I was mystified, and decided to probe him a bit the next time we could talk in private. The chance came along before long, when I was lining up for lunch and spotted him a few places ahead in the queue.
I suppose this might sound odd, but at Hailsham, the lunch queue was one of the better places to have a private talk. It was something to do with the acoustics in the Great Hall; all the hubbub and the high ceilings meant that so long as you lowered your voices, stood quite close, and made sure your neighbours were deep in their own chat, you had a fair chance of not being overheard. In any case, we weren’t exactly spoilt for choice. ‘Quiet’ places were often the worst, because there was always someone likely to be passing within earshot. And as soon as you looked like you were trying to sneak off for a secret talk, the whole place seemed to sense it within minutes, and you’d have no chance.
So when I saw Tommy a few places ahead of me, I waved him over – the rule being that though you couldn’t jump the queue going forwards it was fine to go back. He came over with a delighted smile, and we stood together for a moment without saying much – not out of awkwardness, but because we were waiting for any interest aroused by Tommy’s moving back to fade. Then I said to him:
‘You seem much happier these days, Tommy. Things seem to be going much better for you.’
‘You notice everything, don’t you, Kath?’ He said this completely without sarcasm. ‘Yeah, everything’s all right. I’m getting on all right.’
‘So what’s happened? Did you find God or something?’
‘God?’ Tommy was lost for a second. Then he laughed and said: ‘Oh, I see. You’re talking about me not … getting so angry.’
‘Not just that, Tommy. You’ve turned things around for yourself. I’ve been watching. So that’s why I was asking.’
Tommy shrugged. ‘I’ve grown up a bit, I suppose. And maybe everyone else has too. Can’t keep on with the same stuff all the time. Gets boring.’
I said nothing, but just kept looking right at him, until he gave another little laugh and said: ‘Kath, you’re so nosy. Okay, I suppose there is something. Something that happened. If you want, I’ll tell you.’
‘Well, go on then.’
‘I’ll tell you, Kath, but you mustn’t spread it, all right? A couple of months back, I had this talk with Miss Lucy. And I felt much better afterwards. It’s hard to explain. But she said something, and it all felt much better.’
‘So what did she say?’
‘Well … The thing is, it might sound strange. It did to me at first. What she said was that if I didn’t want to be creative, if I really didn’t feel like it, that was perfectly all right. Nothing wrong with it, she said.’
‘That’s what she told you?’
Tommy nodded, but I was already turning away.
‘That’s just rubbish, Tommy. If you’re going to play stupid games, I can’t be bothered.’
I was genuinely angry, because I thought he was lying to me, just when I deserved to be taken into his confidence. Spotting a girl I knew a few places back, I went over to her, leaving Tommy standing. I could see he was bewildered and crestfallen, but after the months I’d spent worrying about him, I felt betrayed, and didn’t care how he felt. I chatted with my friend – I think it was Matilda – as cheerfully as possible, and hardly looked his way for the rest of the time we were in the queue.
But as I was carrying my plate to the tables, Tommy came up behind me and said quickly:
‘Kath, I wasn’t trying to pull your leg, if that’s what you think. It’s what happened. I’ll tell you about it if you give me half a chance.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish, Tommy.’
‘Kath, I’ll tell you about it. I’ll be down at the pond after lunch. If you come down there, I’ll tell you.’
I gave him a reproachful look and walked off without responding, but already, I suppose, I’d begun to entertain the possibility that he wasn’t, after all, making it up about Miss Lucy. And by the time I sat down with my friends, I was trying to figure out how I could sneak off afterwards down to the pond without getting everyone curious.
