The Roll

Theo was already in his seat, with his feet on the rung of Frederick’s.

“You look wet.”

“It’s raining.”

“I know it’s raining. I came on the bus. The bus has a leak over the third seat on the left and a woman sat under it all the way from Anacostia with a newspaper on her head and said nothing.” Theo took his feet off the rung. “Who’s the parent?”

Frederick looked at the door. Through the glass panel in it he could see the corridor, and in the corridor, against the opposite wall, between a fire extinguisher and a noticeboard about the spring musical, Castellanos, standing with his hands folded in front of him, wearing the badge.

“It’s an inspection day.”

“So he’s a parent.”

“He’s a parent.”

“Whose?”

“Nobody’s asked.”

Theo looked at the glass for a while, with the expression he used for things he meant to enjoy later.

“He’s standing like a parent,” he said. “That’s the funny bit. He’s standing exactly like a parent. He’s even got the face. My dad’s got that face at parents’ evening. It’s the face of a man who’s been told where to wait.”

---

Mr Abernathy’s homeroom was his chemistry laboratory, on the first floor of the old building, with benches in rows and gas taps along them and a periodic table on the back wall that had been there so long that two of the elements on it had been renamed since and nobody had changed them. There were twenty-six of them in homeroom, and they sat on stools, in the order of the alphabet, because Mr Abernathy said the alphabet was the only seating plan that had never started a war.

Mr Abernathy came in at sixteen minutes past eight, in the brown jacket, with the register under his arm, and put it on the front bench and opened it.

He did not look up. He never looked up for the roll. He said he knew their voices.

“Adeyemi.”

“Here.”

“Alvarez.”

“Here.”

The rain ran down the long windows. On the sill nearest the door was the yellow bucket Frederick had seen from the car park, with a steady drip landing in it from a stain in the ceiling shaped, Theo said, like Ohio.

“Hanover.”

“Here.”

“Hartigan.”

“Here, sir.”

Mr Abernathy said Hanover the way he said Adeyemi and Alvarez and everybody else, the way he had said it on the morning of the first of November with the radio still talking about the accession in the office downstairs, at the same speed and in the same voice, and then gone on to Hartigan. Frederick had thought about that a great deal since. He had decided it was the kindest thing anybody had done for him all year, and that Mr Abernathy did not know it was kind, and would have been annoyed to be told.

“Price.”

“Here.”

“Price, you have a telephone in your hand.”

“Taking notes, sir.”

“It is a quarter past eight. There is nothing yet to take a note of.” Mr Abernathy turned a page of the register. “Put it in your bag. It will find its way out again by nine; they always do.”

---

When the roll was done he closed the register and folded his hands on it.

“Three announcements,” he said. “Listen to them. I will not be repeating them, because repeating things is how they become rumours.”

Twenty-six people stopped doing what they were doing.

“One. It is an inspection day. An inspector from Virginia, a Mr Stroud, will be in the building from half past eight until the last bell. He may sit at the back of any room you are in. He may ask you questions. You will answer them truthfully and briefly. You will not look at him.” Mr Abernathy paused. “You will also not look at not looking at him, which is worse. Felix.”

“Sir.”

“That includes your tie.”

Felix looked down at his tie, which was orange and had small green ducks on it, and which had been discussed at length by the table at lunch on Friday, and seemed to decide that it was too late now.

“Two. Mr Ferrante is ill. He has the thing that everybody has. He sends his apologies and the reading.” A faint sound went round the room, the sound of twenty-six people remembering a reading. “His history classes today will be taken by a substitute, a Mr Pettigrew. Mr Pettigrew taught history at this school for forty years. He retired in 2011. He taught Mr Ferrante. He has come in today as a favour to the school, at eight hours’ notice, from somewhere a long way off, and you will treat him as you would treat any visitor to whom the school owes a favour, which is to say better than you treat each other.”

Marcus put his hand up.

“Sir, is he the one who taught the Battle of Kip’s Bay with the chairs?”

“That was 1991,” said Mr Abernathy. “I was there. Two chairs were lost.” He paused. “Three. The roof. There are at present two buckets in this corridor and one in the stairwell. The caretaker estimates seven by lunch. If you see a new drip, you will tell the office. You will not, Hartigan, name it.”

“Sir, the one over the door’s already called Ohio.”

