Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [41]
I’d spotted him standing in the late afternoon sunshine beside the big sycamore near the South Playing Field, and since my calendar was there in my bag—I’d been showing it off during our music lesson—I’d gone over to him.
He was absorbed in a football match involving some younger boys over in the next field and at this stage his mood seemed just fine, tranquil even. He smiled when I came up to him and we chatted for a minute about nothing in particular. Then I said: “Tommy, look what I managed to get.” I didn’t try to keep the triumph out of my voice, and I may even have gone “dah-dah!” as I brought it out and handed it to him. When he took the calendar, there was still a smile on his features, but as he flicked through I could see something closing off inside him.
“That Patricia,” I began to say, but I could hear my own voice changing. “She’s so clever . . .”
But Tommy was already handing it back to me. Then without another word he marched past me off towards the main house.
This last incident should have given me a clue. If I’d thought about it with half a brain, I should have guessed Tommy’s recent moods had something to do with Miss Lucy and his old problems about “being creative.” But with everything else going on just at that time, I didn’t, as I say, think in these terms at all. I suppose I must have assumed those old problems had been left behind with our early teen years, and that only the big issues that now loomed so large could possibly preoccupy any of us.
So what had been going on? Well, for a start, Ruth and Tommy had had a serious bust-up. They’d been a couple for about six months by then; at least, that’s how long they’d been “public” about it—walking around with arms around each other, that kind of thing. They were respected as a couple because they weren’t show-offs. Some others, Sylvia B. and Roger D., for example, could get stomach-churning, and you had to give them a chorus of vomiting noises just to keep them in order. But Ruth and Tommy never did anything gross in front of people, and if sometimes they cuddled or whatever, it felt like they were genuinely doing it for each other, not for an audience.
Looking back now, I can see we were pretty confused about this whole area around sex. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, given we were barely sixteen. But what added to the confusion—I can see it more clearly now—was the fact that the guardians were themselves confused. On the one hand we had, say, Miss Emily’s talks, when she’d tell us how important it was not to be ashamed of our bodies, to “respect our physical needs,” how sex was “a very beautiful gift” as long as both people really wanted it. But when it came down to it, the guardians made it more or less impossible for any of us actually to do much without breaking rules. We couldn’t visit the boys’ dorms after nine o’clock, they couldn’t visit ours. The classrooms were all officially “out of bounds” in the evenings, as were the areas behind the sheds and the pavilion. And you didn’t want to do it in the fields even when it was warm enough, because you’d almost certainly discover afterwards you’d had an audience watching from the house passing around binoculars. In other words, for all the talk of sex being beautiful, we had the distinct impression we’d be in trouble if the guardians caught us at it.
I say this, but the only real case I personally