was standing just beyond the bushes, doing his baby arm-waving thing, with his fingers out like two starfish. Shaun probably never realised how near he came to death. Andrew slammed on his brakes so hard and so quickly that Aidan looked at him with respect.
“What is it, Shaun?” Andrew asked, calmly leaning out of his window.
“I did it, Professor! I did it!” Shaun said. “She sings. She sings sweet. Come and see!” He was red in the face with pride and excitement.
Realising that Shaun must be talking about the motor mower, Andrew said, “Move out of the way then, and I’ll park the car.”
Shaun obediently backed into the bushes and then ran after the car. As soon as Andrew and Aidan had climbed out, he led them at a trot to the strange shed. Inside it, the motor mower was standing under the coloured window in a ring of rust. Shaun seemed to have polished it.
“Pull the starter. Hear her sing,” Shaun pleaded.
Dubiously, Andrew bent and took hold of the handle on the end of the starter wire. Normally, this felt as if you were trying to pull a handle embedded in primordial granite. On a good day, you could pull the handle out about an inch, with a strong graunching noise. On a bad day, the handle would not move however hard you pulled. On both good and bad days, nothing else happened at all. But now Andrew felt the wire humming out sweetly in his hand. When it reached the critical length, the engine coughed, caught and broke out into a chugging roar. The mower shook all over, filling the shed with blue smoke. Shaun had worked a miracle. Andrew felt total dismay. He knew Mr Stock would be furious.
“Well done, Shaun,” he said heartily, and tried to calculate how long it would be until Mr Stock felt moved to mow the lawns. “Er…” he bellowed above the noise of the mower, “how long is it until the Melstone Summer Fete? How do I turn this thing off?”
Shaun reached forward and deftly twitched the right lever. “Two weeks,” he said in the resounding silence. “Not for two weeks. I thought everyone knew that.”
“Then we should be safe from the Wrath of Stock until then,” Andrew murmured. “Good work, Shaun. Now you can get on and clean this shed up.”
“Can’t I mow the grass?” Shaun pleaded.
“No,” Andrew said. “That would be most unwise.”
Shaun and Aidan were both disappointed. Aidan had thought that taking turns with Shaun at chugging about with the mower would have been fun. Shaun looked sadly around the rubbish in the shed. “What do I do with the cement bags?” he said.
The cement bags had been there so long that they had set like a row of hard paper-covered boulders. “Better bury them,” Andrew said over his shoulder as he pushed Aidan out of the shed. “Come on, Aidan. We have to unload the car.”
As they crossed the front lawn to the car, Aidan looked meaningly at the grass. It was all tufts and clumps. It had a fine crop of daisies, buttercups and dandelions, and several mighty upstanding thistles. If ever a lawn needed mowing…
“Don’t ask,” Andrew said. “Mr Stock will be busy full time until the Fete, stretching beans and pumping up potatoes. He collects First Prizes. He also prides himself on being the only one who can start that mower. I hope, by the time the Fête’s over, that the mower will have reverted to its old form. Otherwise I shall get mountains of dead lettuce.”
“I understand,” said Aidan. “I think.”
“And yard-long carrots,” Andrew said bitterly.
They unloaded the groceries and took them to the kitchen. Then Aidan went back for his own bulging bags. While he was hauling them up to his room, he heard a noise that sounded like the mower. Shaun must have disobeyed Andrew, he thought, looking out of the landing window. But the noise turned out to be Tarquin O’Connor’s adapted car arriving to take Stashe home for lunch. Good! Aidan thought. There was a huge electric torch on the windowsill of Andrew’s study. Once Stashe was out of the way, Aidan intended to go in and borrow it. He was going to need it for tonight.
Aidan liked the room he had been given. He liked its size and its low ceiling and its long, low window that showed that the walls were three feet thick. He wondered if that window had at one time been several arrow slits. Melstone House was certainly old enough. Above all, Aidan was charmed by the way the creaky wooden floor ran downhill to all four walls. If he put the marble he happened to have in his pocket down in the middle of the room, it rolled away to any one of the walls, depending how he dropped it.
To his dismay, Mrs Stock was in the room, tidying repressively. Being forbidden to move the living room furniture, Mrs Stock was taking out her feelings on the spare room. She glowered at Aidan and his carrier bags.
“Moving in for a long stay, are you?” she said. “You’ve got enough for a lifetime there. I hope you’re grateful to Professor Hope. He isn’t made of money, you know.”
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