Enchanted Glass (11 page)

“You — you’ve got half of a floral loo in your care!” Stashe managed to say. That made Andrew laugh too.

They went through the grand front door and sat on the imposing front steps to put their boots on again. Stashe said cheerfully, “I must see to Flotsam. See you the day after tomorrow,” and shut the front door behind them.

After this, the boundary took them down the broad curve of a gravel drive, almost to the front gates of Melstone Grange. But there it curved off again into fields and moorland on the other side of the village. Andrew looked that way, satisfied. It was almost exactly the line he
had pencilled in on the map. But he could see Aidan was quite tired.

“I think we’ll leave the rest for another day,” he said, “and walk home through the village.”

Aidan was glad to agree. He felt as if he had walked for a week. And he suspected it was still a long way through the village to Melstone House.

He was right. Melstone was a long, thin village. It looked very fine in the late afternoon light, with its rows of cottages alternating with bigger houses built of old red brick, and the occasional newish bungalow squeezed in between. One of those bungalows belonged to Mr Stock, Andrew said, but he wasn’t sure which. Aidan sighed. It was becoming just a long, long road to him.

Talking of Mr Stock made Andrew think of vegetables. “My feeling is that we owe ourselves a slap-up supper tonight,” he said. “Are you any good at cooking?”

“Not bad,” Aidan said. “Gran always said she didn’t hold with helpless males who couldn’t even boil an egg. She made me learn cooking when I was quite small. I can do most ordinary things.”

“Good!” said Andrew. “Then you can do some tonight.”

Oh dear. “When my legs stop aching,” Aidan said
swiftly, and looked around for something to take Andrew’s mind off cooking.

The road was winding them downhill towards the dip where Melstone House lay. And there, on the next corner, stood the perfect thatched cottage, one of those that had snuggled itself down into the land over the centuries, so that it looked as if it had grown there rather than been built. Flowering creepers grew round its diamond-paned windows and its slightly sideways front door, and its front garden was a mass of roses, roses of every possible colour.

“Hey!” Aidan said craftily, but meaning it too. “That’s a nice house! I like it better than that place of Ronnie Stock’s.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Andrew agreed. “It’s idyllic.”

Someone was bobbing about in the garden, tending the roses. As they came closer, they saw it was Tarquin O’Connor — Tarquin walking on two legs, but very carefully, as if he didn’t quite trust his new, non-existent leg not to disappear suddenly and dump him in a rose bush.

Tarquin saw them at the same time. He came limping to his front gate with a delighted smile above his little beard. “Hello there!” he called out. “I wondered if you’d be along. Come on in and have a cup of tea. I’ve just made some biscuits, so I have.”

Relief!
thought Aidan.

The biscuits were some of the best shortbreads Aidan had ever tasted. Tarquin’s teacups were the kind Gran had kept in a glass-fronted cupboard and never used. Aidan hardly dared drink out of his. He stared round Tarquin’s rambling, comfortable room while he listened to Tarquin confessing to Andrew, with a rueful smile, that his non-existent leg was still there, but he just didn’t
trust
it.

“It’s the way my fingers go through it when I put my socks on,” he explained.

Andrew took his glasses off and examined the leg. Aidan looked at the polished furniture and the low ceiling with black beams in it, and then at Tarquin’s old, glowing, Oriental rugs.

“Oh, I like your carpets much better than Ronnie Stock’s!” he exclaimed.

“And so you should!” Tarquin said, laughing. “Ronnie never did have any taste. As long as something costs a lot, Ronnie thinks it’s good. But how come you saw inside his house?”

“Stashe took us in,” Aidan said. He and Andrew described the way the boundary of the field-of-care ran through the middle of Melstone Grange, including the downstairs cloakroom.

Tarquin laughed at that, just as Stashe had. “Ronnie will have it,” he said, “that the Grange is ever so old. He was
always telling me so when I used to ride for him. So I went to the County Record Office and looked the place up. And it was built in 1832, so it was. That makes it Victorian, more or less. This cottage goes back three hundred years before that — and maybe more, but there’s no records for earlier than that. And I’ll bet that your field-of-care goes back as far as my house does at least, or it wouldn’t have the Grange built across it. By the way, did Stashe tell you of the great row there’s been on the Fête Committee?”

“No,” Andrew said, still staring at Tarquin’s leg. “Wally Stock did.”

