The White Devil (6 page)

The headmaster lifted his chin and started confirming the key facts: that Theodore Ryder, a Sixth Former in the Lot, died on the morning of September 9. Ryder appeared to have been ill, and he appeared to have died of that illness. The inquest doctor (the headmaster gestured to the man in the sport coat) had graciously agreed to join the meeting; Dr. Sloane . . . (even in mourning, the five hundred boys could not resist a ripple of amusement:
Oh, WELL, Dr. Sloane,
Mrrrowww
; Dr. Sloane peered at the crowd, puzzled and curious why his name would cause a stir, not realizing that to a pack of toffs, having a name shared with London’s tony Sloane Square, but not
being of
Sloane Square, was pretention itself) . . . Dr. Sloane would speak shortly and allow the boys to hear the details firsthand, to ask questions, and to satisfy themselves with the answers. This would be the first time and, the headmaster sincerely hoped, the last that he would be forced to report the death of a boy at school.

Theodore Ryder . . .
the doctor was speaking now. He gazed from his glasses—thick ones—as if staring into blinding stage lights. He spoke nasally, clinically. A computer nerd of medicine.

Theodore Ryder died of a pulmonary sarcoidosis, a disease which, when left untreated, attacks the function of the lungs. What was at first puzzling to us was the apparent speed of the onset of the disease,
pushing glasses up the nose,
since according to the family Theodore exhibited none of the traditional symptoms associated with the onset of sarcoid, such as fatigue. Even up to the night before
—here the doctor checked his notes—
Theodore Ryder’s next-door neighbor reported him apparently in perfect health.
Andrew reddened, flush with a combination of relief—it wasn’t drugs! it wasn’t a murder!—and mortification. He would have given anything not to be mentioned today.
Just leave me out of it
, he pleaded.

“Suh?”

A hand shot up. Electric bolts shot up Andrew’s back.
What would this boy ask? Would it be about him?
The doctor looked around, disoriented.

The headmaster rose in a billow of gown. “The boys are encouraged to ask questions,” he reminded Dr. Sloane. “Thank you, Mr. Clegg-Bowra. Please.”

The boy rose. “Sir, what was Theo doing on Church Hill?”

Piers Fawkes stood quickly to explain the place-name in the doctor’s ear.
The place where he was found. Up on the hill
.

“I am a pathologist and not a psychiatrist,” replied Dr. Sloane with a smile, unctuously; “therefore I cannot explain any
motivation
Theodore Ryder would have had for walking to a certain spot. But from a medical perspective . . . perhaps we
can
find a motivation.

“Time of death I place between seven and nine in the morning. Let us assume therefore Theodore died while walking to breakfast. His lung volume would have been greatly reduced by the presence of granulomas and swollen lymph tissue. They would be hardened, unable to stretch. He would have experienced shortness of breath. Then difficulty breathing. He would have experienced acute distress. As this difficulty became urgent, then life-threatening, panic would have set in. If such an event transpired at the hospital, we would at this point take emergency measures such as inserting an endotracheal tube to force the patient to breathe . . . but of course Theodore was not in hospital. So he did, I would suspect, what is natural—again, conjecture,” another incongruous and wholly inappropriate smile, “—which is to seek high ground, associating an open environment with open air. More oxygen. Which he would have badly needed since he was, in effect, suffocating.”

Colin Jute had grown intensely uncomfortable throughout this long-winded and depressing answer. He had invited the doctor to provide clinical reassurance, not to frighten the boys and add his own colorful terms. Another hand shot up. Jute leapt to his feet and pointed, hoping the question was not a medical one.

“So there were no drugs involved?” barked a red-haired boy.

“We tested for drugs and found nothing,” responded the doctor nasally. “But that might be a question better answered by the police . . .”

The headmaster had had enough of the doctor. He took back the podium. The police, he thundered, had investigated thoroughly and found absolutely no sign of drugs, or crime of any kind. Theodore Ryder died of natural causes. He delivered these words in a scolding voice implying
And just let me hear any more nonsense to the contrary
. This was not turning out to be the outpouring of emotion he had planned, and he was willing to force the discourse back into line if necessary.

“More questions,” the headmaster commanded.

There were several. Was the infection contagious? The doctor redeemed himself here.
Not in the slightest . . . sarcoidosis is actually a fairly mysterious disease whose causes and development are poorly understood by science; but one thing we do know is that it is not communicable
. . . and so on. The headmaster sniffed.
Not communicable
was better: authoritative, reassuring. Something the boys could pass on to their parents.

Was the body to be buried on campus, in a special memorial?

