The Remains of the Day

by Kazuo Ishiguro

one finds it most difficult to achieve that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence that is essential to good waiting;

‘He was my enemy,’ he was saying, ‘but he always behaved like a gentleman. We treated each other decently over six months of shelling each other. He was a gentleman doing his job and I bore him no malice. I said to him: “Look here, we’re enemies now and I’ll fight you with all I’ve got. But when this wretched business is over, we shan’t have to be enemies any more and we’ll have a drink together.”

‘I fought that war to preserve justice in this world. As far as I understood, I wasn’t taking part in a vendetta against the German race.’

Whatever complications arose in his lordship’s course over subsequent years, I for one will never doubt that a desire to see ‘justice in this world’ lay at the heart of all his actions.

commiserations

Some were gentlemen who felt strongly, like his lordship himself, that fair play had not been done at Versailles and that it was immoral to go on punishing a nation for a war that was now over.

the French were the most intransigent as regards releasing Germany from the cruelties of the Versailles treaty

indulgence.

Eleanor Austin,

hawker’s

barrow,

‘You are perpetually talking of my “great inexperience,” Mr Stevens, and yet you appear quite unable to point out any defect in my work. Otherwise I have no doubt you would have done so long ago and at some length.

nonchalance,

I did my best not to give away anything of my exasperation on discovering that a task I had thought all but behind me was in fact still there unassaulted before me.

trunks.

gist

mackintosh

subterfuge

furtively

explicate

sow

Gentlemen like our good host still believe it’s their business to meddle in matters they don’t understand.

hog-wash.

believe I have a good idea of what you mean by “professionalism.” It appears to mean getting one’s way by cheating and manipulating. It appears to mean serving the dictates of greed and advantage rather than those of goodness and the desire to see justice prevail in the world. If that is the “professionalism” you refer to, sir, I don’t much care for it and have no wish to acquire it.’

George Ketteridge,

for our generation, I think it fair to say, professional prestige lay most significantly in the moral worth of one’s employer.

Butlers of my father’s generation, I would say, tended to see the world in terms of a ladder – the houses of royalty, dukes and the lords from the oldest families placed at the top, those of ‘new money’ lower down and so on, until one reached a point below which the hierarchy was determined simply by wealth – or the lack of it.

For our generation, I believe it is accurate to say, viewed the world not as a ladder, but more as a wheel.

debates are conducted, and crucial decisions arrived at, in the privacy and calm of the great houses of this country. What occurs under the public gaze with so much pomp and ceremony is often the conclusion, or mere ratification, of what has taken place over weeks or months within the walls of such houses.

Lord Wakeling,

Lord Camberley,

Sir Leona...

hemmed

guv.

batman

geezer.

civvy.’

whim

cornicings

chump.’

woefully

ensconced

stupefaction

Lord Halifax.

Herr Ribbentrop.

abhor

Sir Oswald Mosley, the gentleman who led the ‘blackshirts’,

fulcrum

Carolyn Barnet

foibles