“Him! He
would!
” Tarquin said. “I swear that man knows things before they happen! But it’s true, so it is, that for a while there it looked as if the whole Fête was off. I was thinking that Stockie — your Mr Stock — might be likely to cut his own throat with nowhere to show his veg at. But now it turns out that they’ve brought in Mr Brown and all’s right again, so it is.”

Andrew put his glasses on again to say, “I’ve not met Mr Brown.”

“Him down at the Manor? Really not?” Tarquin said. And he added, just like Wally Stock, “Recluse and a bit of a scholar, just like you, Andrew. I’m surprised you don’t know him.”

His grandfather, Andrew remembered, had always said,
“Mr Brown is not for us, Andrew, but we have to be very polite to him.” He said thoughtfully, “No. My grandfather didn’t seem to get on with him.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Tarquin said. “
Nobody
knows the man. That makes it all the more surprising he’s going to run the Fête, so it does. Anyway, what do you make of this leg of mine?”

“I think I can harden it up,” Andrew said. “But slowly, bit by bit. Drop in to see me as often as you can, and I’ll get it more solid gradually.”

“Thank you kindly,” Tarquin said gratefully. “It was a bit embarrassing this morning when Stockie dropped by to see me — having a rave about the Fête being cancelled, so he was — and I caught my trouser leg on a nail. I walked off in one direction and my trouser leg went in another. Stockie stared a bit.”

“You’d think he’d be used to such things,” Andrew said, “working for my grandfather all these years. Oh, well. Are your feet rested, Aidan? We’d better be going.”

M
rs Stock had gone home when Andrew and Aidan arrived back at Melstone House. There was, quite inevitably, a dish of caulifower cheese in the middle of the kitchen table. There was a reproachful note under it that said,
Our Shaun dint know what to do so he went in that old shed. If he done wrong you should a been here.

Andrew simply laughed and set about cooking steak from the freezer. Andrew did most of it, to Aidan’s relief. Aidan didn’t know where saucepans were kept or how the stove worked, but he helped. And all the time, he kept looking at the huge clothes for Groil that he had brought downstairs and hung over a kitchen chair, hoping that it wouldn’t rain, so that they could put the clothes out on the woodshed roof after supper. Those clothes were Aidan’s very first big magical project and he wanted it to
work.

I can’t
wait
to see if they fit! he kept thinking.

While Aidan was thinking this for at least the fortieth time, his grandmother’s voice came into his mind, saying what Gran always said when Aidan said he couldn’t wait.
Aidan, don’t wish your life away!
Usually Aidan took this to mean that he wasn’t to waste present time by longing for something in the future. But this time he remembered how big Groil was and how Groil was not
strictly
a vegetarian. Gran’s words took on quite a different meaning then. Aidan thought Oh! and felt rather small.

All the same, he watched Andrew toss the big clothes up on to the woodshed roof at sunset. Then Aidan found he had not the slightest desire to know if they fitted or not. He went to bed. He was quite tired after all that walking and he went to sleep at once.

Around midnight, he was woken by a rattling bang from his window. Wind, Aidan thought sleepily. The bang happened again. He heard the window shake. He’ll break it! Aidan thought and got out of bed fast, up the floor and down again to the window. Rather like last night, he could see a bulging white moon hurtling through a thin smoke of clouds. As he got to the window, moon and clouds vanished behind a great dark fist. BANG. The window leaped about.

Aidan climbed cautiously on to the three foot wide sill
and opened the window. He knelt there and looked out at Groil’s fist, just stopping itself from hitting the glass again. Below that, Groil’s huge face was turned up to him, foreshortened, so that Groil looked more like Shaun than ever. The face broke into a vast smile as Aidan leaned out, showing two rows of extremely big square teeth. Below that, Groil was wearing the clothes. Aidan had actually made them too big. Groil had had to turn the sleeves up and roll up the legs of the jeans. Aidan could see the pale cuffs of them above Groil’s bare feet — which still looked enormous, even from this height.

“Oh, good! You found the clothes!” Aidan said.

Groil nodded vehemently, his eyes all creased up with his smile. “You made them?”

“Yes,” Aidan said.

“Thought so,” said Groil. “They smell of you. A smell of good magics.”

“And you like them?” Aidan asked anxiously.

