The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted

by William Coles

  ‘I hope you’re still saying that tomorrow.’

  I hauled off my Yankees jacket, an old gift from an old girlfriend. It drifted and sank. We trod water in the heaving swell.

  Cally shouted away to keep my spirits up – though for herself, I don’t think she could have cared one jot that we were in such danger.

  Cally looked over her shoulder, caught sight of a huge wave scything towards us. ‘This is it!’ she called.

  We went in like body-surfers, hands outstretched in front of our heads. The wave swept us in clean over the ledges. I lifted my head out of the water and caught sight of the cliff-face looming high above us. We were going much too fast. I tried to turn so that my feet took the brunt of the impact. The wave smacked into the cliff, jarring the side of my body. It stunned me. I was on the verge of being sucked back out to sea when a strong arm caught me about the waist. She held me tight as the water boiled over the ledges.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Cally. ‘Now!’

  I staggered to my feet. The water seethed about my waist. Cally, agile as ever, was already out of the water. She hauled me upwards. I was still dazed, but even as the next wave crashed onto my legs, I was scrabbling up over the rock, my hands clawing and clinging to wherever they could find a purchase.

  I didn’t fully regain my senses until we had reached the top of the cliff. I threw myself on the grass, coughing up seawater and bile. Cally lay beside me. She was holding my hand. For a while there was silence as we stared up at the stars, and then she started to chuckle. And that’s what I remember most about the night: not our adventure on the ledges, not the kissing, not the swim, but Cally’s laugh. More than any other sound, that laugh captured the sheer rapture of what it is to be alive. What a tonic it was.

  ‘That was lovely,’ she turned onto her side, still chuckling, her belly rippling with giggles as she held me tight. ‘Thank you. Are you okay?’

  I think I was in shock, though I hid it. ‘I’m pretty well. How are you?’

  ‘I feel so randy,’ she said.

  ‘Now you tell me!’

  ‘Come on!’ she said, hauling me to my feet. ‘Let’s get to the car and get the heater on. You still have the keys?’

  I patted my pockets. Amazingly, they jangled against my side.

  She kissed me hard, wet, on the mouth. ‘I think that might have been quite close,’ she said.

  ‘Please don’t ever do that again.’

  ‘Come on,’ she said, already leading the way back through the field. ‘I want to make love.’

  And so we did, in the passenger seat of the Merc and with the heater going full blast. Is there anything to touch the ecstasy of a condemned man who’s been given a last-minute stay of execution?

  CHAPTER 3

  So how came I to be languishing in Dorset in 1988 while the rest of my peers were busy-bee drones in the City, working their way up the corporate ladders, with dreams of fast cars and mortgages? Why wasn’t I apprenticed to some trade where I could learn about litigation or tax or copy-writing or brokerage or any of the other respectable London jobs that pay by the million?

  The answer is simple: I had no idea what it was that I wanted to do. It is the curse of modern times that the bright young things can do whatever they want, live wherever they want, sleep with whomsoever they want – just so long as you go for it, you too can have it all. If you have that dream, that vision, there’s never been a better time in history to seize your destiny. If, on the other hand, you’re a dabbler, a dilettante, there’s lots of things that you might like to try; and lots of things that you might be reasonably good at. But in this era of specialisation, there is little room left for the dabblers who drift like honeybees from one flower to the next.

  After nigh on fifteen years of school and university, I had a clutch of qualifications but no star on which to hitch them. So instead I’d been travelling for nearly two years and had become embroiled in yet another disastrous love affair. I don’t know why it is, but in affairs of the heart, I’m a magnet for the cataclysmic. Not for me the girlfriend who drifts into my life and who slowly ebbs out; rather, they tend to end things in the most spectacular fashion. If I were to sum up all my great affairs of the heart, the word that would most generally fit the bill is ‘Disaster’. But of course they end disastrously. After touching Himalayan peaks of happiness, where is there to go but down? So after university I had yet again been scalded by love, and as a result took off travelling.

