by Jan Morris
I had heard something interesting of the house. I had heard that in 1913, when T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, was engaged on an archaeological excavation in Mesopotamia, he had met here the young Turkish officer Mustafa Kemal, later to be known as Attaturk. And it is said that this secret meeting between the Oxford don, who was a British agent, and the most formidable of the Young Turks was to have an incalculable influence upon the course of the First World War and the post-war settlement; for Attaturk is supposed to have promised that he would use his influence within the Turkish army to allow the Arab revolt, already germinating in British minds as well as Arab ones, so to succeed that in future years British influence would be paramount in the Middle East. As it turned out, Attaturk was the very Turkish commander who allowed the forces of the Arabs, under British patronage, to capture Damascus, thus ensuring British suzerainty in those parts for another forty years: if the story is true, then the white Agency above the harbour of Hav played a clandestine role of enormous significance in the history of the British Empire, of Israel, and of the world between the wars.
‘I dare say’, Mr Thorne was saying, ‘that you may think the survival of this Agency an anachronism. Some of my colleagues do. But our duties here have always been specialized. We are an independent window, as it were, upon the eastern Levant. Here in Hav we can make contacts denied to diplomatic missions in places closer to the mainstream. I would not like you to go away with the impression that we are merely idle lotus-eaters — that’s what Kinglake called Stormont, you know, the Resident, in his time — “a plump and idle lotus-eater”.’
‘No, plump we may be,’ interjected Rosa, who is, ‘but idle certainly not. Lucky old Stormont hadn’t got a radio link, had he?’
The conversation moved on, by way of Wales and the British monarchy, to the subject of 24 Residenzstrasse. ‘I hope you don’t believe all the bizarre things they say about it,’ said Mr Thorne quite crossly. ‘Von Tranter was as thorough a Nazi as anyone else, I can assure you, and worked hand-in-glove with von Papen throughout the war. Putting up that plaque was a disgrace. As for the poppycock about Hitler coming to Hav, believe me, if he had ever been within a hundred miles of this Agency, he would never have got home alive.’
It seemed a good moment, as we appeared to have entered cloak-and-dagger territory, to raise the story of Lawrence and Attaturk. This was evidently unwelcome. ‘Lawrence did come to this house,’ said the Agent, in a formal tone of voice, ‘but the visit was purely private. He came as the guest of the then Agent, a somewhat eccentric man called Winchester, the first man in Hav, as a matter of fact, to ride a motorcycle. His interest was in the barrow-graves of the salt-marsh, at that time supposed to be Minoan, now known to be troglodytic. He stayed some ten days, and then proceeded overland to his dig in Iraq. Anything else you may have heard’, said Mr Thorne conclusively, ‘is totally unfounded.’ Thus on a detectably minatory note the Agent’s hospitality came to an end, and with ‘so lovely to see a new face’ from Rosa, and ‘You must come again some time’ from Mr Thorne — ‘how long did you say you were staying?’ — I was shown to my car and waved fairly perfunctorily down the drive.
Hardly was I around the corner and in the shrubbery, out of sight of the house, when an elderly man in green gallabiyeh and turban urgently signalled me to stop. ‘Excuse me, memsahib,’ he said, ‘I am head dragoman here. Bearer says you ask about Lawrence Pasha — I tell you truth now. My father was dragoman here then, and he remembered visit of Lawrence Pasha very well. Now I tell you, at same time Turkish gentleman stayed in this house. Mr Thorne not tell you that I think. British prefer to forget that. But my father remember very well, and he knew who that Turkish gentleman was, he knew . . . He remembered very clearly, and many times he described to us Lawrence Pasha riding Winchester Sahib’s motorcycle up and down this drive. He never rode motorcycle before, but very fast he rode, very very fast, very dangerous and once, my father said, that Turkish gentleman went for ride on back seat of motorbike, and when they came back to this house he was very pale.’
I have asked several people at the Athenaeum what they know of the Lawrence story, but they do not seem very interested, just as they see nothing to be wondered at in the fact that the fishermen’s oil store used to be an English church, and seem indifferent to the presence of the white house with its radio masts above the harbour. ‘All I want from Britain is the Beatles,’ Magda said to me one day: for their tastes in Western music are years behind the times.
