“Sometimes.”

“Doesn’t seeing him every week help?” Having watched until Jonathan repeated his nod, she said “Give it time and maybe there’ll be someone extra in your life if that’s what you’d like.”

Just now he felt he had to concentrate all his liking on his grandmother. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

Rather less than a look passed between Trudy and his mother. He could have done without the impression that another secret was at large in the house. Once dinner was finished he would have watched the Tuesday quiz shows with his mother, but their guest had to see a programme she’d told her history students to watch. The documentary about people being tortured by the Inquisition until they believed they were as bad as they were told only sharpened his unease. As soon as the credits began to crawl up the screen he retreated upstairs to talk to God and his grandmother.

He hadn’t been in bed long when his mother came to give his forehead a lingering kiss, which she used to say was putting good dreams in. “Not asleep yet? I expect having the light off will help,” she said. “Don’t be surprised if you hear someone else upstairs.”

“Who?” Jonathan gasped, scarcely a word.

“Trudy, of course. She’ll be staying.”

Since she would hardly be sleeping in his grandmother’s old bed, presumably she would share his mother’s — had shared it last night too. He wished he’d asked to sleep there instead of alone in the dark. Once his mother left him in it he found a solitary sentence to repeat. “Please God let my grandmother hear just nice things about her.”

Shouldn’t that settle everything? At last it let him sleep. He lurched awake, anxious not to be confronted by Trudy’s face again, but only daylight had stolen into his room. While he was in the bathroom Trudy and his mother collaborated on breakfast before running him to school in his mother’s car, which had space for all of them. Outside the school gates, as he leaned forward from the back seat to deliver a kiss he hoped would be too swift for his schoolfellows to see, both women turned to him. Their cheeks brushed together, and they exchanged smiles not unlike shy kisses, magnifying his awkwardness as he stumbled into the yard.