Regulation Nine

“Candidates will enter in the order of their numbers,” said the man in grey, “and will place any telephone, watch with a function other than the time, calculator, recording device, written or printed material and food in the box on the table, and will then go directly to their desks and sit down and not touch the paper. Candidates who have none of these things will say so as they pass the table. Candidates who say so and are found to have one will be removed. My name is Mr Lumsden. I am the invigilator appointed by the Columbia District Examinations Board for this centre for the whole of the examination period. Four four three zero.”

Nobody moved.

“Four four three zero,” said Mr Lumsden again, at precisely the same volume, looking at a list.

“That’s Abrams,” whispered June. “Abrams, go.”

Abrams went.

---

It took eleven minutes.

They went in one at a time past Mr Lumsden at the door, who looked at each of them, and at a card on his list with a photograph on it, and at them again, and nodded, and they walked down the long aisle between the desks in the striped light to the table at the front with the green cloth, and put their telephones in the grey steel box, and said nothing, or said nothing, sir if they had nothing, and went to their desks.

The box filled up. From the line in the corridor he could hear it filling, through the open door, a soft clatter every few seconds, plastic on plastic, like somebody dropping dominoes one at a time into a tin.

Devon, ahead of him, went in at four four six two and walked the whole length of the aisle holding his telephone out in front of him in both hands, at arm’s length, as he had held it in February, as though carrying it to a vet, and stood over the box for a long moment, and then let go of it all at once and turned away and walked to his desk very fast without looking back, like a man leaving a funeral before the end.

“Four four seven one.”

He went in.

Mr Lumsden looked at him.

Close to, he was older than he had looked through the glass. Sixty-five, perhaps, or seventy. A thin, dry, tidy face, very clean-shaven, with deep lines down from the nose, and pale blue eyes with nothing at all behind them but attention. He looked at Frederick’s face, and down at the card in his hand, which had on it the photograph from the front of Frederick’s school pass, taken in September by the man who came every September with a white sheet and a stool, and the name typed under it, HANOVER, Frederick A., and the number. He looked up again. He compared the two for exactly as long as he had compared the others.

Then he nodded and looked at his list.

“Four four seven two.”

That was all.

Frederick walked down the aisle. It was hot in the gym already, hotter than the corridor, with the sun lying in bars across the desks and the air above them very still, and his shoes were loud on the floor and nobody looked up at him, because they were all looking at the papers face down in front of them and not touching them.

At the table he took his telephone out of his blazer pocket.

It had been off since the car. He looked at it in his hand. A plain black telephone, a year old, with a crack across one corner of the screen from a step on the bluff at Santa Monica, which he had not had mended, because he did not want it mended. It had in it his mother and Theo and the Palace switchboard and the hospital and Castellanos and Dame M and the Private Secretary and fourteen numbers that were the fourteen offices of the fourteen heads of government, and one that was the Casa Rosada.

He put it in the box on top of the others, face down.

“Nothing else, sir,” he said.

Mr Lumsden, behind him at the door, did not look round.

---

His desk was in the fourth row, the fourth from the left, under the third of the high windows. 4D. 4471. The card was taped to the corner with a single strip of tape at a slight angle. The paper was face down. On the back of it, printed at the top in black, COLUMBIA DISTRICT EXAMINATIONS BOARD. HISTORY: THE CROWN AND THE REALMS. SOPHOMORE CERTIFICATE. TUESDAY 12 JUNE. THREE HOURS. And underneath, in smaller capitals, DO NOT TURN OVER UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD TO DO SO.

He sat down and put his pens in the groove, and his pencil, and the eraser, and the ruler beside the paper, and his hands on the desk.

Theo came down the aisle a minute later with a face like a man walking out onto a frozen lake, and stopped at the table, and put his telephone in the box, and then stood looking down into the box for a moment longer than he needed to, and then said, quite loudly, in his ordinary voice:

“Nothing else.”

And then, because he could not help himself, because he was Theo:

“Sir.”

And came and sat at 4E, beside him, a yard away, and put his hands flat on the desk on either side of the paper and looked straight ahead at the stage, where the curtains were shut.

He did not look at Frederick. Frederick did not look at him. That was the arrangement too. You did not look at anybody in the Board’s examinations, Theo’s cousin had said, because the Board’s men could see a look from a hundred yards, and they would ask you what it meant.

---

When the last candidate was in, Mr Lumsden shut the double doors.

He shut the left one and then the right one, and slid a bolt at the top of the right one into the frame, and then stood with his back to the doors for a moment and looked down the length of the gym at the ninety of them in their rows. Then he walked back up the aisle, at the same pace, to the table, and stood behind it, beside the grey steel box, and looked into it.

He closed the lid.

It closed with a sound like a cash drawer. He took a padlock from his jacket pocket, an ordinary brass padlock of the kind you bought for a garden shed, and put it through the hasp on the front of the box, and closed it, and tried it with his thumb, and put the key in his waistcoat pocket, and buttoned the pocket.

