Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [109]
It probably came out pretty muddled at first, but after a while, as I became more confident she’d hear me out, I calmed down and got a lot clearer. I’d been turning over in my mind for weeks and weeks just what I’d say to her. I’d gone over it during those long car journeys, and while sitting at quiet tables in service-station cafés. It had seemed so difficult then, and I’d eventually resorted to a plan: I’d memorised word for word a few key lines, then drawn a mental map of how I’d go from one point to the next. But now she was there in front of me, most of what I’d prepared seemed either unnecessary or completely wrong. The strange thing was—and Tommy agreed when we discussed it afterwards—although at Hailsham she’d been like this hostile stranger from the outside, now that we were facing her again, even though she hadn’t said or done anything to suggest any warmth towards us, Madame now appeared to me like an intimate, someone much closer to us than anyone new we’d met over the recent years. That’s why suddenly all the things I’d been preparing in my head just went, and I spoke to her honestly and simply, almost as I might have done years ago to a guardian. I told her what we’d heard, the rumours about Hailsham students and deferrals; how we realised the rumours might not be accurate, and that we weren’t banking on anything.
“And even if it is true,” I said, “we know you must get tired of it, all these couples coming to you, claiming to be in love. Tommy and me, we never would have come and bothered you if we weren’t really sure.”
“Sure?” It was the first time she’d spoken for ages and we both jolted back a bit in surprise. “You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple? So you are in love. Deeply in love. Is that what you’re saying to me?”
Her voice sounded almost sarcastic, but then I saw, with a kind of shock, little tears in her eyes as she looked from one to the other of us.
“You believe this? That you’re deeply in love? And therefore you’ve come to me for this . . . this deferral? Why? Why did you come to me?”
If she’d asked this in a certain way, like the whole idea was completely crazy, then I’m sure I’d have felt pretty devastated. But she hadn’t quite said it like that. She’d asked it almost like it was a test question she knew the answer to; as if, even, she’d taken other couples through an identical routine many times before. That was what kept me hopeful. But Tommy must have got anxious, because he suddenly burst in:
“We came to see you because of your gallery. We think we know what your gallery’s for.”
“My gallery?” She leaned back on the window ledge, causing the curtains to sway behind her, and took a slow breath. “My gallery. You must mean my collection. All those paintings, poems, all those things of yours I gathered over the years. It was hard work for me, but I believed in it, we all did in those days. So you think you know what it was for, why we did it. Well, that would be most interesting to hear. Because I have to say, it’s a question I ask myself all the time.” She suddenly switched her gaze from Tommy to me. “Do I go too far?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to say, so just replied: “No, no.”
“I go too far,” she said. “I’m sorry. I often go too far on this subject. Forget what I just said. Young man, you were going to tell me about my gallery. Please, let me hear.”
“It’s so you could tell,” Tommy said. “So you’d have something to go on. Otherwise how would you know when students came to you and said they were in love?”
Madame’s gaze had drifted over to me again, but I had the feeling she was staring at something on my arm. I actually looked down to see if there was birdshit or something on my sleeve. Then I heard her say:
“And this is why you think I gathered all those things of yours. My gallery, as all of you always called it. I laughed when I first heard that’s what you were calling it. But in time, I too came to think of it as that.