“It’s my second book,” Tommy said. “There’s no way anyone’s seeing the first one! It took me a while to get going.”

He was lying back on the settee now, tugging a sock over his foot and trying to sound casual, but I knew he was anxious for my reaction. Even so, for some time, I didn’t come up with wholehearted praise. Maybe it was partly my worry that any artwork was liable to get him into trouble all over again. But also, what I was looking at was so different from anything the guardians had taught us to do at Hailsham, I didn’t know how to judge it. I did say something like:

“God, Tommy, these must take so much concentration. I’m surprised you can see well enough in here to do all this tiny stuff.” And then, as I flicked through the pages, perhaps because I was still struggling to find the right thing to say, I came out with: “I wonder what Madame would say if she saw these.”

I’d said it in a jokey tone, and Tommy responded with a little snigger, but then there was something hanging in the air that hadn’t been there before. I went on turning the pages of the notebook—it was about a quarter full—not looking up at him, wishing I’d never brought up Madame. Finally I heard him say:

“I suppose I’ll have to get a lot better before she gets to see any of it.”

I wasn’t sure if this was a cue for me to say how good the drawings were, but by this time, I was becoming genuinely drawn to these fantastical creatures in front of me. For all their busy, metallic features, there was something sweet, even vulnerable about each of them. I remembered him telling me, in Norfolk, that he worried, even as he created them, how they’d protect themselves or be able to reach and fetch things, and looking at them now, I could feel the same sort of concerns. Even so, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, something continued to stop me coming out with praise. Then Tommy said:

“Anyway, it’s not only because of all that I’m doing the animals. I just like doing them. I was wondering, Kath, if I should go on keeping it secret. I was thinking, maybe there’s no harm in people knowing I do these. Hannah still does her watercolours, a lot of the veterans do stuff. I don’t mean I’m going to go round showing everyone exactly. But I was thinking, well, there’s no reason why I should keep it all secret any more.”

At last I was able to look up at him and say with some conviction: “Tommy, there’s no reason, no reason at all. These are good. Really, really good. In fact, if that’s why you’re hiding in here now, it’s really daft.”

He didn’t say anything in response, but a kind of smirk appeared over his face, like he was enjoying a joke with himself, and I knew how happy I’d made him. I don’t think we spoke much more to each other after that. I think before long he got his Wellingtons on, and we both left the goosehouse. As I say, that was about the only time Tommy and I touched directly on his theory that spring.

Then the summer came, and the one year point from when we’d first arrived. A batch of new students turned up in a minibus, much as we’d done, but none of them were from Hailsham. This was in some ways a relief: I think we’d all been getting anxious about how a fresh lot of Hailsham students might complicate things. But for me at least, this non-appearance of Hailsham students just added to a feeling that Hailsham was now far away in the past, and that the ties binding our old crowd were fraying. It wasn’t just that people like Hannah were always talking about following Alice’s example and starting their training; others, like Laura, had found boyfriends who weren’t Hailsham and you could almost forget they’d ever had much to do with us.

And then there was the way Ruth kept pretending to forget things about Hailsham. Okay, these were mostly trivial things, but I got more and more irritated with her. There was the time, for instance, we were sitting around the kitchen table after a long breakfast, Ruth, me and a few veterans. One of the veterans had been talking about how eating cheese late at night always disturbed your sleep, and I’d turned to Ruth to say something like: “You remember how Miss Geraldine always used to tell us that?” It was just a casual aside, and all it needed was for Ruth to smile or nod. But she made a point of staring back at me blankly, like she didn’t have the faintest what I was talking about. Only when I said to the veterans, by way of explanation: “One of our guardians,” did Ruth give a frowning nod, as though she’d just that moment remembered.

I let her get away with it that time. But there was another occasion when I didn’t, that evening we were sitting out in the ruined bus shelter. I got angry then because it was one thing to play this game in front of veterans; quite another when it was just the two of us, in the middle of a serious talk. I’d referred, just in passing, to the fact that at Hailsham, the short-cut down to the pond through the rhubarb patch was out of bounds. When she put on her puzzled look, I abandoned whatever point I’d been trying to make and said: “Ruth, there’s no way you’ve forgotten. So don’t give me that.”

Perhaps if I hadn’t pulled her up so sharply—perhaps if I’d just made a joke of it and carried on—she’d have seen how absurd it was and laughed. But because I’d snapped at her, Ruth glared back and said:

“What does it matter anyway? What’s the rhubarb patch got to do with any of this? Just get on with what you were saying.”

It was getting late, the summer evening was fading, and the old bus shelter felt musty and damp after a recent thunderstorm. So I didn’t have the head to go into why it mattered so much. And though I did just drop it and carry on with the discussion we’d been having, the atmosphere had gone chilly, and could hardly have helped us get through the difficult matter in hand.

But to explain what we were talking about that evening, I’ll have to go back a little bit. In fact, I’ll have to go back several weeks, to the earlier part of the summer. I’d been having a relationship with one of the veterans, a boy called Lenny, which, to be honest, had been mainly about the sex. But then he’d suddenly opted to start his training and left. This unsettled me a little, and Ruth had been great about it, watching over me without seeming to make a fuss, always ready to cheer me up if I seemed gloomy. She also kept doing little favours for me, like making me sandwiches, or taking on parts of my cleaning rota.

Then about a fortnight after Lenny had gone, the two of us were sitting in my attic room some time after midnight chatting over mugs of tea, and Ruth got me really laughing about Lenny. He hadn’t been such a bad guy, but once I’d started telling Ruth some of the more intimate things about him, it did seem like everything to do with him was hilarious, and we just kept laughing and laughing. Then at one point Ruth was running a finger up and down the cassettes stacked in little piles along my skirting board. She was doing this in an absent-minded sort of way while she kept laughing, but afterwards, I went through a spell of suspecting it hadn’t been by chance at all; that she’d noticed it there maybe days before, perhaps even examined it to make sure, then had waited for the best time to “find” it. Years later, I gently hinted this to Ruth, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, so maybe I was wrong. Anyway, there we were, laughing and laughing each time I came out with another detail about poor Lenny, and then suddenly it was like a plug had been pulled out. There was Ruth, lying on her side across my rug, peering at the spines of the cassettes in the low light, and then the Judy Bridgewater tape was in her hands. After what seemed an eternity, she said:

“So how long have you had this again?”