One of a Kind

Chapter 9

We found a beach and spent a happy few hours collecting shells and dabbling our feet in the fabulous blue water. Ivo bought me an ice cream and I bought him a huge whirl of candy floss, uncertain as to whether putting sugar into a system that was already rebounding to levels of energy unequalled by anybody over the age of seven was such a good idea.

I kept all my thoughts to myself. Agonising over my stupidity gave me an almost pleasurable pain, after all, here I was. Beautiful beach, fabulous scenery, and the man I cared about most in the world – I had everything, didn’t I? I wanted to bang my head against something for my idiocy, but as Ivo was the only solid thing to hand, I didn’t.

Ivo marvelled at the intricate swirls of the shells, at the colour of pebbles and the feel of the dark ridged sand under our feet. It was a little bit like being with an alien who had just beamed down onto the planet, such was his joy and focus on things that I took for granted.

‘Don’t you have an off switch?’ I asked, licking the remainder of my Mr Whippy out of the end of the cone.

He thought for a second, looking down to watch the tide sucking shingly sand around his bare toes. ‘You sound like my ex-girlfriend,’ he said. ‘And the one before that.’ His tone was neutral, observational. ‘Am I that difficult to be around? Seriously, Cress?’

I frowned. ‘It’s just that you make me feel…’ Careful, Cress…

‘Tired? Annoyed? Frustrated that you can’t get a word in? Irritated because I’m not paying attention?’

‘…one dimensional.’

That stopped him. He’d been listing provocations almost resigned, running through them like a litany of faults he’d heard so many times that they’d become defining characteristics. Now he had to think.

‘I do? Make you feel…’

‘One dimensional, yes. As though I’m plodding along on a single path, while you’re taking all the interesting diversions, absorbing all the views and then coming back to me a bit sad that I haven’t seen what you have.’ It was true. Discounting all the other ways he made me feel, this feeling that I was slightly inadequate led the way.

‘Wow.’ Ivo pushed his hands into his pockets, making the sleeves of his shirt roll up and exposing his wrists, long and pale, to the sun. His hair flopped down, hiding his expression as he perused his feet, splayed across the sandy ridges through the bubbles and splashes. ‘That makes me sound a bit like a red setter.’

‘There are certain points of similarity,’ I said, and then smiled when he looked up to meet my eye. ‘Aristocratic, long-haired, inability to come when called.’

Now he waded towards me, clonking slightly because of all the shells he had pushed into his pockets. They bulged, making him look as though he’d gained weight in very specific places. ‘I always come when called, Cress,’ he said, almost inaudibly over the sound of a nearby set of toddlers shrieking into the water armed with buckets. ‘Always. I might not be reliable on my own time, but if you need me – I will be there.’ He touched my shoulder. ‘And thank you.’

‘For comparing you to a red setter?’ He actually looked a lot more like an Afghan hound right now, with the sun shining on his blondness and bone structure that jutted like a pyramid.

‘For making this’ – he put both hands alongside his head and wiggled his fingers – ‘sound like a positive thing. Sorry, by the way, if I make you feel a bit weird, I truly don’t mean to, I can’t help thinking along fifty different lines at once and choosing the most interesting one to follow up. It’s just the way I’m wired and I do try to keep a handle on it.’

‘Could be worse,’ I said, trying cheerily to lift his slight mood of sadness. ‘After all, it’s your following up of the strange squirrel affair that’s brought us here, and you were right, I did need a holiday.’ I waved a hand, indicating the beach, which was filling rapidly, and the multicoloured cliffs. ‘This is lovely.’

This was reassuring. I could keep the ‘we’re just friends’ act going, all light-hearted and cheery. Inwardly I congratulated myself on my acting skills. I’d not had much call to exercise them on the British wildlife, but they were turning out to be a pretty good asset.

‘Come on then.’ Ivo grabbed my hand. ‘If you like this, you’ll love this little cove I know. We can pick up a picnic, head over there, sit on the cliffs and watch the sun go down, to round off the day.’

From another man this would have sounded like a romantic proposition. I looked at him sideways. ‘That sounds nice. Cheaper than going for dinner, too.’ Friends, friends, we’re just friends, tralalala.

