“Oh no,” Patricia said. “That’s not it at all. Not sensible at all.” Then she said, “What have you got to lose? By telling her, I mean?”

I shrugged. “My pride?”

Patricia laughed then, which surprised me. “That’s not pride, my darling girl, that’s shame. And maybe nothing will ever come of it and Fizzy will move away and in a year’s time you’ll have forgotten all about each other. But maybe you’ll end up as two old ladies together, living in a house on a clifftop with a rose garden and a goat pottering around outside.” She was quiet for a moment. After a pause, she added, “Why not just ask her if you can kiss her, at least?”

And then it was my turn to laugh because I was sure this was a joke.

“You know,’ Patricia said as we made our way home, almost as if she’d just remembered it. “I once asked your father if I could kiss him.”

*

I found I kept revisiting that house on the clifftop in my mind. Perhaps not the goat – weren’t goats terrible messy and destructive? – but the rose garden would be nice. Fizzy and I would garden well together, I imagined.

*

“What will you do, the day you pass your test?” Patricia asked me one afternoon. “Immediately after?”

I thought for a moment. “I will drive to Fizzy’s house,” I said eventually. “I’ll beep the horn outside until she sees me. Then I’ll drive her to the beach. And on the way we’ll get one of those barbecues – you know, in the foil tray – and vegetarian sausages. Did I tell you Fizzy’s a vegetarian? She’s ever so interested in animal welfare and where milk comes from and everything like that. And we’ll sit on the beach by a fire, and watch the waves and the sunset and that sort of thing. And when the sun goes down we’ll probably swim in the sea,” I added, quite surprising myself.

I found that I was quite prone to letting my imagination run away with me like this since I’d made my big speech about love and skin and bones and happiness. It seemed there was no stopping things, now the dam had been broken.

Patricia seemed delighted by my answer. “Well, I suppose we must hope you pass in the summer, then.”

*

But that summer came and went, along with the autumn and the winter. Over that time there were many more lessons, eight failed tests and my eighteenth birthday, in celebration of which, Fizzy prepared a picnic – consisting entirely of cider, cheese straws and chocolate-covered honeycomb – and took me on the train to a patch of woodland she had known as a child.

When we’d drunk the cider we’d lain on a blanket and looked up at the sky and I wondered if maybe I didn’t need to make any explicit declarations at all. Surely, Fizzy could feel it? Surely, she would stay?