One of a kind, p.15
One of a Kind, page 15
‘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.
10
The next morning I was up and ready to meet Sally while Ivo was still blearily trying to find his jacket.
‘Where’s she meeting you? I’ll drop you off and head over to try to winkle Tony’s secrets out of him before she comes back to spoil my plans.’
I checked my phone. ‘She says to meet out on the cliffs somewhere. She’s sent me the what3words.’
Ivo shuddered. ‘I’ll drop you nearby then. I’ve had enough of cliffs for a week or so.’ He’d got lightly sunburned during our evening picnic and there was a red ridge along his forehead about which he was being ridiculously self-conscious. ‘When we get back to Yorkshire I’m not going any higher than the third rung of the stepladder. The gutters can take care of themselves.’
He found his jacket, crumpled casually on the sofa, and put it on.
‘I can’t imagine you ever having anything to do with guttering.’ I followed him out to the car. It was strange how our friendship felt easier now that we’d moved on into something else. Or was it easier because I wasn’t having to pretend that was all it was?
‘Ah, I can be surprisingly practical when I so choose.’ He paused for a moment, sliding into the driver’s seat. ‘I wanted to be a painter and decorator for a while. But then Latin happened, and I discovered that I look dreadful in overalls.’
‘Stop it.’
I appreciated his attempts to make me think he had simply shrugged off what I’d told him about my family. I knew it would resurface at some point; there would be questions about my mother, how often I saw her and whether we got on, how I felt about her inheritance of the whole of her own mother’s fortune. Lots of questions. But, from Ivo, they’d feel like curiosity. Like wanting to get to know me better. And they wouldn’t hurt.
He dropped me at a footpath sign, where a narrow pathway between two hedges led relentlessly upwards, and I trudged amid the birdsong and flappy-stemmed bouquets of wild flowers to where the path opened onto a windswept field, with a far-off view of the sea.
Two men were up there, close to the edge of the cliff, wearing fluorescent overalls and pegging tape like temporary fencing all along the periphery.
Sally was waiting for me, sitting on a half-hearted wall and kicking in a desultory way at the masonry. ‘Hi.’
She sounded downbeat. When I got closer, I realised she’d got the kind of abrasion along one cheek that usually comes from a thrown fist. ‘Morning. Are you all right?’
‘Sure. Yes, of course.’ She shook her head as though to cast off memories. I wondered if she’d got an abusive partner tucked away somewhere. The job of wildlife rescue means a lot of strange hours, irregular meals and constant wet clothing. It’s not an easy gig for someone who has a suspicious other half who demands their dinner on the table and a body in the bed at pre-directed times. I had a quick moment where my brain tried to wonder what Ivo thought of me living that kind of life. But then, wasn’t that the same as his job, only with cuddly animals instead of stolen bikes?
