"You warmed up honestly," Tomas said. "It's why the sweep worked. If you'd been showing off for the room, I'd have learned nothing from you."
Marsh stared at him. "You're comforting me. I came to apologise and you're comforting me."
"It's a reflex," Tomas said. "He trained it in. I apologise."
And Marsh — big, hot-tempered Colin Marsh, who had lost a round and a temper and a week's certainty — laughed, suddenly and helplessly and with real relief in it, the first uncomplicated sound anyone had made all evening, and clapped Tomas once on the shoulder with a hand like a spade and went out into the rain still laughing at himself, which was worth more than the apology.
Duarte did not come at all, at first. Duarte sat on the edge of the mat with his elbows on his knees and his champion's hands hanging between them, and he stayed there while the chairs were stacked and the lights over the viewing room went off, and Tomas, who understood about waiting for the end of sentences, got on with his departure and did not approach him. It was Duarte who finally spoke, without looking up, in the voice of a man addressing the floor because the floor could be trusted.
"You let us," he said.
Tomas stopped.
"For two days. Three rounds. You let us laugh at you in the corridor, you let me put on a warm-up like a peacock in front of you, you let me spend a whole round —" he gestured at the mat, at its whole shining geography of his defeat — "a whole round teaching you my signature, one careful lesson at a time, like a man reading his own will aloud. You could have ended it in the first minute of the first day. You could have said one name in that corridor and the laughing would have stopped like a tap turning. And you stood there in your plain clothes and you let us."
"Yes," Tomas said.
"Why?" Duarte looked up then, and his face was not angry, which was worse; it was the face of a man doing arithmetic he had been avoiding for years. "Was it a lesson? Were we a lesson you were teaching?"
"No." Tomas said it gently, and at once, so that the idea would not live. "You weren't a lesson, Rafael. Nobody was. I came here to be evaluated for a scholarship. That's the entire plot. If I'd announced him in the corridor, you would have stopped laughing — and started performing. You'd have given me your respect because of a name, not because of anything I'd done, and then nothing in this room would have been true. Not your rounds. Not my —" He searched, and found the plain word. "Not my measure of myself, either. He taught me never to spend his name as money. It isn't money. It's a trust." He paused. "And the laughing didn't cost me anything. I want you to know that accurately too. I've been a plain man in plain clothes being underestimated in rooms since I was nineteen. It's practically my home address. You didn't wound me. You just — declined to see me, for a while, and then you saw me. That's a better story than most rooms get."
Duarte was silent for a long time. The rain had thickened on the windows.
"Show me the entry again sometime," he said at last. "The roll. Slowly. At the speed of the kettle you keep mentioning."
"Any time," Tomas said. "Bring a notebook."
"Champions don't bring notebooks."
"You do now," Tomas said, and Duarte — after a moment, and with the air of a man paying a bill he had finally decided was his — laughed, once, and stood, and offered his hand, and Tomas took it.
Antoniou had waited until the hall was empty, which everyone understood to be its own kind of sentence. He stood now by the photograph wall at the far end of the room — thirty years of gradings and champions in frames — and Tomas, sensing that this last part was the real business of the evening, followed him and stood beside him and looked where he was looking.
There was a space in the second row: the paint behind one missing frame was a shade lighter than the rest, a pale rectangle like a window onto the room the wall had once been.