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  Presently the Governor adjourned with his guest of honour to a wide divan, covered with carpets in the Turkish way, which stood just within the French windows of the salon, looking out on to the garden. There they were joined by the Governor’s wife and daughter, ample ladies both, in long white dresses and small tilted hats, who draped themselves side by side at the end of the divan, slightly separate from Izmic and His Excellency, and looked to me suggestively like odalisques. In twos and threes the citizenry took their turn to wait upon this court, and were greeted I noticed with varying degrees of condescension.

  When for example athletic young men, with shy young wives, went over to grasp Izmic by the shoulder or pretend to rumple his hair, the Governor was all jollity, his ladies sweet with smiles. When elderly Turkish-looking gentlemen went, without their wives, sometimes the Governor actually rose to his feet to greet them, while his ladies adjusted their skirts and all but tidied their black hair. Others seemed less graciously received. I could not hear what was said, from my peregrinating distances, but I got the impression that sometimes the exchange of courtesies was curt. The Caliph’s Wazir, though greeted by formal smiles, did not last long at the divan. A group of Greeks was all but waved away, and went off laughing rather rudely among themselves. And when Chimoun the Port Captain approached the presence with his svelte and predatory wife, I thought for a moment the Governor seemed a little nervous.

  Magda and her black man, each holding a plate of langoustines, pressed me to a garden bench, in the shade of a fine old chestnut, from where I could view this intriguing pageant in toto. From there it all looked very colourful, very charming — the splash of crimson from the band in the corner, the bright dresses and gaudy hats, the wonderfully varied wandering wardrobe of kaftans, gallabiyehs, white uniforms, tight-buttoned suits and ecclesiastical headgear — and in the middle, intermittently revealed to us between the comings and goings of the guests, the Governor there on his divan, with his ladies and his champion, looking now so unmistakably Levantine that I almost expected him to pull his feet up under him and sit cross-legged on his rugs.

  ‘I suppose you are thinking,’ Magda remarked, ‘what a pretty scene!’ and her friend laughed cynically.

  ‘Well it is a pretty scene,’ I replied.

  ‘You are so innocent,’ Magda said, ‘for a person of your age. You cannot have travelled much, I think. You sit here smiling around you as though it is a little show. You think it is all lobsters and urchins and nice music. Believe me it is much more than that.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ said her companion idiomatically.

  ‘This is almost the only time in the whole year’, she went on, ‘when all these people meet at the same time. Do you suppose they are here just to talk about the Roof-Race, or congratulate the Governor’s daughter on her smart dress from Beirut? No, my friend, they’re talking about very different things.’

  ‘They’re talking about money,’ said the black man.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Magda, ‘they’re talking about money. And they’re talking about power, and many other things too. They’re not just here for fun. Look at them! Do they look as though they are having fun?’

  They did actually, since half of them were stuffing urchins into their mouths, and many were laughing, and some were looking at the garden flowers, and others were deep in what seemed to be very absorbing gossip. But I saw what Magda meant. It was not exactly a blithe party. Currents I could not place, allusions I could not identify, seemed to loiter on the air. Separate little groups of people had assembled now, and appeared to have turned their backs on all the others. The longer I looked at the Governor the less he seemed like the benevolent figurehead of an idiosyncratic Mediterranean backwater, and the more like one of those spidery despots one reads about in old books of oriental travel, crouching there at the heart of his web.

  ‘Well what d’you suppose they all want?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah,’ said Magda sententiously, ‘if we knew that, we would know the answer to life’s riddles, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ her friend added.

  As I passed through the salon on my way out, having said my goodbyes to the divan (‘Charmed, charmed,’ murmured the two ladies, and the Governor bowed distractedly from the waist, being deep in talk with the Maronite archbishop), a man in well-cut sharkskin intercepted me. He was Mario Biancheri of the Casino. He had heard I was about, he said, and as we had friends in common in Venice, wondered if I would care to visit the Casino, which was difficult to enter without an introduction. ‘You can drive out, of course, but it’s a terrible road — you really need four-wheel drive. But if you’re prepared to get up early you could come with me in the launch one morning when we return from the market. We would see that you got home again. You would be amused? Very well, signora, it’s fixed.

