I’d hardly ever been to the Kingsfield in those days, so Ruth and I had to consult the map a number of times on the way and we still arrived several minutes late. It’s not very well-appointed as recovery centres go, and if it wasn’t for the associations it now has for me, it’s not somewhere I’d look forward to visiting. It’s out of the way and awkward to get to, and yet when you’re there, there’s no real sense of peace and quiet. You can always hear traffic on the big roads beyond the fencing, and there’s a general feeling they never properly finished converting the place. A lot of the donors’ rooms you can’t get to with a wheelchair, or else they’re too stuffy or too draughty. There aren’t nearly enough bathrooms and the ones there are are hard to keep clean, get freezing in winter and are generally too far from the donors’ rooms. The Kingsfield, in other words, falls way short of a place like Ruth’s centre in Dover, with its gleaming tiles and double-glazed windows that seal at the twist of a handle.
Later on, after the Kingsfield became the familiar and precious place it did, I was in one of the admin buildings and came across a framed black- and-white photo of the place the way it was before it was converted, when it was still a holiday camp for ordinary families. The picture was probably taken in the late fifties or early sixties, and shows a big rectangular swimming pool with all these happy people—children, parents—splashing about having a great time. It’s concrete all around the pool, but people have set up deck chairs and sun loungers, and they’ve got large parasols to keep them in the shade. When I first saw this, it took me a while to realise I was looking at what the donors now call “the Square”—the place where you drive in when you first arrive at the centre. Of course, the pool’s filled in now, but the outline’s still there, and they’ve left standing at one end—an example of this unfinished atmosphere—the metal frame for the high diving board. It was only when I saw the photo it occurred to me what the frame was and why it was there, and today, each time I see it, I can’t help picturing a swimmer taking a dive off the top only to crash into the cement.
I might not have easily recognised the Square in the photo, except for the white bunker-like two-storey buildings in the background, on all three
visible sides of the pool area. That must have been where the families had their holiday apartments, and though I’d guess the interiors have changed a lot, the outsides look much the same. In some ways, I suppose, the Square today isn’t so different to what the pool was back then. It’s the social hub of the place, where donors come out of their rooms for a bit of air and a chat. There are a few wooden picnic benches around the Square, but—especially when the sun’s too hot, or it’s raining
—the donors prefer to gather under the overhanging flat roof of the recreation hall at the far end behind the old diving board frame.
That afternoon Ruth and I went to the Kingsfield, it was overcast and a bit chilly, and as we drove into the Square it was deserted except for a group of six or seven shadowy figures underneath that roof. As I brought the car to a stop somewhere over the old pool—which of course I didn’t know about then—one figure detached itself from the group and came towards us, and I saw it was Tommy. He had on a faded green track suit top and looked about a stone heavier than when I’d last seen him.
Beside me Ruth, for a second, seemed to panic. “What do we do?” she went. “Do we get out? No, no, let’s not get out. Don’t move, don’t move.”
I don’t know what I’d been intending to do, but when Ruth said this, for some reason, without really thinking about it, I just stepped out of the car. Ruth stayed where she was, and that was why, when Tommy came up to us, his gaze fell on me and why it was me he hugged first. I could smell a faint odour of something medical on him which I couldn’t identify. Then, though we hadn’t yet said anything to each other, we both sensed Ruth watching us from the car and pulled away.
There was a lot of sky reflected in the windscreen, so I couldn’t make her out very well. But I got the impression Ruth had on a serious, almost frozen look, like Tommy and I were people in a play she was watching. There was something odd about the look and it made me uneasy. Then Tommy was walking past me to the car. He opened a rear door, got into the back seat, and then it was my turn to watch them, inside the car, exchanging words, then polite little kisses on the cheeks.
Across the Square, the donors under the roof were also watching, and though I felt nothing hostile about them, I suddenly wanted to get out of
there quickly. But I made myself take my time getting back into the car, so that Tommy and Ruth could have a little longer to themselves.
