Mrs Giacopazzi sorted through a file of photographs making last minute decisions about the illustrations for Giacopazzi Territory, the book of beautiful illustrations of Hampshire locations that were connected with Giacopazzi and her novels. There was something about the sketch Monty Iremonger had done on Farley Mount that revealed more of her youthful self than the photographs.
What a good painter he was.
Long after his death, a dozen or so of his Markham water-colours, hanging in the local Trust House that had once been Monty’s local, had been ‘discovered’ by a London art critic who had written about them and so made Iremongers desirable and rare. Monty had left most of his paintings to Eve, who had never sold any or even exhibited them. Occasionally, usually on Georgia’s birthday, a little water-colour would come by special delivery with just the message, ‘For Georgia from Eve’.
All these years putting off and putting off doing anything about meeting. It wouldn’t have been so difficult: Eve and I both had the money and the means to arrange it. Always tomorrow, next month, next year. How has it all gone so quickly? One day we are young and the next the party’s over. But there’s always been so much, so much to get done. To write the books, to get the money to be secure.
She went to the window of her suite.
Park Lane, the roads around Marble Arch and the Cumberland Hotel, as far as the eye could see, were solid with unmoving traffic moving in the shimmering haze of exhaust fumes and reflected heat.
Room Service delivered a tray of Malvern water and ice.
‘How do you manage to keep going in London?’ she asked the young man as he set the tray beside her. ‘Look, do you see that woman down there? I’ve been watching her. She obviously got fed up with sitting in the traffic jam so she paid off her taxi. She’s been trying to get off that little grassy island for five minutes, but she daren’t step off in case the traffic moves.’
The waiter held back the voile curtain and took a polite interest in Madam’s observation.
‘Is a bad place to get out of a taxi-cab. No crossings, no traffic-lights. She can be there till tomorrow.’
‘No, see… she’s getting back in the same taxi she paid off just now. She’s laughing… How can she laugh… how can she even breathe?’
‘Is better than Barcelona, madam.’ He was smiling cheekily at her.
‘Is that where you are from?’
‘Not exactly… but everyone knows that waiters are called Manuel and they come from Barcelona.’ He poured the chilly Malvern. ‘Will that be all, madam?’
‘Thank you.’ She handed him a pound coin which he accepted with a polite nod.
‘Madam, London is the most exciting place in the world. I love it even if I die from the traffic gasses. Is not always like this… not always full of flocks of chattering starlings with cameras and backpacks. This week is Chelsea Show. Today railway strike, it makes much more cars but everybody wants to come to London, madam. Is the most exciting city in the world.’
‘Perhaps it is not true that youth is wasted on the young.’
Not understanding, he nodded and left, and she returned to the window, smiling at the thought that she would soon be far from the most exciting city in the world, she would be standing high on the Downs where she lived and have neither sight nor sound of any combustion engine other than perhaps their own tractor.
Chelsea Week. That meant that it was almost round to D-Day again. Forty-five years since Overlord, and nearly fifty since war was declared. It must have been about this time of year that Eve and I met for the first time. Quite an anniversary. I suppose there will be fiftieth anniversary celebrations of singing the old songs, letting off fireworks, taking the children for a nice evening out to watch mock battles.
We’re a warlike nation… too many Hughs, not enough Nicks. In Markham Park, nothing had ever been erected to celebrate one single peaceful human achievement, only a cenotaph and a grey cannon on a pedestal, no work of art or bandstand or lily-pond – just the weapon and the names of the young flesh and blood and bones of Markham’s young men.
She turned again to the small water-colour sketch that was to be the cover illustration of Giacopazzi Territory. A gifted man, Monty, and nobody had realized. They should erect a statue of him. She smiled to herself – Montague I, the painter/postman. Six foot of solid postman’s uniform with cycle clips. A lot better in the Market Square than Mr Palmerston.
Fifty years since he had done the little portrait. Was this young Georgia Kennedy, painted standing at the top of the hill with the outline of the Farley Monument in the background, already beginning to slide down the slope of time? Or had she been at the bottom of a new career preparing to climb up? Who cares. There can’t be a lot more slope left. For a while she had thought that Eye of the Storm had left her written out. When there’s nothing to say, shut up. But not yet. There’s always something else to say.
Meeting Eve again, meeting Leonora, Dorothy and Mrs Farr – not Farr, Mrs O’Neill now – they would make her mind fizz. She knew that the need to write would begin to well up, building pressure until she would shut herself away for six months. Shut the door on the beautiful bowl of a valley she practically owned outright now, on the Downs and the fields; shut her ears to the muffled thud of cloven hooves and the pattering of dung as the cattle went down the lane, to the clop of hooves as the others rode out on to the Downs, to the hiss of rain as it drove across the valley, and to the human sounds of village life.
Even now, before Eye of the Storm was in true book form, it had started again. Even as she had been standing watching the great snarl-up around Marble Arch, she had begun to think about this woman who had been marooned on the grassy island in the midst of all that aggressive traffic fighting for each inch of territory.
Plump and white-haired in her silk trousers and loose jacket, the woman had calmly looked at the pond and wandered around on the grass, apparently oblivious to her predicament at the hub of the welded mass of traffic, before she became aware of the craziness of her situation. She had laughed with the taxi driver, shrugging her shoulders and throwing up her hands, then got in and sat in the back, still expressing with her hands and laughing. What was she doing? Something positive, exciting probably. Where was she going? Somewhere enjoyable without any stress or hassle. But what had brought her to this point in her life?
I suppose writers have a kind of Fallopian tube in which the first cell of ideas form, which then become fertilized by something like this incident, and which are eventually born as full-blown books. I hope that I die with my tube still unemptied.
This woman in the midst of all that revving and roaring was calm and unruffled, amused even, at finding herself on a tiny grassy island with water and flowers and trees…
A spot of safety…
Markham was thus in the midst of war…
The Town Restaurant kitchens at its calm centre…