The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted (11 page)

‘Shall we go on?' she asked.

‘Okay.'

‘You're doing great.'

She continued to walk backwards and I followed her over, still holding her gaze. She stumbled and fell, yelping with fear, and then looked up at me and laughed for the path was already way behind us and we were walking onto good solid ground.

‘And how was that for you?' she said.

‘Hair-raising.' We walked to her easel; as ever in her life, Cally strolled right by the cliff edge. It was as if she were almost daring herself. Sometimes the toe of her shoe would splay right over the edge of the precipice.

‘Why do you walk so close to the edge?' I asked.

‘I like it,' she said.

‘Ever tried walking down the middle of the motorway?'

‘No, but only because of the traffic.'

‘Did you say you'd make it worth my while?'

‘I did,' she said. ‘I've got some sloe gin. Do you like sloe gin?'

‘Sure.'

‘But I have only one glass. I didn't know anyone was going to be joining me.'

‘Or would be foolhardy enough to join you.'

‘Grabbing life by the throat,' she said. ‘I'll have to put you in my picture now.'

‘Just so long as you don't want me to sit anywhere near the cliff.'

‘No, Kim; it is always me who has to sit next to the cliff. Sit on the grass, watch the birds, sip some gin.' I cleared some of the stones and the guano and made myself a nest in a little hollow, out of the wind and yet with my head slightly raised so that I could stare out to the sea. There was a weak spring sun, though the wind made it cold. Cally was close enough by for us to talk. I watched her as she painted. She was painting in oils, working in broad, sweeping brush-strokes. She had her back to the sea and I could not see her picture. I liked watching her. She was beautiful and talented and she was utterly absorbed in her work.

She looked up again at the birds overhead. ‘It is funny to think that long after I am gone, those birds – or at least the next thousand generations of them – will still be there, will still be nesting on Old Harry, and will still be diving into the sea for the limitless fish.' She went back to the painting and for a while was silent.

‘I can feel when you're looking at me,' she said, her paintbrush darting.

‘How do you know?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I just do.'

‘And do you have any other extrasensory perceptions?'

‘I do, as it happens.'

‘And what are they?'

She pointed at me with her paintbrush. ‘One day…' She trailed off and smoothed the hair from her forehead. ‘You might find out. One day.'

I took another sip of the sloe gin. Cally had made it herself, she told me, plucking the sloes from the autumn hedgerows, before spiking them with a fork and adding sugar and gin and leaving them to mulch over the winter. It was much stronger than the shop-bought sloe gin that I was used to, both sweet and astringent, and with the bitter bite of the sloes. I liked the colour of it. It was a vivid pink, bordering on crimson. I held the glass up to the sky and squinted through the gin and the brown dregs and up to the sun. I'd had a few glasses.

Cally was concentrating on a small detail of her picture, working in small dabs with a tiny brush. Without taking her eyes off the canvas, she asked me one of the most unanswerable questions that a man can ever be asked.

‘What is it,' she said, ‘that a woman really wants?'

I swirled my gin and watched the pink diamonds form on the edge of the crystal. ‘I don't know,' I said. ‘What do women want?'

‘It's not going to be that easy,' she said. ‘Think about it.'

‘Give me a moment,' I said. I thought back to some of my past loves – not that there had ever been that many. As I thought back to India, and to Estelle, and to those other great loves who had once been capable of snatching the very breath from my throat, I discerned that they might have had something in common. ‘I guess a woman wants to be loved,' I said. ‘But she must be loved unconditionally. She can be as capricious as she pleases. She can blow hot, she can blow cold; she wants you and then she doesn't want you. She wants to settle down; she wants to party. But if you are a man, and you love her, you must accept all that, because that is what she is, and that is what you have to do. Your love must be without ties or conditions. No matter what the provocation, and no matter what a woman says, your love must be deep and loyal and last for ever.'

Cally broke away from her painting and looked at me. Her eyes were smiling. ‘Not far off.'

‘But I'm still not even close.'

