“You’re weirder than I thought you were,” she said thoughtfully, smiling at me in a funny way that might have been a bit sarcastic or a bit sad, or both. She stopped suddenly and pointed at a door in a high stone wall.

“This is where I live.”

“Hmm, that’s odd…”

“What’s odd?”

“Well, your father … he’s a doctor, but there’s no brass nameplate…”

“For a start, not all doctors put up a nameplate – for example, those who work in hospitals… And secondly my father isn’t a doctor.”

“So why did you lie to Monsieur Dubois?”

“Do I ask you why you blocked the girls’ toilets, just after lunch, with the loo paper you hide under the washbasins? We had stomach pains all afternoon!”

I ignored that and said, “So then it wasn’t you who gave me the answer to the question? Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why do you think I would do something like that?”

She opened the door with a big key and I just had time to glimpse a huge garden, almost the size of a park. She was about to disappear, but then she turned around and said, “If you want, you can come and do your homework with me one day.”

I was flattered, but the word “homework” bothered me a bit.

That evening, I left Dad by himself to muddle through with his research in his magazine, the Journal for Collectors and the Curious. He was a bit surprised, because usually on Friday evenings I liked to help him take notes in it, sorting out his orders and deliveries. I told him I needed to think things over. I knew it was an activity he took seriously and even encouraged. We agreed to get together the next morning and take the Panhard out for a spin.

When I got to my room, the first thing I did was to open the dictionary:

Miracle from the Latin miraculum, “a wonder”, from mirari, “to wonder at”. An extraordinary event believed to result from a benign divine intervention and to which a spiritual significance is attached.

I thought the dictionary went a bit over the top about the word “miracle”, but on the whole I agreed. In any event I wasn’t a particular expert in divine matters. I took all my books out from my desk, even the ones from last year, because it couldn’t do any harm. I came across a little manual given to me by a lady that my father had taken me to see, because of my difficulties. My visits to her didn’t last long, because a month after our first meeting she moved away and we never saw her again. Dad said it couldn’t have been anything to do with me, she must have been planning it already.