The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted

by William Coles

  She was wearing black boots and white trousers and a pink cashmere top, coiffed hair, perfect make-up. She was sort of sexy, but she didn’t do it for me.

  ‘She’s not in,’ she said. ‘She’s probably out painting.’

  ‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I’ll see her around.’

  ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘No.’

  I could sense her probing me. She wanted to know if we were lovers.

  ‘Can I give you a lift somewhere?’ she asked. She had a slight pout. ‘Buy you a coffee in Swanage?’

  ‘I’m good thanks,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll…’ I was about to say I was going to the beach, but I realised that she would immediately want to join me. ‘I’ll be on my way.’

  I walked off down the road and took a turn down a footpath that led to the beach. Greta watched me as she drove by. She was in a sporty little GTi, white, and she was driving too fast.

  I gave Greta five minutes before looping through the fields round to the back of Cally’s house. I jumped over a dry-stone wall and walked up through the garden; it was in immaculate order, but with a lush hint of the wilderness in the borders. I don’t think that Cally was ever much of a gardener, but she had a man who looked after it all.

  Just as she’d said, the back door was unlocked. I let myself in, took off my trainers, and silently padded up the stairs in my stockinged feet. I was excited; not quite a thief in the night, but I did feel like a trespasser.

  I knew where the bathroom was. It was where she had bandaged my ribs all those months ago. The door was closed. I had not made a sound, but she already knew I was there. I was about to knock when she called out to me. ‘Come in,’ she said.

  I turned the knob. I eased the door open and the dark of the corridor was flooded with daylight that spilt out of the bathroom. I looked in. Cally was in the bath, hair tied up, sipping at a mug of black coffee. She held the cup with both hands as if it were a two-handled quaich. She looked at me over the rim of the cup with she-devil eyes. The bath was full and thick with bubbles. I could see her face and her neck, but all else was hidden from view. Two candles burned by the sink. The window was open and the room smelt of citrus. It was heavenly – so clean, so spacious, so very different from everything about my life in the hotel.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  I put my bag on the ground, knelt by the bath, and kissed her. Her lips moved underneath mine. ‘Hello,’ I said.

  She set her coffee cup on a table, snaked her wet arms around my neck, and kissed me again.

  ‘Would you like to join me?’ she said.

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘There’s coffee on the side if you want. Pour yourself a cup.’

  I poured coffee from the cafetière and quickly peeled off my clothes. I left them scattered on the floor.

  She laughed at me. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘You just throw your stuff wherever you want and dive straight in. Too few people do that.’

  ‘Really?’ I got into the bath. The water was hot, but not piping. ‘I thought most women liked to keep things neat and tidy.’

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘As for most women – well, they may like things one way today, but tomorrow, they may also have a fancy for spontaneity and hurling your clothes any which way you please.’

  I lowered myself into the bath. The water was very close to teetering over the edge. Cally watched with amusement. ‘Is he going to do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course he’s going to do it.’

  Ever so slowly, I eased my head back until it rested against the rim of the bath. Our legs were interlocked at the knees. The water was so high that it tremored at the edge.

  We gazed at each other.

  ‘Still as gorgeous as ever,’ she said.

  ‘There’s only one gorgeous person round here and that’s you,’ I said.

  She smiled and cocked her head.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk, don’t say a thing, don’t do anything. All I want is to look at you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. She stretched a long finger to her lips and urged me to silence.

  I had never done that before, just looked and looked into a woman’s eyes without time constraints and without a word being said. Although nothing was being said, a myriad thoughts and thrills were constantly running through our heads as we forged this intense connection. It’s very different from the connection that you have when you make love; it resonates on a much deeper level, like the subsonic boom of a blue whale that travels for hundreds of miles beneath the sea. I realised that if I had fifteen minutes with a beautiful stranger, and if I could only gaze into her eyes, then we would become much more closely connected than we would by any amount of conversation.

