Driving towards Markham on seemingly the first dull day for months, Leonora Altzheiber’s companion asked, ‘Would you ever want to go back to live in your old home town, Leonora?’
Leonora Altzheiber, as she always did, considered the question before giving a glib answer. ‘Only if I could go back to Markham some time in the summer of 1944, before Georgia became all complicated and cleared off, and if I could stop time going beyond the summer. I was still innocent, virginal and happy.’
Her companion, the artist Fenella Standing, turned to look at her. ‘If you ask me you’ve still got the hots for your precious Georgia.’
‘Jealousy doesn’t suit you, Fenny. And in any case…’
‘In any case…?’
Leonora Altzheiber yanked the lighter from the dashboard of the car and pressed it hard on the tip of her cigarette. ‘In any case… she let me down.’
‘Because she went off with her lover and had a baby? And not necessarily in that order.’
Leonora went silent for several minutes. ‘It wasn’t like that. She let me down by leaving me to find my own way out of Markham. It is true that she was pregnant when she left…’
‘And poor little Lena had her nose put out of joint.’
‘Oh Fenny! You do like to bitch it up sometimes. Her nose was not put out of joint. Quite the opposite… she was the only one in whom Georgia confided. Georgia told me she was pregnant ages before that Christmas when Nick had an accident and they went away. Nobody knew except Little-Lena, not Nick, not even Eve Hardy. I was the only one to know. And I still know the quite vital bits Georgia has chosen to leave out of her book. She has copped out. But I know.’
‘“… And everyone will know, because you told those blabbering trees…”’ Irritatingly to Leonora Altzheiber, her friend sang and hummed the old Ink Spots song.
‘Well, they won’t, Fenny dear, not from me.’
‘Frau Altzheiber! You do still have a yen for your heroine.’
‘You might not know a single one, Fenny, but there are nice people dotted around the world, and Georgia Kennedy was one of them.’
Experienced novelist though she was, Georgia Giacopazzi knew that she would be hard pressed to describe the emotion she felt when Mrs Partridge and Mrs O’Neill arrived at The Coach House. In herself, emotion manifested itself in an aching throat from trying to smile and not to cry. Dumbly shaking her head, she embraced the two old women.
‘Mrs Partridge! And Mrs Farr,’ was all that she could manage as she clung to them.
Ursula chewed her mouth and Dolly wiped her eyes. ‘Come on now, ease off or you’ll knock me off my stick.’
A round-faced woman in a smart suit and an expensive hair-do was with them.
‘You didn’t mind me bringing Bonnie? She’s a fan of yours. Read all Georgia’s books, Bonnie, haven’t you?’
‘Bonnie? All these years and I’ve still had you fixed in my mind as a rather better edition of Shirley Temple.’
‘She’s got two shops as well as the one Marie started,’ Mrs Partridge said proudly.
The waiters hovered and Georgia Giacopazzi turned to Ursula who was standing easily, legs apart and evenly balanced as she had always done.
‘Mrs Farr,’ Georgia clasped her hands again. ‘I can’t get over you, you are just the same.’
‘You must need your contact lenses then, Georgia. I’m a stringy old lady who intends to hang on as long as she can.
‘It’s a strange occasion, this one. Not one that either Dorothy or I could have expected to have lived to see when we first met. I was curious to see what you and Eve would be like.’
Mrs Partridge said, ‘Is it all true?’
Late that night, when the reunion was all over, Georgia Honeycombe sat in the ingle seat of her own room and recalled most vividly that moment facing Mrs Partridge when she had asked, Is it all true?
Other images. Leonora and her partner – whatever that term might imply. Georgia Honeycombe remembered how Leonora had made an entrance. The hotel manager had flourished open the door and ushered in Leonora Altzheiber. Sifting through the jumble of impressions Giacopazzi recalled moving forward to greet her and seeing at once that Leonora Altzheiber was the kind of woman who always made an entrance, a woman for whom doors were always opened with a flourish by some senior member of staff. It was not only her long-legged height and handsomeness, but a self-assurance that she was Somebody. Elegant and stylish, she turned the heads of both men and women.
