Anyway, my point is, it wasn’t long before Ruth realised the way she’d been carrying on with Tommy was all wrong for the Cottages, and she set about changing how they did things in front of people. And there was in particular this one gesture Ruth picked up from the veterans. Back at Hailsham, if a couple were parting, even for a few minutes, it had been an excuse for big embraces and snogging. At the Cottages, though, when a couple were saying goodbye to each other, there’d be hardly any words, never mind embraces or kisses. Instead, you slapped your partner’s arm near the elbow, lightly with the back of your knuckles, the way you might do to attract someone’s attention. Usually the girl did it to the boy, just as they were moving apart. This custom had faded out by the winter, but when we arrived, it was what was going on and Ruth was soon doing it to Tommy. Mind you, at first, Tommy didn’t have a clue what was going on, and would turn abruptly to Ruth and go: “What?,” so that she’d have to glare furiously at him, like they were in a play and he’d forgotten his lines. I suppose she eventually had a word with him, because after a week or so they were managing to do it right, more or less exactly like the veteran couples.
I’d not actually seen the slap on the elbow on the television, but I was pretty sure that’s where the idea had come from, and just as sure Ruth hadn’t realised it. That was why, that afternoon I was reading Daniel Deronda on the grass and Ruth was being irritating, I decided it was time someone pointed it out to her.
IT WAS NEARLY AUTUMN and starting to get chilly. The veterans were spending more time indoors and generally going back to whatever routines they’d had before the summer. But those of us who’d arrived from Hailsham kept sitting outside on the uncut grass—wanting to keep going for as long as possible the only routine we’d got used to. Even so, by that particular afternoon, there were maybe only three or four apart from me reading in the field, and since I’d gone out of my way to find a quiet corner to myself, I’m pretty sure what happened between me and Ruth wasn’t overheard.
I was lying on a piece of old tarpaulin reading, as I say, Daniel Deronda, when Ruth came wandering over and sat down beside me. She studied the cover of my book and nodded to herself. Then after about a minute, just as I knew she would, she began to outline to me the plot of Daniel Deronda. Until that point, I’d been in a perfectly okay mood, and had been pleased to see Ruth, but now I was irritated. She’d done this to me a couple of times before, and I’d seen her doing it to others. For one thing, there was the manner she put on: a kind of nonchalant but sincere one as though she expected people to be really grateful for her assistance. Okay, even at the time, I was vaguely aware what was behind it. In those early months, we’d somehow developed this idea that how well you were settling in at the Cottages—how well you were coping—was somehow reflected by how many books you’d read. It sounds odd, but there you are, it was just something that developed between us, the ones who’d arrived from Hailsham. The whole notion was kept deliberately hazy—in fact, it was pretty reminiscent of the way we’d dealt with sex at Hailsham. You could go around implying you’d read all kinds of things, nodding knowingly when someone mentioned, say, War and Peace, and the understanding was that no one would scrutinise your claim too rationally. You have to remember, since we’d been in each other’s company constantly since arriving at the Cottages, it wasn’t possible for any of us to have read War and Peace without the rest noticing. But just like with the sex at Hailsham, there was an unspoken agreement to allow for a mysterious dimension where we went off and did all this reading.
It was, as I say, a little game we all indulged in to some extent. Even so, it was Ruth who took it further than anyone else. She was the one always pretending to have finished anything anyone happened to be reading; and she was the only one with this notion that the way to demonstrate your superior reading was to go around telling people the plots of novels they were in the middle of. That’s why, when she started on Daniel Deronda, even though I’d not been enjoying it much, I closed the book, sat up and said to her, completely out of the blue:
“Ruth, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why do you always hit Tommy on the arm like that when you’re saying goodbye? You know what I mean.”
Of course she claimed not to, so I patiently explained what I was talking about. Ruth heard me out then shrugged.
“I didn’t realise I was doing it. I must have just picked it up.”
A few months before I might have let it go at that—or probably wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. But that afternoon I just pressed on, explaining to her how it was something from a television series. “It’s not something worth copying,” I told her. “It’s not what people really do out there, in normal life, if that’s what you were thinking.”
Ruth, I could see, was now angry but unsure how to fight back. She looked away and did another shrug. “So what?” she said. “It’s no big deal. A lot of us do it.”
“What you mean is Chrissie and Rodney do it.”
As soon as I said this I realised I’d made a mistake; that until I’d mentioned these two, I’d had Ruth in a corner, but now she was out. It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to. Sure enough, I saw a gleam come into Ruth’s eyes and when she spoke again it was in an entirely new voice.
