Ten Past Ten

Mr Lumsden went down the aisle, and drew the bolt, and opened the left-hand door six inches, and stepped through it into the corridor, and pulled it to behind him, and it swung back and stopped an inch short of the frame, exactly as before.

It was Dr Brooks.

He did not turn round this time. He did not need to. He could see her in the glass of the third high window above him, very small and backwards, reflected from the panel of the door: a dark suit, the hair pinned up, a hand at her collar. And beside her, a head taller, behind her shoulder, the shape of Castellanos, who had moved aside to let her have the door and had not moved further than that.

Dr Brooks did not come to examinations.

She had been principal of Ellicott for eleven years, and Theo said that in all of that time she had never once been seen in the gym during the Board’s papers, because the Board did not like the head of a centre in the examination room, and she did not like the Board, and the arrangement suited them both. She had shaken Frederick’s hand on his first day in September 2025, in her office, when he was twelve, and had said, Mr Hanover, you will be treated here exactly as everybody else is treated, which I should warn you is not always well, and had not shaken it since. She had spoken to the school on the loudspeaker at two o’clock on the thirty-first of October, while he was standing in the corridor of the math wing with Mrs Pruitt. She kept a green chair in front of her desk, a visitor’s chair with wooden arms and a seat that had been re-covered too many times, for people who were being told things.

His mother had sat in it on the twenty-eighth of September. Then he had.

---

They talked for longer this time.

He could see it in the reflection. Mr Lumsden’s grey back, very straight. Dr Brooks facing him, talking, with the hand at her collar, and then without it, and then with both hands together in front of her, the way she held them in assembly when she was going to say something about the roof. Talking for a long time. Mr Lumsden not moving.

Then Mr Lumsden said something. Short.

Then Dr Brooks said something longer, and he saw her turn her head and look past Mr Lumsden, through the inch of door, into the gym, and he could not see her face in the reflection, it was too small, but he knew she was looking at the fourth row.

He did not turn round.

He kept his eyes on the paper. On his own handwriting. I think it is what a King in London is for. He kept them there, and he felt her look reach the fourth row and find the back of his head and stay on it, the way you feel the sun reach your neck through a window, and he did not turn round, because if he turned round she would have to decide something about his face, and he did not want her to have to.

Mr Lumsden shook his head. Once.

He took the card out of his breast pocket and did not hold it up this time. He only held it, in his hand, at his side, the way Castellanos had held the telephone.

Dr Brooks looked at the card. She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she nodded, and said one more thing, which was very short, and turned and walked away along the corridor fast, faster than he had ever seen her walk, towards the trophy case and the front office and the doors to the car park, with her heels going on the old boards that creaked in eleven places, and he counted four of them before the sound went round the corner.

Castellanos did not go with her.

---

Mr Lumsden came back in and shut the door and bolted it and turned round and looked at them, and they faced the front without being told, all of them, ninety, because they had learned.

He walked back up the aisle at his one speed.

At 4D he did not slow down. He did not look at the paper or at Frederick. But as he passed, Frederick, who was looking at nothing but his own handwriting, saw Mr Lumsden’s left hand, swinging at his side, come to a stop for a fraction of a second, an inch above the corner of the desk where the candidate card was taped, 4D. 4471, and then go on.

That was all. A hand stopping. Then he was past, and at the table, and sitting down on the gym bench, and taking out the black book.

He wrote for longer this time.

---

Frederick made himself list it, as before.

Dr Brooks, at the door of an examination, for the first time in eleven years.

Asking for something, at length. Being told no. Asking again. Looking at the fourth row. Being shown the card and not having it held up, because she was the head of the centre and Mr Lumsden would not hold a card up to the head of a centre, but showing it to her all the same.

Accepting it.

Walking away fast, not to her office, which was the other way, past the gym and up the stairs, but towards the front of the building and the doors to the car park.

He thought about that.

Dr Brooks walked fast when there was a leak. He had seen her walk fast twice: in February, the morning the roof over the science corridor had come in, and in March, when a boy in the seventh grade had fallen off the climbing bars in this gym and Mr Kaminski had sent for her. She did not walk fast for the Board, or for inspectors, or for parents. She had not walked fast for him on the thirty-first of October; she had been in her office with the loudspeaker. She walked fast towards things that were happening, that needed her there, now.

Something was happening at the front of the building.

And Castellanos had not gone with her. Whatever it was at the front of the building, it did not need Castellanos. Castellanos was staying where he was, outside the door, because whatever it was, it was not a danger, and if it had been a danger Castellanos would have gone to it, and he had not.

He looked at the list in his head and it came out, every time, the same way. Something had happened. It was not a danger to him. It could not be passed to him under Regulation Nine. And the people who wanted it passed to him had been told so twice, and had accepted it twice, and had not done the thing they could have done, which was to ask him to leave the room.