My jaunty tone and evident practicality made him tilt his head. Suddenly I was being scrutinised in a way that felt a little like being under a spotlight. ‘We can talk, is what I meant.’ He lifted my hand and shook it lightly. ‘About… things. About how we think everything could pan out regarding our friend Fred and his mysterious relocation to Yorkshire. About…’ He looked down now at my hand, still in his, and ran his thumb over the scars and scratches that always adorned my limbs, because life with small furry animals was, as Sally and I had agreed, more biting than bonding. ‘About what it is that you always seem to be shying away from.’

Then he began wading back towards the dry sand, tugging me along with him like a small dinghy in the wake of a liner.

Oh no. Did he know? Had he seen? I could only hope that he had no idea how I felt, or, that if he did, he had good enough manners to honour my self-respect and pretend he hadn’t.

‘Me?’ I protested. His legs were longer than mine so I was having to trot, and consequently spraying seawater up my legs. ‘I’m not shying away from anything! You’re the one who avoids subjects!’

‘Only because they just slip past me,’ Ivo said to the now crowded beach, neatly stepping around two small girls splashing one another in the shallow fringe of breakers. ‘You do it actively.’

We found our shoes and socks, abandoned in the midst of a family group who were setting up windbreaks and rugs, and put them on. I carefully dusted the sand from my feet, pulled on my socks and began lacing up my boots, only to see Ivo shove his socks into his pocket and pull on his shoes without having once undone the laces. I opened my mouth to ask if he wouldn’t be horribly uncomfortable with sandy feet in the walking trainers he’d chosen to wear today, but then bit my lip. Ivo was an adult, and quite capable of making his own decisions, but if he once complained that his shoes were rubbing I’d be justified in giving him a what-did-you-expect look. Besides, I was busy crafting my response to his accusations of my superficiality. I could do it, there were a hundred-and-one reasons why I kept things light and I could bury the reality beneath them. Then we trudged up the beach and into town, to argue lightly over sandwich fillings.

My phone buzzed with the receipt of a text.

Hi, it’s Sally. Feel bad that I never got to show you our squirrel rescue facility. Come early tomorrow and I’ll take you down and maybe we can compare notes! I don’t get to meet other people who understand what it’s like. Around 8?

I read Ivo the text as we drove. The little cove he had in mind was a fair way from Cowes and I’d lost all sense of direction, so I was glad he knew where he was heading.

‘Do you want to?’ he asked, stopping at a junction and squinting at a road sign, which made my confidence in him waver somewhat. ‘I thought you wanted to head back straight away, soon as we’d said “bye” to Fred?’

I stared down at the text again. There was something in those few words that gave me a warm feeling. Friendship offered, a nice, simple friendship; it would be refreshing in comparison to the one I was currently wading through. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I don’t meet many people generally in the rescue profession. Apart from my workmates, and when we’re sent on courses. There aren’t many people who know what it’s like being in the middle of a muddy field at three in the morning, trying to untangle a fox from an electric fence.’

Sally wanted to make contact again, wanted to talk. To show me what she did; the successes of animal rescue could be few and far between and it was nice to celebrate them with someone who understood that animals died far more often than they thrived, and that not crying over each failure didn’t make you hard, it made you practical.

And also someone who knew that you did cry over the failures.

‘Yes,’ I said, as the car moved off along yet another curving lane through birdsong and branches. ‘I think I’d like to see their facilities.’

‘Okay then. We can book an evening sailing, drive home overnight. Make the most of our last day down here.’ He pulled the car to the left down a very narrow turn that looked more like a gateway than a road. ‘But while I’m showing Tony the picture of our Mr Williams I might ask why Sally has seen them knocking about together.’

‘Just be careful. If he’s prone to outbursts…’ I trailed off.

‘I can handle myself.’ Ivo flexed a bicep at me. ‘I can swear in fifteen languages and I’m a black belt in miso.’

‘Bean paste?’

‘If anyone comes at me in anger, I swap recipes with them until they calm down.’ He flicked me a glance. ‘Seriously, Cress, I’m a journalist. D’you not think I’ve been in dodgy situations before?’

I opened my mouth to reply that negotiating with escaped bullocks and interviewing the victims of bike theft wasn’t really a preparation for being imprisoned in a Portakabin with an irrationally angry fifteen-stone bloke, but I didn’t. He knew. Of course he did. Having the personality of someone running in a speeded-up film didn’t mean Ivo was stupid.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘It could be useful.’