  After nearly two years in Asia, I returned home to London. It was not long before my father started asking just when it was that I would fulfil my destiny.

  ‘Why don’t you just try something – anything?’ he’d said. ‘It doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life. Anything at all. Damn it – you might even like it!’

  I’d had a shot at becoming a croupier. Dreams of wearing a sharp suit and a snappy bowtie as I riffled through the chips and smiled at women who dripped in diamonds. I’d lasted a week; done for by my lousy maths.

  A career in copy writing: failed at the first hurdle. A career in selling insurance and cashing in on all my blueblood acquaintances; I walked out of the interview. A career as a Lloyds underwriter, such a grand title for such tedium. A career as a trader, screaming and haggling in the pit with the other hyenas.

  ‘I’ve got some friends in the fashion industry,’ said my stepmother, Edie. She had been a model once and was still holding on to her beauty.

  My father was reading the Telegraph, puffing away on one of his high-tar cigarettes. He had been a no-nonsense general and certainly would not have put up with any of this nonsense from his subalterns. How he had mellowed. There was slight flicker of the eyebrows, as if to say, ‘God help us!’

  ‘Lots of lovely girls,’ Edie continued, sipping on her bitter espresso. ‘You might like fashion – really.’

  My father gazed out of the kitchen window. ‘Oh look,’ he said. ‘There’s a young pig flying over the top of the eucalyptus.’

  ‘Have you ever thought about writing about your travels?’ Edie said. ‘Travel writing’s becoming very popular.’

  ‘My God!’ He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Now there’s a whole herd of the buggers doing a fly-past!’

  Edie gave him a wan smile. ‘If you’re not going to be helpful, darling…’

  ‘I’m going to do the crossword.’

  He left and soon after, Edie squawked, ‘Is that the time?’ and followed him.

  With nothing better to do, I started to clean the kitchen. What to do, what to do? I was the boy of destiny, but where to go to follow my nebulous star? Like every other stripling, I suppose I dreamed of women and money and expensive holidays and, above all else, impressing my peers and my friends, so that they were incapable of doing anything else but falling to their knees in the most abject adulation.

  I flicked through some photo albums. Pictures of my mother, long dead now, and my father when he’d once known what joy it was to be alive. Pictures of military parades that I’d attended, tapping my feet to the drummers’ beat; first days of term; old tree-houses; stately homes; and then, in a small cluster of pictures from a holiday from the distant past, the Knoll House Hotel.

  I smiled. I must have been about six years old and it was one of the last holidays that I’d ever had with my mother. I hadn’t thought about it in years. But I remembered it. I remembered a playground and a pirate’s ship. I remembered shrimps from the rock pools that had been boiled up in an old paint can. And a day on the beach when we’d rented one of the huts, my mother smiling and my father laughing as we had tea in the snug as the rain thrummed on the rooftop. A little pitch-and-putt golf course, as I hacked in the heather with cut-down clubs. And, bizarrely, I remember a vast ski jump that had been pitched beside the swimming pool – built not for the guests but for the proprietor’s daughter so that she could follow her ski-jumping dreams. I wondered if she ever made it to the Olympics.

  It was odd that I hadn’t thought about the Knoll House befo
re. Looking back, it might have been one of the happiest holidays of my life.

  On a whim, and because all my friends were at work that morning, I called up directory enquiries, found the hotel’s number, and in under a minute was being put through to Anthony, the hotel’s manager.

  He sounded jolly; we hit it off immediately. It was March. By coincidence, the hotel was just about to open for the Easter break. It had been closed for three or four months during the winter and Anthony had just returned from his UK recruitment tour. Over the phone I must have somehow conveyed that precise mix of friendliness, punctiliousness and subservience that are required of a good waiter. Anthony hired me on the spot. Could I come down the next day?

  I could have kissed him I was so happy. In one bound, Kim was free!

  Sure, up until five minutes earlier, I had never once considered a career in the catering industry. But in a matter of moments, I was already smitten – I’d be out of London; I’d be away from my parents. Life on a hotel campus with waiters and waitresses and a regular routine. I might be marking time, marching but not moving forward, but at least I would be on the move.

