Never Let Me Go

Chapter Ten

Sometimes I’ll be driving on a long weaving road across marshland, or maybe past rows of furrowed fields, the sky big and grey and never changing mile after mile, and I find I’m thinking about my essay, the one I was supposed to be writing back then, when we were at the Cottages. The guardians had talked to us about our essays on and off throughout that last summer, trying to help each of us choose a topic that would absorb us properly for anything up to two years. But somehow—maybe we could see something in the guardians’ manner—no one really believed the essays were that important, and among ourselves we hardly discussed the matter. I remember when I went in to tell Miss Emily my chosen topic was Victorian novels, I hadn’t really thought about it much and I could see she knew it. But she just gave me one of her searching stares and said nothing more.

Once we got to the Cottages, though, the essays took on a new importance. In our first days there, and for some of us a lot longer, it was like we were each clinging to our essay, this last task from Hailsham, like it was a farewell gift from the guardians. Over time, they would fade from our minds, but for a while those essays helped keep us afloat in our new surroundings.

When I think about my essay today, what I do is go over it in some detail: I may think of a completely new approach I could have taken, or about different writers and books I could have focused on. I might be having coffee in a service station, staring at the motorway through the big windows, and my essay will pop into my head for no reason. Then I quite enjoy sitting there, going through it all again. Just lately, I’ve even toyed with the idea of going back and working on it, once I’m not a carer any more and I’ve got the time. But in the end, I suppose I’m not really serious about it. It’s just a bit of nostalgia to pass the time. I think about the essay the same way I might a rounders match at Hailsham I did particularly well in, or else an argument from long ago where I can now think of all the clever things I should have said. It’s at that sort of level—daydream stuff. But as I say, that’s not how it was when we first got to the Cottages.

Eight of us who left Hailsham that summer ended up at the Cottages. Others went to the White Mansion in the Welsh hills, or to Poplar Farm in Dorset. We didn’t know then that all these places had only the most tenuous links with Hailsham. We arrived at the Cottages expecting a version of Hailsham for older students, and I suppose that was the way we continued to see them for some time. We certainly didn’t think much about our lives beyond the Cottages, or about who ran them, or how they fitted into the larger world. None of us thought like that in those days.

The Cottages were the remains of a farm that had gone out of business years before. There was an old farmhouse, and around it, barns, outhouses, stables all converted for us to live in. There were other buildings, usually the outlying ones, that were virtually falling down, which we couldn’t use for much, but for which we felt in some vague way responsible—mainly on account of Keffers. He was this grumpy old guy who turned up two or three times a week in his muddy van to look the place over. He didn’t like to talk to us much, and the way he went round sighing and shaking his head disgustedly implied we weren’t doing nearly enough to keep the place up. But it was never clear what more he wanted us to do. He’d shown us a list of chores when we’d first arrived, and the students who were already there—“the veterans,” as Hannah called them—had long since worked out a rota which we kept to conscientiously. There really wasn’t much else we could do other than report leaking gutters and mop up after floods.

The old farmhouse—the heart of the Cottages—had a number of fireplaces where we could burn the split logs stacked in the outer barns. Otherwise we had to make do with big boxy heaters. The problem with these was they worked on gas canisters, and unless it was really cold, Keffers wouldn’t bring many in. We kept asking him to leave a big supply with us, but he’d shake his head gloomily, like we were bound to use them up frivolously or else cause an explosion. So I remember a lot of the time, outside the summer months, being chilly. You went around with two, even three jumpers on, and your jeans felt cold and stiff. We sometimes kept our Wellingtons on the whole day, leaving trails of mud and damp through the rooms. Keffers, observing this, would again shake his head, but when we asked him what else we were supposed to do, the floors being in the state they were, he’d make no reply.

I’m making it sound pretty bad, but none of us minded the discomforts one bit—it was all part of the excitement of being at the Cottages. If we were honest, though, particularly near the beginning, most of us would have admitted missing the guardians. A few of us, for a time, even tried to think of Keffers as a sort of guardian, but he was having none of it. You went up to greet him when he arrived in his van and he’d stare at you like you were mad. But this was one thing we’d been told over and over: that after Hailsham there’d be no more guardians, so we’d have to look after each other. And by and large, I’d say Hailsham prepared us well on that score.

Most of the students I was close to at Hailsham ended up at the Cottages that summer. Cynthia E.—the girl who’d said about me being Ruth’s “natural successor” that time in the Art Room—I wouldn’t have minded her, but she went to Dorset with the rest of her crowd. And Harry, the boy I’d nearly had sex with, I heard he went to Wales. But all our gang had stayed together. And if we ever missed the others, we could tell ourselves there was nothing stopping us going to visit them. For all our map lessons with Miss Emily, we had no real idea at that point about distances and how easy or hard it was to visit a particular place. We’d talk about getting lifts from the veterans when they were going on their trips, or else how in time we’d learn to drive ourselves and then we’d be able to see them whenever we pleased.

Of course, in practice, especially during the first months, we rarely stepped beyond the confines of the Cottages. We didn’t even walk about the surrounding countryside or wander into the nearby village. I don’t think we were afraid exactly. We all knew no one would stop us if we wandered off, provided we were back by the day and the time we entered into Keffers’s ledgerbook. That summer we arrived, we were constantly seeing veterans packing their bags and rucksacks and going off for two or three days at a time with what seemed to us scary nonchalance. We’d watched them with astonishment, wondering if by the following summer we’d be doing the same. Of course, we were, but in those early days, it didn’t seem possible. You have to remember that until that point we’d never been beyond the grounds of Hailsham, and we were just bewildered. If you’d told me then that within a year, I’d not only develop a habit of taking long solitary walks, but that I’d start learning to drive a car, I’d have thought you were mad.

Even Ruth looked daunted that sunny day the minibus dropped us in front of the farmhouse, circled round the little pond and disappeared up the slope. We could see hills in the distance that reminded us of the ones in the distance at Hailsham, but they seemed to us oddly crooked, like when you draw a picture of a friend and it’s almost right but not quite, and the face on the sheet gives you the creeps. But at least it was the summer, not the way the Cottages would get a few months on, with all the puddles frozen over and the rough ground frosted bone hard. The place looked beautiful and cosy, with overgrown grass everywhere—a novelty to us. We stood together in a huddle, the eight of us, and watched Keffers go in and out of the farmhouse, expecting him to address us at any moment. But he didn’t, and all we could catch was the odd irritated mutter about the students who already lived there. Once, as he went to get something from his van, he gave us a moody glance, then returned to the farmhouse and closed the door behind him.

Before too long, though, the veterans, who’d been having a bit of fun watching us being pathetic—we were to do much the same the following summer—came out and took us in hand. In fact, looking back, I see they really went out of their way helping us settle in. Even so, those first weeks were strange and we were glad we had each other. We’d always move about together and seemed to spend large parts of the day awkwardly standing outside the farmhouse, not knowing what else to do.

It’s funny now recalling the way it was at the beginning, because when I think of those two years at the Cottages, that scared, bewildered start doesn’t seem to go with any of the rest of it. If someone mentions the Cottages today, I think of easy-going days drifting in and out of each other’s rooms, the languid way the afternoon would fold into evening then into night. I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea. I think about how I read them, lying on my front in the grass on warm afternoons, my hair—which I was growing long then—always falling across my vision. I think about the mornings waking up in my room at the top of the Black Barn to the voices of students outside in the field, arguing about poetry or philosophy; or the long winters, the breakfasts in steamed-up kitchens, meandering discussions around the table about Kafka or Picasso. It was always stuff like that at breakfast; never who you’d had sex with the night before, or why Larry and Helen weren’t talking to each other any more.

But then again, when I think about it, there’s a sense in which that picture of us on that first day, huddled together in front of the farmhouse, isn’t so incongruous after all. Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable quite to let each other go.

The veterans, who of course knew nothing about the history of Tommy and Ruth’s relationship, treated them as a long-established couple, and this seemed to please Ruth no end. For the first weeks after we arrived, she made a big deal of it, always putting her arm around Tommy, sometimes snogging him in the corner of a room while other people were still about. Well, this kind of thing might have been fine at Hailsham, but looked immature at the Cottages. The veteran couples never did anything showy in public, going about in a sensible sort of way, like a mother and father might do in a normal family.

There was, incidentally, something I noticed about these veteran couples at the Cottages—something Ruth, for all her close study of them, failed to spot—and this was how so many of their mannerisms were copied from the television. It first came to me watching this couple, Susie and Greg—probably the oldest students at the Cottages and generally thought to be “in charge” of the place. There was this particular thing Susie did whenever Greg set off on one of his speeches about Proust or whoever: she’d smile at the rest of us, roll her eyes, and mouth very emphatically, but only just audibly: “Gawd help us.” Television at Hailsham had been pretty restricted, and at the Cottages too—though there was nothing to stop us watching all day—no one was very keen on it. But there was an old set in the farmhouse and another in the Black Barn, and I’d watch every now and then. That’s how I realised that this “Gawd help us” stuff came from an American series, one of those with an audience laughing along at everything anyone said or did. There was a character—a large woman who lived next door to the main characters—who did exactly what Susie did, so when her husband went off on a big spiel, the audience would be waiting for her to roll her eyes and say “Gawd help us” so they could burst out with this huge laugh. Once I’d spotted this, I began to notice all kinds of other things the veteran couples had taken from TV programmes: the way they gestured to each other, sat together on sofas, even the way they argued and stormed out of rooms.

Anyway, my point is, it wasn’t long before Ruth realised the way she’d been carrying on with Tommy was all wrong for the Cottages, and she set about changing how they did things in front of people. And there was in particular this one gesture Ruth picked up from the veterans. Back at Hailsham, if a couple were parting, even for a few minutes, it had been an excuse for big embraces and snogging. At the Cottages, though, when a couple were saying goodbye to each other, there’d be hardly any words, never mind embraces or kisses. Instead, you slapped your partner’s arm near the elbow, lightly with the back of your knuckles, the way you might do to attract someone’s attention. Usually the girl did it to the boy, just as they were moving apart. This custom had faded out by the winter, but when we arrived, it was what was going on and Ruth was soon doing it to Tommy. Mind you, at first, Tommy didn’t have a clue what was going on, and would turn abruptly to Ruth and go: “What?,” so that she’d have to glare furiously at him, like they were in a play and he’d forgotten his lines. I suppose she eventually had a word with him, because after a week or so they were managing to do it right, more or less exactly like the veteran couples.

I’d not actually seen the slap on the elbow on the television, but I was pretty sure that’s where the idea had come from, and just as sure Ruth hadn’t realised it. That was why, that afternoon I was reading Daniel Deronda on the grass and Ruth was being irritating, I decided it was time someone pointed it out to her.

It was nearly autumn and starting to get chilly. The veterans were spending more time indoors and generally going back to whatever routines they’d had before the summer. But those of us who’d arrived from Hailsham kept sitting outside on the uncut grass—wanting to keep going for as long as possible the only routine we’d got used to. Even so, by that particular afternoon, there were maybe only three or four apart from me reading in the field, and since I’d gone out of my way to find a quiet corner to myself, I’m pretty sure what happened between me and Ruth wasn’t overheard.

I was lying on a piece of old tarpaulin reading, as I say, Daniel Deronda, when Ruth came wandering over and sat down beside me. She studied the cover of my book and nodded to herself. Then after about a minute, just as I knew she would, she began to outline to me the plot of Daniel Deronda. Until that point, I’d been in a perfectly okay mood, and had been pleased to see Ruth, but now I was irritated. She’d done this to me a couple of times before, and I’d seen her doing it to others. For one thing, there was the manner she put on: a kind of nonchalant but sincere one as though she expected people to be really grateful for her assistance. Okay, even at the time, I was vaguely aware what was behind it. In those early months, we’d somehow developed this idea that how well you were settling in at the Cottages—how well you were coping—was somehow reflected by how many books you’d read. It sounds odd, but there you are, it was just something that developed between us, the ones who’d arrived from Hailsham. The whole notion was kept deliberately hazy—in fact, it was pretty reminiscent of the way we’d dealt with sex at Hailsham. You could go around implying you’d read all kinds of things, nodding knowingly when someone mentioned, say, War and Peace, and the understanding was that no one would scrutinise your claim too rationally. You have to remember, since we’d been in each other’s company constantly since arriving at the Cottages, it wasn’t possible for any of us to have read War and Peace without the rest noticing. But just like with the sex at Hailsham, there was an unspoken agreement to allow for a mysterious dimension where we went off and did all this reading.

It was, as I say, a little game we all indulged in to some extent. Even so, it was Ruth who took it further than anyone else. She was the one always pretending to have finished anything anyone happened to be reading; and she was the only one with this notion that the way to demonstrate your superior reading was to go around telling people the plots of novels they were in the middle of. That’s why, when she started on Daniel Deronda, even though I’d not been enjoying it much, I closed the book, sat up and said to her, completely out of the blue:

“Ruth, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why do you always hit Tommy on the arm like that when you’re saying goodbye? You know what I mean.”

Of course she claimed not to, so I patiently explained what I was talking about. Ruth heard me out then shrugged.

“I didn’t realise I was doing it. I must have just picked it up.”

A few months before I might have let it go at that—or probably wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. But that afternoon I just pressed on, explaining to her how it was something from a television series. “It’s not something worth copying,” I told her. “It’s not what people really do out there, in normal life, if that’s what you were thinking.”

Ruth, I could see, was now angry but unsure how to fight back. She looked away and did another shrug. “So what?” she said. “It’s no big deal. A lot of us do it.”

“What you mean is Chrissie and Rodney do it.”

As soon as I said this I realised I’d made a mistake; that until I’d mentioned these two, I’d had Ruth in a corner, but now she was out. It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to. Sure enough, I saw a gleam come into Ruth’s eyes and when she spoke again it was in an entirely new voice.

“So that’s it, that’s what’s upsetting poor little Kathy. Ruth isn’t paying enough attention to her. Ruth’s got big new friends and baby sister isn’t getting played with so often…”

“Stop all that. Anyway that’s not how it works in real families. You don’t know anything about it.”

“Oh Kathy, the great expert on real families. So sorry. But that’s what this is, isn’t it? You’ve still got this idea. Us Hailsham lot, we have to stay together, a tight little bunch, must never make any new friends.”

“I’ve never said that. I’m just talking about Chrissie and Rodney. It looks daft, the way you copy everything they do.”

“But I’m right, aren’t I?” Ruth went on. “You’re upset because I’ve managed to move on, make new friends. Some of the veterans hardly remember your name, and who can blame them? You never talk to anyone unless they’re Hailsham. But you can’t expect me to hold your hand the whole time. We’ve been here nearly two months now.”

I didn’t take the bait, but said instead: “Never mind me, never mind Hailsham. But you keep leaving Tommy in the lurch. I’ve watched you, you’ve done it a few times just this week. You leave him stranded, looking like a spare part. That’s not fair. You and Tommy are supposed to be a couple. That means you look out for him.”

“Quite right, Kathy, we’re a couple, like you say. And if you must intrude, I’ll tell you. We’ve talked about this, and we’ve agreed. If he sometimes doesn’t feel like doing things with Chrissie and Rodney, that’s his choice. I’m not going to make him do anything he’s not yet ready for. But we’ve agreed, he shouldn’t hold me back. Nice of you to be concerned though.” Then she added, in a quite different voice: “Come to think of it, I suppose you haven’t been that slow making friends with at least some of the veterans.”

She watched me carefully, then did a laugh, as though to say: “We’re still friends, aren’t we?” But I didn’t find anything to laugh about in this last remark of hers. I just picked up my book and walked off without another word.

