The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted

by William Coles

  The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted

  THAMES RIVER PRESS

  An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC)

  Another imprint of WPC is Anthem Press (www.anthempress.com)

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by

  THAMES RIVER PRESS

  75–76 Blackfriars Road

  London SE1 8HA

  www.thamesriverpress.com

  © William Coles 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary

  and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-85728-345-0

  Cover design by Sylwia Palka

  This title is also available as an eBook

  Further Praise for William Coles

  The Well-Tempered Clavier

  “What a read! Every schoolboy’s dream comes true in this deftly-written

  treatment of illicit romance. A triumph.”

  —Alexander McCall Smith

  “This is a charming and uplifting read.”

  —Piers Morgan

  “An outstanding debut novel. A wonderful story of first love.

  Few male authors can write about romance in a way which appeals to women.”

  —Louise Robinson, Sunday Express

  “Charming, moving, uplifting. Why can’t all love stories be like this?”

  —Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal

  “A beautiful book, managing to use a simple narrative voice without consequently bland style – honesty, beauty, and passion pervade the novel but so do humour, youthfulness and energy.”

  —Stuck in a Book

  “My own piano teacher was called Mr Bagston and frankly I don’t think any power on earth could have persuaded us to create a scene of the kind Coles so movingly describes!”

  —Boris Johnson, London Mayor

  “Passionate and excruciatingly compelling.”

  —Curledup.com

  Dave Cameron’s Schooldays

  “A superbly crafted memoir.”

  —Daily Express

  “Try Dave Cameron’s Schooldays for jolly fictional japes. It helps to explain the real Dave’s determination to whip us into shape.”

  —Edwina Currie, The Times

  “A piece of glorious effrontery… takes an honourable place amid the ranks of lampoons.”

  —The Herald

  “A fast moving and playful spoof. The details are so slick and telling that they could almost have you fooled.”

  —Henry Sutton, Mirror

  “A cracking read… Perfectly paced and brilliantly written, Coles draws you in, leaving a childish smile on your face.”

  —News of the World

  Mr Two-Bomb

  “Compellingly vivid, the most sustained description of apocalypse since Robert Harris’s Pompeii.”

  —Financial Times

  For my great mate Mark Pilbrow,

  a pig-farmer’s son – much like myself

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Like Kim, I was also a waiter at the splendid Knoll House Hotel in 1988. I went back there recently and it was like stepping into this most fabulous time warp. Children are still not allowed into the dining room at suppertime, and incredibly still not a single television to be found in the bedrooms! So as it is, even in this ultra high-tech twenty-first century, families are still being forced to read books and play games, and even, on occasion, actually talk with each other in the evening. Long may it continue! The sights at the Knoll House are also just as breathtaking as they were twenty-five years ago: the Agglestone is still there, the pirate ship and the beach huts and the Dancing Ledges, they’re all still there – and I don’t doubt that they’ll still be there even a hundred years from now.

  My thanks to the artist Jono Freemantle who provided me with all those lovely details about what it is to be a painter; and to Rudi Schultz, that dry old sea-stick, who conjured with pictures of beds and beach-huts. And my thanks, as ever, to Margot, my wife, who sometimes wonders, I know, just what is fact and what is fiction in these love stories I write. Perhaps one day I will go through these novels and underline the events that have actually happened to me in black. Those that are based on hearsay will be underlined in green; and those that have sprung from nothing more than my most lurid imaginings will be underscored in brilliant scarlet.

  Perhaps.

  CHAPTER 1

  Is it my nature only to appreciate what I have long after it has left me? When I’m in a long-term relationship, locked tight with a lover, it is so easy to take things for granted: to dwell on the irritations; to lose sight of everything that was once good and kind and decent; to forget the things that I first fell in love with. Instead, my lover’s looks, her laughter, her enthusiasms, they all become submerged by a dead weight of the mundane and the routine.

  Always, always, I want more. For a few weeks, a month, I can be content. But then, even if I were dating Helen of Troy, I would start to wonder. What if…

  My eyes wander and the daydreams begin. Would her lips taste any the sweeter? Could I? Should I? Would she?

  But there was one woman…

  Yes, there was one woman, who kept things so fresh and so chilli-hot that there was never even a moment for complacency.

  Of course, it ended – as all stand-out love affairs must. But when I look back on my time with Cally, I am nothing but grateful. Even the little sting in the tail, for that also I eventually – eventually – came to thank her.

  I know little about women. But what little I do know is largely down to Cally. She taught me what is classy, what is cool; what is seemly, what is gross. Above all, she taught me that in a relationship the correct route across a square is by three sides. That is, in all dealings – whether with a lover, a wife or a mistress – it is very rarely wise to boldly state your needs. Rather, a man must learn to be canny. When he has a goal in mind, an aim, a yearning, he must travel towards it obliquely.