We began by driving through narrow, twisting lanes. Then we came out into open, featureless countryside and travelled on along a near-empty road. What I remember about that part of our trip to the boat was that for the first time in ages the sun started to shine weakly through the greyness; and whenever I glanced at Ruth beside me, she had on a quiet little smile. As for what we talked about, well, my memory is that we behaved much as if we’d been seeing each other regularly, and there was no need to talk about anything other than what we had immediately in front of us. I asked Tommy if he’d been to see the boat already, and he said no, he hadn’t, but a lot of the other donors at the centre had. He’d had a few opportunities, but hadn’t taken them.
“I wasn’t not wanting to go,” he said, leaning forward from the back. “I couldn’t be bothered really. I was going to go once, with a couple of others and their carers, but then I got a bit of bleeding and couldn’t go any more. That was ages ago now. I don’t get any trouble like that any more.”
Then a little further on, as we continued across the empty countryside, Ruth turned right round in her seat until she was facing Tommy, and just kept looking at him. She still had on her little smile, but said nothing, and I could see in my mirror Tommy looking distinctly uncomfortable. He kept looking out of the window beside him, then back at her, then back out of the window again. After a while, without taking her gaze off him, Ruth started on a rambling anecdote about someone or other, a donor at her centre, someone we’d never heard of, and all the time she kept looking at Tommy, the gentle smile never leaving her face. Perhaps because I was getting bored by her anecdote, perhaps because I wanted to help Tommy out, I interrupted after a minute or so, saying:
“Yeah, okay, we don’t need to hear every last thing about her.”
I said this without any malice, and really hadn’t intended anything by it. But even before Ruth paused, almost as I was still speaking, Tommy made a sudden laughing noise, a kind of explosion, a noise I’d never heard him make before. And he said:
“That’s exactly what I was about to say. I lost track of it a while ago.”
My eyes were on the road, so I wasn’t sure if he’d addressed me or Ruth. In any case, Ruth stopped talking and slowly turned back in her seat until she was facing the front again. She didn’t seem particularly upset, but the smile had gone, and her eyes looked far away, fixed somewhere on the sky ahead of us. But I have to be honest: at that instant I wasn’t really thinking about Ruth. My heart had done a little leap, because in a single stroke, with that little laugh of agreement, it felt as though Tommy and I had come close together again after all the years.
I found the turning we needed around twenty minutes after we’d set off from the Kingsfield. We went down a narrow curving road shrouded by hedges, and parked beside a clump of sycamores. I led the way to where the woods began, but then, faced with three distinct paths through the trees, had to stop to consult the sheet of directions I’d brought with me. While I stood there trying to decipher the person’s handwriting, I was suddenly conscious of Ruth and Tommy standing behind me, not talking, waiting almost like children to be told which way to go.
We entered the woods, and though it was pretty easy walking, I noticed Ruth’s breath coming less and less easily. Tommy, by contrast, didn’t seem to be experiencing any difficulty, though there was a hint of a limp in his gait. Then we came to a barbed wire fence, which was tilted and rusted, the wire itself yanked all over the place. When Ruth saw it, she came to an abrupt halt.
“Oh no,” she said, anxiously. Then she turned to me: “You didn’t say anything about this. You didn’t say we had to get past barbed wire!”
“It’s not going to be difficult,” I said. “We can go under it. We just have to hold it for each other.”
But Ruth looked really upset and didn’t move. And it was then, as she stood there, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing, that Tommy seemed to become aware for the first time just how frail she was.
Maybe he’d noticed before, and hadn’t wanted to take it in. But now he stared at her for a good few seconds. Then I think what happened next— though of course I can’t know for certain—was that the both of us, Tommy and I, we remembered what had happened in the car, when we’d more or less ganged up on her. And almost as an instinct, we both went to her. I took an arm, Tommy supported her elbow on the other side, and we began gently guiding her towards the fence.
I let go of Ruth only to pass through the fence myself. Then I held up the wire as high as I could, and Tommy and I both helped her through. It wasn’t so difficult for her in the end: it was more a confidence thing, and with us there for support, she seemed to lose her fear of the fence. On the other side, she actually made a go of helping me hold up the wire for Tommy. He came through without any bother, and Ruth said to him:
“It’s only bending down like that. I’m sometimes not so clever at it.”
Tommy was looking sheepish, and I wondered if he was embarrassed by what had just happened, or if he was remembering again our ganging up on Ruth in the car. He nodded towards the trees in front of us and said:
“I suppose it’s through that way. Is that right, Kath?”