Georgia Honeycombe sipped the smooth brandy and listened to the comfortable sounds of Pete clattering chains and calling to animals, and passed on in her thought to her reunion with Little-Lena.
‘Leonora!’
‘Mrs Kennedy, we meet at long last;’ Her voice had been throaty and sexy, a voice used to command and public speaking. She had shaken hands strongly and kissed the air at both sides of Georgia’s cheeks. ‘Strange meeting. Goodness, it is a long time since I cried, but I believe I shall not help it. I doubt if Fenella is aware that I’m even capable of it. You have no idea what influence this lady had on me, Fenny. Georgia, let me introduce my partner, Fenella Standing.’
Georgia, in shaking hands with the well-known young sculptress whose flame-red shaggy hair she wore as a kind of trade-mark, had detected signs of challenge in the young woman’s tight bottom lip, chin-up expression, but the girl had been polite. ‘I’m glad to meet Leonora’s famous friend. I’ve certainly heard so much about you from her. You really are as your book jackets show you – I had assumed they were re-touched portraits.’
At home, she recalled acknowledging the compliment with a smile. With her youth and looks, she can be generous with the odd crumb of compliment, but Desmond Morris would tag that challenge as sexual. She can’t think I’m interested in Leonora! Leonora’s use of the term ‘partner’ was intentionally ambiguous and androgynous. Leonora Altzheiber had a gossip-column reputation for taking lovers of all persuasions. Georgia Honeycombe knew well enough about gossip-column reputations – they sold whatever it was one had to sell. Leonora Altzheiber belongs to my Giacopazzi world, the one that says, Never mind what they write so long as they spell your name right.
Leonora had seemed determined to set the tone of their meeting on a light, sociable level with cocktail conversation. ‘You know Fenny’s work?’
‘Of course, and admire it.’
‘Really?’ said Leonora Altzheiber. ‘All those horses and stags in a state of rut – I can’t stand them. But Fenny’s all right.’
Now, with only a table-lamp and the flickering fire, Georgia allowed herself to consider the phenomenon of Frau Altzheiber. It’s all put on. Somewhere inside the beautiful, hard amber is the trapped fossil of Little-Lena Wiltshire. She’s beautiful, successful, no doubt fawned upon – what a problem she would have if she still had the Wiltshires in her life. Mary and Dick would always be on to her about grandchildren. Roy! I forgot to ask her about Roy. The amber theatre director had asked about Eve Hardy.
‘Eve is coming.’
‘She’s a titled lady, isn’t she?’
‘If you count foreign titles.’
‘With a name like Altzheiber, I have to.’
‘She married a Marquis she met in London during the war – one of her “League of Nations” lovers, I believe.’
‘And she got the Hardy fortune?’
‘No, the Marquis had one. Freddy Hardy had another family in America. I was sorry when I read of Waldemar’s death.’
‘Right! One of the good guys, you know.’ For a moment the defensive shutters had opened and vulnerable Little-Lena Wiltshire had peeped out. But only for a moment.
The sculptress had wandered off into the adjoining orangery with her drink, obviously only here at The Coach House because she was, for the present, smitten by Leonora.
‘What’s this for, Georgia?’ Leonora had asked, waving her hand at the luxurious buffet and bar. ‘Is it curiosity? Or do you expect reaction to what you’ve written about us all. It’s what novelists do, isn’t it?’
‘Not I. Sentiment… curiosity too, I imagine. Once I had resurrected the past, I simply did not want to die without trying to gather together those of us who are left.’
‘You are not dying?’ Without very much concern.
Georgia, the chameleon, watched herself slipping into the language of the glitterati.
‘Not as far as I know. At least, no more than anybody – but I’m getting on.’
‘I know, we all are. You are seventy-two, Georgia. And I am sixty. And we both look damn good and know it. Are those Markham’s famous centenarians? I can see they are. I must speak to the O’Neill widow. I have cornered the market in Niall O’Neill’s films – they are pure gold, irreplaceable, part of film history. Ha… and they’re all mine.’
