Report

Nobody ran.

That was the first thing. The bell went at ten past three, the last bell, the bell that on every other day of the year set off the whole of Ellicott like a starting gun, eleven hundred people hitting the corridors at once, bags and coats and shouting and the side doors banging; and in room fourteen twenty-six people got up from the alphabet and put their books in their bags and picked up their coats and went out, quietly, one at a time, the way people leave a church.

Each of them, going out, passed Mr Pettigrew’s desk.

Each of them, going out, said Thank you, Mr Pettigrew.

Not all at once. One at a time. June first, and then Felix with his ducks, and Lucía, and Marcus with his trombone case, Thank you, Mr Pettigrew, and Devon, with his telephone in his pocket for once, very quietly, Thank you, sir, and Priya, who said it without looking at him and without stopping, the way she said everything, but said it.

Mr Pettigrew stood behind the desk with the box of cards in front of him and said Thank you back to each of them, a little more surprised each time, as though he were being handed small unexpected presents one after another and did not know where to put them all.

“What a nice class,” he said to Frederick, when they had gone, and there was nobody left in room fourteen but the two of them and Theo, who was taking a very long time over his bag. “What a nice, quiet, polite class. In my day they’d have been out of that door before the bell finished. Somebody’s brought them up very well.”

“Mr Abernathy, sir,” said Frederick. “He’s our homeroom.”

“Abernathy,” said Mr Pettigrew, with deep satisfaction, as though a theory had been confirmed. “Still in the jacket. Well. It shows.”

---

Mr Stroud was in the doorway.

He had gone out ahead of the class, at the bell, with his clipboard against his chest, and was standing now just outside the door, under the walkway, in the thin rain that was nearly not rain any more, and with him, Frederick saw, was Dr Brooks, in her grey suit, with her reading glasses on their chain, who must have come across the yard to collect him at the end of the day, the way you collect a parcel.

They were standing just outside the glass door of room fourteen, and the glass door was not quite shut, and Frederick, who was helping Mr Pettigrew put the elastic bands back round the cards, the ones that had not snapped, could hear every word.

“…a very full day, Dr Brooks,” Mr Stroud was saying. “Very full. I’ll put it all in writing, naturally. You’ll have the report within the month. But you’ll want my impressions.”

“I would,” said Dr Brooks.

“The building,” said Mr Stroud, “leaks.”

“It does.”

“I counted eleven buckets by the end of seventh period. I believe that may be a record.”

“It equals one,” said Dr Brooks. “It was eleven on the thirty-first of October.”

“Was it.” Mr Stroud wrote that down. “The teaching. Adequate to good. Mr Abernathy, very good. Ms Varga, unorthodox but defensible. Mrs Ruiz,” he paused, “spirited. Mrs Pruitt wears two cardigans. The physical education master picks the sides himself, which I’ve noted, and approve of. And the substitute,” he lowered his voice slightly, though not enough, “the substitute, Dr Brooks, is a remarkable old man and a very good teacher and should, in my professional opinion, have retired some time ago and should on no account be allowed to.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Don’t,” said Mr Stroud. “He’ll be insufferable.”

---

“And the pupils,” said Dr Brooks.

“The pupils,” said Mr Stroud, “are polite. Unusually so. Very quiet. Almost,” he searched for the word, “conspiratorial. I had the strongest impression all day that they knew something I did not.”

There was a pause, outside the door.

“Children often do,” said Dr Brooks.

“Quite. Quite. One boy,” said Mr Stroud, and Frederick, at the desk, with an elastic band in his fingers, went very still, “one boy I must mention. In the sophomore year. In the H’s. Hanover.”

“Ah,” said Dr Brooks.

“You’ll know him.”

“I know all of them, Mr Stroud.”

“Of course. Hanover.” Mr Stroud turned a page on the clipboard. “Inattentive in five lessons out of six. I have the details. Geometry, chemistry, Spanish, physical education, art. Struck by a ball in physical education, though not seriously. He seemed, all day, to be thinking about something else entirely. I don’t know what. Something weighing on him.” He paused. “And in history this morning, Dr Brooks, he gave an answer about the Charter, which I recorded at the time as sound, and which he himself, this afternoon, in my presence, corrected. At the board. Against my express view. With an authority.”

