Kazuo Ishiguro (7 page)

‘I merely remarked…’

‘It’s all right. You’ve every right. You find all of that, earlier on, you find it embarrassing, and you disapprove. But what else am I to do? I don’t wish to look back at my life when I’m old and see something empty. I want to see something I can be proud of. You see, Christopher, I’m ambitious.’

‘I’m not sure I quite understand you. You’re under the impression you’ll lead a more worthwhile life if you consort with famous people?’

‘Is that really how you see me?’

She turned away, perhaps genuinely hurt, and drew again on her cigarette. I watched her staring down at the deserted street below, and at the white stucco-fronted buildings opposite. Then she said quietly: ‘I can see it might look that way. At least to someone observing me with a cynical eye.’

‘I hope I don’t observe you in that way. It would upset me to think I did so.’

‘Then you should try to be more understanding.’ She turned to me with an intent expression, before looking away again. ‘If my parents were alive today,’ she said, ‘they’d be telling me it’s high time I was married. And perhaps it is. But I won’t do what I’ve seen so many girls do. I won’t waste all my love, all my energy, all my intellect - modest as that is - on some useless man who devotes himself to golf or to selling bonds in the City.

When I marry, it will be to someone who’ll really contribute. I mean to humanity, to a better world. Is that such an awful ambition? I don’t come to places like this in search of famous men, Christopher. I come in search of distinguished ones. What do I care about a little embarrassment here and there?’ - she waved towards the room - ‘But I won’t accept it’s my fate to waste my life on some pleasant, polite, morally worthless man.’

‘When you put it like that,’ I said, ‘I can see how you might see yourself as, well, almost a zealot.’

‘In a way, Christopher, I do. Oh, what’s that piece they’re playing now? It’s something I know. Is it Mozart?’

‘I believe it’s Haydn.’

‘Oh yes, you’re right. Yes, Haydn.’ For several seconds, she looked at the sky and appeared to be listening.

‘Miss Hemmings,’ I said, eventually, ‘I’m not proud of the way I behaved towards you earlier. In fact, I now very much regret it. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.’

She went on looking out into the night, stroking her cheek lightly with her cigarette holder. “That’s very decent of you, Christopher.’ she said quietly. ‘But I should be the one to apologise.

I was just trying to use you, after all. Of course I was. I’m sure I made myself look dreadful earlier on, but I don’t care about that. I do care, though, I treated you badly. You perhaps won’t believe me, but it’s true.’

I laughed. ‘Well, then, let’s both try and forgive each other.’

‘Yes, let’s.’ She turned to me and her face suddenly broke into a smile that was almost childlike in its glee. Then a weariness fell over it once more and she turned back to the night. ‘I often treat people badly,’ she said. ‘I suppose that comes with being ambitious.

And not having so much time left.’

‘Did you lose your parents long ago?’ I asked.

‘It seems like for ever. But in another way, they’re always with me.’

‘Well, I’m glad you enjoyed the evening, after all. I can only say again I’m sorry for my own part in it.’

‘Oh look, everyone’s leaving. What a pity! And I wanted to talk to you about all kinds of things. About your friend, for instance.’

‘My friend?’

“The one you were asking Sir Cecil about. The one in Shanghai.’

‘Akira?

He was just a childhood friend.’

‘But I could tell he was someone very important to you.’

I straightened and looked behind us. ‘You’re right. Everyone is leaving.’

“Then I suppose I should leave too,’ she said. ‘Otherwise my departure will be as much noticed as my entrance.’

But she made no move to go and in the end it was I who excused myself and went back into the room. At one point, when I glanced back, I thought she cut a lonely figure there on the balcony, smoking her cigarette into the night air, the room behind her fast emptying. It even ran through my mind I should go back and offer to escort her out of the proceedings. But then her mentioning Akira had slightly alarmed me, and I decided I had done sufficient for one evening towards improving relations between myself and Sarah Hemmings.

London, 15th May 1931

At the rear of our garden in Shanghai, there was a grass mound with a single maple tree rising out of its summit. From the time Akira and I were around six years old, we enjoyed playing on and around that mound, and whenever I now think of my boyhood companion, I tend to remember the two of us running up and down its slopes, sometimes jumping right off where the sides were at their steepest.

