Before the Boeing touched down at Palma, the young Afrikaner steward came to Georgia Giacopazzi holding her new paperback, Flying High, and asked her to sign it.
‘Any message?’
‘It’s for my girl, Nel.’
It always was – always for my girl… for my wife… for my Mom.
‘What is your name?’
‘Piet.’
She wrote, conscious of the age spots on her hands, ‘For Piet, Eerste Offisie bediende who flew Giacopazzi ply na. With love – Giacopazzi.’
‘I have signed it for you. You must write the message for your girl.’
If it really was for his girl, then he could tell her that the message, ‘First-class officer who flew Giacopazzi like an arrow, with love’, was simply a personalized message. If not, then he would probably show the boys. The name Giacopazzi still meant something.
He read the message and looked pleased.
She said, ‘My Afrikaans is not good, I’m afraid. Does it make sense?’
‘I must tell my girl about your Afrikaans, or she might get the wrong idea.’
Georgia smiled up at him, ‘turning on the Giacopazzi’ as her agent put it. ‘That would never do would it, Piet?’
In the waiting area at Palma, Mrs Giacopazzi, not wishing to strike up conversation with anyone and break her mood, drank iced bottled water and focused her attention upon a magazine.
Where had the Giacopazzi-ing sprung from? When I was young I was never conscious of turning on to anybody. Was I ever anybody but myself? Giacopazzi came after the first book. That had been a good, steady, readable tale. It had got enough reviews in places like Melbourne and Dublin for her publishers to find something to say on the jacket of her second. It was the second book, wasn’t it, that had started the Giacopazzi legend?
Put the Blame on Eve.
Early Giacopazzi eroticism was to be found in Blame. Her publishers had hyped it up on the jacket with a pair of respectable though naked lovers, mouth to mouth at the remains of an apple. Undeservedly, Blame’s reputation for sexiness grew from a number of double meanings the author had not intended – at the time she had never heard of touching up, except in the restoration of paintwork context – and some Freudian images which she had. There were also a few typographical errors that were bizarre and funny. It was still read, but in the Eighties it was only a very mildly erotic book.
Mass-market readers began to expect Georgia Giacopazzi herself to be a femme fatale, seductress, sex symbol. And, to achieve her ambition to be rich, she had publicly become such. Even after she had turned fifty, the myths that surrounded her did not diminish. Nowadays, she had come to the conclusion that her age did not matter. Women loved her for the myth of agelessness that had grown up around her, and her assertion that it was good for women to express lust and desire, whilst men were aroused by her reputed extreme wealth and strings of young lovers: Giacopazzi at whatever age was a challenge-like Dietrich, Lenya, Collins.
The call to resume the flight to London roused her.
What in Hell’s name will they make of me? ‘They’ being those women still alive, whose lives she had ransacked for Eye of the Storm; the women who had known her before she became Giacopazzi.
‘Allow me.’
A too helpful arm encircled her waist to give her unnecessary and unwanted help up the steps of the aircraft.
‘How sweet of you.’
‘You’re Georgia Giacopazzi, aren’t you? My wife has read every one of your books.’
Until Eye of the Storm was in the bookshops, it was necessary to smile.
Momentarily, she was weary of the years of the hike, the hype and false front. For the first time since she had left, she longed for Markham, longed to turn the clock back to the eve of War, and leave it stopped at the time when she and Nick Crockford had sat on the grass in the garden of the old house in Station Avenue.