The White Devil

by Justin Evans

  ONE NIGHT AT dinner he found himself sitting across from Vaz. The table seemed tensed, poised.

  “Hello,” said Vaz pointedly.

  “Hey,” he replied.

  Forks clinked on plates, but all eyes were on Andrew. Flickering between him and Vaz. It seemed that the house had something to say to Andrew and had appointed Vaz its unofficial spokesman.

  “Everything all right?” asked Vaz, almost chummy, a little too loud.

  “Not really,” said Andrew.

  “It’s a tragedy,” agreed Vaz.

  “Yeah, it is. Theo was an awesome guy.”

  “People are saying he died of drugs,” said Vaz. “That he got from you.”

  Andrew’s stomach dropped. He forced himself to swallow. The table fell quiet. “Why would anyone say that?” he asked.

  “You were caught with drugs at your old school. They wouldn’t let you into university in America, so you came here.”

  “What?” objected Andrew, weakly.

  Vaz’s eyes narrowed. “I know Theo would never take drugs.”

  “Not in a million years,” piped in St. John.

  “So either it’s a lie,” continued Vaz, “or you pushed them on him.”

  The food in Andrew’s mouth turned to cardboard. He glanced around the table. All the faces—Oliver, Henry, Roddy, Rhys, Nick, Leland, names he had struggled to learn—turned to him, watching for his reaction.

  “I don’t do drugs anymore,” he said. “I was never that into it. Just a couple of times. I don’t see how you know this anyway.”

  Vaz regarded him coolly, confidently. He definitely knew something. Andrew recalled that tableau: Vaz. Macrae. The others. Macrae would probably know the background of how Andrew got to Harrow. Andrew grew angry.

  “If it wasn’t drugs,” sneered Vaz, “then what happened up there, with Theo? Why isn’t anyone saying?”

  “If he died from drugs he got from me, you think I would still be sitting here?” Andrew countered, finding his voice.

  Vaz, undaunted, shrugged. “What is it, then? You were there.”

  The boys leaned in, watching Andrew.

  He opened his mouth. The image of the pale face rushed at him. That baying gurgle. Andrew blanched. He pushed away from the table, infuriated and humiliated by Vaz’s ignorant, implacable fat face, those black eyes that stayed locked on him—amused. Andrew stood. He walked away from the Sixth Form table, shaking.

  Psycho he heard someone mutter.

  Nothing like this happened till he came.

  Don’t mind us we’ll clean up after you called Vaz, shoving aside Andrew’s plate in a gesture of disgust.

  THE SIXTH FORM table at the Lot was not the only place where the absence of facts, and the ominous rain, led to speculation. It was a murder. A drug overdose. A murder by a drug gang. A mysterious illness.

  These rumors led to calls home. Calls home produced parents’ calls to the school. These calls fed indignation—boys’ and masters’—about the unexplained situation, leading to talk of little else. In Ancient History: Sir, was it drugs? In Maths: Sir, is the school hiding something? In French: Sir, were Kevins—sorry, the local townspeople—involved? The masters bumbled. They hadn’t been briefed. The request to let the family grieve privately . . . to honor the dead by keeping up the mission of the school . . . just wasn’t working. Somebody must have told the headmaster it was getting absurd—nothing was getting done.

  On the third day, a school meeting was called, in Speech Room.

  SPEECH ROOM WERE words spoken with special emphasis at Harrow. They conveyed gravitas and pride. Speech Room, tucked into the hillside, was the heart of the school. The site of the main school plays, school meetings; in the summer it would be host to Speech Day, an annual event where Sixth Formers, about to matriculate, addressed students, parents, and important guests with prepared speeches, poetry, and soliloquies—a kind of valedictory-address-as-entertainment; a display of their maturity through oratory.

  The day of the meeting, clumps of students pushed their way into Speech Room. Andrew entered alone. As he shuffled his way to a seat, he felt that silence descend again. Cold, inquisitive eyes bore into him. He wished he had waited for Roddy.

  Speech Room was not a room, in fact, but an amphitheater, seating five hundred in tightly packed, high-backed chairs. Stairs climbed to the back walls and their stained-glass windows; slender columns rose to an ornate paneled ceiling. At the front rose a stage, and on it stood a podium. On this day, a day with a darkening sky, at eleven in the morning, the headmaster, Colin Jute, took the podium, draped in his black robes. Ramrod straight with a vigorous chin, light hair going grey swept in a side part, and a cauliflower ear (he’d been a rugby player, part of his personal legend). His jowls hung balefully. Next to him slumped Piers Fawkes, legs crossed, with several long nights written on his face. Next to Fawkes sat a thin man, just forty, with wavy brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses. He was the only person onstage not in beak’s robes, and the only one in the room not dressed in dark colors: he wore a seasonal light green sport coat and slacks. He held a thick folder. Not a detective. Too skinny and professional. A doctor? The man pivoted his head, birdlike, not masking his curiosity at the sight before him: several hundred boys, washed and unwashed, beefy, prepubescent, peach-skinned, brown, the full diversity of schoolboys despite their identical dress and narrow range of social class, fidgeting in unaccustomed silence. The great semicircular room—which usually bounced with joshing and chatter—sounded only with coughs and whispers and creaking chairs. The headmaster stepped forward to speak. The whispers faded instantly. Andrew sank into his seat. He felt sick. He closed his eyes and waited for the words. Theo Ryder was strangled on the morning of September 9th. . . . If only someone had spotted his assailant, we might be safe today, and his killer brought to justice. . . .

  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