The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted Read online

  wallet – I wouldn’t be needing it where I was going. Did I bother to lock the door? Of course not: I had nothing worth stealing.

  I walked back up the hill to Cally’s car. It was an absolute beauty, a sky-blue Mercedes sports car with the top already down. That afternoon, I’d left Cally painting by the sea and had driven back to the Knoll House. That first time behind the wheel, I hadn’t really opened her up as there had been too much traffic and too many blind spots. But now that it was night and the roads were clear, I thirsted for speed.

  I eased out of the hotel drive and for a short while pottered along, revelling in the sea breeze and the star-bright night. I’d never driven an open-top at night. It was thrilling, the wind whipping through my hair and slicing at my cheeks as Van Halen pounded out over the stereo.

  I stamped the pedal to the floor, the gears throbbed and the engine roared. I took a too-tight bend on the wrong side of the road and almost went straight into the trees. The car bounced off the kerb and I screeched to a stop. Heart pounding, I checked my bearings and put the car in gear. Much more sedately, almost sheepishly, I continued on my way, tooling through Swanage and out along the coast. Driving at night to be with a new lover: is there anything more exciting?

  For along with everything else, there was also the prospect of our imminent lovemaking. I knew, for a certainty, that we’d be making love that night. But when? Immediately? Would I kiss her languorously and then without a word start to unbutton buttons, pop rivets and unzip zips, before soundlessly we made love beneath the cliff face? Or would there be a kiss and a tip of tongue before we sat cosily by the fire and exchanged our daily morsels, all the while anticipating the lovemaking that was to come? And then the caresses and fondles would become ever more urgent until the conversation was abandoned.

  I parked up and started to walk through the fields to the coast and to the Dancing Ledges. Perhaps it’s just the memories talking, but I still find the name so evocative. They say the Dancing Ledges are named from the waves that used to dance over the rock flats at high tide. But for myself, I like to imagine the smugglers capering in the firelight by the side of the sea.

  I was wondering what Cally would have brought to drink that night. She was quite wealthy, I knew that, and I think we could have drunk champagne every night if that’s what she’d wanted. But sometimes it would be a bottle of chianti, sometimes Sancerre, or ice-cold kummel. Once, she had even obtained a bottle of absinthe, green, sickly, wickedly potent.

  Long before I reached the cliff, I could see the smoke swirling on a fierce wind and hear the waves booming onto the rocks below. The sea was running high and fast, with white tops rolling in as they pounded themselves into frothing surf on the black granite. The rocks gleamed in the moonlight.

  I stood at the cliff edge. The fire was twenty, maybe thirty yards out, right on the very edge of the Dancing Ledges. The larger waves seemed to be all but crashing onto the fire itself, though it would be a while yet before the high tide began its shimmering dance over the ledges. Closer to the cliff face was the pool. The ledges had been cut out by quarrymen and, while they were at it, they had also carved themselves a swimming pool. It was rippling, rectangular, and the high tides cleansed and replenished it. At night, when the Dancing Ledges were a flat grey slab, the pool seemed to turn into a wide black window.

  Cally was squatting down by a rock with her back to the fire – my secret girlfriend. During those early days, we were the only two people who knew about our relationship. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed or ashamed of Cally. I loved her. I just didn’t feel the need to have to explain this love to anyone.

  I suppose before I met Cally, I also might have curled my lip at the thought of a young man with a much older woman. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, then doubtless it seems perverse, unnatural – even taboo. It’s fine enough, these days, for an older, richer man to take up with a woman half his age. But when it’s the other way round, a mature woman and her – how I hate the phrase – ‘toy boy’ lover, then people tend to be much more suspicious about motives. She, the older woman, is seen as disgustingly depraved – while the younger man is little more than a pampered sponger, on a par with a gigolo, being paid to deliver the goods in the bedroom.

  Well, I’ve been there. Not that I expect you to understand – at least not right now – but perhaps one day you will have a better idea of how a young man can fall heels over head for an older woman.

  I could just trot out some trite cliché about age just being a number; or age just being a state of mind. Or I could quote Mark Twain and tell you that age is an issue of mind over matter – and if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. But the truth is this: I have met men and women in their twenties who have already acquired the fusty dullness of middle age. Cally, on the other hand, was that rare breed, like a teenager to her core, hungering for adventure.

  What does it matter? It went in, and it went out – and it worked.

  Even before I had started to scramble down to the ledges, Cally had spotted me. She had this uncanny radar for me, which told her instantly when I was at hand. She looked up and she waved.

  I climbed down and stalked over to the fire. She was drawing on the rock with a stick of charcoal. I don’t know how long she had been drawing, but the picture stretched a full three yards across the rock, a herd of wild horses thundering across the heath. It was very fine, similar to the 30,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux in France. I liked it all the more for the fact that within a few hours it would have been washed clean by the sea. Its temporality only added to its power.

  Cally was a professional artist. Even when she didn’t have a canvas in front of her, she was always doodling on whatever came to hand – paper napkins, receipts, books and fliers and even, yes, million-year-old rocks on the Dorset coast.