  I have no idea how long we had been gazing at each other. Occasionally, she sipped her coffee, but her eyes never left mine. My thoughts ranged from girlfriends, to jobs, to dreams of my travels,

  but gradually these thoughts coalesced into the single knowledge that I very much wanted to make love to this woman.

  But I wasn’t going to be the first to break. It was Cally’s call, her show, and if she wanted to carry on gazing at me until the evening star had first glimmered in the west, then I would go along with that.

  Under the water Cally was stroking my calf with her hand and I started to do the same. Her skin was so smooth it might have been oiled. Gradually, my hand, our hands worked towards the middle, and our fingers touched and clasped and we lay there in the bath, still staring but now holding hands.

  The phone rang. We could hear Cally’s brief message, and then we heard the unmistakable voice of Greta. ‘Cally, hi, it’s me,’ she said. ‘Came round to see you earlier and who should I discover here but our young waiter friend. I hope you haven’t set your sights on the poor boy. At your age, you really ought to know better.’

  Cally sighed and broke off from my hand and let her fingers trail up the inside of my thigh. ‘Well, that’s told me,’ she said.

  ‘Especially at your age.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I find it very hard to resist you.’

  For a couple of minutes now, the water had been draining from the bath, until little archipelagos of knees and torsos and breasts emerged out of the soapsuds.

  She leaned over to kiss me, her hands lightly about my waist, but then she pressed forward, pushing against me until she was lying on top of me, her skin warm and wet against my chest.

  She kissed me. ‘I’ve never made love in this bath before.’

  ‘Let’s do it, then.’

  ‘How did you enjoy looking, but not speaking?’ she said.

  ‘I loved it.’

  ‘Let’s try it again, then.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Once again, I wallowed in Cally’s eyes, though this time it was quite different, because this time we were making love, and though we might stroke and fondle, our eyes never once left each other. She would occasionally lean down to kiss me fondly, lasciviously, but even then our eyes remained locked, as if staring into the wicked flicker of a candle’s flame. After some time, she looked at me, perhaps quizzically, and gave me a slow languorous nod as her firm fingers started to knit about my neck. She didn’t speak, and neither did I, but I could hear this hum detonating deep in the bottom of her throat, and she drew her knees up and raked me with her nails, and when we were done, she kissed me again.

  ‘Your kiss has an echo,’ she said. ‘Even minutes after we’ve stopped kissing, I can still feel the tingle of your lips on mine.’

  ‘I can feel another kind of echo.’

  ‘I’ll bet you can.’

  By now the bath had all but run dry. The foam had sculpted itself to our limbs. I thought that we were going to get out.

  But no.

  ‘Hot water’s so boring, isn’t it?’ she said, eyes sparkling. ‘It’s cosy; it’s relaxing. But is that we want out of life?’

  I was inscrutable. I kissed the
little smoker’s lines that traced about her eyes.

  ‘A cold bath on the other hand?’

  She put the plug back in, and then with one twist of the tap, cold water cannoned into the bath. I gasped, my skin freezing and seizing as the water hit me. The water was bitingly cold. Cally clung to me and there was some slight warmth from her belly, but I could feel the goosebumps rippling over my thighs.

  I treated it as an exercise in pain.

  It hurt, but it wasn’t going to kill me and if she could stand it, then I could most definitely stand it, too.

  ‘This is nice,’ she said.

  ‘Just lovely,’ I replied. ‘I’m getting really turned on.’

  Very delicately she kissed me on the cheek. The bath was nearly full and the water continued to torrent from the taps and my head was the only part of me that was not immersed. The feeling of cold had now moved on to a general numbness.

  ‘I wonder if I’ve got any birch twigs downstairs,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll tan your hide off,’ I said. ‘It’d be a real pleasure.’

  ‘We’re very well suited,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anyone else who would be staying in this bath with me.’

  ‘I’m loving it,’ I said. ‘I mean of course there’s a good chance that I might get frostbite on my extremities, but apart from that, this is just cosy as can be.’