‘Of course it could!’ Fingers fidgeted on the wheel. ‘I’d still like to get to the bottom of the Fred mystery before we go. Poor impulse control could be my friend here. Look, this is the place.’

It was a tiny, chalky-floored car park at the side of the road, empty of any other vehicles, although a worn path in the grass showed where people walked out across the hilltop. Above us the sky spread navy blue, humped with clots of cloud that lay dark along the horizon, threateningly flat-topped as though shaved at the sides.

‘Looks like a storm coming in from the sea,’ I observed.

‘Slow moving. Won’t be here before tomorrow,’ Ivo said confidently. So confidently, in fact, that I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘Weather forecast, before you ask, not my own assumption.’ Ivo unloaded the carrier bags of picnic that we’d bought, and a rug from the boot. ‘If we walk out along this path a bit, we can see down into the cove Ru and I used to swim in sometimes. It’s great, really private, only one little road in and visitors don’t know about it.’

‘Surely you and Ru were visitors?’

‘We didn’t drive in, we came on the boat. And don’t roll your eyes, it wasn’t our boat, it belonged to Ru’s sailing friends.’

We trudged along the little beaten-grass path. I’d got sand in my socks and a wary eye on the clouds massing on the horizon, so I wasn’t as filled with the joys of a country walk as I usually would have been, even with Ivo twinkling glamorously beside me, seizing grass stems and pulling seed heads to scatter across the turf. Cliffs arced around behind us, running sheer to the sea in patches of green and white, where plants were gaining a foothold in chalk. Far beneath, the sea threw itself against boulders, half-hearted in the heat.

‘Here,’ Ivo said suddenly. ‘This is nice.’

The grass sloped here, down to a fence that would prevent us from sliding off the edge of the cliff into the water, and below us a narrow cove was visible, just a crack of an inlet with a small sandy fringe and waves that beat against the encircling cliffside.

With anyone else, it would have been romantic.

‘Very pretty,’ I said.

‘And again, like you mean it.’

I glanced at him. He wasn’t looking at me, instead he was staring up across the grassy hillside, eyes focussed on the far away. ‘Sorry, Ivo,’ I said. ‘It really is lovely, thank you for bringing me.’

Now his gaze snapped back to me and his eyes were searching my face as though he thought I might have some ulterior motive. ‘We need to have a chat,’ he said. ‘Sit down. But let me do the blanket first.’

Meticulously he laid the tartan blanket he’d removed from the car boot across the grass, twitching it into place several times until he was satisfied with its smoothness. Then he carefully aligned the picnic-carrying bag on one side, and indicated, with a formal wave of the hand, that it was ready, so I felt like royalty when I finally collapsed onto it.

‘What do you want to talk about?’ I kept practicality to the fore. I could do this. I really could.

Ivo sat down beside me, legs folded in front of him, like a slim and attractive Buddha. ‘You’re having thoughts,’ he said, very matter-of-fact. ‘About me. I can tell, believe me. I’ve seen that look on so many faces over the years.’

I was startled. I’d been hoping for something more general, or even personal to me. This approach took the wind from my sails. ‘It’s this business with Fred,’ I said. ‘Not you, specifically.’ Lying through my teeth in case it wasn’t too late to save myself.

He turned away and began unpacking picnic comestibles. ‘Oh, there is such an enormous “but” coming along any minute,’ he said, without any notable self-pity. ‘I can practically hear its engine already.’

I looked around. This rural retreat, backed by the sea and with a soundtrack of gulls and wind-fondled grass, was practically made for blurting out confessions. Love and friendship and longing and fear. ‘I don’t understand any of it,’ I went on. That was honest, at least.

‘Chug chug chug chug, woooooo!’ Ivo supplied.

‘I’m just worried that – no, it’s not a worry, that’s wrong, it’s just this thing in the back of my mind, telling me that there’s no more to it all than Tony’s friend borrowing a squirrel. But you’re so certain…’ I tailed off. I had hoped I’d shovelled enough words in to distract him, but he was looking at me now with such an expression of kind understanding that I felt I was admitting to some awful infraction. As though I had been found out and dealt with and my admission was surplus to requirements. My heart was beating so hard that I felt sick, and this clifftop wasn’t the only thing that felt precariously poised over a long drop.

‘You feel as though you’re going along with me to keep me happy,’ he said.

