In our Victorian London home, I would simmer a packet of green flageolets soaked in cold water for six hours; I would wait for him to spill another sentence or two from his head and mark one day from the next.
His job at the institute proved short-lived. ‘Another country running out of money,’ he said, nurturing his own tight-lipped regression. Back home when he had told his assistants that the south-coast project had been suspended, Wijetunga had gone crazy. He had threatened to blow up the bungalow. ‘We can do it,’ he had shrieked, shaking a clenched fist. No messing, boyo. But here, when it came to his turn, Mister Salgado took the news as another simple fact of life.
He found another, more modest job with a local education authority. ‘It’s not what you do every day, but the thoughts that you live with that matter,’ he would tell me, tapping his head with his finger. ‘That, after all, is the sum total of your life in the end.’ I would light the gas fire in the sitting-room and bring out the beer.
‘So, why did we come here then?’ I asked. ‘Like refugees?’
‘We came to see and learn,’ he said, parting the net curtains and staring out at a line of closely pollarded trees. ‘Remember?’
But are we not all refugees from something? Whether we stay or go or return, we all need refuge from the world beyond our fingertips at some time. When I was asked by a woman at the pub, ‘Have you come from Africa, away from that wicked Amin?’ I said, ‘No, I am an explorer on a voyage of discovery,’ as I imagined my Mister Salgado would have replied. The smoke was thick and heavy like a cloud of yeast spread everywhere. She laughed, touching my arm and moving closer in the dark. A warm Shetland jumper. A slack but yielding skin with patchouli behind her ears. I was learning that human history is always a story of somebody’s diaspora: a struggle between those who expel, repel or curtail – possess, divide and rule – and those who keep the flame alive from night to night, mouth to mouth, enlarging the world with each flick of a tongue.
Every May I brought out our summer clothes with their bygone labels – Batik Boutique, CoolMan of Colpetty – and replenished the spice-racks in the larder. I would try to imagine where I would be, and he, the coming winter when the snow might fall for Christmas and Norfolk turkeys would brown in native kitchens: we would move to yet another short-let property. Mister Salgado’s hair turned grey from the temples upward and he began to wear tinted spectacles. Finally, in ’76, he said it was time to settle down. He bought a maisonette in Earls Court. There was a magnolia tree in the garden. We learned to sit silently in big, brown chairs and watch the creamy flowers peel, petal by petal, under a red sun sinking somewhere in Wiltshire.
I read all Mister Salgado’s books, one by one, over the years. There must have been a thousand books in the sitting-room by the end, each a doorway leading somewhere I had never been before. And even after I had read all of them, each time I looked I would find something new. A play of light and shadow; something flitting in and out of a story I knew by heart. New books came every week. After years of tracking his books and after thousands of pages read and reread, I knew instinctively where he would put the newcomers, as if we had both attuned our own inner shelving to a common frame out of the things we read, separately, in our time together. We never spoke about it, but I am sure he also constructed a kind of syllabus for me to follow. He would leave particular books in particular places: on the toilet roll or on top of a pile of his clothes or balanced precariously on the edge of a table with a teacup on top, knowing I would tidy them away and, as I did so, would dip in and be captivated: The Wishing Well, Ginipettiya, The Island. I am sure he wanted me to read these books, but I don’t know whether he knew that I read all his other books as well; all his boxed but boundless realities.
I went to classes and other libraries, night and day, for almost all the years we spent in London together; broke all the old taboos and slowly freed myself from the demons of our past: what is over is over forever, I thought.
‘Why is it so much less frightening here,’ I asked him, ‘even on the darkest night?’
‘It’s your imagination,’ he said. ‘It is not yet poisoned in this place.’ As if we each had an inner threshold that had to be breached before our surroundings could torment us.
One day I showed him a newspaper report about a symposium on Man and Coral that had taken place. ‘You should have been there,’ I said. ‘Presiding over it all.’
He looked wistful. ‘It was a kind of obsession before, you know.’
‘But other people now, at last, all over the world seem to share that obsession …’
‘You remember, all one ocean, no? The debris of one mind floats to another. The same little polyp grows the idea in another head.’ He smiled and touched my head. ‘But these gatherings are full of people who see the world in a different way now. They carry a lot of heavy equipment, you know. Suntan oil. Scuba tanks. They are only concerned with the how, not the why. I belong to another world. Even Darwin searched his desk for a pen, more than the seabed, you know. He relied on reports, talk, gossip. A tallowline. He looked into himself. In our minds we have swum in the same sea. Do you understand? An imagined world.’
The one time I did swim out to Mister Salgado’s real reef, back home, I was frightened by its exuberance. The shallow water seethed with creatures. Flickering eyes, whirling tails, fish of a hundred colours darting and digging, sea snakes, sea-slugs, tentacles sprouting and grasping everywhere. It was a jungle of writhing shapes, magnified and distorted, growing at every move, looming out of the unknown, startling in its hidden brilliance. Suspended in the most primal of sensations, I slowly began to see that everything was perpetually devouring its surroundings. I swam into a sea of sound; my hoarse breathing suddenly punctuated by clicking and clattering, the crunching of fish feeding on the white tips of golden staghorn. My own fingertips seemed to whiten before me as trigger-fish, angel-fish, tiger-fish, tetrons, electrons and sandstone puffer-fish swirled around me, ever hungry.
