Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition) (5 page)

And then there was the time I thought I was in hot water with her. The little footpath that went all round the back of the main house was a real favourite of mine. It followed all the nooks, all the extensions; you had to squeeze past shrubs, you went under two ivy-covered arches and through a rusted gate. And all the time you could peer in through the windows, one after the other. I suppose part of the reason I liked the path so much was because I was never sure if it was out of bounds. Certainly, when classes were going on, you weren’t supposed to walk past. But at the weekends or in the evenings – that was never clear. Most students avoided it anyway, and maybe the feeling of getting away from everyone else was another part of the appeal.

In any case, I was doing this little walk one sunny evening. I think I was in Senior 3. As usual I was glancing into the empty rooms as I went past, and then suddenly I was looking into a classroom with Miss Emily in it. She was alone, pacing slowly, talking under her breath, pointing and directing remarks to an invisible audience in the room. I assumed she was rehearsing a lesson or maybe one of her assembly talks, and I was about to hurry past before she spotted me, but just then she turned and looked straight at me. I froze, thinking I was for it, but then noticed she was carrying on as before, except now she was mouthing her address at me. Then, natural as you like, she turned away to fix her gaze on some other imaginary student in another part of the room. I crept away along the path, and for the next day or so kept dreading what Miss Emily would say when she saw me. But she never mentioned it at all.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about just now. What I want to do now is get a few things down about Ruth, about how we met and became friends, about our early days together. Because more and more these days, I’ll be driving past fields on a long afternoon, or maybe drinking my coffee in front of a huge window in a motorway service station, and I’ll catch myself thinking about her again.

She wasn’t someone I was friends with from the start. I can
remember, at five or six, doing things with Hannah and with Laura, but not with Ruth. I only have the one vague memory of Ruth from that early part of our lives.

I’m playing in a sandpit. There are a number of others in the sand with me, it’s too crowded and we’re getting irritated with each other. We’re in the open, under a warm sun, so it’s probably the sandpit in the Infants’ play area, just possibly it’s the sand at the end of the long jump in the North Playing Field. Anyway it’s hot and I’m feeling thirsty and I’m not pleased there are so many of us in the sandpit. Then Ruth is standing there, not in the sand with the rest of us, but a few feet away. She’s very angry with two of the girls somewhere behind me, about something that must have happened before, and she’s standing there glaring at them. My guess is that I knew Ruth only very slightly at that point. But she must already have made some impression on me, because I remember carrying on busily with whatever I was doing in the sand, absolutely dreading the idea of her turning her gaze on me. I didn’t say a word, but I was desperate for her to realise I wasn’t with the girls behind me, and had had no part in whatever it was that had made her cross.

And that’s all I remember of Ruth from that early time. We were the same year so we must have run into each other enough, but aside from the sandpit incident, I don’t remember having anything to do with her until the Juniors a couple of years later, when we were seven, going on eight.

The South Playing Field was the one used most by the Juniors and it was there, in the corner by the poplars, that Ruth came up to me one lunchtime, looked me up and down, then asked:

‘Do you want to ride my horse?’

I was in the midst of playing with two or three others at that point, but it was clear Ruth was addressing only me. This absolutely delighted me, but I made a show of weighing her up before giving a reply.

‘Well, what’s your horse’s name?’

Ruth came a step closer. ‘My
best
horse,’ she said, ‘is Thunder. I can’t let you ride on
him
. He’s much too dangerous. But you can
ride Bramble, as long as you don’t use your crop on him. Or if you like, you could have any of the others.’ She reeled off several more names I don’t now remember. Then she asked: ‘Have you got any horses of your own?’

I looked at her and thought carefully before replying: ‘No. I don’t have any horses.’

‘Not even one?’

‘No.’

‘All right. You can ride Bramble, and if you like him, you can have him to keep. But you’re not to use your crop on him. And you’ve got to come
now
.’

My friends had, in any case, turned away and were carrying on with what they’d been doing. So I gave a shrug and went off with Ruth.

The field was filled with playing children, some a lot bigger than us, but Ruth led the way through them very purposefully, always a pace or two in front. When we were almost at the wire mesh boundary with the garden, she turned and said:

‘Okay, we’ll ride them here. You take Bramble.’