I glanced at my sheet and began to lead the way again. Further into the trees, it grew quite dark and the ground became more and more marshy.
“Hope we don’t get lost,” I heard Ruth say to Tommy with a laugh, but I could see a clearing not far away. And now with time to reflect, I realised why I was so bothered by what had happened in the car. It wasn’t simply that we’d ganged up on Ruth: it was the way she’d just taken it. In the old days, it was inconceivable she’d have let something like that happen without striking back. As this point sunk in, I paused on the path, waited for Ruth and Tommy to catch up, and put my arm around Ruth’s shoulders.
This didn’t seem so soppy; it just looked like carer stuff, because by now there was something uncertain about her walk, and I wondered if I’d badly underestimated how weak she still was. Her breathing was getting quite laboured, and as we walked together, she’d now and then lurch into me. But then we were through the trees and into the clearing, and we could see the boat.
Actually, we hadn’t really stepped into a clearing: it was more that the thin woods we’d come through had ended, and now in front of us there was open marshland as far as we could see. The pale sky looked vast and you could see it reflected every so often in the patches of water breaking up the land. Not so long ago, the woods must have extended further, because you could see here and there ghostly dead trunks poking out of the soil, most of them broken off only a few feet up. And beyond the dead trunks, maybe sixty yards away, was the boat, sitting beached in the marshes under the weak sun.
“Oh, it’s just like my friend said it was,” Ruth said. “It’s really beautiful.”
We were surrounded by silence and when we started to move towards the boat, you could hear the squelch under our shoes. Before long I noticed my feet sinking beneath the tufts of grass, and called out: “Okay, this is as far as we can go.”
The other two, who were behind me, raised no objection, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Tommy was again holding Ruth by the arm. It was clear, though, this was just to steady her. I took long strides to the nearest dead tree trunk, where the soil was firmer, and held onto it for balance. Following my example, Tommy and Ruth made their way to another tree trunk, hollow and more emaciated than mine, a short way behind to my left. They perched on either side of it and seemed to settle. Then we gazed at the beached boat. I could now see how its paint was cracking, and how the timber frames of the little cabin were crumbling away. It had once been painted a sky blue, but now looked almost white under the sky.
“I wonder how it got here,” I said. I’d raised my voice to let it get to the others and had expected an echo. But the sound was surprisingly close, like I was in a carpeted room.
Then I heard Tommy say behind me: “Maybe this is what Hailsham looks like now. Do you think?”
“Why would it look like this?” Ruth sounded genuinely puzzled. “It wouldn’t turn into marshland just because it’s closed.”
“I suppose not. Wasn’t thinking. But I always see Hailsham being like this now. No logic to it. In fact, this is pretty close to the picture in my head. Except there’s no boat, of course. It wouldn’t be so bad, if it’s like this now.”
“That’s funny,” Ruth said, “because I was having this dream the other morning. I was dreaming I was up in Room 14. I knew the whole place had been shut down, but there I was, in Room 14, and I was looking out of the window and everything outside was flooded. Just like a giant lake. And I could see rubbish floating by under my window, empty drinks cartons, everything. But there wasn’t any sense of panic or anything like that. It was nice and tranquil, just like it is here. I knew I wasn’t in any danger, that it was only like that because it had closed down.”
“You know,” Tommy said, “Meg B. was at our centre for a while. She’s left now, gone up north somewhere for her third donation. I never heard how she got on. Have either of you heard?”
I shook my head, and when I didn’t hear Ruth say anything, turned to look at her. At first I thought she was still staring at the boat, but then I saw her gaze was on the vapour trail of a plane in the far distance, climbing slowly into the sky. Then she said:
“I’ll tell you something I heard. I heard about Chrissie. I heard she completed during her second donation.”
“I heard that as well,” said Tommy. “It must be right. I heard exactly the same. A shame. Only her second as well. Glad that didn’t happen to me.”
“I think it happens much more than they ever tell us,” Ruth said. “My carer over there. She probably knows that’s right. But she won’t say.”
“There’s no big conspiracy about it,” I said, turning back to the boat. “Sometimes it happens. It was really sad about Chrissie. But that’s not common. They’re really careful these days.”
“I bet it happens much more than they tell us,” Ruth said again. “That’s one reason why they keep moving us around between donations.”
