possibles

The possibles are the people whom Hailsham students imagine as the ordinary individuals from whom they were copied. The idea turns a question about biological origins into a search for personal meaning: students watch strangers in public places, wondering whether a resemblance might disclose something about who they are or what lies ahead. Ruth’s reported sighting in Cromer gives this private theory a concrete, uneasy form, while leaving its central promise unresolved.

The Theory and Its Terms

At its simplest, the theory assumes that every student was copied from a normal person who continues to live somewhere in the world. That person is the student’s model, and a student looking for possibles is trying to identify the individual behind that origin. The search can happen in ordinary public settings—towns, shopping centres, or transport cafés—where a stranger’s age, appearance, or manner might invite comparison. The theory supplies a way to imagine an otherwise unseen connection between the students and the wider world.

The word carries more than one implication. It can refer to an individual who might be a student’s model, but it also evokes the uncertain process of deciding whether that individual is a match. A sighting is not proof. Students may see someone who seems to fit, discuss the resemblance, and still have no way to establish the connection. The term therefore holds together a definite claim about how the students originated and an open-ended search whose results remain speculative.

Silence, Debate, and Curiosity

The subject was already familiar at Hailsham, but the students sensed they were not supposed to discuss it, so it remained intriguing and disturbing rather than becoming an ordinary topic of conversation. At the Cottages, it was still difficult to raise casually. Talk about possibles carried more awkwardness than talk about sex, even as students remained fascinated by it. It tended to return in solemn arguments, distinct from everyday disputes about literature such as James Joyce. The combination of reticence and recurring debate made the subject feel both forbidden and hard to leave alone.

Students broadly accepted the basic premise, but disagreed about what a model should look like. Some expected a person twenty to thirty years older, approximately the age of a natural parent. Others rejected that expectation as sentimental: models could have been drawn from babies or old people, and there was no necessary generation separating a student from a model. One counterargument was that the people used as models might have been selected at the peak of health, which could explain why they seemed likely to be of parental age. These discussions approached questions the students did not want to enter, then tended to subside without settling them.

They also differed over why anyone should seek a model. Some treated the original individual as a technical necessity, irrelevant to the life the student would make. Ruth claimed to belong to this dismissive camp, and Kathy probably did as well. Yet even those who professed indifference became curious when a sighting was reported. The gap between stated belief and actual attention is central to the expression: the search can be disavowed in principle and still exert a strong pull.

Models as Clues to Identity

For students who took the search seriously, finding a model could seem to offer a glimpse of the future. This did not mean they expected to inherit the person’s job or reproduce that person’s life. Rather, they believed that seeing the individual from whom they had been copied might disclose something about their own deep identity, or give them some sense of what their lives held in store. The model functions in this reasoning less as a literal blueprint than as a possible clue.

That hope is powerful precisely because it is uncertain. The theory makes a stranger’s outward resemblance seem capable of answering an inward question, but the evidence available to the students cannot guarantee that answer. Their arguments about age show them trying to give the search a rational basis; their curiosity shows how much more than rational classification is at stake. The possibles become a focus for thinking about origin, individuality, and the desire to discover a future in someone else’s visible life, without resolving whether such a discovery is possible.

Ruth’s Report from Cromer

The term becomes especially immediate when Ruth tells Kathy that Chrissie and Rodney have seen a possible for her in Cromer, on the north Norfolk coast. According to the report, the woman worked in an open-plan office. The account turns an abstract discussion into a specific prospect: there is now a place to visit and a particular person to compare with Ruth. When Tommy asks Rodney where he saw Ruth’s possible, Rodney gives only an approximate location, a turning off the High Street, and adds that the woman might have had the day off. The uncertainty is practical as well as theoretical; the group cannot assume that a reported resemblance will lead to a meeting.

Rodney eventually points out the woman in a blue outfit, talking to a larger woman in red. She is around fifty, has kept her figure, and wears her darker hair in a ponytail like Ruth’s. As she laughs and shakes her head, the group sees more of Ruth in her face. The resemblance grows more persuasive through sustained looking, but it remains an impression, not confirmation. When other office workers notice the group and one gives them an uncertain wave, the spell breaks and they flee in giggly panic. The scene makes the possibles vivid as an act of collective attention: the students study an ordinary stranger for signs of kinship, then retreat without learning whether their interpretation is true. In this way, the expression names both the hope that a model might make identity legible and the distance that remains between a suggestive likeness and knowledge.