Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [88]
I stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“You must know what I mean. Tommy doesn’t like girls who’ve been with . . . well, you know, with this person and that. It’s just a thing he has. I’m sorry, Kathy, but it wouldn’t be right not to have told you.”
I thought about it, then said: “It’s always good to know these things.”
I felt Ruth touch my arm. “I knew you’d take it the right way. What you’ve got to understand, though, is that he thinks the world of you. He really does.”
I wanted to change the subject, but for the moment my mind was a blank. I suppose Ruth must have picked up on this, because she stretched out her arms and did a kind of yawn, saying:
“If I ever learn to drive a car, I’d take us all on a trip to some wild place. Dartmoor, say. The three of us, maybe Laura and Hannah too. I’d love to see all the bogs and stuff.”
We spent the next several minutes talking about what we’d do on a trip like that if we ever went on one. I asked where we’d stay, and Ruth said we could borrow a big tent. I pointed out the wind could get really fierce in places like that and our tent could easily blow away in the night. None of this was that serious. But it was around here I remembered the time back at Hailsham, when we’d still been Juniors and we were having a picnic by the pond with Miss Geraldine. James B. had been sent to the main house to fetch the cake we’d all baked earlier, but as he was carrying it back, a strong gust of wind had taken off the whole top layer of sponge, tossing it into the rhubarb leaves. Ruth said she could only vaguely remember the incident, and I’d said, trying to clinch it for her memory:
“The thing was, he got into trouble because that proved he’d been coming down through the rhubarb patch.”
And that was when Ruth looked at me and said: “Why? What was wrong with that?”
It was just the way she said it, suddenly so false even an onlooker, if there’d been one, would have seen through it. I sighed with irritation and said:
“Ruth, don’t give me that. There’s no way you’ve forgotten. You know that route was out of bounds.”
Maybe it was a bit sharp, the way I said it. Anyway, Ruth didn’t back down. She continued pretending to remember nothing, and I got all the more irritated. And that was when she said:
“What does it matter anyway? What’s the rhubarb patch got to do with anything? Just get on with what you were saying.”
After that I think we went back to talking in a more or less friendly way, and then before long we were making our way down the footpath in the half-light back to the Cottages. But the atmosphere never quite righted itself, and when we said our goodnights in front of the Black Barn, we parted without our usual little touches on the arms and shoulders.
IT WASN’T LONG AFTER THAT I made my decision, and once I’d made it, I never wavered. I just got up one morning and told Keffers I wanted to start my training to become a carer. It was surprisingly easy. He was walking across the yard, his Wellingtons covered in mud, grumbling to himself and holding a piece of piping. I went up and told him, and he just looked at me like I’d bothered him about more firewood. Then he mumbled something about coming to see him later that afternoon to go through the forms. It was that easy.
It took a little while after that, of course, but the whole thing had been set in motion, and I was suddenly looking at everything—the Cottages, everybody there—in a different light. I was now one of the ones leaving, and soon enough, everyone knew it. Maybe Ruth thought we’d be spending hours talking about my future; maybe she thought she’d have a big influence on whether or not I changed my mind. But I kept a certain distance from her, just as I did from Tommy. We didn’t really talk properly again at the Cottages, and