In the months after that talk with Roger, I kept thinking about it a lot, about Hailsham closing and all the implications. And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever. It’s not that I started to panic, exactly. But it definitely felt like Hailsham’s going away had shifted everything around us. That’s why what Laura said to me that day, about my becoming Ruth’s carer, had such an impact on me, even though I’d stone- walled her at the time. It was almost like a part of me had already made that decision, and Laura’s words had simply pulled away a veil that had been covering it over.
I first turned up at Ruth’s recovery centre in Dover—the modern one with the white tiled walls—just a few weeks after that talk with Laura. It had been around two months since Ruth’s first donation—which, as Laura had said, hadn’t gone at all well. When I came into her room, she was sitting on the edge of her bed in her night-dress and gave me a big smile. She got up to give me a hug, but almost immediately sat down again. She told me I was looking better than ever, and that my hair suited me really well. I said nice things about her too, and for the next half hour or so, I think we were genuinely delighted to be with each other. We talked about all kinds of things— Hailsham, the Cottages, what we’d been doing since then—and it felt like we could talk and talk forever. In other words, it was a really encouraging start—better than I’d dared expect.
Even so, that first time, we didn’t say anything about the way we’d parted. Maybe if we’d tackled it at the start, things would have played out differently, who knows? As it was, we just skipped over it, and once we’d been talking for a while, it was as if we’d agreed to pretend none of that had ever happened.
That may have been fine as far as that first meeting was concerned. But once I officially became her carer, and I began to see her regularly, the sense of something not being right grew stronger and stronger. I developed a routine of coming in three or four times a week in the late afternoon, with mineral water and a packet of her favourite biscuits, and it should have been wonderful, but at the beginning it was anything but that. We’d start talking about something, something completely innocent, and for no obvious reason we’d come to a halt. Or if we did manage to keep up a conversation, the longer we went on, the more stilted and guarded it became.
Then one afternoon, I was coming down her corridor to see her and heard someone in the shower room opposite her door. I guessed it was Ruth in there, so I let myself into her room, and was standing waiting for her, looking at the view from her window over all the rooftops. About five minutes passed, then she came in wrapped in a towel. Now to be fair, she wasn’t expecting me for another hour, and I suppose we all feel a bit vulnerable after a shower with just a towel on. Even so, the look of alarm that went across her face took me aback. I have to explain this a bit. Of course, I was expecting her to be a little surprised. But the thing was, after she’d taken it in and seen it was me, there was a clear second, maybe more, when she went on looking at me if not with fear, then with a real wariness. It was like she’d been waiting and waiting for me to do something to her, and she thought the time had now come.
The look was gone the next instant and we just carried on as usual, but that incident gave us both a jolt. It made me realise Ruth didn’t trust me, and for all I know, maybe she herself hadn’t fully realised it until that moment. In any case, after that day, the atmosphere got even worse. It was like we’d let something out into the open, and far from clearing the air, it had made us more aware than ever of everything that had come between us. It got to the stage where before I went in to see her, I’d sit in my car for several minutes working myself up for the ordeal. After one particular session, when we did all the checks on her in stony silence, then afterwards just sat there in more silence, I was about ready to report to them that it hadn’t worked out, that I should stop being Ruth’s carer. But then everything changed again, and that was because of the boat.
God knows how these things work. Sometimes it’s a particular joke, sometimes a rumour. It travels from centre to centre, right the way across the country in a matter of days, and suddenly every donor’s talking about it. Well, this time it was to do with this boat. I’d first heard about it from a couple of my donors up in North Wales. Then a few days later, Ruth too started telling me about it. I was just relieved we’d found something to talk about, and encouraged her to go on.
“This boy on the next floor,” she said. “His carer’s actually been to see it. He says it’s not far from the road, so anyone can get to it without much bother. This boat, it’s just sitting there, stranded in the marshes.”
“How did it get there?” I asked.
“How do I know? Maybe they wanted to dump it, whoever owned it. Or maybe sometime, when everything was flooded, it just drifted in and got itself beached. Who knows? It’s supposed to be this old fishing boat. With a little cabin for a couple of fishermen to squeeze into when it’s stormy.”
The next few times I came to see her, she always managed to bring up the boat again. Then one afternoon, when she began telling me how one of the other donors at the centre had been taken by her carer to see it, I said to her:
“Look, it’s not particularly near, you know. It would take an hour, maybe an hour and a half to drive.”
“I wasn’t suggesting anything. I know you’ve got other donors to worry about.”
“But you’d like to see it. You’d like to see this boat, wouldn’t you, Ruth?”
“I suppose so. I suppose I would. You spend day after day in this place. Yeah, it’d be good to see something like that.”
“And do you suppose”—I said this gently, without a hint of sarcasm—“if we’re driving all that way, we should think about calling in on Tommy? Seeing his centre’s just down the road from where this boat’s meant to be?”
Ruth’s face didn’t show anything at first. “I suppose we could think about it,” she said. Then she laughed and added: “Honest, Kathy, that wasn’t the only reason I’ve been going on about the boat. I do want to see it, for its own sake. All this time in and out of hospital. Then cooped up here. Things like that matter more than they once did. But all right, I did know. I knew Tommy was at the Kingsfield centre.”
“Are you sure you want to see him?”
“Yes,” she said, no hesitation, looking straight at me. “Yes, I do.” Then she said quietly: “I haven’t seen that boy for a long time. Not since the Cottages.”
Then, at last, we talked about Tommy. We didn’t go into things in a big way and I didn’t learn much I didn’t know already. But I think we both felt better we’d finally brought him up. Ruth told me how, by the time she left the Cottages the autumn after me, she and Tommy had more or less drifted apart.
“Since we were going different places to do our training anyway,” she said, “it didn’t seem worth it, to split up properly. So we just stayed together until I left.”
And at that stage, we didn’t say much more about it than that.
As for the trip out to see the boat, I neither agreed nor disagreed to it, that first time we discussed it. But over the next couple of weeks, Ruth kept bringing it up, and our plans somehow grew firmer, until in the end, I sent a message to Tommy’s carer through a contact, saying that unless we heard from Tommy telling us not to, we’d show up at the Kingsfield on a particular afternoon the following week.
Chapter Nineteen
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
