‘Do you smell that?’ I asked, spooked.

‘It’s wintergreen’ – she nodded – ‘and thyme and eucalyptus. The gardener’s been burning them. Smoking them. He thought there might be early signs of a Varroa mite infestation in the hive.’

She pointed to a small, old, white WBC hive in the far corner of the garden.

Mrs Meadows (I noted, with a small twinge of irritation) currently looked quite lovely – a good ten years younger than she usually did, because she wasn’t yet (I quote her guilty admission) ‘in full make-up’.

We sat down on a bench and she inspected the piece of paper again, frowning.

The borders were charming. They were buzzing. And there was a little hole in Mrs Meadows’s tights over her big toe. A slightly chipped painted nail poked out through it – on her right foot – which was only visible when she slid it from her leather clog and employed it to scratch her opposite calf. She was wearing glasses, too: large, heavy, tortoiseshell glasses.

What a strange, pointlessly feminine and formal creature she was, I mused, but yet underneath it – the uptightness, the hairspray, the polished veneer – something half-formed and musky, something organic and interesting, quietly throbbing and pulsing, like a delicate little mollusc – a freshwater bivalve – tucked quietly away inside its shell.

Hmmn. Was there actually more to Mrs Meadows than I had initially reckoned on? Was this to be all about Mrs Meadows from here on in? Mrs Meadows? Who two days ago had seemed – well, insignificant? Excess to requirements. A mere frill?

‘4.0.0.4?’ I prompted, clearing my throat, irritated, at myself – by my changing perceptions, I suppose (was I starting to try and see my way towards … towards loving Mrs Meadows now, like Mr Huff eventually would?).

‘It’s a central processing unit chip,’ she explained, ‘or a microprocessor, which is part of a family of four chips called the MCS.4. The MCS.4 basically consists of the “four thousand four” – as it’s generally known – alongside a supporting read-only memory chip – which we call a ROM – for custom applications, a random access memory chip – which we call a RAM – for processing data, then finally a shift register chip for the IO port …’ Her eyes kept on scanning the borders, worriedly, as she spoke, then returning to the beehive a short distance off.

Of course I didn’t have the first clue what she was talking about.

‘A chip,’ I said.

‘Yes. Intel originally designed the four thousand four for the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation in the late sixties,’ she expanded, ‘they manufactured calculators, of course. But then they quickly realized – Intel, I mean – the chip’s amazing potential for universal applications, so they bought it back again and relaunched it in 1971, and that’s when it became the first general-purpose programmable processor on the market. A simple building block for engineers …’

‘But what does the 4.0.0.4 actually do?’ I wondered.