“I ran into Rodney once,” I said. “It wasn’t so long after Chrissie completed. I saw him in this clinic, up in North Wales. He was doing
okay.”
“I bet he was cut up about Chrissie though,” said Ruth. Then to Tommy: “They don’t tell you the half of it, you see?”
“Actually,” I said, “he wasn’t too bad about it. He was sad, obviously. But he was okay. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years anyway. He said he thought Chrissie wouldn’t have minded too much. And I suppose he should know.”
“Why would he know?” Ruth said. “How could he possibly know what Chrissie would have felt? What she would have wanted? It wasn’t him on that table, trying to cling onto life. How would he know?”
This flash of anger was more like the old Ruth, and made me turn to her again. Maybe it was just the glare in her eyes, but she seemed to be looking back at me with a hard, stern expression.
“It can’t be good,” Tommy said. “Completing at the second donation. Can’t be good.”
“I can’t believe Rodney was okay about it,” Ruth said. “You only spoke to him for a few minutes. How can you tell anything from that?”
“Yeah,” said Tommy, “but if like Kath says, they’d already split up…”
“That wouldn’t make any difference,” Ruth cut in. “In some ways that might have made it worse.”
“I’ve seen a lot of people in Rodney’s position,” I said. “They do come to terms with it.”
“How would you know?” said Ruth. “How could you possibly know? You’re still a carer.”
“I get to see a lot as a carer. An awful lot.”
“She wouldn’t know, would she, Tommy? Not what it’s really like.”
For a moment we were both looking at Tommy, but he just went on gazing at the boat. Then he said:
“There was this guy, at my centre. Always worried he wouldn’t make it past his second. Used to say he could feel it in his bones. But it all turned out fine. He’s just come through his third now, and he’s completely all right.” He put up a hand to shield his eyes. “I wasn’t much good as a carer. Never learnt to drive even. I think that’s why the notice for my first came so early. I know it’s not supposed to work that way, but I reckon that’s what it was. Didn’t mind really. I’m a pretty good donor, but I was a lousy carer.”
No one spoke for a while. Then Ruth said, her voice quieter now:
“I think I was a pretty decent carer. But five years felt about enough for me. I was like you, Tommy. I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t sure if she expected me to respond to this. She hadn’t said it in any obviously leading way, and it’s perfectly possible this was a statement she’d come out with just out of habit—it was the sort of thing you hear donors say to each other all the time. When I turned to them again, Tommy still had his hand up to shade his eyes.
“Pity we can’t go closer to the boat,” he said. “One day when it’s drier, maybe we could come back.”
“I’m glad to have seen it,” Ruth said, softly. “It’s really nice. But I think I want to go back now. This wind’s quite chilly.”
“At least we’ve seen it now,” Tommy said.
We chatted much more freely on our walk back to the car than on the way out. Ruth and Tommy were comparing notes on their centres—the food, the towels, that kind of thing—and I was always part of the conversation because they kept asking me about other centres, if this or
that was normal. Ruth’s walk was much steadier now and when we came to the fence, and I held up the wire, she hardly hesitated.
We got in the car, again with Tommy in the back, and for a while there was a perfectly okay feeling between us. Maybe, looking back, there was an atmosphere of something being held back, but it’s possible I’m only thinking that now because of what happened next.
The way it began, it was a bit like a repeat of earlier. We’d got back onto the long near-empty road, and Ruth made some remark about a poster we were passing. I don’t even remember the poster now, it was just one of those huge advertising images on the roadside. She made the remark almost to herself, obviously not meaning much by it. She said something like: “Oh my God, look at that one. You’d think they’d at least try to come up with something new.”
But Tommy said from the back: “Actually I quite like that one. It’s been in the newspapers as well. I think it’s got something.”
Maybe I was wanting that feeling again, of me and Tommy being brought close together. Because although the walk to the boat had been fine in itself, I was starting to feel that apart from our first embrace, and that moment in the car earlier on, Tommy and I hadn’t really had much to do with each other. Anyway, I found myself saying:
“Actually, I like it too. It takes a lot more effort than you’d think, making up these posters.”
“That’s right,” Tommy said. “Someone told me it takes weeks and weeks putting something like that together. Months even. People sometimes work all night on them, over and over, until they’re just right.”