  ‘You’re going where?’ Edie was horrified.

  My father seemed rather pleased. ‘The Knoll House,’ he meditated the next day. ‘I haven’t been there in years.’

  He wanted to drive me down that morning and if I had been more perceptive I would have let him. Young men may like to fly solo, but they forget that there is a special pleasure for parents to put themselves out for their children. Instead he gave me a lift to Waterloo Station. He was on his way to the Stock Exchange. He never much talked about his work – or perhaps I just never asked him about it. He was wearing a suit with a dark tie, his jacket slung on the back seat.

  We took his personal Mini, rather than the family Mercedes, which meant that he could smoke. He loved that brown Mini. We had gone down a little cul-de-sac near to where we lived in Chelsea. It was a quiet street and the road was sealed off with a number of bollards. He drove straight at the bollards at about thirty miles per hour. Just when it seemed that a crash was inevitable, he flicked the steering wheel. With two wheels on the pavement and two wheels in the gutter, we flew through the bollards. The Mini bounced back onto the road. He was laughing so hard he started to choke.

  He nudged me in the ribs. ‘Thought the old man had lost his marbles?’

  ‘You’d have had a fit if I drove like that!’

  ‘Once – probably.’ He puffed at his cigarette before flicking the stub out of the window. ‘I discovered that road a month ago. I’m not even sure it’s a shortcut. It’s probably a long cut. You should have seen the expression on Edie’s face when I first took her there. “We’re going to crash!”’ he cried, in a high-pitch squeal, laughing. ‘She was as white as a ghost.’

  He laughed again, lighting up another cigarette with one-hand as he double D-clutched down to second.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think it might have been better if I hadn’t gone straight into the army. Should have seen some of the world. Lot of stuffed shirts in the army.’

  It was a part of my father that, for a long time, I had never known existed. For so long he had been this humourless army officer, but since a severe accident that I’d had at school, it was as if he’d given up trying to train me like some well-tended vine, for ever pruning and shaping and nurturing with fertiliser. He had come to accept that there was much joy to be had from watching me grow, even if the end product might not be what he’d first envisaged.

  ‘So what happened to you?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. There was a time when the army was the most important thing in the world to me. And then things happen… You get a better sense of what’s important.’

  ‘There was a time when you wanted me to join up.’

  ‘What an imbecile!’ he said. I was not sure if he was referring to himself or the biker on the Ducati. ‘You’ll like the Knoll House,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and visit you when you’ve settled in. There’s a pub just the near hotel, the Bankes Arms. Full of dark crannies. Used to go there with your mother.’

  We tore into Waterloo station and parked in the taxi rank. ‘Do you need any money?’ he asked, stretching to the back seat for his wallet. He peeled off some crisp red £50 notes. ‘Here’s a couple of hundred. Send us a postcard some time.’

  I stretched over to give him an awkward hug and made to kiss him on the side of the cheek. There was a time, a few years earlier, when he would have shrunk from such overtures, but he had learned to accept these indignities from his eldest son.

  On the pavement, I waved. He gave me a formal salute. It was rather nice, actually. Of all the extraordinary things that can happen between father and son, I enjoyed his company.

  I caught the train down to Poole, which carved through genteel, staid Wiltshire. I was aware that a new chapter in my life was beginning; aware I had no inkling as to what might be on the next page. Perhaps not adventure, but certainly something different.

  I wondered if there might yet be love on the horizon. It had been a long time since I had kissed a woman. Some men are capable of bouncing back after a bad break-up. They don’t even bother to lick their wounds before immersing themselves straight back into the hostile element. But I was still tired, punch-drunk and the wounds still raw and tender; if you have ever been in love, then you will know how it is. Not that I’d been foreswearing on women for all time, not by any means. I had been having a time out.

