather chair in his front room, where he'd sat two autumns ago elaborating the rules for the new boarders: how to treat matrons, whom to speak to if there were difficulties--deputy prefect, then a prefect, and only then a master. It felt wrong trying to picture where his teacher's body lay, as if he'd come upon Mr. Jevins in his pants in the upstairs hall at some odd hour, an embarrassing thing he wouldn't soon forget.

In the courtyard, before Samuel could decide whether to say anything, Giles turned off into the changing rooms for Lincoln House. Samuel kept walking on toward his own dorm. When he entered the main hall after showering and 140

eating supper, he saw Mr. Kinnet, the new master, smoking a cigarette at the window by the door to the library. He had night duty this week and was watching the study hall. Samuel wanted to tell him what had happened to Jevins. Someone should know, he thought, an adult.

"Got a problem there, Phipps? Need to use the loo or something?"

"No, sir."

"You look as if you've been sick."

"Just tired, sir."

"It's barely half seven, shouldn't you be off being terrorized by your superiors?"

"It's Friday, sir. Most of them have gone home."

"Make friends with the day boys, that's my advice. Some local tosser with a big house and a pool. Get his mum to drag you home on weekends."

He extinguished his cigarette by reaching out the window and mashing it against the iron casement.

"Mr. Jevins," Samuel blurted. "It's a pity."

"What's that, Phipps?"

"Nothing." He walked quickly up the front stairs, their creaking awful and loud, and then up the next flight to the landing and along into his dorm. The room was empty. From the window he looked back across the darkened lawn. He wished he were with Trevor, his older brother. He felt an aching kind of sadness, but right away a voice in his head told him not to be a weakling.

Though it wouldn't be lights-out for another hour, he climbed into bed. He read three geography lessons that 141

weren't due until Monday and worked over figures in his chemistry lab book, doing the sums in his head, putting a mark next to each figure he'd recalculated. The Latin textbook he left on the shelf behind him, wondering, despite himself, how long it would take them to find a new teacher and whether the old man had suffered as he went.

" P H I P P S Y ! O Y ! "

Giles was shaking him awake. It was long before breakfast but all the boys were up and out of bed.

"Jevins croaked! They're carrying him down right now!

The ambulance's right out front! Bennet's been crying for ages, the wus. Come on--get up!"

Samuel ran to the window, wriggling between taller boys to get a view. There were no sirens or flashing lights. The ambulance looked almost abandoned sitting in the empty gravel car park, its back doors hanging open, its headlights on though the sun had already peeked over the lip of the field.

" 'Bout time," some little second-former said. "He was bloody ancient."

"Younger than your mother's twat, Krishorn."

Silence fell as two men dressed in navy blue jackets and trousers emerged from the portico with a stretcher held between them, on it a long mound of a shape covered over with a sheet, the body too wide for the conveyance, arms rolled out to the side, hands visible. Bennet's weeping could be heard from the back of the room. The lead man stepped up into the van and the stretcher disappeared from sight.

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"No deus ex machina for Jevins, hey? Plot over." Giles stared at the ambulance with a wistful look, as if he were staring at his parents' car pulling out of the drive. Samuel gripped the cool stone of the window frame, the sounds around him seeming to fade from his ears.

At breakfast, the headmaster stood up from the head table and said he had a sad bit of news. Mr. Jevins had died of a heart attack the previous evening. "He served this school for forty-two years and was the finest teacher of Latin I have ever known." At this, a few snickers. With reproving emphasis, the headmaster went on, "And
just
so as there won't be any idle talk on the subject, it was Mrs. Pebbly who found Mr. Jevins at rest in his rooms this morning. There will be a service in chapel Monday at four. Your parents are being notified. Out of respect for Mr. Jevins I think it fitting we eat the remainder of our breakfast in silence." And with that he sat down. T H AT A F T E R N O O N , S A M U E L tried watching Giles and a few others play a game of French cricket out by the field house, but his gaze kept wandering up to the billowing white clouds. The sight of the stretcher, the clean white sheet, the open palms. It had stilled a part of Samuel's mind he'd never realized had been moving. A tiny ball in the middle of his brain had spun to a halt. It scared him. He'd always thought fear would be something fast, a thing that pushed you forward. Up in the dorm that morning after breakfast, he'd still hoped for an explanation of his knowing, a conversation between masters he'd overheard without realizing, some 143

comment made at supper. But when the headmaster had described what happened, the timing of it, all of a sudden Samuel saw the food on his plate and the boys opposite him and the whole dining hall as if through the wrong end of a telescope. It was as though the everyday world, all that was familiar to him, had been revealed as a tiny, crowded dwelling, full of noise and chatter. A house on an empty plain. Beyond its walls a vast landscape.

The barely noticeable pace of the clouds' approach across the sky seemed like evidence of this hidden enormity, his classmates' frantic motions on the pitch nothing but the buzzing of insects against the window of an attic room. Sitting there on the playing fields, he longed more ardently than he ever had to be with Trevor, hanging out in his room, watching him at his desk fiddling with his computer, talking on and on about computer things, the books he'd ordered by mail open beside him, his brother not listening to half of whatever Samuel said, but nodding. His brother who'd never seemed happy at his own school, who never seemed to make friends. In that room with Trevor, he might still be safe. By the time his parents' Peugeot turned into the car park at ten to four on the Monday, it seemed he hadn't spoken to another person in years. He ran to the car. His mother in her black dress and handbag had barely risen from the passenger's seat when he began, "Mum, I knew, I knew before everyone else, before they told us, I knew they'd have to get another teacher and it was right when it happened, just after seven, I knew he was dead before anyone."

