Chapter 7
The duck had been, as I knew it would be, excellent, as had the sauce. Ivo may have given the impression of having a butterfly mind, but when something got his attention, he could focus to the exclusion of all else and it made him a terrific cook. He also arranged for us to borrow his brother’s friend’s house, while I booked a ferry crossing, although I didn’t mention the squirrel. If he’d been illegally removed, the paperwork to return him could have held us up for weeks, particularly if there was even the chance of any diseases among his compatriots. I really didn’t think I could cope with weeks of Ivo’s speculation while Fred languished in quarantine.
Bright and early the next morning, we packed up the car. Well, Ivo was bright. I’d had a somewhat disturbed and overheated night on the sofa. Although Ivo had offered me his bed, I didn’t think I would have slept any better there. In fact, it would probably have been worse, with the haunting thoughts of past lovers in every book and painting. So I’d stretched out on the long velvet couch and sweated into the perfumed air of the warm night, meanwhile overhead Ivo clattered about packing things and birds tap-danced on the guttering.
As a result, at 5a.m. I was gritty-eyed and the remnants of the cold were making themselves felt in a headache and raspy cough.
‘More nettle tea?’ Ivo asked, in a sympathetic tone as I swept my meagre belongings into my holdall and wished I could look wistful and ethereal in my leggings and T-shirt, rather than like someone whose much needed yoga class has been evacuated.
‘No, thanks. I’m fine, it’s just a bit early.’ I put my wildlife rescue jumper around my shoulders. I may need it, if anyone questioned me about Fred. ‘I’m going to have to fetch a tetchy squirrel now. If I’m not back in ten minutes, he may have eaten me.’
‘Deliciously edible as you are,’ Ivo replied, pertly.
‘Stop it. You sound more camp than that No?l Coward jacket of yours.’ It was a quick rejoinder, to cover my ridiculous blush at his words. I didn’t think there was anything personal in it, but a stupid tiny bit of my pride wanted to pretend that there might be.
‘Well, it might have been Oscar Wilde, I’m still not really clear on that point.’ Ivo pinged the car open and leaned against it, toning wonderfully with the morning in his scarlet block-print trousers and emerald green shirt.
‘Neither of them was a bastion of alpha maleness though, were they?’
‘I suppose not. But then, I’ve never been an alpha male. Nor, I suspect, a beta. I’m somewhere around the middle of the alphabet; if a lambda male is a thing, then I’m it. I can change a lightbulb and wrangle moths, but I cry at Titanic and hug everyone. What’s that, in your Man Alphabet?’
I shook my head, ‘I think it’s just you, Ivo,’ I said, leaving him looking smug while I went to crate up Fred for his long journey home.
‘If this were a film,’ I said to the cocked ears and bright eyes that met me when I went into the stable, ‘you’d be getting together with a troupe of your squirrel friends to find your own way home.’ I held the travel cage against the door. ‘I suspect you’d be building tiny rafts and drawing maps on acorns or something.’
Fred tipped his head the other way and pinged around the cage.
‘And the grey squirrels would be the enemy,’ I carried on, lost in my world of cute cartoon animals. ‘You’d have an unlikely ally; maybe a fox or something. Or an owl.’
Fred scuttled into the travel box and I closed the door. ‘I have a horrible feeling that Ivo might be catching,’ I said. ‘The entirety of that previous whimsical statement is definitely more of an Ivo thing than a Cressida thing.’
Ivo had loaded our bags into the car, programmed the sat nav and left a corner so that we could wedge Fred into the boot. Now he was perched in the driver’s seat with his legs sticking out of the car, watching me. ‘Five hours, the sat nav says.’ He leaned back and fiddled with the dashboard.
‘We’re on the three o’clock ferry. Plenty of time and we can share the drive.’ I closed the boot, aware of Fred’s little furry face peering at me through his bars. He was probably sick of being carted around the countryside like a difficult suitcase. ‘You’re going home, Fred.’
Fred passed no opinion on this. I strapped myself in, took a deep breath and said, ‘Right Batman, let’s high tail it for the hills.’
Ivo started the car. ‘Am I Batman? I thought you were Batman.’
‘Who are you then? You’re definitely not Robin. Catwoman, maybe?’