“It’s too easy,” I said, “to criticise when you’re just driving by.” “Easiest thing in the world,” Tommy said.
Ruth said nothing, and kept looking at the empty road in front of us. Then I said:
“Since we’re on the subject of posters. There was one I noticed on the way out. It should be coming up again pretty soon. It’ll be on our side
this time. It should come up any time now.” “What’s it of?” Tommy asked.
“You’ll see. It’ll be coming up soon.”
I glanced at Ruth beside me. There was no anger in her eyes, just a kind of wariness. There was even a sort of hope, I thought, that when the poster appeared, it would be perfectly innocuous—something that reminded us of Hailsham, something like that. I could see all of this in her face, the way it didn’t quite settle on any one expression, but hovered tentatively. All the time, her gaze remained fixed in front of her.
I slowed down the car and pulled over, bumping up onto the rough grass verge.
“Why are we stopping, Kath?” Tommy asked.
“Because you can see it best from here. Any nearer, we have to look up at it too much.”
I could hear Tommy shifting behind us, trying to get a better view. Ruth didn’t move, and I wasn’t even sure she was looking at the poster at all.
“Okay, it’s not exactly the same,” I said after a moment. “But it reminded me. Open-plan office, smart smiling people.”
Ruth stayed silent, but Tommy said from the back: “I get it. You mean, like that place we went to that time.”
“Not only that,” I said. “It’s a lot like that ad. The one we found on the ground. You remember, Ruth?”
“I’m not sure I do,” she said quietly.
“Oh, come on. You remember. We found it in a magazine in some lane. Near a puddle. You were really taken by it. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”
“I think I do.” Ruth’s voice was now almost a whisper. A lorry went past, making our car wobble and, for a few seconds, obscuring our view of the hoarding. Ruth bowed her head, as though she hoped the lorry had
removed the image forever, and when we could see it clearly again, she didn’t raise her gaze.
“It’s funny,” I said, “remembering it all now. Remember how you used to go on about it? How you’d one day work in an office like that one?”
“Oh yeah, that was why we went that day,” Tommy said, like he’d only that second remembered. “When we went to Norfolk. We went to find your possible. Working in an office.”
“Don’t you sometimes think,” I said to Ruth, “you should have looked into it more? All right, you’d have been the first. The first one any of us would have heard of getting to do something like that. But you might have done it. Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you’d tried?”
“How could I have tried?” Ruth’s voice was hardly audible. “It’s just something I once dreamt about. That’s all.”
“But if you’d at least looked into it. How do you know? They might have let you.”
“Yeah, Ruth,” Tommy said. “Maybe you should at least have tried. After going on about it so much. I think Kath’s got a point.”
“I didn’t go on about it, Tommy. At least, I don’t remember going on about it.”
“But Tommy’s right. You should at least have tried. Then you could see a poster like that one, and remember that’s what you wanted once, and that you at least looked into it…”
“How could I have looked into it?” For the first time, Ruth’s voice had hardened, but then she let out a sigh and looked down again. Then Tommy said:
“You kept talking like you might qualify for special treatment. And for all you know, you might have done. You should have asked at least.”
“Okay,” Ruth said. “You say I should have looked into it. How? Where would I have gone? There wasn’t a way to look into it.”
“Tommy’s right though,” I said. “If you believed yourself special, you should at least have asked. You should have gone to Madame and asked.”
As soon as I said this—as soon as I mentioned Madame—I realised I’d made a mistake. Ruth looked up at me and I saw something like triumph flash across her face. You see it in films sometimes, when one person’s pointing a gun at another person, and the one with the gun’s making the other one do all kinds of things. Then suddenly there’s a mistake, a tussle, and the gun’s with the second person. And the second person looks at the first person with a gleam, a kind of can’t-believe-my-luck expression that promises all kinds of vengeance. Well, that was how suddenly Ruth was looking at me, and though I’d said nothing about deferrals, I’d mentioned Madame, and I knew we’d stumbled into some new territory altogether.
Ruth saw my panic and shifted round in her seat to face me. So I was preparing myself for her attack; busy telling myself that no matter what she came at me with, things were different now, she wouldn’t get her way like she’d done in the past. I was telling myself all of this, and that’s why I wasn’t at all ready for what she did come out with.