15
To Casino Cove — dreaming? — a call from Dodo — hard and steely — Solveig and the champagne — a remarkable menu
It was the loveliest of pearly mornings, all warm and still, the sea as calm as urchin soup, the castle shimmering in the warm sun behind us, when Mario Biancheri, his Chinese henchmen and I scudded away from the market quay on the day of my initiation into Casino Cove.
Nothing else was moving on the water, but all around us, as we swept in a wide showy curve from the waterfront, the city was awakening. The first traffic was just entering Pendeh Square, on the New Hav promenade somebody was doing callisthenics, and the gardener was already up and about in the flower-beds of the British Agency. At the coal wharf a coaster was unloading in a haze of sooty dust. I sat in the stern of the boat, and thought that Hav had never looked so lovely — gone all its seediness, all its decay, from this perspective, on such a morning! Round the Hook we swept, and the hills rose green and fresh on either side, and under the Conveyor Bridge, whose platform was swinging, entirely untenanted except for the captain, from one tower to the other — and there was the Iron Dog glaring down at us from the headland, and before us the open sea, veiled in a thin morning haze, stretched away to Cyprus and distant Africa.
It looked an entirely open sea — as so often, Hav felt utterly alone in the world. But when we had rounded the southern point, passed through the San Spiridon channel, and entered the wide declivity called China Bay, busy life began to show — and life altogether separate from that of the city we had left behind us. It was like entering a different ocean. There were scores of Chinese fishing-craft about, their crews grimly working at nets or riggings. There were marker buoys everywhere, and schools of those apparently abandoned boats, silently bobbing, which give a particular mystery to every Chinese shore. Sometimes Biancheri waved at the fishermen, but they responded only in an abstracted Chinese way: once our helmsman shouted something, but nobody answered.
Straggling over its hillocks now I could see Yuan Wen Kuo, brown and huddled, and then we were around the next point, and before us on a tight little cove, hemmed about by steep cliffs, thickly greened by woods, half-obscured by the masts and upperworks of a dozen large yachts, stood the buildings of the Casino. They did not look like Hav at all. They were low, and pink-washed, and had pale tiled roofs, and seemed to breathe, even at that distance, the very numen of immense wealth. Biancheri caught my eye and made a face, wry, amused, half apologetic, implying ‘Well, there we are, for what it’s worth . . .’ I shouted a response above the din of the engines. ‘Breakfast should be good,’ I said.
Breakfast was. The hotel was still asleep, so Biancheri and I ate alone upon the wide restaurant verandah, with its yellow-cushioned furniture, its bright flowering plants, its apparently numberless and weightless Chinese servants, the yachts gleaming across the lawn and the lovely cove beyond. Biancheri laughed to see me, as the steaming coffee arrived with cornflakes and Oxford marmalade. ‘You think you are dreaming? But there’s no Times! What a shame! We must complain to the management!’
Presently the management joined us, in the elegantly suited and delicately after-shaved person of Monsieur Tomas Chevallaz, a Swiss, he told me, who had worked in his time at the Mandarin Hong Kong, the Connaught in London and ‘a pub of my own at home’. The Hav Casino, he told me, was quite different from them all. It was unique. Since its beginnings in the late 1920s it had never had to advertise — all was by word of mouth, or by inheritance. Now it was a private c
lub, and as old Pierpont Morgan remarked about the owning of steam-yachts, if you had to ask how much it cost, you couldn’t afford it. ‘In the twelve years I have managed this place, I can remember only about a dozen of our guests who did not arrive on their own yachts.’
He identified some of the boats lying there below us — this one a Spanish industrialist’s, that one a shipowner’s, another the matrimonially disputed property of an American actor — and by now a few of the guests were trickling on to the terrace for their breakfasts. Most of them slept very late, Chevallaz said, having been up most of the night at the gaming tables; and some of them, as everyone knew, preferred to sleep the sleep narcotic, which is why he would be grateful if I did not mention present guests by name — ‘In Hav nobody minds, it is when they get home to their boardrooms . . .’