  I can still remember Cally as she told me this one universal truth. It took me a couple of minutes to digest. I pondered it, repeating what she said. She just chuckled, poking at the fire with a piece of driftwood. ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you, Kim?’ she laughed. ‘One day when I’m nothing more than a memory, you’ll realise this is wisdom speaking.’

  ‘Wisdom?’ I jeered. ‘And what wisdom, pray, is she speaking out of?’

  ‘You are a disgusting little puppy,’ she said, ‘and like all disgusting little puppies, you are going to have to be taught the error of your ways.’

  I remember her hands tugging at my belt.

  ‘Again?’ I’d asked.

  ‘If you know what’s good for you – which, come to think of it, you probably don’t.’

  Even now twenty years later, the memory of it brings a smile to my face. With some of my other lost loves, I can barely even remember what happened from one year to the next. But with Cally, I can recall actual conversations; I can remember the exact way that she would raise a wry eyebrow, thereby issuing a bedroom command that could not be ignored. Above all else, I can remember her laugh. The deep, throaty, joyous laugh of a woman who was proud to vent her more noisome emotions and who didn’t give a damn who heard her.

  But if there is one lesson from Cally etched into my memory,
it is that each and every day was to be grabbed by the throat.

  Of course, I’d heard that much before – who hasn’t? Carpe diem! Seize the day! Go for it! Get it while it’s hot! Or, as my grandfather, a farmer, liked to say, ‘This ain’t no rehearsal.’

  And that’s what Cally did – and that’s what she gave me. The knowledge that this life: it’s the only shot we’ve got.

  As we get older, and as we pass the grim, grey mantle of destiny onto the next generation, there is a tendency to accept the ordinary. There comes a belief that, actually, ‘middle of the road’ isn’t too bad.

  But not Cally – she fought, raged, against the very thought. Anything for her, anything at all, to avoid getting stuck in that warm, wide rut that can come with middle age.

  And I guess, I suppose, that was one of the reasons why she took up with me as a lover.

  I was young, just twenty-three years old, and eager to taste life’s smorgasbord. And Cally… she was eager too – only to a factor of ten.

  What I still find truly remarkable is that many women her age seem to content themselves with life in a rut. But for Cally, every day it was where’s the fun? Where’s the action? What’s the maximum amount of excitement that can be extracted from my next twenty-four hours on this earth?

  Not bad. Not bad at all for a woman who, at forty-four years old, was more than two decades my senior.

  But then Cally was, of course, a woman who knew what she wanted.

  And most of the time, she got it.

  CHAPTER 2

  There were consequences to the pair of us trying to extract the maximum amount from each and every moment – some hair-raising, some illegal and some downright dangerous. During my time with Cally, I lost at least three of my nine lives. Each time was different, varying in degrees of spontaneity, foolhardiness and drunkenness.

  But to give you just a taster of what could happen when I was with Cally, I will tell you about our little party on Midsummer’s Eve. It was indicative of the sheer weirdness that could occur when Cally was in charge.

  It had been a late night at the hotel, diners dawdling over their coffees and their brandies as they contemplated the dusky skyline. Meanwhile, I and the other waiters and waitresses had to smile pleasantly and amenably, as if there was nothing we enjoyed more of an evening than hanging around in the dining room of the Knoll House Hotel.

  I have not been there in a long time, but back then the Knoll House was an old-style family hotel on that glorious strip of England that is Studland, Dorset. This piece of coastline is famous for many reasons, not least its nudist beach, as well as Old Harry, a spectacular chalk arch that’s been carved from the coast. But my romantic heart will for ever associate Studland with the smugglers and the corsairs who would run brandy casks, skeins of silk and fine Virginian tobacco to the wild caves that surround the Dancing Ledges.

  The hotel was a throwback. There were no televisions in any of the guests’ rooms. Instead guests had to indulge in such old-fashioned pursuits as card games and drinking and – think of it! – conversation.

  Children were welcome – it was, after all, a traditional family hotel – but they also had to know their place. The children had a separate dining room, awash with minders who were all absolute sticklers for good manners and hearty eating.

  The main dining room, spacious, unchanged since Enid Blyton used to take her table in the corner, was the adults’ safe haven. Children were banned at night-time and had to amuse themselves in their bedrooms while an army of nannies paraded the hotel corridors. Guests would dress up for dinner and would be personally welcomed into the dining room by the hotel’s avuncular proprietor.

  Although I can remember everything about Cally, my memory of the hotel itself is a little rusty. But as I recall, there were about twenty or thirty serving staff, young men and women marking time in Dorset as they decided what next to do with their lives. We weren’t paid much, but we did get free lodging and we had the boon of each other’s company.

