Kathy and Tommy seek a deferral from Madame

Kathy and Tommy seek a deferral from Madame in a visit that brings their long-held hope into direct contact with the people who shaped Hailsham. They arrive expecting to make a personal case for their love and leave with the answer that no exception exists. The meeting also reveals that Hailsham’s collection of student artwork served a public campaign to establish the students’ humanity, not a route to postponing their donations. Their appeal thus becomes both an intimate request and an encounter with the institution’s history and limits.

Background and Approach

By the end of the summer, Tommy had grown stronger, but the prospect of notice for his fourth donation was becoming harder to set aside. Kathy recalls that they might have been content to continue their days together—talking, reading aloud, drawing, and having sex—if time had not made delay feel increasingly untenable. When she tells Tommy that she has seen Madame enter the house whose address Ruth supplied, he responds quietly that Ruth got it right. Kathy agrees that the next step is theirs: they will go to Madame and ask.

They decide to combine the visit with Tommy’s next trip for laboratory tests. Kathy plans to sign him out for the whole day so they can go to Littlehampton on the way back. The errand carries the weight of an expectation they have rehearsed for years: they believe the Gallery may have preserved evidence of their inner lives, and they hope that proof of their love can persuade Madame and Miss Emily to grant them more time. Kathy and Tommy have discussed both the deferral rumours and the theory connecting them to the Gallery, but the prospect of putting those ideas to a direct test frightens them as well as draws them forward.

Kathy had imagined the approach to Madame’s door in advance: the two of them standing outside, summoning the nerve to ring the bell, then waiting with their hearts pounding. The actual journey goes badly in more ordinary ways. Their car plays up, delaying them by an hour; a clinic mix-up makes Tommy repeat three tests, leaving him woozy; and, on the way to Littlehampton, he becomes carsick enough that they must stop repeatedly so he can walk it off. They arrive just before six in the evening, park behind the bingo hall, and take from the boot a sports bag containing Tommy’s notebooks. As they walk towards the town centre, Tommy begins to feel better, then remembers he has missed lunch and insists on finding a takeaway sandwich before facing their purpose.

Finding Madame

While they are looking for food, Tommy grips Kathy’s arm and points out Madame as she passes a hairdresser on the opposite pavement. She wears the neat grey suit Kathy remembers. Kathy identifies the bench where she has previously sat and the nearby house, and Tommy immediately starts walking faster, as if to catch up. Kathy holds his arm to slow him; she fears he may call out in a way that will harm their chances. Madame goes through her small gateway and pauses at the door to find her keys. Kathy has the impression that Madame may already know they are there and is ignoring them, so Kathy calls to her first.

The polite greeting makes Madame spin around. Kathy recognizes the coldness in her eyes from their earlier encounter outside Hailsham’s main house. Madame’s face stiffens as she sees them, and Kathy reads her reaction as revulsion; then the expression shifts, and Madame studies the pair more carefully in the evening sun. Kathy identifies herself as Kathy H. and introduces Tommy D., explaining that they are from Hailsham and have not come to cause trouble. Madame’s response softens into a small smile and she asks why they have come. Tommy raises the sports bag and says that he has brought things she may want for her Gallery. Madame invites them inside to hear what they want.

The meeting matters partly because the encounter changes the distance Kathy feels between them. At Hailsham, Madame had seemed like a hostile stranger from the outside. Now, despite the lack of any clear display of warmth, Kathy experiences her as intimate, closer to them than people they have met in recent years. The formality of the visit gives way to a more direct appeal: Kathy abandons much of the speech she had practised during long car journeys and at service-station cafés, and speaks as she might once have spoken to a guardian.

The Appeal and Its Rejection

Kathy explains that they have heard rumours about Hailsham students receiving deferrals, but know the rumours may be wrong and are not relying on them. She acknowledges that couples may have come to Madame claiming to be in love, then insists that she and Tommy would not have made the journey unless they were sure of their feelings. Madame challenges what it means to be sure of love, questioning whether love can be known so simply. Though her voice sounds almost sarcastic, Kathy sees small tears in her eyes as she looks between them.

