“You’re the one who bought a Moomin jigsaw. The only Moomins I know are the one in the hat and the other one. Now can we get back to my catastrophically overboiled sauce–wedding?”

“I thought you would appreciate the distraction.” Mum slotted a bit of wig-wolf into place. “As for the sauce-wedding, well, have you thought that maybe—maybe not every dish is meant to have a sauce?”

I turned from the jigsaw. “What are you saying?”

“Well, for example, there is a nice Chinese place in the next village, and they do this sort of dry chilli and garlic chicken and it is very good.”

“No, I mean, what is this metaphor implying about me and Oliver?”

For a moment, Mum seemed to genuinely resent my pulling her thoughts back from the dry chilli and garlic chicken. “I mean, mon caneton, that you and Oliver may not be the sort who are good at being married.”

Inside, I mega-winced. The comparison here was obvious. “Like you and Dad, you mean?”

“No, Luc.” Mum looked at me like I was six and had just told her I thought cats were made of marzipan. “Your father and I were not bad at being married, we were bad at him not being a lying, cheating sack of broken penises who only thinks about himself.”

“But if we’re not good at being married, what can we be good at?”

Another of Mum’s trademark shrugs. “Being not married? After all, you don’t need to, not really.”

I tasted something bitter, a mix of superfood salad and bile. For a moment Miriam Blackwood popped up at the back of my mind saying, I don’t understand why gay people want to get married at all. Sitting back on the sofa, I shuffled slightly farther away from Mum. Things had got uncomfortable suddenly, and I wasn’t used to Pucklethroop-in-the-Wold being uncomfortable. “That’s…” My stomach was making wurbling motions, and I didn’t like it. “That’s not okay to say.”

“Why not?” Mum seemed genuinely shocked.

My skin was feeling crawly in a way I didn’t want to be associating with my mum’s house. “Because that’s…that’s what people like Oliver’s parents say. Why do you have to get married? It’s not like you can have babies.”

“Oh, Luc.” She didn’t come any closer—she was usually pretty good at respecting personal space, probably from years of talking people down from bad trips—but her body language got all nonthreatening. “I did not mean it in that way. I only meant that there are some people who are very good together but are not so good at weddings or at being married. Look at Judy. She has had very many boyfriends, all very happily, but her marriages, they never last.”