The Last Exam

For nineteen years Rosa Quispe had prepared other people for the Mastery exam. She had done it in a classroom on the fourth floor of a language institute in Miraflores, Lima, with a view of a parking lot and, on clear days, a thin gray strip of the Pacific. She knew the format the way a pilot knows a cockpit. She could recite the grading criteria in her sleep and occasionally, according to her husband, did. In all that time, however, she had never taken the exam herself, and it had begun to feel like a small, private hypocrisy, the dentist who has never sat in the chair.

So when the institute offered to pay for her to take it in London, as part of a scheme to have its senior teachers certified, she accepted at once and spent the following six months insisting to anyone who asked that she was not in the least nervous. Her students, who had known her for years, were not fooled. On her last day before the trip they presented her with a card that read, in thirty different hands, "Break a leg, Miss Rosa. Not literally." She put it in her purse, where it would turn out to be the only thing that arrived in London undamaged.

Things began to go wrong at the very first hurdle. Her flight to Madrid left four hours late, which meant that she missed her connection, which meant that she spent a night on a bench in Barajas airport, using her coat as a pillow and her vocabulary notebook as a mental anchor. When she finally landed at Heathrow, eighteen hours behind schedule, her suitcase did not. A young man at the lost luggage desk assured her, with impeccable courtesy and no apparent conviction, that it would probably turn up within forty-eight hours. The exam was in thirty-six.

She arrived at her small hotel in Bloomsbury at eleven at night with the clothes she stood up in, a toothbrush bought at the airport and a growing sense that the universe had a sense of humor. Barely had she fallen asleep when the fire alarm went off. It was, the night manager explained at half past three, with fifty bleary guests in pajamas standing on the pavement, a false alarm triggered by someone making toast. Rosa, who had once taught a whole lesson on the passive voice using hotel notices as examples, found this almost funny. Almost.

The morning of the exam brought a strike on the Underground. Rosa, who had planned to take the Tube, studied a map, abandoned the idea of a bus within five minutes and ended up walking the two and a half miles to the exam center, at a pace somewhere between a march and a jog. She arrived with eight minutes to spare, out of breath and wearing yesterday's blouse. The invigilator, a calm woman with a lanyard and half-moon glasses, checked her passport, looked at her for a moment and said kindly, "You look like you've been through the wars." Rosa nearly hugged her.

The Reading and Use of English paper went, on the whole, rather well. Midway through it she came across a text on the history of the umbrella, a subject on which she had once built an entire lesson, and had to suppress a laugh. It was the Listening that tested her. No sooner had the first recording begun than a road drill started up in the street outside, steady and enthusiastic, as though it had been booked for the occasion. The invigilator closed the windows. The drill was not impressed. Rosa leaned towards the speaker, shut her eyes and listened as she had told hundreds of students to listen: not for every word, but for the shape of the argument, the signposts, the however and the that said.

In the afternoon came the Speaking test, which she had always told her students was the easiest part, because it was just a conversation. Her partner was a young man from Seville called Javier, a doctor about to start work in a hospital in Leeds, who was so nervous that his hands were shaking. As they waited outside the room, Rosa did what she had done a thousand times before without thinking. She talked to him. She asked about Leeds, about his specialty, about whether he had found an apartment. By the time they were called in, he was laughing. It was only halfway through the test, discussing a set of pictures about urban planning, that she realized she had spent the whole afternoon behaving like a teacher, and that it had calmed her down at least as much as it had calmed him.

The Writing paper, which had been scheduled for the morning, had been moved to the end of the day because of the strike. By then Rosa had been awake for most of two days. She chose the essay question on whether experience matters more than qualifications, a topic so ironic in the circumstances that she suspected it had been written specifically to mock her. She wrote fast and cleanly, organized her argument in four paragraphs and finished with a conclusion that began, "Be that as it may", which she had been forbidding her students to use for years on the grounds that it was overused. On this occasion, she decided, it was earned.

Her suitcase arrived at the hotel that evening, an hour after she had returned from the exam, with a small dent in one corner and a label from Frankfurt, a city she had never been to. She sat on the bed and laughed until she cried, and then called her husband in Lima and talked for an hour, mostly about the toast.

The results came eight weeks later. She had passed, comfortably, with the top grade. Only one detail spoiled her satisfaction, and it was the kind of detail she would never have mentioned to anyone except her students. Her highest score was in Speaking, the part she had barely prepared for. Her lowest, by a narrow but undeniable margin, was in Use of English, the part she had been teaching, with what she had always considered complete authority, for nineteen years.

She told her class the whole story on the first Monday back, from the bench in Madrid to the drill outside the window. They loved it. At the end, a quiet girl in the back row put her hand up and asked what the most important lesson had been. Rosa thought about it for longer than she expected. "That things will go wrong," she said finally, "and that you will be fine anyway. Not because you know every rule. Because you know how to keep talking." Then she picked up a board pen and wrote on the whiteboard, in large capitals: BARELY HAD I FALLEN ASLEEP WHEN THE ALARM WENT OFF. "Right," she said. "Inversion. Who can tell me why this is correct?"