You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [47]
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 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 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.
“PHIPPSY! OY!”
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.
“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.