The straight-faced SAA steward asked, quite politely, ‘Something to drink,’ but delayed ‘Madam?’just those few seconds too long after the question.
‘Danke. Suurlemonene?’
‘Certainly, Madam.’ He smiled as he poured and handed her the fruit juice. ‘Wull there be anything ulse I can bring for you?’
‘Danke. Ek is moeg, ek wil rus.’
He offered her a blanket.
Although she was neither tired, nor wanted to rest, she accepted it. She had been travelling this route for years enough now to know that speaking a few words of their language to an Afrikaans steward could get a buzzer answered after the cabin lights were dimmed. With a British passport and a name like Giacopazzi, it was not a bad idea to ensure one’s comfort – it was a long flight from Jo’burg to London.
Having finished the fruit juice, Georgia Giacopazzi settled back into her seat, grateful that the seat next to her was not taken by somebody who might have bought one of her paperbacks which were always on sale in airport and railway-station bookshops. Some people seemed to think that because they had laid out some cash, a small percentage of which eventually trickled down to the author, that gave them permission to ask personal questions. If they paid ten times the price of a book for a restaurant meal, they wouldn’t dream of asking the chef, ‘How old are you?’ or ‘I thought you’d be taller.’
It was partly her own fault, she had always agreed to a clause in her contracts that her books show a picture all glitz and glam. Image-making. Conning readers that I’m a nice lady – nice old lady. Her agent, Bruce, had said, ‘Not old, Georgia. It’s a charming picture,’ and slid on to talking of the possibility of getting a mini-series for the new book. Georgia was still ambitious and normally egoist enough to want to see herself portrayed by some internationally-known star if the mini-series was made.
Who could play Hugh? Fascinated as always by looking down on clouds, her mind drifted. Ronald Pickup? He looked a lot like Hugh. If the Australians came up with their share for the series, then Hugh might for ever be transformed into Ronald Pickup. He would have liked that.
She had settled Charlie Partridge’s part whilst she was writing the book – the American who played Columbo… something Falk… Peter! His face exactly Charlie’s. And Dolly Partridge? Georgia knew who would be right to play Dolly. That bright woman… what was her name?… in the play and then the film… leave it and it will come.
The cloud was thinning and becoming islands in space. It had been quite weird how, when she started writing this book, she discovered that she had such an extraordinary total recall of those six years of the Second World War that she scarcely needed to do any research. She had done ten earlier books, but none of them was at all like Running Away From the Smoothing Iron. Why had she decided to write it at all? Merely to unload her memory, and free some of the cluttered old cells? Or was it to say the things she had never said to the people involved? Oddly, of all the questions she had been asked by interviewers, none of them had ever asked why.
‘Mrs Giacopazzi, you have admitted that your new novel is totally autobiographical…’
‘Yes, so far as a novel may be autobiography.’
‘The events are factual?’
‘As I recall them. But I say that it is still a novel – a fiction.’
‘But for your characters you have used your husband, your friends, neighbours, your… lovers – without, as one might say, halt or hindrance – using their real names.’
‘Well, there seemed little point in trying to disguise them. In any case, it was all a long time ago.’
Respectfully, because Georgia Giacopazzi is becoming an old lady, ‘May I ask why you did not write a conventional autobiography?’
‘I think it is because it was the only way that I could know what those people I was so close to at that time actually thought and felt. A novelist is always inside the heads and hearts of her characters. An autobiographer is inside only her own, and merely an observer of anyone else.’
‘I see.’
‘It seemed important to me to try to understand the people with whom I spent the wartime years, the women especially. At the time, I was very young. Concerned only with myself. Those six years made up a very significant part of my life… not significant, that’s not the word… essential, in the way of a distilled essence – condensed. Time during those years did seem to have the quality of denseness. So much could happen within the space of a few days… hours even. On VE Day, I was a very different woman from the young housewife I was at the start of the War. It was being with the women, you see. Had it not been for the war and being involved with the women… Good Lord, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘How do you imagine they will feel, these people – finding themselves in a popular bestseller?’
Georgia Giacopazzi withdrew her gaze from the cabin window now that they had left behind the cloud landscape and there was only the endless blue of space to see.
Collins! Pauline Collins would be Dolly.