Mister Salgado shook his head. ‘I should have done something of my own with that bay. I used to think that in a month or two, the next year, I would have a chance to turn the whole bay into a sanctuary. A marine park. I used to plan it in my head: how I’d build a jetty, a safe marina for little blue glass-bottomed boats, some outriggers with red sails, and then a sort of floating restaurant at one end. You could have produced your finest chilli crab there, you know, and the best stuffed sea-cucumbers. Just think of it: a row of silver tureens with red crab-claws in black bean sauce, yellow rice and squid in red wine, a roasted red snapper as big as your arm, shark fin and fried seaweed. It would have been a temple to your gastronomic god, no? I thought of it like a ring, a circular platform with the sea in the middle. We could have farmed for the table and nurtured rare breeds for the wild. A centre to study our prehistory. We could have shown the world something then, something really fabulous. What a waste.’
‘Let’s do it here,’ I said. ‘Let’s open a restaurant here, in London.’
‘That’s for you to do,’ he said. ‘Some day, for yourself.’
He bought the red Volkswagen about that time and taught me to drive. We motored all over the country. We would fill up the tank on a Sunday morning, and drive for miles visiting every historic house, garden, park and museum within a day’s circuit. ‘The Cook’s Tour’ he called it with a happy smile, and everywhere explained to me the origins of each artefact we came across. ‘The urge to build, to transform nature, to make something out of nothing is universal. But to conserve, to protect, to care for the past is something we have to learn,’ he would say.
One cold, wet afternoon we came back to discover a small snackbar at the end of our road up for sale. Mister Salgado said, ‘Here’s your chance. Make it come true.’ He invested the last of his savings in it. I painted it the colours of our tropical sea. Bought some wicker chairs and a blackboard for the menu. I put coloured lights outside and bucket lanterns inside. It was ready to grow. Mister Salgado beamed.
Then, in the summer of 1983, mobs went on the rampage in Colombo. We saw pictures of young men, who looked no different from me, going berserk on what could have been our main road. The rampant violence made the television news night after night for weeks. There had been nothing like it when trouble had broken out before, when books had been burned and the first skirmishes had started. Even during the insurgency of ’71, the news had come only in drifts, distanced. But this time images of cruelty, the birth of a war, flickered on the screens across the world as it happened. I remembered my fervent schoolmaster: his wobbly, black bicycle with its rust-eaten chain-guard, the schoolbook he always carried with him and the black umbrella that would bloom in the warm rain. I had found him in a ditch on the edge of our rice-field, that unsettled month which ended with me coming to Mister Salgado’s house. His legs had been broken by a bunch of older boys who used to huddle in a hut in the schoolyard and chant the slogans of a shrinking world.
At the end of the summer, out of the blue one day, Tippy telephoned Mister Salgado. He was changing planes at Heathrow, heading for New York to do some deal. He said he got our number from Directory Enquiries; Tippy knew how things worked all over the world. He said it was wartime now, back home. ‘Buggers are playing hell.’ He talked about the political shenanigans, the posturing and the big money that was there to be made as always out of big trouble. ‘Big bucks, boy,’ he said. ‘Big bloody bucks.’ Right at the end he mentioned Nili. He said she was in a sanatorium off the Galle Road. She was on her own. The business with Robert had ended soon after we had left. He had gone back to the States. Eventually she had started a venture of her own: a guest house for tourists. It had done well. But then during the violence of the summer, a mob had been tipped off that Danton Chidambaram and another Tamil family had been given shelter there by Nili. Their own homes had been gutted. She had hidden the two families upstairs and scolded the louts who came after them. The next night a mob had come with cans of kerosene and set fire to the place. There had been wild dancing in the street. She went to pieces. ‘In a mess, men. Hopeless. You know how it is, machang … killing herself now. She has no one, really.’
Mister Salgado put the phone down and pressed his fingers to his temples. He repeated what Tippy had said to him. He told me he had to go and see her. ‘I must go back.’
I had once asked her advice about a dish I was making. She had shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘You are the master now, the master of cooking!’ I didn’t tell my Mister Salgado that. Instead I said, ‘It’s been too many years. So much has happened.’ I modelled my voice on his as I had always wanted to, but I knew I could not stop him. I should not.
‘You know, Triton,’ he said at the end, ‘we are only what we remember, nothing more … all we have is the memory of what we have done or not done; whom we might have touched, even for a moment …’ His eyes were swollen with folds of dark skin under and over each eye. I knew he was going to leave me and he would never come back. I would remain and finally have to learn to live on my own. Only then did it dawn on me that this might be what I wanted deep down inside. What perhaps I had always wanted. The nights would be long at the Earls Court snack shop with its line of bedraggled, cosmopolitan itinerants. But they were the people I had to attend to: my future. My life would become a dream of musky hair, smoky bars and garish neon eyes. I would learn to talk and joke and entertain, to perfect the swagger of one who has found his vocation and, at last, a place to call his own. The snack shop would one day turn into a restaurant and I into a restaurateur. It was the only way I could succeed: without a past, without a name, without Ranjan Salgado standing by my side.
