But that wasn’t all I felt looking at those peculiar frogs that day. Because it was there again, only faint and in the background at first, but growing all the while, so that afterwards it was what I kept thinking about. I couldn’t help it, as I looked at those pages, the thought went through my mind, even as I tried to grab it and put it away. It came to me that Tommy’s drawings weren’t as fresh now. Okay, in many ways these frogs were a lot like what I’d seen back at the Cottages. But something was definitely gone, and they looked laboured, almost like they’d been copied. So that feeling came again, even though I tried to keep it out: that we were doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we were now thinking and planning.
Now I’m going over this again, it occurs to me that might have been another reason we were so slow to talk openly to each other about our plans. It was certainly the case that none of the other donors at the Kingsfield were ever heard talking about deferrals or anything like that, and we were probably vaguely embarrassed, almost like we shared a shameful secret. We might even have been scared of what might happen if word got out to the others.
But as I say, I don’t want to paint too gloomy a view of that time at the Kingsfield. For a lot of it, especially after that day he asked me about his animals, there seemed to be no more shadows left from the past, and we really settled into each other’s company. And though he never asked me again for advice about his pictures, he was happy to work on them in front of me, and we’d often spend our afternoons like that: me on the bed, maybe reading aloud; Tommy at the desk, drawing.
Perhaps we’d have been happy if things had stayed that way for a lot longer; if we could have whiled away more afternoons chatting, having sex, reading aloud and drawing. But with the summer drawing to an end, with Tommy getting stronger, and the possibility of notice for his fourth donation growing ever more distinct, we knew we couldn’t keep putting things off indefinitely.
It had been an unusually busy period for me, and I’d not been to the Kingsfield for almost a week. I arrived in the morning that day, and I remember it was bucketing down. Tommy’s room was almost dark, and you could hear a gutter splashing away near his window. He’d been down to the main hall for breakfast with his fellow donors, but had come back up again and was now sitting on his bed, looking vacant, not doing anything. I came in exhausted – I’d not had a proper night’s sleep for ages – and just collapsed onto his narrow bed, pushing him against the wall. I lay like that for a few moments, and might easily have fallen asleep if Tommy hadn’t kept prodding my knees with a toe. Then finally I sat up beside him and said:
‘I saw Madame yesterday, Tommy. I never spoke to her or anything. But I saw her.’
He looked at me, but stayed quiet.
‘I saw her come up the street and go into her house. Ruth got it right. The right address, right door, everything.’
Then I described to him how the previous day, since I was down on the south coast anyway, I’d gone to Littlehampton in the late afternoon, and just as I’d done the last two times, walked down that long street near the seafront, past rows of terraced houses with names like ‘Wavecrest’ and ‘Sea View’, until I’d come to the public bench beside the phone box. And I’d sat down and waited – again, the way I’d done before – with my eyes fixed on the house over the street.
‘It was just like detective stuff. The previous times, I’d sat there for over half an hour each go, and nothing, absolutely nothing. But something told me I’d be lucky this time.’
I’d been so tired, I’d nearly nodded off right there on the bench. But then I’d looked up and she was there, coming down the street towards me.
‘It was really spooky,’ I said, ‘because she looked exactly the same. Maybe her face was slightly older. But otherwise, there was no real difference. Same clothes even. That smart grey suit.’
‘It couldn’t literally have been the same suit.’
‘I don’t know. It looked like it was.’
‘So you didn’t try and speak to her?’
‘Of course not, stupid. Just one step at a time. She was never exactly nice to us, remember.’
I told him how she’d walked right past me on the opposite side, never glancing over to me; how for a second I thought she would also go past the door I’d been watching – that Ruth had got the wrong address. But Madame had turned sharply at the gate, covered the tiny front path in two or three steps and vanished inside.
After I’d finished, Tommy stayed quiet for some time. Then he said:
‘You sure you won’t get into trouble? Always driving out to places you’re not supposed to be?’