Groil nodded again and smiled blissfully. “Cosy,” he said. “Warm. Smart too. I shall sleep well, come the winter days. And room to grow. No one can laugh at me for being bare now. You are very kind. I shall praise you to the High Lord. Might even ask someone to mention you to the King.”

“That’s all right,” Aidan said, wondering who this High
Lord and this King were. “You’re very welcome.”

“I had a bit of trouble with the not-buttons though,” Groil said. “Did I get them right?” He backed away, so that Aidan could see the zip on the jeans and the one at the neck of the sweatshirt, and gestured to them. “You pull them up shut? Right?”

Both zips were properly closed. Groil was no fool, Aidan thought, even though he had probably never seen a zip in his life before. “Yes,” he said. “Zips. You got both zips right. You look good.”

“Zips,” Groil repeated. “I look good. I feel good. I got
clothes!
” He whirled away, waving his arms Shaun-fashion, and began to dance around the dim, moonlit lawn. “I got
clothes!
” he sang in a grating tenor voice. “I look
good!
I got
zips
, I got
clothes
, I look
good!
” He leaped. He cavorted. He flung his legs up in extravagant high kicks. He jumped. Once or twice Aidan was sure Groil came down on a thistle, but didn’t appear to notice. His feet must have been like leather. “I got
zips!
I got
clothes!
” Groil roared out, and leaped like a ballet dancer, twizzling round in mid-air.

After a moment or so, Aidan caught Groil’s rhythm and leaned out of the window and clapped in time to the dance. His hands were quite sore by the time Groil finally danced himself round the corner of the house and out of sight.
Even then, Aidan could hear him singing in the distance. He went back to bed, rather astonished at how easy it was to make someone that happy. Gran had always said you made yourself happy too, but Aidan had never really believed her until now.

“Groil liked the clothes,” he reported to Andrew in the morning.

Andrew grinned over the bacon he was frying. He seemed to be making breakfast earlier than usual. “I heard him singing,” Andrew said. “
Not
one of the world’s great tenors.”

“He danced too,” Aidan said.

“I felt the ground shaking,” Andrew replied, turning the bacon and fried bread out on to two plates. “Eat up. Today we’re going to follow the boundary round the other way, to the left of the dip in the road. And it looks like rain, so I want to get going as soon as possible.”

It started drizzling slightly as the two of them set off, and it was decidedly colder. Groil would be glad of the clothes, Aidan thought as he trudged past Wally Stock’s cows on the way to the road. Come to think of it, Aidan was glad of his own new zip-up waterproof. I got zips! he thought to himself, and couldn’t help grinning.

The boundary on this side was nothing like as regular as Andrew had thought. It took a great bulge away from the
wood and Andrew’s fields, out into unknown meadows, where it ran beside the road for a space, until the road swerved away towards Andrew’s former University. Here they lost the line of the boundary for a while. In fact, Aidan wondered if they had lost themselves too. They waded through a marshy field full of tall rushes, where they could not even see the village, although they could hear the church clock striking somewhere in the distance behind the wood. Eleven o’clock, Aidan thought. Already.

Here the rain came down properly, white and pelting. The rushes bent and hissed with it and the distant wood was almost cancelled out by grey rods of rain. They could hardly see where they were walking, let alone find the boundary. They were soaked in seconds, with hair streaming into their eyes and their glasses nearly useless.

Andrew made two sloshing, sucking strides in what was probably the wrong direction, and stopped. “This is no good,” he said. “Let’s make for the wood and shelter there until this stops. It can’t rain this hard for very long.”

Aidan took his glasses off and could then just about see the wood, dark green behind the rain. It was much further off than he had thought. They floundered and squelshed towards it, each of them trying, from time to time, to wipe wet glasses on Andrew’s handkerchief. Aidan had forgotten, in his shopping orgy, that he might need
handkerchiefs. He was cursing himself about it by the time they finally stumbled through a bramble thicket and in under the trees.

“It’s just as wet here,” he said disgustedly.

“Yes, but in a different way,” Andrew said.

This was true. The leaves on the trees held the rain up, so that they could at least see where to walk. But every so often a tree would become too full of water and it would all come down, twenty minutes’ worth of heavy rain, and tip itself on their heads. Up above, they could hear the rain hissing steadily on to the tops of the trees, while all around them one tree after another unloaded cold water with a wet crash.