Miss Emily, whom they find in the house in a wheelchair, takes responsibility for answering their questions. She remembers Tommy as the boy with a bad temper and a big heart, recognizes Kathy H., and says they have both done well. She also says that she has heard about Kathy’s work as a carer and remembers the students. Madame, by contrast, questions what good that recognition does for the students and withdraws from the conversation. Miss Emily tells Kathy and Tommy that she regrets disappointing them, but that their case is serious: they have thought carefully and hoped carefully. Her sympathy does not change the answer. When Kathy asks directly whether deferrals exist, Miss Emily says there is no truth in the rumour. Asked by Tommy whether it was ever true before Hailsham closed, she says it was never true, not even before the Morningdale scandal or during Hailsham’s most influential years.

Tommy then asks why the students’ artwork was taken if the rumour was false, and whether the Gallery existed at all. Miss Emily confirms that there was a Gallery, and says that a reduced collection is now in the house. The notebooks Tommy brought prompt a related question, but the explanation overturns their hoped-for connection between art and deferral: the Gallery was real, while the promise they had attached to it was not. When Kathy asks why the students had been educated and encouraged to make art if they were still destined to donate and die, Miss Emily explains that collecting their work was intended to show what the students were like inside—to prove that they had souls.

Hailsham’s Purpose and the Limits of Its Work

Miss Emily describes Hailsham as part of a small, vocal movement that challenged the way the donation programme was conducted. Alongside Glenmorgan House and later the Saunders Trust, Hailsham helped demonstrate that students raised in humane, cultivated surroundings could become as sensitive and intelligent as ordinary people. Before such efforts, she says, clones existed for many people only as objects serving medical science. Hailsham selected the best student artwork for exhibitions; in the late 1970s, when the movement was at its height, its events drew cabinet ministers, bishops, and other prominent visitors, as well as speeches and pledged funds. The art was evidence in a public argument about the students’ humanity.

That achievement, Miss Emily insists, did not give Hailsham power to alter the students’ fate. She says that even at the height of its influence, the institution could not have granted the deferrals Kathy and Tommy seek. Its work did secure comparatively humane surroundings, education, and protection from the worst conditions faced by students elsewhere. Miss Emily says that other students were still being raised in deplorable conditions, and that with Hailsham gone matters would get worse. The protection Hailsham offered was significant, but it did not change the donation system or create an exception for couples in love.

Miss Emily also explains why the school closed. The movement depended on supporters, politicians, and corporations, and its position weakened when public opinion changed after the Morningdale scandal. She mentions other contributing factors, including a television series, and acknowledges that the movement may have been too fragile to withstand the shift. Sponsors disappeared one after another over a little more than a year. Hailsham continued for two years longer than Glenmorgan House, but eventually had to close; Miss Emily says there is now nowhere like it in the country. She and Madame have retreated to their house, where a mountain of the students’ work remains alongside debt and memories of the students they tried to help.

Consequences and Significance

The final exchange leaves no room for the exception Kathy and Tommy came to request. Tommy asks once more whether there is definitely no deferral, and Miss Emily answers gently that there is nothing of the kind: his life must run the course set for it. She describes the students as lucky pawns, shaped by a political climate that once made humane institutions possible and later turned against them. Madame objects to any expectation that the students should feel grateful, pointing out that they came seeking something more than what Hailsham gave them. The disagreement exposes the gap between the guardians’ defence of what they achieved and the couple’s immediate need for time.

For Kathy and Tommy, the visit converts a rumour into a confirmed impossibility. It also separates two things they had hoped were joined: Hailsham did collect art, and the art did serve a serious purpose, but neither fact meant that their relationship could postpone donation. Their notebooks can announce the reason for the visit, not alter the answer. The scene’s turn is therefore both personal and institutional: the prospect of extra time disappears just as the couple finally asks those with authority to grant it, while the history they learn reveals that Hailsham’s compassion operated within limits it could never overcome.