shrugged and moved it back again. Since he was employing the method he had used on his ditched car, while Mrs Stock was using brute force, he hoped she would shortly get tired of this. Meanwhile, he was getting some excellent magical practice. That evening, the piano actually trundled obediently into the light when he beckoned it.
Then there was Mr Stock.
Mr Stock’s mode of tyranny was to arrive at the back door, which opened straight into the kitchen, while Andrew was having breakfast. “Nothing particular you want me to do today, so I’ll just get on as usual,” he would announce. Then he would depart, leaving the door open to the winds.
Andrew would be forced to leap up and shut the door before the wind slammed it. A slam, as his grandfather had made clear to him, could easily break the delicate coloured glass in the upper half of the door. Andrew loved that coloured glass. As a boy, he had spent fascinated hours looking at the garden through each different-coloured pane. Depending, you got a rose-pink sunset garden, hushed and windless; a stormy orange garden, where it was suddenly autumn; a tropical green garden, where there seemed likely to be parrots and monkeys any second. And so on. As an adult now, Andrew valued that glass even more. Magic apart, it was old, old, old. The glass had all sorts of internal wrinkles and trapped bubbles, and its long-dead maker had somehow managed to make the colours both intense and misty at once, so that in some lights, the violet pane, for instance, was both a rich purple and a faint lilac grey at one and the same time. If a piece of that glass had broken or even cracked, Andrew’s heart would have cracked with it.
Mr Stock knew that. It was his way of ensuring, like Mrs Stock, that Andrew did not make any changes.
Unfortunately for Mr Stock, Andrew went over the grounds as carefully as he went over Melstone House itself. The walled vegetable garden was beautiful. Mr Stock’s great ambition was to win First Prize in all the vegetable classes at the Melstone Summer Fete, either from his own garden down the road or from Andrew’s. So the vegetables were phenomenal. But for the rest, Mr Stock was content merely to mow lawns. Andrew shook his head at the flower garden and winced at the orchard.
After a couple of months, while he waited for Mr Stock to mend his ways and Mr Stock went on as usual, Andrew took to leaping up as soon as Mr Stock appeared. Holding the precious door open ready to shut again after Mr Stock left, he would say things like, “I think today would be a good time to get rid of all those nettles in the main flowerbed,” and, “Give me a list of the shrubs we need to replace all the dead ones and I’ll order them for you,” and, “There’ll be no harm in pruning the apple trees today: none of them are bearing fruit.” And so on. Mr Stock found himself forced to leave his vegetables, often for days on end.
Mr Stock took his revenge in his traditional manner. The following Monday, he kicked open the back door. Andrew was only just in time to stop it crashing against the inside wall, even though he had cast aside his toast and leaped to the door handle at the sight of Mr Stock’s hat silhouetted through the coloured glass.
“You’ll need both hands,” Mr Stock said. “Here.” And he placed a vast cardboard box loaded with vegetables in Andrew’s arms. “And you’re to eat these all yourself, see. Don’t you let that old bossyboots go pinching them off you. And she will. I know her greedy ways. Puts them in her bag and scuttles off home with them if you give her the chance. So you eat them. And don’t try chucking them away. I’ll know. I empty the bins. So. Nothing particular you want me to do today. I’ll just get on, shall I?”
“Well, actually there is,” Andrew said. “The roses need tying in and mulching.”
Mr Stock glared at him incredulously. This was rebellion.
“Please,” Andrew added in his usual polite way. “I’ll be—!” said Mr Stock. And turned and trudged away.
Andrew, very gently, nudged the door closed with his foot and dumped the cardboard box beside his toast. It was that or drop it, it was so heavy. Unpacked, it proved to contain six enormous onions, a bunch of twelve-inch carrots, a cabbage larger than Andrew’s head, ten peppers the size of melons, a swede like a medium-sized boulder and a vegetable marrow like the body of a small crocodile. The spaces were carefully packed with overripe peapods and two foot runner beans. Andrew grinned. This was all the stuff that would not be up to the standard of Melstone Fete. He left a few of the most edible things out on the table and packed the rest back in the box, which he hid in the corner of the pantry.
Mrs Stock found it of course. “He’s never palmed his rejects off on us again!” she pronounced. “The size of them! All bulk and no taste. And what am I to do for potatoes? Whistle? Really, that man!” Then she took her coat off and went to put the furniture back again. They were still at that.
The next day, Mr Stock kicked the door open on behalf of a box full of fourteen lettuces. On Wednesday, for variety, he accosted Andrew as Andrew went out to check the state of the garden walls and presented a further cardboard box containing ten kilos of tomatoes and a squash like the deformed head of a baby. On Thursday, the box contained sixteen cauliflowers.
Andrew smiled nicely and accepted these things, staggering a bit under their weight. This had happened when his grandfather annoyed Mr Stock too. They had often wondered, Andrew and his grandfather, if Mr Stock collected cardboard boxes and stored them ready to be annoyed with. Andrew presented the tomatoes to Mrs Stock.
“I believe you had better make some chutney,” he said.
“And how do you expect me to find time for that, when I’m so busy—” She broke off, mildly embarrassed.
“Moving the furniture in the living room?” suggested Andrew. “Perhaps you could bring yourself to leave it for once.”
Mrs Stock found herself making chutney. “World of his own!” she muttered over her seething red, vinegary saucepan, and occasionally, as she spooned the stuff into jars, and it slid out and pooled stickily on the table, “Professors! Men!” And, as she got her coat on to leave, “Don’t blame me that the table’s covered in jars. I can’t label them until tomorrow and they’re not going anywhere until I have.”
Once he was alone, Andrew did as he had done every evening that week. He heaved the latest box out of the pantry and carried it outside to where the lean-to of the woodshed made a flattish slope level with his head. With the help of a kitchen chair, he laid the vegetables out up there. Too high for Mr Stock to see, his grandfather had remarked, or Mrs Stock either.
Tomatoes, squash and cauliflowers, were all gone in the morning, but the marrow remained. Careful looking showed a slightly trampled place in the grass beside the woodshed, but Andrew, remembering his grandfather’s advice, enquired no further. He took the marrow back and tried to cut it up to hide in the freezer. But no knife would penetrate the crocodile skin of the thing and he was forced to bury it instead.
Friday brought a gross of radishes from Mr Stock and five bloated aubergines. It also brought Andrew’s new computer. Finally. At last. Andrew forgot house, grounds, radishes, everything. He spent an absorbed and beatific day setting up the computer and beginning the database for his book, the book he really wanted to write, the new view of History.
“Would you believe, it’s a computall now!” Mrs Stock told her sister. She never could get that word right. “Sitting there all day, patter-patter, like dry bones, fair gives me the creeps. And if I ask him anything, it’s, ‘Do as you think best, Mrs Stock’. I could have given him the boiled teacloths for lunch and he wouldn’t have noticed!”
Well, he was a professor, Trixie pointed out, and professors were well known to be absent-minded. And
