The guest of honour, the man de Vèze admires is not here yet. There are a good half-dozen of them waiting for him on the lawn, the French Consul at Singapore and his lady, two other diplomats both over thirty, one grey with a beard like a monkey’s arse, the other pink in a salmon shirt with a double-barrelled Christian name. Also just arrived are a young historian very much in vogue, Philippe Morel, and his wife Muriel.
The most striking figure in the group is a man relatively advanced in years, quick movements, old-fashioned monocle, very sprightly, brings to mind a comic character in a play, the engaging con man, jug ears, he plays to the gallery while they wait, he has introduced himself to de Vèze: I am Baron de Clappique.
De Vèze would never have believed that there had actually been such a person as Clappique.
‘It’s not his real name,’ whispers the Consul, ‘actually he’s a journalist, Max Goffard, he’s promised me he will behave himself, but he’s getting restless, he came expressly to meet our guest of honour, spring a surprise on him, I thought it would be a good idea to bring them together, they’ve known each other for ages, but our Monsieur Goffard has decided he wants to be called Clappique, I’m afraid there might be trouble.’
The journalist steps up his brusqueness.
‘Ears, lie down! They are radar dishes not cauliflowers, for years I was called ‘Cauliflower’, I fought the first war with these cauliflowers, it was modern technology that saved me, I went through the second with my radar receivers, the war-correspondent’s ultimate weapon! ah yes, I remember the soldiers in their red trousers, the summer of 1914, the Cossacks already close to Berlin, the Germans surrendering for bread and butter, and yesterday morning Johnson decided to unleash his B52s on Vietnam, it’s a funny old business!’
Everyone on the lawn is outraged, the Americans haven’t understood a thing, they’ve got to be stopped one way or another, or at least restrained.
The Consul has told de Vèze in confidence that the journalist fought all through the First World War and that in 1918 he was the only survivor of his whole Company.
‘But the experience didn’t turn him into a stay-at-home, did you know he was also one of the survivors of the Hindenburg disaster? Not easy, not easy at all. Between the two world wars he wandered round the colonies, Morocco especially, the Riff wars in the 1920s, they called him “African” Goffard. Ask him to tell you about it,’ said the Consul, drawing on his meerschaum pipe, ‘then maybe he’ll stop calling himself Clappique.’
At seventy, Max Goffard is back in Asia again, working for a news agency.
‘Yeah,’ says he, ‘I don’t know if you’re like me but I can’t take Paris, the banks of the Seine, for a more than a week, that’s my limit, so off I toddle to Vietnam, the last of the colonial wars, I’ll have seen them all, all their struggles for independence since the Riff, the inter-war years, too right, that was a real war too, they were in a sense the forerunners, with some habits left over from the old days, not in the best taste, Vietnam is the end of an era, I’ve come full circle, I also wanted to go to Peking, but no visa, and no one intervened to help me get one, I’m not liked everywhere, people complain that I cast a shadow.’
A smile, Max’s eyes swivel towards the garden gate:
‘But I’ll get even!’
While they wait for the guest of honour to arrive, the Consul’s wife suggests a game of croquet, there was no time for her husband to do more than glare at her, the others acquiesced, fancy, the best she can come up with is a game of croquet saying it was the latest thing in Singapore.
Max was enthusiastic:
‘It’s starting up again, 1914 all over, no, ’25 or ’26, I did play in 1914 but the last time was ’26, in Rabat, in the gardens of the Residence, Lyautey’s place, a great moment, I’ll have to tell you about Lyautey, you know in those days I talked a lot with our beloved Lyautey, who’d overstayed his welcome, about the colonies, the Riff war. He was all Indochina, he’d interrupt me and say, Clappique, I’m an Asia man, absolutely! And I’d have to listen, and fascinating it was too, now and then I’d be permitted to say a word about the Riff, anyway, until he gets here, everyone look to their mallets!’
Max has explained the rules to the beginners, the Morels and the two diplomats, the grey one and the pink one: the nine hoops stuck in the lawn, the ball you hit with a mallet, but please not as in golf, you barbarian, watch me, face forward, legs apart, mallet swinging like a pendulum between the legs, eyes front, then a smart, sharp tap, clack, taking turns, in teams of two, through the nine arches, yes nine, I didn’t make the rules, (to the pink diplomat) no sniggering! nine hoops, in order, and then turn for home, Rabat, though, was a different kettle of fish!
Max is starting to feel hot, he swings his arms about, shuffles his feet, blinks a lot, no, he says to de Vèze, I never liked being called ‘The African’, in those days, during the Riff wars, I wasn’t very good at my trade, shush! not a word, at times Max goes off into a kind of trance and ignores all and sundry, he lets his eyes settle on the ocean, the lawn, the trees, not very good at my trade at all.
In one corner of the garden, on the side nearest the sea, there is a twisted knot, which looks beyond unravelling, of roots which turn into branches or trunks, branches that take root in the soil, a tangle of trees and leaves so intricately intertwined that you can’t make out what’s what, your eye returns to the lawn, the Consul said that his garden is a bottomless pit, you stop tending, draining, uprooting for just one week, and nature sneaks back, puts out shoots, you can’t see it happening, and then one fine morning you find yourself with creepers swarming all over the veranda, and as for the lawn, don’t ask! a very fragile thing is a real lawn, the soil, the climate, a true, even green, cut with shears once a week by gardeners on their knees.
Max surveys the garden, a large white patch stands out against the green, nine hoops, ages ago a chap in a white djellaba is playing croquet, only has one eye, in 1925 in the gardens of the Residence at Rabat, the man’s right eye is fine, he’s a quick learner, he plays well, he’s one of the finest shots in the whole of the Atlas, old man, lost his eye in a shoot-out with our side, now he’s one of us, one of the best formal surrender ceremonies we ever organised, you should have seen the way he handed over his rifle! Anyone would have thought he was giving it to us to clean, us the overlords! Pity that times change, a terrific do, yes that’s really the scent of orange blossom, 1925, end of an era that no one sees coming, the moment when Lyautey is about to be pushed on to the sidelines by Pétain, but no one sees it coming.
Spit-roasted mutton, no, braised lamb, at the Residence the spit-roasts are generally left to the tourists, we have more sophisticated palates, a baked-mud oven, a very fierce flame, when the fire begins to make hot embers a bucket of water is thrown on to them, two or three sucking lambs are laid on the cinders, the oven is closed and made airtight, it’s left to cook for ten or twelve hours, the meat is incomparably tender, Lyautey is very partial to a game of croquet, see how considerate he is with the man with one eye, a government school, strategy, alliances, your shot, you’ll understand.
In Morocco at that time things are not going at all well, so play a game of croquet, make an effort not to gloat too much over Spanish setbacks in the northern Riff, thirteen thousand hidalgos killed in two nights at the start of the revolt, they never recovered from that, lots of prisoners, the privates, had their throats cut; for the officers the Riffians demanded ransoms with fairly short deadlines, Lyautey likes watching his guests eat, Moroccan-style, with their fingers, looks down rather on those who use both hands and the ones who guzzle their food and leave nothing on their plates, it was better to be a prisoner of Abd el-Krim’s regulars, with them you didn’t get much to eat but at least they tried to abide by modern laws, whereas the others, the not-so-regulars who fought only when the enemy crossed their land, had no idea of how to treat prisoners.