The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted (18 page)

‘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?'

‘Not really.'

‘Oh?' He continued to turn the stem of the glass between his fingers. ‘“Not really.” What a delicate phrase and with such a wealth of nuances. So what's she like?'

I chuckled. ‘She's great.'

‘But obviously not yet for public consumption.'

‘Or paternal dissection.'

‘Nothing ever is,' he said, ‘though I suppose that's how we paters like it.'

I came out swinging over the next nine holes; I didn't know where the ball was going, but I was intent on hitting the cover off it. As my game got better, my father started to flag. I beat him two and one, and he couldn't have cared a hoot. We had more drinks in the clubhouse. He'd drunk a lot, well over the limit, but he seemed to have hollow legs. Alcohol had only the most negligible effect on his faculties.

He was staying at the hotel and offered me supper there, but I didn't much fancy being inspected by the rest of the team, so we had supper in Swanage. ‘What's the name of that local pub of yours?' he asked as we drove back.

‘The Bankes Arms.'

‘That's the one,' he said. ‘Let's go for a nightcap. Your mother used to like the place. Got a very fine snug, as I remember—'

I looked at him in amazement. ‘You've been in the snug?'

‘Yes, with your mother, a little round table and a tiny banquette, all very cosy. Surprised you haven't tried it out.' He gave me a dig in the ribs. ‘Honestly, the youth of today. Wasted on you! Wasted on you.'

I'd not seen him in such fine fettle for a long time. He bought us bitter and two whisky chasers. I was just sitting down when I saw Cally and Greta over in the corner; I'd told Cally that I would be popping round to her place later. I had not expected to see her in the pub.

I waved at them as I sat down.

‘Friends of yours?' my father said. ‘Shall we join them?'

The booze had turned him into a bon viveur and he was in the mood for new blood.

‘Hi Cally, hi Greta,' I said. ‘Do you mind if we join you?'

I made the introductions, hands were shaken, and my father went off to the bar to get a bottle of white wine. Greta was tipsy and flirty, Cally more circumspect.

‘How was the golf?' she asked.

‘Golf was great,' I said. ‘What have you painted today?'

‘I was in the mood for horses today,' she said. ‘First I rode them and then I painted them.'

‘And what have you been up to, Greta?'

‘Busy, busy, busy,' she said, and underneath the table I felt her knee knock into mine. ‘So that's your dad? Ex-army?' She eyed him at the bar, where he was producing a number of notes from his wallet. ‘He can come and polish my brass any day.'

‘He doesn't do that any more,' I said. ‘But he could probably send round his batman.'

‘His batman?' Greta rolled her eyes. Her mascara was smudged down her left cheek. ‘And does batman wear tight pants and a cape?'

‘Only if you ask nicely.'

‘I can ask very nicely indeed.' She rummaged in her bag and put on some scarlet lipstick. It was a little too thick at one side. She puckered, pouted and blew me a kiss.