Ok. Ok, yes. Practicality. Reality versus feelings. I could do this. ‘No. Well, yes, a bit.’

There was a small, sad silence. Into it came the soft sound of waves breaking and a far-off car engine, then an ominous roll of distant thunder.

‘I don’t want to bring you down,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d love to believe that this is going to be the case that makes you famous, but I can’t help thinking that it might all be part of your…’ I took a breath. ‘That it might be one of your obsessions and you’re not seeing clearly because of that getting in the way. I wish I could just roll along with you, but I keep remembering that your parents have someone to clean the house for you and you burned the sauce because you were looking at newspapers.’

I swallowed hard. Had I done it? I had the feeling that as long as I could keep the focus on him, on pragmatism and the realities of friendship, I might get out of this with my heart intact. Or, if not intact, at least not shredded into tiny tatters, I’d settle for that.

Ivo tipped his head. One hand combed the soft pile of today’s velveteen trousers, restless and looking for input. ‘I’m twenty-seven,’ he said.

‘I know. So am I.’

‘No, what I mean is, I haven’t killed myself yet. I haven’t burned to death in a culinary conflagration or poisoned myself with inadequately refrigerated pork products. I can cope, Cress. Just because my life looks random and unfocussed to you, it doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m doing. Okay, sometimes I’m late to a meeting or I turn up to a black tie do in a 1970s glam rock outfit, but I have workarounds. I have reminders on my phone, a calendar for appointments, Alexa for timings. My brain is’ – he did the finger-thing again – ‘and it can make me unsystematic, overloaded easily and an absolute bastard about anniversaries. But I’m still here. Still standing.’ He reached out a hand and laid it on my wrist where I was sprawled on the blanket. ‘Is that not enough for you?’

Enough. Enough for friendship? It always had been. Ivo had always been more than enough to be my friend, and it hurt that he thought that his ADHD made him not friendship material. His randomness and his occasional pinpoint focus made him him. But this conversation was beginning to feel dangerous. There was a look in Ivo’s eye that I wasn’t used to seeing, a look of trepidation, as though my answer to his question could hurt him more than he was capable of dealing with. I could take away that look by telling him that my reluctance around him wasn’t due to his behaviour it was because I wanted Ivo as so much more than a friend, but… I twisted my tongue in my mouth to stopper my lips. I couldn’t do it. Not even to take that look from his face, I couldn’t open myself up to him. I couldn’t take that leap.

Ivo drew his knees up. It was a childishly defensive gesture and I knew he was trying to shield himself from my words. ‘But isn’t that friendship, Cress?’ he asked softly. ‘Everyone has to make allowances for other people. Unless they are identical twins, of course,’ he went on, in a more normal tone. ‘But even then, they are two different people, so, yes. Nobody is perfect. Friendship should be people caring about each other. Looking after one another.’

‘I don’t need looking after.’ It sounded stiff and as though I’d pre-arranged the words. Oh Ivo. Friendship. Can’t you see me, protecting myself here?

‘No. No, of course you don’t.’ He’d lost the gentle tone and assumed a practicality. ‘What you do need is a few of these amazing sausage rolls, however, and some crisps. There isn’t a drama in the world that isn’t better with pastry products and Pringles.’

‘Ivo…’

He shook his head. ‘It’s all right, Cress. I’m not pushing anything. Well, anything other than these spectacular rolls. You know how you feel, and, believe me, I’m not a stranger to this situation. I’ve learned to accept with grace and poise the fact that not every woman wants to hang out with someone who’s got a brain like a TK Maxx on sales day.’ He grinned at me and passed me a packet. ‘Even if he is utterly gorgeous and fanatically devoted, when in the field.’ Another grin, and wiggled eyebrows. ‘I’ve got references. Available on request.’

I laughed now. That intense, scared look was gone from his face. I had clearly been more convincing than I had thought I was capable of. Friendship. We were back on an even keel, even though my insides felt as though we’d been through a hurricane. I’d held the line and not revealed my emotional fragility. He’d let his condition take the blame and I had let him.

I felt a quick moment of shame about that. ‘I’m not saying I don’t want to find out what’s going on here,’ I said, the words slipping out in my relief. ‘I’m really not.’

I meant the Fred affair. Of course I did.

‘Well, how could you, when I’m so downright adorable?’

‘That’s not…’ I stopped talking. There was a different look on his face now. An expression I didn’t think I’d ever seen before, a softening and – something else.

