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 com-pany. 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
“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