  She purred on top of me, her lips hovering just an inch above mine.

  ‘And are you really getting turned on?’

  ‘Well, in my mind, yes,’ I said. ‘My heart is willing, though the flesh may be weak. Literally.’

  I was starting to shiver. At first I could control it, but in the end there was no escaping that my whole body was shaking from the cold.

  ‘I’m being very thoughtless,’ she said. ‘There’s not a scrap of fat on you, you’re nothing but sinewy muscle, whereas I… I have much more padding.’

  I grabbed the sides of her belly, a hefty haunch thick in each of my hands. ‘And I love it.’

  ‘Let me get you out and get you dry,’ she said.

  With both hands she hauled me out of the bath and wrapped me in a vast white towel. I was still shivering and when I glimpsed myself in the mirror, I saw that my lips were blue. As for Cally, I don’t know whether it was her natural padding, but she did not seem to have suffered any ill effects whatsoever from our ice bath.

  She led me through to her bedroom, another light airy room, with a vast four-poster bed. The foot-thick posts were black with age and carved with ornate flowers and cupids. It had lush curtains, which swirled with William Morris patterns. Cally put on a white bathrobe and got me a toddy. We lay in the bed together.

  ‘How old is this bed?’ I asked.

  ‘Over four hundred years,’ she said. ‘I like its history.’

  ‘What is its history?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I like to think of it. I like to think of all the people who have slept in this bed, and the hundreds and hundreds of couples who have made love here…’ She trailed off as her hand rummaged beneath my towel. ‘I daresay quite a few people have died here, too.’

  ‘You like your history, don’t you.’

  ‘I love it. Old cups and old coins and old sculptures – to think of all the hands that have touched them over the centuries and to know that you are just the latest in a long line, and that long after we’ve gone, there will be many more to come.’

  ‘But for the moment, it’s our turn in the bed.’

  ‘It’s our time in the sun.’

  ‘If only these four posts could talk.’

  ‘They would have a story to tell.’ She swept her hair off her face. ‘But I’m sure it will be nothing to the story that’s about to happen.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I thought it might be the best way to warm you up.’

  ‘You’ll have to be quick about it, Cally,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to be back at the hotel in half an hour.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ she said, as she went about her unique way of warming me up. Just to think of it now still sends a shiver of delight running up my spine. If I could be warmed up like that every time I was cold, then for the rest of my life, I would daily immerse myself in Cally’s freezing bathtub.

  I saw Cally again after lunch, when I trickled down to her beach hut, and then again in her home after serving dinner. I spent the night and was up at the crack of dawn and traipsing back to the hotel. I may have been setting a precedent, but it was a precedent that I was more than happy to keep. So long as Cally was in Dorset, I’d see her at least two or three times a day, and every time we met we made love. Her house and her beach hut were the primary places where we would eke out our ardour, but if the mood took us – as it often did – then we would make love in any discreet field or lay-by or leafy bower that came to hand.

  And then there were the not so discreet places, chief of which was the Agglestone. I had been there a few times by myself, but landmarks, buildings, even trees and shrubs take on new significance when they are seen with a lover. When Cally took me there, one lunch-time on my day off, it seemed like one of the most extraordinary natural wonders of the world, with this thousand tons of sandstone perched at the top of a hill. A few decades back, the Agglestone had looked even more dramatic. The main stone had, by some freak of nature, been balanced on top of a smaller one. They looked like some miraculous hanging anvil. Then one wild winter night in the Seventies, there was a wind to end all winds and the Agglestone was tilted off its perch, and there it remains like some giant toad that is for ever staring at the stars.