CHAPTER THREE
The pond lay to the south of the house. To get there you went out the back entrance, and down the narrow twisting path, pushing past the overgrown bracken that, in the early autumn, would still be blocking your way. Or if there were no guardians around, you could take a short cut through the rhubarb patch. Anyway, once you came out to the pond, you’d find a tranquil atmosphere waiting, with ducks and bulrushes and pond-weed. It wasn’t, though, a good place for a discreet conversation – not nearly as good as the lunch queue. For a start you could be clearly seen from the house. And the way the sound travelled across the water was hard to predict; if people wanted to eavesdrop, it was the easiest thing to walk down the outer path and crouch in the bushes on the other side of the pond. But since it had been me that had cut him off in the lunch queue, I supposed I had to make the best of it. It was well into October by then, but the sun was out that day and I decided I could just about make out I’d gone strolling aimlessly down there and happened to come across Tommy.
Maybe because I was keen to keep up this impression – though I’d no idea if anyone was actually watching – I didn’t try and sit down when I eventually found him seated on a large flat rock not far from the water’s edge. It must have been a Friday or a weekend, because I remember we had on our own clothes. I don’t remember exactly what Tommy was wearing – probably one of the raggy football shirts he wore even when the weather was chilly – but I definitely had on the maroon track suit top that zipped up the front, which I’d got at a Sale in Senior 1. I walked round him and stood with my back to the water, facing the house, so that I’d see if people started gathering at the windows. Then for a few minutes we talked about nothing in particular, just like the lunch-queue business hadn’t happened. I’m not sure if it was for Tommy’s benefit, or for any onlookers’, but I’d kept my posture looking very provisional, and at one point made a move to carry on with my stroll. I saw a kind of panic cross Tommy’s face then, and I immediately felt sorry to have teased him, even though I hadn’t meant to. So I said, like I’d just remembered:
‘By the way, what was that you were saying earlier on? About Miss Lucy telling you something?’
‘Oh …’ Tommy gazed past me to the pond, pretending too this was a topic he’d forgotten all about. ‘Miss Lucy. Oh that.’
Miss Lucy was the most sporting of the guardians at Hailsham, though you might not have guessed it from her appearance. She had a squat, almost bulldoggy figure, and her odd black hair, when it grew, grew upwards so it never covered her ears or chunky neck. But she was really strong and fit, and even when we were older, most of us – even the boys – couldn’t keep up with her on a fields run. She was superb at hockey, and could even hold her own with the Senior boys on the football pitch. I remember watching once when James B. tried to trip her as she went past him with the ball, and he was the one sent flying instead. When we’d been in the Juniors, she’d never been someone like Miss Geraldine who you turned to when you were upset. In fact, she didn’t tend to speak much to us when we were younger. It was only in the Seniors, really, we’d started to appreciate her brisk style.
‘You were saying something,’ I said to Tommy. ‘Something about Miss Lucy telling you it was all right not to be creative.’
‘She did say something like that. She said I shouldn’t worry. Not mind what other people were saying. A couple of months ago now. Maybe longer.’
Over at the house, a few Juniors had stopped at one of the upstairs windows and were watching us. But I now crouched down in front of Tommy, no longer pretending anything.
‘Tommy, that’s a funny thing for her to say. Are you sure you got it right?’
‘Of course I got it right.’ His voice lowered suddenly. ‘She didn’t just say it once. We were in her room and she gave me a whole talk about it.’
When she’d first asked him to come to her stud
y after Art Appreciation, Tommy explained, he’d expected yet another lecture about how he should try harder – the sort of thing he’d had already from various guardians, including Miss Emily herself. But as they were walking from the house towards the Orangery – where the guardians had their living quarters – Tommy began to get an inkling this was something different. Then, once he was seated in Miss Lucy’s easy chair – she’d remained standing by the window – she asked him to tell her the whole story, as he saw it, of what had been happening to him. So Tommy had begun going through it all. But before he was even half way she’d suddenly broken in and started to talk herself. She’d known a lot of students, she’d said, who’d for a long time found it very difficult to be creative: painting, drawing, poetry, none of it going right for years. Then one day they’d turned a corner and blossomed. It was quite possible Tommy was one of these.
Tommy had heard all of this before, but there was something about Miss Lucy’s manner that made him keep listening hard.
