‘And even if it is true,’ I said, ‘we know you must get tired of it, all these couples coming to you, claiming to be in love. Tommy and me, we never would have come and bothered you if we weren’t really sure.’
‘Sure?’ It was the first time she’d spoken for ages and we both jolted back a bit in surprise. ‘You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple? So you are in love. Deeply in love. Is that what you’re saying to me?’
Her voice sounded almost sarcastic, but then I saw, with a kind of shock, little tears in her eyes as she looked from one to the other of us.
‘You believe this? That you’re deeply in love? And therefore you’ve come to me for this … this deferral? Why? Why did you come to me?’
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 she hadn’t quite said it like that. She’d asked it almost like it was a test question she knew the answer to; as if, even, she’d taken other couples through an identical routine many times before. That was what kept me hopeful. But Tommy must have got anxious, because he suddenly burst in:
‘We came to see you because of your gallery. We think we know what your gallery’s for.’
‘My gallery?’ She leaned back on the window ledge, causing the curtains to sway behind her, and took a slow breath. ‘My gallery. You must mean my collection. All those paintings, poems, all those things of yours I gathered over the years. It was hard work for me, but I believed in it, we all did in those days. So you think you know what it was for, why we did it. Well, that would be most interesting to hear. Because I have to say, it’s a question I ask myself all the time.’ She suddenly switched her gaze from Tommy to me. ‘Do I go too far?’ she asked.
I didn’t know what to say, so just replied: ‘No, no.’
‘I go too far,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I often go too far on this subject. Forget what I just said. Young man, you were going to tell me about my gallery. Please, let me hear.’
‘It’s so you could tell,’ Tommy said. ‘So you’d have something to go on. Otherwise how would you know when students came to you and said they were in love?’
Madame’s gaze had drifted over to me again, but I had the feeling she was staring at something on my arm. I actually looked down to see if there was birdshit or something on my sleeve. Then I heard her say:
‘And this is why you think I gathered all those things of yours. My gallery, as all of you always called it. I laughed when I first heard that’s what you were calling it. But in time, I too came to think of it as that. My gallery. Now why, young man, explain it to me. Why would my gallery help in telling which of you were really in love?’
‘Because it would help show you what we were like,’ Tommy said. ‘Because …’
‘Because of course’ – Madame cut in suddenly – ‘your art will reveal your inner selves! That’s it, isn’t it? Because your art will display your souls!’ Then suddenly she turned to me again and said: ‘I go too far?’
She’d said this before, and I again had the impression she was staring at a spot on my sleeve. But by this point a faint suspicion I’d had ever since the first time she’d asked ‘I go too far?’ had started to grow. I looked at Madame carefully, but she seemed to sense my scrutiny and she turned back to Tommy.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let us continue. What was it you were telling me?’
‘The trouble is,’ Tommy said, ‘I was a bit mixed up in those days.’
‘You were saying something about your art. How art bares the soul of the artist.’
‘Well, what I’m trying to say,’ Tommy persisted, ‘is that I was so mixed up in those days, I didn’t really do any art. I didn’t do anything. I know now I should have done, but I was mixed up. So you haven’t got anything of mine in your gallery. I know that’s my fault, and I know it’s probably way too late, but I’ve brought some things with me now.’ He raised his bag, then began to unzip it. ‘Some of it was done recently, but some of it’s from quite a long time ago. You should have Kath’s stuff already. She got plenty into the Gallery. Didn’t you, Kath?’
For a moment they were both looking at me. Then Madame said, barely audibly:
‘Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?’ She let that hang, and I thought I could see tears in her eyes again. Then she turned to me and asked: ‘Do we continue with this talk? You wish to go on?’
It was when she said this that the vague idea I’d had before became something more substantial. ‘Do I go too far?’ And now: ‘Do we continue?’ I realised, with a little chill, that these questions had never been for me, or for Tommy, but for someone else – someone listening behind us in the darkened half of the room.
I turned round quite slowly and looked into the darkness. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard a sound, a mechanical one, surprisingly far away – the house seemed to go much further back into the dark than I’d guessed. Then I could make out a shape moving towards us, and a woman’s voice said: ‘Yes, Marie-Claude. Let us carry on.’
I was still looking into the darkness when I heard Madame let out a kind of snort, and she came striding past us and on into the dark. Then there were more mechanical sounds, and Madame emerged pushing a figure in a wheelchair. She passed between us again, and for a moment longer, because Madame’s back was blocking the view, I couldn’t see the person in the wheelchair. But then Madame steered it around to face us and said:
‘You speak to them. It’s you they’ve come to speak to.’
‘I suppose it is.’
The figure in the wheelchair was frail and contorted, and it was the voice more than anything that helped me recognise her.
‘Miss Emily,’ Tommy said, quite softly.