I accepted the invisible rein she was holding out, and then we were off, riding up and down the fence, sometimes cantering, sometimes at a gallop. I’d been correct in my decision to tell Ruth I didn’t have any horses of my own, because after a while with Bramble, she let me try her various other horses one by one, shouting all sorts of instructions about how to handle each animal’s foibles.

‘I told you! You’ve got to really lean back on Daffodil! Much more than that! She doesn’t like it unless you’re
right back!
’

I must have done well enough, because eventually she let me have a go on Thunder, her favourite. I don’t know how long we spent with her horses that day: it felt a substantial time, and I think we both lost ourselves completely in our game. But then suddenly, for no reason I could see, Ruth brought it all to an end, claiming I was deliberately tiring out her horses, and that I’d have to put each of them back in its stable. She pointed to a section of the fence, and I began leading the horses to it, while Ruth seemed
to get crosser and crosser with me, saying I was doing everything wrong. Then she asked:

‘Do you like Miss Geraldine?’

It might have been the first time I’d actually thought about whether I liked a guardian. In the end I said: ‘Of course I like her.’

‘But do you
really
like her? Like she’s special? Like she’s your favourite?’

‘Yes, I do. She’s my favourite.’

Ruth went on looking at me for a long time. Then finally she said: ‘All right. In that case, I’ll let you be one of her secret guards.’

We started to walk back towards the main house then and I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn’t. I found out though over the next several days.

I’m not sure for how long the ‘secret guard’ business carried on. When Ruth and I discussed it while I was caring for her down in Dover, she claimed it had been just a matter of two or three weeks – but that was almost certainly wrong. She was probably embarrassed about it and so the whole thing had shrunk in her memory. My guess is that it went on for about nine months, a year even, around when we were seven, going on eight.

I was never sure if Ruth had actually invented the secret guard herself, but there was no doubt she was the leader. There were between six and ten of us, the figure changing whenever Ruth allowed in a new member or expelled someone. We believed Miss Geraldine was the best guardian in Hailsham, and we worked on presents to give her – a large sheet with pressed flowers glued over it comes to mind. But our main reason for existing, of course, was to protect her.

By the time I joined the guard, Ruth and the others had already known for ages about the plot to kidnap Miss Geraldine. We were never quite sure who was behind it. We sometimes suspected certain of the Senior boys, sometimes boys in our own year. There was a guardian we didn’t like much – a Miss Eileen – who we thought for a while might be the brains behind it. We didn’t know when the abduction would take place, but one thing we felt convinced about was that the woods would come into it.

The woods were at the top of the hill that rose behind Hailsham House. All we could see really was a dark fringe of trees, but I certainly wasn’t the only one of my age to feel their presence day and night. When it got bad, it was like they cast a shadow over the whole of Hailsham; all you had to do was turn your head or move towards a window and there they’d be,
looming in the distance. Safest was the front of the main house, because you couldn’t see them from any of the windows. Even so, you never really got away from them.

There were all kinds of horrible stories about the woods. Once, not so long before we all got to Hailsham, a boy had had a big row with his friends and run off beyond the Hailsham boundaries. His body had been found two days later, up in those woods, tied to a tree with the hands and feet chopped off. Another rumour had it that a girl’s ghost wandered through those trees. She’d been a Hailsham student until one day she’d climbed over a fence just to see what it was like outside. This was a long time before us, when the guardians were much stricter, cruel even, and when she tried to get back in, she wasn’t allowed. She kept hanging around outside the fences, pleading to be let back in, but no one let her. Eventually, she’d gone off somewhere out there, something had happened and she’d died. But her ghost was always wandering about the woods, gazing over Hailsham, pining to be let back in.

The guardians always insisted these stories were nonsense. But then the older students would tell us that was exactly what the guardians had told
them
when they were younger, and that we’d be told the ghastly truth soon enough, just as they were.

The woods played on our imaginations the most after dark, in our dorms as we were trying to fall asleep. You almost thought then you could hear the wind rustling the branches, and talking about it seemed to only make things worse. I remember one night, when we were furious with Marge K. – she’d done something really embarrassing to us during the day – we chose to punish her by hauling her out of bed, holding her face against the window pane and ordering her to look up at the woods. At first she kept her eyes screwed shut, but we twisted her arms and forced open her eyelids until she saw the distant outline against the moonlit sky, and that was enough to ensure for her a sobbing night of terror.

