You Are Not a Stranger Here

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 I , 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 two autumns ago elaborating the rules for the new boarders: how to treat matrons, whom to speak to if there were difficulties—deputy prefect, then a prefect, and only then a master. It felt wrong trying to picture where his teacher’s body lay, as if he’d come upon Mr. Jevins in his pants in the upstairs hall at some odd hour, an embarrassing thing he wouldn’t soon forget.

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. There will be a service in chapel Monday at four. Your parents are being notified. Out of respect for Mr. Jevins I think it fitting we eat the remainder of our breakfast in silence.” And with that he sat down.

THAT AFTERNOON, SAMUEL tried watching Giles and a few others play a game of French cricket out by the field house, but his gaze kept wandering up to the billowing white clouds. The sight of the stretcher, the clean white sheet, the open palms. It had stilled a part of Samuel’s mind he’d never realized had been moving. A tiny ball in the middle of his brain had spun to a halt. It scared him. He’d always thought fear would be something fast, a thing that pushed you forward. Up in the dorm that morning after breakfast, he’d still hoped for an explanation of his knowing, a conversation between masters he’d overheard without realizing, some comment made at supper. But when the headmaster had described what happened, the timing of it, all of a sudden Samuel saw the food on his plate and the boys opposite him and the whole dining hall as if through the wrong end of a telescope. It was as though the everyday world, all that was familiar to him, had been revealed as a tiny, crowded dwelling, full of noise and chatter. A house on an empty plain.

Beyond its walls a vast landscape.

The barely noticeable pace of the clouds’ approach across the sky seemed like evidence of this hidden enormity, his classmates’ frantic motions on the pitch nothing but the buzzing of insects against the window of an attic room.

Sitting there on the playing fields, he longed more ardently than he ever had to be with Trevor, hanging out in his room, watching him at his desk fiddling with his computer, talking on and on about computer things, the books he’d ordered by mail open beside him, his brother not listening to half of whatever Samuel said, but nodding. His brother who’d never seemed happy at his own school, who never seemed to make friends. In that room with Trevor, he might still be safe.

By the time his parents’ Peugeot turned into the car park at ten to four on the Monday, it seemed he hadn’t spoken to another person in years. He ran to the car. His mother in her black dress and handbag had barely risen from the passenger’s seat when he began, “Mum, I knew, I knew before everyone else, before they told us, I knew they’d have to get another teacher and it was right when it happened, just after seven, I knew he was dead before anyone.”

He burst into tears, pressing his face against his mother’s body, hugging her. Her hands came down to rub his back, arms cradling his head.

“All right, dear, it’s all right.”

“But I knew,” he mumbled into her dress. “Why? Why?”

Her hands came to a stop and she pressed him harder against her.

“It’s okay now, it’ll be all right… Of course you didn’t know, dear. He was a good teacher… you liked him. It’s hard, that’s all.”

Samuel looked up into her face. She had long black hair a bit ruffled now in the breeze. She never usually wore makeup but today she’d put on pale lipstick, the look in her eyes the look she had when he got sick. He wanted to comfort her, to explain.

“Mum, I knew on Friday. Mrs. Pebbly didn’t find him till Saturday morning.”

She smiled weakly, looking down at the gravel.

“You remember when Granny died,” his father said across the top of the car, his voice weirdly loud. He was staring intently at Samuel, his shirt and tie done tightly up against his throat. “You remember we were all sad then. You’re sad now.

You see? And sometimes you think things when you’re sad.

It’s natural.”

“But it was Friday. I was playing—”

His father turned his head away abruptly, glancing across the field. He closed his mouth and swallowed, his eyes squinting into the distance, lips turning down into a kind of grimace, as if he were forcing something nasty tasting down his throat.

“Come on,” he said to Samuel’s mother, turning around and heading across the lot. “We’ll be late.”

In the chapel, the headmaster recounted Mr. Jevins’s life, his days in the army, a military cross, teaching in Rhodesia, the years of service to Saint Gilbert’s. His elderly sister said a few words. The ceremony ended with a recorded playing of Jevins’s favorite church music, Allegri’s Miserere. The boarders all knew it, having heard the recording the third Sunday of every month, when the old man had doubled as minister. Each time he played the song, he reminded them that the Latin sung was Psalm Fifty-one, which he would recite to them afterward in English. Samuel remembered vividly him standing on the step of the altar in his gown, the only master left who wore one. He would pause in his reading before the last line of the penultimate verse, his voice dropping so low it seemed as if he were talking to himself: The sacrifice accept-able to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

No one translated for the audience after the singing ended.