Because they could. Regulation Eleven. A candidate may leave the examination room at any time after the first hour. It was ten past ten. The first hour was over. Anybody at that door could have said to Mr Lumsden ask the candidate in 4D whether he will come out, and Mr Lumsden would have had to walk up the aisle to 4D and ask, because asking whether he would leave was not a communication, it was the regulation, and Frederick would have said yes.

Nobody had asked.

So whatever it was, it was a thing that somebody had decided he did not need to come out for. Somebody who knew what it was had decided that. Somebody he trusted, or two of them, or three.

He found that he could hold that. Just about. Like a hot cup.

---

He looked at the essay.

Three sides and a half. The argument was there. It needed an end, and Mr Ferrante said that the end of an essay was the only part the examiner read twice, so you had better have something in it you would be prepared to have read twice.

He thought about the Viceroy.

Not the one in 1976, whose name he knew and whose grey book he had read on the floor of his father’s study. The one now. Julio César Mackinlay Zapiola, who had been a judge of the Supreme Court of Justice for eleven years and of the lower courts for twenty before that, and had retired at sixty-nine, and been asked at seventy to go and live in a pink house on a square and sign things, and had said yes because, he had told Frederick, a judge who is asked to serve and says no has no right to sit in judgment on anybody who said yes.

He had come up for the second of May.

He had stood at the side of the Blue Drawing Room through all fourteen oaths, not only the Plate’s, through New Albion’s in two languages and South Africa’s in all of its own and Hanover’s in German, standing very upright by the window with his hands folded in front of him, for an hour and forty minutes, at seventy-six, and had not sat down when he was offered a chair, and had not looked at his watch. And afterwards, when the room was emptying, he had come across the carpet slowly and shaken Frederick’s hand and said the thing about never having done anything.

And then, because Frederick had asked him, standing by the window with the gardens behind them, he had told him about the Casa Rosada.

My study is on the first floor, Majestad, at the corner over the square. It has a window that looks at the obelisk and a window that looks at the river, and the one that looks at the river does not open, because a Viceroy in 1912 had it painted shut after a pigeon came in during a meeting with the Archbishop. The desk is the desk. You will know which desk I mean.

Frederick had known.

I sit at it every morning at eight. I am told by the staff that he sat at it every morning at eight too, for seven years, with a soldier at the door, and wrote letters to his wife, and did the crossword in English, because he said it was the only thing he could still do in the King’s language without the junta’s permission. The Viceroy had looked out of the window at the garden. I think about that sometimes. Not often. A man can’t sit at a desk and think about that every morning, or he would never get anything done. But sometimes, when I sign something, I think: he did not sign. And I make sure I have read it.

---

He picked up his pen.

The Register says the King’s refusal is the act that most explains the Crown’s standing in the Plate. I think it is the act that most explains how the Crown is remembered. That is not the same.

The Crown is remembered for the King. It stands because of the Viceroy. In 1976 a King in London refused to recognise a junta, and it mattered, and it cost him something, and it was right. But it cost him less than it cost the man in the Casa Rosada, and it was easier, and it came second. If the Viceroy had signed, the King’s refusal would have been a King refusing his own representative, and it would have been a quarrel. Because the Viceroy did not sign, the King’s refusal was the King agreeing with him. That is a different thing, and it is a smaller thing, and it is the thing a King who is not in the room can do.

I do not think the King would mind my saying so. I think he would say it himself, if he were asked.

He stopped. He looked at the last sentence.

He did not know whether his father would say it. His father had never been asked, by Frederick or by anybody, so far as Frederick knew. His father had put the grey book on the bottom shelf behind the others, and said not that one, from the door, quite gently, when Frederick was nine. That might have meant it is not for you yet. It might have meant it is not mine to talk about. It might have meant that his father, at twenty-nine, in London, had refused a junta six thousand miles away and gone to bed that night in his own bed, and had known for fifty-three years, every single morning, that a judge in Buenos Aires had not.

He left the sentence in. It would be read twice. He would be prepared to have it read twice.

He drew a line under the essay with the ruler.

---

The clock said twenty minutes past ten, which meant sixteen and a half.

He turned the page. He had an hour and forty minutes and one essay left, and he looked at the six questions again, at eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve, at the Act of the Centenary and the Philippines and the Regency Act and the May Day Bombings and Malaya, and he was trying to choose between eight and ten when a sound came in through the high windows above him.

It was not a loud sound. It was a car horn.

Not a long blast; two short ones, polite, like somebody arriving at a house and letting the people inside know. And then, after a pause, from somewhere below the windows and a long way off across the car park, the sound of Mr Obi’s hut window sliding open on its runner, which you could hear from anywhere in Ellicott if the air was still enough, and the air was very still.

He did not look up.

He looked at question eight. Why did the River Plate become a realm of the Crown in 1910, and not before?

Then he looked up.