Through these varying melodies the Havians shouted to each other in their several languages, so that as I wandered through the crowd I moved from Turkish to Arabic, from Italian to Chinese to surprisingly frequent enclaves of English — for as I have discovered from the Athenaeum, Hav intellectuals in particular love to talk English among themselves. Mahmoud was there and introduced me to his hitherto unrevealed wife, who looked like a very pretty deer, but seemed to speak no known language at all. Dr Borge was there and told me to ignore the folk-artists banging and fluting away in the other room, as they were pure phonies — ‘One of these evenings I’ll take you to a place I know and let you hear the real thing.’ Magda, in yellow, was accompanied by a handsome-bearded black man, and who should be with Fatima (brown silk, helping herself to urchin mayonnaise from the buffet) but the stately figure of the tunnel pilot himself. ‘I hear you have bought one of our old cars,’ he said. ‘A wise purchase. We keep them scrupulously.’
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
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.