‘Well, of course we want to be loved unconditionally,' she said. ‘But we don't want our men to be doormats. We don't want to be trampling over them as we please, and then having them get up and ask for more. So the love must be there. But we want a man who knows his own mind.'

‘So it's still just this riddle that is wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma?'

Cally painted. I sipped sloe gin. The gulls dived and the sea throbbed; it was very soothing. Cally was working at the top of the picture. She seemed to be concentrating on her work, but very softly, she started to speak.

‘Did you know that King Arthur was once captured in an ambush?' she said.

I shook my head.

‘I'll tell you about it. He was captured by a king, and he was given a very difficult question. He had to find out what women really want; he was given one year to do it. If he didn't do it, then he was going to be executed.'

‘Okay.'

‘So the young king went round quizzing women, girls, ladies, princesses. He still couldn't find an answer. And then, when his year was nearly up, he was told that there was one woman, a hideous crone, who knew the answer. But she would ask a heavy price.

‘In the end though, he didn't have any option, and so he went to see her. She was just as ugly as everyone had told him. The crone said that she did know the answer to his riddle, but that she would only give it to him if she could marry his most handsome knight, Sir Lancelot.

‘Arthur thinks that this is too much for his friend, but Lancelot says that if it means saving Arthur's life, he'll marry the hag. So Arthur agrees to the deal, and he finds out what it is that women really want.'

I topped up the glass and took it over to Cally. She rolled the gin in the glass and sipped, before handing it back to me. ‘Thank you.'

‘And the answer?'

‘What a woman really wants is… to be in charge of her own life.'

‘Right.' I didn't know what to think of the answer. ‘Is that it?'

‘No, it's not it. Arthur gets his answer and announces it to the king, and it is generally agreed that he has delivered the right answer—'

‘At least for that day.'

‘That he has delivered the right answer,' she continued smoothly. ‘So Lancelot has to marry the hag, and surprisingly it turns out to be a great wedding and all of the knights of the Round Table are there to give him a good send off. On the wedding night, Lancelot is a little nervous as he goes up to the bridal suite, but as he walks into the room, he finds this beautiful woman lying on the bed. She smiles at him. She is pleased to see him; she is in fact his bride. Because Lancelot had been so lovely, she had transformed herself into a beauty.

‘Lancelot is very pleased. And then she gives him a question. She can be a beauty by day, or a beauty by night. Which would he prefer? Would he prefer to have all his friends going green with envy in the day? Or would he prefer to be making love every night with this beautiful woman?'

‘Tough call,' I said.

‘What would you do?'

‘Well, it's a tough call. I think I'd duck it. Just throw the question right back at her.'

‘Correct answer!' said Cally. ‘Lancelot dithered and then, since he probably couldn't make up his mind, he told her to do whatever she wanted.'

‘And she was very happy.'

‘And she was so happy that she decided to be beautiful all of the time.'

‘But that still didn't stop Lancelot from running off with Arthur's Guinevere.'

She nodded in acknowledgement. ‘He was a guy, wasn't he? It doesn't matter what a guy has, eventually he's always going to want more.'

Cally was beautiful. I gazed at her curves and the swell of her bosom, and her jeans skin tight on her thighs. Her age meant nothing; at that moment, all I was looking at was an incredibly good-looking woman.

‘Do you know what you want?' I asked Cally.

She didn't look up. ‘I do.'

‘And will you get it?'

‘Maybe. I usually do.' She broke off and looked at me quickly. I noticed her lips. They were very full. I wanted to kiss her. ‘But this time I'm not sure.'

I helped Cally pack up. She swigged the last of the gin and tossed the dregs over the cliff edge. Just before she packed the canvas, she scribbled something on the back with a black pencil.

‘What are you writing?' I asked.

‘A reminder,' she said. ‘The day, the company. What I drank. Would you like to see the picture?'

I liked it. I hadn't expected to. I'd expected the sort of student daubings that I'd seen from my friends. But this was good, very good. She had captured the gulls and the bride white cliffs against the grey sky. And there, tucked in the corner, was a figure in red, lying slouched on the grass, one arm behind his head and the other holding up a glass of sloe gin to the sun.

