Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [39]
“But you can’t blame us,” I said. “We’d been taught to think about each other, but never about the guardians. The idea the guardians had differences between them, that never occurred to us.”
“But we were old enough,” Tommy said. “By that age, it should have occurred to us. But it didn’t. We didn’t think about poor Miss Lucy at all. Not even after that time, you know, when you saw her.”
I knew straight away what he meant. He was talking about the morning early in our last summer at Hailsham, when I’d stumbled across her up in Room 22. Thinking about it now, I’d say Tommy had a point. After that moment it should have been clear, even to us, how troubled Miss Lucy had become. But as he said, we never considered anything from her viewpoint, and it never occurred to us to say or do anything to support her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Many of us had turned sixteen by then. It was a morning of brilliant sunshine and we’d all just come down to the courtyard after a lesson in the main house, when I remembered something I’d left in the classroom. So I went back up to the third floor and that’s how the thing with Miss Lucy happened.
In those days I had this secret game. When I found myself alone, I’d stop and look for a view—out of a window, say, or through a doorway into a room—any view so long as there were no people in it. I did this so that I could, for a few seconds at least, create the illusion the place wasn’t crawling with students, but that instead Hailsham was this quiet, tranquil house where I lived with just five or six others. To make this work, you had to get yourself into a sort of dream, and shut off all the stray noises and voices. Usually you had to be pretty patient too: if, say, you were focusing from a window on one particular bit of the playing field, you could wait ages for those couple of seconds when there wasn’t anyone at all in your frame. Anyway, that was what I was doing that morning after I’d fetched whatever it was I’d left in the classroom and come back out onto the third-floor landing.
I was keeping very still near a window looking down onto a section of the courtyard where I’d been standing only moments before. My friends had gone, and the courtyard was steadily emptying, so I was waiting for my trick to work, when I heard behind me what sounded like gas or steam escaping in sharp bursts.
It was a hissing noise that would go on for about ten seconds, pause, then come again. I wasn’t alarmed exactly, but since I seemed to be the only person around, I thought I’d better go and investigate.
I went across the landing towards the sound, along the corridor past the room I’d just been in, and down to Room 22, second from the end. The door was partly open, and just as I came up to it, the hissing started up again with a new intensity. I don’t know what I expected to discover as I cautiously pushed the door, but I was properly surprised to find Miss Lucy.
Room 22 was hardly used for classes because it was so small and, even on a day like that one, hardly any light got in. The guardians sometimes went in there to mark our work or get on with reading. That morning the room was darker than ever because the blinds had been pulled almost all the way down. There were two tables pushed together for a group to sit around, but Miss Lucy was there alone near the back. I could see several loose sheets of dark, shiny paper scattered over the table in front of her. She herself was leaning over in concentration, forehead very low, arms up on the surface, scrawling furious lines over a page with a pencil. Underneath the heavy black lines I could see neat blue handwriting. As I watched, she went on scrubbing the pencil point over the paper, almost in the way we did shading in Art, except her movements were much more angry, as if she didn’t mind gouging right through the sheet. Then I realised, in the same instant, that this was the source of the odd noise, and that what I’d taken for dark shiny paper on the table