  It was already spitting with rain as we tethered the horses to some heather, and by the time we had climbed to the base of the rock, it was raining quite hard. We held hands as we walked around the stone, the rain drumming down, spitting off the rock. We had quickened our stride to get back to the horses, when a bolt of lightning lit up the sky followed immediately by a shockwave of thunder, which seemed to rattle the very teeth in my head. Almost immediately, we were hit by the monsoon. I had not seen rain like it in a long time. In just a few seconds I was so wet that I might as well have been dropped in the sea. Our brisk walk turned into an amble. There was no hurry because we could get no wetter. I caught Cally’s eye and we laughed. ‘Come on!’ she said, and started peeling off her clothes. I wriggled out of my trousers which, tight and wet, were sticking firm to my thighs. And still it poured. Naked, we ran in the sand around the Agglestone, like we were taking part in an old, old ritual that had been conducted around that stone for thousands of years; we ended up against the Agglestone’s rough rock, pelted by the rain and flensed by the wind, and I didn’t doubt for a second that that also was exactly what the ritual demanded of us. The knowledge that lovers like us had been trysting there for millennia, and that we were just the latest link in this long, long chain, bound us both to the past and to the future.

  We rode back naked, sticking to the heath and to the hedgerows, but we still had to cross a couple of roads. A car slowed as it overtook us, and the woman in the passenger seat looked at us, at first languidly and then with more interest. The car slowed as it moved on, so that the driver could inspect us in the rear-view mirror.

  In spite of all that, Cally remained my beautiful dark secret.

  My carping colleagues certainly knew that I was seeing someone. I didn’t visit the pub so often. At sun up, I’d sometimes be spotted skulking back into the hotel. In the late afternoon, the waiters would watch as I flew back to my room to change hurriedly into my uniform.

  But I kept my mouth shut and so did Annette and Oliver, and for a time no one even came close to guessing the identity of my mystery love.

  It was all going to come out eventually; there was no doubt of that. In such a small community, it was inevitable that we would be found by prying eyes. Even so, when it did finally happen, I was rather surprised. Up until then, I had no idea that he knew me so well.

  My father had come down to play golf with me. He�
��d brought my clubs. The Mini barely stopped for a moment outside the hotel before I’d hopped in and we had roared off. Darren and Janeen watched me leave. I gave them a regal wave.

  My father craned his head this way and that as we went down the drive. ‘Hasn’t changed a bit,’ he said. ‘Hasn’t changed in well over a decade. They still have just the one TV?’

  ‘Only the one.’

  ‘You get out on the pitch-and-putt course much?’

  ‘Not so much,’ I said, and that was true. Since Cally had come into my life a month earlier, I had not touched a golf club.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened to my golf these days.’ He puffed away on his cigarette, tapping the ash out of the window as we screeched along the coast. ‘Not hitting it off the middle. Maybe I’m just getting old.’

  We had a pint in the clubhouse and ordered two lobster salads for lunch after the first nine. What a day to be out on the golf course. All those killjoys who complain that golf is just a game for bourgeois blow-hards can go suck it. On a summer’s day, there is no finer way to pass the afternoon.

  My father played his usual steady game, and I thrashed the ball from one bank of rough to the next, and even though I was being given strokes aplenty, he was still three up at the turn. Just a few years before he’d have been desperate to win, but on that day he was quite happy just to potter along with his cigarette trailing from his lips.

  We stopped off back at the clubhouse. The lobsters were waiting for us and we had gin and tonic outside on the patio and then a bottle of white and then some Wolfschmidt kummel. I didn’t know what all the booze was going to do to my swing, but it certainly wasn’t going to make it much worse.

  ‘Your stepmother has been wondering when you are going to settle down into a proper job,’ my father said. There was an After Eight mint on his coffee saucer. He ate it in one.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea. Doesn’t being a waiter count?’

  ‘It’s difficult for her to swank with her friends when all their boys are beavering away in the City.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘If you’re having fun, then who gives a monkey’s cuss?’ He let out a small, contented belch and massaged his broad belly. He was inspecting his glass of kummel against the clear blue sky. ‘Seeing anyone at the moment?’