Half Past Eleven

The Private Secretary got out of the grey car on the road side, and shut the door behind him, and stood for a moment on the pavement in the sun, looking at the gate.

He was carrying something. A folder, flat, under his right arm, held the way he held everything, square to his side, as if it were part of the arm.

Mr Obi came out of the hut. He did not look at the clipboard this time. He looked at the Private Secretary, and at the folder, and rolled the gate back on its rail, not eighteen inches, but all the way, the full width of a car, the way he rolled it back at a quarter past three, and stood beside it.

So Dr Brooks had told him. Whoever the Private Secretary was, he had the authority of the principal at the gate of Ellicott High School this morning, and Mr Obi had been told so, and had rolled the gate.

The Private Secretary did not go through it.

He turned first to Don Ignacio, on his kitchen chair in the last foot of shade. And Don Ignacio stood up, slowly, the folder on his own arm, one hand on the back of the chair, and the two of them stood on the pavement facing each other in the heat beside the black car with the flag, and the Private Secretary inclined his head, and Don Ignacio bowed, from the neck, and they spoke.

Not for long. Perhaps half a minute.

Frederick watched the Private Secretary’s free hand. It stayed at his side the whole time. It did not gesture at the building. It did not reach for Don Ignacio’s folder. The Private Secretary did not ask for it, and Don Ignacio did not offer it, and when they had finished speaking Don Ignacio sat down again on Mr Obi’s chair with his own folder on his knees, as before, and the Private Secretary inclined his head again and turned and walked through the gate, and Mr Obi rolled it shut behind him.

He came across the car park at his own pace, which was a little faster than Mr Lumsden’s and a great deal more like a clerk’s, and went in below the third window, out of sight.

---

The clock said thirty-three minutes past eleven, which meant twenty-nine and a half past.

He did not look at the doors. He looked at his paper. He had the two essays done and Section A done and twenty-nine and a half minutes, and he turned back to the first page, to the clause of the Charter, to read it over, because that was what Mr Ferrante said you did with the time at the end, you read it over as if somebody else had written it and you were going to mark it.

He read the first line of his answer to 1(a) four times and did not take in a word.

He heard the footsteps.

The corridor floor creaked in eleven places, and he heard four of them, coming from the far end, from the front office, regular, not fast, the steps of a man who walked on old boards every day of his life in a house where the boards had been laid in the eighteenth century and knew exactly where to put his feet. He heard them stop.

He did not turn round.

He looked up instead, at the third window, at the glass of it, where an hour and a half ago he had seen Dr Brooks small and backwards, and found the reflection of the left-hand panel of the door, and in it, at the height of a grown man’s head, a third face.

---

The Private Secretary did not touch the handle.

Frederick watched for it. Castellanos had tried it once, carefully, to be heard. Dr Brooks had not had to; Castellanos had brought Mr Lumsden to the door for her. His mother had tried it twice, fast, not knowing. The Private Secretary stood at the glass with his hands at his sides and the folder under his arm and looked through the panel at the back of the room, and did not reach for the handle at all.

At the front of the gym, Mr Lumsden looked up.

He looked at the panel over the top of his half-moon glasses. He looked at the face in it for some seconds. He saw, Frederick thought, what Frederick saw: a man at a door who was not trying it. Not knocking. Not signalling. Standing there with a folder, looking in, and making no claim on anybody.

Mr Lumsden looked at the face a moment longer, and then he took out his watch and looked at that, and took out the black book and wrote something short in it, and put the book away, and did not get up.

The face in the panel moved aside. Down, and to the left. There was a pause, and the top of a head appeared at the bottom of the glass, beside the other, the dark one with the grey at the crown: lower than Castellanos’s, because the Private Secretary had sat down.

On the old library chair. Castellanos had brought it over from the fire door. Or the Private Secretary had. Frederick did not know which, and could not see, and found that he could see it perfectly: the Private Secretary sitting on the curved-backed chair outside the gym doors with the folder on his knees, square, not opening it, with Castellanos standing beside him, and the two of them looking along the corridor at nothing, waiting for twelve.

---

The folder.

He had seen it under the Private Secretary’s arm at the gate, and in the reflection at the door, and in the reflection now, a corner of it, just showing over the lower edge of the glass, on his knees. He had seen the colour at the gate in the sun, and he had seen it again at the door, and he made himself look at it in the reflection now, for as long as he dared, to be sure.

It was pale blue.

One folder. Pale blue. The colour of the box with the gold sun on the lid that had been on his grandfather’s desk at half past seven, the thinnest of the four.

The rule was that no paper of one realm was read in a room where another’s lay open.

It had been his mother’s rule first. She had made it on the fourth of October, when the Regency Office was eleven people in two rooms on the ground floor of the north wing and thirteen boxes went down to the small dining room every morning, one officer for each group of realms; and she had done them one at a time, at breakfast, with the others shut, so that she would only ever have to be one realm’s Regent at once. The Household had kept it after her. The Private Secretary had kept it as if it had been carved over the door. He did not carry two realms’ papers in one hand. He did not carry two realms’ papers in one car. When the Prime Minister came on Thursdays the Realm’s box was the only box in the study, and the others were in the next room, shut.

The Private Secretary had brought one realm’s paper to the door of the gym.