“Did he.”

“He did. I have had to revise my note.” Mr Stroud sounded, Frederick thought, very nearly hurt. “It is the first proposition in thirty years that I have had to revise during an inspection, Dr Brooks. The first. I have written it down.” He looked at the clipboard. “I have, I’m afraid, also had to revise sound on the Charter. I had him as sound on the Charter in the morning. By the afternoon he was sounder than I was.” He cleared his throat. “Five inattentions,” he said, “and one error. Corrected.”

“One error corrected,” said Dr Brooks, “is the whole of what a school is for, Mr Stroud.”

There was a pause.

“I’ll put that in the report,” said Mr Stroud, after a moment. “If I may.”

“Please do.”

---

Castellanos was standing against the wall of the glass block, just along from the door, in the shelter of the walkway, with his hands folded in front of him and the badge on his chest that said PARENT.

Mr Stroud, turning to go with Dr Brooks, saw him, and stopped.

He had passed Castellanos, Frederick thought, at least seven times that day. On the stairs. In the corridor. By the vending machine. At the gym door. In the corridor again, outside the office, Lost, are you? He had never once looked at him for more than a second. He looked at him now, for longer, with the clipboard against his chest, and the hand went along the shelf and stopped, for the first time all day, on Castellanos.

“You,” said Mr Stroud. “I’ve seen you.”

“Yes.”

“All day. Everywhere.” Mr Stroud looked at the badge. “A parent?”

Castellanos thought about it.

“Of a sort,” he said.

Mr Stroud looked at him for a moment longer, as though this were a reasonable answer but an incomplete one, and he was the kind of man who liked his answers complete.

“Whose?” he said.

Castellanos turned his head, very slightly, towards the glass door of room fourteen, behind which the boy in the H’s was standing at Mr Ferrante’s desk with an elastic band in his fingers, very still, looking at him.

“His,” said Castellanos.

Mr Stroud followed his look. He looked through the glass at the boy in the H’s for a long moment, and then back at Castellanos, and something passed over his face that Frederick could not read, a man doing a sum and getting an answer he did not like and deciding, as a matter of principle, not to check it.

“Then you’ll want,” said Mr Stroud, “to speak to him about attention.”

“I will,” said Castellanos.

“It’s the courtesy a man pays the present.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Castellanos. “In those words.”

“Good.” Mr Stroud turned to Dr Brooks, and tucked the clipboard under his arm, and held out his hand to her, and she shook it, and he said, “A very full day, Dr Brooks. Thank you,” and went off along the walkway towards the car park, short and square and very straight in his three-piece suit, with the scorched sheet still in his breast pocket and the brown edge of it showing, into the last of the rain.

Dr Brooks watched him go.

Then she looked at Castellanos, and Castellanos looked at Dr Brooks, and neither of them said anything at all, in a way that Frederick, watching through the glass, thought was very probably the longest conversation either of them had had all day.

Dr Brooks went back across the yard to the office.

---

“Hanover,” said Mr Pettigrew.

“Sir.”

“Would you carry my box again? To the car? I’m in the car park, at the far end, by the fence. It’s a green car. It’s older than you are. You’ll know it, it has a dent in the door shaped like Ohio.”

“Everything’s shaped like Ohio,” said Theo, from the back, still doing his bag.

“Hartigan,” said Mr Pettigrew, “you have been doing that bag for four minutes. Either do it up or leave it to your heirs.”

Theo did it up.

Frederick picked up the box. CHARTER 1974. STILL GOOD. It was lighter now, because some of the cards had fallen out of their snapped bands during the day and Mr Pettigrew had put them in his coat pockets, which bulged, and because Frederick was used to it.

Mr Pettigrew put on his tweed coat and his scarf in the colours of the college nobody knew, and went to the windowsill and picked up the rain hat from beside Benjamin Franklin, and looked at it, and did not put it on.