Georgia Honeycombe gave herself some more brandy and stood it to warm on the ingle shelf. Leonora did it beautifully, the glitterati bit. She was taller than most women, long-legged and sexual, as she had been at sixteen.
Then the reception room door had opened and Nick’s great body had stood filling the space. As always when he entered a room, all faces had turned, and as always she had felt an erotic flicker at seeing him. He had stood there carrying Belle as he had carried Pete and Dixie and Tessa and in turn all of their children. This morning, under his weight, their bathroom scales had registered two hundred and thirty pounds and, when he remembered not to stoop, he was well over six foot tall. What did Leonora see? A weathered and white-maned man getting on in years, but still handsome, wearing his lion hair to his collar to cover the old burn scars? Or was she able still to see something of the younger Nick she had fantasized over in her developing years? He was still there for Georgia: intelligent, sensitive, caring eyes looking out from a weather-beaten face. As a gesture to the occasion he had dressed in his Harris tweed, and looked as though it and he were designed for each other. From the way he carried Belle, anyone could see that he was a family man who was at ease with children.
‘Leonora, you remember…?’
‘I know who it is… Nicholas.’ Her gaze had run appreciatively up and down. ‘Hello, Nick-long ages no see. I was going to marry you and you ran away.’ She laughed, and Giacopazzi – as she had become once Leonora appeared – remembered thinking that Leonora’s bridgework and porcelain capping were as beautiful and as expensive as her own. ‘Just look at you – you’re still one hell of a man, Nick. Perhaps it’s still not too late for us to elope.’ She had linked his arm and at once drew him towards the orangery. ‘Come where it’s quiet, I want to ask you everything.’
Georgia Honeycombe had guessed that Leonora wanted to take him to where the sculptress was. When she had been writing Eye of the Storm she had wondered whether she had gone too far with Little-Lena’s burgeoning sexuality, when at sixteen she was unbuttoning her blouse so as to tie it at the midriff to show off her breasts to the soldiers billeted in Markham, and rolling up shorts till there was no leg left to them. Is she still putting her goods in the window, but not selling? But perhaps she had sold: after all she was only a teenager when she had married Waldemar Altzheiber and put her foot on the first rung of her particular ladder of success. At sixty, she’s got off the art of seduction in public better than anyone I ever saw do it.
Now, the fumes of the warm brandy were relaxing. She did not try to order her impressions but let them take her over as she did when brain-storming ideas for a new novel. It was as well that she was not at present involved in writing anything, for when she was working on a novel she relied on being up and at her computer by five o’clock – drinking brandy always made her sleep on.
She recalled how Eve had come in with much the same kind of flourish as Leonora, but with much less awareness of the interest she created.
For Giacopazzi the novelist, the coming together of Tottie and Dixie was drama of a high order. For Georgia Honeycombe, mother to Dixie and great-grandmother to Belle, that event was fraught with danger, as was the meeting of Eve and Dorothy Partridge.
The door of the reception room had opened and a sturdy little boy of Belle’s age with fair curls had raced into the room and stood staring. For a moment she had thought that it was Belle. When he had seen that he was the centre of attention, he had turned and run back to Eve and the group of people with her to whom he obviously belonged.
‘Eve! I was beginning to think you might not come after all.’
‘You said bring family – so I did.’
‘All of them?’ Georgia Giacopazzi quickly took in the family entourage who followed. Entourage is the apt word, she thought.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Absolutely not. At last I may satisfy my curiosity.’
Eve’s family fussed her and Hildegard into armchairs. A family used to money and having things their way and oblivious to the attention their entrance had created.
‘This then is great-grandson Joshua.’ Still holding Belle, Georgia picked up the little boy, who was obviously quite used to attention. ‘You are beautiful.’
She heard Eve draw in a short breath ‘Oh! It’s…’ and was about to add something but changed her mind. ‘Don’t tell him, Georgia, he knows it. It’s true of course.’ She went to take the baby, but was beaten to it by Hildegard. ‘And this is his Papa, Fergus.’ Eve’s hand stretched towards the young man she obviously adored, ‘…and my daughter, Melanie – whom you once met as a small bump.’