“Kathy,” she said, “I don’t really expect you to forgive me ever. I can’t even see why you should. But I’m going to ask you to all the same.”
I was so thrown by this, all I could find to say was a rather limp: “Forgive you for what?”
“Forgive me for what? Well, for starters, there’s the way I always lied to you about your urges. When you used to tell me, back then, how sometimes it got so you wanted to do it with virtually anyone.”
Tommy shifted again behind us, but Ruth was leaning forward now, looking straight at me, like for the moment Tommy wasn’t with us in the car at all.
“I knew how it worried you,” she said. “I should have told you. I should have said how it was the same for me too, just the way you described it. You realise all of this now, I know. But you didn’t back then, and I should have said. I should have told you how even though I was with
Tommy, I couldn’t resist doing it with other people sometimes. At least three others when we were at the Cottages.”
She said this still without looking Tommy’s way. But it wasn’t so much like she was ignoring him, than that she was trying so intensely to get through to me everything else had been blurred out.
“I almost did tell you a few times,” she went on. “But I didn’t. Even then, at the time, I realised you’d look back one day and realise and blame me for it. But I still didn’t say anything to you. There’s no reason you should ever forgive me for that, but I want to ask now because…” She stopped suddenly.
“Because what?” I asked.
She laughed and said: “Because nothing. I’d like you to forgive me, but I don’t expect you to. Anyway, that’s not the half of it, not even a small bit of it, actually. The main thing is, I kept you and Tommy apart.” Her voice had dropped again, almost to a whisper. “That was the worst thing I did.”
She turned a little, taking Tommy in her gaze for the first time. Then almost immediately, she was looking just at me again, but now it was like she was talking to the both of us.
“That was the worst thing I did,” she said again. “I’m not even asking you to forgive me about that. God, I’ve said all this in my head so many times, I can’t believe I’m really doing it. It should have been you two.
I’m not pretending I didn’t always see that. Of course I did, as far back as I can remember. But I kept you apart. I’m not asking you to forgive me for that. That’s not what I’m after just now. What I want is for you to put it right. Put right what I messed up for you.”
“How d’you mean, Ruth?” Tommy asked. “How d’you mean, put it right?” His voice was gentle, full of child-like curiosity, and I think that was what started me sobbing.
“Kathy, listen,” Ruth said. “You and Tommy, you’ve got to try and get a deferral. If it’s you two, there’s got to be a chance. A real chance.”
She’d reached out a hand and put it on my shoulder, but I shook her off roughly and glared at her through the tears.
“It’s too late for that. Way too late.”
“It’s not too late. Kathy, listen, it’s not too late. Okay, so Tommy’s done two donations. Who says that has to make any difference?”
“It’s too late for all that now.” I’d started to sob again. “It’s stupid even thinking about it. As stupid as wanting to work in that office up there. We’re all way beyond that now.”
Ruth was shaking her head. “It’s not too late. Tommy, you tell her.”
I was leaning on the steering wheel, so couldn’t see Tommy at all. He made a kind of puzzled humming sound, but didn’t say anything.
“Look,” Ruth said, “both of you, listen. I wanted us all to do this trip, because I wanted to say what I just said. But I also wanted it because I wanted to give you something.” She’d been rummaging in the pockets of her anorak, and now she held out a crumpled piece of paper. “Tommy, you’d better take this. Look after it. Then when Kathy changes her mind, you’ll have it.”
Tommy reached forward between the seats and took the paper. “Thanks, Ruth,” he said, like she’d given him a chocolate bar. Then after a few seconds, he said: “What is it? I don’t get it.”
“It’s Madame’s address. It’s like you were saying to me just now. You’ve at least got to try.”
“How d’you find it?” Tommy asked.
“It wasn’t easy. It took me a long time, and I ran a few risks. But I got it in the end, and I got it for you two. Now it’s up to you to find her and try.”
I’d stopped sobbing by now and started the engine. “That’s enough of all this,” I said. “We’ve got to get Tommy back. Then we need to be getting back ourselves.”
“But you will think about it, both of you, won’t you?”
“I just want to get back now,” I said.
“Tommy, you’ll keep that address safe? In case Kathy comes round.”