“It is not called anything. It is a hole.” Mr Abernathy stood up. “That’s all. Go to your classes. Walk, do not run, and if you meet a man in a three-piece suit with a clipboard on the stairs, let him go first.”

---

He was halfway to the door with his bag when it opened from the outside, and an old man came in backwards.

He came in backwards because he was carrying a cardboard box in both arms and had pushed the door with his shoulder, and when it gave he went through with it, slowly, the way a ship goes through a lock, and stopped in the middle of the doorway and turned round.

He was tall and very thin, with a long neck and a long face and white hair flattened down by a rain hat, which was still on. He had on a tweed coat that was wet across the shoulders and a scarf in the colours of a college Frederick did not know. On the side of the cardboard box, in thick black marker, someone had written CHARTER 1974, and under that, smaller, in the same hand but a later pen, STILL GOOD.

He looked round the room at the benches and the gas taps and the periodic table with its two wrong elements, and at twenty-six sophomores with their bags on their shoulders, and he smiled, as if he had come back to a place he had left in a hurry and was pleased to find it exactly where he had left it.

“This,” he said, “is not fourteen.”

“No, Mr Pettigrew,” said Mr Abernathy.

The old man looked at Mr Abernathy for a moment over the top of the box.

“Abernathy,” he said. “Good God. Still in the jacket.”

“Still in the jacket, Mr Pettigrew.”

“I gave you a B-minus for an essay on the Peace of Boston in 1979.”

“You did, Mr Pettigrew.”

“It deserved a C.”

“It did,” said Mr Abernathy. “I’ve always been grateful.”

The class stood very still, the way a class stands when two teachers are being people in front of it, which happened about once a year and was always worth staying for.

---

“I can’t find fourteen,” said Mr Pettigrew. “They’ve moved it. When I was here fourteen was on this floor, next to the music room. Now there’s a door with a picture of a trumpet on it and a girl inside playing the same four notes.”

“Fourteen is in the new block, Mr Pettigrew. Since 2014.”

“Is it. The glass one.” He looked at the window, through which a corner of the new block was visible across the yard, with the rain sheeting down it. “It leaks, I expect.”

“It leaks worse than this one.”

“Good,” said Mr Pettigrew, as though something had been confirmed for him about the modern world. He shifted the box in his arms. “I’ve been away. My son has a farm in the Dakotas, north of Minot, wheat and sunflowers and a great many geese, and I went out to help with the harvest in July and stayed. There’s no television. My daughter-in-law has a wireless she keeps on for the weather, and in the Dakotas the weather’s the only news there is. I haven’t read a newspaper since the autumn. I can’t say I’ve missed one.”

Frederick, who was standing nearest the door, felt the room behind him change, the way the air changes in a room when a window has been opened somewhere else in the building.

“There was some trouble with the King’s aeroplane, I gather,” said Mr Pettigrew. “In the autumn. My daughter-in-law said there was something on the wireless about it, between the weather and the price of durum. I hope it all came right.”

Nobody said anything.

The drip went into the yellow bucket by the door, once.

“It came right, Mr Pettigrew,” said Mr Abernathy, in exactly the voice in which he took the roll, “in a manner of speaking.”

“Good,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Good. He’s a decent man, the King. I met him once, in 1987, at a schools’ prize-giving. He asked me what I taught and I said history, and he said Oh, poor you, there’s so much of it.” He laughed. “I’ve never forgotten it.”

---

He looked round for somebody to give the box to.

There was nobody in the world nearer to him than Frederick, who was standing a yard away with his bag on his shoulder and his face, he hoped, doing nothing.

“You,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Young man. You look as if you have arms. What’s your name?”

There was a pause in the room behind him that was, he thought afterwards, about the length of a breath held by twenty-five people at once.

“Hanover, sir.”

“Hanover.” Mr Pettigrew considered it. “Hanover. There was a Hanover in my form in 1983. Terrible boy. Set fire to a map of Ohio.” He held out the box. “Are you a history student, Hanover?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sophomore?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you’re mine, first period. Carry this to fourteen, there’s a good fellow, and don’t drop it, it’s the Charter.” He settled his rain hat. “Not the actual Charter. My notes on it. Better, in some respects. Fewer amendments.”

Frederick took the box. It was much heavier than it looked, and smelled of a cupboard.

“After you, Mr Pettigrew,” said Mr Abernathy.

“No, no, I’ll follow the boy. He knows where the glass block is and I don’t.” Mr Pettigrew turned in the doorway, the way the box had come through it, slowly, and looked back at the room, at the benches and the taps and the twenty-five faces.

