Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [40]
She was so lost in what she was doing, it took a while for her to realise I was there. When she looked up with a start, I could see her face was flushed, but there were no traces of tears. She stared at me, then put down her pencil.
“Hello, young lady,” she said, then took a deep breath. “What can I do for you?”
I think I turned away so I didn’t have to look at her or at the papers over the desk. I can’t remember if I said very much—if I explained about the noise and how I’d worried about it being gas. In any case, there was no proper conversation: she didn’t want me there and neither did I. I think I made some apology and went out, half expecting her to call me back. But she didn’t, and what I remember now is that I went down the staircase burning with shame and resentment. At that moment I wished more than anything that I hadn’t seen what I’d just seen, though if you’d asked me to define just what I was so upset about, I wouldn’t have been able to explain. Shame, as I say, had a lot to do with it, and also fury, though not exactly at Miss Lucy herself. I was very confused, and that’s probably why I didn’t say anything about it to my friends until much later.
After that morning I became convinced something else—perhaps something awful—lay around the corner to do with Miss Lucy, and I kept my eyes and ears open for it. But the days passed and I heard nothing. What I didn’t know at the time was that something pretty significant had happened only a few days after I’d seen her in Room 22—something between Miss Lucy and Tommy that had left him upset and disorientated. There would have been a time not so much earlier when Tommy and I would have immediately reported to each other any news of this sort; but just around that summer, various things were going on which meant we weren’t talking so freely.
That’s why I didn’t hear about it for so long. Afterwards I could have kicked myself for not guessing, for not seeking Tommy out and getting it out of him. But as I’ve said, there was a lot going on around then, between Tommy and Ruth, a whole host of other stuff, and I’d put all the changes I’d noticed in him down to that.
It’s probably going too far to say Tommy’s whole act fell apart that summer, but there were times when I got seriously worried he was turning back into the awkward and changeable figure from several years before. Once, for instance, a few of us were going back from the pavilion towards the dorm huts and found ourselves walking behind Tommy and a couple of other boys. They were just a few paces ahead, and all of them—Tommy included—looked to be in good form, laughing and shoving each other. In fact, I’d say Laura, who was walking beside me, took her cue from the way the boys were larking about. The thing was, Tommy must have been sitting on the ground earlier, because there was a sizeable chunk of mud stuck on his rugby shirt near the small of his back. He was obviously unaware of it, and I don’t think his friends had seen it either or they’d surely have made something of it. Anyway, Laura being Laura shouted out something like: “Tommy! You got poo-poo on your back! What have you been doing?”
She’d done this in a completely friendly way, and if some of the rest of us made a few noises too, it wasn’t anything more than the sort of thing students did the whole time. So it was a complete shock when Tommy came to a dead halt, wheeled round and stared at Laura with a face like thunder. We all stopped too—the boys looking as bewildered as we were—and for a few seconds I thought Tommy was going to blow for the first time in years. But then he abruptly stalked off, leaving us all swapping looks and shrugging.
Nearly as bad was the time I showed him Patricia C.’s calendar. Patricia was two years below us but everyone was in awe of her drawing skills, and her stuff was always sought after at the Art Exchanges. I’d been particularly pleased with the calendar, which I’d managed to get at the last Exchange, because word had been going round about it from weeks