“So that’s it, that’s what’s upsetting poor little Kathy. Ruth isn’t paying enough attention to her. Ruth’s got big new friends and baby sister isn’t getting played with so often . . .”
“Stop all that. Anyway that’s not how it works in real families. You don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh Kathy, the great expert on real families. So sorry. But that’s what this is, isn’t it? You’ve still got this idea. Us Hailsham lot, we have to stay together, a tight little bunch, must never make any new friends.”
“I’ve never said that. I’m just talking about Chrissie and Rodney. It looks daft, the way you copy everything they do.”
“But I’m right, aren’t I?” Ruth went on. “You’re upset because I’ve managed to move on, make new friends. Some of the veterans hardly remember your name, and who can blame them? You never talk to anyone unless they’re Hailsham. But you can’t expect me to hold your hand the whole time. We’ve been here nearly two months now.”
I didn’t take the bait, but said instead: “Never mind me, never mind Hailsham. But you keep leaving Tommy in the lurch. I’ve watched you, you’ve done it a few times just this week. You leave him stranded, looking like a spare part. That’s not fair. You and Tommy are supposed to be a couple. That means you look out for him.”
“Quite right, Kathy, we’re a couple, like you say. And if you must intrude, I’ll tell you. We’ve talked about this, and we’ve agreed. If he sometimes doesn’t feel like doing things with Chrissie and Rodney, that’s his choice. I’m not going to make him do anything he’s not yet ready for. But we’ve agreed, he shouldn’t hold me back. Nice of you to be concerned though.” Then she added, in a quite different voice: “Come to think of it, I suppose you haven’t been that slow making friends with at least some of the veterans.”
She watched me carefully, then did a laugh, as though to say: “We’re still friends, aren’t we?” But I didn’t find anything to laugh about in this last remark of hers. I just picked up my book and walked off without another word.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I should explain why I got so bothered by Ruth saying what she did. Those early months at the Cottages had been a strange time in our friendship. We were quarrelling over all kinds of little things, but at the same time we were confiding in each other more than ever. In particular, we used to have these talks, the two of us, usually up in my room at the top of the Black Barn just before going to bed. You could say they were a sort of hangover from those talks in our dorm after lights out. Anyway, the thing was, however much we might have fallen out during the day, come bed-time, Ruth and I would still find ourselves sitting side by side on my mattress, sipping our hot drinks, exchanging our deepest feelings about our new life like nothing had ever come between us. And what made these heart-to-hearts possible—you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time—was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we’d honour confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn’t use against each other anything we’d talked about during those sessions. Okay, this had never been spelt out exactly, but it was definitely, as I say, an understanding, and until the afternoon of the Daniel Deronda business, neither of us had come anywhere near breaching it. That was why, when Ruth said what she did about my not being slow making friends with certain veterans, I wasn’t just cross. To me, it was a betrayal. Because there wasn’t any doubt what she’d meant by it; she was referring to something I’d confided in her one night about me and sex.
As you’d expect, sex was different at the Cottages from how it had been at Hailsham. It was a lot more straightforward—more “grown up.” You didn’t go around gossiping and giggling about who’d been doing it with whom. If you knew two students had had sex, you didn’t immediately start speculating about whether they’d become a proper couple. And if a new couple did emerge one day, you didn’t go around talking about it like it was a big event. You just accepted it quietly, and from then on, when you referred to one, you also referred to the other, as in “Chrissie and Rodney” or “Ruth and Tommy.” When someone wanted sex with you, that too was much more straightforward. A boy would come up and ask if you wanted to spend the night in his room “for a change,” something like that, it was no big deal. Sometimes it was because he was interested in becoming a couple with you; other times it was just for a one-nighter.
The atmosphere, like I say, was much more grown up. But when I look back, the sex at the Cottages seems a bit functional. Maybe it was precisely because all the gossip and secrecy had gone. Or maybe it was because of the cold.
When I remember sex at the Cottages, I think about doing it in freezing rooms in the pitch dark, usually under a ton of blankets. And the blankets often weren’t even blankets, but a really odd assortment—old curtains, even bits of carpet. Sometimes it got so cold you just had to pile anything you could over you, and if you were having sex at the bottom of it, it felt like a mountain of bedding was pounding at you, so that half the time you weren’t sure if you were doing it with the boy or all that stuff.
Anyway, the point is, I’d had a few one-nighters shortly after getting to the Cottages. I hadn’t planned it that way. My plan had been to take my time, maybe become part of a couple with someone I chose carefully. I’d never been in a couple before, and especially after watching Ruth and Tommy for a while, I was quite curious to give it a try for myself. As I say, that had been my plan, and when the one-nighters kept happening, it unsettled me a bit. That was why I’d decided to confide in Ruth that night.
