by Betty Burton
1989
‘Look, isn’t that that novelist woman?’ A woman, holding a large amount of hand luggage as she awaits the announcement of her flight, points.
‘Which novelist?’
‘The one who writes the dirty mysteries… you know Lay of the Land.’
‘Yes, Tricks of the Trade, all those… there, look, coming down the corridor, the one in the white.’
‘You’re right, it’s her. She looks just the same as her picture. I always thought it was touched up.’
‘It’s her face that’s touched up I should think, plastic surgery. I expect her old chin is up behind her ears.’
‘You’ve got to give it to her, though, she looks fantastic. Man, who would wear white silk to travel in?’
They gawp and press close to the window as the trail of passengers makes its way towards the fuel-suckling Boeing 747 gleaming in the clear, bright winter sunlight. Georgia Giacopazzi in her role of writer of blockbusters is used to being inspected and discussed by strangers.
‘How old do you think she is really?’
‘Nobody knows anything much about her. Not even where she lives. I read this big, in-depth profile about her in Cosmo and they said it was all true – about the mystery of her private life.’
‘All invented by publicity agents.’
‘She owns a London flat, a penthouse in Manhattan where she stays for a few days when she goes to New York to see her publisher, and a villa in The Algarve – isn’t that in France or Spain or somewhere? – but she never, ever lives more than a few days in any of them. She has them just to keep people at bay. It said that she lives somewhere where nobody knows, not even her agent. She writes one of her blockbusters, goes on a big publicity tour, does TV and photo-calls all round the world, and then disappears again until she’s written another one.’
‘She gets three million dollars a book now.’
‘How many rand is that?’
‘God knows, but it buys a hell of a lot of face-lifts.’
‘“An enigma” – that’s what they called her in Cosmo.’ The enigma is now approaching the aircraft steps. All that one can tell from this distance is that she is of average height, has that whiter shade of white hair which indicates that it was once red, and walks upright with an air of assurance about her.
‘You’ve got to admit, she looks pretty damned sexy still.’ The woman, the enigma, carrying an armful of fresh proteas, not huddling from the bitter winter wind of the high veld which ripples and billows her white silk coat, halts at the aircraft steps, turns towards the observation lounge window, raises her hand once then boards the London-bound aircraft.
1939
Spring
Georgia Kennedy got out of bed and, as she had fantasized doing many times but had never had the courage to actually do since she had been Mrs Hugh Kennedy, Manager’s Wife, took off her Ceylonese pyjamas and walked naked down to the kitchen to make herself tea and toast, stopping to look at her face in the landing mirror.
A mane of reddish-gold hair that grew in masses of tendrils, straight high forehead, a firm chin and jaw-line which, she foresaw, would probably be plumply hidden in twenty years’ time, and wide intelligent greenish eyes which would probably be surrounded by a mass of little lines in twenty years’ time. Their embryos were already there. Leaning towards her reflection she raised her brows, pressed the star creases with her middle fingers.
What sort of a face is that Georgia Kennedy? Not beautiful, not lovely. Pretty. Good-looking. Handsome? You’re a striking-looking young woman, Mrs Kennedy, and you look sweeter and kinder than you are. You’ve got the sort of face that used to make youths believe that Georgia Honeycombe was an easy lay. And now that you are Mrs Kennedy, it’s a face that makes all of the Good Sports at the Club dances press their thighs closer to yours than they would dare to with the other men’s wives.
What is it that gives men that impression of me? She searches her full lips, pink cheeks and golden hair and receives the answer that hers is the face of a young woman which makes men think of milkmaids in summer meadows. A country girl with a pretty face, and the Good Sports knew all about country girls and hay-cocks – easy lay, cock.
But they had all been wrong, she had not been anybody’s easy lay: when she had given herself to Hugh it was in well-deserved virginal white.
Given? Well, that’s as good a description of it as any. He certainly hadn’t taken her. Not Hugh. Hugh as a bridegroom was knocking the door of forty: if there had been wild oats, he had sown them years before. Wild oats no more rampant than those sown in the company of the entire touring team, and which were more concerned with policemen’s helmets and thefts of public toilet signs than with women.
And ‘well-earned’ virginal white? Yes, because it had not been the nature of the pubescent Georgia Honeycombe to be chaste. She had strong lusts and vivid dreams in which she sometimes cried out. But she had parents who saw to it that she grew up to be a nice girl, a good girl; added to which she had been taught in a hassock and cassock school, in which God and his vicar kept an eye out for sins of girlish flesh.
Hugh got Georgia intact, and the honeymoon was almost over before he could bring himself to change that state. She preferred not to remember the honeymoon.
Hugh was better at firing off rifles.
They were not suited, but divorce in 1937 was not an option many couples considered, so they rubbed along and things got slightly better. Georgia was no longer intact, but she was disillusioned and unsatisfied. Married love was not what she had expected it to be. But, like divorce, in 1937 a more liberated sex-life was not an option open to a woman who had been to a hassock and cassock school. Not much of an option to many women who lived under the scrutiny of the community in a place like Markham then.
