Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
If for us the Gallery remained in a hazy realm, what was solid enough fact was Madame’s turning up usually twice – sometimes three or four times – each year to select from our best work. We called her ‘Madame’ because she was French or Belgian – there was a dispute as to which – and that was what the guardians always called her. She was a tall, narrow woman with short hair, probably quite young still, though at the time we wouldn’t have thought of her as such. She always wore a sharp grey suit, and unlike the gardeners, unlike the drivers who brought in our supplies – unlike virtually anyone else who came in from outside – she wouldn’t talk to us and kept us at a distance with her chilly look. For years we thought of her as ‘snooty’, but then one night, around when we were eight, Ruth came up with another theory.
‘She’s scared of us,’ she declared.
We were lying in the dark in our dorm. In the Juniors, we were fifteen to a dorm, so didn’t tend to have the sort of long intimate conversations we did once we got to the Senior dorms. But most of what became our ‘group’ had beds close together by then, and we were already getting the habit of talking into the night.
‘What do you mean, scared of us?’ someone asked. ‘How can she be scared of us? What could we do to her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ruth said. ‘I don’t know, but I’m sure she is. I used to think she was just snooty, but it’s something else, I’m sure of it now. Madame’s scared of us.’
We argued about this on and off for the next few days. Most of us didn’t agree with Ruth, but then that just made her all the more determined to prove she was right. So in the end we settled on a plan to put her theory to the test the next time Madame came to Hailsham.
Although Madame’s visits were never announced, it was always pretty obvious when she was due. The lead-up to her arrival began weeks before, with the guardians sifting through all our work – our paintings, sketches, pottery, all our essays and poems. This usually went on for at least a fortnight, by the end of which four or five items from each Junior and Senior year would have ended up in the billiards room. The billiards room would get closed during this period, but if you stood on the low wall of the terrace outside, you’d be able to see through the windows the haul of stuff getting larger and larger. Once the guardians started laying it out neatly, on tables and easels, like a miniature version of one of our Exchanges, then you knew Madame would be coming within a day or two.
That autumn I’m now talking about, we needed to know not just the day, but the precise moment Madame turned up, since she often stayed no longer than an hour or two. So as soon as we saw the stuff getting displayed in the billiards room, we decided to take turns keeping look-out.
This was a task made much easier by the way the grounds were laid out. Hailsham stood in a smooth hollow with fields rising on all sides. That meant that from almost any of the classroom windows in the main house – and even from the pavilion – you had a good view of the long narrow road that came down across the fields and arrived at the main gate. The gate itself was still a fair distance off, and any vehicle would then have to take the gravelled drive, going past shrubs and flowerbeds, before at last reaching the courtyard in front of the main house. Days could sometimes go by without us seeing a vehicle coming down that narrow road, and the ones that did were usually vans or lorries bringing supplies, gardeners or workmen. A car was a rarity, and the sight of one in the distance was sometimes enough to cause bedlam during a class.
The afternoon Madame’s car was spotted coming across the fields, it was windy and sunny, with a few storm clouds starting to gather. We were in Room 9 – on the first floor at the front of the house – and when the whisper went around, poor Mr Frank, who was trying to teach us spelling, couldn’t understand why we’d suddenly got so restless.
The plan we’d come up with to test Ruth’s theory was very simple: we – the six of us in on it – would lie in wait for Madame somewhere, then ‘swarm out’ all around her, all at once. We’d all remain perfectly civilised and just go on our way, but if we timed it right, and she was taken off-guard, we’d see – Ruth insisted – that she really was afraid of us.
Our main worry was that we just wouldn’t get an opportunity during the short time she was at Hailsham. But as Mr Frank’s class drew to an end, we could see Madame, directly below in the courtyard, parking her car. We had a hurried conference out on the landing, then followed the rest of the class down the stairs and loitered just inside the main doorway. We could see out into the bright courtyard, where Madame was still sitting behind the wheel, rummaging in her briefcase. Eventually she emerged from the car and came towards us, dressed in her usual grey suit, her briefcase held tightly to herself in both arms. At a signal from Ruth we all sauntered out, moving straight for her, but like we were all in a dream. Only when she came to a stiff halt did we each murmur: ‘Excuse me, Miss,’ and separate.
