"Beginner's luck," Marsh said, at the volume of a man talking to his friends and not, officially, to the room. "First hour's always clean. It's when they're tired and somebody's actually on them that you find out. Bodies like that—" he nodded toward Tomas's narrow frame, "—they're all technique until somebody leans on them. Then there's nothing underneath."
"He hasn't been leaned on," Sato said.
"He will be," Marsh said comfortably.
Sato did not answer. He had stopped watching the group and was watching only Tomas, and his watching had changed quality during the hour in a way he would not have been able to justify to Duarte if Duarte had asked — which Duarte, fortunately, did not. It was the economy that troubled him. Beginners are economical by luck, in patches, between spasms of effort. This man was economical the way a sentence is economical when every word has been chosen by someone who dislikes waste on principle. His feet arrived. That was Sato's private formulation, arrived at in silence and not shared: other people's feet travelled, and hoped; this man's feet arrived, already finished with the journey, already standing in the place the next second was going to need.
It proved nothing. Sato was an analyst. He knew the difference between a pattern and a proof, and he filed the observation under pattern, and waited, as he preferred to wait, for more data.
"Right," Antoniou said, clapping once, at the front of the hall. "You have all fallen down adequately, which puts you ahead of most of humanity. Tea, ten minutes. Then partner work — throws at walking pace, and the first of the groundwork. Those who are assisting—" his gaze travelled, level and unhurried, to the window, "—will now be asked. And will remember what this assessment is for."
Tomas went back to the bench, sat down, and drank his tea from the mug Hannah gave him, holding it in both hands the way he had been taught to hold things that were not his. He felt neither vindicated nor relieved. He felt, if anything, the small specific calm of a man who has played the first notes of an unfamiliar piano and found it, against expectation, in tune.
He had not yet been leaned on. On that, at least, Colin Marsh was entirely right.
The partner work began at walking pace, as Antoniou had promised, with the pairs spread across the mats like dancers in a hall where the music had not yet been decided. Throws first, each partner taking turns to be the floor's brief guest, then the rudiments of groundwork: how to hold a man down honestly, and how to be held down without panic, and how to get up again — that plain trilogy on which, Antoniou remarked to the room at large, most of the rest was commentary.
Tomas was paired first with the heavy-set man from the morning line, whose name was Osei, and who apologised in advance, at length, for his weight.
The seniors circulated as assistants now, and their styles of assistance were a curriculum in themselves. Sato corrected a grip with two fingers and a sentence of eight words, and the applicant he corrected stood straighter for the rest of the hour, as if filed. Duarte corrected with brilliance and witnesses. And Marsh — Marsh partnered the eager ones, the young men who had come to the assessment hoping to be discovered, and gave them the full weather of himself, so that Antoniou twice had to say, without raising his voice, "Mr. Marsh. It's an assessment, not a harvest," and Marsh would ease off, grinning, having made his point to an audience of one nervous man at a time.
"Why does he do that?" the physiotherapist whispered to Tomas, in a rotation where they stood waiting together. Her name was Diana, she was forty-four, and she had the brisk compassion of her profession. "The big one. It's not teaching. My clinic would call it something else."
"He needs the room to agree with him," Tomas said. "About what he is."
"And does it work?"
"Mostly," Tomas said. "Rooms are kind."
She looked at him sideways, amused and a little startled, and then they were called back onto the mat. "You'll feel it," he said. "Everybody feels it. It's not personal."
"I know," Tomas said. "Go ahead."