Georgia Giacopazzi, treading carefully and slowly because of the very high heels she is wearing, comes down the wide sweep of thickly-carpeted stairs. And she wants to have a last look at the house about which she has from time to time over the last twenty-five years been curious.
The house is much as she had expected it to be – inherited money plus style (her contribution), order plus bits of bad taste such as the folly with its life-size plaster guru (his contribution). And to think it was he who told me that gin and orange was a common drink. ‘A shop-girl’s drink, Georgia.’
She had not imagined that they would have become such an old, old and ailing couple. Several times over the last forty-eight hours she had looked at them and thanked her own peasant ancestry from whom she had inherited robustness and a supple body, and maybe the English climate was kinder to the skin.
Georgia Giacopazzi has, since the Swinging Sixties and some gossip columnist interest, been known to the public simply as Giacopazzi. Giacopazzi’s plumpish, ageless face has, for forty years or more, looked at her readers from the back cover of millions of copies of her novels, and smiled nicely.
Giacopazzi’s novels are not nice – at least that is the impression one receives from jacket illustrations, for no matter what she writes her publishers see that on the jacket the illustrator spills blood, bares male torsos and drapes chilly (or aroused) women in wet satin. No, they are not nice, but she never intends niceness. Niceness is not a reason why she sells everywhere from Hudson Bay to Alice Springs. Giacopazzi has the knack. She is a good storyteller of death and love, sex and mystery who keeps her readers page-turning to the end. She is a genre writer who appeals to people who know that the main ingredient of a book ought to be enjoyment for the reader. Giacopazzi has never won an award, never been seriously reviewed, never been invited on a TV panel of real writers, yet she is number three in any list of most-read authors. And her books have never been nice.
But she has now written another sort of book. It is the reason why she has left home and is visiting people, some of whom she has not seen for almost fifty years. The book is about them.
The house, whose stairs she now descends, was built in the Sixties in Johannesburg which, in that city, means that it is an old, mellow place. Designed to suit the nine months of summer, the place is spacious, airy, almost doorless, galleried and open-planned around a slightly Moorish courtyard. It is a rich house in a rich suburb full of Liberal jews and of rich Rhodesians who ran away before it became Zimbabwe. Georgia Giacopazzi’s conscience has sometimes been troubled by the size of her own income, but at least she has worked for it herself, worked long and hard for it over forty years. If she sold in thousands rather than millions, she would earn less than a teacher. These ex-Rhodesian ex-pat Brits have lived for forty years on the long, hard, hungry labour of others who finished up with nothing, not even their old age.
She can hardly wait to get away from them and their beautiful home.
Inside the house, sounds and light play tricks. The girl and her grandmother are not close by, but the girl’s voice drifts clearly through fretted apertures and stone archways.
Georgia Giacopazzi coughs to signal her approach but she cannot compete with the girl’s raised jaw-cracking English of a certain type of South African. The girl has always attended a school wherein the accent is fostered and enhanced – more English than the English, these Brits speak of England as ‘Home’ unto the third and fourth generation of settlers.
Georgia Giacopazzi smiles, not eavesdropping but listening professionally, for of course Georgia Giacopazzi is a novelist with an ear for convincing dialogue.
She slows her progress because she is curious to hear the rest of the conversation between the girl and her grandmother – after all, one of the reasons she has come all this way is not only to seek permission for some entries in her new novel, but to satisfy a long-lived curiosity about the grandmother.
The girl’s voice comes clearly from the garden room. ‘Well, Granny, I should be absolutely prepared to have hormone implants at seventy if it’s the means of keeping old age at bay for twenty-five years.’
‘Not twenty-five – ten, maybe – no way could she pass for forty-five. Those fair, plumpish Englishwomen of her type always manage to keep their wrinkles at bay; their problem is running to fat.’ Her own body was spare.
‘She’s not plumpish, she’s just not shrivelled up. You’re seeing her as a contemporary, Granny darling. I see her from my viewpoint and I don’t think she looks fifty even… I mean, just compare her to Ma…’
‘Diplomatic of you, sweetheart, not to compare her to this old strip of biltong.’
‘Oh Granny, you are just sweet.’
‘Darling child, this country isn’t kind to women’s bodies.’
‘Right on. So, when a thing like this HRT thingy is discovered, we should take advantage of it.’
‘Never mind, darling, you are only just getting your hormones, it is forty years before you will have to think about replacing your lost ones.’
Georgia Giacopazzi clicks her high heels across the terrazzo hallway and smiles as she approaches the girl and her grandmother. ‘My packing’s done, I’ll be out of your hair in an hour.’
‘It has been a pleasure.’
The politeness of her age and class armoured anything that might lie behind the formal cliché. For the two days of her visit, Georgia Giacopazzi had tried to find a chink through which she might glimpse in the old woman the girl who fifty years ago must have been passionate and unscrupulous. But nothing. She had revealed no more of her feelings about their common bond, if that is what it was, than Georgia Giacopazzi herself had done. Two women whose lives had been drastically changed by the fortunes of a war that had been over for forty years.
And when Georgia Giacopazzi had asked her if she was disturbed by anything in the draft of the new Giacopazzi book, she had said politely, ‘I hardly think it matters, it is only fiction.’