  ‘By the way, did you enjoy the food? We did the catering. If you are planning to do any entertaining yourself we shall be delighted to help — we need not be as expensive as we look!’ And so in the end I was seen off at the door of the Palace, past the Circassian sentries, beneath the onion domes, away from the mysteries of that somewhat dream-like function, with a brisk quotation of sample prices — ‘You prefer a sit-down meal? Certainly, certainly.’ As I walked across the square the bands played on: thump of Souza from the garden, ‘Chanson d’amour’ from the blue room, and a reedy wheeze and jangle of folk melody.

  14

  Mystery of Mr Thorne — Hav Britannica — in spite of all temptations — luncheon at the Agency — Lawrence Sahib and the Turkish gentleman — ‘very pale’

  The British Agent’s name is — well, I will call him Thorne. His wife’s name is — well, let us say Rosa. They are the only English residents in Hav, and he is the only foreign diplomatic representative. He keeps very much to himself. He is officially invited every year, he tells me, to the Roof-Race and the Victor’s Party, but has never been to either, confining himself to private contact with the Governor or the Foreign Department when the need arises, which seems to be infrequently. He is a tall thin man, very clever I think, with a high brow and the sort of nose which, without being retroussé, slopes downwards below the nostrils to the upper lip. She was at Cambridge, where she read foreign languages, and is clever too, while affecting Kurdish jewelry and sandals with heavy gold thongs. It is touted about, naturally, that Thorne is a spy-master, and that much British and American intelligence passes through his hands. Magda says he is the original of one of John Le Carré’s characters, but she can’t remember which.

  He is a mystery, but a mystery the people of Hav seem perfectly content to ignore. From almost anywhere on the waterfront you can see his fine white house above the harbour, radio aerials sprouting from the outbuildings behind, yet hardly anybody goes near the place, and it stands there apparently aloof to the life of the peninsula. It is a tantalizing relic of the brief and not very glorious Hav Britannica.

  If in 1794 Nelson had obeyed his original instructions, and attacked the peninsula of Hav instead of sailing west to invest Corsica, he might never have had his eye shot out at Calvi. As it was, the British never did have to take Hav by force, for it fell into their hands peacefully under the treaty arrangements of 1815. They wanted it for strategic reasons. They were coming to see India as the true source and focus of their power, and were more and more concerned with the safety of the routes that led there. With Gibraltar already theirs, with Malta to control the central Mediterranean, the Ionians to command the Adriatic, and with Hav flying the flag away to the east, their lines of communication through the inner sea seemed to be secure.

  In those days warships were small enough to make use of Hav’s poor harbour, and the British promptly established a garrison, built a Residency, an Admiralty House, an Anglican church and an ice-house, and made the Protectorate of Hav and the Escarpment a proper little tight-meshed outpost of their fast coalescing empire. Many well-known imperial figures had Hav connections at one time or another. Bold Gene
ral C. J. Napier, conqueror of Baluchistan, spent some months in the city reorganizing the garrison, and wrote to his wife that it was ‘a dreadful hole — worse than Sind! I am sorry for the poor soldiers, but it is the price we pay for power’. The half-mad Lord Guilford, who established an Ionic university in Corfu, paid a brief spectacular visit to Hav, swathed in his usual flowing toga, to suggest a sister establishment here: it was to be called the Trojan Academy, but protests from the Sublime Porte direct to the Crown, so Guilford always claimed, put paid to the project. General Gordon was a more frequent visitor, sometimes in the course of his duties as a military engineer (he had a scheme for resuscitating the Spartan canal as a defence work), sometimes in the pursuit of Truth: just as he believed the Seychelles to be the true site of the Garden of Eden, so he was sure that Noah’s Ark had really grounded on the Escarpment, and he wrote many learned papers to prove it.

