Page 27 of The Headmaster’s Binding

The wet left shoe said he had gone past the fourteenth step and into its standing water, whether he remembered it or not.

On the ninth step, face down, Croft had found a green spiral notebook, fat with use, the cover warped into a curve by a coat pocket. He gave it to me the way he gives me everything, already turned so that I would not see it open, and then he stood in the fog with his hands at his sides and waited to be told what the morning was.

"Nothing to the gatehouse book," I said. "The hasp to me. The door to a locksmith you trust."

"Sir," Croft said, and the morning was that.

* * *

I carried the notebook in my breast pocket for nearly twelve hours, and I am going to write down what that was like, because this page answers to no one and because the cost should be on record somewhere, even a record no one reads.

The inspector has asked me one question all term in her own voice, without paper under it: tell me about Mercer. The answer is in a green spiral notebook that spent the day against my chest. Every question she will ask next is in there too. What he has seen, and when, and what he has made of it; how far he stands from the truth in steps; whether the college's editor has stayed ahead of him or fallen behind. A term of my two sets of books could have been audited in twenty minutes with a pot of tea, and I would have known, at last, exactly what I am concealing and exactly how bad it has become, and I would have known one other thing besides, which I will not name, but which has a page in that notebook or I am no reader of men.

I did not open it.

Here is the reasoning, entered honestly. In twenty-six years I have never read a record I was prepared to leave unfiled. Reading is filing; the officer who knows a thing is obliged to it; that is what an officer is. If I read his notebook I would have to act on his notebook, and every action it could oblige me to is a door closing on the man who wrote it. And under the reasoning, where the true ledger is kept: I did not want what is in that book taken. I wanted it handed.

I had one folder out of the locked drawer that morning as well, on my own desk, for reasons I do not intend to set down even here. I read it standing, and I did not file it when I finished. I laid it face down beside the blotter, which is not filing, which is not like me, and it lay there all day like a hand I could not look at the back of.

At noon the inspector crossed my path in the north corridor, by design or by the appearance of accident, which with her are the same thing in different coats. She wished to speak about the end of term.

"I am told the college keeps a winter rite," she said. "Carols. Candles. The Provost's annual Latin."

"The last night of term. It is the one evening the whole college is in one room."

"Yes," she said, and gave me a half second more of her attention than the sentence required. "I thought I should see it before I go."

Before I go. I stood at arm's length from the woman whose entire mandate could be settled, in evidence, out of a green spiral book riding inside my coat, and she looked at my face and never once at my pocket, and I produced correct sentences about the order of service until she released me. I have carried compromising paper before. I have never before carried it into conversation with the person it compromises me to, and I record, for accuracy, that the notebook seemed to gain an ounce for every sentence of that exchange, and that I walked away from her with the flat, careful gait of a man balancing water.

At four I sent Croft with a card: My compliments, and I will see Dr. Mercer at six o'clock. I did not wait for Tuesday. Let the record note that too: I have a sanctioned hour with the man tomorrow, procedurally bulletproof, and I spent a summons rather than wait for it.

* * *

He came at six exactly, which told me the state of him; he spends a minute of lateness on me every Tuesday like a coin, and tonight he did not have it. He stood in front of the desk with his chin up and his weight even, a man braced for the standard interview, ready to be threatened in the standard dialect, and I took the notebook from my pocket and laid it on the blotter between us and watched the brace fail.

"You have lost something," I said.

He looked at it for three full seconds. I watched the sequence land: where, first, and then when, and then, arriving last and hardest, what is written in it. His color went and came back in the time it takes a lamp to recover from a surge.

"That's private," he said.

"It was on the ninth step of a stair that does not appear on any plan of this college. Private is not the first word available."

"Did you read it?"

"No."

"You expect me to believe that."

"No," I said. "It is nevertheless true."

He picked it up and turned it in his hands, checking the warp of it, the rubber band, whatever tells a man his diary has kept his secrets, and some of the color that came back was the other kind. "It's mostly lists," he said.

"I am told lists are an instrument of the rational mind."

"Who told you that?"

"A man I am about to ask to stop making them."