Kevin
couldn’t stop glancing at the clock. It
was already 8:17, but they hadn’t come for him. This was Tuesday, wasn’t it?
Every Tuesday
it was the same. Crowded in the stuffy homework room under dim yellow lights,
they’d wait for the messenger to come over from the house. First, they’d hear
his scrunching footsteps in the gravel on the parade ground outside. Then, when
he entered, he’d evade all eyes in the hushed classroom, stoop to the prefect’s
ear and whisper the names of those to be called.
Kevin
sat at his desk near the back of the room among some twenty-five others, bent
over his history project. The duty
prefect, Michael Stafford, a much older boy than most of them, with a grave,
acne-scarred face and bloodhound’s eyes behind tortoise-shell glasses, sat
facing them on a dais at the front, doing his own ‘prep,’ but keeping a wary
eye on his underlings, alert for furtively passed written notes, or hissed
conversations behind the backs of hands.
Trying
to concentrate, Kevin dipped his nib in the inkwell and wrote: “Hengist and Horsa were the leaders of the
Jutes, who landed in England at Ebbsfleet, Kent, in AD 449. Horsa was killed in
battle around AD 455, but Hengist, his brother, went on to rule South Britain .
. .”
Outside,
wind-driven rain beat on the classroom windows, but Kevin still heard the
approaching footsteps on the gravel, and tensed when the messenger entered. The
whispered conversation was longer than usual, and Stafford was making a
penciled note of the names.
A
minute or two passed after the messenger left the room. Wasn’t Stafford going to call anyone? But when he did look up and speak it was not
Kevin’s surname he called, but someone else’s.
“Griffiths.”
David
Griffiths, known as ‘Scruffy,’ looked up, an unkempt, curly-headed boy with a
distinct Welsh accent, who always looked as though he slept in his crumpled
school uniform.
“Yes, Stafford?”
“Mr.
Evans wants to see you.”
Friends
exchanged amused glances, and exaggerated coughing broke out around the
room. Scruffy, always in trouble, was
called to Mr. Evans’ study on several Tuesday nights each term. The
misdemeanors for which he was about to receive four strokes of the cane would,
everyone in the room knew, be much the same as they always had been: thirty
minutes detention for an untidy locker; another thirty for an unlaced shoe at
morning chapel; another for forgetting to bring his French dictionary. For
Scruffy Griffiths, like everyone else, an accumulation of ninety or more
minutes of detention in a single week meant a beating. Punishments of six
strokes were kept for more venal sins: a lie; a swear word, or damage to school
property.
Scruffy
stood up with a sudden jerky movement, his chair making a harsh scraping sound
as he pushed it back on the wood-block floor. So Kevin wasn’t going to be
first? Somehow that made the ordeal harder to bear. He’d now have to wait,
pondering what was to come while the other boy walked over to Mr. Evans’ house,
took what was coming to him, and returned to the classroom. If he knew Scruffy,
he’d be blubbering when he came back and took his seat.
Kevin
listened as Griffiths’s unhurried footsteps passed the window. Then nearly ten
minutes dragged by. When he returned he wasn’t crying after all, though his
eyes were swollen and his face flushed.
On
the dais, Stafford consulted the scribbled note beside him.
“Fitzgerald.”
Kevin
swallowed. “Yes, Stafford?”
“Mr.
Evans wants to see you.”
There were a few wry grins around the
homework room, but otherwise there was less reaction than when Griffiths had
been summoned. Unlike Scruffy, Kevin was not the butt of the jokes and jibes
the Welsh boy endured. Kevin rarely if ever found the legs of his pajama pants
tied in knots in the dormitory, his bicycle tires deflated, or his toothbrush
clogged with carbolic soap.
Out
in the corridor, passing empty, darkened classrooms, he stepped into the wind
outside, pulling up his collar against the rain. At the bottom of the parade
ground, across the street behind tall, dim street lamps, stood Crowden House,
Mr. Evans’ house, with its high, leaded gable windows. The building was totally
dark, and yet the front door was wide open.
