Free Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition) by Kazuo Ishiguro Page B

would come running out of the fog and in through the doors of the house, but the rain didn’t ease. And the longer we continued to stand there, the more tense I grew because I could see this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. Ruth too, I’m sure, sensed something was coming up. In the end, I decided to come straight out with it.
    ‘At the Sale last Tuesday,’ I said. ‘I was just looking through the book. You know, the register thing.’
    ‘Why were you looking at the register?’ Ruth asked quickly. ‘Why were you doing something like that?’
    ‘Oh, no reason. Christopher C. was one of the monitors, so I was just talking to him. He’s the best Senior boy, definitely. And I was just turning over the pages of the register, just for something to do.’
    Ruth’s mind, I could tell, had raced on, and she now knewexactly what this was about. But she said calmly: ‘Boring sort of thing to look at.’
    ‘No, it was quite interesting really. You can see all the things people have bought.’
    I’d said this staring out at the rain. Then I glanced at Ruth and got a real shock. I don’t know what I’d expected; for all my fantasies of the past month, I’d never really considered what it would be like in a real situation like the one unfolding at that moment. Now I saw how upset Ruth was; how for once she was at a complete loss for words, and had turned away on the verge of tears. And suddenly my behaviour seemed to me utterly baffling. All this effort, all this planning, just to upset my dearest friend. So what if she’d fibbed a little about her pencil case? Didn’t we all dream from time to time about one guardian or other bending the rules and doing something special for us? A spontaneous hug, a secret letter, a gift? All Ruth had done was to take one of these harmless daydreams a step further; she hadn’t even mentioned Miss Geraldine by name.
    I now felt awful, and I was confused. But as we stood there together staring at the fog and rain, I could think of no way now to repair the damage I’d done. I think I said something pathetic like: ‘It’s all right, I didn’t see anything much,’ which hung stupidly in the air. Then after a few further seconds of silence, Ruth walked off into the rain.

CHAPTER SIX
    I think I’d have felt better about what had happened if Ruth had held it against me in some obvious way. But this was one instance when she seemed just to cave in. It was like she was too ashamed of the matter – too crushed by it – even to be angry or to want to get me back. The first few times I saw her after the conversation under the eaves, I was ready for at least a bit of huffiness, but no, she was completely civil, if a little flat. It occurred to me she was scared I’d expose her – the pencil case, sure enough, vanished from view – and I wanted to tell her she’d nothing to fear from me. The trouble was, because none of this had actually been talked about in the open, I couldn’t find a way of bringing it all up with her.
    I did my best, meanwhile, to take any opportunity to imply to Ruth she had a special place in Miss Geraldine’s heart. There was the time, for example, when a bunch of us were desperate to go out and practise rounders during break, because we’d been challenged by a group from the year above. Our problem was that it was raining, and it looked unlikely we’d be allowed outside. I noticed though that Miss Geraldine was one of the guardians on duty, and so I said:
    ‘If Ruth goes and asks Miss Geraldine, then we’d stand a chance.’
    As far as I remember, this suggestion wasn’t taken up; maybe hardly anyone heard it, because a lot of us were talking all at once. But the point is, I said it standing right behind Ruth, and I could see she was pleased.
    Then another time a few of us were leaving a classroom with Miss Geraldine, and I happened to find myself about to go out the door right after Miss Geraldine herself. What I did was to slow right down so