The White Devil

by Justin Evans

  THE WHITE DEVIL

  A Novel

  Justin Evans

  For Phoebe and for my mother

  The white devil is worse than the black.

  —ENGLISH PROVERB

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  PART III

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Justin Evans

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  OUTSIDE A COOL evening awaited. The perspiration on his back and neck turned icy. He staggered through the darkness, his breathing heavy. It had seized him, like a beast, a monkey sinking fangs into him, clinging to him and weighing him down, waiting for him to tire; a predator making a kill.

  Get as far from people as you can.

  He climbed the stairs. When he reached the top, he stumbled forward. He pulled up a trouser leg and found his calves and ankles had swollen: taut, puffy; dragging beneath him like bags of fluid.

  What was happening to him?

  He was enduring the journey from life to death. The force he was confronting was taking its revenge on him. He was experiencing in the space of an hour what might otherwise be a slow, consuming decline.

  He reached up and touched his face; felt the ridge of his own cheekbone, traced it with his fingertip. The fat had melted away. The sores grew in his mouth. The fever burned his cheeks. He was plummeting quickly through the expected symptoms. He realized he had very little time left.

  It was going to kill him.

  It was going to kill all of them.

  PART I

  What exile from himself can flee?

  1

  Gap Year

  ANDREW TAYLOR STOOD alone before a gate. The growl of his taxi pulling away had long since faded. A sky, whipped by winds, changing preternaturally, galloped overhead: clouds, sun, low-slung fog, in rapid succession. So this was English weather. The place felt wet. A smoky smell (bracken, burnt by gardeners) stung his nose. From somewhere close, a church bell rang. He was on a high hilltop, a few miles to the northwest in the swirl of suburbia flung off by London. The taxi had dropped him on the High Street, a twist of road lined with whitewashed shops, three-story town houses, and weary-looking trees leaning out of holes cut in the pavement. There were views to the north, more hills, rolling away, each stamped with a chain link of identical suburban homes: brown brick, chimney, walled yard. Until he saw the gate, and the eccentric building that would be his new home, he thought he might have come to the wrong place. This was supposed to be a school for England’s elite. That’s what his father had told him. You don’t know how lucky you are, he had said—repeatedly. But Andrew had attended schools for the elite. And in his experience, they were sprawling green campuses, with golf courses and big gymnasiums and gleaming dining centers . . . not buildings distributed along a street. Yet here he was. Twenty-five High Street, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Middlesex. Same address as on the welcome packet, on the brochure, on the welcome letter from his housemaster. And it looked like a fucking time warp.

  First, there was the name. The Lot. It bore the funk of English eccentricity. Andrew already felt allergic to it. Back at Frederick Williams Academy, in Connecticut, the houses were named after donors. Andrew had been two years in Davidson, two in Griswold, and his senior year—the most decadent by far, in a large double room, perfumed by bong water and unwashed clothes—in Noel House. But the Lot rose before him now, a shambling Victorian mansion, ascending four stories to an old-fashioned cross-gabled roof. It was constructed of moldering red brick, with triangular nooks and attic rooms pointing upward, arrowlike, in various spots, while over the door—and elsewhere, wherever a lintel presented a broad hunk of brick—there were carvings on agricultural themes. Hay and scythes. Sunshine and tilling. Moss, soot, and old grit competed for residence in the thin lines of mortar. A low wall, of the same red brick, encircled the place. Between the wall and the house lay a driveway of beige gravel, like a pebbly moat. The arms of the wall met in a gate: two square brick posterns, topped by cast-iron lanterns. Andrew felt his heart sink. This place was dank, cramped, old. The year he would stay here suddenly seemed wearingly long.

  I don’t want to hear a word of complaint out of you. I moved mountains to get you in there.

  Andrew’s father’s voice entered his head, unbidden. As it had a tendency to do. Fierce, southern-accented, accusatory. When Andrew was younger he used to hear it in the shower, arising from the babble of the water pounding the bathtub. He would stop the shower, get out, dripping, and stand in the doorway calling Yes? Yes, Daddy? when it had been nothing. Just the guilt; the internal clock telling him it had been several hours since he heard the hammer and tongs of that voice. And Andrew had heard the voice plenty this past summer.

  I sold the last of Grandfather’s shares for this. Sold them for pennies, in this market, to get your sorry ass out of trouble. What a waste, his father had ranted. What a failure for us all. Ah, me, he would groan. I never thought I would see this happen. Never.

  That was the speech designed to stamp out any complaints about the school. Harrow School. The brochure had made it look like a miniseries on PBS. Scrubbed British schoolboys in jackets and ties and odd, tidy straw hats, which, his father informed him with some relish, were the tradition of the school. Choirboys. Andrew knew the school was prestigious. He knew he was lucky—sort of. But he couldn’t forget that he wasn’t here because he wanted to be here; not even because he deserved to be. Far from it. It was to get him out of sight, quickly. Off, across the Atlantic, to some cross between reform school and finishing school. So that his college applications would have a new listing at the top. So he would have a new set of teachers and administrators to write recs. So the last five years at Frederick Williams Academy would be just a footnote. I went to the prestigious Harrow School . . . and oh, yes, the equally prestigious Frederick Williams Academy. But the less said about that, the better. Maybe, with college applications bragging international experience, the gap between his ninetieth-percentile SATs and his C grades would stand out less. Maybe phrases like doesn’t apply himself . . . tests well, but lazy . . . and most recently, the packed euphemism discipline issues would seem less prominent.