  The dining room had well over seventy tables, with each waiter and waitress catering for about twenty guests. But come the end of the dinner, it did not matter if your every table had been cleared and set for breakfast – we waiting staff could only leave after the very last diner had quit the dining room. What did it matter that we had parties planned; pints to be supped in the Bankes Arms; and red-hot lovers waiting for us on the Dancing Ledges with a great bonfire fanned by the sea breeze?

  My guests had all long gone, so I was fooling around by the puddings at the central station. These puddings were the stuff of legend. The guests could come up and have as much as they wanted; some would skimp on their main courses to come back for seconds and even thirds of these extraordinary puddings, each accompanied by not just ice cream but whipped cream and thick pouring cream.

  Oliver, a tall, angular German who spoke impeccable English, had also already laid up his tables for breakfast and was gazing at the puddings. They filled an entire table.

  ‘I think,’ said Oliver, ‘that I will start with the crème brûlée with some fruit salad and some whipped cream. Then, because I will still be hungry, I will try the trifle, but this time with the pouring cream. And after I have finished that, and because I think I will still be hungry, I will have a large slice of the chocolate gateau.’ Like a dog at the butcher’s window, he stared soulfully at the puddings. He had a pronounced Adam’s apple. It jumped up and down as he swallowed.

  ‘A good selection, my friend,’ I said. ‘But I’m going to start with the trifle. With whipped cream and pouring cream. Then the crème caramel. And to finish, not one, not two, but three brandy snaps.’

  The brandy snaps were my favourite. I’ve no idea, even now, how brandy snaps are made, but they were like brittle brown cylinders of spun sugar and filled with the thickest whipped cream. Another waiter, Roland, had once filched a brandy snap from right underneath the chef’s nose, and we had shared it with Janeen on the staff’s star-lit patio: at first brittle but then melting on your tongue, delicious with the cool cream.

  Roland sidled over. He had one table of golfers still nursing their double Armagnacs. ‘I’ll have the cheese,’ he said. ‘The Roquefort. Best thing ever to come out of France. And if I take their dregs, there might even be a glass of red for me.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Oliver. ‘The cheese must come after the pudding—’

  ‘The French say before.’

  ‘The French!’

  And so, as we waited for those four inconsiderate golfers to quit the dining room and go to the bar, we bickered and salivated, constructing mythical feasts that could never be eaten. For although the guests could have their fill, the staff were never allowed a morsel. They were the perfect Tantalus. Every night we would see them, glistening, evermore enticing; and every night, come the end of the evening, they’d be wheeled out of sight to be stored in the hotel’s cavernous fridges.

  Janeen sidled up. She’d been outside having a cigarette. She was blonde and quite sexy, and once upon a time I’d fancied her, but all those feelings of ardour had evaporated like the morning mist. This had yet to become mutual. There was still a husk of lust in her heart for me.

  ‘Coming to the pub, Kim?’ she asked.

  ‘Not tonight, thanks.’

  ‘You and your mystery lover!’ she said. ‘You reek of it!’ She clutched at one of my wrists and made a play of sniffing at my tunic. ‘Who is she?’

  I smiled as I disengaged. ‘My muse.’

  ‘Who’s that when she’s at home?’

  I was about to lie my reply when one of the golfers suddenly realised that we waiters were still hanging on their departure. He hustled his drunken friends from the room and five of us descended on the table. The table was cleared and re-laid in less than one minute.

  We were about to leave when the pastry chef, Michael, fat and happy, called us over. ‘There’s a last slice of gateau if you’d like it.’

  I’d never tasted this gateau before. It was th
e hotel’s signature piece: four thick layers of moist chocolate cake, mortared together with whipped cream and topped off with grated milk chocolate. We stood in a circle. Forks were shared out and each of us was allowed one single perfect mouthful. We grinned, looking at each other as the chocolate lingered on our palates. Michael glowed with pleasure. Such a small thing. But as with everything in life, and women in particular, we only appreciate a thing if there has been much struggle in acquiring it.

  Cally, I knew, was already waiting for me, so I waved my goodnights and darted back to the staff quarters. These were a cluster of breeze block cells, containing little more than a bed and a basin and built-in wardrobe. On cold wet spring mornings, the very walls would weep in sympathy. We were tucked away at the back of the hotel, with a view that comprised either fir trees or more of the hotel’s rudimentary staff quarters.

  What did I care? It was a clear summer’s night and my lover awaited me. I took a moment to hang up my white tunic, a Nehru jacket with blue collar and piping, brass buttons down the front and my name tag on the breast pocket. My black trousers went onto a separate hanger and my black lace-ups were kicked beside the bed. I tugged on jeans and a T-shirt and an old Yankees baseball jacket. I didn’t take my