Chapter Eleven

I should explain why I got so bothered by Ruth saying what she did. Those early months at the Cottages had been a strange time in our friendship. We were quarrelling over all kinds of little things, but at the same time we were confiding in each other more than ever. In particular, we used to have these talks, the two of us, usually up in my room at the top of the Black Barn just before going to bed. You could say they were a sort of hangover from those talks in our dorm after lights out. Anyway, the thing was, however much we might have fallen out during the day, come bed-time, Ruth and I would still find ourselves sitting side by side on my mattress, sipping our hot drinks, exchanging our deepest feelings about our new life like nothing had ever come between us. And what made these heart-to-hearts possible—you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time—was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we’d honour confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn’t use against each other anything we’d talked about during those sessions. Okay, this had never been spelt out exactly, but it was definitely, as I say, an understanding, and until the afternoon of the Daniel Deronda business, neither of us had come anywhere near breaching it. That was why, when Ruth said what she did about my not being slow making friends with certain veterans, I wasn’t just cross. To me, it was a betrayal. Because there wasn’t any doubt what she’d meant by it; she was referring to something I’d confided in her one night about me and sex.

As you’d expect, sex was different at the Cottages from how it had been at Hailsham. It was a lot more straightforward—more “grown up.” You didn’t go around gossiping and giggling about who’d been doing it with whom. If you knew two students had had sex, you didn’t immediately start speculating about whether they’d become a proper couple. And if a new couple did emerge one day, you didn’t go around talking about it like it was a big event. You just accepted it quietly, and from then on, when you referred to one, you also referred to the other, as in “Chrissie and Rodney” or “Ruth and Tommy.” When someone wanted sex with you, that too was much more straightforward. A boy would come up and ask if you wanted to spend the night in his room “for a change,” something like that, it was no big deal. Sometimes it was because he was interested in becoming a couple with you; other times it was just for a one-nighter.

The atmosphere, like I say, was much more grown up. But when I look back, the sex at the Cottages seems a bit functional. Maybe it was precisely because all the gossip and secrecy had gone. Or maybe it was because of the cold.

When I remember sex at the Cottages, I think about doing it in freezing rooms in the pitch dark, usually under a ton of blankets. And the blankets often weren’t even blankets, but a really odd assortment—old curtains, even bits of carpet. Sometimes it got so cold you just had to pile anything you could over you, and if you were having sex at the bottom of it, it felt like a mountain of bedding was pounding at you, so that half the time you weren’t sure if you were doing it with the boy or all that stuff.

Anyway, the point is, I’d had a few one-nighters shortly after getting to the Cottages. I hadn’t planned it that way. My plan had been to take my time, maybe become part of a couple with someone I chose carefully. I’d never been in a couple before, and especially after watching Ruth and Tommy for a while, I was quite curious to give it a try for myself. As I say, that had been my plan, and when the one-nighters kept happening, it unsettled me a bit. That was why I’d decided to confide in Ruth that night.

It was in many ways a typical evening session for us. We’d brought up our mugs of tea, and we were sitting in my room, side by side on the mattress, our heads slightly stooped because of the rafters. We talked about the different boys at the Cottages, and whether any of them might be right for me. And Ruth had been at her best: encouraging, funny, tactful, wise. That’s why I decided to tell her about the one-nighters. I told her how they’d happened without my really wanting them to; and how, even though we couldn’t have babies from doing it, the sex had done funny things to my feelings, just as Miss Emily had warned. Then I said to her:

“Ruth, I wanted to ask you. Do you ever get so you just really have to do it? With anybody almost?”

Ruth shrugged, then said: “I’m in a couple. So if I want to do it, I just do it with Tommy.”

“I suppose so. Maybe it’s just me anyway. There might be something not quite right with me, down there. Because sometimes I just really, really need to do it.”

“That’s strange, Kathy.” She fixed me with a concerned look, which made me feel all the more worried.

“So you don’t ever get like that.”

She shrugged again. “Not so as I’d do it with just anybody. What you’re saying does sound a bit weird, Kathy. But maybe it’ll calm down after a while.”

“Sometimes it won’t be there for ages. Then it suddenly comes on. It was like that, the first time it happened. He started snogging me and I just wanted him to get off. Then suddenly it just came on, out of nowhere. I just really had to do it.”

Ruth shook her head. “It does sound a bit weird. But it’ll probably go away. It’s probably just to do with the different food we’re eating here.”

She hadn’t been a huge help, but she’d been sympathetic and I’d felt a little better about it all afterwards. That’s why it was such a jolt to have Ruth suddenly bring it up the way she did in the middle of the argument we were having that afternoon in the field. Okay, there was probably no one to overhear us, but even so, there was something not at all right about what she’d done. In those first months at the Cottages, our friendship had stayed intact because, on my side at least, I’d had this notion there were two quite separate Ruths. There was one Ruth who was always trying to impress the veterans, who wouldn’t hesitate to ignore me, Tommy, any of the others, if she thought we’d cramp her style. This was the Ruth I wasn’t pleased with, the one I could see every day putting on airs and pretending—the Ruth who did the slap-on-the-elbow gesture. But the Ruth who sat beside me in my little attic room at the day’s close, legs outstretched over the edge of my mattress, her steaming mug held in both her hands, that was the Ruth from Hailsham, and whatever had been happening during the day, I could just pick up with her where we’d left off the last time we’d sat together like that. And until that afternoon in the field, there’d been a definite understanding these two Ruths wouldn’t merge; that the one I confided in before bed was one I could absolutely trust. That’s why when she said that, about my “not being slow making friends with at least some of the veterans,” I got so upset. That’s why I just picked up my book and walked off.

But when I think about it now, I can see things more from Ruth’s viewpoint. I can see, for instance, how she might have felt I had been the one to first violate an understanding, and that her little dig had just been a retaliation. This never occurred to me at the time, but I see now it’s a possibility, and an explanation for what happened. After all, immediately before she made that remark, I’d been talking about the arm-slapping business. Now it’s a bit hard to explain this, but some sort of understanding had definitely developed between the two of us about the way Ruth behaved in front of the veterans. Okay, she often bluffed and implied all sorts of things I knew weren’t true. Sometimes, as I said, she did things to impress the veterans at our expense. But it seems to me Ruth believed, at some level, she was doing all this on behalf of us all. And my role, as her closest friend, was to give her silent support, as if I was in the front row of the audience when she was performing on stage. She was struggling to become someone else, and maybe felt the pressure more than the rest of us because, as I say, she’d somehow taken on the responsibility for all of us. In that case, then, the way I’d talked about her slap on the elbow thing could be seen as a betrayal, and she might well then have felt justified retaliating as she had. As I say, this explanation only occurred to me recently. At the time I didn’t look at the larger picture or at my own part in it. I suppose, in general, I never appreciated in those days the sheer effort Ruth was making to move on, to grow up and leave Hailsham behind. Thinking about this now, I’m reminded of something she told me once, when I was caring for her in the recovery centre at Dover. We’d been sitting in her room, watching the sunset, as we so often did, enjoying the mineral water and biscuits I’d brought, and I’d been telling her how I still had most of my old Hailsham collection box safely stowed inside my pine chest in my bedsit. Then—I wasn’t trying to lead onto anything, or make any kind of point—I just happened to say to her:

“You never had a collection after Hailsham, did you?”

Ruth, who was sitting up in bed, was quiet for a long time, the sunset falling over the tiled wall behind her. Then she said:

“Remember the guardians, before we left, how they kept reminding us we could take our collections with us. So I’d taken everything out of my box and put it into this holdall bag. My plan was I’d find a really good wooden box for it all once I got to the Cottages. But when we got there, I could see none of the veterans had collections. It was only us, it wasn’t normal. We must all have realised it, I wasn’t the only one, but we didn’t really talk about it, did we? So I didn’t go looking for a new box. My things all stayed in the holdall bag for months, then in the end I threw them away.”

I stared at her. “You put your collection out with the rubbish?”

Ruth shook her head, and for the next few moments seemed to be going through in her mind all the different items in her collection. Finally she said:

“I put them all in a bin bag, but I couldn’t stand the idea of putting them out with the rubbish. So I asked old Keffers, once when he was about to drive off, if he’d take the bin bag to a shop. I knew about charity shops, I’d found it all out. Keffers rummaged in the bag a bit, he didn’t know what any of it was—why should he?—and he did this laugh and said no shop he knew would want stuff like that. And I said, but it’s good stuff, really good stuff. And he could see I was getting a bit emotional, and he changed his tune then. He said something like: ‘All right, missy, I’ll take it along to the Oxfam people.’ Then he made a real effort and said: ‘Now I’ve had a closer look, you’re right, it is pretty good stuff!’ He wasn’t very convincing though. I suppose he just took it away and put it in some bin somewhere. But at least I didn’t have to know that.” Then she smiled and said: “You were different. I remember. You were never embarrassed about your collection and you kept it. I wish now I’d done that too.”

What I’m saying is that we were all of us struggling to adjust to our new life, and I suppose we all did things back then we later regretted. I was really upset by Ruth’s remark at the time, but it’s pointless now trying to judge her or anyone else for the way they behaved during those early days at the Cottages.

As the autumn came on, and I got more familiar with our surroundings, I began noticing things I’d missed earlier. There was, for instance, the odd attitude to students who’d recently left. The veterans were never slow coming out with funny anecdotes about characters they’d met on trips to the White Mansion or to Poplar Farm; but they hardly ever mentioned students who, right up until just before we’d arrived, must have been their intimate friends.

Another thing I noticed—and I could see it tied in—was the big hush that would descend around certain veterans when they went off on “courses”—which even we knew had to do with becoming carers. They could be gone for four or five days, but were hardly mentioned in that time; and when they came back, no one really asked them anything. I suppose they might have talked to their closest friends in private. But there was definitely an understanding that you didn’t mention these trips out in the open. I can remember one morning watching, through the misted-up windows of our kitchen, two veterans leaving for a course, and wondering if by the next spring or summer, they’d have gone altogether, and we’d be taking care not to mention them.

But it’s perhaps stretching it to claim students who’d left were an actual taboo. If they had to be mentioned, they got mentioned. Most commonly, you’d hear them referred to indirectly, in connection with an object or a chore. For example, if repairs were needed to a downpipe, there’d be a lot of discussion about “the way Mike used to do it.” And there was a tree stump outside the Black Barn everyone called “Dave’s stump” because for over three years, until a few weeks before our arrival, he’d sat on it to read and write, sometimes even when it was raining or cold. Then, maybe most memorably, there was Steve. None of us ever discovered anything much about the sort of person Steve had been—except that he’d liked porn magazines.

Every now and again, you’d come across a porn mag at the Cottages, thrown behind a sofa or amidst a pile of old news-papers. They were what you’d call “soft” porn, though we didn’t know about such distinctions then. We’d never come across anything like that before and didn’t know what to think. The veterans usually laughed when one showed up and flicked through it quickly in a blasé way before throwing it aside, so we did the same. When Ruth and I were remembering all this a few years ago, she claimed there were dozens of these magazines circulating around the Cottages. “No one admitted to liking them,” she said. “But you remember how it was. If one turned up in a room, everyone pretended to find it dead boring. Then you came back half an hour later and it would always be gone.”

Anyway, my point is that whenever one of these magazines turned up, people would claim it was a left-over from “Steve’s collection.” Steve, in other words, was responsible for every porn mag that ever showed up. As I say, we never found out much else about Steve. We did, though, see the funny side of it even then, so that when someone pointed and said: “Oh look, one of Steve’s magazines,” they did it with a bit of irony.

These magazines, incidentally, used to drive old Keffers mad. There was a rumour that he was religious and dead against not just porn, but sex in general. Sometimes he’d work himself into a complete state—you could see his face under his grey whiskers blotchy with fury—and he’d go thudding around the place, barging into people’s rooms without knocking, determined to round up every one of “Steve’s magazines.” We did our best to find him amusing on these occasions, but there was something truly scary about him in these moods. For one thing, the grumbling he usually kept up suddenly stopped and this silence alone gave him an alarming aura.

I remember one particular time when Keffers had collected up six or seven of “Steve’s mags” and stormed out with them to his van. Laura and I were watching him from up in my room, and I’d been laughing at something Laura had just said. Then I saw Keffers opening his van door, and maybe because he needed both hands to move some stuff about, he put the mags down on top of some bricks stacked outside the boiler hut—some veterans had tried to build a barbecue there a few months earlier. Keffers’s figure, bent forwards, his head and shoulders hidden in the van, went on rummaging about for ages, and something told me that, for all his fury of a moment ago, he’d now forgotten about the magazines. Sure enough, a few minutes later, I saw him straighten, climb in behind the wheel, slam the door and drive off.

When I pointed out to Laura that Keffers had left the magazines behind, she said: “Well, they won’t stay put for long. He’ll just have to collect them all up again, next time he decides on a purge.”

But when I found myself strolling past the boiler hut about half an hour later, I saw the magazines hadn’t been touched. I thought for a moment about taking them up to my room, but then I could see if they were ever found there, I’d get no end of teasing; and how there was no way people would understand my reasons for doing such a thing. That was why I picked up the magazines and went inside the boiler hut with them.

The boiler hut was really just another barn, built onto the end of the farmhouse, filled with old mowers and pitch-forks—stuff Keffers reckoned wouldn’t catch alight too easily if one day the boiler decided to blow up. Keffers also kept a workbench in there, and so I put the magazines down on it, pushed aside some old rags and heaved myself up to sit on the tabletop. The light wasn’t too good, but there was a grimy window somewhere behind me, and when I opened the first magazine I found I could see well enough.

There were lots of pictures of girls holding their legs open or sticking their bottoms out. I’ll admit, there have been times when I’ve looked at pictures like that and felt excited, though I’ve never fancied doing it with a girl. But that’s not what I was after that afternoon. I moved through the pages quickly, not wanting to be distracted by any buzz of sex coming off those pages. In fact, I hardly saw the contorted bodies, because I was focusing on the faces. Even in the little adverts for videos or whatever tucked away to the side, I checked each model’s face before moving on.

It wasn’t until I was nearing the end of the pile that I became certain there was somebody standing outside the barn, just beside the doorway. I’d left the door open because that’s how it was normally, and because I wanted the light; and twice already I’d found myself glancing up, thinking I’d heard some small noise. But there’d been no one there, and I’d just gone on with what I was doing. Now I was certain, though, and lowering my magazine I made a heavy sighing sound that would be clearly audible.

I waited for giggling, or maybe for two or three students to come bursting into the barn, eager to make the best of having caught me with a pile of porn mags. But nothing happened. So I called out, in what I tried to make a weary tone:

“Delighted you could join me. Why be so shy?”

There was a little chuckle, then Tommy appeared at the threshold. “Hi, Kath,” he said sheepishly.

“Come on in, Tommy. Join in the fun.”

He came towards me cautiously, then stopped a few steps away. Then he looked over to the boiler, and said: “I didn’t know you liked that sort of stuff.”

“Girls are allowed too, aren’t we?”

I kept going through the pages, and for the next few seconds he stayed silent. Then I heard him say:

“I wasn’t trying to spy on you. But I saw you from my room. I saw you come out here and pick up that pile Keffers left.”

“You’re very welcome to them when I’ve finished.”

He laughed awkwardly. “It’s just sex stuff. I expect I’ve seen them all already.” He did another laugh, but then when I glanced up, I saw he was watching me with a serious expression. Then he asked:

“Are you looking for something, Kath?”

“What do you mean? I’m just looking at dirty pictures.”

“Just for kicks?”

“I suppose you could say that.” I put down one mag and started on the next one.

Then I heard Tommy’s steps coming nearer until he was right up to me. When I looked up again, his hands were hovering fretfully in the air, like I was doing a complicated manual task and he was itching to help.

“Kath, you don’t… Well, if it’s for kicks, you don’t do it like that. You’ve got to look at the pictures much more carefully. It doesn’t really work if you go that fast.”

“How do you know what works for girls? Or maybe you’ve looked these over with Ruth. Sorry, not thinking.”

“Kath, what are you looking for?”

I ignored him. I was nearly at the end of the pile and I was now keen to finish. Then he said:

“I saw you doing this once before.”

This time I did stop and look at him. “What’s going on here, Tommy? Has Keffers recruited you for his porn patrol?”

“I wasn’t trying to spy on you. But I did see you, that time last week, after we’d all been up in Charley’s room. There was one of these mags there, and you thought we’d all left and gone. But I came back to get my jumper, and Claire’s doors were open so I could see straight through to Charley’s room. That’s how I saw you in there, going through the magazine.”

“Well, so what? We all have to get our kicks some way.”

