“Luc.” She opened the door with a look of puzzlement on her face that quickly became one of concern. “Oh no, what has happened? Have you discovered Oliver randomly travels in time and so you have known him your whole life and are only just beginning to realise it?”

“So,” I asked, “you’ve been watching Doctor Who or reading The Time Traveller’s Wife?”

She shrugged. “A bit of both. In different ways, they are very creepy men.”

“Doctor Who’s a woman now.”

“Oh no, Luc, spoilers. I am only up to the one with the big scarf. Anyway”—she stood aside—“you had better come in. I’m afraid I did not know you were visiting so I have not made the special curry.”

I followed her into the living room, which always had a faint air of Judy and dogs despite, at the moment, containing neither. “I think I’ll live.”

“You should eat something, mon caneton. Food is important when you’ve had a shock.”

“Just to clarify,” I said, adopting a position of sofaly slumpitide, “I’ve had a shock because I’ve had a fight with Oliver about the wedding. Not about him being a time traveller. We’re on the same page there, right?”

“You know”—Mum sat down beside me and dragged the coffee table towards us—“I am very happy for you to come here and talk to me about anything you like, even if Oliver is not a time traveller, but you are going to have to make yourself useful for once and help me with my jigsaw.”

I stared at the coffee table, which was strewn with little clumps of a partially assembled picture in a sea of pieces, many of them upside down. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Jigsaws are good for people of my age. They stop you getting the Alzheimer’s.”

“Okay but…” I kept staring, pushing back a rising suspicion that I was very much the Oliver in this room. “Why are you not starting with the edges?”

“Why would I do that?”

Embarrassingly, I had to think about it. “Everybody starts with the edges. It gives you something to—to… It’s more efficient.” Oh my God, I was Oliver. Or maybe it was jigsaws. Were we all, deep down, an Oliver and all it took to bring it out was a disassembled picture of the Moomins?

“No,” Mum said firmly. “Efficient is not cutting the picture up in the first place. Doing a jigsaw is not about efficiency, it is about the journey.”

I gave her a look. “You mean, the real jigsaw is the friends we make along the way?”

She gave me a look back. “No, Luc. A jigsaw is a jigsaw. Your friends are your friends. You cannot be friends with a jigsaw. What are you even talking about?”

“It’s just a thing people say.”