“They’ll ring back in an hour,” he said. “Come on. I’ll show you round the estate. Know anything about bees, do you?” “Well, a very little, yes. I got bitten with the natural history bug at Oxford.” He was going to tell Mendel how he had wrestled with Goethe’s metamorphoses of plants and animals in the hope of discovering, like Faust, “what sustains the world at its inmost point.” He
