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Toby’s mother said that when Eleanor came he’d have to go down to the ground floor and help her with the lift.

Toby said — sulkily, because he was angry with her for something he couldn’t quite put his finger on — ‘She doesn’t need help.’

His mother was standing in front of the mirror she had propped on top of a chest in her bedroom. She was arranging her hair in a complicated kind of knot, and she had a hairclip between her teeth.

Through it she said without looking at him, ‘Toby, this isn’t about need. It’s about manners.’

Toby kicked one foot clumsily against the other. Then he went out of his mother’s bedroom and banged the door shut and leaned against it. This door, his mother’s bedroom door, was one of only a few doors in the flat. There was just that door, and the front door and the door on the bathroom. The rest was just space. Upwards, outwards, sideways. Just space.

‘I live in a loft,’ Toby said to someone when he’d started his new school.

Several boys had stared at him, elaborately uninterested.  ‘Whatever,’ they’d said.

‘I do,’ Toby had said to himself silently all that day. ‘I do.’ And then, ‘My father bought it.’

He had. Toby’s father had bought the loft two years ago, and had given it to Paula and Toby.

‘Conscience money,’ Paula’s friend, Lindsay, said.

Paula hadn’t replied. She put the photograph of Toby’s father on the black rattan chest between two of the huge high windows. It was a photograph taken on a boat, and Toby’s father was sitting on the roof of the cabin, and he was smiling. His feet were bare. The photograph did not, however, include Toby’s father’s wife and children who were, Toby knew, the reason why he and his mother lived in the loft on their own.

‘At least,’ Paula said sometimes to Toby, when she got very loving and then very angry, ‘at least you know who your father is.’

What she meant by that Toby hadn’t the faintest idea. And he certainly wasn’t asking. Occasionally, if he was alone in the flat while Paula went to buy a newspaper, or to collect the dry-cleaning, he would pick up his father’s photograph and lay it face down on the black rattan chest.

‘You just stay there, Gavin,’ he’d say. ‘You just do as you’re told.’

He sighed now. He wanted to be back in his mother’s bedroom, but he had made that impossible. He sighed again. The loft looked enormous in the gathering gloom, as if the walls and ceiling were quietly dissolving into the darkness, just melting away so that the night could pour in. Paula had lit her lamps, the lamps that threw light up into the dusky spaces, the lamps that let light fall on to her orange cushions and the rug striped like a zebra. She had put glasses on the low table between the sofas because people were coming, glasses and bowls of varnished Japanese rice crackers. People were coming. Eleanor was coming.

Toby pushed himself away from the door and stood up. He liked Eleanor. She walked unevenly with the help of a stick, and her hair was a white fuzz, and she talked to him as if he might have an opinion worth hearing. He also liked how his mother was with Eleanor, how she was calm and able to think about things that weren’t automatically going to upset her. Eleanor once said to Toby that the older she got the more she preferred the universal to the individual and personal. Toby had wondered if she was talking about galaxies.

He went slowly across the living space, avoiding, as usual, actually treading on the zebra rug. On the far side, a metal staircase resembling a ladder with perforated treads rose up in the dimness to the platform where Toby’s bed was, and his computer, and the toy theatre for which he collected puppets. He climbed the ladder slowly, a deliberate tread at a time, until he was out of the glow of the lamps and into the privacy of darkness. Then he sat down on the top step of the ladder and leaned forward, until his chin was on his knees, and he sighed again. Friday nights.

© Joanna Trollope

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