I’ll never forget the strange change that came over us the next instant. Until that point, this whole thing about Madame had been, if not a joke exactly, very much a private thing we’d wanted to settle among ourselves. We hadn’t thought much about how Madame herself, or anyone else, would come into it. What I mean is, until then, it had been a pretty light-hearted matter, with a bit of a dare element to it. And it wasn’t even as though Madame did anything other than what we predicted she’d do: she just froze and waited for us to pass by. She didn’t shriek, or even let out a gasp. But we were all so keenly tuned in to picking up her response, and that’s probably why it had such an effect on us. As she came to a halt, I glanced quickly at her face – as did the others, I’m sure. And I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.
By the time we’d crossed the courtyard and reached the grass, we were a very different group from the one that had stood about excitedly waiting for Madame to get out of her car. Hannah looked ready to burst into tears. Even Ruth looked really shaken. Then one of us – I think it was Laura – said:
‘If she doesn’t like us, why does she want our work? Why doesn’t she just leave us alone? Who asks her to come here anyway?’
No one answered, and we carried on over to the pavilion, not saying anything more about what had happened.
Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside – but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant. I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day; similar if not in the actual details, then inside, in the feelings. Because it doesn’t really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home. Not when you’re eight years old, and you’re all together in a place like Hailsham; when you’ve got guardians like the ones we had; when the gardeners and the delivery men joke and laugh with you and call you ‘sweetheart’.
All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that comes along, there’s a part of you that’s been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: ‘One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.’ So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against
CHAPTER FOUR
I won’t be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I’ve got a lot out of it, I have to admit I’ll welcome the chance to rest – to stop and think and remember. I’m sure it’s at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I’ve been getting this urge to order all these old memories. What I really wanted, I suppose, was to get straight all the things that happened between me and Tommy and Ruth after we grew up and left Hailsham. But I realise now just how much of what occurred later came out of our time at Hailsham, and that’s why I want first to go over these earlier memories quite carefully. Take all this curiosity about Madame, for instance. At one level, it was just us kids larking about. But at another, as you’ll see, it was the start of a process that kept growing and growing over the years until it came to dominate our lives.
After that day, mention of Madame became, while not taboo exactly, pretty rare among us. And this was something that soon spread beyond our little group to just about all the students in our year. We were, I’d say, as curious as ever about her, but we all sensed that to probe any further – about what she did with our work, whether there really was a gallery – would get us into territory we weren’t ready for yet.
The topic of the Gallery, though, still cropped up every once in a while, so that when a few years later Tommy started telling me beside the pond about his odd talk with Miss Lucy, I found something tugging away at my memory. It was only afterwards, when I’d left him sitting on his rock and was hurrying towards the fields to catch up with my friends, that it came back to me.
It was something Miss Lucy had once said to us during a class. I’d remembered it because it had puzzled me at the time, and also because it was one of the few occasions when the Gallery had been mentioned so deliberately in front of a guardian.
We’d been in the middle of what we later came to call the ‘tokens controversy’. Tommy and I discussed the tokens controversy a few years ago, and we couldn’t at first agree when it had happened. I said we’d been ten at the time; he thought it was later, but in the end came round to agreeing with me. I’m pretty sure I got it right: we were in Junior 4 – a while after that incident with Madame, but still three years before our talk by the pond.
The tokens controversy was, I suppose, all part of our getting more acquisitive as we grew older. For years – I think I’ve said already – we’d thought that having work chosen for the billiards room, never mind taken away by Madame, was a huge triumph. But by the time we were ten, we’d grown more ambivalent about it. The Exchanges, with their system of tokens as currency, had given us a keen eye for pricing up anything we produced. We’d become preoccupied with T-shirts, with decorating around our beds, with personalising our desks. And of course, we had our ‘collections’ to think of.
I don’t know if you had ‘collections’ where you were. When you come across old students from Hailsham, you always find them, sooner or later, getting nostalgic about their collections. At the time, of course, we took it all for granted. You each had a wooden chest with your name on it, which you kept under your bed and filled with your possessions – the stuff you acquired from the Sales or the Exchanges. I can remember one or two students not bothering much with their collections, but most of us took enormous care, bringing things out to display, putting other things away carefully.
The point is, by the time we were ten, this whole notion that it was a great honour to have something taken by Madame collided with a feeling that we were losing our most marketable stuff. This all came to a head in the tokens controversy.
It began with a number of students, mainly boys, muttering that we should get tokens to compensate when Madame took something away. A lot of students agreed with this, but others were outraged by the idea. Arguments went on between us for some time, and then one day Roy J. – who was a year above us, and had had a number of things taken by Madame – decided to go and see Miss Emily about it.