Those who did appear looked anything but drugged. They were the lean, lithe kind, smooth-tanned, and had probably already played a game of tennis, or been swimming, or at least gone for a jog through the trees. They all seemed to know each other intimately, and exchanged greetings across the tables in variously accented English — ‘You’re looking rather terrific’ — ‘My dear, I had a call from Dodo,’ or, ‘Kurt says he’s never going to eat urchins again.’ They seemed to me nationless and quite timeless. They might have been from any decade of our century, or earlier. They were the stuff of Carlsbad, Newport, Monte Carlo in the thirties, even Hav itself in the days of the Russians. ‘Have you heard from Scott?’ they asked each other. ‘What a pity Otto isn’t here!’
‘You see,’ said Chevallaz as we walked over the sprinkled lawns to his office, ‘our clients are different from others. They cannot fly to Hav. They can hardly drive. They would be mad to come by train. They can really only come in their own ships, or their friends’ ships, and that’s what makes them feel like rich people from other times. You are quite right. And when they are here, here they stay. As you know, they’re not encouraged to take their yachts into the city harbour, where they’d probably sink, and it’s a frightful track over the cliffs here. Why move? I doubt if one of our guests in a thousand ever goes into the city, and we much prefer it that way.’
All around his office were portraits of the Casino’s famous guests. There were kings, statesmen, authors, bankers, actresses, great ladies of the social circuit. There was Noël Coward — ‘To dear André — happy days!’ — and there was Hemingway in a bush shirt — ‘To Hav . . .?’ Coco Chanel was fuzzed and misty, in the photographic style of the day. Maurice Chevalier was wearing his boater. Winston Churchill painted on the beach. Thomas Mann looked haggard. And no, could it be —? ‘Yes, I’m afraid so, though I’m not sure he ought to be there. He is supposed to have come to Hav, you know, secretly during the war, and legend says he was picked up by a U-boat at the cove here. We don’t know the truth, but my predecessor hung the picture there anyway. I’m often told I should remove it, but I don’t know . . . he’s not the only villain on the wall.’
His mother loved him anyway, I suggested. ‘In that case he did not come here,’ Biancheri said. ‘Nobody who comes to the Hav Casino ever had a mother.’ It is clearly not a place rich in the milk of human kindness, and as we wandered around that morning, from pool to solarium, from kitchens to gambling rooms, something very hard and steely seemed to impregnate the air. Almost everyone who works at the Cove is Chinese, and the responses we got from the staff were taciturn, just as the buildings themselves, fitted out in every last degree of luxury, seemed nevertheless devoid of comfort. Above the roulette tables Chevallaz showed me the hidden mirrors and monitors which ensure that the billionaires below do not cheat (not that any of them try — they are much too clever for that). In the restaurant he showed me the one-way mirrors behind which less exhibitionist celebrities prefer to dine — seeing but unseen.
Wherever we went young Chinese in olive-green fatigues seemed to be prowling around holding night-sticks. ‘Please don’t ask me’, said Chevallaz, ‘if they have guns too.’ Security, he said, was one of his chief headaches, especially as so many of his guests brought their own bodyguards too — ‘See that guy over there?’ — and leaning against the wall of one of the bungalows was a tall heavy man in white tennis gear, holding a walkie-talkie and looking distinctly bulged around the hips. There had been sufficient mayhem at the Cove in its time, Chevallaz said — did I know about the Tiananmen affair? No? Ah well, it was a subject he preferred to stay clear of anyway. ‘I’m only an employee, and I like my job.’
And who were his employers? Oh, the same Chinese syndicate, mutatis mutandis, that had founded the Casino back in the 1920s. All the money was Chinese — well, almost all — he had heard some European money had slid in, one way or another, after the war. And the Hav government — it had no share? Better not know, he implied.
‘Jan, my dear,’ came a loud deep voice from a patio. It was Solveig, a Swedish actress of my acquaintance, so Chevallaz left us together — ‘I’ll send coffee over,’ he said.
