Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [53]
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