Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [69]
Again, we’d turned and were heading back towards the High Street, when Rodney had stopped suddenly. Then he’d indicated silently an office on the other side of the street.
There it was, sure enough. It wasn’t exactly like the magazine advert we’d found on the ground that day, but then it wasn’t so far off either. There was a big glass front at street-level, so anyone going by could see right into it: a large open-plan room with maybe a dozen desks arranged in irregular L-patterns. There were the potted palms, the shiny machines and swooping desk lamps. People were moving about between desks, or leaning on a partition, chatting and sharing jokes, while others had pulled their swivel chairs close to each other and were enjoying a coffee and sandwich.
“Look,” Tommy said. “It’s their lunch break, but they don’t go out. Don’t blame them either.”
We kept on staring, and it looked like a smart, cosy, self-contained world. I glanced at Ruth and noticed her eyes moving anxiously around the faces behind the glass.
“Okay, Rod,” Chrissie said. “So which one’s the possible?”
She said this almost sarcastically, like she was sure the whole thing would turn out to be a big mistake on his part. But Rodney said quietly, with a tremor of excitement:
“There. Over in that corner. In the blue outfit. Her, talking now to the big red woman.”
It wasn’t obvious, but the longer we kept looking, the more it seemed he had something. The woman was around fifty, and had kept her figure pretty well. Her hair was darker than Ruth’s—though it could have been dyed—and she had it tied back in a simple pony-tail the way Ruth usually did. She was laughing at something her friend in the red outfit was saying, and her face, especially when she was finishing her laugh with a shake of her head, had more than a hint of Ruth about it.
We all kept on watching her, not saying a word. Then we became aware that in another part of the office, a couple of the other women had noticed us. One raised a hand and gave us an uncertain wave. This broke the spell and we took to our heels in giggly panic.
WE STOPPED AGAIN FURTHER DOWN THE STREET, talking excitedly all at once. Except for Ruth, that is, who remained silent in the middle of it. It was hard to read her face at that moment: she certainly wasn’t disappointed, but then she wasn’t elated either. She had on a half-smile, the sort a mother might have in an ordinary family, weighing things up while the children jumped and screamed around her asking her to say, yes, they could do whatever. So there we were, all coming out with our views, and I was glad I could say honestly, along with the others, that the woman we’d seen was by no means out of the question. The truth was, we were all relieved: without quite realising it, we’d been bracing ourselves for a let-down. But now we could go back to the Cottages, Ruth could take encouragement from what she’d seen, and the rest of us could back her up. And the office life the woman appeared to be leading was about as close as you could hope to the one Ruth had often described for herself. Regardless of what had been going on between us that day, deep down, none of us wanted Ruth to return home despondent, and at that moment we thought we were safe. And so we would have been, I’m pretty sure, had we put an end to the matter at that point.
But then Ruth said: “Let’s sit over there, over on that wall. Just for a few minutes. Once they’ve forgotten about us, we can go and have another look.”
We agreed to this, but as we walked towards the low wall around the small car park Ruth had indicated, Chrissie said, perhaps a little too eagerly:
“But even if we don’t get to see her again, we’re all agreed she’s a possible. And it’s a lovely office. It really is.”
“Let’s just wait a few minutes,”