Boys and their parents filed from the chapel into the courtyard. The women from the kitchen removed cling wrap from platters of sandwiches and began pouring the tea.

MR. JEVINS HAD died only a month into the school year.

The headmaster conducted the Latin classes until Christmas, doing a poor job of hiding his shock at how little the students had been taught. After the holiday, there was a new man, younger than Kinnet he looked, and not easily fooled.

By the time Samuel came home for the summer, his parents appeared to have forgotten his teacher’s death, as though it were just another term-time event, a cricket match won or lost. He spent a week lying around the house, then at last Trevor returned.

He was sixteen now, five years older than Samuel. He seemed taller and thinner than he had at Christmas, his acne a bit worse. Usually when they returned from school they would spend at least a few hours rigging traps for the cat, books pulled off tables by strings soaked in tuna water or obstacle courses of cosmetics items taken from their mother’s cupboard and arranged on the stairs. But each holiday Trevor seemed less interested and this time he didn’t want to do it at all.

He’d got his learner’s permit and three mornings a week he had driving lessons. The rest of his time he spent in his room at the computer, programming in some machine code, the screen covered in lines of numbers and symbols.

Newsletters from American software companies and product literature covered his desk and floor. Samuel watched his brother work, or just hung out in his room and read or played on the game station.

It didn’t matter that Trevor only half listened to him or that when he did listen he often made fun of him. His brother being there, the sound of his voice, it was enough. The distance from things he’d kept experiencing during the year, that odd retreat from the physical world, it diminished with Trevor around. Lying on the floor beneath his brother’s window, staring up at the sky on those summer afternoons, listening to Trevor’s fingers on the keyboard, Samuel understood with a secret embarrassment that he loved his brother. One afternoon, their mother banned Trevor from the computer for three hours and told them both to go outside.

Under a tree in the orchard, Samuel sat cross-legged while Trevor lay closer to the trunk in deeper shade, his eyes closed, trying, as he’d told Samuel, to retain in his mind the next line of his program.

Samuel watched huge clouds float on the horizon, taller than churches, vacant palaces in the sky.

“Trev?” he said. “You know that teacher of mine that died last year?”

“Hmmm.” An American baseball cap shaded his brother’s face; he wore trousers and long sleeves, determined that if he had to be outside he would at least prevent himself from getting a tan.

“When he died?” Samuel said. “I knew. Right when it happened.”

“Huh-uh.”

“But it was before anyone else. We hadn’t been told. The school didn’t even know. Not till the next day.”

“Hmmm,” Trevor said. “Maybe you dreamt it. Like Dad and that cousin of his.”

“I wasn’t dreaming, Trev, I was playing football… What about Dad’s cousin?”

Trevor pulled tufts of grass from the orchard floor and threw them down over his feet. “We were on holiday up at the Morlands’. You were still a diaper-ridden little rodent, shitting huge volumes of refuse.”

“Come on, Trevor.”

“Don’t deny it. Anyway, it was when those fat Morlands used to give us that bit at the back with the door between where we slept and Mum and Dad’s room. Dad had this dream his cousin William had died. I woke up and he was sitting at the edge of the bed, speaking with this funny little quiet voice, saying it was sad William died, going on about how the two of them used to play in the back of Granddad’s rope factory.

Creepy, really. Then he got up and went back in the other room. Mum tried telling me the phone call had come the day before, that they just hadn’t told me yet, but I knew he hadn’t been on the phone, and I saw him talking on the cordless the next morning out in the garden before breakfast, looking all worried.

“Anyway, we left so they could go to the funeral. I’m probably not supposed to tell you. They give you flack about your whatsit with that teacher last year?”

“Dad swallowed.”

“Typical. He needs to develop a new subroutine for anger, that one’s dated.”

“We’re going back to the Wests’ for holiday, aren’t we?”

“Yes. Again. Same thing three summers running. Oh, but you like boats, Trevor, and don’t tell me you and Peter don’t have enormous fun, because you do,” Trevor said, imitating their mother’s matter-of-fact reporting of their inner lives.

“Peter West is a rugby-crazed Nazi. He should be taken out and shot.”

Samuel waited but Trevor said nothing about Penelope, the sister. Last time they’d gone up, it seemed like Trevor disliked her the way he did with girls he liked.

