Georgia Giacopazzi thought that the last leg of the long flight was always worse than the rest. A man seated across the gangway, wearing expensive aftershave and gold jewellery, tried to chat her up. He was an American and he set her off remembering the first time she had met one in real life. Nineteen forty-two, just after Hugh had gone off with Floozie.
Mrs Giacopazzi guessed that her seat partner dined out on any name he collected. He didn’t come on to her. He was in his late forties, the wrong age to find well-known women anything other than interesting items. She could recognize those men who were stimulated by gossip column legends. Giacopazzi’s serious chatters-up were either under thirty, or over fifty and not given to scent and talcum. The men of forty or fifty were too insecure, too busy spreading their thinning hair and shoring up a fading macho image to think sexually of women older than themselves.
She did her PR duty with this one, then she allowed her eyes to close so that he would think she slept. At some convention, he could say ha-ha that he had slept with the Giacopazzi woman, and that her chin sagged and she had wrinkles that didn’t show in publicity shots… and Christ, how the woman snored.
She drifted back into her favourite project. If the mini-series was going to be made of Eye of the Storm, then it was crucial that they got Nick right. She knew who she would like. Ever since she had seen him in the Butch Cassidy film and then when she had met him for real a couple of years back. Of course they weren’t likely to get him, but he had had exactly that same unaffected sexuality as Nick. Of course he was more handsome than Nick, but the kind of production they were likely to want to make of Eye was sure to be internationally glitzy. It was more important to get Eye of the Storm right than any of the earlier films. If Ukay-Ozzi Pictures made the series, they would never put the Nick character in an unglamorous AFS uniform.
That period when Hugh went overseas and Nick was in Liverpool was the longest part of the war. Nick wrote regularly, on each neat page she had been able to hear his voice. His voice angry at the living conditions of Liverpool people, his intelligent voice coming through in his forecast of a changed post-war Britain, and his voice tender with love and passion for Georgia Kennedy.
Nearly fifty years ago now, yet she still remembered how much she had longed for him, so that every love-song on the wireless about separated couples seemed directed at herself and Nick.
‘The very thought of you, and I forget to do,
The little or-din-ary things that ev’ryone ought to do…
I see your face in ev’ry flower, your eyes in stars above,
It’s just the thought of you, the very thought of you, my Love.’
The man with the gold jewellery glanced sideways at the old woman humming quietly to herself.
Nick had received two bravery awards for going into explosive or dangerous situations. When it had come to writing the scene in the book about how he had tackled the burning farm, she had seemed to have total recall, and she had awakened many times since with the smell of burning straw in her nostrils.
I wish Mary Wiltshire was still alive, I should have liked to know what she thought when she saw me and Nick going about together.
Once, before Hugh had come home on the awful embarkation leave, Nick had come back to Markham with seven days off. They had gone out together every day. A goodnight kiss, and that had been all. Ages before, he had said that in time she would fall to him like a ripe medlar. Before Hugh’s leave, it had seemed that that time might be near, but she had been faithful to her vows to Hugh.
Lord, how naïve I was. She still had the letter Hugh had written to her after he got back on the XJ-R6 station, could remember the words, they were stuck in her memory. ‘I did not imagine that you’d be so upset. I had heard the gossip that you had been seen playing tennis with Crockford. When you said that he was doing the garden, I felt a lot easier in my conscience. I thought you were having a fling with your old flame and we could call it Love-All.’
Oh… too long ago… too long a-go.
Yet, the knowledge that she had not been able to see him for what he was when she married him still rankled. For she considered herself something of a judge of character who was seldom wrong in her first impression of people and who saw through her fictional characters as soon as they hit the page.
At least it had rankled until a few days ago when she had seen them. What nothings they were. Rich, idle, boring, selfish nothings. She pictured it now: Hugh lying there served by houseboys in white uniforms and red sashes wearing gloves to serve at table; maids in caps and aprons; gardeners in khaki work-clothes and leather kneecaps, keeping the swimming-pool immaculate and the lawns bright green… Old Hugh, his white Clark Gable singed yellow from thousands of cigarettes. Old Hugh with dewlaps sitting staring or lying abed half paralysed and pathetically ga-ga. And Floozie… walnut-skinned and juiceless, her sexy legs shrivelled to sticks. With children who talked of nothing but the state of the rand against the dollar, and the unreliability and ingratitude of servants… only the girl of all of them had been worth expending any effort on – at least she was whilst she was going through a liberal, protesting phase. Let’s hope it’s more than a phase.
God what awful, useless lives, living off the tobacco crops which other people grew for them. They had never planted or harvested anything – except the money.
Georgia Giacopazzi thought of the fields and meadows surrounding her own home. Good growing land in a fertile valley. On acres where the earth had once been impoverished, they had brought it back into good heart themselves. She smiled faintly, and clutched her thighs at the imagined feel of the great old-fashioned tractor seat vibrating as she drew the chains across a rutted field; then the live smell as their boots crushed clods when they inspected the new grass and clover; then the years of growing crops. Although she loved to be in the throes of writing, she worked quickly because she could hardly wait to get out to do something in the fields or milking-parlour.
But… in the beginning it had been the novels that paid for it all. And then the meadows and fields and animals began to pay for themselves.
Her mind again drifted back to Hugh as it had occasionally over the years. It is a recurring theme in many of her novels, the puzzle of a man approaching middle age who marries a young girl and who, once they are married, tires of her and leaves her unfulfilled and takes an equally young mistress. She felt in her briefcase for a pencil and her notes for Goodnight, Broadway Baby! – the novel she had talked over with her editor before leaving for Jo’burg.
Reading it again, it sounded crass. Perhaps I’m dried up… written out now that I’ve done Eye, now that I’ve seen Hugh. Perhaps it’s all done with. Well, that would be a relief. Wouldn’t it? Forty years of being addicted to fictitious lives, fictitious people, and never feeling free for long enough to enjoy her other life. Would it be a relief not to feel compelled to keep saying something?
The aftershave man perked up. ‘Another bestseller coming on?’
Georgia Giacopazzi smiled at him and winked conspiratorially.
‘Do you take your characters from life?’
‘Very often.’
From now on he would be sure to read the new Giacopazzi paperback – hoping to find himself in it, recognizing himself not as the foolish, perfumed, middle-aged character with his hair parted too low, but as the absolute and utter shit that the young heroine fell for. Her male readers usually quite liked the Hugh character – or Chris, or whoever was the current utter cad who dropped his wife and went off with a rich society bird.