“You weren’t doing it for kicks. I could tell, just like I can now. It’s your face, Kath. That time in Charley’s room, you had a strange face. Like you were sad, maybe. And a bit scared.”

I jumped off the workbench, gathered up the mags and dumped them in his arms. “Here. Give these to Ruth. See if they do anything for her.”

I walked past him and out of the barn. I knew he’d be disappointed I hadn’t told him anything, but at that point I hadn’t thought things through properly myself and wasn’t ready to tell anyone. But I hadn’t minded him coming into the boiler hut after me. I hadn’t minded at all. I’d felt comforted, protected almost. I did tell him eventually, but that wasn’t until a few months later, when we went on our Norfolk trip.

Chapter Twelve

I want to talk about the Norfolk trip, and all the things that happened that day, but I’ll first have to go back a bit, to give you the background and explain why it was we went.

Our first winter was just about over by then and we were all feeling much more settled. For all our little hiccups, Ruth and I had kept up our habit of rounding off the day in my room, talking over our hot drinks, and it was during one of those sessions, when we were larking around about something, that she suddenly said:

“I suppose you’ve heard what Chrissie and Rodney have been saying.”

When I said I hadn’t, she did a laugh and continued: “They’re probably just having me on. Their idea of a joke. Forget I mentioned it.”

But I could see she wanted me to drag it out of her, so I kept pressing until in the end she said in a lowered voice:

“You remember last week, when Chrissie and Rodney were away? They’d been up to this town called Cromer, up on the north Norfolk coast.”

“What were they doing there?”

“Oh, I think they’ve got a friend there, someone who used to live here. That’s not the point. The point is, they claim they saw this… person. Working there in this open-plan office. And, well, you know. They reckon this person’s a possible. For me.”

Though most of us had first come across the idea of “possibles” back at Hailsham, we’d sensed we weren’t supposed to discuss it, and so we hadn’t—though for sure, it had both intrigued and disturbed us. And even at the Cottages, it wasn’t a topic you could bring up casually. There was definitely more awkwardness around any talk of possibles than there was around, say, sex. At the same time, you could tell people were fascinated—obsessed, in some cases—and so it kept coming up, usually in solemn arguments, a world away from our ones about, say, James Joyce.

The basic idea behind the possibles theory was simple, and didn’t provoke much dispute. It went something like this. Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life. This meant, at least in theory, you’d be able to find the person you were modelled from. That’s why, when you were out there yourself—in the towns, shopping centres, transport cafés—you kept an eye out for “possibles”—the people who might have been the models for you and your friends.

Beyond these basics, though, there wasn’t much consensus. For a start, no one could agree what we were looking for when we looked for possibles. Some students thought you should be looking for a person twenty to thirty years older than yourself—the sort of age a normal parent would be. But others claimed this was sentimental. Why would there be a “natural” generation between us and our models? They could have used babies, old people, what difference would it have made? Others argued back that they’d use for models people at the peak of their health, and that’s why they were likely to be “normal parent” age. But around here, we’d all sense we were near territory we didn’t want to enter, and the arguments would fizzle out.

Then there were those questions about why we wanted to track down our models at all. One big idea behind finding your model was that when you did, you’d glimpse your future. Now I don’t mean anyone really thought that if your model turned out to be, say, a guy working at a railway station, that’s what you’d end up doing too. We all realised it wasn’t that simple. Nevertheless, we all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store.

There were some who thought it stupid to be concerned about possibles at all. Our models were an irrelevance, a technical necessity for bringing us into the world, nothing more than that. It was up to each of us to make of our lives what we could. This was the camp Ruth always claimed to side with, and I probably did too. All the same, whenever we heard reports of a possible—whoever it was for—we couldn’t help getting curious.

The way I remember it, sightings of possibles tended to come in batches. Weeks could go by with no one mentioning the subject, then one reported sighting would trigger off a whole spate of others. Most of them were obviously not worth pursuing: someone seen in a car going by, stuff like that. But every now and then, a sighting seemed to have substance to it—like the one Ruth told me about that night.

According to Ruth, Chrissie and Rodney had been busy exploring this seaside town they’d gone to and had split up for a while. When they’d met up again, Rodney was all excited and had told Chrissie how he’d been wandering the side-streets off the High Street, and had gone past an office with a large glass front. Inside had been a lot of people, some of them at their desks, some walking about and chatting. And that’s where he’d spotted Ruth’s possible.

“Chrissie came and told me as soon as they got back. She made Rodney describe everything, and he did his best, but it was impossible to tell anything. Now they keep talking about driving me up there, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I ought to do anything about it.”

I can’t remember exactly what I said to her that night, but I was at that point pretty sceptical. In fact, to be honest, my guess was that Chrissie and Rodney had made the whole thing up. I don’t really want to suggest Chrissie and Rodney were bad people—that would be unfair. In many ways, I actually liked them. But the fact was, the way they regarded us newcomers, and Ruth in particular, was far from straightforward.

Chrissie was a tall girl who was quite beautiful when she stood up to her full height, but she didn’t seem to realise this and spent her time crouching to be the same as the rest of us. That’s why she often looked more like the Wicked Witch than a movie star—an impression reinforced by her irritating way of jabbing you with a finger the second before she said something to you. She always wore long skirts rather than jeans, and little glasses pressed too far into her face. She’d been one of the veterans who’d really welcomed us when we’d first arrived in the summer, and I’d at first been really taken by her and looked to her for guidance. But as the weeks had passed, I’d begun to have reservations. There was something odd about the way she was always mentioning the fact that we’d come from Hailsham, like that could explain almost anything to do with us. And she was always asking us questions about Hailsham—about little details, much like my donors do now—and although she tried to make out these were very casual, I could see there was a whole other dimension to her interest. Another thing that got to me was the way she always seemed to want to separate us: taking one of us aside when a few of us were doing something together, or else inviting two of us to join in something while leaving another two stranded—that sort of thing.

You’d hardly ever see Chrissie without her boyfriend, Rodney. He went around with his hair tied back in a ponytail, like a rock musician from the seventies, and talked a lot about things like reincarnation. I actually got to quite like him, but he was pretty much under Chrissie’s influence. In any discussion, you knew he’d back up Chrissie’s angle, and if Chrissie ever said anything mildly amusing, he’d be chortling and shaking his head like he couldn’t believe how funny it was.

Okay, I’m maybe being a bit hard on these two. When I was remembering them with Tommy not so long ago, he thought they were pretty decent people. But I’m telling you all this now to explain why I was so sceptical about their reported sighting of Ruth’s possible. As I say, my first instinct was not to believe it, and to suppose Chrissie was up to something.

The other thing that made me doubtful about all this had to do with the actual description given by Chrissie and Rodney: their picture of a woman working in a nice glass-fronted office. To me, at the time, this seemed just too close a match to what we then knew to be Ruth’s “dream future.”

I suppose it was mainly us newcomers who talked about “dream futures” that winter, though a number of veterans did too. Some older ones—especially those who’d started their training—would sigh quietly and leave the room when this sort of talk began, but for a long time we didn’t even notice this happening. I’m not sure what was going on in our heads during those discussions. We probably knew they couldn’t be serious, but then again, I’m sure we didn’t regard them as fantasy either. Maybe once Hailsham was behind us, it was possible, just for that half year or so, before all the talk of becoming carers, before the driving lessons, all those other things, it was possible to forget for whole stretches of time who we really were; to forget what the guardians had told us; to forget Miss Lucy’s outburst that rainy afternoon at the pavilion, as well as all those theories we’d developed amongst ourselves over the years. It couldn’t last, of course, but like I say, just for those few months, we somehow managed to live in this cosy state of suspension in which we could ponder our lives without the usual boundaries. Looking back now, it feels like we spent ages in that steamed-up kitchen after breakfast, or huddled around half-dead fires in the small hours, lost in conversation about our plans for the future.

Mind you, none of us pushed it too far. I don’t remember anyone saying they were going to be a movie star or anything like that. The talk was more likely to be about becoming a postman or working on a farm. Quite a few students wanted to be drivers of one sort or other, and often, when the conversation went this way, some veterans would begin comparing particular scenic routes they’d travelled, favourite roadside cafés, difficult roundabouts, that sort of thing. Today, of course, I’d be able to talk the lot of them under the table on those topics. Back then, though, I used to just listen, not saying a thing, drinking in their talk. Sometimes, if it was late, I’d close my eyes and nestle against the arm of a sofa—or of a boy, if it was during one of those brief phases I was officially “with” someone—and drift in and out of sleep, letting images of the roads move through my head.

Anyway, to get back to my point, when this sort of talk was going on, it was often Ruth who took it further than anybody—especially when there were veterans around. She’d been talking about offices right from the start of the winter, but when it really took on life, when it became her “dream future,” was after that morning she and I walked into the village.

It was during a bitterly cold spell, and our boxy gas heaters had been giving us trouble. We’d spend ages trying to get them to light, clicking away with no result, and we’d had to give up on more and more—and along with them, the rooms they were supposed to heat. Keffers refused to deal with it, claiming it was our responsibility, but in the end, when things were getting really cold, he’d handed us an envelope with money and a note of some igniter fuel we had to buy. So Ruth and I had volunteered to walk to the village to get it, and that’s why we were going down the lane that frosty morning. We’d reached a spot where the hedges were high on both sides, and the ground was covered in frozen cowpats, when Ruth suddenly stopped a few steps behind me.

It took me a moment to realise, so that by the time I turned back to her she was breathing over her fingers and looking down, engrossed by something beside her feet. I thought maybe it was some poor creature dead in the frost, but when I came up, I saw it was a colour magazine—not one of “Steve’s magazines,” but one of those bright cheerful things that come free with newspapers. It had fallen open at this glossy double page advert, and though the paper had gone soggy and there was mud at one corner, you could see it well enough. It showed this beautifully modern open-plan office with three or four people who worked in it having some kind of joke with each other. The place looked sparkling and so did the people. Ruth was staring at this picture and, when she noticed me beside her, said: “Now that would be a proper place to work.”

Then she got self-conscious—maybe even cross that I’d caught her like that—and set off again much faster than before.

But a few evenings later, when several of us were sitting around a fire in the farmhouse, Ruth began telling us about the sort of office she’d ideally work in, and I immediately recognised it. She went into all the details—the plants, the gleaming equipment, the chairs with their swivels and castors—and it was so vivid everyone let her talk uninterrupted for ages. I was watching her closely, but it never seemed to occur to her I might make the connection—maybe she’d even forgotten herself where the image had come from. She even talked at one point about how the people in her office would all be “dynamic, go-ahead types,” and I remembered clearly those same words written in big letters across the top of the advert: “Are you the dynamic, go-ahead type?”—something like that. Of course, I didn’t say anything. In fact, listening to her, I even started wondering if maybe it was all feasible: if one day we might all of us move into a place like that and carry on our lives together.

Chrissie and Rodney were there that night, of course, hanging onto every word. And then for days afterwards, Chrissie kept trying to get Ruth to talk some more about it. I’d pass them sitting together in the corner of a room and Chrissie would be asking: “Are you sure you wouldn’t put each other off, working all together in a place like that?” just to get Ruth going on it again.

The point about Chrissie—and this applied to a lot of the veterans—was that for all her slightly patronising manner towards us when we’d first arrived, she was awestruck about our being from Hailsham. It took me a long time to realise this. Take the business about Ruth’s office: Chrissie would never herself have talked about working in any office, never mind one like that. But because Ruth was from Hailsham, somehow the whole notion came within the realms of the possible. That’s how Chrissie saw it, and I suppose Ruth did say a few things every now and then to encourage the idea that, sure enough, in some mysterious way, a separate set of rules applied to us Hailsham students. I never heard Ruth actually lie to veterans; it was more to do with not denying certain things, implying others. There were occasions when I could have brought the whole thing down over her head. But if Ruth was sometimes embarrassed, catching my eye in the middle of some story or other, she seemed confident I wouldn’t give her away. And of course, I didn’t.

So that was the background to Chrissie and Rodney’s claim to have seen Ruth’s “possible,” and you can maybe see now why I was wary about it. I wasn’t keen on Ruth going with them to Norfolk, though I couldn’t really say why. And once it became clear she was completely set on going, I told her I’d come too. At first, she didn’t seem too delighted, and there was even a hint that she wouldn’t let Tommy come with her either. In the end, though, we all went, the five of us: Chrissie, Rodney, Ruth, Tommy and me.

Chapter Thirteen

Rodney, who had a driver’s licence, had made an arrangement to borrow a car for the day from the farm-workers at Metchley a couple of miles down the road. He’d regularly got cars this way in the past, but this particular time, the arrangement broke down the day before we were due to set off. Though things got sorted out fairly easily—Rodney walked over to the farm and got a promise on another car—the interesting thing was the way Ruth responded during those few hours when it looked like the trip might have to be called off.

Until then, she’d been making out the whole thing was a bit of a joke, that if anything she was going along with it to please Chrissie. And she’d talked a lot about how we weren’t exploring our freedom nearly enough since leaving Hailsham; how anyway she’d always wanted to go to Norfolk to “find all our lost things.” In other words, she’d gone out of her way to let us know she wasn’t very serious about the prospect of finding her “possible.”

That day before we went, I remember Ruth and I had been out for a stroll, and we came into the farmhouse kitchen where Fiona and a few veterans were making a huge stew. And it was Fiona herself, not looking up from what she was doing, who told us how the farm boy had come in earlier with the message. Ruth was standing just in front of me, so I couldn’t see her face, but her whole posture froze up. Then without a word, she turned and pushed past me out of the cottage. I got a glimpse of her face then, and that’s when I realised how upset she was. Fiona started to say something like: “Oh, I didn’t know…” But I said quickly: “That’s not what Ruth’s upset about. It’s about something else, something that happened earlier on.” It wasn’t very good, but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.

In the end, as I said, the vehicle crisis got resolved, and early the next morning, in the pitch dark, the five of us got inside a bashed but perfectly decent Rover car. The way we sat was with Chrissie up front next to Rodney, and the three of us in the back. That was what had felt natural, and we’d got in like that without thinking about it. But after only a few minutes, once Rodney had brought us out of the dark winding lanes onto the proper roads, Ruth, who was in the middle, leaned forward, put her hands on the front seats, and began talking to the two veterans. She did this in a way that meant Tommy and I, on either side of her, couldn’t hear anything they were saying, and because she was between us, couldn’t talk to or even see each other. Sometimes, on the rare occasions she did lean back, I tried to get something going between the three of us, but Ruth wouldn’t pick up on it, and before long, she’d be crouched forwards again, her face stuck between the two front seats.

After about an hour, with day starting to break, we stopped to stretch our legs and let Rodney go for a pee. We’d pulled over beside a big empty field, so we jumped over the ditch and spent a few minutes rubbing our hands together and watching our breaths rise. At one point, I noticed Ruth had drifted away from the rest of us and was gazing across the field at the sunrise. So I went over to her and made the suggestion that, since she only wanted to talk to the veterans, she swap seats with me. That way she could go on talking at least with Chrissie, and Tommy and I could have some sort of conversation to while away the journey. I’d hardly finished before Ruth said in a whisper:

“Why do you have to be difficult? Now of all times! I don’t get it. Why do you want to make trouble?” Then she yanked me round so both our backs were to the others and they wouldn’t see if we started to argue. It was the way she did this, rather than her words, that suddenly made me see things her way; I could see that Ruth was making a big effort to present not just herself, but all of us, in the right way to Chrissie and Rodney; and here I was, threatening to undermine her and start an embarrassing scene. I saw all this, and so I touched her on the shoulder and went off back to the others. And when we returned to the car, I made sure the three of us sat exactly as before. But now, as we drove on, Ruth stayed more or less silent, sitting right back in her seat, and even when Chrissie or Rodney shouted things to us from the front, responded only in sulky monosyllables.

Things cheered up considerably, though, once we arrived in our seaside town. We got there around lunch-time and left the Rover in a car park beside a mini-golf course full of fluttering flags. It had turned into a crisp, sunny day, and my memory of it is that for the first hour we all felt so exhilarated to be out and about we didn’t give much thought to what had brought us there. At one point Rodney actually let out a few whoops, waving his arms around as he led the way up a road climbing steadily past rows of houses and the occasional shop, and you could sense just from the huge sky, that you were walking towards the sea.

