Twenty to Ten

“The relationship between the Crown and the realms depended more on individuals than on laws.” How far do these sources support this view?

He had a page and a half. He had started with the clause in Source A, because the clause was a law, and you had to start with the law to have something to argue against, and he had written that the clause said in the Crown, and in no other, and that this was a law about a person that did not name the person, which was the cleverest thing about it, because it meant that the person could change and the law would not have to.

Then he had gone to the lion, and the creature in the gaucho’s hat with its own knife, and written that the cartoonist thought the Crown was a table, a thing you sat at, and that the creature thought it was a knife, a thing you kept your hand on, and that both of them were talking about people and not about the Act of the Centenary at all, which the cartoon did not mention.

And then the square.

He was writing about the man in the arch when the handle of the door turned.

---

It was not loud. It was the small dry sound of a brass handle going down against a spring and stopping, because the door was bolted at the top and would not open, and then going up again.

But the gym was very quiet, and it carried.

Ninety pens stopped. Not all at once; in a ripple, from the back row forward, the way the noise had started at nine o’clock but the other way round, so that for a second or two the sound of writing went away down the rows towards the stage like water draining out of a bath. Then there was nothing. Then a chair creaked.

Mr Lumsden looked up from the gym bench behind the table.

He did not stand up at once. He looked at the doors for a moment over the top of his half-moon glasses, the way he had looked at the clock, as though the doors had done something he would have to make a note of. Then he took the glasses off and let them drop on the cord, and stood, and came down the aisle between the desks towards the doors at exactly the speed at which he had walked the aisles at a quarter past nine, not one step faster.

“Candidates will continue,” he said as he came, without raising his voice, to the air above the desks.

The pens started again. Some of them.

Frederick’s did not.

---

He had not meant to turn round. He turned round.

You could see the doors from 4D if you turned in your chair and looked back over your left shoulder, past June, who was at 5D behind him and had turned round too, and past the four rows behind her, all the way down the long aisle to the double doors and the two glass panels in them at the height of a grown man’s head.

There was a face in the left-hand panel.

It was Castellanos.

He had known it would be before he turned. He did not know how he had known. Perhaps from the handle, the way it had gone down and stopped and not been tried again, once, carefully, the way a man tries a door when he already knows it is locked and wants only to be heard trying it. Castellanos’s face filled the glass. He was not looking at Mr Lumsden coming down the aisle towards him. He was looking past Mr Lumsden, over his shoulder, down the rows, row by row, from the back forward, and Frederick could see his eyes moving, the way they moved in a crowd at an airport, sorting it.

The panels looked at the back row. Castellanos had said so in the car. I won’t be able to see you through them.

He could not see him. He was looking anyway.

---

Mr Lumsden reached the doors. He reached up, without hurrying, and drew the bolt at the top of the right-hand one, and opened the left-hand one inwards by about six inches, and stepped sideways through the gap into the corridor, and pulled the door to behind him.

Not shut. To. It swung back on its hinge and stopped against the frame about an inch short of closing, and stayed there.

Through the glass panel Frederick could see the back of Mr Lumsden’s grey head and the shoulders of his grey suit, and over his right shoulder, a head taller, Castellanos.

They talked.

He could not hear them. There was the inch of open door, and the length of the gym, and ninety people very carefully breathing, and he could not hear a word. He could see Castellanos’s mouth. It was moving in the way it moved when Castellanos was saying something he had decided in advance how to say: short, flat, with a pause in the middle. Castellanos’s right hand was down at his side, and in it, held loosely, screen inwards against his leg, there was a telephone.

Not his own. His own was smaller and older. This one was the black one the Household gave the senior officer on a detail for the one line that went to the Palace and nowhere else.

He did not hold it up. He did not show it to Mr Lumsden. He held it down at his side, against his trouser leg, the way you hold a thing you have been told to bring and not to use.

Mr Lumsden shook his head.

Once. A small movement, side to side, not unkind, the movement of a man who has shaken his head at a great many people at a great many doors and has found that one shake, done properly, is enough.

Castellanos said something else. Longer this time. His face did not change.

Mr Lumsden took the card out of his breast pocket.

He did not put his glasses on. He did not need to read it. He held it up between two fingers, at the height of Castellanos’s chest, for perhaps two seconds, the way a ticket inspector holds up a ticket that is the wrong colour, and then put it back in his pocket and shook his head again.

---

And then Castellanos looked past him again, through the inch of open door, down the aisle, and found him.

Frederick did not know how. Perhaps because he was the only one in the fourth row turned round in his chair. Perhaps because Castellanos had been finding him in rooms since he was twelve and could have found him in the dark by the shape of the back of his head. But for about a second, through an inch of door and forty yards of gym and the bars of sun from the high windows, they looked at each other.

Castellanos’s face did nothing.

Frederick had seen it do a great many things. He had seen it on the bluff at Santa Monica on the Thursday morning, when it was the only thing on the bluff that was not moving. He had seen it on the boards on Twenty-Second Street on the Friday, before Castellanos put it down on his arms. He had seen it at the airfield on the Saturday, and at the side door of the north wing on the Monday night with a white cup in its hands. He knew most of the things it could do.

