One of a Kind, page 13
‘And you ought to return that phone call,’ I said, nodding back through the office to where the phone sat on her desk.
‘Oh! Yes,’ Sally spoke slowly now. ‘Yes, I suppose I ought.’ She eyed me thoughtfully again. ‘It might be something that needs urgent attention.’
‘It usually is, isn’t it?’ I wondered why she seemed to think I may be responsible for this, then realised that she would be holding me responsible for being here and thus preventing her from answering in the first place.
Sally waved us off, watching as Ivo turned the Volvo in the narrow muddy space at the top of the lane and raising a final hand in farewell as we shot off back to the proper grip of tarmac.
‘You didn’t show Tony the picture.’ I turned in my seat to face Ivo.
‘Didn’t want the chance that he might go off on one, not with you there in the firing line,’ he said. ‘That’s why I want to come back tomorrow, I can do it then, if you distract Sally and stand somewhere a really long way away. Oh, thanks for agreeing to stay the extra day, by the way.’ He gave me half a smile and a wink. ‘There’s a few things I’d like to check out before we go back, and I really do think you could do with a holiday.’
The competence that I’d seen in him was fading now, as though he found it an effort to maintain. It seemed to be breaking down into the usual good-natured bafflement that was my Ivo.
‘Me? Why would I need a holiday?’
‘You’ve been unwell. You need to recuperate.’
‘Which is precisely why I took the week off work, and yet I’ve been dragged to the far ends of the Earth in search of a squirrel-smuggling racket that has yet to be resolved,’ I said, smartly. I didn’t want our killing time on the Isle of Wight to somehow become my fault. ‘I ought to be lounging around in the sun, eating vitamin-C tablets and drinking orange juice, not spending my time in some millionaire’s playpark.’
Ivo said nothing for a moment. He drove carefully down the narrow lane, overhung with fresh green and surrounded by banks woven with pink campion and ragged robin, overtopped by the umbrellas of cow parsley and hemlock. Grass scraped the Volvo’s bonnet, sending cascades of pollen blossoming into the air like tiny escape pods.
Finally he spoke. ‘What do you think is going on there?’ He sounded as though he really cared about my answer.
Going on? Apart from chronic underfunding, with which I was only too familiar, I hadn’t noticed anything suspicious at all. ‘Is there anything going on?’
Ivo looked at me and it was a look of peculiar intensity, as though his thoughts were off elsewhere doing their own thing but leaving his body here to drive the car. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I was itching in there. Oh, not actually itching, not like an allergy or anything, more… more a kind of itching in the back of my head, do you understand?’
‘Can’t you just have a spidey sense, like other people?’ I asked and he grinned now, ruefully.
‘I know, I know, it sounds weird. I am weird, I admit it! Not exactly your normal, run-of-the-mill, “the two defendants were found guilty of stealing a motorbike and there’s another cow stuck in the river at Malton” local journo, am I? But I really and truly can’t help it, Cress; I don’t want to help it, this is who I am. How I am. Things just sort of prickle away in my brain and I can’t let them go until I’ve processed it all properly and something about this whole squirrel thing is going niggle, niggle, niggle. I need to ask Tony about the bloke in the picture.’ A car was approaching down the narrow lane and Ivo slowed the Volvo. The oncoming vehicle was coming faster than was wise.
‘You may have missed your chance.’ I had no idea how he could do this. On the one hand he was mentally working on the mystery of Fred as though it were something he needed to solve, and on the other – on the other he was being Ivo as I’d always known him. As though two men existed within the same body, fighting for dominance.
‘I know. I’ll try tomorrow, while you’re distracting Sally. I get the feeling that she thinks Tony will actually detonate on impact or something, but I didn’t get the feeling that he was that kind of person, did you?’
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘But then people with anger issues don’t exactly have it tattooed on their foreheads, do they? If everyone had their personality problems out there front and centre, it would make life so much easier for everyone.’
‘Would it?’ He twitched the wheel and the car tilted at an uncomfortable angle, two wheels breasting the grassy edge to the road to allow the SUV to pass us in the lane, heading down towards the forest. It was still going too fast and made no attempt to get out of our way. ‘Do you actually think I’d have an easier life if I had “can’t concentrate, random focus, unable to order life correctly” where everyone could see? Seriously?’
I had a tiny inkling now of what it must be like to be Ivo. That duality of concentration versus distraction, at war inside his head all the time, must be exhausting. Something warm hit me in the heart as I realised just how many times I’d seen him fight himself to stay in a conversation when I’d thought he was being deliberately awkward. In reality he’d really been struggling. The feeling wasn’t pity, it was more like admiration.
‘Okay, maybe not.’ I closed my eyes. Ivo wasn’t my weird friend any more. He was a man who carried demons, demons he’d let me see for the first time. Things were, as Lil would have said, ‘getting way complicated’. ‘Fred didn’t seem that keen to run back to his mates, did he?’ I asked, half sleepily, to change the subject, and probably rhetorically since Ivo hadn’t really been watching.
‘Mmm.’
I opened one eye, but Ivo was concentrating on the road, flipping glances into the mirror to watch the SUV squeezing its way down the inadequate width of the lane behind us. ‘Maybe…’ I said cautiously, and then stopped.
‘Maybe, what?’
So he was listening to me. ‘Maybe there really isn’t any mystery? Maybe Tony’s friend “borrowed” a squirrel, just to show off, maybe he has a girlfriend he wanted to seduce by means of a cute furry animal?’
‘In Yorkshire?’ Ivo’s incredulity rang around the inside of the car like the singalong pop songs he was so fond of.