Samuel himself hated going to Wales. He had to sleep in what seemed more like the cabin of a ship than a bedroom, under a duvet that smelled of seaweed. The Wests’ kids were both around Trevor’s age; they treated Samuel like a neighbor’s dog their parents had sworn them to mind.

“Why do you think Mum and Dad tried hiding it from you like that?” Samuel asked.

“Dad having dreamt it first, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Sam.” Patches of bare earth were left where he’d torn up the roots of the grass. “Who knows?” He looked up with a crazed smile. “Maybe you should try bending spoons. I bet you’d get on TV for that.” He chuckled, rolling his head back onto the grass. Samuel grabbed his foot and started pulling him across the ground. He kicked back and shouted that Samuel was nothing but a child and then Samuel let go and they wandered into the barn looking about for something to do.

A FEW DAYS later, sitting in the car on the motorway north, Samuel studied the back of his father’s head, his shoulder, the thick branch of his upper arm, the dark-haired forearm, his hand gripping the knob of the gearshift. The tired look on his face when he came through the back door from work, the distracted way he ate his dinner, the blur of weekend afternoons when he napped on the front hall couch, all this disappeared when he got behind the wheel of the car.

He spoke more, seemed alive in a different way. Samuel thought of this as his father’s real self that for some reason only appeared in between places. Whenever he got picked up from school at the end of a term and they reached the head of the valley—just the two of them—his father would press the car up to ninety miles an hour on the straight country lane and then cut the engine as they swooped onto the downhill. They’d plummet faster and faster, fields whizzing by, the car freewheeling, slowly losing speed as they glided along the valley floor, until eventually they crept at fifteen, ten, five miles an hour, engine still off, seeing how far they could get on initial speed plus gravity: to the Southers’ farm or the pub or one time all the way to the foot of the humpback bridge. In the car his father seemed like a magician, in control of everything. Not a man in the middle of the night speaking in a quiet voice of dreams. They arrived at the Wests’ as darkness fell and ate their dinner on their laps in the living room. The house was modern, built onto a cliff on the isle of Anglesey just across the Menai Strait from north Wales. A summer home made for boating, a dock down below. One wall of the living room was glass and through it you could see the lights of houses on the far shore and the lights of a yacht traveling back against the channel’s current, returning from a day at sea.

PETER TOOK TREVOR and Samuel out in the canoe the next morning. He was a year younger than Trevor, co-captain of his rugby team. He had a helmet of thick blond hair, a wide neck, and he didn’t wear any socks with his trainers.

“Faster!” he called over his shoulder as Trevor and Samuel paddled furiously on the right side of the canoe, their two strokes trying to balance the force of Peter’s one to keep the boat on course for the beach out where the strait opened onto the sea. The three of them were racing ahead of Penelope and the adults, who followed behind in a rowboat and a little Sunfish, laden with provisions for lunch and umbrellas for the sun.

Each time Trevor leaned forward to pull his paddle through the water, Samuel could see the muscles in his brother’s neck straining. He was thin and had never been particularly strong.

“Move it along, you two,” Peter yelled, and Trevor’s face went red with exertion.

When the others arrived, towels were handed out and the volleyball net set up. Penelope lay in the sun reading a book.

She was two years older than her brother and quieter. The only sport she ever spoke of was sailing, which she did with her father. While the rest of them played volleyball, Trevor and Samuel sat next to her, under the shade of a nearby umbrella, Trevor in his long sleeves.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Camus,” she said. Her hair was very short and seemed unnaturally pale, a nameless shade between blond and white. There was something very adult about her hair.

“What’s the book about?”

“A plague.”

“Cool,” Trevor said, nodding.

Samuel dug a large hole in the sand in front of him. He felt certain their conversation had something to do with sex.

“You still live in Devon, right?” his brother asked.

“Yeah, it’s awful. The point of life in a place so small escapes me.”

Trevor seemed to have no reply to this but started talking instead about a software application he had in development that charted people’s moods over time. For a year you entered data on your mental state along with thirty variables of diet, weather, geographical location, et cetera, and then the program used the data to predict your mood on future days. When it was done he would try to get the Weather Channel’s Web site to offer a link to the download.

“Right,” Penelope said, returning to her book.

“Do you ever go to parties?” Trevor asked.

Samuel imagined disappearing into the hole he’d dug in front of him.

“Sometimes,” she replied, not looking up from the page.

