His voice faltered as he saw his blurred shadow growing smaller on a lower panel of his grandmother’s door. Either he was unaware of shrinking from the notion that she was within arm’s reach of the other side or the door was creeping open. The voice that made him see it lurch backwards because he had was his mother’s. “Is that Jonathan talking to himself? What’s wrong with him?”

“Will it be his way of coping, do you think?”

He should have closed the kitchen door. He shut himself in his room and moved his desk away from the wall so that he could sit facing the room with surely no space for anyone, no matter how thin, to sidle behind him. He didn’t need to finish his English homework until the weekend. Instead he applied himself to sums that he was supposed to call arithmetic now that he’d changed schools. He was feeling sure enough of his pencilled answers to commit ink to them when Trudy called “It’s waiting for you, Jonathan.”

He left his bedroom light on so that it would be there for him, his mother’s phrase that finally conveyed some meaning, and hurried to the dining-room. His mother was ladling out a lamb casserole as Trudy filled glasses with wine and his with juice while the sideboard and dresser kept their distance from the table yet helped it aggravate the disapproving sombreness. “Did you get much done?” his mother asked him.

“I won’t do it about grandma after all.”

“I hope that’s not because of me.” When he failed to think of a safe reply she said “What does your subject have to be?”

“Losing something.”

“What else can you say you’ve lost beside your grandmother? Unless you’re intending to tell your teacher how your father absconded.”

Jonathan wasn’t sure of the last word, but otherwise his thoughts seemed not to be hidden from anyone. “Are you still unhappy about him, Jonathan?” Trudy said, stroking his arm.