12. Adrian #2
"You want to know what the hour was like," he said.
"There's nothing. That's what it's like.
Not fuzzy. Not dark. Gone, clean, like a page razored at the spine, and you know that already, don't you, because you knew about the shoe.
So here's where we are: your college keeps a stair that eats an hour of a man and hands back the body with the lamp lit, and you have the nerve to stand there and tell me the building's closed because of damp. "
"I have not mentioned damp."
"You were about to."
I was. I abandoned the survey of the bridge. "Stop looking," I said. "I am asking you."
"Asking." He came a step closer, which was not in my plan, and the plan did not survive it. "You could make it an order. You're the Headmaster. I'm new and I'm untenured and there's a review with my name on it every Tuesday; it would take you one memo."
"It would."
"But you're asking."
"I am asking."
He looked at me for a long moment, and when he spoke again the anger had gone somewhere under the words and what was left was worse, because it was plain. "You know what I saw put itself out. Ask me anyway."
Ten inches. That is what remained between us by then; I measured it the way I measure everything, and I can report that ten inches is wide enough for an entire institution and too narrow for me to trust my hands.
His breath was audible. So, I suppose, was mine.
The lamp on the desk burned at its allowance and did not lean, and I was cataloguing that with the gratitude of a man checking his instruments in a dive.
Then my hand left my side.
I record it as it occurred: I did not send it.
It rose the way the candles lean, and I watched it go with the part of me that watches, and it crossed the ten inches and laid itself along his jaw, thumb at the hinge, fingers in the badly shaved shadow.
The whole of him went still under my palm.
Warm. Unpriced. His head weighed into the hand by a degree, the way a thing settles that has been asked to settle, and his mouth was near enough that the next inch had no procedure in it. No committee. No college.
I took the inch back.
It cost what a wall costs. I returned the hand to my side, to its place, thumb against the seam of my trousers like a man on parade, and behind me, in the cold corner where the curtain does not quite reach, the window made its small dry crack, frost going over the glass in one stride, a sound I know the way Rosalind knows the kettle, and I did not turn, and I did not explain it, and I will not explain it here.
He glanced past my shoulder once, at the glass. At the new white corner. Filed whatever he saw. Said nothing.
"The review stands at five o'clock tomorrow," I said, which was not what the ten inches were for, and both of us knew it, and neither of us moved for the space of four breaths, and then he stepped back first, because one of us had to and I had already proven, twice this autumn, that it would not be me.
"Four o'clock," he said. "Tuesdays are at four."
"Four," I said. "Yes."
He got to the door and stopped with his hand on it.
"For what it's worth," he said, not turning around, "you should've read the notebook.
You'd have hated it. There's a whole page in there that would've saved you the trouble of asking me anything," and then he was through it and into the corridor, and I stood in my own office doing sums with no numbers in them.
* * *
I walked him out. There is no institutional gloss for it; the Headmaster does not walk junior faculty across the quad at half past six; I did it because the alternative was watching him go from the window, and I have done enough of that this term to know which of the two costs more.
We fell into step by the chapel walk. I noticed, at ten yards, that I had shortened my stride and he had lengthened his, and that the compromise had been reached without negotiation, below the level at which either of us was consulted.
The fog stood off the lawns at its usual height and held still while we went through it, and he talked about his seminar, of all things, the essay Toby Renner had written and half-ruined with a borrowed thesis, and I said the things a headmaster says, and the whole quiet length of the quad was a conversation about nothing conducted at exactly the pitch of the other conversation, the one we were not having, the one with ten inches in it.
The gallery window was lit.
She stood in it with her book. Neave was a shadow behind her shoulder.
She did not step back from the glass when I looked up, and she did not pretend to be studying the weather; she watched the two of us cross her sightline in step, from the chapel walk to the Letters door, the full length of the quad, and at the end of it, with the economy of a woman totting a column, her pencil moved twice.
Two entries. I have begun to keep books on what she keeps books in, and I know this much: she does not write down what she has merely seen. She writes down what she intends to use.
* * *
The frost had cleared from the office window by ten. All but the one corner.
I sat with the face-down folder at my left hand and the candle burning at its allowance, and I entered the day's true account, since this page answers to no one.
I summoned a man in order to frighten him off the worst ground on this campus, and I held better cards than I have ever held against anyone: his trespass, his lost hour, his notebook, his review, his need of this post, the whole apparatus of a college that has ended careers for a tenth of what he has done.
I laid down exactly one of them. Then I returned his property with the seal of his privacy unbroken, and converted my order into a request, and walked him back across open ground in front of the inspector as though the quad were a page and I wanted the entry made.
There is a sentence that ends men like him. I have used it four times in nine years; it costs nothing to say and it has never once failed me; I had it loaded all afternoon. It requires only a flat voice and a reference to the terms of a probationary appointment.
I could not make my mouth perform it. I record the fact without decoration, as an officer should: the station's best instrument for the removal of a hazard was tested tonight against a literature professor with a wet shoe and a night he cannot account for, and the instrument failed, and the failure was not in the sentence.
Above the quad, the pencil moved twice. I do not know yet what the second entry was. I know what the first one was. It crossed forty yards of fog in step, and it did not have the sense to walk apart.