Never Let Me Go, Chapters 21-23

The way it turned out, though, we got lucky and were spared that particular ordeal.

We set off after Madame at a reasonable distance, first through the pedestrian precinct, then along the near-deserted High Street.

The fireplace had been sealed off with a board, and where the fire would have been, there was a picture, woven like a tapestry, of a strange owl-like bird staring out at you.

Then a gruff male voice called something from upstairs, so muffled it might have been two floors up.

She just went on standing there at the threshold, as though hesitating to come in.

If she’d asked this in a certain way, like the whole idea was completely crazy, then I’m sure I’d have felt pretty devastated.

But Tommy must have got anxious, because he suddenly burst in:

I looked at Madame carefully, but she seemed to sense my scrutiny and she turned back to Tommy.

With all our schemes and plans?”

The figure in the wheelchair was frail and contorted, and it was the voice more than anything that helped me recognise her.

And the way it all ended has left her feeling somewhat disillusioned.

Even before the Morningdale scandal, even back when Hailsham was considered a shining beacon, an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things, even then, it wasn’t true.

And as long as I was steadfast, then no doubts ever crossed your minds, any of you.

All around the country, at this very moment, there are students being reared in deplorable conditions, conditions you Hailsham students could hardly imagine.

For the next few minutes, Miss Emily went on reminiscing about different events from those days, mentioning a lot of people whose names meant nothing to us.

Not like our colleagues at the Saunders Trust.

They recoiled from that.”

And I often think now, we were culpable not to do so.

Had we been more alert, less absorbed with ourselves, if we’d worked very hard at that stage when the news about Morningdale first broke, we might have been able to avert it.

Our little movement, we were always too fragile, always too dependent on the whims of our supporters.

Lucy wasn’t with us for long, so for us she’s just a peripheral figure in our memory of Hailsham.

But what she was wanting to do, it was too theoretical.

Then she turned as though to go back into the house, and seeing us there on the pavement, stopped abruptly, almost shrinking back.

I kept us on the most obscure back roads I knew, where only our headlights disturbed the darkness.

I couldn’t really see anything, and when I tried to go towards the screams, I was stopped by an impenetrable thicket.

The mud was impeding him too, because one time, when he kicked out, he slipped and fell out of view into the blackness.

I remember the few weeks that came after that—the last few weeks before the new carer took over—as being surprisingly tranquil.

But in the end, I think it’s about something else, something much more than my feeling vengeful and mean-spirited.

The only indulgent thing I did, just once, was a couple of weeks after I heard Tommy had completed, when I drove up to Norfolk, even though I had no real need to.

The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control.