It was in many ways a typical evening session for us. We’d brought up our mugs of tea, and we were sitting in my room, side by side on the mattress, our heads slightly stooped because of the rafters. We talked about the different boys at the Cottages, and whether any of them might be right for me. And Ruth had been at her best: encouraging, funny, tactful, wise. That’s why I decided to tell her about the one-nighters. I told her how they’d happened without my really wanting them to; and how, even though we couldn’t have babies from doing it, the sex had done funny things to my feelings, just as Miss Emily had warned. Then I said to her:
“Ruth, I wanted to ask you. Do you ever get so you just really have to do it? With anybody almost?”
Ruth shrugged, then said: “I’m in a couple. So if I want to do it, I just do it with Tommy.”
“I suppose so. Maybe it’s just me anyway. There might be something not quite right with me, down there. Because sometimes I just really, really need to do it.”
“That’s strange, Kathy.” She fixed me with a concerned look, which made me feel all the more worried.
“So you don’t ever get like that.”
She shrugged again. “Not so as I’d do it with just anybody. What you’re saying does sound a bit weird, Kathy. But maybe it’ll calm down after a while.”
“Sometimes it won’t be there for ages. Then it suddenly comes on. It was like that, the first time it happened. He started snogging me and I just wanted him to get off. Then suddenly it just came on, out of nowhere. I just really had to do it.”
Ruth shook her head. “It does sound a bit weird. But it’ll probably go away. It’s probably just to do with the different food we’re eating here.”
She hadn’t been a huge help, but she’d been sympathetic and I’d felt a little better about it all afterwards. That’s why it was such a jolt to have Ruth suddenly bring it up the way she did in the middle of the argument we were having that afternoon in the field. Okay, there was probably no one to overhear us, but even so, there was something not at all right about what she’d done. In those first months at the Cottages, our friendship had stayed intact because, on my side at least, I’d had this notion there were two quite separate Ruths. There was one Ruth who was always trying to impress the veterans, who wouldn’t hesitate to ignore me, Tommy, any of the others, if she thought we’d cramp her style. This was the Ruth I wasn’t pleased with, the one I could see every day putting on airs and pretending—the Ruth who did the slap-on-the-elbow gesture. But the Ruth who sat beside me in my little attic room at the day’s close, legs outstretched over the edge of my mattress, her steaming mug held in both her hands, that was the Ruth from Hailsham, and whatever had been happening during the day, I could just pick up with her where we’d left off the last time we’d sat together like that. And until that afternoon in the field, there’d been a definite understanding these two Ruths wouldn’t merge; that the one I confided in before bed was one I could absolutely trust. That’s why when she said that, about my “not being slow making friends with at least some of the veterans,” I got so upset. That’s why I just picked up my book and walked off.
But when I think about it now, I can see things more from Ruth’s viewpoint. I can see, for instance, how she might have felt I had been the one to first violate an understanding, and that her little dig had just been a retaliation. This never occurred to me at the time, but I see now it’s a possibility, and an explanation for what happened. After all, immediately before she made that remark, I’d been talking about the arm-slapping business. Now it’s a bit hard to explain this, but some sort of understanding had definitely developed between the two of us about the way Ruth behaved in front of the veterans. Okay, she often bluffed and implied all sorts of things I knew weren’t true. Sometimes, as I said, she did things to impress the veterans at our expense. But it seems to me Ruth believed, at some level, she was doing all this on behalf of us all. And my role, as her closest friend, was to give her silent support, as if I was in the front row of the audience when she was performing on stage. She was struggling to become someone else, and maybe felt the pressure more than the rest of us because, as I say, she’d somehow taken on the responsibility for all of us. In that case, then, the way I’d talked about her slap on the elbow thing could be seen as a betrayal, and she might well then have felt justified retaliating as she had. As I say, this explanation only occurred to me recently. At the time I didn’t look at the larger picture or at my own part in it. I suppose, in general, I never appreciated in those days the sheer effort Ruth was making to move on, to grow up and leave Hailsham behind. Thinking about this now, I’m reminded of something she told me once, when I was caring for her in the recovery centre at Dover. We’d been sitting in her room, watching the sunset, as we so often did, enjoying the mineral water and biscuits I’d brought, and I’d been telling her how I still had most of my old Hailsham collection box safely stowed inside my pine chest in my bedsit. Then—I wasn’t trying to lead onto anything, or make any kind of point—I just happened to say to her:
