The Boeing 747 was within half an hour of its first touchdown. Georgia Giacopazzi could see nothing in the cabin window except for her own reflection. An unruffled face whose outlines had been lightly padded and pouched by years. Lively hair controlled and drawn back in a simple chignon. Seen indistinctly like this, if she raised her head to stretch the loose skin beneath her chin, the well-preserved elderly woman looked much like the young Georgia Kennedy. As she had done when writing Eye of the Storm, she had for the past half-hour been thinking dispassionately about herself when young. Not only Georgia Kennedy, but Georgia Kennedy and the men who had meant something to her – none had been more difficult than Nick Crockford to put into the novel. Others had been easier, because once she began to write they gradually became characters in the novel, but not Nick Crockford.
In retrospect, events seldom seem to have been random: human beings are usually able to find a pattern, a design, and call it Fate… God’s will – ‘If I had only done so and so, I should never have…’, ‘If I had had ’flu that week instead of the next it would have been different…’ or, ‘If I had left the house five minutes later…’ So it was with Georgia Giacopazzi. During the writing of the book, she had come to the conclusion that the events of the next fifty years of her life, about which she had thought so much over the last year, had had their beginnings at the meeting in the Town Hall.