Somebody near the back made a very small noise. Frederick thought it was probably Devon.

---

He knew what the room by the library looked like, because he had been shown it in May.

It was a small square room on the second floor at the end of the library corridor that had been a store for the old encyclopaedias and was now a store for nothing, with one window onto the playing field, and Dame M had stood in the middle of it with her folder and Dr Brooks beside her and said, a desk, sir, there, and a chair, and an invigilator from the Board, Mr Lumsden himself, who has agreed. An officer in the corridor. A telephone on the desk, on a line to the Palace switchboard and nowhere else, that rings if it must. The Board has agreed to all of it. It has written to say so. It has a regulation for candidates of particular circumstances, and it says you are one.

He had looked at the telephone, which was not there yet, on the desk, which was not there yet.

Who decides if it must?

The Private Secretary, Dame M had said.

And if it rings, I stop?

If it rings, sir, you are the King.

He had stood in the store room for a moment by the window and looked out at the playing field, where the juniors were doing the long jump and a boy was raking the sand.

Dr Brooks had said nothing at all. She had written to Dame M in April, he learned afterwards, a letter of one paragraph which said that the school would of course make any arrangement the Household required, and that she hoped very much that it would not require one.

No, he had said.

And Dame M had closed her folder and said I thought not, sir, and had gone and told the Board, and the Board had written back to say that it noted the candidate’s decision and that the candidate would therefore sit the examination under the ordinary regulations of the Board, in the ordinary room, with the ordinary candidates, which the Board assumed was what the candidate intended, and he had read that letter three times and liked it better every time.

---

“Before the examination begins,” said Mr Lumsden, from the front, “I am required to read you two of the Board’s regulations in full. I shall read them once. You will not have the opportunity to ask me to read them again.”

He took a card from his breast pocket and held it at arm’s length and put on the half-moon glasses from the cord round his neck and looked at the card through them.

“Regulation Nine. No person other than the invigilator and the candidates shall enter the examination room while the examination is in progress, and no communication of any kind shall be passed to any candidate by any person, by any means or for any reason, until the examination is concluded.”

He looked up over the glasses at the room, and down again.

“Regulation Eleven. A candidate may leave the examination room at any time after the first hour of the examination, on giving notice to the invigilator. A candidate who leaves the examination room shall not return to it, and the paper of that candidate shall be collected at the time of leaving and marked as it stands.”

He lowered the card.

“I have been asked this morning,” said Mr Lumsden, in the same voice, “whether there are any exceptions to Regulation Nine. I shall tell you what I told the person who asked me. There are two. Fire, and the health of a candidate in the room. I have invigilated for the Board at this centre and at others for twenty-six years, and I have not yet been shown a third.” He put the card back in his pocket. “I do not expect to be shown one today.”

He took the glasses off and let them fall on their cord.

Frederick looked at the paper in front of him. He did not look at Theo. He wondered who had asked. Dr Brooks, perhaps, at eight, in her office, as a courtesy, because there was a protection officer on the premises and she would have wanted Mr Lumsden to know what he could expect. Or Castellanos himself, on Friday, going round the gym with Mr Kaminski and the chair. It was the kind of question Castellanos would ask, in his flat voice, so that he would know the answer and not have to find it out.

It did not matter. There were two, and he had refused the room that would have made a third.

---

“The time,” said Mr Lumsden, and took out the pocket watch and opened it, “by my watch, is fifty-nine minutes past eight. The clock on the wall of this room is three and a half minutes fast. The Board’s examinations are timed by the invigilator’s watch. You may disregard the clock.”

Ninety heads turned round, together, to look at the clock over the doors in its wire cage, which said two minutes past nine, and turned back.

Through the glass panels in the doors behind them, at the height of a grown man’s head, there was nothing to see but the empty corridor, and the far wall, and the top of a fire door. He could not see the chair. He knew it was there. He knew, without seeing it, without any way of seeing it, that somewhere about now Castellanos would be coming along the corridor from his office by the custodian’s room in his buttoned jacket, at a steady pace, and would look once through the glass panel at the backs of ninety heads, and would sit down on the old library chair by the fire door with his hands on his knees, forty feet away, and would not move.

Mr Lumsden watched the second hand on the watch go round.

The sun lay across the desk in a bar, over the back of the paper and half of his left hand. Under the third window. Outside, through the wired glass, set so high in the wall that from a desk you saw nothing near and only things far off, because the old building stood on the rise above the river road: the far end of the car park falling away, the wire fence, the side gate, the flat roof of Mr Obi’s hut, the road beyond it, and above all of it, empty, blue, hot, the sky.

It was ten o’clock in Buenos Aires.

“You may turn over your papers,” said Mr Lumsden, “and begin.”