Toby felt large as an elephant — or perhaps a giraffe — between them in their little home. Their tables and chairs only seemed to reach somewhere around his knees, and he kept walking into doorframes as though they were built to a different scale. They had baked him a cake with three candles for the three years of his degree and decorated it with the University logo, which he didn’t recognize until they pointed it out. The sitting room was hung with paper chains and balloons and more WELCOME HOME banners; it was very tidy and bright and full of plants and pictures; there was even a color scheme, with a blue sofa (which would turn into a bed for him later), blue curtains, and yellow walls. They got out a bottle of champagne from the fridge. Toby didn’t know how to open it so Angie did, and they drank a toast to him.
— I only got a two-two, he protested, blushing. It’s honestly not worth all this.
— Nonsense, said Naomi, putting her arm around his waist and her head against his chest. We’ve had such hard times and such a lot of bad luck. Now everything’s turning out to be for the best. Here’s to you, my brilliant boy. Here’s to us. Isn’t this a bit better than where you last saw me?
— I’d say so, said Angie. Better than that dump.
Naomi and Angie had planned out the whole evening. They showed Toby around the garden, which belonged to the owners who lived downstairs but which they were allowed to use. It was a big garden, rather neglected, overtaken by clumps of pampas grass and wandering up among trees at its far end.
— I’d love to get to work out here, said Naomi, who was good at plants. Perhaps they’ll let us put a few things in and do a bit of tidying up.
— Perhaps, said Angie tolerantly, if we get the time.
Then there were cocktails and hot homemade appetizers, followed by vegetarian lasagna and expensive ice cream. And for after dinner they had rented a video, Shine, which they thought would be suitable.
— I know you’re not into blockbusters, said Angie.
He politely didn’t tell them he’d seen it already, or that he hadn’t liked it.
Over balloon glasses of brandy last thing, when they had pulled out the sofa and made up his bed, Angie explained to Toby that her name wasn’t short for Angela. She had been rushed into hospital when she was only a few hours old, and the nurses had called her Angel because they didn’t think she’d live. A man walking his dog in a park had found her abandoned under a bush, wrapped up in someone’s bloody nightdress. They never found out whose nightdress it was.
— I’m the original babe in the woods, she said. Now, wouldn’t that make a great film? Haven’t I given you a fantastic subject? Complete with a happy ending too.
Naomi poured herself a second brandy. She watched Angie with a private smiling concentration, nursing her glass in her warm palms and breathing the fumes, slightly drunk and exalted. Then she turned to Toby expectantly as if he was their audience and might applaud what she loved and had had displayed for him.
When he settled down to sleep, Toby pulled the duvet tightly up over his ears. Their bedroom opened directly off the sitting room where he lay. He dreaded overhearing Angie making love with his mother (although no more than he had dreaded it with the men).
* * *
ANGIE WORKED with children in a play group run by the local council. Naomi had been doing office work for the Royal Automobile Club for a couple of years now; it was dull but it was safe, it brought the money in, she didn’t hate it. So they were both out all day; they stepped around Toby in his bed in the mornings while they were getting ready and made their arrangements in hurried undertones. When they pulled the door shut behind them at half past eight he sank back down into a sleep that ballooned with relief and lightness into the empty space.
They left him notes in the kitchen: Supper at six-thirty if you’d like some (mushroom risotto); there were boxes to tick for YES or NO. He worried while he ate his cereals over what to put, and how often he could say no without offending them; it was always possible that they felt as grateful as he did on the nights he ate at Clare’s or bought himself chips. When he said yes, he had to spend all day trying to remember to get back in time. There was only one bus from town that came anywhere near the house and it only ran once every hour; if he got out of bed around midday, that didn’t leave him much time for getting things done. If he was late for supper, Angie would be silent and smiling and Naomi overemphatic in her reassurances that it didn’t matter as she hurried to warm things up.
He did have things to do. Each day he set himself one task to accomplish: the travel agent’s to visit, or the doctor’s to organize his inoculations, or some item of clothing to buy, or insurance to arrange. He didn’t always accomplish it. Toby’s “task for the day” became a sort of jokey catchphrase with Angie, and it was true that he wasn’t very good at focusing single-mindedly on his purpose. However much he determined not to be distracted or to allow himself to be waylaid, there must be something in his face that gave away an openness to suggestion like a weakness. Anyone eccentric or garrulous always sat next to him on the bus. People selling political newspapers or giving out religious tracts or tickets for a club homed in on him from across a crowd, also refugees with an album of photographs of torture injuries and a petition to sign that turned out to involve contributing money. He never managed to avoid the eye of the homeless who were selling their Big Issue magazine, so that he always had to stop and explain to them that he didn’t have anything to spare. Then he’d find himself in a long conversation while the crowd flowed past as if he’d never been a part of it, on his way somewhere.
The day he went to see his father he happened to have a book in his pocket that he had just bought from a man selling Socialist Worker; when he had tried to explain that he didn’t want to buy their paper because it seemed to him that their approach to politics was superficial and sloganizing, the man had produced from somewhere inside his coat a book of essays in tiny print on shiny paper, assuring Toby that he would find inside the deep-level analysis he was looking for. Toby accepted it rather than make a fuss, and then the man asked him for two pounds.
Graham got very excited about the book.
— God, I can’t believe that anyone still reads this stuff. Wonderful old Trotskyite nonsense. Listen to this: “Sooner or later, and despite all the immense obstacles on the way, the working class and its allies in other classes will bring into being an authentically democratic social order.” Ah, those were the days. And you paid two pounds? For this? Of course I was in the CP when I was at college. We’d have thought this was dangerous revisionism.
He had to lend Toby two pounds to replace what he’d spent (Toby needed it for bus fare), and he went on reading out sentences about workers and mass movements in delighted irony until the toddler he was minding fell over his baby walker and had to be picked up and consoled. Graham’s third wife, Linda, worked in a psychiatric unit for teenagers and was the family breadwinner; Graham looked after the children, who were nine, five, and two.
— I hear your mother’s having a lesbian fling, Graham said, expertly hoisting his little son’s legs in the air to change his nappy, wiping him with a sequence of torn-off chunks of cotton wool soaked in baby oil that he had laid out ready in a row alongside the plastic changing mat. He was looking austerely patriarchal; his hair and beard had turned a soft clean white. Clare had told Toby that he had played Santa Claus for Daniel’s playgroup, and also that he wasn’t selling much work. ‘Whether it’s because he’s not producing much, or because nobody wants it, we’re not sure.’