‘You speak to them,’ Madame said, as though washing her hands of everything. But she remained standing behind the wheelchair, her eyes blazing towards us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘Marie-Claude is correct,’ Miss Emily said. ‘I’m the one to whom you should be speaking. Marie-Claude worked hard for our project. And the way it all ended has left her feeling somewhat disillusioned. As for myself, whatever the disappointments, I don’t feel so badly about it. I think what we achieved merits some respect. Look at the two of you. You’ve turned out well. I’m sure you have much you could tell me to make me proud. What did you say your names were? No, no, wait. I think I shall remember. You’re the boy with the bad temper. A bad temper, but a big heart. Tommy. Am I right? And you, of course, are Kathy H. You’ve done well as a carer. We’ve heard a lot about you. I remember, you see. I dare say I can remember you all.’
‘What good does it do you or them?’ Madame asked, then strode away from the wheelchair, past the two of us and into the darkness, for all I know to occupy the space Miss Emily had been in before.
‘Miss Emily,’ I said, ‘it’s very nice to see you again.’
‘How kind of you to say so. I recognised you, but you may well not have recognised me. In fact, Kathy H., once not so long ago, I passed you sitting on that bench out there, and you certainly didn’t recognise me then. You glanced at George, the big Nigerian man pushing me. Oh yes, you had quite a good look at him, and he at you. I didn’t say a word, and you didn’t know it was me. But tonight, in context, as it were, we know each other. You both look rather shocked at the sight of me. I’ve not been well recently, but I’m hoping this contraption isn’t a permanent fixture. Unfortunately, my dears, I won’t be able to entertain you for as long as I’d like just now, because in a short while some men are coming to take away my bedside cabinet. It’s a quite wonderful object. George has put protective padding around it, but I’ve insisted I’ll accompany it myself all the same. You never know with these men. They handle it roughly, hurl it around their vehicle, then their employer claims it was like that from the start. It happened to us before, so this time, I’ve insisted on going along with it. It’s a
beautiful object, I had it with me at Hailsham, so I’m determined to get a fair price. So when they come, I’m afraid that’s when I shall have to leave you. But I can see, my dears, you’ve come on a mission close to your hearts. I must say, it does cheer me to see you. And it cheers Marie-Claude too, even though you’d never know it to look at her. Isn’t that so, darling? Oh, she pretends it’s not so, but it is. She’s touched that you’ve come to find us. Oh, she’s in a sulk, ignore her, students, ignore her. Now, I’ll try and answer your questions the best I can. I’ve heard this rumour countless times. When we still had Hailsham, we’d get two or three couples each year, trying to get in to talk to us. One even wrote to us. I suppose it’s not so hard to find a large estate like that if you mean to break the rules. So you see, it’s been there, this rumour, from long before your time.’
She stopped, so I said: ‘What we want to know now, Miss Emily, is if the rumour’s true or not.’
She went on gazing at us for a moment, then took a deep breath. ‘Within Hailsham itself, whenever this talk started up, I made sure to stamp it out good and proper. But as for what students said after they’d left us, what could I do? In the end, I came to believe – and Marie-Claude believes this too, don’t you, darling? – I came to believe that this rumour, it’s not just a single rumour. What I mean is, I think it’s one that gets created from scratch over and over. You go to the source, stamp it out, you’ll not stop it starting again elsewhere. I came to this conclusion and ceased to worry about it. Marie-Claude never did worry about it. Her view was: “If they’re so foolish, let them believe it.” Oh yes, don’t show me that sour face of yours. That’s been your view of it from the beginning. After many years of it, I came not exactly to the same viewpoint. But I began to think, well, perhaps I shouldn’t worry. It’s not my doing, after all. And for the few couples who get disappointed, the rest will never put it to the test anyway. It’s something for them to dream about, a little fantasy. What harm is there? But for the two of you, I can see this doesn’t apply. You are serious. You’ve thought carefully. You’ve hoped carefully. For students like you, I do feel regret. It gives me no pleasure at all to disappoint you. But there it is.’
I didn’t want to look at Tommy. I felt surprisingly calm, and even though Miss Emily’s words should have crushed us, there was an aspect to them that implied something further, something being held back, that suggested we hadn’t yet got to the bottom of things. There was even the possibility she wasn’t telling the truth. So I asked:
‘Is it the case, then, that deferrals don’t exist? There’s nothing you can do?’
She shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘There’s no truth in the rumour. I’m sorry. I truly am.’
Suddenly Tommy asked: ‘Was it true once though? Before Hailsham closed?’
Miss Emily went on shaking her head. ‘It was never true. 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. It’s best to be clear about this. A wishful rumour. That’s all it ever was. Oh dear, is that the men come for the cabinet?’