At the bottom of the stairs she halted at her unclear reflection in the glazed kitchen door to contemplate briefly the rest of Georgia Kennedy. Top heavy, well-defined waist, wide pelvis, rounded behind, long, solid legs – she would have made a good ‘Gibson’ Girl. Viewing herself objectively she knew that, had she been a mare, someone would no doubt have given her an approving slap on her flanks and said that she’d have no trouble when it came to producing. But Georgia did not want to produce. She smoothed the slight convex of her belly. She quite liked her own body but had never felt any desire to use it for the growing of tiny Hughs.
The letterbox, which had a flap like a man-trap, almost got Charlie Partridge’s fingers this time. His attention was caught by a pink image behind the patterned glass which was intended to protect postmen from such unexpected visions.
A good bloody thing she an’t my Missis.
Which, at least as far as Georgia Kennedy was concerned, wasn’t true. It might have been quite a good thing for her to have had a husband more like Charlie Partridge and less like Captain Kennedy. But there, she had been only barely eighteen when Hugh had proposed, and girls of eighteen can’t be expected to know that a dashing Territorial Army officer and captain of Markham Cricket Club isn’t necessarily going to make a dashing husband. Certainly Hugh Kennedy had not.
1989
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 settl
ed 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.
1939
Spring
Half an hour later and two long streets further on – the last leg of his early round before going to his own home where his wife Marie would have a mug of cocoa waiting ready to drink – Charlie Partridge went in by the back door of his parents’ home in Jubilee Lane where his father, Sam, ready for work in his park-keeper’s uniform, was as usual waiting with a ready-poured mug of well-sugared, dark-brown Co-op 99 tea at just the right temperature for Charlie to drink quickly. His mother, Dolly, on her way down the garden with a basket of washing and a bag of pegs dangling from her mouth, put her face up for a peck which she returned with a wink.
Charlie squeezed into the chair at the cramped coal-cupboard end of the table, nodded to his father. ‘Dad.’
‘Charlie.’ The father, in his usual meal-time place beside the back door at the cramped larder end of the table, inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘How’s Marie?’
‘Right as rain.’
‘Bonnie?’
Charlie nodded without giving chapter and verse of his daughter’s health. His mother and Marie would chew that over when they went out shopping together this afternoon. Not that there was really anything to chew over, Bonnie was as bonny as she had always been for the entire five years since her birth. ‘You all right then, Dad?’
‘All right as I’ll ever be.’
Which exchange of greeting they had been making ever since Charlie had got promoted from telegram boy to postal delivery service at the station end of Markham. On Charlie’s round there were probably twice as many houses as on some of the other rounds, but people got few letters. At the railway end the houses progressed downhill – not in the literal sense, for this was the floor of the valley – from the streets of small shops and terraced cottages that spoked out from the hub of the centre of the country market town, the boss of which was the great Norman abbey. The best houses on Charlie’s round were the rows of single-bays of Station Avenue where he had seen the hazy naked outline of Hugh Kennedy’s wife.
Father and son sat with the back door open and watched Dolly as she looped up very white sheets and pillowcases.
Dolly Partridge, in her late forties, was still a very good-looking woman. Brown eyes and brown hair streaked with grey, and good teeth that had stood up well to the ravages of years of bad nutrition and lack of dental treatment. A handsome buxom woman with large breasts and heavy hips and veins that made her legs ache. Her only indulgence was powder, lipstick, and the best tight Eugene perm twice a year. Whether it be early morning when whitening the front step, or late at night putting out the milk-bottles for the Co-op, she had on a bit of make-up. She had married Sam when she was barely seventeen.
As a hero in the War to End All Wars of 1914, Samuel Partridge had been one of the first ex-servicemen to move into one of the six houses on Jubilee Lane reserved for such men. More aptly to be moved into, because one and a half of his own legs had not returned from France with him and artificial ones had not been ready. Sam, Dolly, their daughter Paula and two sons, Charlie and Harry.
Harry was the last child Dolly and Sam managed to make before all that kind of thing became difficult for them when Sam was blown up in that terrible French mud-hole. Sam could affirm that lightning did strike twice. The first shell split one leg and blew off most of the other, the second penetrated his groin with shrapnel. He still had nightmares in which he struggled to thrust a bayonet into a disembodied voice that called, ‘Out! You can’t play with two stumps and one ball.’ When, in this dream, he wept with shame and frustration, a Red Cross official bent over him and said, ‘Don’t cry, corporal, it’s not like castration, you’ll still need to shave.’
Dolly talked him through the nights of his nightmares. But, being a young woman of normal appetites, she had had her own dreams that she could not speak of to anyone.
She came back in, wanting to get on with her chores, pushing round the two men filling the kitchen. ‘Move yourself a bit, Charlie.’
‘You know what I just seen?’ Charlie asked. ‘You know Hugh Kennedy, cricket captain?’
‘A course I know him, works at the flour mill, lives in Station Avenue,’ said Sam. ‘Officer in the Territorials.’
‘Got a blonde wife, years younger,’ said Dolly. ‘What about him?’
‘Her… his missis…’ Charlie leaned forward and lowered his voice ‘…just as I was putting the letters through, she was just going up the hallway… in the buff… without a stitch on.’ His hands revealed that he was a man who liked bosoms.
Sam Partridge supped deeply, the star-creases at the corner of his eyes deepening as he withdrew his nose from the mug and heaved several quiet laughs. ‘Hope you never got your fingers trapped in the excitement, our Charl.’
