Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition) Read Online Free PDF

way, what was that you were saying earlier on? About Miss Lucy telling you something?’
    ‘Oh …’ Tommy gazed past me to the pond, pretending too this was a topic he’d forgotten all about. ‘Miss Lucy. Oh that.’
    Miss Lucy was the most sporting of the guardians at Hailsham, though you might not have guessed it from her appearance. She had a squat, almost bulldoggy figure, and her odd black hair, when it grew, grew upwards so it never covered her ears or chunky neck. But she was really strong and fit, and even when we were older, most of us – even the boys – couldn’t keep up with her on a fields run. She was superb at hockey, and could even hold her own with the Senior boys on the football pitch. I remember watching once when James B. tried to trip her as she went past him with the ball, and he was the one sent flying instead. When we’d been in the Juniors, she’d never been someone like Miss Geraldine who you turned to when you were upset. In fact, she didn’t tend to speak much to us when we were younger. It was only in the Seniors, really, we’d started to appreciate her brisk style.
    ‘You were saying something,’ I said to Tommy. ‘Something about Miss Lucy telling you it was all right not to be creative.’
    ‘She did say something like that. She said I shouldn’t worry. Not mind what other people were saying. A couple of months ago now. Maybe longer.’
    Over at the house, a few Juniors had stopped at one of the upstairs windows and were watching us. But I now crouched down in front of Tommy, no longer pretending anything.
    ‘Tommy, that’s a funny thing for her to say. Are you sure you got it right?’
    ‘Of course I got it right.’ His voice lowered suddenly. ‘She didn’t just say it once. We were in her room and she gave me a whole talk about it.’
    When she’d first asked him to come to her study after Art Appreciation, Tommy explained, he’d expected yet another lecture about how he should try harder – the sort of thing he’d had already from various guardians, including Miss Emily herself. But as they were walking from the house towards the Orangery – where the guardians had their living quarters – Tommy began to get an inkling this was something different. Then, once he was seated in Miss Lucy’s easy chair – she’d remained standing by the window – she asked him to tell her the whole story, as he saw it, of what had been happening to him. So Tommy had begun going through it all. But before he was even half way she’d suddenly broken in and started to talk herself. She’d known a lot of students, she’d said, who’d for a long time found it very difficult to be creative: painting, drawing, poetry, none of it going right for years. Then one day they’d turned a corner and blossomed. It was quite possible Tommy was one of these.
    Tommy had heard all of this before, but there was something about Miss Lucy’s manner that made him keep listening hard.
    ‘I could tell,’ he told me, ‘she was leading up to something. Something different.’
    Sure enough, she was soon saying things Tommy found difficult to follow. But she kept repeating it until eventually he began to understand. If Tommy had genuinely tried, she was saying, but he just couldn’t be very creative, then that was quite all right, he wasn’t to worry about it. It was wrong for anyone, whether they were students or guardians, to punish him for it, or put pressure on him in any way. It simply wasn’t his fault. And when Tommy had protested it was all very well Miss Lucy saying this, but everyone did think it was his fault, she’d given a sigh and looked out of her window. Then she’d said:
    ‘It may not help you much. But just you remember this. There’s at least one person here at Hailsham who believes otherwise. At least one person who believes you’re a very good student, as good as any she’s ever come across, never mind how creative you are.’
    ‘She wasn’t having you on, was she?’