He looked sideways at me. ‘No. I’m the Joker,’ he said and there was a weight of meaning in his tone that made me think again of that book I’d seen beside his bed. Committing the Perfect Crime. Had he put it there on purpose, for me to see and misunderstand? But then I thought of the hurt on his face when he’d thought I didn’t trust him, when I’d possibly suspected him of keeping information from the police.
‘Ivo…’
‘I’ve never told anyone about the ADHD thing, you know.’ His voice was more normal now.
I didn’t know what to say to that. ‘None of the girlfriends?’ I asked in the end.
He shook his head and he accelerated the car out onto the main road. ‘No one. Some people may have guessed but nobody has been crass enough to ask. So I hope you feel special.’
I chanced a quick look at him but he was keeping his eyes on the road. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said, truthfully. ‘Thank you doesn’t seem appropriate.’
‘I just wanted you to know. None of it is deliberate. None of it. I don’t do things to be annoying, and I don’t forget stuff because I don’t care. My executive functioning skills are non-existent, and I operate purely through the means of writing everything important down.’ Another sideways look. ‘I wanted you to know. Now, shall we have some music? What do you fancy? My playlist might be a little heavy on the pop side, so if you want to indulge your taste for thrash metal, now is not the time.’
We squabbled lightly about music until I fell into a doze, half-dreaming. His recent mentioning of the ADHD had puzzled me – was I really the first person he’d told outright about it? Or was he trying to make me feel special, for some reason? But then, the way he dropped it in then wheeled away, like someone throwing a huge rock into a still pond and being afraid of the ripples – that wasn’t the mark of someone used to airing it regularly. He almost seemed ashamed, or afraid, when he mentioned ADHD, and I didn’t know why. But then, my exposure to it was mostly limited to workmates talking about their own children or nieces and nephews and making it sound as though ADHD mainly caused a lot of noisy gardens and a need for help with schoolwork. Ivo had been brilliant at uni, and was restrained, often to the point of reticence.
We reached Southampton, with a couple of driver-swaps and opportunities to open the car up to let Fred have some fresh air, while we sat charging the car, and ate ice cream and debated the merits of London Grammar of whom Ivo, it seemed, was irrationally fond.
The ferry crossing was smooth, punctuated by boats that flew around us, all sail and elegance, like water-bound birds, and then we landed and drove off the ferry into what felt like 1950. Narrow lanes held cyclists and horse riders and we headed up a hill where little cottages hung over the road, all white paint and half-timbering. I half expected the Famous Five to wander into view amid the lacy wash of cow parsley and buttercups that ornamented the roadsides. It was improbably quaint and brought me out in a longing for fresh lemonade and gingham. As we climbed, the sunlight winked and reflected off the sea and seemed to illuminate the countryside in bright, sharp colours, as though the scenery had been painted in shades of acid.
‘I thought we were staying in Cowes?’ I asked, bewildered.
‘Sort of Cowes.’ Ivo was watching the sat nav. ‘But a bit higher up.’
‘A bit higher up’ turned out to be a lap boarded building set amid treetops and looking out over the water, all carefully decorated and having more than a little of the ‘curated’ about it. The wooden roof arched overhead like a sail, the floors were boarded like a deck and self-consciously rounded windows like portholes peppered every wall. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to sleep here or take it out for a trip around the bay.
‘Your brother’s friends have a “thing” about boats, don’t they?’ I put my bag down in the hallway, a little afraid to walk any further in, just in case we cast off.
‘Huh.’ Ivo carried Fred inside and put his cage on the floor. ‘At least it’s available for us and we don’t have to explain the squirrel.’ He put the key back in the keysafe on the wall very carefully. ‘There. Now we both know where it is.’ Then, off my look. ‘I lose keys a lot. Put them down and can’t remember where or they fall out of my pockets or, I dunno, maybe the universe swallows them. Living with my brain feels a bit like that, you know. As though the universe is swallowing me up.’
He wandered through, down the wood-framed hall and into a large living room that jutted out above the trees to give the impression now that we were in a hot air balloon, floating towards the water. ‘Nice enough, I’ll give them that.’
‘Not enough clutter.’ I followed him. In contrast to Ivo’s place, with the heaped bookcases, velvet sofas and general air of well-used antiquity, this house looked as though it was automatically scrubbed every morning. All linen and wood and clean lines – it must be like living in Sweden.
‘They let it to film companies, when they’re not down for the sailing,’ Ivo said, picking up a little model of a yacht that sat on a wide window ledge. He said this as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘I think it was once a major part of a Netflix series.’ The boat went down and he stared out of the window. ‘I take it this isn’t your kind of place then, Cress?’
