Alice's Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Alice’ came easily to her. ‘Yes,’ she continued blithely, ‘we are sleeping together. We are lovers – and we are incredibly happy! I suppose it’s odd, how we took so long to sort ourselves out, but he was rather horrid when I first met him, you know.’
    ‘He was ill, Georgie!’
    ‘Yes, he was ill. But then he got all fragile and clingy and I was such a brute to him!’
    ‘My dear girl, you were never a brute! You couldn’t have been expected to know what was going on in his poor head! He didn’t even know himself!’
    ‘But then there was Fitzie!’ Georgina murmured, guiltily. ‘What was all that about?’
    ‘Squadron Leader Fitzsimmonds was an attractive man who offered you a light-hearted flirtation at a time when that was exactly what you needed.’
    ‘It went a little further than that, Alice!’
    ‘But … not …?’
    ‘No. Not!’ Georgina confirmed. Then she was laughing again.
    ‘What’s funny?’ Alice demanded, half seriously.
    ‘You are! One moment you’re all “modern woman” condoning fornication! Oh, yes you were! And the next you’re sighing with relief because I didn’t misbehave with poor Fitzie … who just got married, by the way! To myflying friend Lucinda! So now they’re off somewhere, looping the loop together. So sweet!’
    ‘Good heavens, Georgie! The way people talk these days! The things they do!’
    ‘It’s the war,’ Georgina said, suddenly serious. ‘It’s driven us all out of our minds.’
    They sat for a while in silence, Georgina picturing the handsome Canadian flier with whom she had come close to having a serious affair, and how she had understood, quite suddenly, one morning when she was ferrying a Mosquito cross-country, from the RAF storage unit at Little Rissington to the airfield at Filton, that it was Christopher Bayliss who mattered most to her, and not only most, but hugely.
    It had been a short flight and the visibility was good. A blustery wind had moderated considerably since she had taken off and she was relaxed and enjoying the unusually stress-free assignment when the image of Neil Fitzsimmonds came into her head. There he was, self-confident and handsome, enviably at ease with the way he was moving through what he described, almost affectionately, as his war. When they had met, nine months previously, and he had been a senior member of her group of fliers and she a new recruit, they had been mutually attracted to one another. He had sought her out, and despite their heavy workloads and constant movement between the various airfields and repair workshops, they had contrived to see a lot of each other. When their feelings had deepened they had plannedwhat Georgina regarded as a voyage of discovery – a week of leave, which was to be spent alone together, in a borrowed cottage on the North Devon coast. However, on that morning flight, as she glimpsed, through broken cloud, the southern Cotswolds and the meanderings of the River Avon, the image of Neil Fitzsimmonds became replaced in her mind by Christopher Bayliss, and she understood suddenly, and without doubt, his overwhelming importance to her.
    ‘Fitzie took it very well,’ Georgina explained to Alice, ‘and quite soon afterwards discovered Lucinda. So all was well. Except that Chris had changed. When I first arrived at the cottage I thought it was going to be a disaster.’
    ‘Well of course he had changed, Georgie! Six months had passed and he had recovered.’
    ‘I know, and I was stupid not to have expected him to be different. It was a bit embarrassing at first, getting to grips with how our relationship had altered … But he was so adorable, Alice!’ She remembered the scene, only weeks previously, when she and Christopher, having found their way through the confusion and near tragedy of the previous year, had comprehended each other and understood what the result of that comprehension was going to be.
    Rose’s footfalls, as she moved about the bedrooms on the floor