‘I could tell,’ he told me, ‘she was leading up to something. Something different.’
Sure enough, she was soon saying things Tommy found difficult to follow. But she kept repeating it until eventually he began to understand. If Tommy had genuinely tried, she was saying, but he just couldn’t be very creative, then that was quite all right, he wasn’t to worry about it. It was wrong for anyone, whether they were students or guardians, to punish him for it, or put pressure on him in any way. It simply wasn’t his fault. And when Tommy had protested it was all very well Miss Lucy saying this, but everyone did think it was his fault, she’d given a sigh and looked out of her window. Then she’d said:
‘It may not help you much. But just you remember this. There’s at least one person here at Hailsham who believes otherwise. At least one person who believes you’re a very good student, as good as any she’s ever come across, never mind how creative you are.’
‘She wasn’t having you on, was she?’ I asked Tommy. ‘It wasn’t some clever way of telling you off?’
‘It definitely wasn’t anything like that. Anyway …’ For the first time he seemed worried about being overheard and glanced over his shoulder towards the house. The Juniors at the window had lost interest and gone; some girls from our year were walking towards the pavilion, but they were still a good way off. Tommy turned back to me and said almost in a whisper:
‘Anyway, when she said all this, she was shaking.’
‘What do you mean, shaking?’
‘Shaking. With rage. I could see her. She was furious. But furious deep inside.’
‘Who at?’
‘I wasn’t sure. Not at me anyway, that was the most important thing!’ He gave a laugh, then became serious again. ‘I don’t know who she was angry with. But she was angry all right.’
I stood up again because my calves were aching. ‘It’s pretty weird, Tommy.’
‘Funny thing is, this talk with her, it did help. Helped a lot. When you were saying earlier on, about how things seemed better for me now. Well, it’s because of that. Because afterwards, thinking about what she’d said, I realised she was right, that it wasn’t my fault. Okay, I hadn’t handled it well. But deep down, it wasn’t my fault. That’s what made the difference. And whenever I felt rocky about it, I’d catch sight of her walking about, or I’d be in one of her lessons, and she wouldn’t say anything about our talk, but I’d look at her, and she’d sometimes see me and give me a little nod. And that’s all I needed. You were asking earlier if something had happened. Well, that’s what happened. But Kath, listen, don’t breathe a word to anyone about this, right?’
I nodded, but asked: ‘Did she make you promise that?’
‘No, no, she didn’t make me promise anything. But you’re not to breathe a word. You’ve got to really promise.’
‘All right.’ The girls heading for the pavilion had spotted me and were waving and calling. I waved back and said to Tommy: ‘I’d better go. We can talk more about it soon.’
But Tommy ignored this. ‘There’s something else,’ he went on. ‘Something else she said I can’t quite figure out. I was going to ask you about it. She said we weren’t being taught enough, something like that.’
‘Taught enough? You mean she thinks we should be studying even harder than we are?’
‘No, I don’t think she meant that. What she was talking about was, you know, about us. What’s going to happen to us one day. Donations and all that.’
‘But we have been taught about all that,’ I said. ‘I wonder what she meant. Does she think there are things we haven’t been told yet?’
Tommy thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I don’t think she meant it like that. She just thinks we aren’t taught about it enough. Because she said she’d a good mind to talk to us about it herself.’
‘About what exactly?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe I got it all wrong, Kath, I don’t know. Maybe she was meaning something else completely, something else to do with me not being creative. I don’t really understand it.’
Tommy was looking at me as though he expected me to come up with an answer. I went on thinking for a few seconds, then said:
‘Tommy, think back carefully. You said she got angry …’
‘Well, that’s what it looked like. She was quiet, but she was shaking.’
‘All right, whatever. Let’s say she got angry. Was it when she got angry she started to say this other stuff? About how we weren’t taught enough about donations and the rest of it?’
‘I suppose so …’
‘Now, Tommy, think. Why did she bring it up? She’s talking about you and you not creating. Then suddenly she starts up about this other stuff. What’s the link? Why did she bring up donations? What’s that got to do with you being creative?’
