Enchanted Glass. Diana Wynne Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ out the last race at Leicester now,” Tarquin said to him. “She uses that as the clincher.”

      Andrew moved the paper along and his eyes widened. He read out, in a fading, astonished voice, “First, Real Danger, second, Flight to Hope, third, Eustacia’s Way. Look here,” he said, “most horses have names like Bahajan King, or Lord Hannibal, or something in Arabic. What do you do when one of those comes up?”

      “Oh, that’s simple,” Stashe said sunnily. “Depending if one of those without meaning comes first, second or third, they give you a question mark to the prophecy or advice. They say, ‘This might work’ or ‘This is the best I can tell you’ — things like that.”

      This girl is mad, Andrew thought. Barking. But I do need help with the computer.

      “She’s quite sane,” Tarquin put in helpfully.

      Andrew’s mouth opened to contradict this. But at that moment Mrs Stock put her face round the door. “Here’s our Shaun,” she announced. “And you’re employing him as handyman here. If you don’t and you hire that Stashe instead, I’m leaving and you can just find yourself another housekeeper!”

      Everyone stared at her. Trying not to laugh, Andrew took his glasses off and slowly cleaned them with his handkerchief. “Don’t tempt me, Mrs Stock,” he said. “Don’t tempt me.”

      Mrs Stock bridled. “Is that a jo —?” she began. Then it dawned on her that it might not be a joke. She gave Andrew a slanting, upwards look. “Well, anyway,” she said, “this is our Shaun.” She pushed a bulky young man into the room.

      Shaun was probably about eighteen. It took Andrew — and Aidan too — only a glance to see that Shaun was what people in Melstone called “a bit in the head” or, Aidan thought, what the Arkwrights would call “mentally challenged”. His face and body were fat in that way that showed that his body was trying to make up for his brain. His eyes looked tight round the edges. He stood there, perplexed and embarrassed at the way everyone was looking at him, and twisted his plump thumbs in his T-shirt, ashamed.

      “He can do most things,” Mrs Stock asserted, pushing her way in after Shaun. “Provided you explain them to him first.”

      Mr Stock had been prudently lurking outside the study windows to see how Stashe got on. Now he stuck his face, and his hat, through the nearest opening. “I am not,” he said, “having that lummock-de-troll glunching about this place! Trod on all my tomatoes he did, last year.”

      And suddenly everyone was shouting at one another.

      Shaun gave vent to a great tenor bellow. “Was not my fault, so!” Stashe shouted at her uncle to keep his nose out of things, and then turned and shouted at Mrs Stock. Mrs Stock shouted back, shriller and shriller, defending Shaun and telling Stashe to keep her bossy, managing face out of Professor Hope’s business. Tarquin bounced in his chair and yelled that he was not going to sit there to hear his daughter insulted, while Mr Stock kept up a rolling boom, like a big bass drum, and seemed to be insulting everyone.

      Aidan had never heard anything like this. He sat back in his hard chair and kept his mouth shut. Andrew rolled his eyes. Finally, he put his glasses back on and marched to his desk where he found his long, round, old-fashioned ruler, swung it back and banged it violently against the side of his computer. CLANG!

      The shouting stopped. Andrew took his glasses off again, in order not to see the incredulous way they all looked at him.

      “Thank you,” Andrew said. “If you’ve all quite finished arranging my affairs for me, I shall now tell you what I have decided. Shaun, you can work here for a week’s trial.” He was sorry for Shaun and he thought a week wouldn’t hurt anyone. “That suit you?” he asked. Shaun gave him a relieved, eager nod. “And you, Stashe,” Andrew went on, “since you know your way around computers, you can come for a month’s trial. I need a database set up and a lot of documents tapped in and something’s gone wrong with this computer.” Probably a lot more, he thought, now that he had hit the thing. “Is that OK?”

      Mrs Stock glowered. Stashe, looking perky and triumphant, said, “I can do Tuesdays, Fridays and Mondays. When do I start?”

      “She works down the Stables on the other days,” Tarquin explained.

      “Then start tomorrow,” Andrew said. “Nine-thirty.”

      Aidan was greatly relieved. Up to now he had thought Andrew was the kind of person that everyone pushed about.

      “Mr Stock,” Andrew continued, “I’m sure you have work to do. And Mrs Stock, can you make up the bed in the front spare room, please? Aidan will be staying here until we can sort out what he ought to do.”

      “Oh, thanks!” Aidan gasped. He could hardly breathe, he was so relieved and grateful.

       Chapter Three

      Andrew was anxious to question Aidan further, but he had to leave that until the evening when Mr and Mrs Stock had left. Aidan fell into an exhausted sleep anyway, as soon as Mrs Stock had shown him to the spare room.

      Downstairs, things were very unrestful. Mr Stock was enraged at the way Mrs Stock had thrust Shaun into the household. Mrs Stock could not forgive Mr Stock for producing Stashe. She was fairly annoyed with Andrew too. “I do think,” she told her sister, “that with all I have to do, he didn’t ought to have taken in that boy. I’ve no notion how long he’ll be staying either. World of his own, that man!”

      As always when she was annoyed, she made cauliflower cheese.

      “I’ll eat it,” Aidan said, when Andrew was about to throw it away.

      Andrew paused, with the dish above the waste-pail. “Not pizza?” he asked, in some surprise.

      “I can eat that too,” Aidan said.

      Andrew, as he put the offending cauliflower back in the oven, had a sudden almost overwhelming memory of how much he had needed to eat when he was Aidan’s age. This brought with it a flood of much vaguer memories, of things old Jocelyn had said and done, and of how much he had learned from the old man. But he was unable to pin them down. Pity, he thought. He was fairly sure a lot of these things were important, both for himself and for Aidan.

      After supper, he took Aidan into the living room and began to ask him questions. He started, tactfully, with harmless enquiries about school and friends. Aidan, after he had looked round the room and realised, with regret, that Andrew did not have a television, was quite ready to answer. He had plenty of friends, he told Andrew, and quite enjoyed school, but he had had to give all that up when the social workers had whisked him off to the Arkwrights, who lived somewhere out in the suburbs of London.

      “But it was nearly the end of term anyway,” Aidan said consolingly. He thought Andrew was probably worried about his education, being a professor.

      Andrew secretly made a note of the Arkwrights’ address. They were surely worrying. Then he went on to questions about Aidan’s grandmother. Aidan was even readier to answer these. He talked happily about her. It did not take Andrew long to build up a picture of a splendidly quirky, loving, elderly lady, who had brought Aidan up very well indeed. It was also clear that Aidan had loved her very СКАЧАТЬ