The aircraft cabin lights were now dimmed. Although the drone of the engines was soporific, Georgia Giacopazzi was quite awake. She could easily have buzzed the steward and ordered a gin and tonic, but she preferred to let her mind wander over what was ahead.
Even though for years she had not needed much sleep, she was always able to relax, giving her time to think through a problem or anticipate a sticky situation. When she was asked how she managed to fit so much into twenty-four hours, her smart answer was, ‘When you are all asleep, I’m working’, and it was true.
Then she had started work on something very different from what was implied in her smart answer. She felt apprehensive. It had all seemed so simple when she had talked to her publisher about using real people and real events in the novel.
‘No problem,’ (the book had an American publisher – Fiskess, Frankel Books), ‘we’ll write and get them to agree to it.’
‘And if they do object?’
Nathan Fiskess had patted down the air. ‘That’s for our legal people to sort out. But I don’t believe we’re talking litigation here.’
‘I think perhaps I should ask them personally.’
‘Write the book first,’ Nat had advised.
‘You mean let them see what I’ve written?’
‘They’ll love it. Georgia – they’re wrinklies now.’
‘Thanks, Nat, they’re my contemporaries.’
‘Giacopazzi is nobody’s contemporary.’ Nathan Fiskess spread his hands. ‘We can stand a little litigation now and then. I promise you, Georgia, watch my lips and put a dollar on my words – write what you like and they’ll love it. We worry – you write. The Giacopazzi circus rolls again.’
She smiled wryly now as she remembered his grin as he flicked an imaginary whip. That’s what the Giacopazzi industry had become: a great twenty-four-hour-a-day, world-wide glitzy entertainment of books and videos and films. Nothing arty-farty about Nat Fiskess: he was in publishing for the bread. If anybody had created Giacopazzi from the English novelist, it was Nat.
So far, he had been right. There had been no problems in Johannesburg, where she had expected some. To write the book, she had bugged her memories of those who had been her closest friends during the war years, and had written a fiction around the facts of their lives. And now she was facing them in turn – those who were left. Had they remembered her kindly? A flash came to her of the emaciated, drip-fed figure in the luxurious room in Johannesburg. I wasn’t unkind … nor unfair.
She turned her mind now to how to handle the reunion.
A reunion of wrinklies who had once been young and who had been arbitrarily thrown together in wartime Britain. Hardly thrown, she thought, remembering their sedate first meeting. All of us wearing hats except Mrs Farr.
I can’t remember ever seeing Mrs Farr wearing a hat: she always wore a scarf tied behind like an Italian peasant woman. I suppose it was small things like that which made her different. There was something about Mrs Farr that was rather romantic. Why didn’t I remember that when I was writing about her? Mrs Farr had taken to Markham, but Markham had never really taken to her. Has it taken to her now? Probably not, unless in the last fifty years Markham has changed out of all recognition.