  ‘How was the car?’ she asked. With three quick flicks she etched out a perfect horse’s mane.

  ‘I’m going to get myself an open-top.’

  ‘Borrow mine any time you like,’ she said. ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I stooped to kiss her, a kiss on the cheek and then a kiss full on the lips as my arm curled around her shoulders. In a moment the horses were abandoned.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ she said, arms round my waist as she kissed me again. ‘Let me feast my eyes on you.’ We sat there by the fire, the flames thundering in the wind, and gazed at each other. And what I saw was a woman who was in the very prime of her life – she was five foot two, exactly a foot shorter than me, with a mane of chestnut hair, slightly spattered with the afternoon’s paint. Around her mouth and eyes, delightful teasing lines which were permanently on the verge of creasing into a laugh.

  ‘We’re very close to the edge,’ I said.

  ‘Just how I like it.’

  ‘And what are we drinking tonight?’

  ‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘Brandy for heroes. Brandy for lovers.’

  As usual she had a thick waterproof rug and her fabulous wicker basket. Inside it were two apples, some Emmenthal and some biscuits and an old horn-handled Laguiole lock knife. The bottle of Cognac probably cost more than I earned in a fortnight. She had already opened it and I could taste the brandy on her breath.

  We drank from two exquisite brandy balloons made of cut glass and so big that just one could have held the entire bottle. Cally loved beautiful things – not that she was materialistic, but there were certain occasions when nothing but the best would do. Her wine glasses, her tea cups and her crockery were, without exception, gorgeous both to the eye and to the touch; her favourite bed was a vast queen-sized playpen that she had shipped over all the way from the forests of Malaysia.

  She topped up her own glass, poured me a tot and, like druids studying some ancient runes, we swirled the brandy, watching the amber ride through the glass rainbow before inhaling it deep into our lungs.

  There was a slight indent in the ledges, about the size of a single bed, perfect for lying in, and we nestled a
gainst the rock. We sat shoulder to shoulder on the rug as the fire blazed into the night. She must have taken some time gathering all the driftwood, for the fire was three, four feet high, the flames licking over the rock as the sparks were blown by the breeze. Beneath us the thundering charge of the waves was followed by the boom as they smacked into the base of the ledges and then the rumbling suck of the wash back. It was invigorating, the occasional wet flicks of the waves and the contrast of the heat of the fire on our faces.

  Cally put her glass down and looked up.

  ‘The stars are bright tonight,’ she said. As I looked up, before I’d even said a word, she whipped her cashmere scarf round my neck and held it tight as if she was on the verge of choking me.

  I looked at her quizzically. I did not know what she was doing, but I knew she had her reasons – and that in her own time she would make them known to me.

  She laughed and then just as quickly released me before rewarding me with a kiss.

  ‘You know the Thuggee in India?’ she said.

  ‘The bandits?’

  ‘They would travel in twos and threes and little by little they would join up with the huge caravans that travelled across India. It could take weeks before the whole band had been assembled.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then, when the time was ripe and the Thuggee were sitting around the fires with the rest of their fellow travellers, the leader would look up into the night sky and he’d say—’

  ‘The stars are bright tonight.’

  ‘Yes – and that was the cue for the massacre. The rumals would fly and the knuckles would crack and in under a minute every man and woman would have been strangled to death. The children though, they were sometimes left to live to become Thugs in their own right.’

  ‘How sad,’ I said. It was difficult not to picture such a scene at that very fire where we were seated. ‘So for thousands of travellers, those words, “the stars are bright tonight”, would have been the last words that they ever heard.’

  ‘Not a bad way to die.’ She retrieved her glass. ‘There you’d be, gazing up to the heavens and dwelling on the great infinity of all that’s out there, weighing it up against the complete insignificance of your own life – and then suddenly, a noose round your neck and it’s over. It would have been very quick. Better than cancer. Better than dying in a hospice. Anything but a hospice.’

  ‘So what if it was cloudy?’ I asked.

  ‘History does not relate,’ she said, before adding matter-of-factly: ‘Let’s make love.’

  I kissed her with abandon, my tongue roiling against her teeth. ‘Where and when do you want me?’

  ‘I want you now and I think… I think I want you just here, right on the edge of the ledge,’ she said.

  Her hips and bosom swayed seductively from side to side. She had a rhythm all of her own. She danced by the side of the fire, accompanied only by the hissing wind and the thrum of the sea.

  ‘And how shall I please my master?’ She tied up her top like some Oriental dancer, so that I could see her belly. ‘Would you like to undress me – or would you like to watch?’

  ‘Strip,’ I commanded. ‘I want you to strip.’

  She smiled at me, arch, wicked, as she pulled off her cashmere jumper. Riding boots and tight white riding britches soon followed. Now she stood before me, right on the edge of the ledge, in bright silhouette against the night, wearing only panties and a silk bra, luminous white in the darkness.

  ‘You’re liking this, aren’t you?’ she said, one hand on her hip as, like a lingerie model, she cocked her knee.

  ‘Mmm.’

  She smiled again before unclipping her bra. It fell at her feet and then she hitched her thumbs around the top of her knickers and in one graceful movement had pulled them off.