I’m not saying we necessarily went around the whole time at that age worrying about the woods. I for one could go weeks
hardly thinking about them, and there were even days when a defiant surge of courage would make me think: ‘How could we believe rubbish like that?’ But then all it took would be one little thing – someone retelling one of those stories, a scary passage in a book, even just a chance remark reminding you of the woods – and that would mean another period of being under that shadow. It was hardly surprising then that we assumed the woods would be central in the plot to abduct Miss Geraldine.

When it came down to it, though, I don’t recall our taking many practical steps towards defending Miss Geraldine; our activities always revolved around gathering more and more evidence concerning the plot itself. For some reason, we were satisfied this would keep any immediate danger at bay.

Most of our ‘evidence’ came from witnessing the conspirators at work. One morning, for instance, we watched from a second-floor classroom Miss Eileen and Mr Roger talking to Miss Geraldine down in the courtyard. After a while Miss Geraldine said goodbye and went off towards the Orangery, but we kept on watching, and saw Miss Eileen and Mr Roger put their heads closer together to confer furtively, their gazes fixed on Miss Geraldine’s receding figure.

‘Mr Roger,’ Ruth sighed on that occasion, shaking her head. ‘Who’d have guessed he was in it too?’

In this way we built up a list of people we knew to be in on the plot – guardians and students whom we declared our sworn enemies. And yet, all the time, I think we must have had an idea of how precarious the foundations of our fantasy were, because we always avoided any confrontation. We could decide, after intense discussions, that a particular student was a plotter, but then we’d always find a reason not to challenge him just yet – to wait until ‘we had in all the evidence’. Similarly, we always agreed Miss Geraldine herself shouldn’t hear a word of what we’d found out, since she’d get alarmed to no good purpose.

It would be too easy to claim it was just Ruth who kept the secret guard going long after we’d naturally outgrown it. Sure enough, the guard was important to her. She’d known about the
plot for much longer than the rest of us, and this gave her enormous authority; by hinting that the
real
evidence came from a time before people like me had joined – that there were things she’d yet to reveal even to us – she could justify almost any decision she made on behalf of the group. If she decided someone should be expelled, for example, and she sensed opposition, she’d just allude darkly to stuff she knew ‘from before’. There’s no question Ruth was keen to keep the whole thing going. But the truth was, those of us who’d grown close to her, we each played our part in preserving the fantasy and making it last for as long as possible. What happened after that row over the chess illustrates pretty well the point I’m making.

I’d assumed Ruth was something of a chess expert and that she’d be able to teach me the game. This wasn’t so crazy: we’d pass older students bent over chess sets, in window seats or on the grassy slopes, and Ruth would often pause to study a game. And as we walked off again, she’d tell me about some move she’d spotted that neither player had seen. ‘Amazingly dim,’ she’d murmur, shaking her head. This had all helped get me fascinated, and I was soon longing to become engrossed myself in those ornate pieces. So when I’d found a chess set at a Sale and decided to buy it – despite it costing an awful lot of tokens – I was counting on Ruth’s help.

For the next several days, though, she sighed whenever I brought the subject up, or pretended she had something else really urgent to do. When I finally cornered her one rainy afternoon, and we set out the board in the billiards room, she proceeded to show me a game that was a vague variant on draughts. The distinguishing feature of chess, according to her, was that each piece moved in an L-shape – I suppose she’d got this from watching the knight – rather than in the leap-frogging way of draughts. I didn’t believe this, and I was really disappointed, but I made sure to say nothing and went along with her for a while. We spent several minutes knocking each other’s pieces off the board, always sliding the attacking piece in an ‘L’. This continued
until the time I tried to take her and she claimed it wouldn’t count because I’d slid my piece up to hers in too straight a line.

At this, I stood up, packed up the set and walked off. I never said out loud that she didn’t know how to play – disappointed as I was, I knew not to go that far – but my storming off was, I suppose, statement enough for her.

It was maybe a day later, I came into Room 20 at the top of the house, where Mr George had his poetry class. I don’t remember if it was before or after the class, or how full the room was. I remember having books in my hands, and that as I moved towards where Ruth and the others were talking, there was a strong patch of sun across the desk-lids they were sitting on.

