This morning, as she skivvied, we had an extraordinary discussion about the Home Computing Revolution. She’d gleaned via the elusive Mr Barrow’s tabloid rag (Mr Barrow is Toot Rock’s very own smooth-skinned McCavity; he may only ever be apprehended as an absence) that something called the ‘Apple Mackintosh’ was, as of this very day, to be made available, for money, in shops, to the general public. She was unable to comprehend how or why this much heralded object would be in any way better or more useful than a standard typewriter: ‘And they only ever as write out bills to torment us poor working folk with those!’ she muttered. I silently held up my book. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ she grumbled. ‘Words is words is words is words.’

‘Well, thank goodness Trollope and De Quincey weren’t of your blinkered mind-set, Mrs Barrow!’ I quipped, then went on to laboriously explain the demarcation between mechanical, electronic, analogue and digital technologies – even drawing a little diagram on the inside back cover of my jotter. I cogently summarized Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication and Moore’s Law in what I hoped were layman’s terms. I said, ‘This is the Third Industrial Revolution, Mrs Barrow. You are witness to the genesis of a new era: the Information Age – the paperless office, the revolutionary concept of information sharing. This is bigger than people walking on the moon,’ I said. ‘One day our entire lives – everything, literally everything: transport, personal hygiene, sex – will be digitized.’

As Mrs Barrow brushed out and then re-set the fire I explained how I’d been posted as a foreign correspondent to California during the late 1960s and how it’d been – by a lucky coincidence – the fertile breeding ground, the hub, of all these extraordinary, nay game-changing hypotheses. I told her how the scientists had discovered a way of sending letters to each other via computer: digital letters! Mrs Barrow paid great heed as she flitted about the cottage – a spry grey squirrel in pleated skirt and pop socks – with her bucket, her broom and her mop. Then, once I’d completed my lecture, she placed her hands on her hips, laboriously cleared her throat and said, ‘I remember as when they invented the ballpoint pen, Mr Huff. Everyone making a big old fuss about it, they was. Now it’s just something and nothing. I’m as happy to be using a pencil myself! Nobody cares about the ballpoint pen no more, Mr Huff. This’ll be the same. A flush in the pan. You mark my words.’

‘Those walnuts have been in the cupboard for at least five Christmases, Mr Huff!’ Miss Hahn yells up at me, throwing down her bike into the long grass. I’ve seen her throw it down before. Many times. Toss it down, without a care. I find it difficult to marry this apparent recklessness with her complete fastidiousness in regard to every detail connected to Mulberry Cottage. The lists! The rules! The special requirements! I also observed the pointed way she used my surname. Of course we made the booking for the cottage under Lara’s maiden name: Ashe. I’m no fool. We’d never have got it for the full eight weeks otherwise.