Actually, when we did reach the sea, we found we were standing on a road carved into a cliff edge. It seemed at first there was a sheer drop down to the sands, but once you leant over the rail, you could see zigzagging footpaths leading you down the cliff-face to the seafront.

We were starving by now and went into a little café perched on the cliff just where one of the footpaths began. When we went in, the only people inside were the two chubby women in aprons who worked there. They were smoking cigarettes at one of the tables, but they quickly got up and disappeared into the kitchen, so then we had the place to ourselves.

We took the table right at the back—which meant the one stuck out closest to the cliff edge—and when we sat down it felt like we were virtually suspended over the sea. I didn’t have anything to compare it with at the time, but I realise now the café was tiny, with just three or four little tables. They’d left a window open—probably to stop the place filling up with frying smells—so that every now and then a gust would pass through the room making all the signs advertising their good deals flutter about. There was one cardboard notice pinned over the counter that had been done in coloured felt-tips, and at the top of it was the word “look” with a staring eye drawn inside each “o.” I see the same thing so often these days I don’t even register it, but back then I hadn’t seen it before. So I was looking at it admiringly, then caught Ruth’s eye, and realised she too was looking at it amazed, and we both burst out laughing. That was a cosy little moment, when it felt like we’d left behind the bad feeling that had grown between us in the car. As it turned out, though, it was just about the last moment like that between me and Ruth for the rest of that outing.

We hadn’t mentioned the “possible” at all since arriving in the town, and I’d assumed when we sat down we’d finally discuss the matter properly. But once we’d started on our sandwiches, Rodney began talking about their old friend, Martin, who’d left the Cottages the year before and was now living somewhere in the town. Chrissie eagerly took up the subject and soon both veterans were coming out with anecdotes about all the hilarious things Martin had got up to. We couldn’t follow much of it, but Chrissie and Rodney were really enjoying themselves. They kept exchanging glances and laughing, and although they pretended it was for our benefit, it was clear they were remembering for each other. Thinking about it now, it occurs to me the near-taboo at the Cottages surrounding people who’d left might well have stopped them talking about their friend even to each other, and it was only once we’d come away they’d felt able to indulge themselves in this way.

Whenever they laughed, I laughed too just to be polite. Tommy seemed to be understanding things even less than me and was letting out hesitant little half-laughs that lagged some way behind. Ruth, though, was laughing and laughing, and kept nodding to everything being said about Martin just like she too was remembering them. Then once, when Chrissie made a really obscure reference—she’d said something like: “Oh, yes, the time he put out his jeans!”—Ruth gave a big laugh and signalled in our direction, as though to say to Chrissie: “Go on, explain it to them so they can enjoy it too.” I let this all go, but when Chrissie and Rodney started discussing whether we should go round to Martin’s flat, I finally said, maybe a bit coldly:

“What exactly is he doing here? Why’s he got a flat?”

There was a silence, then I heard Ruth let out an exasperated sigh. Chrissie leaned over the table towards me and said quietly, like she was explaining to a child: “He’s being a carer. What else do you think he’d be doing here? He’s a proper carer now.”

There was a bit of shifting, and I said: “That’s what I mean. We can’t just go and visit him.”

Chrissie sighed. “Okay. We’re not supposed to visit carers. Absolutely strictly speaking. Certainly not encouraged.”

Rodney chuckled and added: “Definitely not encouraged. Naughty naughty to go and visit him.”

“Very naughty,” Chrissie said and made a tutting noise.

Then Ruth joined in, saying: “Kathy hates to be naughty. So we’d better not go and visit him.”

Tommy was looking at Ruth, clearly puzzled about whose side she’d taken, and I wasn’t sure either. It occurred to me she didn’t want the expedition side-tracked and was reluctantly siding with me, so I smiled at her, but she didn’t return my look. Then Tommy asked suddenly:

“Whereabouts was it you saw Ruth’s possible, Rodney?”

“Oh…” Rodney didn’t seem nearly so interested in the possible now we were in the town, and I could see anxiety cross Ruth’s face. Finally Rodney said: “It was a turning off the High Street, somewhere up the other end. Of course, it might be her day off.” Then when no one said anything, he added: “They do have days off, you know. They’re not always at their work.”

For a moment, as he said this, the fear passed through me that we’d misjudged things badly; that for all we knew, veterans often used talk of possibles just as a pretext to go on trips, and didn’t really expect to take it any further. Ruth might well have been thinking along the same lines, because she was now looking definitely worried, but in the end she did a little laugh, like Rodney had made a joke.

Then Chrissie said in a new voice: “You know, Ruth, we might be coming here in a few years’ time to visit you. Working in a nice office. I don’t see how anyone could stop us visiting you then.”

“That’s right,” Ruth said quickly. “You can all come and see me.”

“I suppose,” Rodney said, “there aren’t any rules about visiting people if they’re working in an office.” He laughed suddenly. “We don’t know. It hasn’t really happened with us before.”

“It’ll be all right,” Ruth said. “They let you do it. You can all come and visit me. Except Tommy, that is.”

Tommy looked shocked. “Why can’t I come?”

“Because you’ll already be with me, stupid,” Ruth said. “I’m keeping you.”

We all laughed, Tommy again a little behind the rest of us.

“I heard about this girl up in Wales,” Chrissie said. “She was Hailsham, maybe a few years before you lot. Apparently she’s working in this clothes shop right now. A really smart one.”

There were murmurs of approval and for a while we all looked dreamily out at the clouds.

“That’s Hailsham for you,” Rodney said eventually, and shook his head as though in amazement.

“And then there was that other person”—Chrissie had turned to Ruth—“that boy you were telling us about the other day. The one a couple of years above you who’s a park keeper now.”

Ruth was nodding thoughtfully. It occurred to me that I should shoot Tommy a warning glance, but by the time I’d turned to him, he’d already started to speak.

“Who was that?” he asked in a bewildered voice.

“You know who it is, Tommy,” I said quickly. It was too risky to kick him, or even to make my voice wink-wink: Chrissie would have picked it up in a flash. So I said it dead straight, with a bit of weariness, like we were all fed up with Tommy forgetting all the time. But this just meant Tommy still didn’t twig.

“Someone we knew?”

“Tommy, let’s not go through this again,” I said. “You’ll have to have your brains tested.”

At last the penny seemed to drop, and Tommy shut up.

Chrissie said: “I know how lucky I am, getting to be at the Cottages. But you Hailsham lot, you’re really lucky. You know…” She lowered her voice and leaned forward again. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you lot about. It’s just that back there, at the Cottages, it’s impossible. Everyone always listening in.”

She looked around the table, then fixed her gaze on Ruth. Rodney suddenly tensed and he too leaned forward. And something told me we were coming to what was, for Chrissie and Rodney, the central purpose of this whole expedition.

“When Rodney and I, we were up in Wales,” she said. “The same time we heard about this girl in the clothes shop. We heard something else, something about Hailsham students. What they were saying was that some Hailsham students in the past, in special circumstances, had managed to get a deferral. That this was something you could do if you were a Hailsham student. You could ask for your donations to be put back by three, even four years. It wasn’t easy, but just sometimes they’d let you do it. So long as you could convince them. So long as you qualified.”

Chrissie paused and looked at each of us, maybe for dramatic effect, maybe to check us for signs of recognition. Tommy and I probably had puzzled looks, but Ruth had on one of her faces where you couldn’t tell what was going on.

“What they said,” Chrissie continued, “was that if you were a boy and a girl, and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.”

There was now a strange atmosphere around the table, a kind of tingle going round.

“When we were in Wales,” Chrissie went on, “the students at the White Mansion. They’d heard of this Hailsham couple, the guy had only a few weeks left before he became a carer. And they went to see someone and got everything put back three years. They were allowed to go on living there together, up at the White Mansion, three years straight, didn’t have to go on with their training or anything. Three years just to themselves, because they could prove they were properly in love.”

It was at this point I noticed Ruth nodding with a lot of authority. Chrissie and Rodney noticed too and for a few seconds they watched her like they were hypnotised. And I had a kind of vision of Chrissie and Rodney, back at the Cottages, in the months leading up to this moment, probing and prodding this subject between them. I could see them bringing it up, at first very tentatively, shrugging, putting it to one side, bringing it up again, never able quite to leave it alone. I could see them toying with the idea of talking to us about it, see them refining how they’d do it, what exactly they’d say. I looked again at Chrissie and Rodney in front of me, gazing at Ruth, and tried to read their faces. Chrissie looked both afraid and hopeful. Rodney looked on edge, like he didn’t trust himself not to blurt out something he wasn’t supposed to.

This wasn’t the first time I’d come across the rumour about deferrals. Over the past several weeks, I’d caught more and more snatches of it at the Cottages. It was always veterans talking among themselves, and when any of us showed up, they’d look awkward and go quiet. But I’d heard enough to get the gist of it; and I knew it had specifically to do with us Hailsham students. Even so, it was only that day, in that seafront café, that it really came home to me how important this whole notion had become for some veterans.

“I suppose,” Chrissie went on, her voice wobbling slightly, “you lot would know about it. The rules, all that sort of thing.”

She and Rodney looked at each of us in turn, then their gazes settled back on Ruth.

Ruth sighed and said: “Well, they told us a few things, obviously. But”—she gave a shrug—“it’s not something we know much about. We never talked about it really. Anyway, we should get going soon.”

“Who is it you go to?” Rodney suddenly asked. “Who did they say you had to go to if you wanted, you know, to apply?”

Ruth shrugged again. “Well, I told you. It wasn’t something we talked about much.” Almost instinctively she looked to me and Tommy for support, which was probably a mistake, because Tommy said:

“To be honest, I don’t know what you’re all talking about. What rules are these?”

Ruth stared daggers at him, and I said quickly: “You know, Tommy. All that talk that used to go round at Hailsham.”

Tommy shook his head. “I don’t remember it,” he said flatly. And this time I could see—and Ruth could too—that he wasn’t being slow. “I don’t remember anything like that at Hailsham.”

Ruth turned away from him. “What you’ve got to realise,” she said to Chrissie, “is that even though Tommy was at Hailsham, he isn’t like a real Hailsham student. He was left out of everything and people were always laughing at him. So there’s no point in asking him about anything like this. Now, I want to go and find this person Rodney saw.”

A look had appeared in Tommy’s eyes that made me catch my breath. It was one I hadn’t seen for a long time and that belonged to the Tommy who’d had to be barricaded inside a classroom while he kicked over desks. Then the look faded, he turned to the sky outside and let out a heavy breath.

The veterans hadn’t noticed anything because Ruth, at the same moment, had risen to her feet and was fiddling with her coat. Then there was a bit of confusion as the rest of us all moved back our chairs from the little table all at once. I’d been put in charge of the spending money, so I went up to pay. The others filed out behind me, and while I was waiting for the change, I watched them through one of the big misty windows, shuffling about in the sunshine, not talking, looking down at the sea.

Chapter Fourteen

When I got outside, it was obvious the excitement from when we’d first arrived had evaporated completely. We walked in silence, Rodney leading the way, through little backstreets hardly penetrated by the sun, the pavements so narrow we often had to shuffle along in single file. It was a relief to come out onto the High Street where the noise made our rotten mood less obvious. As we crossed at a pelican to the sunnier side, I could see Rodney and Chrissie conferring about something and I wondered how much of the bad atmosphere had to do with their believing we were holding back on some big Hailsham secret, and how much was just to do with Ruth’s having a go at Tommy.

Then once we’d crossed the High Street, Chrissie announced she and Rodney wanted to go shopping for birthday cards. Ruth was stunned by this, but Chrissie just went on:

“We like buying them in big batches. It’s always cheaper in the long run. And you’ve always got one handy when it’s someone’s birthday.” She pointed to the entrance of a Woolworth’s shop. “You can get pretty good cards in there really cheap.”

Rodney was nodding, and I thought there was something a little bit mocking around the edges of his smile. “Of course,” he said, “you end up with a lot of cards the same, but you can put your own illustrations on them. You know, personalise them.”

Both veterans were now standing in the middle of the pavement, letting people with pushchairs move round them, waiting for us to put up a challenge. I could tell Ruth was furious, but without Rodney’s co-operation there wasn’t much that could be done anyway.

So we went into the Woolworth’s, and immediately I felt much more cheerful. Even now, I like places like that: a large store with lots of aisles displaying bright plastic toys, greeting cards, loads of cosmetics, maybe even a photo booth. Today, if I’m in a town and find myself with some time to kill, I’ll stroll into somewhere just like that, where you can hang around and enjoy yourself, not buying a thing, and the assistants don’t mind at all.

Anyway, we went in and before long we’d wandered apart to look at different aisles. Rodney had stayed near the entrance beside a big rack of cards, and further inside, I spotted Tommy under a big pop-group poster, rummaging through the music cassettes. After about ten minutes, when I was somewhere near the back of the store, I thought I heard Ruth’s voice and wandered towards it. I’d already turned into the aisle—one with fluffy animals and big boxed jigsaws—before I realised Ruth and Chrissie were standing together at the end of it, having some sort of tête-à-tête. I wasn’t sure what to do: I didn’t want to interrupt, but it was time we were leaving and I didn’t want to turn and walk off again. So I just stopped where I was, pretended to examine a jigsaw and waited for them to notice me.

That was when I realised they were back on the subject of this rumour. Chrissie was saying, in a lowered voice, something like:

“But all that time you were there, I’m amazed you didn’t think more about how you’d do it. About who you’d go to, all of that.”

“You don’t understand,” Ruth was saying. “If you were from Hailsham, then you’d see. It’s never been such a big deal for us. I suppose we’ve always known if we ever wanted to look into it, all we’d have to do is get word back to Hailsham…”

Ruth saw me and broke off. When I lowered the jigsaw and turned to them, they were both looking at me angrily. At the same time, it was like I’d caught them doing something they shouldn’t, and they moved apart self-consciously.

“It’s time we were off,” I said, pretending to have heard nothing.

But Ruth wasn’t fooled. As they came past, she gave me a really dirty look.

So by the time we set off again, following Rodney in search of the office where he’d seen Ruth’s possible the month before, the atmosphere between us was worse than ever. Things weren’t helped either by Rodney repeatedly taking us down the wrong streets. At least four times, he led us confidently down a turning off the High Street, only for the shops and offices to run out, and we’d have to turn and come back. Before long, Rodney was looking defensive and on the verge of giving up. But then we found it.

Again, we’d turned and were heading back towards the High Street, when Rodney had stopped suddenly. Then he’d indicated silently an office on the other side of the street.

There it was, sure enough. It wasn’t exactly like the magazine advert we’d found on the ground that day, but then it wasn’t so far off either. There was a big glass front at street-level, so anyone going by could see right into it: a large open-plan room with maybe a dozen desks arranged in irregular L-patterns. There were the potted palms, the shiny machines and swooping desk lamps. People were moving about between desks, or leaning on a partition, chatting and sharing jokes, while others had pulled their swivel chairs close to each other and were enjoying a coffee and sandwich.

“Look,” Tommy said. “It’s their lunch break, but they don’t go out. Don’t blame them either.”

We kept on staring, and it looked like a smart, cosy, self-contained world. I glanced at Ruth and noticed her eyes moving anxiously around the faces behind the glass.

“Okay, Rod,” Chrissie said. “So which one’s the possible?”

She said this almost sarcastically, like she was sure the whole thing would turn out to be a big mistake on his part. But Rodney said quietly, with a tremor of excitement:

“There. Over in that corner. In the blue outfit. Her, talking now to the big red woman.”

It wasn’t obvious, but the longer we kept looking, the more it seemed he had something. The woman was around fifty, and had kept her figure pretty well. Her hair was darker than Ruth’s—though it could have been dyed—and she had it tied back in a simple pony-tail the way Ruth usually did. She was laughing at something her friend in the red outfit was saying, and her face, especially when she was finishing her laugh with a shake of her head, had more than a hint of Ruth about it.