Then Mr. West came by and said it was time for lunch. That evening a band played at the pub in the village. You had to be fifteen to go, so Samuel stayed behind while the others went. They didn’t get back until late, and Peter and Trevor woke him, turning on the light and making noise. They smelled of smoke and beer. Peter got straight into bed and rolled onto his side. Trevor just sat there for a long time on the edge of his bed, staring about.

“Turn the light out, would you?” Peter said. “And while you’re at it, stop gawking at my sister.”

Trevor made no motion for the lamp. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in his hands. With a disgusted huff, Peter got out of bed and switched off the light, leaving Trevor sitting in the dark. Samuel tried to close his eyes and go back to sleep but he couldn’t. He lay on his side looking at his brother’s outline against the barely visible square of the room’s only window. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

Eventually, Trevor climbed under the sheets, and Samuel kept listening until his breathing went quiet.

IN THE MIDDLE of their second week, the two families took a long hike up Mount Snowdon. The day was hot, the air thin and dry. It was nearly six by the time they returned to the cars. Samuel rode in the back seat with his brother, drifting into sleep along the way. Something heavy was pressing against the side of his head. He saw Giles kicking a football up against a copper beech tree. From all around, in the air, down through the earth, all through his body, Samuel felt the crumpled pity he’d felt that evening on the lawn, but now it was as if Jevins were still alive, were only about to die, as they stood there doing nothing, Giles smiling. But then Jevins was under the white sheet, he was dead, and the pity, that pressure in Samuel’s head, became stronger, thick as water all round him. He saw a triangle of sunlight on the water’s surface, blackness either side. Trevor was there. The light was blinding him. Samuel heard his brother yell. He stood on the deck of the Wests’ house, roofed now in glass.

Somewhere behind him a boat’s hull shattered. Beneath the glass roof it was no longer the deck, but Trevor’s room, clothes tidied into drawers, books piled neatly on the floor by the hard drive, dust on the stacks of twelve-inch singles, a weeping coming from under his mother’s door. He saw his father tied to a chair and gagged.

“…blubbering like a fat infant,” he heard, waking to find himself with his face pressed against his brother’s shoulder, mouth half open against his shirt, his own body hot with sweat. His mother looked back over her shoulder and smiled.

“Having a sleep, are you?”

He turned to the window and saw that they were rising onto the bridge, the sun-dappled waters of the strait running beneath them.

All through supper, his mind remained captive to the dream.

The sights and sounds of people at the table reached him from the distance he’d experienced for the first time at school that morning in the dining hall. When coffee and pudding came round, Samuel’s father said he was going to fetch a map from the car. Samuel asked to be excused and followed him out the back door into the drive.

“Not having cake?” he said when he turned the corner round the Peugeot and noticed Samuel standing there. He’d spent most of the holiday chatting with Mr. West, napping in the afternoons, encouraging his sons to take up Peter’s offers of pickup rugby with his friends.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“You know how Mrs. West said Penelope should take Trevor out for a sail?”

“Did she? Right. What about it?”

His father had his hand on the door of the car but hadn’t opened it yet.

“You can’t let them.”

“How do you mean?”

Samuel felt his face go red in the darkness.

“What are you talking about?” his father said.

Clutching his hands into fists, Samuel said, “It’s like you and cousin William.”

His father stood very still for a moment. Then he walked quickly round the car, coming to stand directly in front of Samuel. He was tall and Samuel only came up to his chest.

He wore one of the same blue Oxford shirts he wore each day to work, only rolled at the sleeves and without a tie.

“Now you listen to me,” he said in a tone so severe it frightened Samuel. “I suppose it’s your brother who saw fit to tell you some story about me and William. It is not true. Do you understand me?”

Samuel could hear the roar and toss of waves against the rocks. Above the line of trees, stars were visible.

“I asked you a question, young man.”

“You never believed me when I told you about Mr. Jevins,” Samuel said, thankful it was dark enough that his father couldn’t see the water welling in his eyes.

“So that’s what this is about.”

“No!” Samuel said through gritted teeth. “You can’t let them go sailing.”

His father’s hands gripped Samuel’s shoulders, his fingers digging into his flesh to the point of pain.

“I’m going to say this once,” he said, “so you had better listen. You’re twelve years old and you have a lot of ideas in your head, but nothing will wreck you quicker than if you let yourself confuse what’s real and what isn’t, you hear me? I don’t know what it is you’re dreaming, or what you dreamt about that teacher, but that’s all it is—dreams. Your life’s got nothing to do with those shadows, nothing at all.

