Defeated, I slumped backwards, and as I did, my left arm flopped with an uncontrolled floppishness that caught the stack of papers whose order I had so carefully preserved and sent them tumbling to the floor in a mess of sticky tags and handwritten notes.
Oliver grew very still indeed. “Lucien,” he said in his most carefully regulated monotone, “I feel like your presence here is becoming unhelpful.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” If Oliver’s anger instinct was to get super-duper calm, mine was to get super-duper sarcastic, which was probably less mature but also probably healthier in the long run. “Is my involvement in our wedding becoming inconvenient?”
“Now you’re being—”
“If you dare say I’m being childish, I am getting up and walking out of that door.”
Oliver gave me a cold, distant look that I’d seen a couple of times before but had never imagined would be directed at me. “Right at this moment, that might be the most practical thing you can do.
Leave this to me, Lucien, I’ll have everything finished by the time you’re back.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. It had been ages since I’d had a good storm-out.
I stormed.
I stormed so extravagantly that I ended up at my mum’s house.
“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.”
A light of what was probably misplaced understanding glimmered in her eyes. “Ah, bon. Then, yes, it is about being, as they say, friends with a jigsaw. One is not efficient when one is being friends with a jigsaw. Now”—her tone grew brisk—“help me be friends with this jigsaw because I am quite stuck.” She squinted at her various clusters of Moomin. “I am looking for the last piece of Papa’s hat.”
“And you don’t think it’d be better to—” I let it go. And started combing through the nine hundred and twenty-six pieces that remained in the thousand-piece jigsaw to find the one bit that had a fragment of Moomin top hat on it.