From time to time, when we had worn ourselves out, we would sit panting at the top of the mound with our backs against the trunk of the maple tree. From this vantage point, we had a clear view over my garden and of the big white house standing at the end of it. If I close my eyes a moment, I am able to bring back that picture very vividly: the carefully tended ‘English’ lawn, the afternoon shadows cast by the row of elms separating my garden and Akira’s; and the house itself, a huge white edifice with numerous wings and trellised balconies. I suspect this memory of the house is very much a child’s vision, and that in reality, it was nothing so grand. Certainly, even at the time, I was conscious that it hardly matched the splendour of the residences round the corner in Bubbling Well Road. But the house was certainly more than adequate for a household comprising simply my parents, myself, Mei Li and our servants.

It was the property of Morganbrook and Byatt, which meant there were many ornaments and pictures around the place I was forbidden to touch. It meant also that from time to time, we would have boarding with us a ‘house guest’ - some employee newly arrived in Shanghai who had yet to ‘find his feet’. I do not know if my parents objected to this arrangement.

I did not mind at all, since usually a house guest would be some young man who brought with him the air of the English lanes and meadows I knew from The Wind in the Willows, or else the foggy streets of the Conan Doyle mysteries. These young Englishmen, no doubt eager to create a good impression, were inclined to indulge my lengthy questions and sometimes unreasonable requests. Most of them, it occurs to me, were probably younger then than I am today, and were probably all at sea so far from their home. But to me at the time, they were all of them figures to study closely and emulate.

But to return to Akira: there is a particular instance that now comes to mind from one such afternoon, after the two of us had been running frantically up and down that mound to enact one of our extended dramas. We were for a moment sitting down against the maple tree to recover our breath, and I was gazing across the lawn towards the house, waiting for my chest to stop heaving, when Akira said behind me: ‘Be careful, old chip. Centipede. By your foot.’

I had clearly heard him say ‘old chip’, but did not at this point think anything of it. But having once used the phrase, Akira seemed rather pleased with it, and over the following several minutes, once we resumed our game, proceeded to address me so over and over: “This way, old chip!’

‘More fast, old chip!’

‘Anyway, it’s not old chip,’ I told him in the end, during one of our disputes over how our game should proceed. ‘It’s old chap.’

Akira, as I knew he would, protested vigorously. ‘Not at all.

Not at all. Mrs Brown. She make me say again and again. Old chip. Old chip. Correct pronunciation, everything. She say old chip. She teacher!’

It was pointless to try to convince him; since starting his English lessons, he was immensely proud of his position within his family as the expert English speaker. All the same, I was unwilling to concede the point, and in the end the quarrel grew to such proportions, Akira simply stalked off in a fury, our game abandoned, through our ‘secret door’ - a gap in the hedge separating the two gardens.

On the next few occasions we played together, he did not call me ‘old chip’, or make any reference to this altercation on the mound. I had all but forgotten the matter when one morning a few weeks later, it came up again suddenly as we were walking back together along Bubbling Well Road past the grand houses and beautiful lawns. I cannot remember quite what I had just said to him. In any case, he responded by saying: ‘Very kind of you, old chap.’

I remember resisting the temptation to point out that he had come round to my view. For by then I knew Akira well enough to realise he was not saying ‘old chap’ by way of a subtle admission that he had previously been wrong; rather, in some odd way we both understood, he was implying that he had always been the one to claim it was ‘old chap’; that he was now merely reasserting his argument, and my lack of protest simply confirmed his conclusive victory. Indeed, for the rest of the afternoon, he continued to ‘old chap’ me with an ever more smug expression, as though to say: ‘So you’re no longer determined to be ridiculous. I’m glad you’re seeing more sense.’

This kind of behaviour was not at all untypical of Akira, and though I always found it infuriating, for some reason I rarely made the effort to protest. In fact - and today I find this hard to explain - I felt a certain need to preserve such fantasies on Akira’s behalf, and had, say, an adult tried to arbitrate in the ‘old chip’ dispute, I would just as likely have taken Akira’s side.