‘Jan, how amazing, of all people! You’re alone? God, I wish I were, but you know how Eric is, he’s so terribly friendly with everyone, and here we are stuck in this absurd place.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘Darling, how could one? It’s absurd, obscene. Nothing but millionaires and Chinese people everywhere, and gambling — you know I hate gambling. I suppose you’re living in some delicious garret somewhere. You are lucky. Sit down at once, sit here, tell me everything!’
I told her about Signora Vattani and my apartment in New Hav, and about the harbour, and the onion-domed Serai, and the snow raspberries, and Missakian’s trumpet, and the Athenaeum, and Brack and Kretev. How absolutely perfect, she cried, she could hardly wait to see it all for herself. How could she get into Hav? Well, I said, I supposed she could get hold of a jeep or something to get her up the cliff track, and down the edge of the salt-marsh, and through the Balad; or alternatively she might persuade Signor Biancheri to take her on the market launch, though that meant getting up at about three in the morning.
At that moment the coffee arrived, together with a bunch of fresh roses, a bottle of champagne and a bowl of fruit. ‘When you have enjoyed your coffee,’ said a note in Chevallaz’s fastidious hand, ‘I hope you will drink my health in something a little stronger.’ Tacitly we abandoned Solveig’s visit to Hav.
‘What a marvellous man Chevallaz is,’ she said.
‘Marvellous,’ I agreed, ‘and he knows his business, too.’
‘There is somebody else here you may know,’ said Biancheri, showing me into the bar, and sure enough, the moment I saw the face of the head barman, I remembered him from Venice. Seeing his bitter-sweet smile there, reaching across the bar to shake his hand, gave me a most curious sense of déjà vu. And when I looked around the cramped but indefinably expensive little saloon, too, all seemed creepily familiar to an old habituée of Harry’s Bar: the same sorts of faces, the same loud talk, the same confident laughter, the same weather-eye on the door to see if anyone who matters is coming in. ‘But not,’ said Biancheri, joining me with a gin-fizz in a corner of the room — ‘not altogether the same food that you are accustomed to get from Ciprianis. I think you will agree that our restaurant menu is something a little different.’ He was right. Could there be such a menu, I wondered, anywhere else on earth? Not only were there the old stalwarts of classical French and Italian cooking — not only the inescapable pigeons’ breasts and raw mushrooms of the cuisine nouvelle — not only roast beef for traditionalists, jellied duck for Sinophiles, bortsch for nostalgia, couscous, pumpkin pie — there was also a fascinating selection of Hav specialities.
You could eat sea-urchins grilled, meunière, baked, stewed, in batter, with ginger garnish, as a pâté, in an omelette, in a soup or raw. You could eat roast kid in the escarpment style, which meant cold with a herb-flavoured mayonnaise, or barbecued over catalpa charcoal from the western hills. You could eat the legs of frogs from the salt-marshes, which are claimed to have a flavour
like no others, or Hav eels, which are pickled in rosemary brine, or the pink-coloured mullet which is said to be unique to these waters, and which the Casino likes to serve smoked with dill sauce, or the tall sweet celery which grows on the island of the Greeks, or a salad made entirely, in the inexplicable absence of lettuce anywhere on the peninsula, of wild grasses and young leaves gathered every morning in the hills above Yuan Wen Kuo. You could even eat a dish, otherwise undefined, listed as ours hav faux.
This was only a joke, said Biancheri, though in the 1920s Hav bear really was eaten sometimes at the Casino. Now the false bear was no more than a bear-shaped duck terrine. ‘But then,’ he added, ‘it is all a joke. For myself I prefer scrambled eggs.’
I did not stay for lunch, anyway. As the hungrier plutocrats began to drift out of the bar towards the restaurant, Biancheri walked down with me to the waiting launch, where the boatswain started up his engines as he saw us approaching, and the deckhand untied the hawser to push off. ‘You will find something to sustain you on the way home’, said Biancheri, ‘in the after cabin’: and so as we splashed and sprayed our way back to Hav I sat in the stern like Waring, laughing, and eating bread, cheese, apples and Greek celery, washed down with ice-cold retsina. The Chinese bowed soundlessly when I stepped ashore beneath the Fondaco.
16
Hav and the maze — artistic cross-breeding — on poetry — on pictures — on music — Avzar Melchik — honouring an emblem