Miss Emily, our head guardian, was older than the others. She wasn’t especially tall, but something about the way she carried herself, always very straight with her head right up, made you think she was. She wore her silvery hair tied back, but strands were always coming loose and floating around her. They would have driven me mad, but Miss Emily always ignored them, like they were beneath her contempt. By the evening, she was a pretty strange sight, with bits of loose hair everywhere which she wouldn’t bother to push away off her face when she talked to you in her quiet, deliberate voice. We were all pretty scared of her and didn’t think of her in the way we did the other guardians. But we considered her to be fair and respected her decisions; and even in the Juniors, we probably recognised that it was her presence, intimidating though it was, that made us all feel so safe at Hailsham.
It took some nerve to go and see her without being summoned; to go with the sort of demands Roy was making seemed suicidal. But Roy didn’t get the terrible telling-off we were expecting, and in the days that followed, there were reports of guardians talking – even arguing – about the tokens question. In the end, it was announced that we would get tokens, but not many because it was a ‘most distinguished honour’ to have work selected by Madame. This didn’t really go down well with either camp, and the arguments rumbled on.
It was against this background that Polly T. asked Miss Lucy her question that morning. We were in the library, sitting around the big oak table. I remember there was a log burning in the fireplace, and that we were doing a play-reading. At some point, a line in the play had led to Laura making some wisecrack about the tokens business, and we’d all laughed, Miss Lucy included. Then Miss Lucy had said that since everyone at Hailsham was talking about little else, we should forget the play-reading and spend the rest of the lesson exchanging our views about the tokens. And that’s what we were doing when Polly asked, completely out of the blue: ‘Miss, why does Madame take our things anyway?’
We all went silent. Miss Lucy didn’t often get cross, but when she did, you certainly knew about it, and we thought for a second Polly was for it. But then we saw Miss Lucy wasn’t angry, just deep in thought. I remember feeling furious at Polly for so stupidly breaking the unwritten rule, but at the same time, being terribly excited about what answer Miss Lucy might give. And clearly I wasn’t the only one with these mixed emotions: virtually everybody shot daggers at Polly, before turning eagerly to Miss Lucy – which was, I suppose, pretty unfair on poor Polly. After what seemed a very long while, Miss Lucy said:
‘All I can tell you today is that it’s for a good reason. A very important reason. But if I tried to explain it to you now, I don’t think you’d understand. One day, I hope, it’ll be explained to you.’
We didn’t press her. The atmosphere around the table had become one of deep embarrassment, and curious as we were to hear more, we wanted most for the talk to get away from this dodgy territory. The next moment, then, we were all relieved to be arguing again – a bit artificially perhaps – about the tokens. But Miss Lucy’s words had puzzled me and I kept thinking about them on and off for the next few days. That’s why that afternoon by the pond, when Tommy was telling me about his talk with Miss Lucy, about how she’d said to him we weren’t being ‘taught enough’ about some things, the memory of that time in the library – along with maybe one or two other little episodes like that – started tugging at my mind.
While we’re on the subject of the tokens, I want just to say a bit about our Sales, which I’ve mentioned a few times already. The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside. Tommy’s polo-shirt, for instance, came from a Sale. That’s where we got our clothes, our toys, the special things that hadn’t been made by another student.
Once every
Looking back now, it’s funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment. There’d be nothing remotely special and we’d spend our tokens just renewing stuff that was wearing out or broken with more of the same. But the point was, I suppose, we’d all of us in the past found something at a Sale, something that had become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed. We’d all found something like that at one time, and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn’t ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement.
Actually there was some point in hanging about the van as it was being unloaded. What you did – if you were one of these Juniors – was to follow back and forth from the storeroom the two men in overalls carrying the big cardboard boxes, asking them what was inside. ‘A lot of goodies, sweetheart,’ was the usual reply. Then if you kept asking: ‘But is it a bumper crop?’ they’d sooner or later smile and say: ‘Oh, I’d say so, sweetheart. A real bumper crop,’ bringing a thrilled cheer.
The boxes were often open at the top, so you’d catch glimpses of all kinds of things, and sometimes, though they weren’t really supposed to, the men would let you move a few items about for a better look. And that was why, by the time of the actual Sale a week or so later, all sorts of rumours would be going around, maybe about a particular track-suit or a music cassette, and if there was trouble, it was almost always because a few students had set their hearts on the same item.