We all kept on watching her, not saying a word. Then we became aware that in another part of the office, a couple of the other women had noticed us. One raised a hand and gave us an uncertain wave. This broke the spell and we took to our heels in giggly panic.

We stopped again further down the street, talking excitedly all at once. Except for Ruth, that is, who remained silent in the middle of it. It was hard to read her face at that moment: she certainly wasn’t disappointed, but then she wasn’t elated either. She had on a half-smile, the sort a mother might have in an ordinary family, weighing things up while the children jumped and screamed around her asking her to say, yes, they could do whatever. So there we were, all coming out with our views, and I was glad I could say honestly, along with the others, that the woman we’d seen was by no means out of the question. The truth was, we were all relieved: without quite realising it, we’d been bracing ourselves for a let-down. But now we could go back to the Cottages, Ruth could take encouragement from what she’d seen, and the rest of us could back her up. And the office life the woman appeared to be leading was about as close as you could hope to the one Ruth had often described for herself. Regardless of what had been going on between us that day, deep down, none of us wanted Ruth to return home despondent, and at that moment we thought we were safe. And so we would have been, I’m pretty sure, had we put an end to the matter at that point.

But then Ruth said: “Let’s sit over there, over on that wall. Just for a few minutes. Once they’ve forgotten about us, we can go and have another look.”

We agreed to this, but as we walked towards the low wall around the small car park Ruth had indicated, Chrissie said, perhaps a little too eagerly:

“But even if we don’t get to see her again, we’re all agreed she’s a possible. And it’s a lovely office. It really is.”

“Let’s just wait a few minutes,” Ruth said. “Then we’ll go back.”

I didn’t sit on the wall myself because it was damp and crumbling, and because I thought someone might appear any minute and shout at us for sitting there. But Ruth did sit on it, knees on either side like she was astride a horse. And today I have these vivid images of the ten, fifteen minutes we waited there. No one’s talking about the possible any more. We’re pretending instead that we’re just killing a bit of time, maybe at a scenic spot during a carefree day-trip. Rodney’s doing a little dance to demonstrate what a good feeling there is. He gets up on the wall, balances along it then deliberately falls off. Tommy’s making jokes about some passers-by, and though they’re not very funny, we’re all laughing. Just Ruth, in the middle, astride the wall, remains silent. She keeps the smile on her face, but hardly moves. There’s a breeze messing up her hair, and the bright winter sun’s making her crinkle up her eyes, so you’re not sure if she’s smiling at our antics, or just grimacing in the light. These are the pictures I’ve kept of those moments we waited by that car park. I suppose we were waiting for Ruth to decide when it was time to go back for a second look. Well, she never got to make that decision because of what happened next.

Tommy, who had been mucking about on the wall with Rodney, suddenly jumped down and went still. Then he said: “That’s her. That’s the same one.”

We all stopped what we were doing and watched the figure coming from the direction of the office. She was now wearing a cream-coloured overcoat, and struggling to fasten her briefcase as she walked. The buckle was giving her trouble, so she kept slowing down and starting again. We went on watching her in a kind of trance as she went past on the other side. Then as she was turning into the High Street, Ruth leapt up and said: “Let’s see where she goes.”

We came out of our trance and were off after her. In fact, Chrissie had to remind us to slow down or someone would think we were a gang of muggers going after the woman. We followed along the High Street at a reasonable distance, giggling, dodging past people, separating and coming together again. It must have been around two o’clock by then, and the pavement was busy with shoppers. At times we nearly lost sight of her, but we kept up, loitering in front of window displays when she went into a shop, squeezing past pushchairs and old people when she came out again.

Then the woman turned off the High Street into the little lanes near the seafront. Chrissie was worried she’d notice us away from the crowds, but Ruth just kept going, and we followed behind her.

Eventually we came into a narrow side-street that had the occasional shop, but was mainly just ordinary houses. We had to walk again in single file, and once when a van came the other way, we had to press ourselves into the houses to let it pass. Before long there was only the woman and us in the entire street, and if she’d glanced back, there was no way she wouldn’t have noticed us. But she just kept walking, a dozen or so steps ahead, then went in through a door—into “The Portway Studios.”

I’ve been back to the Portway Studios a number of times since then. It changed owners a few years ago and now sells all kinds of arty things: pots, plates, clay animals. Back then, it was two big white rooms just with paintings—beautifully displayed with plenty of spaces between them. The wooden sign hanging over the door is still the same one though. Anyway, we decided to go in after Rodney pointed out how suspicious we looked in that quiet little street. Inside the shop, we could at least pretend we were looking at the pictures.

We came in to find the woman we’d been following talking to a much older woman with silver hair, who seemed to be in charge of the place. They were sitting on either side of a small desk near the door, and apart from them, the gallery was empty. Neither woman paid much attention as we filed past, spread out and tried to look fascinated by the pictures.

Actually, preoccupied though I was with Ruth’s possible, I did begin to enjoy the paintings and the sheer peacefulness of the place. It felt like we’d come a hundred miles from the High Street. The walls and ceilings were peppermint, and here and there, you’d see a bit of fishing net, or a rotted piece from a boat stuck up high near the cornicing. The paintings too—mostly oils in deep blues and greens—had sea themes. Maybe it was the tiredness suddenly catching up with us—after all, we’d been travelling since before dawn—but I wasn’t the only one who went off into a bit of a dream in there. We’d all wandered into different corners, and were staring at one picture after another, only occasionally making the odd hushed remark like: “Come and look at this!” All the time, we could hear Ruth’s possible and the silver-haired lady talking on and on. They weren’t especially loud, but in that place, their voices seemed to fill the entire space. They were discussing some man they both knew, how he didn’t have a clue with his children. And as we kept listening to them, stealing the odd glance in their direction, bit by bit, something started to change. It did for me, and I could tell it was happening for the others. If we’d left it at seeing the woman through the glass of her office, even if we’d followed her through the town then lost her, we could still have gone back to the Cottages excited and triumphant. But now, in that gallery, the woman was too close, much closer than we’d ever really wanted. And the more we heard her and looked at her, the less she seemed like Ruth. It was a feeling that grew among us almost tangibly, and I could tell that Ruth, absorbed in a picture on the other side of the room, was feeling it as much as anyone. That was probably why we went on shuffling around that gallery for so long; we were delaying the moment when we’d have to confer.

Then suddenly the woman had left, and we all kept standing about, avoiding each other’s eyes. But none of us had thought to follow the woman, and as the seconds kept ticking on, it became like we were agreeing, without speaking, about how we now saw the situation.

Eventually the silver-haired lady came out from behind her desk and said to Tommy, who was the nearest to her: “That’s a particularly lovely work. That one’s a favourite of mine.”

Tommy turned to her and let out a laugh. Then as I was hurrying over to help him out, the lady asked: “Are you art students?”

“Not exactly,” I said before Tommy could respond. “We’re just, well, keen.”

The silver-haired lady beamed, then started to tell us how the artist whose work we were looking at was related to her, and all about the artist’s career thus far. This had the effect, at least, of breaking the trance-like state we’d been in, and we gathered round her to listen, the way we might have done at Hailsham when a guardian started to speak. This really got the silver-haired lady going, and we kept nodding and exclaiming while she talked about where the paintings had been done, the times of day the artist liked to work, how some had been done without sketches. Then there came a kind of natural end to her lecture, and we all gave a sigh, thanked her and went out.

The street outside being so narrow, we couldn’t talk properly for a while longer, and I think we were all grateful for that. As we walked away from the gallery in single file, I could see Rodney, up at the front, theatrically stretching out his arms, like he was exhilarated the way he’d been when we’d first arrived in the town. But it wasn’t convincing, and once we came out onto a wider street, we all shuffled to a halt.

We were once again near a cliff edge. And like before, if you peered over the rail, you could see the paths zigzagging down to the seafront, except this time you could see the promenade at the bottom with rows of boarded-up stalls.

We spent a few moments just looking out, letting the wind hit us. Rodney was still trying to be cheerful, like he’d decided not to let any of this business spoil a good outing. He was pointing out to Chrissie something in the sea, way off on the horizon. But Chrissie turned away from him and said:

“Well, I think we’re agreed, aren’t we? That isn’t Ruth.” She gave a small laugh and laid a hand on Ruth’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. We’re all sorry. But we can’t blame Rodney really. It wasn’t that wild a try. You’ve got to admit, when we saw her through those windows, it did look…” She trailed off, then touched Ruth on the shoulder again.

Ruth said nothing, but gave a little shrug, almost as if to shrug off the touch. She was squinting into the distance, at the sky rather than the water. I could tell she was upset, but someone who didn’t know her well might well have supposed she was being thoughtful.

“Sorry, Ruth,” Rodney said, and he too gave Ruth a pat on the shoulder. But he had a smile on his face like he didn’t expect for one moment to be blamed for anything. It was the way someone apologised when they’d tried to do you a favour, but it hadn’t worked out.

Watching Chrissie and Rodney at that moment, I remember thinking, yes, they were okay. They were kind in their way and were trying to cheer Ruth up. At the same time, though, I remember feeling—even though they were the ones doing the talking, and Tommy and I were silent—a sort of resentment towards them on Ruth’s behalf. Because however sympathetic they were, I could see that deep down they were relieved. They were relieved things had turned out the way they had; that they were in a position to comfort Ruth, instead of being left behind in the wake of a dizzying boost to her hopes. They were relieved they wouldn’t have to face, more starkly than ever, the notion which fascinated and nagged and scared them: this notion of theirs that there were all kinds of possibilities open to us Hailsham students that weren’t open to them. I remember thinking then how different they actually were, Chrissie and Rodney, from the three of us.

Then Tommy said: “I don’t see what difference it makes. It was just a bit of fun we were having.”

“A bit of fun for you maybe, Tommy,” Ruth said coldly, still gazing straight ahead of her. “You wouldn’t think so if it was your possible we’d been looking for.”

“I think I would,” Tommy said. “I don’t see how it matters. Even if you found your possible, the actual model they got you from. Even then, I don’t see what difference it makes to anything.”

“Thank you for your profound contribution, Tommy,” said Ruth.

“But I think Tommy’s right,” I said. “It’s daft to assume you’ll have the same sort of life as your model. I agree with Tommy. It’s just a bit of fun. We shouldn’t get so serious about it.”

I too reached out and touched Ruth on the shoulder. I wanted her to feel the contrast to when Chrissie and Rodney had touched her, and I deliberately chose exactly the same spot. I expected some response, some signal that she accepted understanding from me and Tommy in a way she didn’t from the veterans. But she gave me nothing, not even the shrug she’d given Chrissie.

Somewhere behind me I could hear Rodney pacing about, making noises to suggest he was getting chilly in the strong wind. “How about going to visit Martin now?” he said. “His flat’s just over there, behind those houses.”

Ruth suddenly sighed and turned to us. “To be honest,” she said, “I knew all along it was stupid.”

“Yeah,” said Tommy, eagerly. “Just a bit of fun.”

Ruth gave him an irritated look. “Tommy, please shut up with all this ‘bit of fun’ stuff. No one’s listening.” Then turning to Chrissie and Rodney she went on: “I didn’t want to say when you first told me about this. But look, it was never on. They don’t ever, ever, use people like that woman. Think about it. Why would she want to? We all know it, so why don’t we all face it. We’re not modelled from that sort…”

“Ruth,” I cut in firmly. “Ruth, don’t.”

But she just carried on: “We all know it. We’re modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from. We all know it, so why don’t we say it? A woman like that? Come on. Yeah, right, Tommy. A bit of fun. Let’s have a bit of fun pretending. That other woman in there, her friend, the old one in the gallery. Art students, that’s what she thought we were. Do you think she’d have talked to us like that if she’d known what we really were? What do you think she’d have said if we’d asked her? ‘Excuse me, but do you think your friend was ever a clone model?’ She’d have thrown us out. We know it, so we might as well just say it. If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from.”

“Ruth”—Rodney’s voice was steady and had a warning in it—“let’s forget about it and go and see Martin. He’s off this afternoon. You’ll like him, he’s a real laugh.”

Chrissie put an arm around Ruth. “Come on, Ruth. Let’s do what Rodney says.”

Ruth got to her feet and Rodney started to walk.

“Well, you lot can go,” I said quietly. “I’m not going.”

Ruth turned and looked at me carefully. “Well, what do you know? Who’s the upset one now?”

“I’m not upset. But sometimes you speak garbage, Ruth.”

“Oh, look who’s upset now. Poor Kathy. She never likes straight talking.”

“It’s nothing to do with that. I don’t want to visit a carer. We’re not supposed to and I don’t even know this guy.”

Ruth shrugged and exchanged glances with Chrissie. “Well,” she said, “there’s no reason we’ve got to go round together the whole time. If little Miss here doesn’t want to join us, she doesn’t have to. Let her go off by herself.” Then she leaned over to Chrissie and said in a stage whisper: “That’s always the best way when Kathy’s in a mood. Leave her alone and she’ll walk it off.”

“Be back at the car by four o’clock,” Rodney said to me. “Otherwise you’ll have to hitch-hike.” Then he did a laugh. “Come on, Kathy, don’t get in a sulk. Come with us.”

“No. You go on. I don’t feel like it.”

Rodney shrugged and started to move off again. Ruth and Chrissie followed, but Tommy didn’t move. Only when Ruth stared at him did he say:

“I’ll stay with Kath. If we’re splitting, then I’ll stay with Kath.”

Ruth glared at him in fury, then turned and strode off. Chrissie and Rodney looked at Tommy awkwardly, then they too began walking again.

Chapter Fifteen

Tommy and I leaned on the rail and stared at the view until the others had gone out of sight.

“It’s just talk,” he said eventually. Then after a pause: “It’s just what people say when they’re feeling sorry for themselves. It’s just talk. The guardians never told us anything like that.”

I started to walk—the opposite way to the others—and let Tommy fall in step beside me.

“It’s not worth getting upset about,” Tommy went on. “Ruth’s always doing things like that now. It’s just her letting off steam. Anyway, like we were telling her, even if it’s true, even a little bit true, I don’t see how it makes any difference. Our models, what they were like, that’s nothing to do with us, Kath. It’s just not worth getting upset about.”

“Okay,” I said, and deliberately bumped my shoulder into his. “Okay, okay.”

I had the impression we were walking towards the town centre, though I couldn’t be sure. I was trying to think of a way to change the subject, when Tommy said first:

“You know when we were in that Woolworth’s place earlier? When you were down at the back with the others? I was trying to find something. Something for you.”

“A present?” I looked at him in surprise. “I’m not sure Ruth would approve of that. Not unless you got her a bigger one.”

“A sort of present. But I couldn’t find it. I wasn’t going to tell you, but now, well, I’ve got another chance to find it. Except you might have to help me. I’m not very good at shopping.”

“Tommy, what are you talking about? You want to get me a present, but you want me to help you choose it…”

“No, I know what it is. It’s just that…” He laughed and shrugged. “Oh, I might as well tell you. In that shop we were in, they had this shelf with loads of records and tapes. So I was looking for the one you lost that time. Do you remember, Kath? Except I couldn’t remember what it was any more.”

“My tape? I didn’t realise you ever knew about it, Tommy.”

“Oh yeah. Ruth was getting people to look for it and saying you were really upset about losing it. So I tried to find it. I never told you at the time, but I did try really hard. I thought there’d be places I could look where you couldn’t. In boys’ dorms, stuff like that. I remember looking for ages, but I couldn’t find it.”

I glanced at him and felt my rotten mood evaporating. “I never knew that, Tommy. That was really sweet of you.”

“Well, it didn’t help much. But I really wanted to find it for you. And when it looked in the end like it wasn’t going to turn up, I just said to myself, one day I’ll go to Norfolk and I’ll find it there for her.”

“The lost corner of England,” I said, and looked around me. “And here we are!”

Tommy too looked around him, and we came to a halt. We were in another side-street, not as narrow as the one with the gallery. For a moment we both kept glancing around theatrically, then giggled.

“So it wasn’t such a daft idea,” Tommy said. “That Woolworth’s shop earlier, it had all these tapes, so I thought they were bound to have yours. But I don’t think they did.”