No, the parents had arranged transport back to Johannesburg. . . .

Would any further school days be canceled?

Their goal was not to disrupt the boys’ lives any more than necessary. . . .

The headmaster relaxed. Much better. They were on the homestretch. He counted the minutes until he could wrap up. He pointed to boys’ raised hands with the aplomb of a talk-show host, almost enjoying himself. Until he pointed at the skinny fellow in the back.

“It sounds like tuberculosis,” the boy shouted.

It wasn’t a question; it was a hand grenade. The room froze. The headmaster puffed up like a bullfrog.
It . . . you . . .
he stammered.

Now it was the doctor’s turn to come to the headmaster’s aid. Tuberculosis, he drawled, had an extremely low rate of incidence in England. At Clementine Churchill Hospital, they see zero cases per year . . . virtually unknown. . . .

“But Theo was from Africa. There are millions of cases in Africa,” belted the boy. “I was there last summer. There were public warnings about spitting.”

A nervous rumble from the crowd.
Theodore Ryder did not have tuberculosis. You just heard from the inquest doctor. Thank you, Mr. Ross-Collins, that is the end of that line of questioning
, stormed the headmaster. He nearly hip-checked the doctor back to his seat. Shifted to housekeeping. The school would send the family a wreath and make a contribution to a charity in the boy’s name. Classes would resume tomorrow. Mr. Moreton would take a group tomorrow to
Hairspray,
playing on the West End; sign up in the Classics Schools. Thank you all.
Dismissed
.

WHEN THEY EMERGED,
the morning sky cast its first fat drops of the day like stones, whacking the boys’ hat brims as they spilled onto the Speech Room promenade. The throng buzzed about the strange meeting and the provocative final exchange. And before the first boys had walked fifty yards, the drops came fast and hard and heavy, drumming the Hill in all-out artillery fire. The boys scattered, holding their boaters and their notebooks over their heads and darting for their houses. Andrew hung back, taking refuge in a basement-level doorway. But the rain did not relent. It came down in sheets. At last he bolted out into it, alone, isolated in the spray and the torrent, and finally arrived at the Lot sopping wet. The Lot lobby was packed. Boys gathered in clusters, steaming in the warmth, vigorously debating the events of the school meeting. Voices rose and chattered; eyes cast around uncertainly, as if expecting someone to pop through the door with more news. Though they could not articulate it, they all felt it:
No one, not even the top man, had seen the doctor’s explanation coming. Lung volume? Suffocating?
They shivered and wiped the rain from their faces.

Seeing Andrew enter, Vaz fell silent, and the others around him took his cue. Andrew stopped, feeling the pierce of Vaz’s black eyes. Andrew should have felt triumph.
See? I told you it wasn’t drugs! I told you it wasn’t me!
But it didn’t matter, he now realized. In Vaz’s eyes he was a scumbag. A stooped, shifty drug dealer. Andrew’s past had come out, and it now defined him. He did not belong at Harrow, those eyes told him. He was an undesirable. An interloper.

Then Vaz’s glance shifted, leading the room’s with it. Something behind Andrew attracted their attention.

Andrew turned and saw what they saw: Piers Fawkes, in a raincoat, damp and unhappy-looking. He led two oversize adults into the foyer. A bearlike man with a creased, overtanned face in a black raincoat. A woman with sun-bleached hair, carefully curled but damped by the weather. Something in the woman’s face was hauntingly familiar. An avian nose and deep-set eyes. Theo’s eyes.

The two groups stared at one another for a moment. One by one, the students picked up the clues:

Both adults wore black—black raincoats, black suit, black dress.

The woman looked expensive but wore no jewelry.

Sorrow fogged over their faces. Their eyes were watery. Their frowns deep. Watching them, you had the sense that the funniest joke, the wildest adventure, could not rouse in them a speck of joy, not if you tried for weeks.

And there was something else. It pulsed from the two grown-ups as they stood staring at the boys.

Bitterness. Envy. Resentment at the living. They clearly had not expected to see such a crowd, and the sentiment just slipped out of them. Hot blood coursed through all these boys’ veins . . . while their son Theo lay refrigerating in some London funeral home.

The crowd of damp boys hung back. Fawkes motioned for the couple to move toward the stairwell. They were on their way to Theo’s room to retrieve his belongings. But the standoff continued. Mr. and Mrs. Ryder were transfixed by the vision of all these uniformed copies of their son.

Rhys Davies broke the spell. He strode across the foyer and extended his hand to Mr. Ryder, then to Mrs. Ryder.

“Theo was the best of us,” he said.