But Kevin was not allowed to enter through this door, because it was
only for the use of Mr.Evans and his monitors, and visiting parents. Kevin and others, the hoi polloi of Crowden House, went in and out of the building only
by its back door. He climbed the stone steps and through the shadowy changing
rooms, with their overloaded clothes hooks, draped with muddy Rugby shirts and
shorts and grubby towels, past the boot lockers, the echoing white-tiled bath
and shower rooms, to Mr. Evans’ oak study door.
Kevin
knocked. There was a chink of light under the door. Beyond it he heard Evans
cough. A smoker’s cough.
“Enter.”
The
housemaster’s study reeked of pipe tobacco. Evans sat upright, reading a book
in a shiny brown leather armchair in front of a hissing gas stove, seeming not
to notice Kevin’s entrance.
“You wanted
to see me, sir?”
Evans
looked up feigning surprise, and eased himself out of his chair. He was an
immensely tall man with drooping shoulders, an ivory white face, a beaky nose
and mournful eyes. In the school library there was a life-sized marble bust of
a lesser Roman emperor that bore a remarkable resemblance to him.
“Yes,
Fitzgerald. I did indeed. And I expect you can imagine why.”
Kevin
shrugged. “No Sir. I can’t,” he said.
“I
think you can, boy. Reflect on it.”
Kevin
reflected.
“It’s
. . . is it because I’ve gone over ninety minutes this week, sir?”
“Precisely.
And what does that mean to you and me, Fitzgerald?”
“That
you’re going to beat me, Sir.”
Mr.
Evans smiled. But the smile was only on his thin lips. There was no warmth or
friendliness in his sad eyes.
“Exactly
right.” Evans opened a closet door beside the fireplace that seemed to overflow
with sports equipment. A golf bag, cricket bats, tennis racquets, hockey
sticks. Reaching in behind these he drew out a long, thin bamboo cane.
“Alright,
then,” Evans said, “I’ll meet you in the common room. You’ll find the chair
down there somewhere.”
Outside
the housemaster’s door, Kevin groped his way along the darkened corridor. In
the common room he switched on the lights and gazed round the big, dingy hall.
On two unvarnished wood tables lay the disordered remains of the day’s
newspapers. Around the room, against the walls, stood some forty upright wooden
chairs. At the far end was a worn billiards table.
And
in the middle of the common room, standing alone was a single chair quite
different from the others. It had a circular plywood seat on four spindly legs,
and it’s back was made of two pieces of brown-varnished doweling, secured to
the seat in an inverted U-shape.
“Well,
we’ve been here a few times before together, haven’t we Fitzgerald?” said
Evans, standing in the doorway.
Kevin stood
by the chair, with one hand resting on the curve of its back. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s
better. Now take your position, if you will.” He closed the door behind him.
Kevin knew
what he had to do. Turning his back to Evans, he faced the chair, grasped its
seat with both hands, lowered his head and locked his neck under its curved
cane back. Behind him, Evans made swishing practice strokes in the air with his
cane with the nonchalance of a Sunday morning golfer.
Bent over
in this strained position, Kevin’s back hurt. Why didn’t the bastard get on
with it?
“Are you
ready, boy?”
“Ready,
sir.”
Kevin
tightened his buttocks, bit his lip and held his breath. But Evans seemed not
to be ready. Kevin could hear him pacing the floor behind him, and
involuntarily relaxed a little.
Facing the
floor, his head clamped under the chair back, Kevin looked down at the linoleum
two feet below. What was that by the leg of the chair? An old sneaker. What was
that doing here?
It was at
that moment, while Kevin was off-guard and his muscles not tightened in
readiness, that the first stroke fell. It cut across both buttocks, perfectly
parallel. It didn’t hurt so much as it numbed him. This wasn’t too bad, he
thought. He could take this.