“You don’t think they did? Oh, Tommy, you mean you didn’t even look properly!”

“I did, Kath. It’s just that, well, it’s really annoying but I couldn’t remember what it was called. All that time at Hailsham, I was opening boys’ collection chests and everything, and now I can’t remember. It was Julie Bridges or something…”

“Judy Bridgewater. Songs After Dark.”

Tommy shook his head solemnly. “They definitely didn’t have that.”

I laughed and punched his arm. He looked puzzled so I said: “Tommy, they wouldn’t have something like that in Woolworth’s. They have the latest hits. Judy Bridgewater, she’s someone from ages ago. It just happened to turn up, at one of our Sales. It’s not going to be in Woolworth’s now, you idiot!”

“Well, like I said, I don’t know about things like that. But they had so many tapes…”

“They had some, Tommy. Oh, never mind. It was a sweet idea. I’m really touched. It was a great idea. This is Norfolk, after all.”

We started walking again and Tommy said hesitantly: “Well, that’s why I had to tell you. I wanted to surprise you, but it’s useless. I don’t know where to look, even if I do know the name of the record. Now I’ve told you, you can help me. We can look for it together.”

“Tommy, what are you talking about?” I was trying to sound reproachful, but I couldn’t help laughing.

“Well, we’ve got over an hour. This is a real chance.”

“Tommy, you idiot. You really believe it, don’t you? All this lost-corner stuff.”

“I don’t necessarily believe it. But we might as well look now we’re here. I mean, you’d like to find it again, wouldn’t you? What have we got to lose?”

“All right. You’re a complete idiot, but all right.”

He opened his arms out helplessly. “Well, Kath, where do we go? Like I say, I’m no good at shopping.”

“We have to look in second-hand places,” I said, after a moment’s thought. “Places full of old clothes, old books. They’ll sometimes have a box full of records and tapes.”

“Okay. But where are these shops?”

When I think of that moment now, standing with Tommy in the little side-street about to begin our search, I feel a warmth welling up through me. Everything suddenly felt perfect: an hour set aside, stretching ahead of us, and there wasn’t a better way to spend it. I had to really hold myself back from giggling stupidly, or jumping up and down on the pavement like a little kid. Not long ago, when I was caring for Tommy, and I brought up our Norfolk trip, he told me he’d felt exactly the same. That moment when we decided to go searching for my lost tape, it was like suddenly every cloud had blown away, and we had nothing but fun and laughter before us.

At the start, we kept going into the wrong sort of places: second-hand bookshops, or shops full of old vacuum cleaners, but no music at all. After a while Tommy decided I didn’t know any better than he did and announced he would lead the way. As it happened, by sheer luck really, he discovered straight away a street with four shops of just the kind we were after, standing virtually in a row. Their front windows were full of dresses, handbags, children’s annuals, and when you went inside, a sweet stale smell. There were piles of creased paperbacks, dusty boxes full of postcards or trinkets. One shop specialised in hippie stuff, while another had war medals and photos of soldiers in the desert. But they all had somewhere a big cardboard box or two with LPs and cassette tapes. We rummaged around those shops, and in all honesty, after the first few minutes, I think Judy Bridgewater had more or less slipped from our minds. We were just enjoying looking through all those things together; drifting apart then finding ourselves side by side again, maybe competing for the same box of bric-a-brac in a dusty corner lit up by a shaft of sun.

Then of course I found it. I’d been flicking through a row of cassette cases, my mind on other things, when suddenly there it was, under my fingers, looking just the way it had all those years ago: Judy, her cigarette, the coquettish look for the barman, the blurred palms in the background.

I didn’t exclaim, the way I’d been doing when I’d come across other items that had mildly excited me. I stood there quite still, looking at the plastic case, unsure whether or not I was delighted. For a second, it even felt like a mistake. The tape had been the perfect excuse for all this fun, and now it had turned up, we’d have to stop. Maybe that was why, to my own surprise, I kept silent at first; why I thought about pretending never to have seen it. And now it was there in front of me, there was something vaguely embarrassing about the tape, like it was something I should have grown out of. I actually went as far as flicking the cassette on and letting its neighbour fall on it. But there was the spine, looking up at me, and in the end I called Tommy over.

“Is that it?” He seemed genuinely sceptical, perhaps because I wasn’t making more fuss. I pulled it out and held it in both hands. Then suddenly I felt a huge pleasure—and something else, something more complicated that threatened to make me burst into tears. But I got a hold of the emotion, and just gave Tommy’s arm a tug.

“Yes, this is it,” I said, and for the first time smiled excitedly. “Can you believe it? We’ve really found it!”

“Do you think it could be the same one? I mean, the actual one. The one you lost?”

As I turned it in my fingers, I found I could remember all the design details on the back, the titles of the tracks, everything.

“For all I know, it might be,” I said. “But I have to tell you, Tommy, there might be thousands of these knocking about.”

Then it was my turn to notice Tommy wasn’t as triumphant as he might be.

“Tommy, you don’t seem very pleased for me,” I said, though in an obviously jokey voice.

“I am pleased for you, Kath. It’s just that, well, I wish I’d found it.” Then he did a small laugh and went on: “Back then, when you lost it, I used to think about it, in my head, what it would be like, if I found it and brought it to you. What you’d say, your face, all of that.”

His voice was softer than usual and he kept his eyes on the plastic case in my hand. And I suddenly became very conscious of the fact that we were the only people in the shop, except for the old guy behind the counter at the front engrossed in his paperwork. We were right at the back of the shop, on a raised platform where it was darker and more secluded, like the old guy didn’t want to think about the stuff in our area and had mentally curtained it off. For several seconds, Tommy stayed in a sort of trance, for all I know playing over in his mind one of these old fantasies of giving me back my lost tape. Then suddenly he snatched the case out of my hand.

“Well at least I can buy it for you,” he said with a grin, and before I could stop him, he’d started down the floor towards the front.

I went on browsing around the back of the shop while the old guy searched around for the tape to go with the case. I was still feeling a pang of regret that we’d found it so quickly, and it was only later, when we were back at the Cottages and I was alone in my room, that I really appreciated having the tape—and that song—back again. Even then, it was mainly a nostalgia thing, and today, if I happen to get the tape out and look at it, it brings back memories of that afternoon in Norfolk every bit as much as it does our Hailsham days.

As we came out of the shop, I was keen to regain the carefree, almost silly mood we’d been in before. But when I made a few little jokes, Tommy was lost in his thoughts and didn’t respond.

We began going up a steeply climbing path, and we could see—maybe a hundred yards further up—a kind of viewing area right on the cliff edge with benches facing out to sea. It would have made a nice spot in the summer for an ordinary family to sit and eat a picnic. Now, despite the chilly wind, we found ourselves walking up towards it, but when there was still some way left to go, Tommy slowed to a dawdle and said to me:

“Chrissie and Rodney, they’re really obsessed with this idea. You know, the one about people having their donations deferred if they’re really in love. They’re convinced we know all about it, but no one said anything like that at Hailsham. At least, I never heard anything like that, did you, Kath? No, it’s just something going around recently among the veterans. And people like Ruth, they’ve been stoking it up.”

I looked at him carefully, but it was hard to tell if he’d just spoken with mischievous affection or else a kind of disgust. I could see anyway there was something else on his mind, nothing to do with Ruth, so I didn’t say anything and waited. Eventually he came to a complete halt and started to poke around with his foot a squashed paper cup on the ground.

“Actually, Kath,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m sure we’re right, there was no talk like that when we were at Hailsham. But there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense back then. And I’ve been thinking, if it’s true, this rumour, then it could explain quite a lot. Stuff we used to puzzle over.”

“What do you mean? What sort of stuff?”

“The Gallery, for instance.” Tommy had lowered his voice and I stepped in closer, just as though we were still at Hailsham, talking in the dinner queue or beside the pond. “We never got to the bottom of it, what the Gallery was for. Why Madame took away all the best work. But now I think I know. Kath, you remember that time everyone was arguing about tokens? Whether they should get them or not to make up for stuff they’d had taken away by Madame? And Roy J. went in to see Miss Emily about it? Well, there was something Miss Emily said then, something she let drop, and that’s what’s been making me think.”

Two women were passing by with dogs on leads, and although it was completely stupid, we both stopped talking until they’d gone further up the slope and out of earshot. Then I said:

“What thing, Tommy? What thing Miss Emily let drop?”

“When Roy J. asked her why Madame took our stuff away. Do you remember what she’s supposed to have said?”

“I remember her saying it was a privilege, and we should be proud…”

“But that wasn’t all.” Tommy’s voice was now down to a whisper. “What she told Roy, what she let slip, which she probably didn’t mean to let slip, do you remember, Kath? She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.”

When he said this, I suddenly remembered a drawing Laura had done once of her intestines and laughed. But something was coming back to me.

“That’s right,” I said. “I remember. So what are you getting at?”

“What I think,” said Tommy slowly, “is this. Suppose it’s true, what the veterans are saying. Suppose some special arrangement has been made for Hailsham students. Suppose two people say they’re truly in love, and they want extra time to be together. Then you see, Kath, there has to be a way to judge if they’re really telling the truth. That they aren’t just saying they’re in love, just to defer their donations. You see how difficult it could be to decide? Or a couple might really believe they’re in love, but it’s just a sex thing. Or just a crush. You see what I mean, Kath? It’ll be really hard to judge, and it’s probably impossible to get it right every time. But the point is, whoever decides, Madame or whoever it is, they need something to go on.”

I nodded slowly. “So that’s why they took away our art…”

“It could be. Madame’s got a gallery somewhere filled with stuff by students from when they were tiny. Suppose two people come up and say they’re in love. She can find the art they’ve done over years and years. She can see if they go. If they match. Don’t forget, Kath, what she’s got reveals our souls. She could decide for herself what’s a good match and what’s just a stupid crush.”

I started to walk slowly again, hardly looking in front of me. Tommy fell in step, waiting for my response.

“I’m not sure,” I said in the end. “What you’re saying could certainly explain Miss Emily, what she said to Roy. And I suppose it explains too why the guardians always thought it was so important for us, to be able to paint and all of that.”

“Exactly. And that’s why…” Tommy sighed and went on with some effort. “That’s why Miss Lucy had to admit she’d been wrong, telling me it didn’t really matter. She’d said that because she was sorry for me at the time. But she knew deep down it did matter. The thing about being from Hailsham was that you had this special chance. And if you didn’t get stuff into Madame’s gallery, then you were as good as throwing that chance away.”

It was after he said this that it suddenly dawned on me, with a real chill, where this was leading. I stopped and turned to him, but before I could speak, Tommy let out a laugh.

“If I’ve got this right, then, well, it looks like I might have blown my chance.”

“Tommy, did you ever get anything into the Gallery? When you were much younger maybe?”

He was already shaking his head. “You know how useless I was. And then there was that stuff with Miss Lucy. I know she meant well. She was sorry for me and she wanted to help me. I’m sure she did. But if my theory’s right, well…”

“It’s only a theory, Tommy,” I said. “You know what your theories are like.”

I’d wanted to lighten things a bit, but I couldn’t get the tone right, and it must have been obvious I was still thinking hard about what he’d just said. “Maybe they’ve got all sorts of ways to judge,” I said after a moment. “Maybe the art’s just one out of all kinds of different ways.”

Tommy shook his head again. “Like what? Madame never got to know us. She wouldn’t remember us individually. Besides, it’s probably not just Madame that decides. There’s probably people higher up than her, people who never set foot in Hailsham. I’ve thought about this a lot, Kath. It all fits. That’s why the Gallery was so important, and why the guardians wanted us to work so hard on our art and our poetry. Kath, what are you thinking?”

Sure enough, I’d drifted off a bit. Actually, I was thinking about that afternoon I’d been alone in our dorm, playing the tape we’d just found; how I’d been swaying around, clutching a pillow to my breast, and how Madame had been watching me from the doorway, tears in her eyes. Even this episode, for which I’d never yet found a convincing explanation, seemed to fit Tommy’s theory. In my head, I’d been imagining I was holding a baby, but of course, there’d have been no way for Madame to know that. She’d have supposed I was holding a lover in my arms. If Tommy’s theory was right, if Madame was connected to us for the sole purpose of deferring our donations when, later on, we fell in love, then it made sense—for all her usual coldness towards us—she’d be really moved stumbling on a scene like that. All this flashed through my mind, and I was on the point of blurting it all out to Tommy. But I held back because I wanted now to play down his theory.

“I was just thinking over what you said, that’s all,” I said. “We should start going back now. It might take us a while to find the car park.”

We began to retrace our steps down the slope, but we knew we still had time and didn’t hurry.

“Tommy,” I asked, after we’d been walking for a while. “Have you said any of this to Ruth?”

He shook his head and went on walking. Eventually he said: “The thing is, Ruth believes it all, everything the veterans are saying. Okay, she likes to pretend she knows much more than she does. But she does believe it. And sooner or later, she’s going to want to take it further.”

“You mean, she’ll want to…”

“Yeah. She’ll want to apply. But she hasn’t thought it through yet. Not the way we just did.”

“You’ve never told her your theory about the Gallery?”

He shook his head again, but said nothing.

“If you tell her your theory,” I said, “and she buys it… Well, she’s going to be furious.”

Tommy seemed thoughtful, but still didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until we were back down in the narrow side-streets that he spoke again, and then his voice was suddenly sheepish.

“Actually, Kath,” he said, “I have been doing some stuff. Just in case. I haven’t told anyone, not even Ruth. It’s just a start.”

That was when I first heard about his imaginary animals. When he started to describe what he’d been doing—I didn’t actually see anything until a few weeks later—I found it hard to show much enthusiasm. In fact, I have to admit, I was reminded of the original elephant-in-the-grass picture that had started off all Tommy’s problems at Hailsham. The inspiration, he explained, had come from an old children’s book with the back cover missing which he’d found behind one of the sofas at the Cottages. He’d then persuaded Keffers to give him one of the little black notebooks he scribbled his figures in, and since then, Tommy had finished at least a dozen of his fantastic creatures.

“The thing is, I’m doing them really small. Tiny. I’d never thought of that at Hailsham. I think maybe that’s where I went wrong. If you make them tiny, and you have to because the pages are only about this big, then everything changes. It’s like they come to life by themselves. Then you have to draw in all these different details for them. You have to think about how they’d protect themselves, how they’d reach things. Honest, Kath, it’s nothing like anything I ever did at Hailsham.”

He started describing his favourites, but I couldn’t really concentrate; the more excited he got telling me about his animals, the more uneasy I was growing. “Tommy,” I wanted to say to him, “you’re going to make yourself a laughing stock all over again. Imaginary animals? What’s up with you?” But I didn’t. I just looked at him cautiously and kept saying: “That sounds really good, Tommy.”

Then he said at one point: “Like I said, Kath, Ruth doesn’t know about the animals.” And when he said this, he seemed to remember everything else, and why we’d been talking about his animals in the first place, and the energy faded from his face. Then we were walking in silence again, and as we came out onto the High Street, I said:

“Well, even if there’s something to your theory, Tommy, there’s a lot more we’ll have to find out. For one thing, how’s a couple supposed to apply? What are they supposed to do? There aren’t exactly forms lying about.”

“I’ve been wondering about all of that too.” His voice was quiet and solemn again. “As far as I can see, there’s only one obvious way forward. And that’s to find Madame.”

I gave this a think, then said: “That might not be so easy. We don’t really know a thing about her. We don’t even know her name. And you remember how she was? She didn’t like us even coming near her. Even if we did ever track her down, I don’t see her helping much.”

Tommy sighed. “I know,” he said. “Well, I suppose we’ve got time. None of us are in any particular hurry.”

By the time we got back to the car park, the afternoon had clouded over and was growing pretty chilly. There was no sign of the others yet, so Tommy and I leaned against our car and looked towards the mini-golf course. No one was playing and the flags were fluttering away in the wind. I didn’t want to talk any more about Madame, the Gallery or any of the rest of it, so I got the Judy Bridgewater tape out from its little bag and gave it a good look-over.

“Thanks for buying this for me,” I said.

