“Only your own story can cure you,” Sophie mutters after a few minutes of silence. “Umbrellas have changed. Purple LED lights fly up and down their sticks. They don’t cost half a month’s wages and nobody patches them with silk. I told you to understand the past, not worm deeper in.”

“But Maupassant’s story is from 1884, a hundred and twenty-five years after my death.”

“Get with the new.”

“Might you prefer the umbrella story in Howards End?”

“Whose end?”

“E.M. Forster. Is the twentieth century up-to-date enough for you?”

“Never mind Howard’s end, what about yours? Where is Jimmy B going to end up? You’d better get a move on or I’ll be here until the apocalypse listening to him drone on about umbrellas.”

“But Howards End is my story, or at least very like an important part of it…a rich woman with a luxuriant umbrella accidentally takes a poor man’s decrepit umbrella home from a concert, and when they try to return the objects to each other it creates a doomed romantic upheaval nearly identical to the way I lost Eliza….”

“Eliza Lawson? Again? Oh, Jimmy. I’m ready for you to leave if you can’t do any better than this after all the time I’ve spent with you, trying to get you to face what really haunts you.”

In fact, there has not been a September in the last eleven years when Sophie hasn’t uttered this very thing. If I don’t give her a grain of truth now and then, she loses all heart.

So. “I met a blue man…”

Blue, yellow…a story sounds true no matter what the colour, as long as there is a colour and the colour is pure.

“See? I knew you met somebody today. I could tell from your face, from your whole body. I knew somebody had you mixed up about time again. Harking all the way back to the invention of friggin’ umbrellas. Pulling you safely away from here and now. How much time do you expect me to squander listening to pointless tales that only distract you from the truth?”

“It wasn’t today I met the blue man. But I thought about him all afternoon. And it’s true, he did get me thinking of time, going back and forth in time, instead of doing what you want me to do, like visiting Madame Blanchard.”

“A blue man.”

“He was all dressed in blue.”

“A blue man from the desert? Are you finally talking to me about the desert?”

“Not the desert. The blue man was in the field behind our house in Westerham. I was playing with George.”

“Oh.” She slumps. “You and Westerham and Henrietta and George Warde. You and Eliza and England and king what’s-his-name.”