Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [66]
For a moment, as he said this, the fear passed through me that we’d misjudged things badly; that for all we knew, veterans often used talk of possibles just as a pretext to go on trips, and didn’t really expect to take it any further. Ruth might well have been thinking along the same lines, because she was now looking definitely worried, but in the end she did a little laugh, like Rodney had made a joke.
Then Chrissie said in a new voice: “You know, Ruth, we might be coming here in a few years’ time to visit you. Working in a nice office. I don’t see how anyone could stop us visiting you then.”
“That’s right,” Ruth said quickly. “You can all come and see me.”
“I suppose,” Rodney said, “there aren’t any rules about visiting people if they’re working in an office.” He laughed suddenly. “We don’t know. It hasn’t really happened with us before.”
“It’ll be all right,” Ruth said. “They let you do it. You can all come and visit me. Except Tommy, that is.”
Tommy looked shocked. “Why can’t I come?”
“Because you’ll already be with me, stupid,” Ruth said. “I’m keeping you.”
We all laughed, Tommy again a little behind the rest of us.
“I heard about this girl up in Wales,” Chrissie said. “She was Hailsham, maybe a few years before you lot. Apparently she’s working in this clothes shop right now. A really smart one.”
There were murmurs of approval and for a while we all looked dreamily out at the clouds.
“That’s Hailsham for you,” Rodney said eventually, and shook his head as though in amazement.
“And then there was that other person”—Chrissie had turned to Ruth—“that boy you were telling us about the other day. The one a couple of years above you who’s a park keeper now.”
Ruth was nodding thoughtfully. It occurred to me that I should shoot Tommy a warning glance, but by the time I’d turned to him, he’d already started to speak.
“Who was that?” he asked in a bewildered voice.
“You know who it is, Tommy,” I said quickly. It was too risky to kick him, or even to make my voice wink-wink: Chrissie would have picked it up in a flash. So I said it dead straight, with a bit of weariness, like we were all fed up with Tommy forgetting all the time. But this just meant Tommy still didn’t twig.
“Someone we knew?”
“Tommy, let’s not go through this again,” I said. “You’ll have to have your brains tested.”
At last the penny seemed to drop, and Tommy shut up.
Chrissie said: “I know how lucky I am, getting to be at the Cottages. But you Hailsham lot, you’re really lucky. You know . . .” She lowered her voice and leaned forward again. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you lot about. It’s just that back there, at the Cottages, it’s impossible. Everyone always listening in.”
She looked around the table, then fixed her gaze on Ruth. Rodney suddenly tensed and he too leaned forward. And something told me we were coming to what was, for Chrissie and Rodney, the central purpose of this whole expedition.
“When Rodney and I, we were up in Wales,” she said. “The same time we heard about this girl in the clothes shop. We heard something else, something about Hailsham students. What they were saying was that some Hailsham students in the past, in special circumstances, had managed to get a deferral. That this was something you could do if you were a Hailsham student. You could ask for your donations to be put back by three, even four years. It wasn’t easy, but just sometimes they’d let you do it. So long as you could convince them. So long as you qualified.”
Chrissie paused and looked at each of us, maybe for dramatic effect, maybe to check us for signs of recognition. Tommy and I probably had puzzled looks, but Ruth had on one of her faces where you couldn’t tell what was going on.
“What they said,” Chrissie continued, “was that if you were a boy and a girl, and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together