"She says the total board will start Saturday at four thousand and something," Tess said. "And that Harold has requested, formally, the seat at the end of the front row, because, and I quote, a man should watch an education from close range."
"He has a seat," Rowan said. "Nadia promised the clinic staff a block by the aisle. He will be there with his cane across his knees like a sceptre."
"And you?" Tess asked, as they locked up together and the light went long and amber across the empty hall. "Brown belt, headline act, tortoise of television. How is the famous calm holding?"
Rowan looked down the hall where Harold had walked, where the blue tape still marked a beginning so ordinary that nobody had thought to celebrate it until a seventy two year old man crossed the whole distance and sat down in a chair like a king. "I keep thinking the week would feel bigger," she said. "Instead it feels like the hall. One section, then the next, rests planned, chair at the end. I can do a hall, Tess. I have had excellent training in halls."
Tess bumped her shoulder, gently, and they went out into the Friday evening together, past the poster in the clinic window, where someone, Nadia denied it hotly and unconvincingly, had drawn a small, respectful tortoise in the corner in green marker.
Saturday arrived with a clean, cold brightness off the water, and by six o'clock the line outside Saltline ran past the clinic entrance and halfway to the harbour road. Nadia Frost had opened the doors early, against every instinct of showmanship, because, she said, a queue of cold people is a queue of people calculating whether charity begins at home, and she intended them warm, seated, and generous. Inside, the hall had been transformed without being disguised. The mats lay at the centre under the bright lights, squared and immaculate. Rows of chairs rose on low platforms on three sides. The charity total board stood where she had placed it on Thursday, readable from the door, and a volunteer with a marker updated it at intervals to a small, sincere ripple of applause. Four thousand two hundred when the doors opened. Four thousand nine hundred by the time the seats were half full. Somewhere past five thousand, the volunteer stopped announcing each hundred and simply let the number speak, because the room had begun to make the sound rooms make when a number stops being arithmetic and becomes a promise.
Harold Benson arrived in the clinic staff party, in his pressed shirt and a tie that Tess insisted on straightening and that he permitted, on the grounds that she had witnessed his signature and was practically legal counsel. He took his seat at the end of the front row, aisle side, where he could stretch his legs and survey the mat with the proprietary air of a man who had, that week, conquered a hall in the same building. Clinic staff filled the block beside him, assistants and physiotherapists off duty and suddenly loud with freedom, and one of them had brought a small paper sign that read THE HALL WAS LONGER, which Harold pretended to disapprove of for nearly a full minute before asking to hold it himself.
Backstage, which at Saltline meant the equipment room with the door shut and a kettle nobody used, Rowan warmed up the way she did everything, in sections, without display. Joints first. Breath next. Then slow entries, practised at half speed against Tess's obliging and increasingly competent resistance, grip, step, angle, settle, each repetition a small rehearsal of patience. Ilya had sent a message that morning, six words long, which Rowan had read three times and then put away. Floor is ready when you are. Walt looked in once, took in the unhurried scene, and delivered his entire pre match address, honed over decades, in its final and perfect form.
"Yours when you're ready," he said, and went out again.