I do not wish to imply by this that Akira dominated me, or that ours was in any sense an unbalanced friendship. I took as much initiative in our games, and if anything, made more of the crucial decisions. The fact was, I believed myself his intellectual superior, and at some level, Akira probably accepted this. On the other hand, there were various things that gave my Japanese friend great authority in my eyes. There were, for instance, his arm-locks - which he would often administer if I made statements that displeased him, or if during one of our dramas, I became resistant to adopting a particular plot-turn he was keen on. More generally, even though he was actually only a month my senior, I did have a sense that he was the more worldly. He did seem to know about many things I did not.

There was, above all, his claim to having ventured on several occasions beyond the boundaries of the Settlement.

It is slightly surprising to me, looking back today, to think how as young boys we were allowed to come and go unsupervised to the extent that we were. But this was, of course, all within the relative safety of the International Settlement. I for one was absolutely forbidden to enter the Chinese areas of the city, and as far as I know, Akira’s parents were no less strict on the matter. Out there, we were told, lay all manner of ghastly diseases, filth and evil men. The closest I had ever come to going out of the Settlement was once when a carriage carrying my mother and me took an unexpected route along that part of the Soochow creek bordering the Chapei district; I could see the huddled low rooftops across the canal, and had held my breath for as long as I could for fear the pestilence would come airborne across the narrow strip of water. No wonder then that my friend’s claim to have undertaken a number of secret forays into such areas made an impression on me.

I remember quizzing Akira repeatedly about these exploits.

The truth concerning the Chinese districts, he told me, was far worse even than the rumours. There were no proper buildings, just shack upon shack built in great proximity to one another. It all looked, he claimed, much like the marketplace in Boone Road, except that whole families were to be found living in each ‘stall’. There were, moreover, dead bodies piled up everywhere, flies buzzing all over them, and no one there thought anything of it. On one occasion, Akira had been strolling down a crowded alley and had seen a man - some powerful warlord, he supposed - being transported on a sedan chair, accompanied by a giant carrying a sword. The warlord was pointing to whomever he pleased and the giant would then proceed to lop his or her head off. Naturally, people were trying to hide themselves the best they could. Akira, though, had simply stood there, staring defiantly back at the warlord. The latter had spent a moment considering whether to have Akira beheaded, but then obviously struck by my friend’s courage, had finally laughed and, reaching down, patted him on the head. Then the warlord’s party had continued on its way, leaving many more severed heads in its wake.

I cannot remember ever attempting to challenge Akira on any of these claims. Once I mentioned casually to my mother something about my friend’s adventures beyond the Settlement, and I remember her smiling and saying something to cast doubt on the matter. I was furious at her, and thereafter I believe I carefully avoided revealing to her anything at all intimate concerning Akira.

My mother, incidentally, was one person Akira regarded with a peculiar awe. If, say, despite his having got me in an arm-lock, I was still loath to concede a point to him, I could always resort to declaring that he would have my mother to answer to. Of course, this was not something I liked to do readily; it rather hurt my pride to have to invoke my mother’s authority at such an age. But on those occasions I was obliged to do so, I was always amazed by the transformation brought about - how the merciless fiend with the vice-like grip could turn in a second into a panic-stricken child. I was never sure why my mother should have such an effect on Akira; for although he was always exceedingly polite, he was on the whole unintimidated by adults. I could not, moreover, recall my mother ever having spoken to him in anything but a gentle and friendly way. I can remember pondering this question at the time, and various possibilities occurring to me.

I did, for a while, consider the notion that Akira regarded my mother as he did because she was ‘beautiful’. That my mother was ‘beautiful’ was something I accepted, quite dispassionately, as fact throughout my growing up. It was always being said of her, and I believe I regarded this ‘beautiful’ as simply a label that attached itself to my mother, no more significant than tall’ or ‘small’ or ‘young’. At the same time, I was not unaware of the effect her ‘beauty’ had on others. Of course, at that age, I had no real sense of the deeper implications of feminine allure.