  Despite the urgent circumstances, the welcome packet for Harrow School had impressed his father. There was the school crest: a prancing lion, heraldic symbols, a Latin motto. Bragging rights: seven prime ministers had attended the school, including Winston Churchill. Andrew’s father had puffed with pride. The Taylors, in his view, were aristocrats. There had been the family plantations in Louisiana. There had been the great-great-uncle, the Civil War admiral, with a battleship named for him (every few years they got hats from some pal of his dad’s in the navy—dark blue with orange stitching: U.S.S. Taylor). And grandfather Taylor had been president of a contact lens manufacturer, Hirsch & Long, had made a small fortune in stock, and had been quite
a grandee in Killingworth, Connecticut, living in a lovingly restored farmhouse—a landmark—with stone walls around a generous property. Never mind that Andrew’s father had floundered for years at American Express, bridling that he’d risen to be no more than a mere vice president, passed over for promotion to executive rank (due, no doubt, to his temper, and his poorly concealed snobbery); or that Hirsch & Long stock had foundered since the introduction of laser surgery and cheap Chinese imports; or that Andrew, the grandson, was now a certified screwup. Never mind that there was no fortune or prestigious career to raise them to the upper echelon of Connecticut or New York society. They would be damned if they were middle class. They were American aristocrats, Andrew’s father thought. They had the stamp of quality. The Taylors deserved Harrow School. In the eyes of his father, this was a homecoming, not an exile.

  But all his son could see were rules. Infantilizing, seemingly infinite rules. A tiny, prim pamphlet Andrew received, titled “Newboys Guide,” helpfully pointed them out.

  No drinking.

  No smoking.

  No eating in the street.

  No leaving the Hill without a chit. (Whatever that was.)

  Boys must wear their Harrow hat to classes.

  Boys must wear school uniform at all times. Except on Sundays, when Sunday dress is mandatory.

  No wearing light-colored raincoats to school meetings. (This one left him speechless.)

  No food in the rooms.

  Boys must “cap” the masters when passing on the street—raise one finger to the brim of the Harrow hat.

  For ladies or the Headmaster, boys must raise the Harrow hat.

  Then there was the copious supply of precious, arcane jargon—cute nicknames, presumably developed over centuries, referring to every aspect of the school. The Newboys Guide offered a lexicon.

  Shell = boy in first form. (Seventh grade, Andrew retranslated.)

  Remove = boy in second form.

  Eccer = exercise.

  Bluer = boys’ school jacket, made of blue wool.

  Greyers = boys’ school trousers, made of grey wool.

  Beak = master (Teacher, Andrew retranslated.)

  And so it went. Andrew felt the claws of claustrophobia on him, sinking deeper with every repetition of the word boy.

  An all-boys’ school.

  He felt awkward in guy groups. Remote and prickly, he was stung by the joshing of sporty types. His subjugation to his father made him hate bullies and provided fuel for outbursts of violent temper when confronted with casual cruelty in the dormitory halls. And generally wasting time with friends made him anxious. It seemed inefficient. He could waste time so much better on his own.

  On the contrary, he liked girls. They sought him out at parties and at school socials—that is, when he deigned to go. He would hang back and make sarcastic remarks or sneak off smoking, or better yet make plans to have a bottle of liquor available and get plastered with some small side group. Most Saturdays, by ten o’clock check-in, he would be untangling himself from some girl’s bra and licking the Southern Comfort and punch that had been deposited, secondhand, around the rim of his mouth. The bohemian girls—the dancers, the hippie chicks—thought he was one of them, with his black T-shirts and angry rebellious questions in class and citations of obscure or otherwise cool literary figures (Mr. Wheeler, why can’t we read any Brautigan? Or Bukowksi?); and the preppie girls—the ones inclined to slum with the druggie kids—would sometimes venture his way as well. Summers, back at home in Killingworth, it was another story altogether. Girls with big hair and obvious perfume bought the package of Boarding School and Long Luxurious Black Hair. They would drink two or three beers and let him do what he wanted to them.

  To get locked away on a hilltop with a few hundred boys made him nervous in a way he couldn’t completely comprehend. What happened when the girls, the sunshine, and the warmth were on the outside and you were on the inside, chilly, English, and isolated? It would be like passing a year in a meat locker.

