There was a space on the corridor wall, he remembered suddenly — he had walked past it ten thousand times — a rectangle of clean paint between the middleweight and the team photograph. He had never once asked Diane about it. He found, sitting there, that he did not want to be the man who asked anyone about any of it except the one person entitled to answer.
So he did the only thing in the whole business that was simple. He put the cassette back in its sleeve with the care of a man handling something that had trusted him. He put the notebook in his jacket pocket. He turned off the dehumidifier's ticking companionship of the archive, locked the cold store, and walked the length of the corridor in the dark club, past forty years of champions hanging straight in their frames — past the blank rectangle, which he did not stop at — to wait, on a Monday night, for the hour when a woman with her own key would come in through the side door to clean a building that had no idea who had been keeping it honest.
Frank Barlow had rehearsed it in the archive room among the tapes, which was ridiculous at sixty-one, and he knew it, and he had done it anyway. Standing between the shelves with the Gothenburg cassette in his hand — the label in his own younger handwriting, faded to the colour of weak tea — he had tried out versions. *I know who you are* sounded like a threat in a film. *You were the Wall* sounded like a fan, and there had been fans; he remembered the posters in that harbour gym, the local papers with their headlines he could half read. *I saw you once* was the truth and the least of it. In the end he had put the tape back on its shelf, squared it with its neighbours out of an old archivist's tenderness, and gone upstairs with nothing rehearsed at all. Some conversations a man should arrive at empty-handed.
There was also the matter of what he owed her, which he turned over on the stairs. Three years she had cleaned around him — emptied his bin, wiped down the little archive window, once, memorably, found his reading glasses in the ring apron pocket where he had left them and set them on his desk without a word — and in three years he had said good evening and thank you and once asked her about the weather in Sweden, as if she were a climate. He had not been unkind. He had been something more ordinary and harder to forgive in himself: he had simply not looked. A coach's whole trade is looking. He had looked at a thousand young fighters and read them like weather vanes, and the best defensive fighter he had ever seen had walked past him with a mop five nights a week, invisible in the plainest way there is, which is the way of all the people a building runs on.
That, in the end, was why he went gently. Whatever this was, it was hers, and he was late to it, and he knew it.
He waited until the building was nearly empty before he went looking for her, which was later than he had planned and later than he would have admitted. He had told himself, all afternoon, that it could wait until training finished. Then he had told himself it could wait until the heavyweight boys had showered and gone. Then it was past ten and the main lights were down to their night setting, and Greta Lindqvist was working the corridor with the dusting wand, moving along the champions' wall the way she always did, unhurried, one frame at a time, and he understood that he had been putting it off because he was afraid of being wrong.
He was not wrong. He knew he was not wrong. That was almost worse.
"Greta," he said.
She did not startle. In three years he had never seen her startle, and he filed that away now among all the other small things he had seen without understanding. "Coach," she said. "You are here late. The boys forget something?"