Evans
has stepped back a few paces, and as he did so made a few more switches in the
air. Nothing happened for a few moments and Kevin lowered his head a little,
withdrew it from the chair back, and half turned to look at his housemaster.
Evans was standing maybe eight feet behind him, immobile, the cane lowered in
his right hand. His eyes seemed to be on Kevin’s buttocks, and he’d have been
hard-pressed to interpret the distracted look in the man’s eyes.
“Look to
your front,” Evans snapped.
Kevin
took a firmer grasp on the chair seat and squeezed the cheeks of his bottom
together as tightly as he could. He heard the little run as Evans approached
and the second stroke came slashing in. His body jerked upward with pain,
jolting the back of his head against its wooden restraint. Tears welled into
his eyes. He braced himself for the third stroke, and it came quickly, this
time at a sharp slashing angle to the first two strokes. His feet twisted and
his toes curled downward in reaction to the pain. One more, only one more.
There
was another long pause. He could hear Evans walking farther away this time,
making little wheezing, breathless sounds between his teeth. Kevin tensed
again, and heard the four quickening paces as he braced every muscle in his
body, his head stiff-necked, twisting sideways, his jaw locked.
So
great was the force of the fourth, final stroke that Kevin stumbled forward a
pace, his head still locked. He stood upright, lifting the chair off the floor,
and raised it a little to disentangle his head. Then he lowered it to the
ground and turned toward his housemaster.
By
now his eyes were so full of tears that he could barely see Evans. He wiped his
eyes with a sleeve of his shirt. Evans said nothing.
“Can
I go now, sir?”
Evens
looked down. “The question’s not whether you can go, Fitzgerald. It’s whether you may go.”
“May I go,
sir?”
“Indeed you
may.”
Kevin made
for the door.
“Fitzgerald.”
Kevin
turned. “Sir?”
“Good man.
Well taken.” He was smiling. The man was
smiling!
“Thank you.
Sir.”
Outside,
in the darkness of the changing rooms, he loosened his belt and slipped his
hand down the inside of the back of his undershorts. He felt the four tender
lines, not yet swollen into weals and, where the strokes had crossed, the
smallest sticky trace of blood on his fingertips. He withdrew his hand, sucking
the rich, iron-tasting blood from his fingertips.
On
his way back to the classroom, on the edge of the parade ground, he passed the
lighted red telephone booth on the sidewalk. Feeling in his pocket he took out
a florin, hauled open the heavy door, slipped inside and dropped the coin into
the slot. He dialed his parents’ number.
They
often had dinner parties on Tuesday nights, but he was sure they wouldn’t mind.
He thought of his mother and father at either end of the table in the warm,
dark paneled dining room, their faces and those of their guests lit by the
three candelabra.
It was cold
in the phone booth, and there was a smell of stale tobacco smoke. His mother
answered the phone. He’d hoped she would.
“Faversham
783”
“Hello,
Mummy.”
“Oh, It’s
my birthday boy. Happy birthday, Kevin, dear. Did you have a nice day?”
“Not
bad.”
In
the background he heard a roar of laughter, and his mother said, “I can’t talk
too long Kevin. We have people to dinner.”
“That’s
all right,” the boy said.
“Oh,
by the way,” his mother said, “I’m afraid your card and present will be a day
or two late. I only remembered to post them this morning. But don’t worry; it’s
on the way. Really.”
“That’s
okay. It’s doesn’t matter. I expect it’ll come tomorrow.”
There
was a pause, then his mother said: “Well, I must go now, dear. Daddy sends his
love, too. You’re all right then, are you?
“Yes,
Mummy, I’m fine.”
“That’s
all right then. Kiss kiss.”
“Mummy,
I . . .”
“What’s
that, dear?”
Was
there any point? “Nothing, Mummy. It’s nothing.”
“Bye
then.”
A
hundred and thirty miles away the line went dead.
He
was limping a little, and it hurt, but it would soon be all right again.
Everything worked out all right in the end.
In
the classroom, waiting his return, they heard his footsteps on the gravel.
end