One by one, and then in small groups, all the boys, the Sixth Formers and the smallest Shell, followed Rhys, crossing to the grieving couple and shaking their hands. They expressed their condolences or just smiled briefly and sympathetically and moved on. Fawkes watched, surprised but gratified. The parents smiled to the extent that they could. They shook hands; they murmured politely and nodded. The father was a great sunburned ape, with feathery blond hair and heavy lips, and to their surprise it was he, not the mother, who began to blubber. He was too overwhelmed and too polite to pause and find a handkerchief, so he kept on shaking hands and nodding and thanking the boys while tears slicked his face.

MATRON OPENED ANDREW’S
door some time later, huffing as usual.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “This came for you. From Sir Alan Vine’s daughter.”

Her vinegary tone left no doubt that she questioned what business Andrew had communicating with Sir Alan Vine’s daughter. She held out a small purple envelope.

Andrew Taylor
, the envelope announced in girlishly looping blue ink. Matron retreated. He ripped it open.

Andrew,

Pick me up at Headland after supper tomorrow and we’ll surprise Piers with his new Byron.

Persephone

PS If possible please learn to act before then.

PPS Sorry about your friend.

He smiled his lopsided smile in spite of himself. Just what he needed, he thought. More drama.

4

A Play About a Caterpillar

THAT FUCKING JUTE.

Piers Fawkes burst through his own door, sweeping with him wind, rain, elm leaves in a whirl, hands shaking with anger and alcoholic craving.

Enduring his crap, that’s what it was—
enduring
. It had been Fawkes, after all, who had driven in the ambulance to the morgue, with the gurney holding the body bag jostling his knees on the turns. It was
he
who had accompanied the body to the dungeons of the hospital (and who had then burst from its doors and hiked a half mile to some random suburban hotel—with, mercifully, a pub—to down two pints and suck countless cigarettes in an attempt to wash away that image of the stainless steel tables—like oversize kitchen sinks, he could not help observing; designed to drain fluids). After the postmortem,
he
had signed the death certificate. All the requirements of a housemaster, a lone man in loco parentis, suddenly transformed from the caretaker of sixty boys to the Factotum of Death for one. God, what a nightmare.

And after all this, because of that ridiculous school meeting, the headmaster had the gall to chew him out. Badly. For an hour. Taking it out on him.

Had it really been Fawkes’s idea to invite the doctor? He didn’t even remember, frankly. (
Let them hear it for themselves
. Had he said that, or Jute?) But Jute pinned it on him. The boys respect
authority
, Jute had stormed, pacing, they respect
firmness
. (
And how should I respect you
, Fawkes had thought, darkly,
heaping shit on me when you know I need this job, know I can’t respond. What kind of leadership does that take?
) They want, Jute had continued (now the expert on what the students want), to push their childish games so far,
but they need someone to know where the line is
.
You
(he had actually pointed) are distant. Not
engaged
. You’re not
respected
. You’re the wrong man for a crisis, and God knows—Jute finally coming to it, at last the dagger thrust—whether a better man could have prevented it in the first place. Fawkes had clenched his fists at this point and growled
I think this conversation is over
before charging from the room and into the swirling, nasty weather, snarling and snapping to himself like a wounded dog until he found himself at the dimly glowing lanterns of the Lot.

Fawkes tore off his wrinkled black robes and flung them onto a chair. He fumbled around his desk for a cigarette. He would walk out, that’s what he would do. See if they could fill his spot on such notice. He would make sure his resignation received publicity. He wasn’t so far gone as a poet that some journalist wouldn’t care. W
HITESTONE
W
INNER
Q
UITS
. He liked that. He lit the cigarette and dragged deeply. The nicotine revived his brain and brought with it several sobering and probably quite accurate notions: that this daydreaming was childish; and that quitting was exactly what Jute wanted him to do.

Fawkes knew he had not been the school’s first choice as housemaster of the Lot. At first he’d only been offered the position of English instructor. But then the commission for the Byron play followed, lending Fawkes a whiff of prestige. Then the school’s top candidate withdrew (the man’s wife got breast cancer); an outside candidate was lost to a competing offer; two other assistant masters were deemed too young; and summer was waning. Someone suggested Fawkes. He was the right age; he was looking for a nearby flat anyway; he had some charisma. Fawkes never pictured himself as a caretaker; but his living expenses would be covered; he was assured Matron and the assistant master, Arnold Macrae, would do the heavy lifting; he would still have time to write. He found himself flattered, stroked, coaxed—and frankly it had been a while since he’d had that kind of attention. No one, in the whirl of mutual flattery that accompanies any hiring process—especially a last-minute, desperate one—stopped to recognize that Fawkes had never been responsible for anything more than writing a hundred lines of poetry per day. He’d never held a proper job; never even had a salary. He’d divorced young, so he’d never cared for children; and he was a heavy drinker.