“What a nice quiet class,” he said. “In my day they’d have been throwing things by now.”

And he went out after Frederick into the corridor, past the fire extinguisher, and past Castellanos, who was standing exactly like a parent and did not move a muscle, and to whom Mr Pettigrew said, kindly, in passing, “Lost, are you? The office is downstairs.”

“Thank you,” said Castellanos.

---

They had to wait at the top of the stairs while a man in a three-piece suit came up them.

He was a short, square man of about seventy, in a grey suit with a waistcoat and a watch chain, with a clipboard held flat against his chest like a breastplate, and a lanyard round his neck that said VISITOR, and under it, in smaller letters, INSPECTORATE. He came up the stairs one at a time, looking at each stair as though it were going in his report, and at the top he stopped and looked at the yellow bucket in the stairwell window and wrote something down.

Frederick stood back against the wall with the box, as Mr Abernathy had said, and let him go first.

The man looked at him. It was a quick look, the kind a man gives a piece of furniture he has already decided not to buy, and it went from his shoes to his face to the box and back to the clipboard, and there was nothing in it at all. No pause. No second look. Nothing.

He had not been looked at like that since he was eleven.

“Box,” said the man to his clipboard, as though noting it, and went on along the corridor towards the office, past Castellanos, at whom he did not look either.

Mr Pettigrew watched him go.

“Inspector,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I had one of those in 1977. He sat at the back of my class for a whole morning and wrote down that I used the word perfidious too often.” Mr Pettigrew started down the stairs. “I used it once more after he’d gone, out of spite. Come on, Hanover. The Charter’s waiting, and it’s been waiting since 1783, so it can wait while I find the glass block, but I’d rather it didn’t.”

---

Theo caught up with him at the bottom of the stairs, where the corridor went out into the covered walkway to the new block, with the rain coming in sideways.

He was grinning in a way Frederick had not seen since the Hartigans’ kitchen in October.

“He doesn’t know,” said Theo.

“I know.”

“He doesn’t know. He thinks the King’s a decent man who said poor you in 1987. He thinks it came right.”

“I know, Theo.”

Behind them came June and Priya and Felix and Marcus with his trombone case, and Lucía, and Devon Price at the back with his telephone already out of his bag, and they caught up and walked beside him in a loose bunch under the walkway, and nobody said anything for a moment, and then June said:

“We’re not going to tell him.”

It was not a question. Frederick looked at her.

“We have to tell him,” said Felix. “Don’t we? Isn’t it a sort of lie, not telling him?”

“It isn’t a lie,” said Priya. She said it without looking at anybody, in the voice in which, Theo had told him afterwards, she had said, on the afternoon of the thirty-first of October in geometry, while he was out in the corridor with Mrs Pruitt and the whole class was half out of its seats, Nobody stands up, it isn’t the law, it’s manners, and everybody had sat down. “He’s been on a farm. He’s on holiday from the news. You don’t wake people up on holiday to tell them about the news. It’s rude.”

“It’s not rude to tell somebody who the King is.”

“It’s rude to tell them it’s him,” said Priya, and nodded at Frederick without looking at him, “in front of him, when he’s carrying a box.”

Felix opened his mouth and shut it again.

“Freddie,” said Theo. “Your call.”

Frederick looked down at the box. CHARTER 1974. STILL GOOD.

He thought about Mr Pettigrew’s face in the doorway, pleased to find everything where he had left it. About poor you, there’s so much of it. About being looked at by the inspector like a piece of furniture, and how restful it had been.

“Don’t tell him,” he said.

---

Theo took his planner out of his back pocket, opened it at the back, where there was a blank page meant for notes on the term’s reading, and wrote across the top in capitals, with a pen he had borrowed from Lucía without asking:

TUESDAY 6 FEB. THE SCORE.

And under it, ruling two columns:

SUB KNOWS: 0 INSPECTOR KNOWS: 0

“What’s that for?” said Frederick.

“Posterity,” said Theo, and put the planner back in his pocket and patted it. “Somebody’s got to keep the record. The Register’s not going to.”

They went across the yard under the walkway in the rain, the eight of them, with the box, and behind them, at the bottom of the stairs, Castellanos came out of the old building, looked at the sky, looked at the walkway, and followed at a parent’s distance, which was further than a protection officer’s and nearer than anybody else’s.