“If Penelope and Trevor want to go sailing, that’s exactly what they’ll do. And I don’t want to hear you’ve gone frightening your mother or brother about this nonsense, you understand? You’re a perfectly normal boy. Everyone has nightmares. They’re tough sometimes. You wake up and you get on with things. That’s just how it is. Now you go on into the house and forget about this. Go on.” He turned Samuel around and aimed him at the back door.

THEY RETURNED FROM the beach earlier than usual the next day, in the middle of the afternoon, people scattering into various parts of the house to shower or nap.

Samuel wandered out onto the deck and found his mother reclining in a chair reading her book. The sun had gone in behind some clouds. She looked up from the page and smiled.

“It’s not so bad here, is it?” she said.

Samuel shrugged.

His mother gazed out over the water. “You looking forward to being a prefect next term? You know your father was quite proud when he heard that.”

“It’ll be all right, I guess.”

“Well, I think it’s quite something.” She turned to admire him.

“Aren’t you going sailing?”

“Mr. West said he’d had it for the day.”

“No, Penelope’s taking the boat out, she and Trevor are going. You could probably tag along if you wanted.”

He felt a tingling in his hands, the air suddenly live with current. He’d tried to forget his dream as his father had told him to. But he felt sick to his stomach with the memory of it now, and it didn’t matter what his father thought.

“You can’t let them,” he said, nearly whispering.

“What are you talking about?”

“Mum. You have to listen. Trevor, he’s going to die out there.

You can’t let them.”

His mother leaned sharply forward, the muscles of her jaw tightening. “How dare you say that,” she said. “How dare you say your own brother is going to die. You should be ashamed! What’s the matter with you?”

“I know about cousin William, Mum—Trev told me—and you can believe whatever you want about Mr. Jevins, but I knew, I fucking knew—”

“Samuel!”

“—and yesterday in the car, I dreamt, I did, I dreamt he was dead and there was a sailboat, and I heard him yell. God, Mum, why won’t you believe me!”

His words seemed to push her back into her chair.

“You dreamt it?” she asked, her tone suddenly flat.

“What’s going on here?” Samuel heard his father ask. He turned to see him standing on the deck behind them. “What’s that you just said to your mother?”

“Roger—”

“No, Elizabeth. I will not indulge this. This family is not going to be turned into a madhouse because of some bloody coincidence that happened ten years ago. It’s ridiculous.

And you, Sam. I thought I’d made myself clear.”

His father grabbed him by the arm and pulled him through the kitchen, past Peter, who looked up in surprise from his plate of biscuits, and past Mrs. West in the hall, down the stairs to the boys’ room. He sat Samuel down on the bed.

“Now you’re going to spend the rest of the day in here, you understand? And you have a good long think about what you’ve just done—scaring your own mother.” His voice was so laden with derision, Samuel thought he might spit on him.

But he turned instead and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Minutes passed. Samuel heard splashing; Penelope called something up to her parents; water sloshed under the dock.

He felt as though his mind’s eye were being dragged through the wall to watch his brother step onto the boat. A dead, rattling sound filled the air of the room. He couldn’t bear it. He hurried to the window, cranked it open as far as it would go, and started yelling, he barely knew what, words coming too quickly, in a jumble. “Stay!” They had to stay here. “Trevor!”

In a moment the door opened behind him, and then his father had him up against one of the bunk beds. He slapped Samuel hard across the face, bouncing his head off the wood of the bed frame. Then he slapped him again, yelling words Samuel couldn’t make out. When his shouting stopped, he turned and left the room.

Later, a few minutes perhaps, a key turned in the knob, locking the door from the outside.

Samuel’s body was numb. He sat cross-legged on the floor, holding his head in his hands, the rattling sound still there in his ears. He saw spots darkening brown on his khaki shorts and realized tears were dripping from his cheeks. He wiped them away and stared at the knitted rows of blue carpet dissolving into infinite pattern. He heard rope chafing on the cleats of the Sunfish, the halyard snapping against the mast.

He felt very tired, as if he’d been running through the woods at school for hours and hours, all the coming pain of his brother’s death arriving in a wave too strong to survive awake. Trevor. Who had been with him in those spare hours in the house, whose room and company he longed for. His brother who had never made friends of his own, who seemed forever lonely.