  So I did wonder about love. I did wonder if in the Knoll House there might be the one. But would it be the slow burn that only comes with time, months and months before you realise that the jewel that you’ve been searching for is right in front of your very nose? Or would it be the coup de foudre, the lightning bolt that left me prone and smitten in under a minute?

  In my naïve way, I hoped that it would be the latter. When lightning strikes, it’s so quick that it seems to blot out all else. You’re rendered so helpless that you lose your appetite and, when in her presence, are hardly capable of speech.

  I caught the bus through Sandy Banks. Even in 1988, Sandy Banks was one of Britain’s most costly pieces of real estate. But I preferred the dirty, functional ferry, in splendid contrast to the manicured lawns and the spit-polished yachts. For pedestrians, the fare was fifty pence. The wind hissed off the waves bringing with it a spit of rain. I sat outside on one of the summer benches. The clear cold felt like balm, icing at my cheeks and frosting my hair. A young boy stood at the back of the ferry tossing bread to the gulls. The birds swooped and whirled and never once missed and every time they snatched up the bread, the boy would laugh. Standing on sentry-duty by his side was the boy’s father, looking ever more miserable as the cold rain sliced through his jumper. He was only a little older than myself; what a trooper to have committed so young – to have found his soul mate and to have decided that she was the one. I wished him well, as I do all my fellow travellers in this crazy journey of love and lust where nothing is certain, except the cataclysmic crash that will come at the end of it all. Still – better by far to be travelling, disasters and all, than to be sitting there remote and loveless on the island shore, gloating with self-satisfied smugness at the sight of the little ships that are foundering in the sea.

  It was only a short ferry ride and on the other side of the estuary: Studland, home of long-remembered holidays. I wondered if I would ever be able to recapture that first careless rapture.

  I had planned on walking to the hotel and was strapping my rucksack to my back when a green Volvo estate pulled over to the side of the road. The front side window eased down. It was a woman, blonde, a pleasant smile. She was only a little older than me.

  ‘Like a lift?’ she said.

  I was about to tell her that I’d be fine. But instead I found myself saying, ‘Thanks.’

  The car belonged to the family of the boy with the bread and the cold, wet man. I heaved my Bergen into the boot and joined the boy in the b
ack.

  ‘Where you heading?’ asked the man. The heater in the car was going full blast. It was wonderful after the wet wind on the ferry.

  ‘The Knoll House,’ I said.

  ‘One of the staff?’

  ‘I’m one of the new waiters.’

  ‘We sometimes go there for dinner,’ said the woman. ‘We’ll have to look out for you. My sister would like you.’

  ‘Would she?’ I asked. ‘Is she anything like you?’

  ‘My sister would definitely like you,’ she laughed. ‘What’s your name?’

  I was formally introduced to Mark and Julienne and little James.

  ‘Do you know about the Knoll House’s puddings?’ said Mark.

  ‘No. They any good?’

  ‘They’re the main reason we go.’ The boy laughed and the woman smiled and the man patted her knee, and I glimpsed an instance of the small pleasures that are to be had from marriage. They are not like the adventures of being a single man; there is none of the electric heat that comes with waiting for your lover at the airport; there is no thrill of the chase, nor that exquisite ecstasy that comes with the taste of new love. But there are compensations: a child’s smile; a cup of tea in the morning; a peck on the cheek as you go to work; and a warm meal, perhaps, when you return. Forgive me, for I know full well that this is just me, perverse to a fault. It would not matter if I were the Bachelor-King or if I were married to the most beautiful woman that has ever walked this earth. Whatever I’ve got, I will always want what he’s having.

  They dropped me at the bus stop by the hotel and they all waved me off as I shouldered my rucksack. ‘Good luck!’ said the man.

  ‘Don’t forget about that sister!’ I called after them.

  I gave them an affectionate wave that ended in a sloppy army salute.

  I looked up at the hotel. Perhaps there was a prick of memory, but I didn’t recognise the place. It was solid, white, comfortably robust and it stood at the top of a hill with sweeping views out over the forest and down to that grey wash of sea. The building seemed to be pre-war, purpose built as the perfect family hotel.