Fawkes had tried to fit himself to the role. But a dull panic seized him when he was faced with the tedious and, he soon realized, incessant demands of the job. Emails—hundreds of them—flooded his school account daily. Parents inquiring about a poor mark; about sniffles in a young one; about the timeline for the refurbishment of the squash court so their son could practice; about a knee injury in football; about bullying, and name-calling, and so on, around the clock. The boys, it turned out, were all amateur arsonists, hackers, pornographers; he was forced to walk the halls at midnight, shutting down computers and breaking up pranks. His 5
A.M.
writing schedule went to hell. He started delegating more and more to Macrae. He used his commission as an excuse to write more, housemaster less. Still, it had pained him when he discovered—through a younger colleague, who in confiding his own anxieties, naïvely blurted it all out to Fawkes—that he was unpopular. Hated by Matron. Despised by Macrae. Viewed as a drunk and a wastrel by the other housemasters, who took their duties seriously, their dislike stoked by their (false) supposition that Fawkes was unfirable due to his commission from the school governors (those shadowy, superrich aristocrats who managed the school’s investments and affairs) to write the play. Never mind that Fawkes wanted to commit the whole draft to the fire, and that he had been avoiding sharing the current manuscript with anyone even though it was months late. As far as the great Harrow School was concerned, Fawkes was vain, sloppy, unqualified, and detached. A hiring mistake—now exposed by a boy’s death.

Bad luck? Or bad housemastering? The facts, Fawkes suspected, would not matter. He would take the fall for it. Maybe not sacked publicly—Jute was too shrewd for that; that would be admitting that the school had been at fault—but vilified, scorned. Blamed.

Fawkes angrily stubbed out his cigarette. He
would
leave. He would take the tube to London. He would call his old friends—the filmmakers and painters and editors and writers he’d come to London to be with and to be. He would get loaded—pints, smokes, pubs, clubs—and dine out on stories about the Hill, a Jurassic Park of British aristocracy. Just walk away, put it all on a credit card for a while, deal with the consequences later. Yes. He breathed deeply, happily. It was the right decision. He felt a sense of elation, as if he’d been trapped in a stuffy room and someone had just thrown open the windows. Oxygen at last. He jumped up to fetch his coat. Snatched his keys. Felt his trouser pocket—wallet, a few bills. All systems ready. He was seconds away from freedom.

And that was when the doorbell rang.

TWO PALE FACES.
The porch light cut their features; they seemed to peer, half materialized, from another dimension. Fawkes was prepared to slam the door on them. But it was Persephone Vine, under bedraggled heaps of dark hair, and another Harrovian; Sixth Form, judging from height.

“What do you want,” he grunted.

“That’s not much of a welcome,” said Persephone.

“It isn’t. Because you aren’t.”

“I told you I was dropping in. Are you really going to send us back out into this?”

Fawkes had a soft spot for the girl. Not only because she was beautiful and exotic and delightful to look at—no, that was another liability he was conscious of and, thankfully, able to manage (the notion of sexual frisson between them was ludicrous; Fawkes had a saggy behind and love handles and a tragicomic view of his own former sexual conquests)—but also because she was fun. All these teenagers were desperate for attention. They looked at you with faces like empty plates, wide, open, eager, wanting you, willing you to tell them who they were; Persephone was as bad as the others. But she had a saving feature: she pretended that she and Fawkes were equals. Pals. It was presumptuous, impertinent, and—given that it sometimes involved inappropriate drinking and smoking together—also a great relief. They had met the previous spring when she was cast in the Byron play. She would come to Fawkes’s apartment to talk about The Play—or as she had it more often (and more annoyingly),
our play
—and he would give her smokes. Soon their project would be long forgotten, and she would ramble about her interpretation of
Antony and Cleopatra
or yet another chapter in her parents’ epic dysfunction, and he would catch himself: he had been listening. Actually enjoying himself.

“I’m going out for smokes, P,” he lied. “Can’t we do this later?”

“No, we can’t.”

Persephone, clearly and inconveniently at her most insistent, wedged herself and her guest into the hall. Fawkes felt his moment of decisiveness slipping away. She and this stupid boy were blocking his escape. He was about to tell her so.

And then Fawkes saw the face.

He had passed over it at first, distracted by his thoughts. But he doubled back now.

