The Cottages & the Outside World
The Cottages: A False Freedom
After leaving Hailsham, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth move to the Cottages — a cluster of run-down farm buildings where young clones live before their donations begin. The Cottages represent a transitional phase: the students have left the structure of Hailsham but have not yet entered the donation cycle. They have a semblance of freedom — they can drive, go on trips, form relationships — but no real autonomy.
The Cottages give the clones the illusion of independent adult life. They cook, clean and socialise. But they cannot leave permanently, cannot get jobs, cannot build futures. Every activity is shadowed by the knowledge that donations will begin. Ishiguro uses this phase to show how freedom without a future is not really freedom at all.
At the Cottages, the clones encounter “veterans” — older students from other institutions — and begin to absorb behaviours copied from television and magazines. Ruth is particularly susceptible, adopting mannerisms she has seen on TV: a particular way of tapping someone’s arm, a style of laughing. This mimicry is both comic and tragic — the clones are trying to perform “normal” human behaviour without any genuine model for it.
Norfolk: The Lost Corner of England
The students learn at Hailsham that Norfolk is “the lost corner of England” — a joke based on maps that sometimes cut off Norfolk due to its eastern position. They transform this into a mythology: Norfolk is where lost things go, so perhaps it is where you can find what you have lost. The trip to Norfolk becomes the novel’s most hopeful and most heartbreaking sequence.
Kathy, Tommy and Ruth travel to Norfolk searching for Ruth’s “possible” — the original human from whom she was cloned. They find a woman in a glass office who looks like Ruth but is clearly not her. Ruth is devastated, realising she was cloned not from a respectable professional but probably from “trash” — drug addicts, prisoners, the desperate. Tommy later finds a cassette tape of “Never Let Me Go” by Judy Bridgewater in a Norfolk junk shop — a copy of the tape Kathy lost at Hailsham. Norfolk delivers on its promise of finding lost things, but what is found brings pain as much as comfort.
Ruth’s Mimicry and Performance
Ruth is the novel’s most complex and frustrating character. At the Cottages, she constantly performs — copying gestures from TV, pretending sophistication, claiming knowledge she doesn’t have. She tells Tommy and Kathy about her plan to work in an office, knowing full well this is impossible. Her mimicry is a desperate attempt to feel human, to have an identity beyond “clone.” It is also deeply sad, because it highlights how completely the clones lack authentic models for adult life.
Ruth’s copying of TV behaviour shows that the clones have no genuine models for adult life. They must construct identities from fragments of popular culture. This mimicry reveals both their desire to be ‘normal’ and the impossibility of achieving it. Ishiguro uses Ruth’s performance to explore the broader question of how all identities are, to some extent, performed.
Tommy’s Art Theory
At the Cottages, Tommy develops a theory: that couples who can prove they are truly in love will be granted a “deferral” — a temporary postponement of their donations. He believes the Gallery exists to assess whether clones have souls, and that presenting their art to Madame could earn them extra time. Tommy begins creating tiny, intricate animals with obsessive detail, pouring everything into this hope.
The deferral rumour circulates among the clones like a religion. It offers hope that love and art can transcend the system. But when Kathy and Tommy finally visit Madame and Miss Emily, they learn the devastating truth: deferrals never existed. The Gallery was used to campaign for better treatment of clones, not to grant individual exemptions. The entire hope was based on a misunderstanding. Ishiguro uses the deferral myth to explore how humans create hope in hopeless situations — and the cruelty of having that hope destroyed.
The Cottages chapters also develop the love triangle between Kathy, Tommy and Ruth. Ruth manoeuvres herself into a relationship with Tommy, partly because she genuinely cares for him and partly to prevent Kathy from having him. This pattern — Ruth blocking the Kathy-Tommy connection — persists throughout the novel, until Ruth apologises after her first donation.
The deferral rumour says couples who prove true love get extra time before donating. Tommy believes art can prove they have souls. But deferrals never existed — the Gallery was for a political campaign. Ishiguro uses this to show how humans create hope in hopeless situations and how devastating its destruction is.