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By Root 443 0

sloping across the ceiling, he could tell it was dark outside as well. He lay there awhile, listening to the cars pass, and farther off the sound of jumbo jets descending to earth. When he moved to rise, he found he had no strength in his arms, and shifting about on the hard floor, realized he was lying in a pool of sweat. For a moment, panic gripped him and he felt he might scream. But just as it had arisen, so it passed, and he stared again at the sloping lights on the ceiling. Gently, images flowed before his mind, and the inscrutable enormity of remembered life washed back over him, leaving him weightless and expectant. He thought of Stockwell, and the exhilaration he had felt on winter afternoons when games were through, running back over the fields to where the parents waited in their heated cars. And he thought of his sealed letters gathered on the living room shelf. He was calm. Soon he would be home again, resting beside his father’s grave, just as the minister’s letter had promised.

DIVINATION

ON THE FOOTBALL pitch, daylight had begun to fade. The other boys were inside already. Samuel had stayed on the field half an hour to practice penalty kicks with his friend Giles, who stood now in front of the goal, waiting for another shot to come. Samuel took ten steps back, then ran at the ball, kicking it high and to the left, missing to the outside by a foot or two.

“Shall we pack it in?” Giles said, dragging his foot across the grass to clear off the mud.

“Don’t you want to have a go?”

Giles shook his head. “I’m knackered, let’s go in.”

It was as they were walking back toward the old manor house the school occupied that Samuel became aware of the cooing and flapping of wings inside the crumbling dovecote, the muffled sounds echoing over the lawn. At that moment, for no apparent reason, he thought: How sad that Jevins should die now, like this, alone in his apartment over the sixth-form dormitories.

Mr. Jevins, who had stood over them just that morning in his gown and oval glasses, reciting Latin—by whom, or what it meant, none of them knew. They’d discovered if they set the wall clock forward ten minutes and rang Bennet’s alarm, Jevins, half deaf, would imagine the sound to be the bell and let them go early. Eighty he must have been, or older. His voice a gravelly whisper, only now and then rising to a pitch, on about some emperor or battle, Samuel guessed. Boys ignored him freely, chatting and throwing paper. Ever since he’d come to Saint Gilbert’s, Samuel had felt a pain associated with this man, a feeling he couldn’t articulate or conceive. This morning for the first time Jevins had slammed his leather book down on the windowsill and with a strain shouted, “Do you boys want me to continue with this lesson or not!”

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 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