I saw his point when he left me in my quarters. From my sitting-room balcony I could see the lights of Hav City, across the bay; outside my bedroom the great skyscraper rose grandiloquently into the early sunshine; between the two vistas my rooms offered me, as an illuminated tapestry above the fireplace declared in stylized Cufic script, ‘All That Your Heart Desires’ — the Lazaretto equivalent, it struck me, of the notices in English boarding houses that used to forbid alcohol, loud music or Visitors After 10 p.m. But all my heart desired was sleep, so I was in bed by ten anyway.
In the morning I had breakfast at a canopied restaurant on the beach called The Salt Trade, in commemoration I suppose of Hav’s ancient maritime connections, and asked for a pot of tea. ‘Hav tea?’ asked the waiter. ‘Of course’, I said. ‘Quite right too’, he smilingly replied, but it turned out to be horrible — bright green in colour, hard-leaved and sulphuric.
A very English middle-aged couple sat at the next table, and smiled over at me. ‘Just arrived?’, the woman said encouragingly.
‘Crack of dawn’, said I.
‘Oh, you must be tired. Never mind, you’re going to love it here, isn’t she darling?’
‘Absolutely. Nowhere better. Suites grand, climate a dream, food first class.’
‘Well I don’t think much of the tea’, I said.
‘Oh you poor thing, you probably had that awful Hav brew. They’ve only just started to make it, you know, and don’t seem to have got it right yet. But Arthur’s quite correct, in general the food’s marvellous. We’re the Ponsonby’s, by the way, I’m Vera, he’s Arthur.’
‘I’ll tell you, though’ said Arthur, ‘you don’t want to experiment too much with the local stuff. Before the kerfuffle we used to stay at the old Casino here, up on the coast, and there they used to force the stuff on us rather, urchins and Hav mushrooms and all that kind if thing. Here they give you a proper choice, and if I were you I’d stick to the victuals you know.’
I thanked him for the kind advice. ‘So you prefer this place to the old one?’ I said.
‘Oh absolutely’, they both replied. ‘Hundred per cent. Do you remember the mongooses, darling?’
‘Do I not? Bloody animals snuffling about in the middle of the night. But fair play, they’ve got it all right this time around.’
‘The thing is’, she said to me, ‘one feels so safe here. The security’s really marvellous, it’s all so clean and friendly, and, well, everything we’re used to really. We’ve met several old friends here, and just feel comfortable in this environment. We shall certainly be coming again, won’t we darling?’
‘Oh, a hundred percent. I think it’s bloody marvellous what they’ve achieved, when you remember what happened here.’
‘Perfectly wonderful’, she said. ‘Well, have a lovely time, dear’, she said as they picked up their bags and towels.
‘Watch the sun, won’t you — it’s fiercer than you think.’
‘And don’t touch that tea again’, said he. ‘Stick to the old Darjeeling.’
Lazaretto is the one reconstruction work of Hav that has been made readily public — ostentatiously public, in fact, to the world at large. Almost as soon as the airport was completed plane-loads of foreign correspondents, travel writers and tourist promoters were flown in to see it arising from the wreckage. They called it The Ultimate Destination, Resort of Resorts, Loveretto. Architectural critics wrote learned pieces about its Myrmidon Tower, without making much sense of it, and gossip columnists welcomed news of the glitzy goings on — Princess Diana was one of the resort’s earliest guests, a publicity coup which put it permanently on the paparazzi map and encouraged a stream of TV celebrities and footballers’ wives from Cheshire. All the construction work was done by Chinese companies. The architects were mostly Chinese too, together with some from India and the Arab world, but I had read that they all worked under the supervision of an aged Havian philosopher named Hayyam Kiruski.
When, after breakfast, the resort’s public-relations officer took me on a tour of the project, I asked her to explain this curious choice. ‘You are aware I suppose’, she replied, ‘that the artistic heritage of Myrmidonic Hav has been essentially Minoan, in all genres. Our greatest artists down the centuries, from Melchik all the way back to Avzar himself, the supreme maze-maker, found their inspiration in the Cretan mysteries. That is why the Perfects invited our famous Kiruski to bring to this project an overriding sense of our intellectual heritage. It is an unprecedent project, you realize. There has been nothing like it in the history of civilization.’
Well, she was a public-relations person, but she may be right. The resort Lazaretto! is a vastly confusing sprawl of a dozen separate guest-houses, each with its own swimming-pool and squat Havian wind-tower, linked by a succession of bridges, hedged footpaths and pedestrian tunnels, and designed in a striking melange of moods or analogies. I am at a loss to define its style — like that reception hall, it seemed to me slightly Kremlinesque, and a bit Bedouin, with touches of the Ottoman and underlying vibrations, so the PR lady suggested, ‘of the unique evocative symbolism that is so characteristic of Hav’s thought and art’.
Fine sandy beaches line the northern coast of the resort, impeccably raked, lined with cafés and patterned with chaises-longues and parasols. From there one can look across the harbour to Hav City on the northern shore. ‘So near and yet so far,’ the PR lady commented, ‘yet there’s nothing there that you can’t get here.’ It looked very different from the Hav I remembered. Gone was the esoteric skyline of turrets, minarets and gilded domes. Only the castle still stood on its crag high above. For the rest, all was a grey flattish blur of new buildings, low and flat, with a minaret protruding here and there, and a distant jumble of masts and riggings at the waterfront, but none of the gaudy eclecticism that made the old city so compelling.
In the southern part of the island, the former San Pietro, the foreign legations are assembled in a Diplomatic Suburb. My cicerone did not take me there. It was not part of Lazaretto, she told me, but was placed adjacent to the resort for administrative purposes. As in the old Hav, the sovereign states had been permitted to build their missions in their own national styles, ‘folksy, modernist, mock-primitive, what have you,’ and she was not impressed. ‘The area is outside the direct remit of our famous Kiruski, and so lacks ideological certainty.’ But actually, in the very middle of the whole ensemble, built on the landfill which has made the two former islands into one, the Myrmidon Tower stands, so far as I can see, utterly beyond ideology — a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technically unexampled vulgarity.
Over lunch I told the PR person that nevertheless I would like to call that afternoon on the British Legate, in the Diplomatic Suburb. ‘I can’t think why,’ she said, but she called the Legate for me anyway, on her mobile telephone. I asked if I could come and see him.
‘What for?’ he said.
‘For old times’ sake. I knew one of your predecessors, long ago.’
‘And who might that have been?’
I thought of saying Harry Potter or Sir Homer Simpson, but restrained myself.
‘I forget the name,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I see. Well come along at 3 p.m. this afternoon. You know where we are? I can give you five minutes.’
Again I considered a sharp retort, but what the hell, said I to myself, you’re not going for the fun of it.