  Naked, Cally stood before me, buxom, curvy, ample. She had hips and a tummy and robust legs and large full breasts, each the size of a honeydew melon.

  She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever laid eyes on.

  Not for Cally the faddy diets and the soul-destroying quest for the body beautiful. She ate and drank as she pleased and be damned to coltish legs and gamine figures – and, for that matter, to hell with formal exercise and sweating in Lycra in Stygian gyms. What she had, above all else, was something that some women only seem to acquire with age: a ring of steel confidence that proclaimed to the world, ‘So I could lose a few pounds here, and I could be a little tauter there – but actually, I’m pretty damn gorgeous just as I am.’

  It only took me another ten years to work it out for myself. That what we are attracted to in the opposite sex is not looks or wealth or power. Rather, what we desire is the confidence that can come with these boons. We are parasites for confidence – we love it and we leech off it, in the hope that some of this intangible magic will somehow be sprinkled onto our own shallow lonely lives.

  This is especially so with a person’s looks. If you feel gorgeous, if you know for a fact that you have the body beautiful, then you won’t be swayed by pictures of supermodels or trite advice on how to slim for the summer – because you know that you’ve got it and you’re so smoking hot that you can play the field until the day you die. Not that you’d necessarily want to; but in your heart, you know that anyone, anyone at all, is just there for the taking.

  Cally sashayed along the edge of the ledges. Occasionally the waves would lick upwards, sending trickles of seawater over her legs and chest. All the while, I watched and I marvelled, aquiver with desire, knowing this spectacular woman was mine for the taking; yet knowing also that I wanted this moment to go on for ever. As so often in my life, anticipation is often even more heady than the actual event.

  She came to a standstill just a few feet from me, stretching upwards, her full breasts almost defying gravity. Her feet were planted on the lip of the ledges. She was side on to the fire, and her skin had this glowing corona, like the moon’s dark face as it eclipses the sun. Even now I wonder if she knew what she was doing – or whether, as ever, she was just pushing things to the limit. There was hunger and there was lust and love, and all salted with this spice of danger.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she asked.

  ‘I am quite deliriously happy,’ I said.

  ‘Would you be happier if we were making love? You could be touching me?’

  ‘Everything comes to he who waits,’ I said. ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to get any better.’

  She jumped, entrechat, her feet crossing back and forth in the air; she had been a dancer, but had given it up for her horses.

  ‘Do you have to do that?’ I said. ‘It’s making me nervous.’

  Another waved crashed into the side of ledges and the water fountained up, cascading over her back. She laughed out loud.

  ‘The question is,’ she said, her teeth beaming white in the darkness as another wave boomed; by now she was completely soaked, her wet skin gleamed in the firelight, ‘if this is as good as it gets, and if we’re never going to be any happier, then why don’t we just end it all now? Why don’t you join me?’

  It was an interesting question. There were once two French newly-weds who hit upon the exact same argument. Knowing that they could never, ever be any happier, and that their lives had each reached a mutual peak, the groom had shot his bride and then blown his own brains out.

  I found the whole idea repellent. Who knows how it’s all going to turn out? The one thing I did know was that we are not gamblers who should quit while we’re ahead. Instead, we are like hogs in the field. We must suck up, devour every ounce of happiness that comes our way – and if we find one delicious truffle, we don’t stop; we keep on snuffling until we find another.

  ‘Have you got a death wish?’ I said. ‘Come and make love to me.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she laughed. ‘And you’re so young too. How thoughtless of me. You still have your whole life ahead of you and I—’

  Her words were abrup
tly cut off, as she disappeared in a thundering haze of water and spume. I jumped up and my glass shattered on the rock. The fire hissed as the seawater licked at its edges.

  I stared out into the darkness, squatting on the lip of the ledge. Cally was a way off, her head seal-slick as she bobbed in the water. She was lit up quite clearly by the flames.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I called.

  ‘Fine!’ She waved at me.

  Her head rose quite steeply in the water and much, much too late I realised that the wave that had taken her over the edge was a mere ripple compared to the monster that was coming in.

  I threw myself flat onto the rock, head tucked tight into my arms. The wave broke over me, hard and full. The water surged deep over the Dancing Ledges and an instant later I was sucked over the edge and into the dark, choppy sea. The fire was dowsed and our only light was from the half-moon.

  ‘You’re all right?’ Cally called. She pulled towards me.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘What about all your things – your basket, your rug?’

  ‘Forget that,’ she shouted. We were lifted up on the swell as another wave banged into the ledges. ‘You’re not cold are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We could swim round the coast. Better to stay here.’ She was utterly calm as she swam, not remotely concerned as the black waves crashed all about us. It was the very oddest sensation as we bobbed in the darkness in that wild sea. The waves seemed absolutely mountainous as they pounded the ledges.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘We glide in on a big wave.’ She had to shout to be heard over the sea’s roar. ‘Scramble up the path. Then we’ll be home free!’

  ‘It sounds so simple,’ I called, and even though we were swimming for our lives, she still laughed at me.

  ‘It will be,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. By the way, I love you. Very much.’