‘It’s very – well, it’s a bit clinical, isn’t it?’ I looked at the neutral colours, the stonewashed rugs. ‘Looks like you could do an appendectomy on the table.’ I waved a hand at the adjustable light fittings that hung, hooked, on the beams above the table in question. ‘I think I may have got used to pots of riding whips and enough old newspaper to housetrain several litters of puppies.’
‘Good,’ he said, ‘far healthier way to live. Right. What now? Do we tout Fred about the streets stopping passers-by to ask if he looks familiar, or what?’
‘“Do you know this squirrel” sort of thing?’ I sat experimentally on one of the sofas. ‘No. I’ve made contact with the local Squirrel People – they’re the ones who look after the local population and who co-ordinate squirrel swaps. They’re most likely to know Fred, or where he may have come from.’
‘Oh Lord, the Squirrel People.’ Ivo looked at Fred, who was perched outside the sleeping box with his tail curled up over his back. ‘I think they may have featured in one of my more gin-sodden nightmares. So, when do we meet them? Do we have to wait for them to come down from the trees, or what?’
‘Stop it.’ I made room for him to sit next to me. It felt surprisingly natural to have him here, squashed against me by the bolster-like cushions on the sofa, as though we both sat on a cloud. ‘No. I made an appointment for us to go over to their headquarters tomorrow morning and they’re going to run their records, check Fred for a microchip, all that, for us.’
Ivo stared at Fred, who stared back with his tiny hand-like paws clasping the wire grill at the front of his cage. ‘They microchip them?’
‘If they’re kept in captivity, yes.’
‘Wow. I’ve only ever had dogs. Well, the family had a spaniel when I was young. And the horses, but they don’t really count as pets.’
Ivo and Fred continued to eyeball one another, like a prisoner who knows they will be out any day now watching a guard who’s been giving them a hard time.
‘We have to be able to identify them,’ I said reasonably. ‘If they’re breeding in captivity.’
Ivo stretched his legs out and arched his back, his shoulder moving against me. He’d done the majority of the driving while I’d slept and I felt a momentary guilt that I’d let him. ‘I thought, maybe a page of mug-shots? Like a sort of squirrel Crimewatch.’
‘Are you tired? Should we – have an early night or something?’ I didn’t edge away from having him so close. It felt as though the sofa was cuddling us together, and I was enjoying the sensation.
‘Any reply I might make to that would sound sleazy and unworthy of me.’ He jumped up again. ‘No. Let’s go out and have something to eat.’
I looked out of the window, across the treetops, which concealed the roofs of what looked like very expensive houses towards a town that had seemed, on our brief drive through, to consist of a load of Michelin stars, nailed together. ‘Er,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘My treat.’ He didn’t look at me now, he swivelled his eyes back to Fred. ‘I know the best places, after all.’ Ivo held out a hand to me. ‘Come on. There’s a great little seafood shack tucked away off the beaten track; you’ll love it. All fresh stuff, plaice and… and… well, they have fish.’ He’d clearly exhausted his piscine knowledge, but I was hungry. ‘And after that, maybe we could do a drive by of the Squirrel People’s headquarters, suss out the lay of the land, all that.’
I took his outstretched hand. He was just so full of movement and enthusiasm that turning him down wasn’t an option. I had a brief flash of what it would be like to be in a relationship with Ivo. A butterfly mind and a careless attitude to things – could I really ever want that? For this man, whose hand closed carefully around mine, who anticipated my reticence to spend money and knocked it away with his generosity; this man with his hair currently pointing in more directions than three dimensions could encompass, slightly stubbled and wearing a paisley shirt that gave fractals a bad name?
And I answered myself, silently. Hell, yes.
But he’d talked about wanting to date me purely in the past tense. I’d had my chance, apparently, although I hadn’t known it at the time. My fear of getting involved with his flightiness and reckless disregard for things like deadlines had made me keep Ivo at arm’s length when I could have been getting involved. And now? Now he was my friend, and knowing the reason for his shocking timekeeping and desperate week-long revision sessions had come too late. Half a decade ago I could have cast caution to the wind, although, I suspected that, in the case of dating Ivo, half of it would have blown back and hit me in the face.
That was then. This was now. And dinner – was dinner.