‘Cressida.’

I found myself caught by his eyes. He’d got the lid of a Pringles tube in one hand but his attention wasn’t on that, it was on me. Full beam, laser-intensity, as though his eyes were trying to concentrate the soul out of my body. ‘Cress,’ he said again, and it was a breath, a vibration in the air that hit me in the heart and tingled all the way down to my toes.

The lid went down and he raised his hand to tangle it in my hair, slowly, keeping eye contact as though using it to pull me closer, like a magnet. My neck prickled, all my skin rising in goosepimples where his fingers contacted, as though he were ice, while I felt his skin like fire against me. ‘Cress.’

He leaned in and his lips were soft, although there was pressure in the kiss that spoke of a longing on both sides. His other hand rose and held me steady. I closed my eyes and let myself get lost in kissing Ivo.

It was like everything I’d ever dreamed, combined with my worst nightmares. Ivo. Ivo. His touch, the firmness of his hands holding me in, the feel of his fingers caught in my hair, the familiar smell of him and the implicit promise in the contact made all the bad stuff and the doubts flare and catch light, burning away in the face of what I wanted. What I’d wanted for so long.

We broke apart after a few moments of the kiss. Gulls wheeled overhead, dipping their wings into the wind and staring at our picnic with wickedly sharp eyes, but we ignored them.

‘Ivo, I…’ I wasn’t even sure what I had been going to say. There was nothing to say. That kiss had taken all my words.

But he interrupted my ellipses. ‘That car down there, just coming into the cove. Isn’t that the car that passed us on the track this morning?’ His whole attention had moved from me; he was staring over my shoulder and down the cliff to where a white SUV had driven onto the narrow band of beach.

‘I don’t know. It was just a car, I wasn’t looking.’ I tried to stifle the annoyance I felt at the interruption. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted an in-depth investigation as to whether we could ever work as a couple, at any level, but this change of subject was too abrupt. I needed to breathe and think about this and now Ivo was off on something else. ‘React to the moment’ seemed to be Ivo’s default and I had no choice but to go along with that for now.

‘It was one just like it. Can you see if it’s got damage to the passenger-side wing?’ Ivo had got up onto his knees and was creeping closer to the fence in a kind of all-fours crouch.

‘Not from here, no. Why?’ I breathed deeply. Switched to ‘Ivo mode’.

‘The one that passed us did. Big dent down one side.’

‘Ivo, I’m sure there’s more than one white SUV on the island. And be careful, that fence doesn’t look all that safe.’

‘Mmm.’ He shaded his eyes from the low-level sun that was bouncing the last of its rays off the sea’s surface, clearly not listening to me. ‘It’s the kind of thing I notice, you see. Big dent, how did that happen? Why haven’t they had it fixed, clearly an expensive vehicle, so maybe they didn’t have time, or didn’t want the car to be noted by a garage…’

‘Maybe it only just happened, and they haven’t had chance yet,’ I said, my voice rising in a note of panic. ‘Ivo – the fence…’

‘The damage looked older than that.’ He was squinting into the diamond light. ‘Yes, I’m pretty certain that’s the same car.’ Then he turned and kneed himself back up the slope towards me. ‘You’re very risk averse, Cress, ever wondered why that might be? Because I have.’

The relief that he’d come back and not plunged over the clifftop accompanied by inadequate fencing made my voice shrill. ‘I am not risk averse! I just don’t want you dying on my watch! Your parents would kill me.’

‘Go on, admit it. You are. Just a little bit?’ As though he didn’t have a care in the world, Ivo reached past me for the little pile of food and began picking olives out of the packet, with oil dripping down the front of his shirt as he palmed them into his mouth. ‘And I’m not just talking about right now. You took a week off work to have a cold.’

‘I felt wretched!’ I could hear the self-justification in my voice as I wailed the words. ‘I wanted to sleep it off, not snot all over baby hedgehogs and badgers.’

‘How do you feel now?’ He ripped open another pack of Pringles, despite the fact that we hadn’t started the first one yet.

‘Fine.’

‘So you could have gone back to work.’

‘I could, if I wasn’t out here in the middle of nowhere trying to help you find out what our man was doing with Fred in his pocket!’ The wonderfulness of that kiss was now being completely subsumed under the feeling of annoyance that Ivo could engender in me. I narrowed my eyes at him and helped myself to crisps.