I could see from the way they had their heads together they were discussing secret guard stuff, and although, as I say, the row with Ruth had been only the day before, for some reason I went up to them without a second thought. It was only when I was virtually right up to them – maybe there was a look exchanged between them – that it suddenly hit me what was about to happen. It was like the split second before you step into a puddle, you realise it’s there, but there’s nothing you can do about it. I felt the hurt even before they went silent and stared at me, even before Ruth said: ‘Oh, Kathy, how are you? If you don’t mind, we’ve got something to discuss just now. We’ll be finished in just a minute. Sorry.’

She’d hardly finished her sentence before I’d turned and was on my way out, angry more at myself for having walked into it than at Ruth and the others. I was upset, no doubt about it, though I don’t know if I actually cried. And for the next few days, whenever I saw the secret guard conferring in a corner or as they walked across a field, I’d feel a flush rising to my cheeks.

Then about two days after this snub in Room 20, I was coming down the stairs of the main house when I found Moira B. just behind me. We started talking – about nothing special – and wandered out of the house together. It must have been the lunch break because as we stepped into the courtyard there were about twenty students loitering around chatting in little groups. My
eyes went immediately to the far side of the courtyard, where Ruth and three of the secret guard were standing together, their backs to us, gazing intently towards the South Playing Field. I was trying to see what it was they were so interested in, when I became aware of Moira beside me also watching them. And then it occurred to me that only a month before she too had been a member of the secret guard, and had been expelled. For the next few seconds I felt something like acute embarrassment that the two of us should now be standing side by side, linked by our recent humiliations, actually staring our rejection in the face, as it were. Maybe Moira was experiencing something similar; anyway, she was the one who broke the silence, saying:

‘It’s so stupid, this whole secret guard thing. How can they still believe in something like that? It’s like they’re still in the Infants.’

Even today, I’m puzzled by the sheer force of the emotion that overtook me when I heard Moira say this. I turned to her, completely furious:

‘What do
you
know about it? You just don’t know anything, because you’ve been out of it for ages now! If you knew everything we’d found out, you wouldn’t dare say anything so daft!’

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’ Moira was never one to back down easily. ‘It’s just another of Ruth’s made-up things, that’s all.’

‘Then how come I’ve
personally
heard them talking about it? Talking about how they’re going to take Miss Geraldine to the woods in the milk van? How come I heard them planning it myself, nothing to do with Ruth or anyone else?’

Moira looked at me, unsure now. ‘You heard it yourself? How? Where?’

‘I heard them talking, clear as anything, heard every word, they didn’t know I was there. Down by the pond, they didn’t know I could hear. So that just shows how much you know!’

I pushed past her and as I made my way across the crowded courtyard, I glanced back to the figures of Ruth and the others, still gazing out towards the South Playing Field, unaware of what had just happened between me and Moira. And I noticed I didn’t
feel angry at all with them any more; just hugely irritated with Moira.

Even now, if I’m driving on a long grey road and my thoughts have nowhere special to go, I might find myself turning all of this over. Why was I so hostile to Moira B. that day when she was, really, a natural ally? What it was, I suppose, is that Moira was suggesting she and I cross some line together, and I wasn’t prepared for that yet. I think I sensed how beyond that line, there was something harder and darker and I didn’t want that. Not for me, not for any of us.

But at other times, I think that’s wrong – that it was just to do with me and Ruth, and the sort of loyalty she inspired in me in those days. And maybe that’s why, even though I really wanted to on several occasions, I never brought it up – about what had happened that day with Moira – the whole time I was caring for Ruth down at the centre in Dover.

All of this about Miss Geraldine reminds me of something that happened about three years later, long after the secret guard idea had faded away.

We were in Room 5 on the ground floor at the back of the house, waiting for a class to start. Room 5 was the smallest room, and especially on a winter morning like that one, when the big radiators came on and steamed up the windows, it would get really stuffy. Maybe I’m exaggerating it, but my memory is that for a whole class to fit into that room, students literally had to pile on top of each other.

That morning Ruth had got a chair behind a desk, and I was sitting up on its lid, with two or three others of our group perched or leaning in nearby. In fact, I think it was when I was squeezing up to let someone else in beside me that I first noticed the pencil case.

I can see the thing now like it’s here in front of me. It was shiny, like a polished shoe; a deep tan colour with circled red dots drifting all over it. The zip across the top edge had a furry pom-pom to pull it. I’d almost sat on the pencil case when I’d shifted and
Ruth quickly moved it out of my way. But I’d seen it, as she’d intended me to, and I said: