Harry Partridge breathed softly close to Georgia’s ear. ‘Georgia, are you awake?’
She turned lazily towards him and linked her arms around his neck, her eyes still closed, smiling. ‘No. But don’t let that stop you.’
Smoothing back her tousled hair, he looked at her in the clear coastal light. ‘It’s been great, Georgia. The dinner, the dancing, wandering down The Lanes like there was no tomorrow; but the greatest thing has been you. Not just last night, not only the way you give yourself up to love-making, but it’s great knowing you.’
She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him. His weathered, handsome face with its uncontrollable cowlick lock of hair that fell forward, his clever eyes and small nose that was like Dolly’s, and teeth so fine that when her tongue had moved over them she had imagined shining bone china. ‘You talk as though we won’t do this again.’
‘Oh we will. Of course we will. But I wanted you to know that you are important to me.’ He tilted back her head so that she had to open her eyes and see that he was sincere. ‘Remember the day on the beach when we talked about what it would be like for people like us after the war, there being a social upheaval and there being a class-less society?’ Georgia nodded. ‘Shall I ever forget!’
‘That’s when I started to think about coming here with you… not just for a twenty-four-hour pass quickie fling, but about us coming here together. I imagined after the war things being different so that we would sometimes come to places like this… you know… spontaneously, any old time, as the fancy took us.’
‘Mm – that would be nice.’
‘I was doing a jump, and for a second or two I thought my ’chute wasn’t going to open, and it flashed through my mind, Bugger all, Harry Partridge, you missed your chance… you shouldn’t have waited. Then the harness buckle unjammed and she opened and I landed like thistledown.’ He chuckled. ‘That taught me a lesson better than all my Dad’s lectures ever did… Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today.’
‘Harry! Don’t joke about it. How awful, that’s the most petrifying thing I can imagine.’
‘Not half as petrifying as being a thousand feet above Salisbury Plain, dropping like a stone, and knowing that there was a beautiful woman you had put off till tomorrow that you could have done today.’
‘Harry!’
‘So, Prude, I made up my mind that I would not wait until after the war for things to change, but I would make some changes of my own. And I’d always imagined coming here with somebody elegant and intelligent and beautiful.’
‘Sergeant Partridge, you are a man who knows how to make a woman feel wonderful.’
He trailed an appreciative hand down the curves of her body. ‘Not difficult with material like this to work on.’
‘I remember, that day on the beach, you said that we were two of a kind. Somebody else once said the same thing to me. I really didn’t know what to think about that… to be of a kind with Harry Partridge with his reputation – Harry Partridge, the free spirit, Good-time Harry?’
She linked her arms tightly about him, inviting him closer, enjoying the luxury of the surroundings and a voluptuous feeling of liberty. ‘I think you knew me better than I knew myself. But now – I know myself very well. I know that my basic nature is joyful. I think that’s what makes you and me two of a kind. Joyfulness. It’s a word that loses its meaning as soon as we are old enough to know its definition.’
‘And what about the other one? Does he – it’s got to be a he? – does he make three of a kind?’
‘I suppose, yes. The two of you have a lot of ideas in common – free love, free hospitals, free lawyers and all those other freedoms.’
‘And have you done this with him?’
She didn’t respond.
‘It’s all right. I’m not the jealous type. When I say free love, I mean equality.’
‘Except that women aren’t quite as free as men. The woman always takes the rap if there is one.’
‘I’d never do that to a woman. I always, always take precautions.’
‘So do I, but there are accidents. I’ve often thought that I am one.’
‘I don’t believe in them, it’s either carelessness or intention. Your parents had you because they intended to give life to a beautiful creature called Georgia.’
He hugged her.
She laughed and tousled him.
‘I’ll tell you what you are, Georgia, you are a natural-born nonconformist. However briefly, I’m glad that we’re inhabiting the same world at the same time… imagine, supposing one of us had been born fifty years before the other, or I was a Martian…’
Drawing back the covers, she flirted her hand down the length of his body. ‘Too terrible to contemplate, to be on a world where there’s no Harry Partridge.’
As though they feared to think it, they made their final hours of love-making last a long time.