‘But it’s only been a couple of days. You’ve recovered quickly, which means the cold wasn’t that bad, yet you rang in sick for the whole week – why was that, Cress?’

His tone was very neutral, not accusatory or demanding, just Ivo wondering why I’d seemingly over-reacted, and it took some of the annoyance from me.

‘I dunno. Maybe I worry too much about illness. I was a sickly child, I think. Mum used to make me stay in bed for ages when I was ill. I know I had a virus once that made me come out in a rash and she… oh, nice try at changing the subject there!’

‘I’m not changing the subject, Cress.’ Now he sounded almost – sad? I found myself reluctant to meet his eye and concentrated on the little bits of buttery pastry stuck to my fingers and the lazy drone of a huge bee that was contentedly bumping its way through a tall set of purple flowers right by our picnic. ‘I want to know about you.’

‘There’s nothing to know.’ The bee had little sacks of bright gold either side of its fuzzy body, where the pollen had stuck. ‘You know all there is to know about me anyway. We’ve known each other for what, eight, nine years? What more do you think there is?’ My heart had started to double-time again, thrumming like a generator in my chest. I had no idea how he could manage to wrong-foot me so consistently.

Ivo dipped a crisp in some humous, concentrating furiously. ‘Maybe nothing, maybe something.’

‘Very enigmatic. Very debating society.’

I was trying to forget about the kiss. Ivo was just Ivo, annoying, captivating, irrational and inquisitive, with his questions and his wavering focus and it was as though he’d never even considered kissing me, never mind actually done it. He could switch conversational topics faster than I could change channels on the TV. ‘You never talk about your parents, do you know that?’ he asked, fishing broken Pringle from the humous tub with the end of a sausage roll.

The bee stopped buzzing and crawled inside a flower. I wanted to get in there with it. ‘No need to,’ I said as lightly as I could manage.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I never shut up about mine, and they’re complete pains in the legal and journalistic arse. I know nothing about yours. They didn’t come to graduation, did they?’

‘They… it’s just not important.’ I turned around to see if the SUV was doing anything interesting that I could use to distract him, but it was still parked on the edge of the sand. Out to sea, a small motorboat was chopping the waters around the headland towards the cove, but it didn’t look as though it would be enough to stop Ivo’s train of thought. I tried to put a metaphorical concrete block on the tracks. ‘Do you not think I’m posh enough for you, is that it? You want to meet my entire family so you can check out my pedigree? See if they know the right cutlery to use in a restaurant and make sure that they don’t think Loose Women is the epitome of intelligent TV programming?’

There was a pause while he licked dip off his fingers and the bee set about another flower stalk. The crushed grass around us sent up a cucumber smell to rival the garlic and I fought the urge to lie down and bury my face in the undergrowth, inhaling deeply to stop any further questioning. Perhaps I could pretend to be dead? I sighed, inwardly. I wasn’t even sure that death would stop Ivo and his questions.

Finally, and still without looking at me, he said, ‘That was below the belt, Cress.’

I knew it had been, and opened my mouth to apologise, but he’d already moved on.

‘Besides, I think your feelings may be something to do with your background, like I said, risk averse and, whilst throwing in your lot with me is hardly akin to alligator-wrestling and tiger-petting, it still seems to be a step further than you can easily take. And I wonder why.’ Now he looked at me. It was a proper, direct look, an interviewer kind of look, as though my answers were essential. ‘Unless both your parents died an untimely and horrible death in front of you.’

I continued to say nothing. Were we still talking about the Fred issue, or… us? When Ivo said, ‘throwing in your lot with me’, how far was he envisaging that actually going?

And that kiss. I could still feel it, all the way down my body. My brain had opted out of involvement about that.

‘Oh, shit, Cress, they didn’t, did they? Oh, please tell me they didn’t, otherwise I’ve just come over as the most tactless jerk on the planet – not that it would be the first time, obviously, but I don’t like doing it.’ He grabbed my hand, effectively preventing me from picking up another sausage roll. ‘Cress. Just tell me.’

I shrugged. ‘Single mum. Dad unknown. Grew up poor, got to Cambridge, met you. That’s all there is to it, Ivo.’

He looked down at my hand, and again ran his finger over the raised weals and half-healed score marks. His touch felt different, not the usual Ivo reckless, thoughtless grasp but… just different. ‘Where’s your mum now?’