“I’ll keep it,” Tommy said. Then, much more solemnly than the last time: “Thanks, Ruth.”
“We’ve seen the boat,” I said, “but now we’ve got to get back. It might be over two hours back to Dover.”
I put the car on the road again, and my memory of it is that we didn’t talk much more on the way back to the Kingsfield. There was still a small group of donors huddled under the roof as we came into the Square. I turned the car before letting Tommy out. Neither of us hugged or kissed him, but as he walked away towards his fellow donors, he paused and gave us a big smile and wave.
It might seem odd, but on the journey back to Ruth’s centre, we didn’t really discuss any of what had just happened. It was partly because Ruth was exhausted—that last conversation on the roadside seemed to have drained her. But also, I think we both sensed we’d done enough serious talking for one day, and that if we tried any more of it, things would start going wrong. I’m not sure how Ruth was feeling on that drive home, but as for me, once all the strong emotions had settled, once the night began to set in and all the lights came on along the roadside, I was feeling okay. It was like something that had been hanging over me for a long time had gone, and even if things were still far from sorted, it felt like there was now at least a door open to somewhere better. I’m not saying I was elated or anything like that. Everything between the three of us seemed really delicate and I felt tense, but it wasn’t altogether a bad tension.
We didn’t even discuss Tommy beyond saying how he looked okay, and wondering how much weight he’d put on. Then we spent large stretches of the journey watching the road together in silence.
It wasn’t until a few days later I came to see what a difference that trip had made. All the guardedness, all the suspicions between me and Ruth evaporated, and we seemed to remember everything we’d once meant to each other. And that was the start of it, that era, with the summer coming on, and Ruth’s health at least on an even keel, when I’d come in the evenings with biscuits and mineral water, and we’d sit side by side at her window, watching the sun go down over the roofs, talking about Hailsham, the Cottages, anything that drifted into our minds. When I think about Ruth now, of course, I feel sad she’s gone; but I also feel really grateful for that period we had at the end.
There was one topic, though, that we never fully discussed: what Ruth had said to us that day by the roadside. Every so often, she’d bring it up casually, saying something like, “Have you thought more about becoming Tommy’s carer? You know you could make it happen if you wanted to.” Eventually, that suggestion—of me becoming Tommy’s carer—came to represent everything else she’d hinted at. I’d tell her I was considering it, but that it wasn’t so easy, even for me, to arrange something like that. Then the conversation would drop. But I knew it was never far from Ruth’s mind, and that’s why, the very last time I saw her, even though she couldn’t speak, I understood what she wanted to say.
It was three days after her second donation when they finally allowed me to visit her, in the early hours of the morning. She was in a room by herself, and it seemed they’d done all they could. By that point, from the way the doctors, nurses, and coordinator acted, I knew they didn’t expect her to pull through. When I looked at her in that hospital bed, under the dim light, I recognized the expression on her face. I’d seen it often enough in other donors. It was like she was trying to force her eyes to look inward, trying to manage the pain spreading throughout her body—like a frantic carer rushing between several ailing patients. Technically, she was still conscious, but she wasn’t truly present with me as I stood beside her bed. Even so, I pulled up a chair, took her hand in mine, and squeezed it whenever another wave of pain made her twist away.
I stayed by her side as long as they allowed—three hours, maybe more. For almost all that time, she seemed far away, lost in herself. But then, just once, as her body twisted in a way that frightened me and I considered calling for more pain relief, she suddenly looked straight at me. For just a few seconds, she knew exactly who I was. It was one of those brief moments of clarity that donors sometimes have in the midst of their suffering, and in that instant, our eyes locked. Although she didn’t speak, I understood her completely. So I whispered, “It’s okay, Ruth. I’m going to do it. I’ll become Tommy’s carer as soon as I can.” I said it softly, knowing she probably wouldn’t hear me even if I shouted. But I hoped that in those few seconds, as our gazes held, she’d read the promise in my face, just as I’d read hers. Then the moment passed, and she slipped away again. I’ll never be certain if she understood, but I think she did. And even if she didn’t, I realize now that she probably knew all along—maybe even before I did—that I’d take care of Tommy, and that we’d “give it a try,” just as she’d urged us to that day in the car.