The Plate’s.

---

And you did not bring a folder to tell a boy his father was dead.

He knew that as certainly as he knew anything. It came up in him all at once, under everything else, the way the floor of a lift comes up under your feet, so that he put his hand flat on the desk again without meaning to.

You did not bring anything. You did not bring the Plate’s folder, or any folder, or any box. If his father had died on the sixth floor this morning, the Private Secretary would have come to this door with nothing in his hands at all, and stood there with his hands empty, because there would have been nothing that any realm wanted signed that could not wait a week; and a man who had kept the rule of the boxes as if it were carved over a door would no more have brought the Plate’s papers to tell the King his father was dead than he would have brought a sandwich.

And Don Ignacio would not have been at the gate. And his mother would not have stood at the door.

It was the Plate.

It was the Plate, and it had been the Plate since twenty to ten, and his father was on the sixth floor with the window open, listening to the traffic on the bridge.

He breathed out. It took a long time. He did not know how long he had not been breathing properly for; since five past eleven, perhaps. Since the eleven seconds. It went out of him in one long breath through his nose, slowly, and the gym came back round him, the heat and the striped light and the ninety pens and Theo’s, hard, at 4E, and the clock in its cage, and the paper in front of him with the clause of the Charter on it in a box with a line number down the side.

His eyes were hot again. He let them be. Nobody was looking at the fourth row.

---

Then he thought about the Plate.

Properly, now, because he could.

Castellanos at twenty to ten with the Palace telephone. Dr Brooks at ten past, running to the gate when the car came. The High Commissioner, with the flag he did not fly for ordinary business, and a leather folder that he would give to nobody but the King, and would not bring into the building, and would not sit down beside until Mr Obi gave him tea. His mother at five past eleven, to look at him. And the Private Secretary at half past, with the Plate’s papers, who had spoken to Don Ignacio on the pavement and had not asked for his folder, and was sitting outside the door now with his own on his knees, not opening it, waiting for twelve.

None of them had asked him to come out.

All of them could have. Regulation Eleven was the regulation. Any one of them could have said to Mr Lumsden ask the candidate in 4D whether he will leave, and none had. Not Castellanos, who would have pulled him out by the ankles. Not his mother. Not the Private Secretary, whose whole life was getting the right paper in front of the right person at the right time.

So whatever was in the Plate’s folder, it was a thing the King could not do anything about before twelve.

Or a thing the King must not be seen to do anything about before twelve.

He did not know which. He thought it might be the second.

---

He thought about the Viceroy’s letter. He knew it nearly by heart; he had read it three times at half past seven.

A colonel of the garrison has written to a newspaper here to say that the bill is an insult to the Crown and to the Army. This is two insults more than the Minister of Defence considers proper in a serving officer, and the colonel has been spoken to. I do not think it is anything.

A Colonel Iriarte, sir. Rodolfo Iriarte. He commands the First Infantry, which the Plate calls the Patricios, in the barracks at Palermo.

The bill for an elected Viceroy has its second reading on Wednesday.

Tomorrow.

No hay nada aquí que no pueda esperar tres horas.

He looked at the clock. Thirty-nine minutes past eleven, which meant thirty-five and a half past. Thirty-five past twelve in Buenos Aires.

He did not let himself think the word. He knew what it was. It was on the paper, in Question Seven, and in Source C, in a square full of soldiers sitting down, and on a card in red ink in his blazer pocket. He did not let himself think it, because if he thought it he would think about the Viceroy at his desk at the corner over the square with the window that did not open, at seventy-six, with his jacket on, and about what might be in the square this morning, and whether anybody was sitting down in it.

And he could do nothing at all about it, in the fourth row, for twenty-four and a half minutes, and nobody had asked him to.

---

He turned back to the first page and read his answers over.

He found a word he had left out in 1(b), and put it in with a small mark, the way the Board said to. He found Uriburu spelt with two r’s in 3(b) and crossed it out and wrote it again. He read the cartoon answer and did not change it, and read Question Seven, all four sides of it, and did not change that either.

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

He looked at that for a while.

He thought he might be asked, today. Not about 1976. About whatever was in the pale blue folder on the Private Secretary’s knees. He thought that whatever it was, the Viceroy had been in the room with it since twenty to ten here, twenty to eleven there, and had not needed the King, or had needed him and had done without him, and that the King had been in a gym in New Westminster writing that the Viceroy’s refusal mattered more.

He did not add anything to the essay. It said what it said.

---

At a quarter to twelve by his watch Mr Lumsden stood up.

“Candidates have fifteen minutes,” said Mr Lumsden. “At twelve o’clock by my watch I shall say pens down. Candidates will stop writing at once. Candidates who continue to write after that instruction will have their papers marked as they stood at twelve o’clock, and a note will be made.”

He sat down.

Beside Frederick, at 4E, Theo put down his pen for the first time in two hours and three quarters and flexed his right hand, open and shut, open and shut, and looked at it as though it belonged to somebody who had been in an accident. Then he picked the pen up again and went back to the beginning of his paper, to read it over, the way Mr Ferrante said, with his lips moving.

He did not look at Frederick. He did not need to. He had looked at him at five past eleven.

At the bottom of the left-hand panel of the door, two heads. Neither of them moving.