The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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!’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Have you ever thought about writing about your travels?’ Edie said. ‘Travel writing’s becoming very popular.’
    â€˜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…’
    â€˜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