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authority , Jute had stormed, pacing, they respect firmness . ( And how should I respect you , Fawkes had thought, darkly, heaping shit on me when you know I need this job, know I can’t respond. What kind of leadership does that take? ) They want, Jute had continued (now the expert on what the students want), to push their childish games so far, but they need someone to know where the line is . You (he had actually pointed) are distant. Not engaged . You’re not respected . You’re the wrong man for a crisis, and God knows—Jute finally coming to it, at last the dagger thrust—whether a better man could have prevented it in the first place. Fawkes had clenched his fists at this point and growled I think this conversation is over before charging from the room and into the swirling, nasty weather, snarling and snapping to himself like a wounded dog until he found himself at the dimly glowing lanterns of the Lot.
    Fawkes tore off his wrinkled black robes and flung them onto a chair. He fumbled around his desk for a cigarette. He would walk out, that’s what he would do. See if they could fill his spot on such notice. He would make sure his resignation received publicity. He wasn’t so far gone as a poet that some journalist wouldn’t care. W HITESTONE W INNER Q UITS . He liked that. He lit the cigarette and dragged deeply. The nicotine revived his brain and brought with it several sobering and probably quite accurate notions: that this daydreaming was childish; and that quitting was exactly what Jute wanted him to do.
    Fawkes knew he had not been the school’s first choice as housemaster of the Lot. At first he’d only been offered the position of English instructor. But then the commission for the Byron play followed, lending Fawkes a whiff of prestige. Then the school’s top candidate withdrew (the man’s wife got breast cancer); an outside candidate was lost to a competing offer; two other assistant masters were deemed too young; and summer was waning. Someone suggested Fawkes. He was the right age; he was looking for a nearby flat anyway; he had some charisma. Fawkes never pictured himself as a caretaker; but his living expenses would be covered; he was assured Matron and the assistant master, Arnold Macrae, would do the heavy lifting; he would still have time to write. He found himself flattered, stroked, coaxed—and frankly it had been a while since he’d had that kind of attention. No one, in the whirl of mutual flattery that accompanies any hiring process—especially a last-minute, desperate one—stopped to recognize that Fawkes had never been responsible for anything more than writing a hundred lines of poetry per day. He’d never held a proper job; never even had a salary. He’d divorced young, so he’d never cared for children; and he was a heavy drinker.
    Fawkes had tried to fit himself to the role. But a dull panic seized him when he was faced with the tedious and, he soon realized, incessant demands of the job. Emails—hundreds of them—flooded his school account daily. Parents inquiring about a poor mark; about sniffles in a young one; about the timeline for the refurbishment of the squash court so their son could practice; about a knee injury in football; about bullying, and name-calling, and so on, around the clock. The boys, it turned out, were all amateur arsonists, hackers, pornographers; he was forced to walk the halls at midnight, shutting down computers and breaking up pranks. His 5 A.M. writing schedule went to hell. He started delegating more and more to Macrae. He used his commission as an excuse to write more, housemaster less. Still, it had pained him when he discovered—through a younger colleague, who in confiding his own anxieties, naïvely blurted it all out to Fawkes—that he was unpopular. Hated by Matron. Despised by Macrae. Viewed as a drunk and a wastrel by the other housemasters, who took their duties seriously, their dislike stoked by their (false) supposition that