‘It's wonderful,' I said. ‘I like it.'

‘Thank you.'

‘One day, when I have the money, I'll buy one of your pictures.'

She smiled at me easily. I carried her easel and stool, while she took the canvas in its leather carry case.

I had forgotten about that thin strip of pathway that connected us to the mainland. I think that Cally had also forgotten that those cliffs and those precipices absolutely terrified me.

She sauntered over the pathway, one hand holding the case. Her other hand was in her pocket, like a boulevardier in the spring.

I followed. I had had a bit to drink and I thought that if I didn't fuss over the pathway, I'd be able to take it in my stride. No big deal at all. Just walk over, keep your head up, and don't for one moment contemplate the prospect of the precipice and the awesome drop. I was looking firmly at Cally. She'd turned round and was watching me.

‘Very good,' she said. She clapped her hands.

I didn't look down. I was determined not to look down.

When I was young, about thirteen, I saw a piece of film footage. It was from the Flying Wallendas. The Wallendas were famous high-wire artists who would never have thought to use a safety net, and for years and years they enthralled audiences all over the world. But one day in 1962, disaster struck. There were seven of them in a pyramid and the front man lost his balance, and down they went and at least two of them died. The team never really recovered, but there was one Wallenda, Karl, who continued to ply his trade until he was well into his seventies; his last moments were recorded on film. In the footage, his hair is slicked back and he still looks quite spry. He has a long pole and is crossing a high wire that has been stretched between two skyscrapers in Puerto Rico. A sudden gust of wind catches him unawares. Karl starts to wobble. Very slowly, he lowers himself until he is almost kneeling on the wire. And then, as the crowd surges forward beneath him, he topples to the side. He snatches at the wire, misses and then he falls. He had always said that it would be the wind that caught him in the end. The wind is the nemesis of the tightrope walker.

And for me. Just as I was feeling sure of myself, a freak gust caught me flat abeam, and I was almost blown clean off the path. I tilted the other way, viciously trying to keep my balance. The path was only about a foot wide. I stared into the abyss; terrifying and yet also so inviting, the jagged rocks like a Siren to my senses, urging me ever downwards.

My arms flailed. I was trying to kneel, but like the last Wallenda, I was already too far gone. I was still desperately clutching onto Cally's stool and her easel, as the rocks and the cliffs heaved in and out of my view, like a storm-tossed sea.

I caught a flurry of movement to my side, as Cally rugby-tackled me, hard around the midriff and slammed me onto the path, punching the breath from my lungs. I was laying face downwards, my legs waving wildly over the edge. I watched as the easel spiralled down, catching the cliff face once, twice, before shattering on the rocks below. The little stool was caught by the wind. It flicked onto a grassy ledge on the main cliff and stayed there. I clung to the cliff face. My face was pressed into the chalk path. Eyes shut. I was violently trembling, my legs and my arms and my back all quivering with terror.

Cally had me, I think, by the belt. She was sitting astride the pathway, as if she were riding a horse. She didn't say anything for a while. Neither of us said or did anything at all. I lay there shivering.

I heard her lighter strike. After a moment, I could smell her cigarette smoke.

I stayed with my eyes shut and my cheek pressed against the chalk and breathed in the cigarette smoke. It was all right, so long as I did not think about what had happened.

Cally flicked her cigarette into the dusk. ‘Okay, Kim,' she said. ‘I am going to stand up and I am going to hold onto your collar.'

She got to her feet and I felt her hand tight at the back of my neck.

‘You are going to keep your eyes shut and you are going to sit up.' She was leaning over me, all but whispering into my ear. ‘You are going to keep your feet either side of the path. Your hands are going to hold onto the edge of the pathway. Can you do that? Just nod.'

I nodded.

‘Okay, do it now.'

I pushed myself up until I was in a sitting position. My thighs were tight on each cliff face. I was astride the path.