Mrs Meadows looked slightly taken aback by this sudden, emotional outpouring from Miss Hahn, but she nodded at her, gamely, and smiled, somewhat condescendingly. I quickly stepped in (Damage limitation! Miss Hahn didn’t want to scare the poor woman off, now, did she?).

‘I have a couple of good friends in Silicon Valley,’ I said. ‘A man called Dr Clark Kipps. I don’t know if you’ve ever …?’

‘Dr Kipps did an amazing lecture at my university when I was a second-year student!’ Mrs Meadows exclaimed. ‘We occasionally correspond. He’s working between California and CERN in Switzerland alongside a man called Tim Berners-Lee who invented ENQUIRE. Are you aware of the sorts of things he’s been dabbling in at all?’

‘Information sharing.’ I nodded.

Mrs Meadows then went off on a long tangent about Dr Kipps and how her former husband, Dr Meadows, had diagnosed a particular kind of neurological disorder in him called – I think – ‘Dystonia’ simply from reading Dr Kipps’s occasional letter (apparently the handwriting becomes very scruffy after approximately three lines, due to a cramping sensation in the hand. Dr Kipps also blinked excessively which was very typical of the condition, I’m told. Both of these characteristics were familiar to me as a long-term – although somewhat distant – acquaintance of said gentleman).

It transpired that Dr Kipps had contracted this rare disorder after suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning as a child. Dr Meadows – who I must admit was starting to sound like some kind of inspired medical genius – had always encouraged Mrs Meadows in her interest in the sciences. They’d met at a small ‘Science Club’ in Rye which Dr Meadows had established in the mid-1960s. Mrs Meadows’s parents (late of Dublin; Mrs Meadows was a lapsed Catholic and had attended convent school) had been living in Rye at that time and she had fled there following a rather messy break-up with … I can’t recall. It might have been an airline pilot.

After Dr Meadows’s sudden death, Mrs Meadows had abandoned all her former interest in science and engineering. The deep passion he’d reignited suddenly dwindled … It was simply too painful for her. It reminded her of Dr Meadows and the ‘great enthusiasms’ they’d shared …

But … but then what an extraordinary coincidence – she gasped – that it was my coming to see her, my searching her out over Orla and Dr Meadows’s diaries that had led to … this sudden, strange discovery. This revelation! How very extraordinary!

Yes! And after she’d been standing in the garden this morning, watching the bees, thinking about … about … and then to make this … this connection … with the stable Dyson’s swarm … she pointed … And what on earth is this? she added, her eyes shining, here, right next to it? I … I honestly don’t know what that means! she panted. ‘What on earth does that …? How perplexing! I need to go home and get a camera or if I could just …if I could just get a piece of paper and copy this all down … Is that a Hopf Bundle? There? Is that …?’