‘I remember you well,’ Georgia said. ‘But you were called Tottie in those days.’ Melanie was exactly as Georgia had always imagined she would look, a lot like Dixie – very like Harry. Would Dolly see it?
Melanie’s English was Americanized. ‘I am still called Tottie quite often, but Hildegard doesn’t like it, do you, Hildy? Thinks it rather common.’ She was swish and urbane, but there was something about her that Georgia Honeycombe liked. That she carried the likeness of Harry Partridge perhaps?
Suddenly, Nick was beside her, carrying a tray of drinks, having apparently escaped from Leonora Altzheiber.
‘Nick doesn’t recognize me, Georgia,’ Eve said.
Nick Crockford looked blankly at the regal old woman, but quickly recovered his composure. ‘Of course I recognize you – Eve.’
She had held out her hand to be helped to her arthritic feet by Nick Crockford, who kissed her offered cheek. ‘Nick, come, you must be the one to take me over to meet Mrs Partridge again. How I love to have a large man to lean on (arthritic ankles, Nick – for my sins, I dare say. How on earth does Georgia move so easily?) I say! Can you imagine… one hundred years old. I hope that I can make it.’
Still deep in thought, Georgia Honeycombe automatically turned the last glowing log and added another, pleased to find that it was aromatic applewood. She recalled that there had come a moment at lunch-time when, as Eve had been sitting with Dorothy Partridge and Ursula O’Neill, she had looked around the reception room and thought, ‘Thank God the young people came; it would have been too ghastly without their chatter.’ As she had looked on at the incongruous coming together of the two old Markham families of Partridge and Hardy, Georgia Honeycombe had observed something of the same hardness still in Eve as there had been during the time when she was nursing. Imperious and elegant as she had become as a titled lady she probably still enjoyed shocking people.
The five women sat together, demonstrating by their grouping and manner that they were for the moment excluding the other people in the room. Leonora Altzheiber joined them.
Eve said, ‘So, Mrs Partridge, now you know that Freddy Hardy’s daughter was Harry Partridge’s whore, what have you got to say to her?’ She smiled, showing that she still had her own teeth.
The old lady did not return the smile. ‘He’d have probably ended up living on Longmile Hill if he hadn’t been killed, perhaps even somewhere better – Longmile isn’t much cop these days. What I’ve got to say is, I never did think over-much of the lot that lived up there. If he wanted to have a posh whore… well that was up to him. And seeing you got family that’s got Partridge blood, then I say it won’t do them any harm.’ Mrs Partridge was a match for Eve, who flicked a look at Georgia and said nothing.
Dorothy Partridge continued, ‘Only thing I want to know is, did you love my Harry?’
At once Eve said, ‘Good Lord, no. He liked women, but I don’t think he was mature enough for a woman, not to marry – certainly not for me to marry, if that’s what you were wondering. But he was pretty good fun, and he looked good in uniform.’
Mrs Partridge turned to Georgia Honeycombe. ‘Did you?’
‘I… don’t know. When I began writing, I did wonder whether I might find out… and if so, I wondered how I would feel about him. I guess that if I did love him, it’s all gone. I do know that I love Nick. I did then and I still do – seventy though we are. I loved being with Harry, he was very physical and full of dreams about what life would be like in the future – I loved that.’
Recalling it now in the familiarity of her own study, she saw that it had been a tricky moment. What would she have said if either herself or Eve had said that they did love him. In deference to the old lady, Giacopazzi had left out of Eye of the Storm the great anger she had felt when she discovered that she was pregnant. And that Harry Partridge – the great expert on love-making, the lover who was always prepared and wouldn’t ever get a woman pregnant – had, from what he had once confessed, probably impregnated one girl before he joined the forces, and had certainly managed to do so to two more. Thank the pill for small mercies; a pity it hadn’t been discovered before.
The situation had been changed by Belle hurling herself on to Georgia’s lap.