The doorbell had gone, and footsteps came down the stairs to answer it. There were men’s voices out in the narrow hall, and Madame came out of the darkness behind us, crossed the room and went out. Miss Emily leaned forward in the wheelchair, listening intently. Then she said:
‘It’s not them. It’s that awful man from the decorating company again. Marie-Claude will see to it. So, my dears, we have a few minutes more. Was there something else you wished to talk to me about? This is all strictly against regulations, of course, and Marie-Claude should never have asked you in. And naturally, I should have turned you out the second I knew you were here. But Marie-Claude doesn’t care much for their regulations these days, and I must say, neither do I. So if you wish to stay a little longer, you’re very welcome.’
‘If the rumour was never true,’ Tommy said, ‘then why did you take all our art stuff away? Didn’t the Gallery exist either?’
‘The Gallery? Well, that rumour did have some truth to it. There was a gallery. And after a fashion, there still is. These days it’s here, in this house. I had to prune it down, which I regret. But there wasn’t room for all of it in here. But why did we take your work away? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it?’
‘Not just that,’ I said quietly. ‘Why did we do all of that work in the first place? Why train us, encourage us, make us produce all of that? If we’re just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions?’
‘Why Hailsham at all?’ Madame had said this from the hallway. She came past us again and back into the darkened section of the room. ‘It’s a good question for you to ask.’
Miss Emily’s gaze followed her, and for a moment, remained fixed behind us. I felt like turning to see what looks were being exchanged, but it was almost like we were back at Hailsham, and we had to keep facing the front with complete attention. Then Miss Emily said:
‘Yes, why Hailsham at all? Marie-Claude likes to ask that a lot these days. But not so long ago, before the Morningdale scandal, she wouldn’t have dreamt of asking a question like that. It wouldn’t have entered her head. You know that’s right, don’t look at me like that! There was only one person in those days who would ask a question like that, and that was me. Long before Morningdale, right from the very beginning, I asked that. And that made it easy for the rest of them, Marie-Claude, all the rest of them, they could all carry on without a care. All you students too. I did all the worrying and questioning for the lot of you. And as long as I was steadfast, then no doubts ever crossed your minds, any of you. But you asked your questions, dear boy. Let’s answer the simplest one, and perhaps it will answer all the rest. Why did we take your artwork? Why did we do that? You said an interesting thing earlier, Tommy. When you were discussing this with Marie-Claude. You said it was because your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.’
She paused, and Tommy and I exchanged glances for the first time in ages. Then I asked:
‘Why did you have to prove a thing like that, Miss Emily? Did someone think we didn’t have souls?’
A thin smile appeared on her face. ‘It’s touching, Kathy, to see you so taken aback. It demonstrates, in a way, that we did our job well. As you say, why would anyone doubt you had a soul? But I have to tell you, my dear, it wasn’t something commonly held when we first set out all those years ago. And though we’ve come a long way since then, it’s still not a notion universally held, even today. You Hailsham students, even after you’ve been out in the world like this, you still don’t know the half of it. All around the country, at this very moment, there are students being reared in deplorable conditions, conditions you Hailsham students could hardly imagine. And now we’re no more, things will only get worse.’
She paused again, and for a moment she seemed to be inspecting us carefully through narrowed eyes. Finally she went on:
‘Whatever else, we at least saw to it that all of you in our care, you grew up in wonderful surroundings. And we saw to it too, after you left us, you were kept away from the worst of those horrors. We were able to do that much for you at least. But this dream of yours, this dream of being able to defer. Such a thing would always have been beyond us to grant, even at the height of our influence. I’m sorry, I can see what I’m saying won’t be welcome to you. But you mustn’t be dejected. I hope you can appreciate how much we were able to secure for you. Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re educated and cultured. I’m sorry we couldn’t secure more for you than we did, but you must realise how much worse things once were. When Marie-Claude and I started out, there were no places like Ha
ilsham in existence. We were the first, along with Glenmorgan House. Then a few years later came the Saunders Trust. Together, we became a small but very vocal movement, and we challenged the entire way the donations programme was being run. Most importantly, we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being. Before that, all clones – or students, as we preferred to call you – existed only to supply medical science. In the early days, after the war, that’s largely all you were to most people. Shadowy objects in test tubes. Wouldn’t you agree, Marie-Claude? She’s being very quiet. Usually you can’t get her to shut up on this subject. Your presence, my dears, appears to have tied her tongue. Very well. So to answer your question, Tommy. That was why we collected your art. We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions. In the late seventies, at the height of our influence, we were organising large events all around the country. There’d be cabinet ministers, bishops, all sorts of famous people coming to attend. There were speeches, large funds pledged. “There, look!” we could say. “Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?” Oh yes, there was a lot of support for our movement back then, the tide was with us.’