He did not feel angry. Later, turning the morning over, he would be precise about this: what he felt was older and quieter than anger, and considerably more useful. He thought of Yusuf, which he did most days and had not expected to do here, in this bright room, under these lights. He thought of the warehouse, and of being nineteen, and of a voice saying that a man who has decided what a thing is before he has touched it will spend his strength arguing with his own decision.
George Antoniou had not yet come down from his office. The clock above the door said ten past nine. The first group was already moving on the mats, stiff with nerves, counting themselves in.
Tomas waited to be called, and listened.
George Antoniou came down the internal stairs at twenty past nine with a folder under his arm and the unhurried air of a man who has never once arrived anywhere by accident. He was fifty-nine, built square and kept upright by habit rather than vanity, and the room reorganised itself around him the way water reorganises around a stone — not dramatically, but at once, and everywhere. Hannah straightened her list. The first group on the mats tried to look mid-exercise. Even Duarte's anecdote, which had been travelling in slow circles around the benches, died where it stood.
"Good morning," Antoniou said. "Thank you for coming. Some of you will know that this assessment is the only one we hold each year, and that I conduct it myself." His eyes moved along the benches, registering faces, and came to rest — not long, a second — on Tomas. "Before we begin, let me be clear about one thing, because every year somebody requires it to be made clear."
He turned, quite deliberately, to the three black belts standing by the window.
"The people on those benches are our guests. They have given up a Saturday and a certain amount of pride to be measured in public by strangers. That is a braver thing than most of what happens on these mats. Anyone — anyone — who treats it as entertainment will leave the hall, and we will discuss his own commitment on Monday." He let the silence finish the sentence. "Rafael. You were telling a story when I came down. Was it a kind story?"
"It was about a tournament, sensei," Duarte said.
"Then tell it at the tournament." Antoniou closed the folder he had not opened. "Colin. Kenji. You will assist with the basics when I ask you, and not before I ask you. Gentlemen, I am disappointed to be giving this speech to senior students. I had prepared it for children, and there are no children in this academy."
Marsh looked at the floor with the concentrated expression of a man discovering an interesting pattern in it. Sato bowed, briefly and correctly, and said, "Sensei," in the tone of someone accepting a correction he intends to examine later. Duarte smiled — he was not a man who could be wholly rebuked in one pass — but the smile had retreated to a purely formal position, and he bowed too.
"Now," Antoniou said to the benches. "We begin with how you move. Nothing else. If you have never done any of this, do it badly and without apology; I am not marking polish. I am looking at what your bodies do when they are not being supervised by your opinions."
He explained the scholarship the way other men explain weather: briefly, and as a thing with rules of its own. One place. It was funded by a small trust his father had established and the academy topped up in good years, of which this had mercifully been one. It carried a year's fees, a gi and equipment, and a bursary, and it carried obligations in return — regular attendance, and the expectation that whoever received it would, in time, be the sort of senior who made rooms like this one easier for strangers to enter. "It is not a prize for the best fighter," he said. "We have tournaments for that. It is a judgement about who will still be here in five years, and what the academy will be like because they are. You cannot show me that in a morning. But you can show me how you begin."