It did none of them now. It looked at him, steady, for about a second, without any expression at all, the way it looked at a road. And then it gave him something. He did not know what it was. It was not a nod. It was less than a nod. It was the thing a face does just before it nods and decides not to.

Then Castellanos looked back at Mr Lumsden and said one word, which Frederick could read, because it was short and Castellanos said it to him every morning at the car.

Right.

And stepped back from the door.

---

Mr Lumsden came back in.

He pushed the left-hand door shut behind him with the flat of his hand until it latched, and reached up and slid the bolt at the top of the right-hand one home, and turned round, and looked down the gym at the ninety of them, and at the dozen or so who were still turned round in their chairs, and at Frederick, who was one of them.

“Candidates will face the front,” said Mr Lumsden, “and continue.”

Frederick faced the front.

Mr Lumsden walked back up the aisle at his one speed, past 4D, past him, and sat down on the gym bench behind the table beside the grey box, and took a small black book out of his jacket pocket, and a pencil, and opened the book on his knee. He took out his watch and looked at it. He wrote something in the book. It was short. Frederick could see the pencil move, three or four words and a number, and stop.

Then Mr Lumsden put the book away and put his glasses on and looked at the space above the desks.

---

His hand was flat on the paper. It had been flat on the paper since the handle. He looked at it.

Beside him, at 4E, Theo had turned round too, and had turned back, and was now, for the first time since nine o’clock, not writing. He was looking at Frederick. Straight at him, across the yard of floor between the desks, with his pen held over his paper and his face white under the freckles, and his eyes saying, as plainly as if he had shouted it across the gym, what is it, what is it, Freddie, what’s happened.

You did not look at anybody in the Board’s examinations. The Board’s men could see a look from a hundred yards.

Frederick looked at him for a moment. Then he shook his head, very slightly, a quarter of an inch, side to side. Not nothing. I don’t know. And then, the other thing, which he did with his eyes, down at Theo’s paper and back up. Write.

Theo looked at him a moment longer. Then he swallowed and bent his head and wrote.

---

He made himself think about it properly. Mr Ferrante said that when you did not know what a source meant you should not guess; you should list what it showed and what it did not show, and see what was left.

It showed Castellanos at the door with the Palace telephone in his hand, at twenty to ten.

It showed him asking to come in, or to have something passed in, and being told no, twice, with the card held up.

It showed him accepting the no.

That was the thing. That was what was left when you had listed the rest. He had accepted it. Right. If it had been anything that was a danger to the King, to Frederick, in this building, Castellanos would not have been at the door asking. He would have been through it. He had gone through a whole city before, in California, on a Friday at two, street by street, with the ground still moving, and no regulation of any Board had been in his mind then, and none would have been now. He had not come through. He had tried the handle once, carefully, so that he would be heard trying it, and asked, and been refused, and said right.

So it was not that.

And he had had the Palace telephone. Not his own. The Palace one. Which meant that somebody at the Palace had rung him. Which meant that somebody at the Palace wanted something brought to the gym door at twenty to ten, or wanted to know whether something could be.

And had been told, through Castellanos, by Mr Lumsden, with a card, that it could not.

And had accepted that too. Or Castellanos would still be at the door.

He listened.

He could not hear anything from the corridor. The doors were thick, and the gym was big, and ninety pens were going again. But he knew the corridor. He knew how long it was from the doors to the fire door at the far end, and the chair, forty feet, on the old library boards that Mr Kaminski said had been laid in 1931 and creaked in eleven places. If Castellanos had walked back to his chair, he would have walked over at least three of them.

He had not heard a creak.

He turned his head, an inch, as if to look at the clock, and looked instead at the glass panel in the left-hand door, out of the corner of his eye.

At the very bottom of the panel, just showing over the lower edge of the glass, there was the top of a head. Dark hair, short, with grey in it at the crown. Not moving. Standing where it had stood, directly outside the door, close against it, with its back to the glass now, facing out into the corridor.

He had not gone back to the chair.

---

The clock said nineteen minutes to ten, which meant twenty-two and a half to.

Twenty-two and a half to eleven in Buenos Aires.

He did not know why he thought that. He thought it anyway, and pushed it away, and looked down at the page and a half on the desk, and at the sentence he had stopped in the middle of.

The man in the arch has no name in the source and does not need one, because

He read it twice. He could not remember what came after because. He had known three minutes ago. He looked at the photograph in Source C, at the square full of soldiers sitting down, and the forty in front of the arch, and the one in the arch, small, dark, with his hands behind his back, too small to have a face.

because it is not the man that the soldiers are refusing to go past. It is the place where he is standing. Anybody could have stood there. What mattered is that somebody did, and that they had the right to.

That was not what he had been going to write. He did not cross it out.

He wrote two more paragraphs, about the clause again, and how a law could make a place for somebody to stand in and could not make them stand in it, and he finished the question at nine minutes to ten by the clock, which was twelve and a half to by Mr Lumsden’s watch, and drew a line under it with the ruler, which was the first thing anybody had found the ruler for.

Then he turned the page to Section B.