Tommy smiled. “If I’d got to that tape box and you were on the LPs, I’d have found it first. It was bad luck for poor old Tommy.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. We only found it because you said to look for it. I’d forgotten about all this lost-corner stuff. After Ruth going on like that, I was in such a mood. Judy Bridgewater. My old friend. It’s like she’s never been away. I wonder who stole it back then?”

For a moment, we turned towards the street, looking for the others.

“You know,” Tommy said, “when Ruth said what she did earl-ier on, and I saw how upset you looked…”

“Leave it, Tommy. I’m all right about it now. And I’m not going to bring it up with her when she comes back.”

“No, that’s not what I was getting at.” He took his weight off the car, turned and pressed a foot against the front tyre as though to test it. “What I meant was, I realised then, when Ruth came out with all that, I realised why you keep looking through those porn mags. Okay, I haven’t realised. It’s just a theory. Another of my theories. But when Ruth said what she did earlier on, it kind of clicked.”

I knew he was looking at me, but I kept my eyes straight ahead and made no response.

“But I still don’t really get it, Kath,” he said eventually. “Even if what Ruth says is right, and I don’t think it is, why are you looking through old porn mags for your possibles? Why would your model have to be one of those girls?”

I shrugged, still not looking at him. “I don’t claim it makes sense. It’s just something I do.” There were tears filling my eyes now and I tried to hide them from Tommy. But my voice wobbled as I said: “If it annoys you so much, I won’t do it any more.”

I don’t know if Tommy saw the tears. In any case, I’d got them under control by the time he came close to me and gave my shoulders a squeeze. This was something he’d done before from time to time, it wasn’t anything special or new. But somehow I did feel better and gave a little laugh. He let go of me then, but we stayed almost touching, side by side again, our backs to the car.

“Okay, there’s no sense in it,” I said. “But we all do it, don’t we? We all wonder about our model. After all, that’s why we came out here today. We all do it.”

“Kath, you know, don’t you, I haven’t told anyone. About that time in the boiler hut. Not Ruth, not anyone. But I just don’t get it. I don’t get what it’s about.”

“All right, Tommy. I’ll tell you. It may not make any more sense after you’ve heard it, but you can hear it anyway. It’s just that sometimes, every now and again, I get these really strong feelings when I want to have sex. Sometimes it just comes over me and for an hour or two it’s scary. For all I know, I could end up doing it with old Keffers, it’s that bad. That’s why… that’s the only reason I did it with Hughie. And with Oliver. It didn’t mean anything deep down. I don’t even like them much. I don’t know what it is, and afterwards, when it’s passed over, it’s just scary. That’s why I started thinking, well, it has to come from somewhere. It must be to do with the way I am.” I stopped, but when Tommy didn’t say anything, I went on: “So I thought if I find her picture, in one of those magazines, it’ll at least explain it. I wouldn’t want to go and find her or anything. It would just, you know, kind of explain why I am the way I am.”

“I get it too sometimes,” said Tommy. “When I really feel like doing it. I reckon everyone does, if they’re honest. I don’t think there’s anything different about you, Kath. In fact, I get like that quite a lot…” He broke off and laughed, but I didn’t laugh with him.

“What I’m talking about’s different,” I said. “I’ve watched other people. They get in the mood for it, but that doesn’t make them do things. They never do things like I’ve done, going with people like that Hughie…”

I might have started crying again, because I felt Tommy’s arm going back around my shoulders. Upset as I was, I remained conscious of where we were, and I made a kind of check in my mind that if Ruth and the others came up the street, even if they saw us at that moment, there’d be no room for misunderstanding. We were still side by side, leaning against the car, and they’d see I was upset about something and Tommy was just comforting me. Then I heard him say:

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Once you find someone, Kath, someone you really want to be with, then it could be really good. Remember what the guardians used to tell us? If it’s with the right person, it makes you feel really good.”

I made a movement with my shoulder to get Tommy’s arm off me, then took a deep breath. “Let’s forget it. Anyway, I’ve got much better at controlling these moods when they come on. So let’s just forget it.”

“All the same, Kath, it’s stupid looking through those magazines.”

“It’s stupid, okay. Tommy, let’s leave it. I’m all right now.”

I don’t remember what else we talked about until the others showed up. We didn’t discuss any more of those serious things, and if the others sensed something still in the air, they didn’t remark on it. They were in good spirits, and Ruth in particular seemed determined to make up for the bad scene earlier on. She came up and touched my cheek, making some joke or other, and once we got in the car, she made sure the jovial mood kept going. She and Chrissie had found everything about Martin comical and were relishing the chance to laugh openly about him now they’d left his flat. Rodney looked disapproving, and I realised Ruth and Chrissie were making a song and dance of it mainly to tease him. It all seemed good-natured enough. But what I noticed was that whereas before Ruth would have taken the opportunity to keep me and Tommy in the dark about all the jokes and references, throughout the journey back, she kept turning to me and explaining carefully everything they were talking about. In fact it got a bit tiring after a while because it was like everything being said in the car was for our—or at least my—special benefit. But I was pleased Ruth was making such a fuss. I understood—as did Tommy—that she’d recognised she’d behaved badly before, and this was her way of admitting it. We were sitting with her in the middle, just as we’d done on the journey out, but now she spent all her time talking to me, turning occasionally to her other side to give Tommy a little squeeze or the odd kiss. It was a good atmosphere, and no one brought up Ruth’s possible or anything like that. And I didn’t mention the Judy Bridgewater tape Tommy had bought me. I knew Ruth would find out about it sooner or later, but I didn’t want her to find out just yet. On that journey home, with the darkness setting in over those long empty roads, it felt like the three of us were close again and I didn’t want anything to come along and break that mood.

Chapter Sixteen

The odd thing about our Norfolk trip was that once we got back, we hardly talked about it. So much so that for a while all kinds of rumours went around about what we’d been up to. Even then, we kept pretty quiet, until eventually people lost interest.

I’m still not sure why this happened. Perhaps we felt it was up to Ruth, that it was her call how much got told, and we were waiting to take our cue from her. And Ruth, for one reason or another—maybe she was embarrassed how things had turned out with her possible, maybe she was enjoying the mystery—had remained completely closed on the subject. Even among ourselves, we avoided talking about the trip.

This air of secrecy made it easier for me to keep from telling Ruth about Tommy buying me the Judy Bridgewater tape. I didn’t go as far as actually hiding the thing. It was always there in my collection, in one of my little piles next to the skirting board. But I always made sure not to leave it out or on top of a pile. There were times when I wanted badly to tell her, when I wanted us to reminisce about Hailsham with the tape playing in the background. But the further away we got from the Norfolk trip, and I still hadn’t told her, the more it came to feel like a guilty secret. Of course, she did spot the tape in the end, much later, and it was probably a much worse time for her to find it, but that’s the way your luck sometimes goes.

As spring came on, there seemed to be more and more veterans leaving to start their training, and though they left without fuss in the usual way, the increased numbers made them impossible to ignore. I’m not sure what our feelings were, witnessing these departures. I suppose to some extent we envied the people leaving. It did feel like they were headed for a bigger, more exciting world. But of course, without a doubt, their going made us increasingly uneasy.

Then, I think it was around April, Alice F. became the first of our Hailsham bunch to leave, and not long after that Gordon C. did too. They’d both asked to start their training, and went off with cheerful smiles, but after that, for our lot anyway, the atmosphere at the Cottages changed forever.

Many veterans, too, seemed affected by the flurry of departures, and maybe as a direct result, there was a fresh spate of rumours of the sort Chrissie and Rodney had spoken about in Norfolk. Talk went around of students, somewhere else in the country, getting deferrals because they’d shown they were in love—and now, just sometimes, the talk was of students with no connections to Hailsham. Here again, the five of us who’d been to Norfolk backed away from these topics: even Chrissie and Rodney, who’d once been at the centre of just this sort of talk, now looked awkwardly away when these rumours got going.

The “Norfolk effect” even got to me and Tommy. I’d been assuming, once we were back, we’d be taking little opportunities, whenever we were alone, to exchange more thoughts on his theory about the Gallery. But for some reason—and it wasn’t any more him than me—this never really happened. The one exception, I suppose, was that time in the goosehouse, the morning when he showed me his imaginary animals.

The barn we called the Goosehouse was on the outer fringes of the Cottages, and because the roof leaked badly and the door was permanently off its hinges, it wasn’t used for anything much other than as a place for couples to sneak off to in the warmer months. By then I’d taken to going for long solitary walks, and I think I was setting out on one of these, and had just gone past the goosehouse, when I heard Tommy calling me. I turned to see him in his bare feet, perched awkwardly on a bit of dry ground surrounded by huge puddles, one hand on the side of the barn to keep his balance.

“What happened to your Wellies, Tommy?” I asked. Aside from his bare feet, he was dressed in his usual thick jumper and jeans.

“I was, you know, drawing…” He laughed, and held up a little black notebook similar to the ones Keffers always went around with. It was by then over two months since the Norfolk trip, but I realised as soon as I saw the notebook what this was about. But I waited for him to say:

“If you like, Kath, I’ll show you.”

He led the way into the goosehouse, hopping over the jaggy ground. I’d expected it to be dark inside, but the sunlight was pouring through the skylights. Pushed against one wall were various bits of furniture heaved out over the past year or so—broken tables, old fridges, that kind of thing. Tommy appeared to have dragged into the middle of the floor a two-seater settee with stuffing poking out of its black plastic, and I guessed he’d been sitting in it doing his drawing when I’d gone past. Just nearby, his Wellingtons were lying fallen on their sides, his football socks peeking out of the tops.

Tommy jumped back onto the settee, nursing his big toe. “Sorry my feet poo a bit. I took everything off without realising. I think I’ve cut myself now. Kath, do you want to see these? Ruth looked at them last week, so I’ve been meaning to show you ever since. No one’s seen them apart from Ruth. Have a look, Kath.”

That was when I first saw his animals. When he’d told me about them in Norfolk, I’d seen in my mind scaled-down versions of the sort of pictures we’d done when we were small. So I was taken aback at how densely detailed each one was. In fact, it took a moment to see they were animals at all. The first impression was like one you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird.

“It’s my second book,” Tommy said. “There’s no way anyone’s seeing the first one! It took me a while to get going.”

He was lying back on the settee now, tugging a sock over his foot and trying to sound casual, but I knew he was anxious for my reaction. Even so, for some time, I didn’t come up with wholehearted praise. Maybe it was partly my worry that any artwork was liable to get him into trouble all over again. But also, what I was looking at was so different from anything the guardians had taught us to do at Hailsham, I didn’t know how to judge it. I did say something like:

“God, Tommy, these must take so much concentration. I’m surprised you can see well enough in here to do all this tiny stuff.” And then, as I flicked through the pages, perhaps because I was still struggling to find the right thing to say, I came out with: “I wonder what Madame would say if she saw these.”

I’d said it in a jokey tone, and Tommy responded with a little snigger, but then there was something hanging in the air that hadn’t been there before. I went on turning the pages of the notebook—it was about a quarter full—not looking up at him, wishing I’d never brought up Madame. Finally I heard him say:

“I suppose I’ll have to get a lot better before she gets to see any of it.”

I wasn’t sure if this was a cue for me to say how good the drawings were, but by this time, I was becoming genuinely drawn to these fantastical creatures in front of me. For all their busy, metallic features, there was something sweet, even vulnerable about each of them. I remembered him telling me, in Norfolk, that he worried, even as he created them, how they’d protect themselves or be able to reach and fetch things, and looking at them now, I could feel the same sort of concerns. Even so, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, something continued to stop me coming out with praise. Then Tommy said:

“Anyway, it’s not only because of all that I’m doing the animals. I just like doing them. I was wondering, Kath, if I should go on keeping it secret. I was thinking, maybe there’s no harm in people knowing I do these. Hannah still does her watercolours, a lot of the veterans do stuff. I don’t mean I’m going to go round showing everyone exactly. But I was thinking, well, there’s no reason why I should keep it all secret any more.”

At last I was able to look up at him and say with some conviction: “Tommy, there’s no reason, no reason at all. These are good. Really, really good. In fact, if that’s why you’re hiding in here now, it’s really daft.”

He didn’t say anything in response, but a kind of smirk appeared over his face, like he was enjoying a joke with himself, and I knew how happy I’d made him. I don’t think we spoke much more to each other after that. I think before long he got his Wellingtons on, and we both left the goosehouse. As I say, that was about the only time Tommy and I touched directly on his theory that spring.

Then the summer came, and the one year point from when we’d first arrived. A batch of new students turned up in a minibus, much as we’d done, but none of them were from Hailsham. This was in some ways a relief: I think we’d all been getting anxious about how a fresh lot of Hailsham students might complicate things. But for me at least, this non-appearance of Hailsham students just added to a feeling that Hailsham was now far away in the past, and that the ties binding our old crowd were fraying. It wasn’t just that people like Hannah were always talking about following Alice’s example and starting their training; others, like Laura, had found boyfriends who weren’t Hailsham and you could almost forget they’d ever had much to do with us.

And then there was the way Ruth kept pretending to forget things about Hailsham. Okay, these were mostly trivial things, but I got more and more irritated with her. There was the time, for instance, we were sitting around the kitchen table after a long breakfast, Ruth, me and a few veterans. One of the veterans had been talking about how eating cheese late at night always disturbed your sleep, and I’d turned to Ruth to say something like: “You remember how Miss Geraldine always used to tell us that?” It was just a casual aside, and all it needed was for Ruth to smile or nod. But she made a point of staring back at me blankly, like she didn’t have the faintest what I was talking about. Only when I said to the veterans, by way of explanation: “One of our guardians,” did Ruth give a frowning nod, as though she’d just that moment remembered.

I let her get away with it that time. But there was another occasion when I didn’t, that evening we were sitting out in the ruined bus shelter. I got angry then because it was one thing to play this game in front of veterans; quite another when it was just the two of us, in the middle of a serious talk. I’d referred, just in passing, to the fact that at Hailsham, the short-cut down to the pond through the rhubarb patch was out of bounds. When she put on her puzzled look, I abandoned whatever point I’d been trying to make and said: “Ruth, there’s no way you’ve forgotten. So don’t give me that.”

Perhaps if I hadn’t pulled her up so sharply—perhaps if I’d just made a joke of it and carried on—she’d have seen how absurd it was and laughed. But because I’d snapped at her, Ruth glared back and said:

“What does it matter anyway? What’s the rhubarb patch got to do with any of this? Just get on with what you were saying.”

It was getting late, the summer evening was fading, and the old bus shelter felt musty and damp after a recent thunderstorm. So I didn’t have the head to go into why it mattered so much. And though I did just drop it and carry on with the discussion we’d been having, the atmosphere had gone chilly, and could hardly have helped us get through the difficult matter in hand.

But to explain what we were talking about that evening, I’ll have to go back a little bit. In fact, I’ll have to go back several weeks, to the earlier part of the summer. I’d been having a relationship with one of the veterans, a boy called Lenny, which, to be honest, had been mainly about the sex. But then he’d suddenly opted to start his training and left. This unsettled me a little, and Ruth had been great about it, watching over me without seeming to make a fuss, always ready to cheer me up if I seemed gloomy. She also kept doing little favours for me, like making me sandwiches, or taking on parts of my cleaning rota.

Then about a fortnight after Lenny had gone, the two of us were sitting in my attic room some time after midnight chatting over mugs of tea, and Ruth got me really laughing about Lenny. He hadn’t been such a bad guy, but once I’d started telling Ruth some of the more intimate things about him, it did seem like everything to do with him was hilarious, and we just kept laughing and laughing. Then at one point Ruth was running a finger up and down the cassettes stacked in little piles along my skirting board. She was doing this in an absent-minded sort of way while she kept laughing, but afterwards, I went through a spell of suspecting it hadn’t been by chance at all; that she’d noticed it there maybe days before, perhaps even examined it to make sure, then had waited for the best time to “find” it. Years later, I gently hinted this to Ruth, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, so maybe I was wrong. Anyway, there we were, laughing and laughing each time I came out with another detail about poor Lenny, and then suddenly it was like a plug had been pulled out. There was Ruth, lying on her side across my rug, peering at the spines of the cassettes in the low light, and then the Judy Bridgewater tape was in her hands. After what seemed an eternity, she said:

“So how long have you had this again?”