‘Why do you think I’m so tired? I’ve been working all kinds of hours to get everything in. But at least we’ve found her now.’
The rain kept splashing outside. Tommy turned onto his side and put his head on my shoulder.
‘Ruth did well for us,’ he said, softly. ‘She got it right.’
‘Yeah, she did well. But now it’s up to us.’
‘So what’s the plan, Kath? Have we got one?’
‘We just go there. We just go there and ask her. Next week, when I take you for the lab tests. I’ll get you signed out for the whole day. Then we can go to Littlehampton on the way back.’
Tommy gave a sigh and put his head deeper into my shoulder. Someone watching might have thought he was being unenthusiastic, but I knew what he was feeling. We’d been thinking about the deferrals, the theory about the Gallery, all of it, for so long – and now, suddenly, here we were. It was definitely a bit scary.
‘If we get this,’ he said, eventually. ‘Just suppose we do. Suppose she lets us have three years, say, just to ourselves. What do we do exactly? See what I mean, Kath? Where do we go? We can’t stay here, this is a centre.’
‘I don’t know, Tommy. Maybe she’ll tell us to go back to the Cottages. But it’d be better somewhere else. The White Mansion, maybe. Or perhaps they’ve got some other place. Somewhere separate for people like us. We’ll just have to see what she says.’
We lay quietly on the bed for a few more minutes, listening to the rain. At some stage, I began prodding him with a foot, the way he’d been doing to me earlier. Eventually he retaliated and pushed my feet off the bed altogether.
‘If we’re really going,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to decide about the animals. You know, choose the best ones to take along. Maybe six or seven. We’ll have to do it quite carefully.’
‘Okay,’ I said. Then I stood up and stretched out my arms. ‘Maybe we’ll take more. Fifteen, twenty even. Yeah, we’ll go and see her. What can she do to us? We’ll go and talk to her.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
From days before we went, I’d had in my mind this picture of me and Tommy standing in front of that door, working up the nerve to press the bell, then having to wait there with hearts thumping. The way it turned out, though, we got lucky and were spared that particular ordeal.
We deserved a bit of luck by then, because the day hadn’t been going at all well. The car had played up on the journey out and we were an hour late for Tommy’s tests. Then a mix-up at the clinic had meant Tommy having to re-do three of the tests. This had left him feeling pretty woozy, so when we finally set off for Littlehampton towards the end of the afternoon, he began to feel carsick and we had to keep stopping to let him walk it off.
We finally arrived just before six o’clock. We parked the car behind the bingo hall, took out from the boot the sports bag containing Tommy’s notebooks, then set off towards the town centre. It had been a fine day and though the shops were all closing, a lot of people were hanging about outside the pubs, talking and drinking. Tommy began to feel better the more we walked, until eventually he remembered how he’d had to miss lunch because of the tests, and declared he’d have to eat before facing what was in front of us. So we were searching for some place to buy a takeaway sandwich, when
he suddenly grabbed my arm, so hard I thought he was having some sort of attack. But then he said quietly into my ear:
‘That’s her, Kath. Look. Going past the hairdressers.’
And sure enough there she was, moving along the opposite pavement, dressed in her neat grey suit, just like the ones she’d always worn.
We set off after Madame at a reasonable distance, first through the pedestrian precinct, then along the near-deserted High Street. I think we were both reminded of that day we’d followed Ruth’s possible through another town. But this time things proved far simpler, because pretty soon she’d led us onto that long seafront street.
Because the road was completely straight, and because the setting sun was falling on it all the way down to the end, we found we could let Madame get quite a way ahead – till she wasn’t much more than a dot – and there’d still be no danger of losing her. In fact, we never even stopped hearing the echo of her heels, and the rhythmic thudding of Tommy’s bag against his leg seemed to be a kind of answer.
We went on like that for a long time, past the rows of identical houses. Then the houses on the opposite pavement ran out, areas of flat lawn appeared in their place, and you could see, beyond the lawns, the tops of the beach huts lining the seafront. The water itself wasn’t visible, but you could tell it was there, just from the big sky and the seagull noises.
