only a temporary and relative fact, untrue five minutes ago and untrue five minutes from now. He thought of the power and speed of that skid, and the repelling power of the ditch. He thought of gravity reversing itself. Then he knelt down with one hand on the grassy mud and the other on the wheel and pushed the two apart. Obediently, with some reluctant sucking and squelshing, the car moved out of the ditch and over the bank and bumped down in the road. Andrew sat himself in the driving seat to put his shoe back on, thinking ruefully that his grandfather would simply have stood in the road and beckoned to get the same result. He would have to work at the practical side of magic a bit more now. Pity. He sighed.
After that, he drove to his grandfather’s house. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” he said, when Mrs Stock opened the door to him.
Mrs Stock nodded and redeemed what little conscience she had by saying, “But I knew you’d know.”
Andrew walked through the front door and into his inheritance.
There was of course a great deal of business involved, not only in Melstone and in Melton, the town nearby, but also in the University, because Andrew decided almost at once to leave the University and live in Melstone House. His parents had left him money and he thought that, with what old Jocelyn had left him, he had enough to give up teaching and write the book he had always wanted to write. He wanted to give the world a completely new view of history. He was glad to leave the University, and particularly glad to leave his Research Assistant. She was such a liar. Amazing that he had wanted to marry her a year ago. But Andrew felt he had to make sure she was safely shunted to another post, and so he did.
One way or another, it was nearly a year before Andrew could move in to Melstone House. Then he had to make sure that the various small legacies in his grandfather’s will were paid, and he did that too; but he was vaguely puzzled that this will, when he saw it, was quite a different size and shape from the paper his grandfather’s ghost had tried to give him. He shrugged and gave Mrs Stock her five hundred pounds.
“And I do hope you’ll continue to work for me just as you did for my grandfather,” he said.
To which she retorted, “I don’t know what you’d do if I didn’t. You live in a world of your own, being a professor.”
Andrew took this to mean yes. “I’m not a professor,” he pointed out mildly. “Just a mere academic.”
Mrs Stock took no notice of this. To her mind this was just splitting hairs. Everybody at a university was to her a professor, unless they were students of course, and therefore even worse. So she told everyone in Melstone that old Jocelyn’s grandson was a professor. Andrew soon became accustomed to being addressed as “Professor”, even by people who wrote to him from elsewhere about details of folklore or asking questions about magic.
He went to give Mr Stock the gardener his legacy of five hundred pounds. “And I do hope you’ll continue your admirable work for me too,” he said.
Mr Stock leaned on his spade. He was no relation to Mrs Stock, not even by marriage. It was simply that a good half of the people in Melstone were called Stock. Both Mr and Mrs Stock were extremely touchy on this matter. They did not like one another. “I suppose that old bossyboots says she’s carrying on for you?” Mr Stock asked aggressively.
“I believe so,” Andrew said.
“Then I’m staying to see fair play,” Mr Stock said and went on banking up potatoes.
In this way, Andrew found himself employing two tyrants.
He did not see them this way of course. To him the two Stocks were fixtures, his grandfather’s faithful servants, who had worked at Melstone House since Andrew had first visited the house as a child. He simply could not imagine the place without them.
Meanwhile, he was extremely happy, unpacking his books, going for walks and simply being in the house where he had spent so many fine times as a boy. There was a smell here — beeswax, mildew, paraffin and a spicy scent he could never pin down — which said Holidays! to Andrew. His mother had never got on with old Jocelyn. “He’s a superstitious old stick-in-the-mud,” she said to Andrew. “Don’t let me find you believing in the stuff he tells you.” But she sent Andrew to stay there most holidays to show that she had not exactly quarrelled with her father.
So Andrew had gone to stay with old Jocelyn and the two of them had walked, over fields, through woods and up Mel Tump, and Andrew had learned many things. He did not remember old Jocelyn teaching him about anything magical particularly; but he did remember companionable nights by the fire in the musty old living room, with the curtains drawn over the big French windows, when his grandfather taught him other things. Old Jocelyn Brandon had a practical turn of mind. He taught his grandson how to make flies for fishing, how to mortice joints, and how to make runestones, origami figures and kites. They had invented riddles together and made up games. It was enough to make the whole place golden to Andrew — though he had to admit that, now he was living here, he missed the old man rather a lot.
But owning the place made up for that somewhat. He could make what changes he pleased. Mrs Stock thought he should buy a television for the living room, but Andrew disliked television so he didn’t. Instead, he bought a freezer and a microwave, ignoring the outcry from Mrs Stock, and went over the house to see what repairs were needed.
“A freezer and a microwave!” Mrs Stock told her sister Trixie. “Does he think I’m going to freeze good food solid, just for the pleasure of thawing it again with rays?”
Trixie remarked that Mrs Stock had both amenities in her own house.
“Because I’m a working woman,” Mrs Stock retorted. “That’s not the point. I tell you, that man lives in a world of his own!”
Great was her indignation when she arrived at the house next day to find that Andrew had moved all the furniture around in the living room, so that he could see to play the piano and get the best armchair beside the fire. It took Mrs Stock a whole morning of grunting, heaving and pushing to put it all back where it had been before.
Andrew came in from inspecting the roof and the outhouse in the yard after she had gone, sighed a little and moved everything to where he wanted it again.
Next morning, Mrs Stock stared, exclaimed and rushed to haul the piano back to its hallowed spot in the darkest corner. “World of his own!” she muttered, as she pushed and kicked at the carpet. “These professors!” she said, heaving the armchair, the sofa, the table and the standard lamps back to their traditional places. “Damn it!” she added, finding that the carpet had now acquired a long slantwise ruck from corner to corner. “And the dust!” she exclaimed, once she had jerked the carpet flat. It took her all morning to clean up the dust.
“So you’ll just have to have the same cauliflower cheese for lunch and supper,” she told Andrew, by way of a strong hint.
Andrew nodded and smiled. That outhouse, he was thinking, was going to fall down as soon as his grandfather’s magic drained from it. Likewise the roof of the house. In the attics, you could look up to see cobwebby patches of sky through the slanted ceilings. He wondered whether he could afford all the necessary repairs as well as the central heating he wanted to install. It was a pity he had just spent so much of his grandfather’s remaining money on a new computer.
In the evening, after Mrs Stock had gone, he fetched a pizza out of his new freezer, threw away the cauliflower cheese and, while the pizza heated, he moved the living room furniture back the way he wanted it.
Dourly,