The boy looked at him, strands of hair dripping down over his eyes, not understanding yet that he was being stared at. He had long hair, which only added to the effect, and Fawkes found himself gripping the doorjamb, instinctively touching cold, present reality.

Persephone grinned, watching him.

“You see it, then. Ha! Got you, Fawkesy.”

Fawkes didn’t respond. He just gaped. The pale crescent moon of the boy’s face. He noticed the mouth next—red, round, a brazenly erotic droop in the lower lip, like a rose petal about to drop. And then the eyes. Grey as a wolf’s. These eyes, he noticed—coming back to reality, awakening to the fact that he was beholding an individual, alive and breathing, not a portrait or an apparition—these eyes were sulky, fearful. Something unsettled in them. The usual teenage need, accompanied by a warning.

“Who are you?” Fawkes managed. “I’m Piers Fawkes.”

“I know. You’re my housemaster.”

“You’re American.” It was a statement. “Wait. The American! Oh God. You’re the one who found Theo.”

The boy tensed. “Yeah,” he said warily.

“I’ve been meaning to stop in. Check on you. I feel terrible. It’s been an awful week. Especially for you.”

“Awful,” echoed Persephone impatiently, “but we’re here for an
audition
.”

“Audition?”

“For the play.
Our
play?” prompted Persephone. “You see the resemblance to Byron, don’t you?”

“Extraordinary.”

“And you got my note? I knew not to bother with email.”

Fawkes cast a guilty glance at the magazines, newspapers, and unopened letters heaped on the dining table.

“For goodness sake,” she fumed.

“Listen, chaps. Whatever you’re here for, it’s been a long day. If you’re going to stay, how about a drink?”

ANDREW HELD A
cold, fragrant martini in his hand, wondering what the protocol was for drinking gin in the apartment of your housemaster when you were underage and had narrowly escaped lynching for being a teenage drug lord. Was this . . . allowed? Apparently it was. Persephone tucked her bare feet under her legs on the sofa and nibbled the lemon twist (which Fawkes had peeled with professional skill as he chatted with them from the kitchen) while Andrew took in the apartment. Nicely proportioned, with a dining room giving onto a patio through French doors, and a small kitchen in black-and-white tile. But so messy it bordered on foul; a squatter’s place. Newspaper littered across the sofa cushions. A modern white desk held letters, papers, folders, a laptop, books with faces down and spines broken; a cordless phone (no cradle), two coffee cups, a full ashtray, a bottle of Advil, a dirty plate with a dirty fork and a bunched-up napkin on top. Andrew sized up Fawkes. His appearance confirmed Andrew’s suspicions in Speech Room: Piers Fawkes had been sleeping poorly. Brown circles stained the skin around his eyes. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes wrinkled, his hands shook. There did not seem to be much stowed beneath the surface. Piers Fawkes was a wreck all over.

“So you want to play Lord Byron?” Fawkes asked.

Andrew mumbled, “Yeah, I guess.”

“Is he always so enthusiastic?” Fawkes asked Persephone.

“He’s American,” she answered. “They’re laconic.”

“I thought they were bubbly and naïve.”

“I do want the part,” Andrew put in, spurred to speak for himself. “Do I really look like him?”

“See for yourself.”

Fawkes snatched up one of the broken-spined hardcovers from the desk and thrust it into Andrew’s hands, flipping pages for him until he reached the illustration plates. They contained multiple portraits of a dark-haired young man in Regency dress—linen collars and cloaks. The images seemed varnished and remote.

“Are you convinced?”

“Do I really look like this?”

“Are you complaining about looking like one of the most beautiful men of all time?” Persephone was indignant.

“Close enough,” drawled Fawkes. “Can you act?”

“I’ve done a little acting,” Andrew said.

“How little?”

“He played the
bad guy
in a play called
The Foreigner
,” piped up Persephone. “I looked it up. Owen Musser, the racist sheriff. Am I right?” Andrew nodded, impressed. She continued: “The role has quite a few lines, actually. The play won two Obies.”

“Not our production,” Andrew added hastily.

“My condolences,” said Fawkes.

“So,” said Persephone, bursting with impatience, “he looks like Byron. He can act, or at least, he
has
acted. Now tell him about our play.”

“Our play,” repeated Fawkes. “Our play was commissioned by the governors of Harrow School. They provided me a rather large sum of money—to a poet anyway—to play the poet’s time-honored role for institutions. Paid flatterer. Immortalizer of invented virtues. Byron was rich, pugnacious, and a sex fiend. But he attended
Harrow
. So let’s put some Vaseline on the lens, add some soft lighting, and make him into a play-in-verse. Longer lasting than a brochure. And the children can play the parts.”