Five Past Eleven

He turned round.

He did not decide to. He was turned round in his chair with his left arm over the back of it before he knew he had moved, looking down the long aisle past June at 5D and the four rows behind her to the double doors, and the left-hand panel, and in it, at the height of a grown man’s head, and a little lower, because she was not as tall as Castellanos, his mother’s face.

Mr Lumsden was already coming down the aisle. Not faster. At his one speed.

His mother was looking through the glass. Not at the rows. At the bolt. She was looking up at the top of the right-hand door, where the bolt was, the way you look at a thing that has just told you something you did not know, and he saw her understand it, and take her hand off the handle, and step back, half a step, and fold her hands in front of her.

Castellanos was beside her. Behind her shoulder. Where he had been beside Dr Brooks.

Mr Lumsden drew the bolt. He opened the left-hand door six inches and stepped through it into the corridor and pulled it to, and it swung back and stopped an inch short, and through the inch, for the first time, because she was standing just there and not to one side, Frederick could see her. Not the reflection. Her.

---

She was in the grey dress. The plain one, with no belt, that she wore for meetings at the Palace, for the Swedish ministers on the screen at three. A pale cardigan over her arm, because she was always cold in buildings and never outside them. No hat. Her hair up, as it had been at breakfast.

Her face.

He knew all of his mother’s faces. He had been learning them for sixteen years. He knew the one for Bridget’s eggs and the one for his marks and the one for his father’s jokes and the one for the Swedish Prime Minister. He knew the one she had worn on the twenty-eighth of September, in the green chair in Dr Brooks’s office, when she had come to Ellicott herself and sat down and held both his hands and told him they had found the aircraft. And he knew the other one, the one after, from the corridor of the sixth floor on the twenty-ninth, late, when he had come up in the lift from the airfield behind his father, and the lift doors had opened, and she had been standing at the end of the corridor under the lights waiting for them, and had not moved at all, and had kept her face so still that it was not a face, it was a held breath.

This was that one.

Composed. Absolutely still. Every line of it held in place.

---

He was sure, then.

He was sure for about eleven seconds. He knew afterwards that it was about eleven seconds, because the clock over the doors had a second hand, inside its cage, and he had been looking at the doors and the clock was above them, and he saw the second hand go from the six to the eight while he was sure, and he never in his life afterwards forgot what eleven seconds was.

His father was dead.

Something had happened on the sixth floor at a quarter to eleven, or half past ten, or twenty to ten, when Castellanos first came, with the Palace telephone in his hand, held down. It had been his father all along. The physicians had reported to her at seven this morning, as they did every morning, in person, and said what they said every morning, and she had come home and had black coffee and told him Cars, and had smiled, and two hours later the sixth floor had rung the Palace, and the Palace had rung Castellanos, and Castellanos had come to the door to ask, and been told no, and had said right, and stood there.

And Dr Brooks had come, and been told no.

And the High Commissioner. That did not fit. He knew it did not fit, and in the eleven seconds he did not care. The High Commissioners would all come. They would all come with their flags, all thirteen of them, one after another, to the Palace, and one of them had come here, to the school, because. Because.

He could not make it fit and he did not try.

He thought: four o’clock. He thought: the blue book on the shelf by the bed, open at Tuesday. He thought: I didn’t go yesterday till a quarter past, because of the cards. He thought: Cars. He thought: Again.

His mother was talking to Mr Lumsden.

---

He watched her talk.

She was talking quietly. He could see her mouth. Not his face; Mr Lumsden’s grey back was in the way of most of it, and the inch of door was narrow. But he could see her mouth, past Mr Lumsden’s shoulder, and it was moving slowly and carefully, in English, the way she spoke English to officials, every consonant, with the Swedish underneath it like water under a floor.

Mr Lumsden said something. Frederick saw him incline his head, very slightly, the way you incline it to a woman you have been brought up to incline it to, and he thought he saw the shape of the word madam.

He did not know who she was.

Frederick saw that, suddenly, in the middle of everything, as clearly as he had seen anything all morning. Mr Lumsden did not know. He had invigilated for the Board for twenty-six years and he did not read the newspapers in working hours, perhaps, or did not look at the pictures, or had looked and had not put the face in the corridor together with the face on the front of every newspaper in the Realm in October, and he was standing in front of the Queen of Sweden, who had been Regent of thirteen realms until six weeks ago, in a corridor in Ellicott High School with an inch of door behind him, and calling her madam, and telling her what he had told everybody.

He did not take the card out.

His mother did not point. Frederick watched for it. If she had come to take him out, she would have pointed: down the aisle, at the fourth row. That one. Fetch him. Or she would have said it, and Mr Lumsden would have had to walk back up the aisle to 4D and ask. She did not point. Her hands were folded in front of her over the cardigan, and they stayed folded.

Then she looked past Mr Lumsden, through the inch, down the aisle, to the fourth row, and found him.

She looked at him for a long time.

Not eleven seconds. Longer. She looked at him the way she had looked at him in the small dining room at seven, over the blue Swedish folder, when she had looked at him properly. As if she were reading him. As if she were reading something written on him that she needed to read twice.

