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
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 club, 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.’