Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

As soon as I said this—as soon as I mentioned Madame—I realised I’d made a mistake. Ruth looked up at me and I saw something like triumph flash across her face. You see it in films sometimes, when one person’s pointing a gun at another person, and the one with the gun’s making the other one do all kinds of things. Then suddenly there’s a mistake, a tussle, and the gun’s with the second person. And the second person looks at the first person with a gleam, a kind of can’t-believe-my-luck expression that promises all kinds of vengeance. Well, that was how suddenly Ruth was looking at me, and though I’d said nothing about deferrals, I’d mentioned Madame, and I knew we’d stumbled into some new territory altogether.