It will drive them crazy, he thought, this pain. What Samuel had said, what he knew. There was nowhere for it to go. It would lay his parents’ world to ruin. He’d live with his mother somewhere; his father wouldn’t be able to bear him. He remembered standing in the main hall with Mr. Kinnet, trying to convince himself it wasn’t true about Jevins. He tried with his whole spirit to go back there now, to the place where he could believe it was a stupid dream, that his mind was being squeezed in the fist of some evil pretender. He prayed like they did in chapel, Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses…

The sail flapped in the breeze.

“Ready?” Trevor called.

The window faced east down the strait. Standing by it, Samuel couldn’t see the boat. Or the sun emerging from behind the bank of cloud. Only the rays of light striking the bridge’s red arch, shining on the water.

“Careful now, you two,” he heard his mother call from the deck, the desperation she tried to hide within the rise of her voice not hidden from Samuel.

Then no more sounds. He turned from the window heavy lidded, his body lowering itself down onto the bed. He laid his head on the pillow and sleep dragged him under.

SAMUEL WOKE TO the feeling of a hand against his cheek.

His mother was sitting by him on the edge of the bed.

“You should come up for supper,” she said. “There’s kedgeree and I saved you some lemonade.”

He clutched her arm.

“They’re fine, Sam, they’re fine. They were only gone a little while, they’re up there now finishing their dinner. Everything’s fine.” She ran her hand through his damp hair, a frail look of relief still hovering in the creases of her face.

“He was too hard today, your father, he wasn’t fair.” Her fingers rubbed his scalp. She looked as though she might cry, but she didn’t.

“There are things you don’t know, Sam, things that make it hard for him.” She paused and looked down at the floor.

Samuel held his mother’s hand, muscles he never knew he had letting go with relief. To be here, his mother’s pulse against his fingers, her face above him, the most familiar thing in the world, listening to her voice, knowing Trevor was upstairs, the house safely around them. He needed nothing more.

“This business your brother told you about—your father’s dream… Well, it’s true he had that dream. And that they didn’t call until the next day, but there’s a good reason for that. He’d seen William just the week before down at the hospital in Southampton, and they knew he wasn’t doing well so it makes sense he would have a dream about it, because of his health, his cousin’s health.”

She glanced up at Samuel and then away again, out the window. “Your father gets upset when he hears you talking about knowing these things, or dreaming; he gets worried, because he loves you and he doesn’t want you to get confused. It’s important you don’t get confused. There are coincidences, but it doesn’t mean the world doesn’t make sense. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Samuel sat up and hugged his mother.

“Darling,” she said, “if you’re having nightmares, if they’re bad, we can find someone, someone you can talk with.” He closed his eyes and pressed his face against her shoulder.

Upstairs, Peter and Penelope and Trevor all looked at him with a strange curiosity, as if he’d just returned from hospital and they were wondering if he was better. He had after all, he thought to himself, yelled some pretty weird stuff out the window for no reason they could tell. Their caution lasted only briefly. He sat at the table eating his kedgeree and drinking his lemonade. Penelope and Trevor seemed to be getting along a bit now. They played a game of racing demon on the table beside him as he ate his cake.

His father and Mr. West had gone down to the pub. Though he’d slept most of the afternoon, he felt tired enough to go to bed after they all watched a video. His mother gave him another hug in the hallway, just outside their bedroom. Trevor came over and joined them.

“Went a bit weird there, hey, Sammy?”

“Yeah,” Samuel said, holding back tears at the feeling of his brother’s arms around him.

IT WAS IN the middle of a light shower the following afternoon that the two of them set off in the car to get vegetables and bread from the village. According to Penelope, who was escorted back to the house only a little while later unharmed, the sun appeared just as the rain ended, a triangle of light glistening on the black pavement, and onto the windshield, causing Trevor to slant into the right lane. The car ripped into the side of the oncoming van before hitting the swerving trailer, the impact smashing the hull of a white sailboat in tow. Samuel sat on the back steps, waiting for his parents to return from the hospital. When they pulled up to the house, hours later, they saw him there. They didn’t get out of the car right away. The eyes of their pale, haggard faces stared at him through the windshield. From the kitchen he could hear a radio playing, the murmur of singing voices.

A broken spirit. That’s what Jevins said God wanted. A broken and contrite heart. Was this the God of the vast landscape, out where Samuel knew now he would spend the rest of his days? The quiet place, beyond the walls of the crowded dwelling.

A broken spirit. Would that be enough?