Her face did not change. It stayed held.

Then she said something else to Mr Lumsden, very short, and turned, and walked away along the corridor with Castellanos a step behind her, not fast, the way she walked in a hospital, and was gone.

---

Mr Lumsden came back in.

He shut the door. He bolted it. He turned round and looked at the gym, and at the eight or nine who were turned round in their chairs, and at Frederick, and did not say candidates will face the front.

He came back up the aisle at his one speed. He did not look at 4D.

Frederick put his hand up.

---

He had not known he was going to. His hand was in the air, at the end of his arm, the way hands are in the air in the fourth row in a classroom when you know the answer, and he looked at it as though it belonged to somebody else, and did not take it down.

Mr Lumsden stopped.

He was at the third row, one desk past 4D’s line. He turned. He looked at the hand over the top of the half-moon glasses. Then he came back, the one step, and stood beside 4D, and looked down at Frederick from his full thin height, with his hands behind his back.

“Yes,” said Mr Lumsden. Not loudly. At exactly the volume of the space between them.

Frederick’s mouth was dry. He found that he could not make it say what he wanted it to say. He tried twice.

“Is it my father?”

It came out as a whisper. It came out as less than a whisper. Beside him, at 4E, Theo’s pen stopped.

Mr Lumsden looked down at him for a long moment.

“I am not permitted,” said Mr Lumsden, “to pass any communication to a candidate.”

“I know. I know. But…”

“I am not permitted,” said Mr Lumsden again, at the same volume, without any change in his voice at all, “to pass any communication to a candidate, by any means, or for any reason, until the examination is concluded.” He paused. “I am permitted to remind a candidate of the regulations.”

Frederick looked up at him.

“Regulation Eleven,” said Mr Lumsden. “A candidate may leave the examination room at any time after the first hour, on giving notice to the invigilator. A candidate who leaves shall not return.” He did not look away. “It is eight minutes past eleven by my watch. The examination ends at twelve.”

That was all. He did not say anything else.

But he did not go away either. He stood beside 4D with his hands behind his back, and Frederick saw again what he had seen at a quarter to eleven, the right hand holding the left wrist, hard, behind the grey back, and Mr Lumsden stood there and waited, for perhaps five seconds, perhaps ten, long enough for a candidate to give notice to the invigilator if a candidate wished to.

---

He thought.

He made himself. He had eleven seconds of not thinking behind him and he could not afford any more, and he made himself think, the way Mr Ferrante said you looked at a source: not what you wished it said. What it said.

She had come to the door.

She had tried the handle twice, quickly, not knowing it was bolted. So she had not been told. She had come from the car straight along the corridor to the door without stopping to ask anybody how the door worked, the way she came into a room.

She had stood at the door. She had not come through it.

On the twenty-eighth of September, she had come to Ellicott herself. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody could have. She had walked into Dr Brooks’s office and sat down in the green chair and taken both his hands and told him. She had not let anybody else tell him. She had not waited for anybody to bring him. She had not stood at any door.

If his father had died this morning, she would not have stood at a door.

She would have come through it. She would have come through Mr Lumsden and the bolt and the Board and Regulation Nine and twenty-six years of invigilation as if they were a bead curtain, and walked down the aisle to the fourth row in front of ninety people and knelt by the desk and told him herself, because she would not have let anybody else, ever, tell him that. Not Castellanos. Not the Private Secretary. Not a man who called her madam.

She had stood at the door and looked at him.

She had looked at him the way you look at someone to see that they are all right. And then she had gone.

He believed it.

He believed it about as much as he could believe anything at eight minutes past eleven with his hand going numb in the air. It was not enough. It was a hot cup again. He held it.

And underneath it, the other thing, the thing he could not get rid of: that his father would want him to finish the paper. That his father would want it more than anything. That if his father had died this morning on the sixth floor, his mother, who knew his father better than anybody alive, might have stood at the door of the gym and looked at their son writing an examination in the fourth row and decided, for his father’s sake, to let him finish.

She might.

He did not think she would. He did not know.

---

He put his hand down.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

Mr Lumsden looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, the same small nod he had given the face in the doorway at a quarter to nine, the nod for a door you have decided to leave shut, and walked on up the aisle to the table and sat down on the gym bench and did not take out the black book.

He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the space above the desks.

Beside Frederick, at 4E, Theo had not started writing again. He was looking at Frederick across the yard of floor, white, with his pen in his fist, and his eyes were saying your mum, Freddie, that was your mum, and they were full.

Frederick looked back at him.

He did not shake his head this time. He did not know what he would have been shaking it for.

He looked at Theo’s paper, and back up at Theo’s face. Write.

And then, because Theo did not move, because Theo was going to sit there and not write until Frederick did, he picked up his own pen, and pulled the answer booklet towards him, and turned past the planning page with 10 and 1811 and 2028 and the King on it, to the first clean page, and wrote at the top, in the margin, where the Board said to write it, 10.

He heard Theo’s pen start again. Hard. You could hear it from the next room.

The clock said thirteen minutes past eleven, which meant nine and a half past.

“Written for a King who cannot act.”

He began.