But the houses on our side continued without a change, and after a while I said to Tommy:
‘It’s not long now. See that bench over there? That’s the one I sit on. The house is just over from it.’
Until I said this, Tommy had been pretty calm. But now something seemed to get into him, and he began to walk much faster, like he wanted to catch up with her. But now there was no one between Madame and us, and as Tommy kept closing the gap, I had to grab his arm to slow him down. I was all the time afraid she’d turn and look at us, but she didn’t, and then she was going in through her little gateway. She paused at her door to find her keys in her handbag, and then there we were, standing by her gate, watching her. She still didn’t turn, and I had an idea that she’d been aware of us all along and was deliberately ignoring us. I thought too that Tommy was about to shout something to her, and that it would be the wrong thing. That was why I called from the gate, so quickly and without hesitation.
It was only a polite ‘Excuse me!’ but she spun round like I’d thrown something at her. And as her gaze fell on us, a chill passed through me, much like the one I’d felt years ago that time we’d waylaid her outside the main house. Her eyes were as cold, and her face maybe even more severe than I remembered. I don’t know if she recognised us at that point; but without doubt, she saw and decided in a second what we were, because you could see her stiffen – as if a pair of large spiders was set to crawl towards her.
Then something changed in her expression. It didn’t become warmer exactly. But that revulsion got put away somewhere, and she studied us carefully, squinting in the setting sun.
‘Madame,’ I said, leaning over the gate. ‘We don’t want to shock you or anything. But we were at Hailsham. I’m Kathy H., maybe you remember. And this is Tommy D. We haven’t come to give you any trouble.’
She came a few steps back towards us. ‘From Hailsham,’ she said, and a small smile actually went across her face. ‘Well, this is a surprise. If you aren’t here to give me trouble, then why are you here?’
Suddenly Tommy said: ‘We have to talk with you. I’ve brought some things’ – he raised his bag – ‘some things you might want for your gallery. We’ve got to talk with you.’
Madame went on standing there, hardly moving in the low sun, her head tilted as though listening for some sound from the seafront. Then she smiled again, though the smile didn’t seem to be for us, but just herself.
‘Very well then. Come inside. Then we’ll see what it is you wish to talk about.’
As we went in, I noticed the front door had coloured glass panels, and once Tommy closed it behind us, everything got pretty dark. We were in a hallway so narrow you felt you’d be able to touch the walls on either side just by stretching out your elbows. Madame had stopped in front of us, and was standing still, her back to us, again like she was listening. Peering past her, I saw that the hallway, narrow as it was, divided further: to the left was a staircase going upstairs; to the right, an even narrower passage leading deeper into the house.
Following Madame’s example, I listened too, but there was only silence in the house. Then, maybe from somewhere upstairs, there was a faint thump. That small noise seemed to signify something to her, because she now turned to us and pointing into the darkness of the passage, said:
‘Go in there and wait for me. I’ll be down shortly.’
She began to climb the stairs, then seeing our hesitation, leaned over the banister and pointed again into the dark.
‘In there,’ she said, then vanished upstairs.
Tommy and I wandered forward and found ourselves in what must have been the front room of the house. It was like a servant of some sort had got the place ready for the night-time, then left: the curtains were closed and there were dim table lamps switched on. I could smell the old furniture, which was probably Victorian. 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. Tommy touched my arm and pointed to a framed picture hanging in a corner over a little round table.
‘It’s Hailsham,’ he whispered.
We went up to it, but then I wasn’t so sure. I could see it was a pretty nice watercolour, but the table lamp beneath it had a crooked shade covered with cobweb traces, and instead of lighting up the picture, it just put a shine over the murky glass, so you could hardly make it out at all.
‘It’s the bit round the back of the duck pond,’ Tommy said.
‘What do you mean?’ I whispered back. ‘There’s no pond. It’s just a bit of countryside.’