His hair was flopping down, covering his face so I couldn’t see his expression.

‘Crofting in Scotland.’

‘But you told me you bought your place from an inheritance your granny left? So, you grew up poor, but there was family money, yet your mum didn’t access it… I mean, you’re called Cressida, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Stop doing investigative journalism on me, Ivo,’ I said, but my voice was quiet and a little bit clogged. Beside me, the bee bundled itself into another purple flower, with intermittent buzzing. I looked at it, trying to appreciate its furry stripes and softly coated body, because it was easier than having to look at Ivo. It had wicked looking spurs all along both legs. Soft and sharp. Fur and sting.

‘Look.’ He gave my hand a little shake. ‘Why not just tell me? It will be far, far easier than this “Twenty Questions” thing and you’ve nothing to be ashamed of, after all. You’re amazing! Gorgeous and clever and you’re here with me, it’s a wonder the world hasn’t been blinded by the brilliance of your situation.’

‘Big head,’ I said, mildly, but he’d made me smile. Which was, evidently, his intention, because now he flicked his hair back with a twitch of his head and gave me the calm, rational expression again.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel better afterwards. Probably.’

‘Oh, it’s all family stuff, very boring.’

‘Try me.’

He was so persistent it was annoying. ‘All right. But you must promise…’

‘Anything, Cress, my darling, anything.’

‘…not to interrupt me. Can you do that?’

He grinned and did the ‘shaky hand, could go either way’ thing with the hand not holding mine. ‘I can try. But, please, please forgive me if I interrupt, I’m just so fantastically interested in you that I may not be able to hold back.’

I stared at the countryside, Ivo only half in my sight. I didn’t want to look at him. ‘Right. Well, my mum was born into money. Lots of money. Her dad was something big in the army and her mum came from land-owning stock, so she grew up with everything. Lovely house…’ I remembered that house, the glowing stone amid the apple trees, glimpsed from the top deck of the bus. ‘Anyway. She and her brother were raised with all that and sent away to school. Her brother, Michael his name was, he was quite a few years older, five or six, so he finished school first and followed their dad into the army. Brigadier Captain Sir Umpty Tumpty, something like that.’

Ivo opened his mouth and I gave him a ferocious look, so he closed it and performed the ‘zip lip’ mime. I switched my attention from the clifftop to the little motorboat that had nosed its way into the cove and was bobbing just offshore.

‘Michael was killed in the Falklands. Mum was brought home from school and groomed for marriage to the son of a friend of her father, some bloke in the Guards, apparently. But she rebelled. Went off the rails, ran away to London, met my dad – whoever he was – and got pregnant with me.’

‘Hard on the parents, that. Losing a son and then a daughter,’ Ivo commented.

‘Sssh. Anyway. Mum couldn’t manage in London. She was picking up secretarial work but she had to stop when I was born, so she came back. Asked her parents for help and they cut her off. Wouldn’t have anything to do with her, or, by extension, me. In fact, they sold up their house and the farm and moved – I don’t know, to Wiltshire I think. Leaving Mum to raise me with nothing, in a little flat just outside York.’

I stopped now. That was pretty much it, but Ivo had other ideas.

‘Your degree, though. History. And what you do now. Wee bit of a contrast?’

‘Mum wanted me to do History. I went along with it to keep her happy. But when the solicitor got in touch to say that my grandmother, her mother, had died and left us money…’ I shook my head again. ‘Mum had managed to keep in touch with her, somehow. It was Grandad who cut us off and he was dead by then, so…’

‘How very Victorian.’ Ivo sounded a little sharp. ‘Casting you out into the snow, simply because your mum wouldn’t marry who he wanted her to.’

‘She said she would, when she came back from London. She went home and told her dad that she’d marry the Guardsman now. But he didn’t want her, because she’d had me. “Damaged goods” were the words used, I believe.’ A flashback to the grimy little kitchen in the rented flat in York, Mum sorting out cutlery while she told me the story. The way her voice had wobbled over the phrase, and how my eyes had flooded at the realisation that, had she not had me, her life could have been so different.

‘And I don’t think my grandfather ever really got over losing Michael.’ I’d tried to understand; it had been the only get-out clause I could come up with. ‘So it was rough all round.’

‘That’s very… it sounds as though you’ve forgiven everybody. Have you?’

