Pens Down

He read Section A over again, and found nothing, and read Question Ten over, and found a sentence that did not have a verb in it, and gave it one.

Then he put the pen down in the groove at the top of the desk, beside the other pen, and the pencil, and the fountain pen of his father’s that he had brought as a spare and had not used, and put his hands flat on either side of the paper, and waited.

He had eleven minutes. He did not use them.

He sat with his hands flat and looked at the stage, at the shut blue curtains, at the table with the green cloth and the grey steel box on it with the brass padlock through the hasp, and at Mr Lumsden behind it on the gym bench with his watch open in his hand. He did not look at the third window. He did not look at the panel. He had looked enough.

There was no more he could do with the paper. There was nothing else he could do with anything.

---

At four minutes to twelve, by the clock, Theo put his pen down too.

He did it carefully, the way Theo put down things he had finished with, a scalpel or a bandage roll, square to the edge, and sat back in his chair with his wet shirt against its back, and let his arms hang at his sides, and shut his eyes.

Frederick looked at him. Just once.

Theo did not open his eyes. But the corner of his mouth went in, the way it went in when he was trying not to say something, and Frederick knew that Theo knew he was being looked at, and was not going to look back, because they were not out yet, and a man from the Board could see a look from a hundred yards.

---

Mr Lumsden stood.

He stood at two minutes to twelve by his watch and came round the end of the table and stood in front of it, in the aisle, below the stage, with the watch open in his left hand and his right hand at his side, and looked at the watch. He did not look at the room. The room looked at him.

Ninety people very nearly not breathing in a hot gym make a particular sound. It is not a sound. It is what is left when there is no sound at all, the way the air at the bottom of a swimming pool is what is left when you are under the water.

“Pens down,” said Mr Lumsden.

There was a clatter, small, all over the room, from the ones who had still been writing. A girl near the back said oh in a small voice, as if something had been taken off her. Then nothing.

“Candidates will remain in their seats,” said Mr Lumsden. “Candidates will not speak. Candidates will not touch their papers. I shall collect them.”

---

He collected them row by row.

From the front, from the left, the way he had let them in. He had a stack of brown envelopes on the table, one for each row, with the Board’s crest on the flap and the row’s letter written on the front in his small square capitals, and he took the first envelope and went along the first row, desk by desk, and picked up each paper and looked at the number on its front and at the number on the card taped to the desk, and put the paper in the envelope, and went on.

It took a long time. He did not hurry it. He looked at every number twice.

At the end of each row he stood by the table and counted the papers in that envelope with his thumb, through the open flap, without taking them out, his lips moving very slightly, and then counted them again, and then sealed the envelope and wrote a number on the back and put it on the table, to the right of the steel box, and took the next envelope.

He came to the fourth row.

He took 4A’s paper, and 4B’s, and 4C’s. He came to 4D. He picked up Frederick’s paper, the answer booklet with 10 in the margin of its last page and the planning page inside it with the King crossed out with a ruler, and looked at the number on its front, 4471, and at the number on the card, 4471, and put it in the envelope.

His hand did not stop this time over the corner of the desk. It went on to 4E.

Theo’s paper went in. Theo did not open his eyes.

---

At three minutes past twelve by the clock, which was a minute and a half past by Mr Lumsden’s watch, the last envelope was sealed and on the table.

Mr Lumsden stood behind the table with the ten envelopes in a row beside the steel box, squared, their edges touching, and looked at them for a moment, the way a man looks at a wall he has just finished building to see that it is straight.

Then he took the brass key out of his waistcoat pocket, and unbuttoned the pocket first, and put the key in the padlock, and turned it, and took the padlock off the hasp, and opened the lid of the box.

“The examination,” said Mr Lumsden, “is concluded.”

He did not say thank you. He did not say well done. He said, in the same voice, at the same volume:

“Candidates will leave the room by rows, from the front, and will take their own telephone from the box as they pass the table, and only their own, and will leave the room in silence, and will not speak until they are in the corridor. First row.”

---

The first row stood up.

