‘Fancy your remembering,’ we tumbled over each other in saying, and then, still laughing, he led me into his highly functional office, all chrome and electronics. ‘Yes, after all these years, fancy your remembering. How did you find us? Just by chance? Certainly not through the British Legation, what? They don’t like us there any more than they liked us when they were a hoity-toity Agency!’
Mr Butterworth didn’t seem to have aged much, and was still in his shirtsleeves, though I noticed he had given up on cuff-links.
‘Well well well, fancy that. There’ve been some changes made, n’est-ce pas? What? I suppose you hardly recognize the old place?’
‘I certainly wouldn’t recognize Butterworth and Sons,’ I said, eyeing the suavity all around me, and remembering the musty premises of 1985.
‘Yes, that’s true, we haven’t done badly since the Intervention. All’s in order for the fifth generation of Butterworths, touch wood. Oh, how rude of me: care for a coffee? Or an Aqua Hav perhaps?’
Coffee would be lovely I said, and he winked at me as he spoke into his desk telephone. ‘Very wise. Can’t stand the Aqua stuff myself, but all good Havians are obliged to like it.’
The coffee arrived and we were silent for a moment until the golden-robed servant withdrew.
‘You’re still not Havian yourself, then?’
‘No, no, no. Never. Well, not altogether. Nowadays, I must admit, I do have more than one nationality. In my business there are advantages to it.’
‘What is your business, actually? I know you told me your great-great-grandfather, was it? — wanted to extend the range of the agency. Has it happened?’
Mr Butterworth stirred his coffee cup for a moment. ‘Shipping agencies’, he said, ‘have always been complex businesses. We’ve always tried to move with the times, which is why we’ve hung on here all this time, and I think I can say we’ve adapted successfully to the new Hav. Those name-plates outside are all ours really, you know — subsidiary companies of ours, associate agencies, concessionaires, that kind of thing.’
‘You mean the whole building is yours?’
‘Well yes, in a manner of speaking. Ownership is a sort of abstraction in Hav these days. Let’s say we have an enthusiastic interest in it all — how’s that?’
I said I’d been at Yuan Wen Kuo the day before, and was struck by the contrast in style between it and the Medina.
‘Ah well, yes, that’s the Chinese way. They like a bit of flash. They’re all at each others’ throats anyway, and love to show off. They’re much more internecine, if that’s the word, than we are down here. Almost all the firms up there are Chinese, cutthroat competitors, and very big business too. They deal in things — things they make, things they sell, huge construction projects, all that kind of stuff. They’re big on import—export—always have been. Down here we’re more — well, theoretical.’
As he said this, he put his finger down the side of his nose and smirked a bit. ‘Funny really,’ he said. ‘It used to be the Chinese who ran laundry businesses…’
‘Are you saying…’
‘Yes I am, more or less. Leave it at that. You see, the Chinese prefer things up front. They’ve been active in Hav for years and years, as you know, and they feel a bit superior to all these people around here. If you want to build an airport, fine, go and talk about it at Yuan Wen Kuo; they’ll fix everything for you, money, materials, labour, technicians, the whole lot — even architects — they hoped to get that Lord Rogers for the terminal, you know. They’ve built the whole caboodle at the Balad.
‘But if you want to ship, say, a cargo of electronics from Cuba to Abu Dhabi, or broker a deal in some debatable substance or other, or fix an exchange rate somewhere, or even arrange a tricky introduction, why, the Medina’s the place, and you can’t do better than consult Butterworth and Sons, Founded 1823! A long-standing British firm, as our letter-heads used to say, “To Be Trusted in All Transactions”.’
‘I’m sure old Oswald would be proud of you.’
‘You can be damned sure of it. He’d be right at home on the new Hav. We do a lot of business with the Lazaretto, you know — wasn’t Biancheri rather a pal of yours in the old days? Lazaretto’s just the old man’s style, I like to imagine. He was very go-ahead in his day.’
And how about the Cathars, I asked him. ‘How d’you get on with them?’
‘Ask no questions, my love, and you’ll be told no lies — well, not many, anyway.’ He laughed boisterously once again and showed me to the door. ‘Where are you off to next?’
I said I was going to the Great Bazaar, to look into the matter of the Roof-Race.
‘Ah yes, the Roof-Race, our Bull Run. There’s money in that, too. Keep your nose clean.’
The Great Bazaar was just at the end of his street. My only remembrance of it concerned the Roof-Race, when in ’84 I raced with the then Mahmoud (now Azzam) through its tumultuous arcades to catch the climactic moments of the Bazaar Leap and the finish. It was still the same shape, with its Market Gate and its Castle Gate, but that was all. It had been rebuilt after the Intervention as a shopping-mall, and was interspersed with a dozen or more coffee shops at which, as I explored the place, swarms of young people sat on sofas or stood at counters noisily talking — junior commerçants or financiers, I assumed, having their lunch break.
The old pattern of the Bazaar, with its myriad alleys open to the sky, had been preserved, and the shops did somehow retain a faintly Levantine air. They all had open fronts. Their produce was laid out in big trays, or hung in flouncy rows, and from their dark interiors the shopkeepers peered out, just as in the old days, like so many watchful serpents, sometimes hissing the terms of a reduction. It reminded me rather of the mock souks that have sprung up in some Arab countries, for the benefit of nervous tourists, at which even the haggling is a sort of pretence.
When I stopped for a coffee myself, and mentioned it to young people at the counter, they were inclined to agree. ‘But then,’ said one girl, ‘the whole Great Bazaar is a con, isn’t it? The Castle Gate isn’t really a gate after all, and look at the Roof-Race circuit!’
I hadn’t seen the Roof-Race circuit, so they took me up to a viewing site above the café. ‘See what I mean?’ said the girl. ‘What’s real about that?’
Nothing was. The old Roof-Race had been run over a ramshackle antique course full of dangerously miscellaneous obstacles, chimney-pots and wind-towers, drainpipes and balustrades, intersected everywhere by the open-roofed alleys that ran below: a medieval, maze-like course immemorially supposed to have been the route run by the legendary Messenger to reach Gamal Abdul Hussein. It was all too real, and people died running it, or jumping over the round open space that was the crux of the Great Bazaar. Now almost the whole roof of the new, concrete mall was perfectly flat, and the only obstacles were artificial bumps sometimes, rather like very high speed-bumps, and concrete chimneys dotted here and there. The roof was still split this way and that, to correspond with the bazaar alleys below, but I noticed that in every case it sloped downwards to the gap, and the line of sight was clear everywhere. A white steel fence ran all around the circuit; dotted here and there were view platforms like the one we were on.