I told her, as neutrally as I could, about how Tommy and I had come across it that day while she’d been gone with the others. She went on examining it, then said:

“So Tommy found it for you.”

“No. I found it. I saw it first.”

“Neither of you told me.” She shrugged. “At least, if you did, I never heard.”

“The Norfolk thing was true,” I said. “You know, about it being the lost corner of England.”

It did flash through my mind Ruth would pretend not to remember this reference, but she nodded thoughtfully.

“I should have remembered at the time,” she said. “I might have found my red scarf then.”

We both laughed and the uneasiness seemed to pass. But there was something about the way Ruth put the tape back without discussing it any further that made me think it wasn’t finished with yet.

I don’t know if the way the conversation went after that was something controlled by Ruth in the light of her discovery, or if we were headed that way anyway, and that it was only afterwards Ruth realised she could do with it what she did. We went back to discussing Lenny, in particular a lot of stuff about how he had sex, and we were laughing away again. At that point, I think I was just relieved she’d finally found the tape and not made a huge scene about it, and so maybe I wasn’t being as careful as I might have been. Because before long, we’d drifted from laughing about Lenny to laughing about Tommy. At first it had all felt good-natured enough, like we were just being affectionate towards him. But then we were laughing about his animals.

As I say, I’ve never been sure whether or not Ruth deliberately moved things round to this. To be fair, I can’t even say for certain she was the one who first mentioned the animals. And once we started, I was laughing just as much as she was—about how one of them looked like it was wearing underpants, how another had to have been inspired by a squashed hedgehog. I suppose I should have said in there somewhere that the animals were good, that he’d done really well to have got where he had with them. But I didn’t. That was partly because of the tape; and maybe, if I have to be honest, because I was pleased by the notion that Ruth wasn’t taking the animals seriously, and everything that implied. I think when we eventually broke up for the night, we felt as close as we’d ever done. She touched my cheek on her way out, saying: “It’s really good the way you always keep your spirits up, Kathy.”

So I wasn’t prepared at all for what happened at the churchyard several days later. Ruth had discovered that summer a lovely old church about half a mile from the Cottages, which had behind it rambling grounds with very old gravestones leaning in the grass. Everything was overgrown, but it was really peaceful and Ruth had taken to doing a lot of her reading there, near the back railings, on a bench under a big willow. I hadn’t at first been too keen on this development, remembering how the previous summer we’d all sat around together in the grass right outside the Cottages. All the same, if I was headed that way on one of my walks, and I knew Ruth was likely to be there, I’d find myself going through the low wooden gate and along the overgrown path past the gravestones. On that afternoon, it was warm and still, and I’d come down the path in a dreamy mood, reading off names on the stones, when I saw not only Ruth, but Tommy, on the bench under the willow.

Ruth was actually sitting on the bench, while Tommy was standing with one foot up on its rusty armrest, doing a kind of stretching exercise as they talked. It didn’t look like they were having any big conversation and I didn’t hesitate to go up to them. Maybe I should have picked up something in the way they greeted me, but I’m sure there wasn’t anything obvious. I had some gossip I was dying to tell them—something about one of the newcomers—and so for a while it was just me blabbing on while they nodded and asked the odd question. It was some time before it occurred to me something wasn’t right, and even then, when I paused and asked: “Did I interrupt something here?” it was in a jokey sort of way.

But then Ruth said: “Tommy’s been telling me about his big theory. He says he’s already told you. Ages ago. But now, very kindly, he’s allowing me to share in it too.”

Tommy gave a sigh and was about to say something, but Ruth said in a mock whisper: “Tommy’s big Gallery theory!”

Then they were both looking at me, like I was now in charge of everything and it was up to me what happened next.

“It’s not a bad theory,” I said. “It might be right, I don’t know. What do you think, Ruth?”

“I had to really dig it out of Sweet Boy here. Not very keen at all on letting me in on it, were you, sweety gums? It was only when I kept pressing him to tell me what was behind all this art.”

“I’m not doing it just for that,” Tommy said sulkily. His foot was still up on the armrest and he kept on with his stretching. “All I said was, if it was right, about the Gallery, then I could always try and put in the animals…”

“Tommy, sweety, don’t make a fool of yourself in front of our friend. Do it to me, that’s all right. But not in front of our dear Kathy.”

“I don’t see why it’s such a joke,” Tommy said. “It’s as good a theory as anyone else’s.”

“It’s not the theory people will find funny, sweety gums. They might well buy the theory, right enough. But the idea that you’ll swing it by showing Madame your little animals…” Ruth smiled and shook her head.

Tommy said nothing and continued with his stretching. I wanted to come to his defence and was trying to think of just the right thing that would make him feel better without making Ruth even more angry. But that was when Ruth said what she did. It felt bad enough at the time, but I had no idea in the churchyard that day how far-reaching the repercussions would be. What she said was:

“It’s not just me, sweety. Kathy here finds your animals a complete hoot.”

My first instinct was to deny it, then just to laugh. But there was a real authority about the way Ruth had spoken, and the three of us knew each other well enough to know there had to be something behind her words. So in the end I stayed silent, while my mind searched back frantically, and with a cold horror, settled on that night up in my room with our mugs of tea. Then Ruth said:

“As long as people think you’re doing those little creatures as a kind of joke, fine. But don’t give out you’re serious about it. Please.”

Tommy had stopped his stretching and was looking questioningly at me. Suddenly he was really child-like again, with no front whatsoever, and I could see too something dark and troubling gathering behind his eyes.

“Look, Tommy, you’ve got to understand,” Ruth went on. “If Kathy and I have a good laugh about you, it doesn’t really matter. Because that’s just us. But please, let’s not bring everyone else in on it.”

I’ve thought about those moments over and over. I should have found something to say. I could have just denied it, though Tommy probably wouldn’t have believed me. And to try to explain the thing truthfully would have been too complicated. But I could have done something. I could have challenged Ruth, told her she was twisting things, that even if I might have laughed, it wasn’t in the way she was implying. I could even have gone up to Tommy and hugged him, right there in front of Ruth. That’s something that came to me years later, and probably wasn’t a real option at the time, given the person I was, and the way the three of us were with each other. But that might have done it, where words would only have got us in deeper.

But I didn’t say or do anything. It was partly, I suppose, that I was so floored by the fact that Ruth would come out with such a trick. I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain’s exhausted, and you know there’s some far-off solution, but you can’t work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up. A voice went: “All right, let him think the absolute worst. Let him think it, let him think it.” And I suppose I looked at him with resignation, with a face that said: “Yes, it’s true, what else did you expect?” And I can recall now, as fresh as anything, Tommy’s own face, the anger receding for the moment, being replaced by an expression almost of wonder, like I was a rare butterfly he’d come across on a fence-post.

It wasn’t that I thought I’d burst into tears or lose my temper or anything like that. But I decided just to turn and go. Even later that day, I realised this was a bad mistake. All I can say is that at the time what I feared more than anything was that one or the other of them would stalk off first, and I’d be left with the remaining one. I don’t know why, but it didn’t seem an option for more than one of us to storm off, and I wanted to make sure that one was me. So I turned and marched back the way I’d come, past the gravestones towards the low wooden gate, and for several minutes, I felt as though I’d triumphed; that now they’d been left in each other’s company, they were suffering a fate they thoroughly deserved.

Chapter Seventeen

As I’ve said, it wasn’t until a long time afterwards—long after I’d left the Cottages—that I realised just how significant our little encounter in the churchyard had been. I was upset at the time, yes. But I didn’t believe it to be anything so different from other tiffs we’d had. It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that.

But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we’d understood that back then—who knows?—maybe we’d have kept a tighter hold of one another.

For one thing, more and more students were going off to be carers, and among our old Hailsham crowd, there was a growing feeling this was the natural course to follow. We still had our essays to finish, but it was well known we didn’t really have to finish them if we chose to start our training. In our early days at the Cottages, the idea of not finishing our essays would have been unthinkable. But the more distant Hailsham grew, the less important the essays seemed. I had this idea at the time—and I was probably right—that if our sense of the essays being important was allowed to seep away, then so too would whatever bound us together as Hailsham students. That’s why I tried for a while to keep going our enthusiasm for all the reading and note-taking. But with no reason to suppose we’d ever see our guardians again, and with so many students moving on, it soon began to feel like a lost cause.

Anyway, in the days after that talk in the churchyard, I did what I could to put it behind us. I behaved towards both Tommy and Ruth as though nothing special had occurred, and they did much the same. But there was always something there now, and it wasn’t just between me and them. Though they still made a show of being a couple—they still did the punching-on-the-arm thing when they parted—I knew them well enough to see they’d grown quite distant from each other.

Of course I felt bad about it all, especially about Tommy’s animals. But it wasn’t as simple any more as going to him and saying sorry and explaining how things really were. A few years earlier, even six months earlier, it might have worked out that way. Tommy and I would have talked it over and sorted it out. But somehow, by that second summer, things were different. Maybe it was because of this relationship with Lenny, I don’t know. Anyway, talking to Tommy wasn’t so easy any more. On the surface, at least, it was much like before, but we never mentioned the animals or what had happened in the churchyard.

So that was what had been happening just before I had that conversation with Ruth in the old bus shelter, when I got so annoyed with her for pretending to forget about the rhubarb patch at Hailsham. Like I said, I’d probably not have got nearly so cross if it hadn’t come up in the middle of such a serious conversation. Okay, we’d got through a lot of the meat of it by then, but even so, even if we were just easing off and chatting by that point, that was still all part of our trying to sort things with each other, and there was no room for any pretend stuff like that.

What had happened was this. Although something had come between me and Tommy, it hadn’t quite got like that with Ruth—or at least that’s what I’d thought—and I’d decided it was time I talked with her about what had happened in the churchyard. We’d just had one of those summer days of rain and thunderstorms, and we’d been cooped up indoors despite the humidity. So when it appeared to clear for the evening, with a nice pink sunset, I suggested to Ruth we get a bit of air. There was a steep footpath I’d discovered leading up along the edge of the valley and just where it came out onto the road was an old bus shelter. The buses had stopped coming ages ago, the bus stop sign had been taken away, and on the wall at the back of the shelter, there was left only the frame of what must have once been a glassed-in notice displaying all the bus times. But the shelter itself—which was like a lovingly constructed wooden hut with one side open to the fields going down the valleyside—was still standing, and even had its bench intact. So that’s where Ruth and I were sitting to get our breath back, looking at the cobwebs up on the rafters and the summer evening outside. Then I said something like:

“You know, Ruth, we should try and sort it out, what happened the other day.”

I’d made my voice conciliatory, and Ruth responded. She said immediately how daft it was, the three of us having rows over the most stupid things. She brought up other times we’d rowed and we laughed a bit about them. But I didn’t really want Ruth just to bury the thing like that, so I said, still in the least challenging voice I could:

“Ruth, you know, I think sometimes, when you’re in a couple, you don’t see things as clearly as maybe someone can from the outside. Just sometimes.”

She nodded. “That’s probably right.”

“I don’t want to interfere. But sometimes, just lately, I think Tommy’s been quite upset. You know. About certain things you’ve said or done.”

I was worried Ruth would get angry, but she nodded and sighed. “I think you’re right,” she said in the end. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot too.”

“Then maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up. I should have known you’d see what was happening. It’s not my business really.”

“But it is, Kathy. You’re really one of us, and so it’s always your business. You’re right, it hasn’t been good. I know what you mean. That stuff the other day, about his animals. That wasn’t good. I told him I was sorry about that.”

“I’m glad you talked it over. I didn’t know if you had.”

Ruth had been picking at some moulding flakes of wood on the bench beside her, and for a moment she seemed completely absorbed in this task. Then she said:

“Look, Kathy, it’s good we’re talking now about Tommy. I’ve been wanting to tell you something, but I’ve never quite known how to say it, or when, really. Kathy, promise you won’t be too cross with me.”

I looked at her and said: “As long as it’s not about those T-shirts again.”

“No, seriously. Promise you won’t get too cross. Because I’ve got to tell you this. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I kept quiet much longer.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Kathy, I’ve been thinking this for some time. You’re no fool, and you can see that maybe me and Tommy, we might not be a couple forever. That’s no tragedy. We were right for each other once. Whether we always will be, that’s anyone’s guess. And now there’s all this talk, about couples getting deferrals if they can prove, you know, that they’re really right. Okay, look, what I wanted to say, Kathy, is this. It’d be completely natural if you’d thought about, you know, what would happen if me and Tommy decided we shouldn’t be together any more. We’re not about to split, don’t get me wrong. But I’d think it was completely normal if you at least wondered about it. Well, Kathy, what you have to realise is that Tommy doesn’t see you like that. He really, really likes you, he thinks you’re really great. But I know he doesn’t see you like, you know, a proper girlfriend. Besides…” Ruth paused, then sighed. “Besides, you know how Tommy is. He can be fussy.”

I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“You must know what I mean. Tommy doesn’t like girls who’ve been with… well, you know, with this person and that. It’s just a thing he has. I’m sorry, Kathy, but it wouldn’t be right not to have told you.”

I thought about it, then said: “It’s always good to know these things.”

I felt Ruth touch my arm. “I knew you’d take it the right way. What you’ve got to understand, though, is that he thinks the world of you. He really does.”

I wanted to change the subject, but for the moment my mind was a blank. I suppose Ruth must have picked up on this, because she stretched out her arms and did a kind of yawn, saying:

“If I ever learn to drive a car, I’d take us all on a trip to some wild place. Dartmoor, say. The three of us, maybe Laura and Hannah too. I’d love to see all the bogs and stuff.”

We spent the next several minutes talking about what we’d do on a trip like that if we ever went on one. I asked where we’d stay, and Ruth said we could borrow a big tent. I pointed out the wind could get really fierce in places like that and our tent could easily blow away in the night. None of this was that serious. But it was around here I remembered the time back at Hailsham, when we’d still been Juniors and we were having a picnic by the pond with Miss Geraldine. James B. had been sent to the main house to fetch the cake we’d all baked earlier, but as he was carrying it back, a strong gust of wind had taken off the whole top layer of sponge, tossing it into the rhubarb leaves. Ruth said she could only vaguely remember the incident, and I’d said, trying to clinch it for her memory:

“The thing was, he got into trouble because that proved he’d been coming down through the rhubarb patch.”

And that was when Ruth looked at me and said: “Why? What was wrong with that?”

It was just the way she said it, suddenly so false even an onlooker, if there’d been one, would have seen through it. I sighed with irritation and said:

“Ruth, don’t give me that. There’s no way you’ve forgotten. You know that route was out of bounds.”

Maybe it was a bit sharp, the way I said it. Anyway, Ruth didn’t back down. She continued pretending to remember nothing, and I got all the more irritated. And that was when she said:

“What does it matter anyway? What’s the rhubarb patch got to do with anything? Just get on with what you were saying.”

After that I think we went back to talking in a more or less friendly way, and then before long we were making our way down the footpath in the half-light back to the Cottages. But the atmosphere never quite righted itself, and when we said our goodnights in front of the Black Barn, we parted without our usual little touches on the arms and shoulders.

It wasn’t long after that I made my decision, and once I’d made it, I never wavered. I just got up one morning and told Keffers I wanted to start my training to become a carer. It was surprisingly easy. He was walking across the yard, his Wellingtons covered in mud, grumbling to himself and holding a piece of piping. I went up and told him, and he just looked at me like I’d bothered him about more firewood. Then he mumbled something about coming to see him later that afternoon to go through the forms. It was that easy.

It took a little while after that, of course, but the whole thing had been set in motion, and I was suddenly looking at everything—the Cottages, everybody there—in a different light. I was now one of the ones leaving, and soon enough, everyone knew it. Maybe Ruth thought we’d be spending hours talking about my future; maybe she thought she’d have a big influence on whether or not I changed my mind. But I kept a certain distance from her, just as I did from Tommy. We didn’t really talk properly again at the Cottages, and before I knew it, I was saying my goodbyes.