On a crisp cloudless Sunday morning, I drove him to the airport. At the check-in counter, while searching for his ticket, he came across his spare keys. ‘Here, you’d better have these,’ he said and handed them to me. A couple of hours later he flew out, after a glimmer of hope in a faraway house of sorrow.
Kazuo Ishiguro
[1954–]
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He left in 1960, when his father, a scientist working for the British government, was transferred to England. The move was meant to be temporary, but the family never returned to Japan. Ishiguro’s formal education took place in Britain, where he attended a boys’ grammar school in Surrey and then the University of Kent at Canterbury, from where he received a BA in English and philosophy in 1978. Ishiguro was a community worker for the Renfrew Social Work Department before taking an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Thereafter, he was employed as a social worker for one year.
Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982. Set in present-day rural England, it is the haunting story of a Japanese widow whose oldest daughter has just committed suicide. A year after the book was published, Ishiguro received the Winifred Holtby Prize. In 1986 he published An Artist of the Floating World, for which he won the Whitbread Award for book of the year. As in his first novel, the narrator is Japanese by birth and struggles to reconcile the past and present.
In 1989 The Remains of the Day was published. In this novel, the protagonist is a traditional English butler who faces disillusionment on a personal and national level in post-war England. With his sympathetic portrayals of human characters through first-person narratives, Ishiguro explores the difficult balance between personal and public morality. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989, and was later filmed, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Ishiguro is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in north London with his wife and daughter. His latest novel is The Unconsoled (1995).
The Remains of the Day is set in 1956, as Britain is passing through the Suez Crisis and coming to terms with the changes associated with losing an empire. The novel suggests a national nostalgia for the past, as questions of class and nationality are suddenly vitally important. Stevens, the butler-narrator, clings desperately to redundant notions of Wank and order’ as embodied in his profession, while the malaise in society becomes increasingly pervasive.
From The Remains of the Day
Tonight, I find myself here in a guest house in the city of Salisbury. The first day of my trip is now completed, and all in all, I must say I am quite satisfied. This expedition began this morning almost an hour later than I had planned, despite my having completed my packing and loaded the Ford with all necessary items well before eight o’clock. What with Mrs Clements and the girls also gone for the week, I suppose I was very conscious of the fact that once I departed, Darlington Hall would stand empty for probably the first time this century – perhaps for the first time since the day it was built. It was an odd feeling and perhaps accounts for why I delayed my departure so long, wandering around the house many times over, checking one last time that all was in order.
It is hard to explain my feelings once I did finally set off. For the first twenty minutes or so of motoring, I cannot say I was seized by any excitement or anticipation at all. This was due, no doubt, to the fact that though I motored further and further from the house, I continued to find myself in surroundings with which I had at least a passing acquaintance. Now I had always supposed I had travelled very little, restricted as I am by my responsibilities in the house, but of course, over time, one does make various excursions for one professional reason or another, and it would seem I have become much more acquainted with those neighbouring districts than I had realized. For as I say, as I motored on in the sunshine towards the Berkshire border, I continued to be surprised by the familiarity of the country around me.
But then eventually the surroundings grew unrecognizable and I knew I had gone beyond all previous boundaries. I have heard people describe the moment, when setting sail in a ship, when one finally loses sight of the land. I imagine the experience of unease mixed with exhilaration often described in connection with this moment is very similar to what I felt in the Ford as the surroundings grew strange around me. This occurred just after I took a turning and found myself on a road curving around the edge of a hill. I could sense the steep drop to my left, though I could not see it due to the trees and thick foliage that lined the roadside. The feeling swept over me that I had truly left Darlington Hall behind, and I must confess I did feel a slight sense of alarm – a sense aggravated by the feeling that I was perhaps not on the correct road at all, but speeding off in totally the wrong direction into a wilderness. It was only the feeling of a moment, but it caused me to slow down. And even when I had assured myself I was on the right road, I felt compelled to stop the car a moment to take stock, as it were.
I decided to step out and stretch my legs a little and when I did so, I received a stronger impression than ever of being perched on the side of a hill. On one side of the road, thickets and small trees rose steeply, while on the other I could now glimpse through the foliage the distant countryside.
I believe I had walked a little way along the roadside, peering through the foliage hoping to get a better view, when I heard a voice behind me. Until this point, of course, I had believed myself quite alone and I turned in some surprise. A little way further up the road on the opposite side, I could see the start of a footpath, which disappeared steeply up into the thickets. Sitting on the large stone that marked this spot was a thin, white-haired man in a cloth cap, smoking his pipe. He called to me again and though I could not quite make out his words, I could see him gesturing for me to join him. For a moment, I took him for a vagrant, but then I saw he was just some local fellow enjoying the fresh air and summer sunshine, and saw no reason not to comply.
