Enchanted Glass Read Free

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 hisfoot 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. Withthe 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