‘Yorkshire girls are allowed to date out of county,’ I pointed out. ‘We’re not constrained to only mating with our own kind.’ This was the Ivo I was used to; it was reassuring to have him asking random questions again.
‘I suppose so.’ Ivo tapped at the wheel, a tune only he could hear. ‘But unless someone comes forward, it’s going to be impossible to find out who he was meeting up there. If, indeed, he was meeting anyone and not just going for a particularly ill-advised late-night walk. With a squirrel.’
‘In a box,’ I added. ‘Which, somehow, got broken.’
Tap, tap, tap. Ivo’s inner tune stepped up the tempo. ‘Could have broken when he fell though.’ He flashed me a quick grin.
‘And thrown itself off into the bushes beside the track?’
‘You sound like me now.’ The grin widened. ‘I thought you were all about the “just an innocent man taking his pet for a wander”?’
I chewed my lip, thinking. But it was hard to think seriously when Ivo was giving it his best Columbo, and just having him sitting beside me was distracting enough. ‘If the box broke when the man fell, it could have been trampled and kicked off the path. There are a lot of deer tracks up there, and it would only take a few coming through to smash up one of the transport boxes; they’re not exactly reinforced oak planking. I broke one once by stepping on it, so, it could happen.’
‘Oh I do love an analytical mind!’ Ivo pulled the car over into a gateway and stopped. ‘So, the transport boxes aren’t particularly strong?’
‘They don’t have to be. For small animals you want to keep them safe from the outside, not the other way around, and we sometimes have to carry the boxes quite a long way. So we need them light, easy to carry and as long as they fasten tightly so the animals can’t get out – that’s the main thing. If the carry box was what Mr Thixendale mistook for a bag, maybe Mr Williams was using it to keep other things in, like his driving licence? So that might have got lost somewhere out in the forest too.’
‘Oh.’ There was a despondent tone in Ivo’s voice now. As though I’d told him unicorns weren’t real, a kind of reinforcement of a fact that went against a hope he’d held dear. ‘Bugger. You make it all sound completely rational. I was thinking something nefarious might have happened to it. That out there now there’s someone who’s stolen our Mr Williams’ identity and is, even now, running up huge debts and hiring helicopters in his name. That, or aliens took it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, no, you’re perfectly right. I’m getting carried away again, aren’t I? It’s part of my problem, I get an idea in my head and that’s it, fixed, and it won’t go away until I can positively prove that I’m wrong. But your idea sounds so… so sensible. No mystery other than why he took the squirrel, and that might have just been because he could.’
He was giving me another insight again. Little by little, I thought, Ivo was opening up, becoming less of the one-dimensional happy-go-lucky friend and more… something else. I had no idea how to deal with that, so I went for matter of fact.
‘And why he took it up on the moor in the middle of the night.’
‘Yeah.’ But he didn’t sound any more cheerful. Ivo not cheerful was a difficult concept; anyone who wore blue velvet trousers and a shirt that Adam Ant might have regarded as being a little too ‘over the top’ practically had cheerful fitted as standard. But now he dropped his head forward until it rested on the steering wheel in an attitude of abject misery that made me ache.
‘Why don’t you take me to one of these beaches you keep going on about?’ I tried. ‘You told Sally we were on holiday. You told me I needed a holiday, but you’re acting like a nineteenth-century poet who’s just had his daffodils napalmed.’
Ivo tipped his head so that he could see me. ‘I’m having a wallow,’ he said.
‘I can see that. But it occurs to me that wallowing isn’t good for you, whereas walking on a beach and possible paddling would be a lot better for your mental health.’
He grunted and turned back to face the dials and buttons of his dashboard. ‘Lewis would never have said that to Morse, you know.’
‘But Morse was his boss, and you’re my…’ I caught myself just in time, before I found I was trying to define whatever it was that we had. ‘…you’re the Mitchell to my Webb.’
‘I’d have said I was the Stephen Fry to your Hugh Laurie, myself.’ As though the change of subject had jerked him out of his misery, Ivo sat up again. ‘After all, I’ve got the Oscar Wilde jacket. Possibly. Or Noël Coward.’
‘So, let’s go to the beach.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Another grin, broader and more filled with mischief than the last. ‘You’re really good for me, Cress, you know that?’
As the car bumped back out onto the narrow lane and the sunlight reached us again from between the high banks and overhanging trees, I wondered to myself how I’d got drawn into all this. I mean, yes, obviously, Ivo, but he was, as we’d established, just a friend. He was gorgeous, that went without question, with the most brilliant mind I’d ever met. But was that brilliance at the expense of other people constantly having to buff it up and polish it to keep it shining? With their own mental gloss being overlooked?
Could I, in short, really stay his friend? Could I seriously see myself riding shotgun forever on his more elaborate schemes, while he carried on wooing and winning the girls on the sidelines? It had been fine up until now, but this new version of Ivo, with the confidences and the unwarranted intimacies, could I seriously have a friendship with him, without breaking my heart? It already felt as though I was treading too close to a self-drawn line that I hadn’t been aware of. I knew Ivo now, not the superficial, amicable, almost sibling-like knowledge I’d had before, but seeing him as a real, complex person. Which had only made him more attractive and heartbreak more inevitable.
I’d been stupid. I’d blindly set myself up as the ‘good friend’. Ivo had needed someone to talk to – and there I had been. Here I was, pretending that I was here to keep him company when really I had wanted more of Ivo than he could give, and deep down I knew it. I had always known it.
And it hurt.
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!’