Abrams. Bello. Diaz. Ten of them. They came out from between the desks into the aisle and went along it to the table one at a time, and leaned over the box, and took their telephones out of it from among the others, and went down the long aisle towards the doors. Mr Lumsden went ahead of them to draw the bolt and stood holding the left-hand door open with his back against it.

The first row went out into the corridor.

Frederick heard their telephones come on.

You could hear it through the open door: ten small chimes and tunes and buzzes, one after another, from just beyond the door, as ten people who had been without a telephone for three hours turned theirs on in the corridor, because you always turned it on at once, everybody did. And then a few seconds later, more: not chimes now, but the other sound, the stutter of a telephone that has been off for three hours catching up with everything that has happened in them, all at once, a stack of messages arriving in a heap, buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz.

Then a voice. A girl’s. Not loud. Saying something with a question in it.

Then nothing.

The corridor went quiet.

He knew that quiet. He had heard it in February, in the corridor between sixth and seventh period, when every telephone in the old building had gone off at once and then a hundred people had been reading. It was not silence. It was a hundred people reading. But this was ten people, and the quiet that came in through the open door was not the quiet of people reading something funny, or something they had expected. It went the wrong way. It came back in through the door towards the gym the way cold comes in under a door, along the floor.

“Second row,” said Mr Lumsden.

---

The second row went. Their telephones came on in the corridor. The same chimes. The same stutter. The same quiet, deeper.

At 5D, behind him, June made a very small sound in her throat and then stopped herself.

“Third row.”

The third row stood up. One of them was Priya, at 3G, who had been in front of him all morning, two desks to the left, and whose back he had seen and not looked at, because Priya did not like being looked at in examinations or in queues or at any other time. She went along the aisle to the table and took her telephone from the box and did not turn it on. She held it in her hand, dark, and walked down the aisle to the doors behind the others, and at the doors, as she went through, she stopped for half a second and looked back.

Not at the gym. At the fourth row. At him.

Then she went out.

---

“Fourth row,” said Mr Lumsden.

He stood up.

His legs had been under the desk for three hours and were stiff, and the backs of his knees were wet, and when he stood the blood went out of his head and came back. He put his hand on the desk until it had. Then he came out from between 4D and 4E into the aisle, behind 4C, and in front of Theo.

Theo was standing too. Close behind him. Close enough that Frederick could hear him breathing, and could feel, without turning round, that Theo had put out one hand and very nearly put it on his shoulder, and had not, because Mr Lumsden had said in silence, and a hand on a shoulder was not silent.

At the table he leaned over the box.

There were fewer telephones in it now, five rows’ worth, fifty or so, in a heap, all face down, all black or grey or blue, in cases or out of them. He found his own at once. It was near the top, where he had put it, face down, with the crack across one corner of the screen from the step on the bluff. He picked it up.

He did not turn it on.

He held it in his hand, as Priya had, dark, and walked down the long aisle between the empty desks of the first three rows, in the striped light from the high windows, towards the open door, where Mr Lumsden stood with his back against it holding it open, and beyond Mr Lumsden, the corridor.

He could not see into the corridor yet. The angle was wrong. He could see the far wall, and the top of the fire door at the end, and the noticeboard with the swimming gala on it. He could hear it. He could hear the first three rows. Thirty people, standing in a corridor, not talking.

As he passed through the door, Mr Lumsden spoke.

Not to the room. To him. Quietly, at the volume of the space between them, without turning his head, the way he had said yes at eight minutes past eleven.

“Mr Hanover.”

Frederick stopped.

Mr Lumsden looked straight ahead of him, at the empty gym, at the rows of desks with nothing on them and the stripes of sun lying across them, and the table with the ten brown envelopes and the open box.

“Your paper,” said Mr Lumsden, “has been collected, and is in the envelope for the fourth row, and will be marked as it stands.” He paused. “That is all I am permitted to say to a candidate.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mr Lumsden inclined his head. Very slightly. The way he had inclined it in the corridor to a woman he called madam.

Frederick went out.