He burst into tears, pressing his face against his mother's 144

body, hugging her. Her hands came down to rub his back, arms cradling his head.

"All right, dear, it's all right."

"But I knew," he mumbled into her dress. "Why? Why?"

Her hands came to a stop and she pressed him harder against her.

"It's okay now, it'll be all right . . . Of course you didn't know, dear. He was a good teacher . . . you liked him. It's hard, that's all."

Samuel looked up into her face. She had long black hair a bit ruffled now in the breeze. She never usually wore makeup but today she'd put on pale lipstick, the look in her eyes the look she had when he got sick. He wanted to comfort her, to explain.

"Mum, I knew on Friday. Mrs. Pebbly didn't find him till Saturday morning."

She smiled weakly, looking down at the gravel.

"You remember when Granny died," his father said across the top of the car, his voice weirdly loud. He was staring intently at Samuel, his shirt and tie done tightly up against his throat. "You remember we were all sad then. You're sad now. You see? And sometimes you think things when you're sad. It's natural."

"But it was Friday. I was playing--"

His father turned his head away abruptly, glancing across the field. He closed his mouth and swallowed, his eyes squinting into the distance, lips turning down into a kind of grimace, as if he were forcing something nasty tasting down his throat.

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"Come on," he said to Samuel's mother, turning around and heading across the lot. "We'll be late."

In the chapel, the headmaster recounted Mr. Jevins's life, his days in the army, a military cross, teaching in Rhodesia, the years of service to Saint Gilbert's. His elderly sister said a few words. The ceremony ended with a recorded playing of Jevins's favorite church music, Allegri's
Miserere.
The boarders all knew it, having heard the recording the third Sunday of every month, when the old man had doubled as minister. Each time he played the song, he reminded them that the Latin sung was Psalm Fifty-one, which he would recite to them afterward in English. Samuel remembered vividly him standing on the step of the altar in his gown, the only master left who wore one. He would pause in his reading before the last line of the penultimate verse, his voice dropping so low it seemed as if he were talking to himself:
The sacrifice accept-
able to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O
God, thou wilt not despise.

No one translated for the audience after the singing ended. Boys and their parents filed from the chapel into the courtyard. The women from the kitchen removed cling wrap from platters of sandwiches and began pouring the tea. M R . J E V I N S H A D died only a month into the school year. The headmaster conducted the Latin classes until Christmas, doing a poor job of hiding his shock at how little the students had been taught. After the holiday, there was a new man, younger than Kinnet he looked, and not easily fooled. 146

By the time Samuel came home for the summer, his parents appeared to have forgotten his teacher's death, as though it were just another term-time event, a cricket match won or lost. He spent a week lying around the house, then at last Trevor returned.

He was sixteen now, five years older than Samuel. He seemed taller and thinner than he had at Christmas, his acne a bit worse. Usually when they returned from school they would spend at least a few hours rigging traps for the cat, books pulled off tables by strings soaked in tuna water or obstacle courses of cosmetics items taken from their mother's cupboard and arranged on the stairs. But each holiday Trevor seemed less interested and this time he didn't want to do it at all.

He'd got his learner's permit and three mornings a week he had driving lessons. The rest of his time he spent in his room at the computer, programming in some machine code, the screen covered in lines of numbers and symbols. Newsletters from American software companies and product literature covered his desk and floor. Samuel watched his brother work, or just hung out in his room and read or played on the game station.

It didn't matter that Trevor only half listened to him or that when he did listen he often made fun of him. His brother being there, the sound of his voice, it was enough. The distance from things he'd kept experiencing during the year, that odd retreat from the physical world, it diminished with Trevor around. Lying on the floor beneath his brother's window, staring up at the sky on those summer afternoons, 147

listening to Trevor's fingers on the keyboard, Samuel understood with a secret embarrassment that he loved his brother. One afternoon, their mother banned Trevor from the computer for three hours and told them both to go outside. Under a tree in the orchard, Samuel sat cross-legged while Trevor lay closer to the trunk in deeper shade, his eyes closed, trying, as he'd told Samuel, to retain in his mind the next line of his program.

Samuel watched huge clouds float on the horizon, taller than churches, vacant palaces in the sky.

"Trev?" he said. "You know that teacher of mine that died last year?"

"Hmmm." An American baseball cap shaded his

brother's face; he wore trousers and long sleeves, determined that if he had to be outside he would at least prevent himself from getting a tan.

"When he died?" Samuel said. "I knew. Right when it happened."

"Huh-uh."

"But it was before anyone else. We hadn't been told. The school didn't even know. Not till the next day."

"Hmmm," Trevor said. "Maybe you dreamt it. Like Dad and that cousin of his."

"I wasn't dreaming, Trev, I was playing football . . . What about Dad's cousin?"

Trevor pulled tufts of grass from the orchard floor and threw them down over his feet. "We were on holiday up at the Morlands'. You were still a diaper-ridden little rodent, shitting huge volumes of refuse."

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"Come on, Trevor."

"Don't deny it. Anyway, it was when those fat Morlands used to give us that bit at the back with the door between where we slept and Mum and Dad's room. Dad had this dream his cousin William had died. I woke up and he was sitting at the edge of the bed, speaking with this funny little quiet voice, saying it was sad William died, going on about how the two of them used to play in the back of Granddad's rope factory. Creepy, really. Then he got up and went back in the other room.
Mum
tried telling me the phone call had come the day before, that they just hadn't told me yet, but I knew he hadn't been on the phone, and I saw him talking on the cordless the next morning out in the garden before breakfast, looking all worried.