  Then Kinglake came of course, the then British Resident Harry Stormont having been at Eton with him; and Edward Lear painted some agreeable pictures of the castle and the Medina; and from time to time parliamentary commissions descended upon the Protectorate, as they did upon all such petty possessions, were well fed at the Residency, watched a smart parade of the 53rd Foot, and went home expressing the view that Her Majesty’s interests on Hav were being diligently safeguarded. Frigates of the fleet put in sometimes. Garden parties were held on the Queen’s birthday. An undistinguished succession of Residents came and went; the best known was perhaps Sir Joshua Remington, who having just escaped bankruptcy by the fortunate chance of his appointment by Lord Palmerston to the office, was lampooned by Punch:

  As he picked up the carver to carve,

  Said Sir, Joshua, ‘We’ll never starve.

  For thanks to LORD P.,

  And the powers that be,

  Whatever we haven’t, we’ve HAV.

  So for half a century the Protectorate lived the familiar life of a British overseas possession. It was not the happiest on the roster, for nearly everyone loathed it (the mosquitoes were terrible then, the drinking-water was often brackish and the food was described by Napier as being ‘fit only for monkeys — if for them’). Old pictures, nevertheless, make life for the imperialists look quite bearable. We see the officers in their shakos, the ladies beneath their parasols, parading the quayside outside the Fondaco, admiring the view through telescopes from Katourian’s Place, or enjoying fêtes-champêtres in the then empty western hills. Here in stilted sepia photographs Chinese women in wide coolie hats sell them silks and souvenirs (‘Buying keepsakes in the Protectorate’), and here a visiting cricket team, very stiff at the wicket, extremely alert in the field, plays the officers of the garrison on the green outside St George’s Church.

  Cricket continued to be played in Hav long after the end of the Protectorate; some of the Russians took it up, and as late as 1912 we read of a match between Prince Bronsky’s XI and a team from Corfu. A few other British legacies died hard, too. The honorific ‘Dirleddy’ has been inherited, I take it, from the etiquette of the Victorian empire-builders. The version of ‘Chant de doleure pour li proz chevalers qui sunt morz’ played by Missakian nowadays was arranged by a garrison bandmaster. Not only the cows and mongooses, but all the Indians one sees in Hav are migrants of the Pax Britannica — they came originally as servants and camp-followers. A few places have kept their British names — China Bay, The Hook, Pyramid Rock, the triangular rock which rises out of the sea off little Yalta — and a few reactionaries still like to call the Balad ‘Blacktown’.

  Most of the meagre monuments of British Hav may still be identified. Westminster never put much money into the place, so that the buildings were mostly ferry-built and second-rate, but still in one form or another they have survived, their origins generally long forgotten. The Residency thrives still as the Agency — the name was adopted by agreement with the Russians in 1875, and British consuls in Hav have called themselves Agents ever since. The Anglican church however, its steeple knocked off, is now used for the storage of oil drums by the Greek fishermen, while the open space in front of it, where they used to play cricket, is now one of the market truck parks (and I have found no trace of the tombstone, mentioned in several imperial memoirs, of the officer who, ‘having recently achieved his Captaincy in the Royal Engineers, Left this Station to Report to the Commander of a yet greater Corps . . .’).

  If you look closely at the barrack block between the Palace and the old legations you will see that its southern wing was verandahed in the Anglo-Indian manner, until the Russians stripped it of its iron-work, and the former Admiralty House, at the southern end of the Lazaretto, is now the agreeable if decrepit restaurant of the pleasure-park. As for the ice-house which stood on the eastern quay, Count Kolchok turned it into a private retreat, in whose cool chambers, if we are to believe the gossip, he often enjoyed himself with the dancer Naratlova; but it was demolished when they built the promenade of New Hav.

  And one British commercial concern, out of several which made their modest fortunes from the Hav connection, is active to this day. One morning I walked into the offices of Butterworth and Sons, World-Wide Preferential Shipping Tariffs, and asked if there was actually a Mr Butterworth. Certainly there was, they said, Mr Mitko Butterworth — would I care to meet him? And there he was, the last living representative, one might say, of the Protectorate of Hav and the Escarpment — a swarthy man in his thirties, shirtsleeved below his swirling electric fan, with large gold cuff-links and round wire spectacles. Yes, he said, he was the great-great-grandson, he thought, of the Oswald Butterworth who had, in 1823, followed the flag to Hav and set up his shipping agency in that very office within the Fondaco.