  Andrew squatted and gripped his heavy bags, and heaved one of them over his shoulder. He stood but he did not advance; he could not cross, not yet. The lanterns stared at him balefully; dirty and unlit. He felt that if he crossed that threshold, he would step into the nineteenth century and be lost there. You’d better get every damn thing right, his father’s voice came to him. Low profile. No rock bands (a reference to Andrew’s band, the One-Eyed Bandits, a favorite excuse for all-weekend bacchanals; cases of cheap beer and jam sessions until daylight). No school plays (Andrew had been busted for smoking outside rehearsals—twice). No party weekends (plenty of stories there). Homework and home. That’s your mantra. You make this good or we’re through with you. Andrew sensed the seriousness in his father’s voice. The anger in the eyes. The desperation. We’re through with you. Could his father really mean it? Cut him off? Throw him out of the house? Not pay for college? Andrew did not think of himself as spoiled, but the consequences of his parents being through with him, at seventeen, seemed hard. He knew the kids from Killingworth who never left the small town. Who worked in retail, or ended up as contractors—painters, landscapers, the guys who drove around in vans, eyes red from the joints they passed. . . . We’re through with you. Did he want to test his father’s resolve? To find out what through meant? He was jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, hungry . . . no. Not today he didn’t.

  He breathed deep and took his first step onto Harrow School property. Squelch. Into a puddle.

  Fuck. Figures.

  He shuffled across the gravel, trying not to drop a bag.

  APPARENTLY HE WAS early.

  “You’re not due till five,” snapped the woman who opened the door. She had frosted hair, overmascara’d lashes, and icy blue eyes that might have once been pretty. Now she was all bosom and belly. She wiped her hand on a towel. Off to the right, through the vestibule, Andrew could see a door opened to a small apartment; a lunch tray; the glow of a television.

  “I’m supposed to live here now,” he said emphatically. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “American,” she observed, glaring at him. “Everything on your own time.”

  “Unfortunately there weren’t any flights to Heathrow scheduled to land when the maid was ready.”

  “Maid?” she drew herself up, angrily. “I am Matron.”

  Was this a name, or a title? She announced it with ontological pride, as if Matron were an element in the periodic table, and she were made of it.

  “And I’ve been traveling since last night. May I please come in?”

  Matron—the Matron?—took a theatrical step to one side and let him through with a resigned sigh.

  THE LOT, IN keeping with its appearance, was something of a mess inside. Old glossy paint; battered bulletin boards; an overall dimness. The fumes of a disinfectant hung about, as if the place had been mopped in a hurry to prepare for the incoming boarders. Stairwells and passages spun outward from the main foyer. Up three flights of stairs—made of heavy slate, worn in the center by many years’ use—Matron led Andrew to his room. It shared a short corridor with three other rooms—all Sixth Formers, Matron told him (seniors, he silently translated). Its ceiling was slanted, giving it a cozy feel.

  “I suppose you’d like a tour,” grumbled Matron.

  The Lot, she said, bustling up to the next story, was really two houses: this one—the original, with all the character—and a new one, constructed onto the back of the original. She whirled him along passages and hallways. The house held sixty boys, Shells to Sixth Form. Wooden plaques with the names of the house’s former residents carved into them (Gascoigne, M.B.H.; Lodge, J.O.M. The Hon; Podmore, H.J.T. ) lined the walls of the longer corridors; upstairs there were common rooms with satellite TV and kitchenettes. Downstairs there was a snooker room, music rooms, shower, and baths. (Snooker? he wondered.) They passed a filthy brick pit with a net covering that Matron referred to as the yarder—clearly a place to play, blow off steam in bad weather. A few ab
andoned balls were trapped in its webbing like inedible flies.

  Then they descended a narrow stair into a warren of tight passages and low ceilings.

  “This the basement?” Andrew asked. He felt a chill crawl up his arms. “It’s cold. Feels like someone left the fridge door open.”

  Matron shot him a look of annoyance. “You must have caught something on the plane.”

  He began to respond—Hey, I wasn’t criticizing—but stopped. There was something different about the basement. It was as if all the crumbling and decrepit parts of the house had been banished down here. The ceiling showed bare beams with beehived plaster and old bent nails, like somebody’s attic. The walls bared their brickwork like the layers of an archeological dig: in one place, herringboned, cathedral-like; in another, ranged in crude verticals, chewed by age, the survivor of a poorer, cruder era. Along the walls, older name-plaques stood stacked against the walls, gathering dust like ancient shields in some neglected treasure room. They were not the warmer, walnut-colored ones hanging on the walls upstairs; the blackness of their lettering merged into stained and sooty wood, as if the old plates themselves were forgetting the names carved into them. A dull, almost drugged sensation came over Andrew. His mind went into slow motion, taking all this in. Maybe he had caught something on the plane. The place seemed to throb. Here is where they hide the history.

  They walked over to the shower stalls, a long, rectangular box of terra-cotta tile, lined with showerheads and soap trays. You can fight your way for a spot through all the naked boys, Matron was wryly saying, and as she spoke the words, she conjured the pictures, bare white figures twisting to bathe and scrub themselves through a scrim of steam. Andrew shook off the image. It was as if it had materialized, then vanished, on its own accord.

  “I don’t like it down here,” Matron continued. “Gives me the creepy-crawlies. There’s a ghost in the Lot, you know. Boys tease that it’s up in the rooms. I think it’s down here.”