‘Have you met this bit of nonsense?’ she had said to no one in particular. ‘She is my great-grandchild, known as Belle.’ Georgia tickled her belly, which she loved; Belle wriggled her sturdy legs. ‘She belongs to my granddaughter, Tess, and her man, but I claim her on the grounds that I’m addicted to her and that Dixie’s too young at forty-four to be a grandmother.’ Having had her petting, Belle had wriggled down to be with her new-found playmate, Joshua.
The atmosphere eased. A waiter topped up their glasses. Then Ursula O’Neill had asked, ‘Why did you write the book?’
‘Why?’ She considered for a few moments, as she did when being interviewed on camera. ‘I don’t know really; perhaps because what happened during those six years was so important to the rest of my life… probably all of our lives. What happened then has had consequences for me for the rest of my life.’
Eve, gazing into space, rather tipsy and flushed, nodded. ‘David was killed. Our house burnt down. My Pa ran off with a girlie. My Ma got a wheelchair. I got Tottie. Harry was killed… and I made friends with a famous writer of detective books.’
Leonora did not take her eyes off Georgia, who continued, ‘I had wanted to write something about the war years, for once to get away from what I always do. I wanted to tell a story about a group of people who met during the war, but not one full of battle-scenes and Spitfires and blitzes. I wanted to write a love story, and when I began to think about it, I realized that I had lived one.’
‘You mean about my Harry?’
‘No. It was about love. Not romance… about the discovery of all sorts of love.’
‘You said it wasn’t a romance, Ursula, didn’t you?’
‘For nearly six years didn’t we women love one another? You can’t call it anything else, can you? I loved Eve for defying the Markham gossip-mongers and turning out to be so strong after so many awful things had happened to her. I loved you, Mrs Partridge, and Marie and Bonnie and all your family for what you were… nice, decent Markham people. And Ursula for always being so supportive and unshakeable: she was the centre of our lives, we poured our troubles over her and she never drowned in them. In a way I even loved Eve’s mother for having the guts to get out and do what she did. None of that was romance… but it was love.’
Ursula prodded, ‘But why did you write it using real names and events? You could have made it more fictional.’
‘I did try doing that, but I couldn’t manage it. I needed to call you Mrs Farr, and to call Mrs Partridge Dolly – because she actually thought of herself as Dolly. No way could I have written about how I felt about the Dolly Partridge, or how she looked or how she spoke – not if I had called her Beryl Chapman or Edith Mitchell.’
Leonora Altzheiber blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘You use a word-processor, don’t you? It would have been easy enough to change the names when you had finished. No one would have been any the wiser… except us.’
‘I tried that too but… it was like… killing you all off. So I decided to do it in the way that I have. There is nothing in the book that I didn’t see, hear, or wasn’t told by the people concerned. It will be called a good many things – but nobody can say that it isn’t the truth.’
Leonora dragged on her cigarette. ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help you God?’
The women looked at the two children who had become part of the circle. Seated on the floor, sharing a plate, head to head, they were totally absorbed in picking out bits that took their fancy and stuffing them, flat handed, into their mouths.
‘Proper little pigeon pair,’ Dorothy Partridge said, and immediately looked across the room to where Dixie and Melanie were standing side by side, absorbed in watching the group of old women seated together.
And Giacopazzi the novelist saw dawning in Dorothy Partridge’s eye that which she had expected to see earlier when Dixie and Melanie had met for the first time, but had not. It had been the babies who had revealed the truth.
‘I remember my Harry as though it was yesterday, all fat and blond, just like that.’
Georgia Honeycombe rose from her ingle seat and stretched her shoulders as Leonora had done that lunchtime.
‘That’s why you wrote the book, Georgia.’ She laughed and downed the last of her wine. ‘And it’s why you’ve gathered us all together here… it’s exactly like the ending of a classic Giacopazzi mystery, except that there is no detective as you usually have. No corpse. Just two cute children who are standing in for a skeleton in your cupboard. Did you chicken out when you wrote the book? Or did you want to see what happened here today so that you could write your last chapter?’
Georgia Honeycombe said, ‘The fifty years since we met have flashed by. I simply wanted to be with you all once more, Lena… in the little time that’s left before we are gone.’
Giacopazzi wanted to be back in her study, facing the blue screen of her VDU.