  Oswald had hoped, he told me, to make Hav once more the great entrepôt for the whole of the Levant trade, perhaps even the Russian trade, as British contemporaries were even then making Hong Kong the chief outlet for the wealth of China. That had never happened, but still the Butterworths had moderately prospered, outlived their several competitors, and become so much a part of Hav life that they had successfully ridden out all subsequent ebbs and flows of political circumstance.

  And did he feel himself, I wondered, to be British still? He shrugged and laughed. ‘When it suits me to feel British, I feel British, but it is very seldom. And rather hard. Work it out yourself. Oswald Butterworth married a Bulgarian, and there has been no new British blood in the Butterworth family since then. What am I — one thirty-secondth British?’ And to my astonishment, for it seemed altogether out of character, he burst into loud song:

  ‘In spite of all temptations,

  To belong to other nations,

  I remain one thirty-secondth of an E-e-e-e-nglishman!’

  When Mr Thorne invited me to lunch, which he called tiffin, at the former Residency, I mentioned Mr Butterworth and his improbable command of Gilbert and Sullivan. ‘Yes, I’ve heard about him,’ the Agent said without a smile, ‘but he’s not a British subject. There are no British subjects here. There may be some Maltese, but they are no longer our responsibility. I have never met this Butterworth.’

  ‘Perhaps we should invite him out, darling?’ said Rosa. ‘He sounds amusing.’

  ‘I think not,’ replied the Agent.

  We were sitting in considerable, but somehow dullened splendour. The house was recognizably an Anglo-Indian villa, translated here from the banks of the Hooghly, but had long lost its imperial panache. The big mahogany table was handsome, but scuffed here and there. The silver was handsome too, but might have been better polished. The Indian manservant who waited on us wore a white jacket not exactly dirty, but sort of grey-looking. We ate fish with Hav cabbage, and drank white wine which I suspect to have been Cypriot. I was the only guest. ‘How nice’, said Rosa, ‘to see a new face. Isn’t it nice, Ronald?’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Mr Thorne.

  Around us on the walls were portraits of the men who had presided over the Hav Protectorate from that house — florid, well-fed Britons eve
ry one, lavishly splayed with insignia of various orders, and sometimes in military uniform. The Agent identified them all for me — ‘General Ricks who made something of a fool of himself in the Crimea, Sir Joshua Remington who became Lord Remington of Hav — you may know the limerick, ‘Whatever we haven’t we’ve Hav?’ — Harry Stormont who was something of an artist, we have one of his paintings in the library in fact, and Sir Roland Triston, and Sir Henry Walton-Vere, the only Anglo-Indian of the lot, surprisingly enough, and Lord Hevington, and General Stockingham, and . . .’

  I had hardly heard of any of them, and my mind wandered rather during this recital, concentrating instead on the fish, which was good but bony. What were we doing there, the Agent, his Rosa and I, eating mullet at the rubbed mahogany table from Calcutta, recalling the ineptitudes of General Ricks at Sebastopol, drinking wine we should not be drinking, in that queer little alien enclave above teeming and tumultuous Hav?

  After lunch we sat on the verandah, among pots of flowering ferns, looking down to the harbour below us, where one of the salt-ships was just rounding the Hook, and the Electric Ferry was slowly crossing the gap between the Lazaretto and San Pietro. I said it reminded me of Sydney. Rosa said it reminded her of the Helston River. Mr Thorne said of course the British never did quite know where they were in Hav. Sometimes they thought of it as an extension of India, sometimes as an outpost of Constantinople — ‘We still call our waiters “bearers” but our watchmen “dragomans”, and they always call me Sahib. “Rivers of history”, one might say. You remember the quotation? No matter.’