Page 32 of The Headmaster’s Binding

There is a form for it. There is a form for everything, and somewhere in the deep drawer of every station desk is Form Nine, Remonstrance of a Station Officer, printed in a fount I have seen nowhere else. I have kept a station for nine years and served seventeen before that and I have never taken one out of the cellophane.

I set the calibration candle where it could watch, and I filled the form in my report hand, the loops closed, the figures continental, and I am copying the operative sentence here because I am proud of it the way a man is proud of the one wall he built plumb:

The undersigned officer declines to implement the amended assessment, and will continue the station at the standing rate and the standing interval, in obedience to the third rubric, which the undersigned holds no schedule can amend.

Declines. Nine years of returns have gone up under my signature, four hundred and seventy-eight of them saying no anomalies in a hand that never varied, and not once have I written a refusing word in the upward direction. I wrote declines and my hand did not shake. I sat and waited for the tremor the way you wait for the thunder after the flash, because there is always a tremor.

Nothing came. The hand lay on the blotter, quiet, like a tool that had finally been picked up for the work it was forged for, and I want it on this page that the steadiness frightened me more than shaking would have. A shaking hand belongs to a man who knows what he is risking. I do not know what the steadiness belongs to.

* * *

The inspector came to me before I could go to her, which is how it always is with her, and I have stopped recording it as coincidence.

Wednesday, nine in the morning, my office. She read the form once at arm's length and once close, through spectacles I have never seen her need, and the room was so quiet I could hear Neave's tray somewhere below us, the little ring of it, like a far-off till.

"You have cited the third rubric," she said.

"I have."

"Correctly." She set the form down and squared it to the blotter's edge, one millimeter, a courtesy in my own dialect, and I did not know until she did it that she had ever noticed the dialect existed. "The office does not receive many of these. I have seen two. One is framed, in a certain room, as an exhibit. I decline to describe the framing of the other."

"I would sign it again this morning."

"Yes," she said. "That is evident in the hand." And then, while I was still parsing that, she took the pen out of my stand, uncapped it, and signed her name under mine. Full name. The date. A small, upright, unhurried signature, the signature of a woman who has never once needed to sign anything quickly.

I looked at the two names on the form and felt the floor of the thing move under me, and I said, with more honesty than I permit myself before ten in the morning, "I do not know what your name makes this."

"Neither do I," said Eleanor Wren. She capped the pen and laid it in the tray, and at the door she turned, with the mildness she saves for her heaviest freight. "Either I have strengthened your remonstrance, Headmaster, or I have witnessed it. We will learn which when the office does." A pause, exactly as long as it needed to be. "I found the drafting very clean."

She went. I sat down, which I had not planned to do.

I know every use the office has for an enemy. Enemies are in the tables; there are procedures; I could have been opposed this morning and slept tonight. I do not know one use it has for whatever she became at my desk at nine o'clock, and I have spent twenty-six years learning that the office always, always finds a use.

The form went up at noon, by the tray, with the two names on it. I watched Neave carry it away level, like a full glass.

* * *

I walked the fabric on Wednesday evening, the long circuit, because a man who has just declined the office's paper wants to know his walls are where he left them.

The east range held. The seam sat quiet under my palm, cold, paid, and the fog kept its distance from the wall in the usual way, and everything in the college's second body reported itself in order, which on any other week would have been a comfort, and this week had the feel of a ward round before a surgery nobody has consented to.

I stopped, as I do not usually permit myself between appointed times, at the place off the chapel walk where the thirty-one steps go down. I did not descend. I stood at the head of them for a count of ten, with the cold coming up past my shoes, and I will enter the observation in the only words this page can hold: what is under this college does not read the office's paper, and it had, nonetheless, the air of a creditor who has heard the argument through the wall. The dark at the foot of those steps has carried an attention all term. Tonight the attention was up. I made the count of ten last its full ten, because leaving early would have been an answer, and then I went on with my hands steady and my back informed, all the way to the corner, that I was walking away from a door.

I came back through the library court at half past nine. Returns close at nine; Marion's lamp was off; but there was light over the issue desk, the little green-shaded one, and through the leaded glass I could see a gowned back at Marion's counter, and the brass spike of request flimsies set out on the counter, and a hand, a right hand, steady, unhurried, copying from the spiked slips into a pocket-book, the top slip's lower corner folded under a thumb, the way a careful copyist keeps his place. Stocktaking, at the term's turn, by lamplight: the college writing itself down, as it has for four centuries, while its Headmaster goes by outside in the dark with his own ledgers to carry. I did not stop. I had nothing left that evening to spend on diligence that was not mine.

* * *

At midnight I let myself into the small room.

I had no reason to be there. There is no sitting scheduled; I have seen to it that nothing is scheduled; that is now, apparently, my official position, signed and countersigned. The room was cold and smelled of stone and old wax, and the candle stood on the sill in its pewter cup, unlit, and I left it so. Some rooms you do not light. You stand in them the way you stand in a church you no longer believe in, out of respect for the man who did.

The small room's window gives onto the backs, over the service lane, and across the lane and up, on the third floor of Corbett, one window was lit.

He marks essays at night. I know this the way I know the college's weather, without being able to cite the survey. The light was the yellow of his desk lamp, not the blue of a screen, and once, while I stood there, a shape crossed it carrying what I would wager was a cup, and did not draw the curtain, because he never draws the curtain, because it has not yet occurred to the man that he lives somewhere he can be watched.

I stood in the dark with my hands behind my back and I itemized. The instrument is borrowed. I know the lender. He does not know he has made the loan, and I am in no position to declare it, and a borrowed instrument used in secret is called theft in every ledger I keep, and I itemized anyway, because it is midnight's only honest procedure and because his are the only books I know of that balance.

Item one: the tithe is doubled, and I have refused it, and the refusal protects the third rubric and does not feed the column. The column does not care what I protect.