‘I don’t know. There must have been some reason, I suppose. Maybe one thing reminded her of the other. Kath, you’re getting really worked up about this yourself now.’
I laughed, because he was right: I’d been frowning, completely lost in my thoughts. The fact was, my mind was going in various directions at once. And Tommy’s account of his talk with Miss Lucy had reminded me of something, perhaps a whole series of things, little incidents from the past to do with Miss Lucy that had puzzled me at the time.
‘It’s just that …’ I stopped and sighed. ‘I can’t quite put it right, not even to myself. But all this, what you’re saying, it sort of fits with a lot of other things that are puzzling. I keep thinking about all these things. Like why Madame comes and takes away our best pictures. What’s that for exactly?’
‘It’s for the Gallery.’
‘But what is her gallery? She keeps coming here and taking away our best work. She must have stacks of it by now. I asked Miss Geraldine once how long Madame’s been coming here, and she said for as long as Hailsham’s been here. What is this gallery? Why should she have a gallery of things done by us?’
‘Maybe she sells them. Outside, out there, they sell everything.’
I shook my head. ‘That can’t be it. It’s got something to do with what Miss Lucy said to you. About us, about how one day we’ll start giving donations. I don’t know why, but I’ve had this feeling for some time now, that it’s all linked in, though I can’t figure out how. I’ll have to go now, Tommy. Let’s not tell anyone yet, about what we’ve been saying.’
‘No. And don’t tell anyone about Miss Lucy.’
‘But will you tell me if she says anything else to you like that?’
Tommy nodded, then glanced around him again. ‘Like you say, you’d better go, Kath. Someone’s going to hear us soon.’
The gallery Tommy and I were discussing was something we’d all of us grown up with. Everyone talked about it as though it existed, though in truth none of us knew for sure that it did. I’m sure I was pretty typical in not being able to remember how or when I’d first heard about it. Certainly, it hadn’t been from the guardians: they never mentioned the Gallery, and t
here was an unspoken rule that we should never even raise the subject in their presence.
I’d suppose now it was something passed down through the different generations of Hailsham students. I remember a time when I could only have been five or six, sitting at a low table beside Amanda C., our hands clammy with modelling clay. I can’t remember if there were other children with us, or which guardian was in charge. All I remember is Amanda C. – who was a year older than me – looking at what I was making and exclaiming: ‘That’s really, really good, Kathy! That’s so good! I bet that’ll get in the Gallery!’
I must by then have already known about the Gallery, because I remember the excitement and pride when she said that – and then the next moment, thinking to myself: ‘That’s ridiculous. None of us are good enough for the Gallery yet.’
As we got older, we went on talking about the Gallery. If you wanted to praise someone’s work, you’d say: ‘That’s good enough for the Gallery.’ And after we discovered irony, whenever we came across any laughably bad work, we’d go: ‘Oh yes! Straight to the Gallery with that one!’
But did we really believe in the Gallery? Today, I’m not sure. As I’ve said, we never mentioned it to the guardians and looking back, it seems to me this was a rule we imposed on ourselves, as much as anything the guardians had decided. There’s an instance I can remember from when we were about eleven. We were in Room 7 on a sunny winter’s morning. We’d just finished Mr Roger’s class, and a few of us had stayed on to chat with him. We were sitting up on our desks, and I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but Mr Roger, as usual, was making us laugh and laugh. Then Carole H. had said, through her giggles: ‘You might even get it picked for the Gallery!’ She immediately put her hand over her mouth with an ‘oops!’ and the atmosphere remained light-hearted; but we all knew, Mr Roger included, that she’d made a mistake. Not a disaster, exactly: it would have been much the same had one of us let slip a rude word, or used a guardian’s nickname to his or her face. Mr Roger smiled indulgently, as though to say: ‘Let it pass, we’ll pretend you never said that,’ and we carried on as before.