‘No, the pond’s behind you.’ Tommy seemed surprisingly irritated. ‘You must be able to remember. If you’re round the back with the pond behind you, and you’re looking over towards the North Playing Field …’
We went silent again because we could hear voices somewhere in the house. It sounded like a man’s voice, maybe coming from upstairs. Then we heard what was definitely Madame’s voice coming down the stairs, saying: ‘Yes, you’re quite right. Quite right.’
We waited for Madame to come in, but her footsteps went past the door and to the back of the house. It flashed through my mind she was going to prepare tea and scones and bring it all in on a trolley, but then I decided that was rubbish, that she’d just as likely forgotten about us, and now she’d suddenly remember, come in and tell us to leave. Then a gruff male voice called something from upstairs, so muffled it might have been two floors up. Madame’s footsteps came back into the hallway, then she called up: ‘I’ve told you what to do. Just do as I explained.’
Tommy and I waited several more minutes. Then the wall at the back of the room began to move. I saw almost immediately it wasn’t really a wall, but a pair of sliding doors which you could use to section off the front half of what was otherwise one long room. Madame had rolled back the doors just part of the way, and she was now standing there staring at us. I tried to see past her, but it was just darkness. I thought maybe she was waiting for us to explain why we were there, but in the end, she said:
‘You told me you were Kathy H. and Tommy D. Am I correct? And you were at Hailsham how long ago?’
I told her, but there was no way of telling if she remembered us or not. She just went on standing there at the threshold, as though hesitating to come in. But now Tommy spoke again:
‘We don’t want to keep you long. But there’s something we have to talk to you about.’
‘So you say. Well then. You’d better make yourselves comfortable.’
She reached out and put her hands on the backs of two matching armchairs just in
front of her. There was something odd about her manner, like she hadn’t really invited us to sit down. I felt that if we did as she was suggesting and sat on those chairs, she’d just go on standing behind us, not even taking her hands away from the backs. But when we made a move towards her, she too came forwards, and – perhaps I imagined it – tucked her shoulders in tightly as she passed between us. When we turned to sit down, she was over by the windows, in front of the heavy velvet curtains, holding us in a glare, like we were in a class and she was a teacher. At least, that’s the way it looked to me at that moment. Tommy, afterwards, said he thought she was about to burst into song, and that those curtains behind her would open, and instead of the street and the flat grassy expanse leading to the seafront, there’d be this big stage set, like the ones we’d had at Hailsham, with even a chorus line to back her up. It was funny, when he said that afterwards, and I could see her again then, hands clasped, elbows out, sure enough like she was getting ready to sing. But I doubt if Tommy was really thinking anything like that at the time. I remember noticing how tense he’d got, and worrying he’d blurt out something completely daft. That was why, when she asked us, not unkindly, what it was we wanted, I stepped in quickly.
It probably came out pretty muddled at first, but after a while, as I became more confident she’d hear me out, I calmed down and got a lot clearer. I’d been turning over in my mind for weeks and weeks just what I’d say to her. I’d gone over it during those long car journeys, and while sitting at quiet tables in service-station cafés. It had seemed so difficult then, and I’d eventually resorted to a plan: I’d memorised word for word a few key lines, then drawn a mental map of how I’d go from one point to the next. But now she was there in front of me, most of what I’d prepared seemed either unnecessary or completely wrong. The strange thing was – and Tommy agreed when we discussed it afterwards – although at Hailsham she’d been like this hostile stranger from the outside, now that we were facing her again, even though she hadn’t said or done anything to suggest any warmth towards us, Madame now appeared to me like an intimate, someone much closer to us than anyone new we’d met over the recent years. That’s why suddenly all the things I’d been preparing in my head just went, and I spoke to her honestly and simply, almost as I might have done years ago to a guardian. I told her what we’d heard, the rumours about Hailsham students and deferrals; how we realised the rumours might not be accurate, and that we weren’t banking on anything.