“He’s right,” he said, to the bust. “It’s stopped.” And put the hat in his pocket with the cards.

---

They went out across the yard.

It had stopped raining. It had stopped somewhere during Henry the Sixth, and the sky over the river had gone from grey to a pale washed yellow at the bottom edge, where the sun was trying, and the yard was full of puddles with the yellow in them, and of people going home, eleven hundred of them, in coats, shouting, the side doors banging, the bell’s starting gun going off at last, five minutes late, everywhere except room fourteen.

Theo walked on one side of him and Mr Pettigrew on the other, and Castellanos behind, at a parent’s distance, which was, Frederick had decided, exactly the distance of a protection officer who has been told to look like a parent and has worked out, over the course of a day, that the two are not as different as the Household thinks.

“I’m going home tomorrow,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Back to the Dakotas. Back to the geese. My son’s coming down to meet me at Minot. I only came for the week, to see my sister in Georgetown, and the school rang on Sunday night, and I thought, well, why not, I’ve not taught for eighteen years and I don’t suppose I’ll get another chance.” He looked at the puddles. “I’ve had a lovely day.”

“Which train, sir?” said Frederick.

“Tomorrow? Oh, I don’t know. The one that goes. There’s one in the morning, I think, from Union Station, that gets you to Chicago by night and then the long one west. My sister’s booked it. I never know the times.”

“The seven-forty,” said Frederick.

Mr Pettigrew looked at him.

“To Chicago. It’s the seven-forty on Wednesdays, sir, from Union Station, platform nine. It gets into Chicago at ten past eight in the evening. You change there for the Northern Limited, which goes at a quarter to ten and gets into Minot on Thursday afternoon at four minutes past three. If it’s on time. It’s not usually on time in February, because of the snow after Fargo, so your son should ring the station at Minot before he sets off.” He shifted the box in his arms. “There’s an earlier one, the six-fifteen, but it’s slower, it stops at every town in Pennsylvania, and you’d miss the connection anyway.”

There was a short silence in the yard.

“Good heavens,” said Mr Pettigrew. “How on earth do you know that?”

“I read them to my father, sir. The trains. Every afternoon. At four.”

“Does he travel a great deal?”

Frederick thought about the sixth floor of New Westminster General, and the board by the bed with eleven words on it, most of them no, and Thursday, twice.

“Not at the moment, sir,” he said. “He likes to know they’re running.”

Mr Pettigrew looked at him for a moment longer, sideways, as they walked, with his head a little on one side, the way he had looked at him across the desk when he put his hand up, like a man looking at a bird that has done something he has read about and never seen.

“That,” he said, “is a very good reason to know a timetable.”

---

Theo had his planner out.

He was walking along beside them through the puddles with it open in front of him, and the pen in his mouth, and he was reading back through the column, from the top, from TUESDAY 6 FEB. THE SCORE, down through everything, the versions and the inspector and the fire and the Prime Minister and Marcus knighted and IN HIS OWN RIGHT: MAY, and he had an expression on his face that Frederick had seen on it once before, on the evening of the twenty-fourth of October, at the Hartigans’ kitchen table, when Frederick had told him first: the face of somebody who has been enjoying a thing enormously and has just understood that it is nearly over, and that it was, the whole time, not entirely a joke.

He looked up from the planner at Mr Pettigrew’s back, and then at Frederick.

“Freddie,” said Theo, quietly.

“What?”

Theo held up the planner. At the top of the column, from the first period, the first line, the one that had been there since eight thirty-five in the morning, unchanged all day while everything under it had gone up and up:

SUB KNOWS: 0

“It’s the only one that hasn’t moved,” said Theo.

They had reached the car park. At the far end, by the wire fence, beside Mr Obi’s hut, there was a small old green car with a dent in the driver’s door shaped, unmistakably, like Ohio.

And beside it, in the space next to it, where it was always parked at a quarter past three, with the engine running and nobody in it yet, the dark blue car without a flag.