No, I wanted to say. I haven’t forgiven my grandfather for leaving my mother to raise a baby with nothing or my grandmother for not standing up to him. I haven’t really come to terms with my mother chucking away all her advantages to play at being a hippy chick in London and getting pregnant by some bloke whose name she hadn’t bothered to remember. I’ve even managed to raise a bit of a grudge against Uncle Michael for joining the army and getting himself killed; without that, none of this would have happened and I’d be the daughter of a privileged mum, and a dad who knew his way around Chelsea and Trooping the Colour.

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘Mostly.’

‘And it does explain why your mother conditioned you to be a low-risk person. Losing her brother and then her parents. In different ways, obviously, but both because of high-stakes lifestyles. I suppose she thought History was a nice, safe sort of degree that wouldn’t lead you into dubious behaviour, like getting involved with a bloke with absolutely no mental filter and an inability to cope with life.’

‘Is that last bit you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, that’s me. And you’re involved with me, whether you like it or not, it’s just the level of involvement we have yet to ascertain.’

I laughed. ‘I should have known you wouldn’t be fazed by a background like mine,’ I said. He’d been right. I felt better now he knew.

‘Hardly. It’s the stuff of melodrama and, I told you, I had a very eclectic upbringing. I’m pretty sure your life story is somewhere in some of those books at my place, only they have added Workhouse.’ He kept hold of my hand, curling his fingers around mine and giving a little squeeze. ‘Besides. You weren’t the only penniless student at uni, but you may have been the one with the biggest chip on their shoulder.’

‘I do not have a chip!’ I said fervently. Now I’d told Ivo what he needed to know, my appetite was back and I was trying to negotiate the stuffed olives one handed. Then I thought about how I’d felt, when my mother had told me her life story, and backtracked. ‘All right, maybe I do, a bit.’

‘And you can honestly say that it isn’t why you struggle with me and my lifestyle?’ Ivo took my hand and placed it gently on the blanket, as though it had been a poorly creature he was nursing, so he could use both hands to manoeuvre the crisp tube.

I repossessed my hand and went back to the olives. He was right, again. I’d used his not knowing about my background to shield myself from him and his glamour. After all, how could anyone with his lifestyle ever want poor little Cressida? How could someone who casually ruined centuries-old furnishings even imagine my life back in that flat, with the damp and the mould? I had been so convinced that he would have been disgusted, hadn’t wanted the possibility of pity to enter our friendship. So I’d just never spoken about any of it. He had stables for God’s sake!

‘You’re “casually privileged”. You use the term yourself. How do you think that feels to someone who grew up with silverfish in the larder and juggling money between rent and food?’ It sounded harsh, I knew. I wasn’t even sure it was the real backbone of my problems with Ivo, but it certainly formed a goodly part of the ribcage. ‘I had nothing, and you spill water on Georgian furniture that’s worth more than my house.’

‘What the hell is that boat doing down there?’ Again, predictably, his attention was gone from me. And, while I welcomed the distraction, I had been enjoying, in a weird way, getting to the bottom of my objections to Ivo. It felt as though I finally had words for the poverty and deprivation and what they’d done to me.

‘Just floating, I think.’

Ivo shaded his eyes again. ‘And the car is still there. I can’t see what’s going on, the light’s too bright.’ Then that switch of focus, of intensity, that almost made me jump. ‘You’re more important. We are more important than whatever’s happening down there.’

‘Is that really true, though?’

His eyes were the fathomless blue of the vast sea below us. When he turned their spotlight on me it was impossible to look away. ‘If you asked me to, Cressida, darling,’ he said, quietly but with emphasis, ‘I would give up this whole thing, run home and become a traffic warden or something.’

Those eyes. ‘I wouldn’t do that, though,’ I breathed.

‘I know, and that’s part of what makes you so utterly fabulous.’ His tone was normal, conversational again. ‘You know what I am and you accept it. Well, mostly.’

I laughed again. Everything felt easier now. I wasn’t hiding any more and he knew all about me. And he’d managed not to interrupt. Mostly. ‘You are an impossible pain, Ivo, and I don’t know that I can ever accept that.’

‘Good enough for me. Have some of this taramasalata. I only bought it because I like saying it, but it’s good, honestly.’

We sat on the clifftop and ate the rest of our picnic while the sun went down behind the hills.