Chapter 7
Three jumped-up youths loitered in the atrium, blocking the path to the lifts. Severus couldn’t help overhearing the tail end of their conversation as he approached.
“Work been busy lately?”
“Yeah, pretty busy, made an arrest the other day,” Weasley bragged. “Got a raid planned in Bitchfield next week… oh, that’s what it’s called, Mione, what do you want me to say? You’re so uptight…”
“Wash your mouth out with soap,” Severus scolded, coming up behind him and making the three Gryffindors jump. Weasley’s mouth immediately filled with suds.
He choked and spat copiously, making Potter back away, his trainers squeaking on the marble floor.
“You can’t do that!” Weasley gurgled.
“Do what? Goodness, Auror Weasley, you’re foaming at the mouth.” Severus snapped his fingers at the security guard. “Rabies. Take him to St Mungos at once, we can’t risk another outbreak.”
He watched as Weasley was dragged away by security with Potter hurrying after him and trying to explain. Once they were out of sight Hermione broke into giggles.
“Thanks,” she laughed, nudging him.
“Whatever for?” he said mildly, trying not to implicate himself by smiling.
He pressed the button to call the lift and spent the journey to Mysteries complaining to her about last night’s disastrous date.
Peggy Pickwick kept a mouse in either sleeve that emerged at every course to nibble from her plate. And she kept a smoky-coloured chinchilla in her handbag.
“That sounds cute!” Hermione cooed. “But very unsanitary. My date was lovely, Hieronymus Smyth took me to London Zoo to see the unicorns.”
“Bully for you.”
“Yes, it was quite special, although they wouldn’t come near us. And I’m not sure about the ethics of zoos in general, versus sanctuaries and conservation of natural habitats.”
“Did you make any insights?”
“About unicorns?”
Severus held open the office door for her and waved his hand about the room vaguely. “About… love.”
“Uhm, not really. It’s hard to think about love when your date brings you somewhere that smells so strongly of manure.”
He snorted. “How about this,” he said, writing Cat person / Dog person on a blue post-it note and handing it to her.
“Hmm… it wouldn’t apply to your Peggy Pipsqueak and her rodents, but that’s quite a good compatibility test. I’ve always thought that pet preference is related to personality.”
“Which are you?” Severus asked, though he thought he knew the answer.
“A cat person, naturally. Cats are intelligent, independent, hygienic, and graceful. They don’t bark incessantly or put their muddy paws all over you. And unlike dogs, they don’t blindly obey people. They make up their own minds. Which are you?”
Well. There could only be one correct answer, after that. Luckily it was the truth.
“I’m also a cat person.”
“Ron likes dogs,” she said disapprovingly.
“And Potter?”
“Oh… he likes both, I suppose, but he’s always had an affinity for owls. He used to talk to Hedwig all the time, it was sweet. Do you have any pets?”
He hadn't had a pet for years, not since the old tabby Maine Coon he'd inherited from his aunt had lived out its ninth and final life in his third year.
Perhaps he should get a cat. Lately he was finding it increasingly difficult to spend his evenings in smoky bars and noisy restaurants, only to return home at night to a bleak and lonely house as silent as death. The building was half-gutted, his furniture was in storage, and he had spent last night watching fresh plaster dry and missing Hermione.
After all, they spent every day together, and he was learning more and more about her. Learning how she had a habit of sticking pencils behind her ear and then spending the next twenty minutes looking for them, and how she used absolutely anything to keep her place in a book but a bookmark: receipts, scissors, keys, and today, a Magnum.
He levitated the ice cream back into the freezer and replaced it with an interdepartmental memo so as to keep Hermione’s place in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
“I would have remembered to take it out before it melted,” she said.
“No you would not have.”
“No, I wouldn’t have,” she admitted, smiling sheepishly.
＊
“Age is not just a number,” Severus pronounced, bursting into the office and throwing his cloak on his desk like an exacting and formidable editor of a fashion magazine. “My date was a hundred and fifty years old at least. She took her teeth out before each course.”
“Oh dear. What did you talk about? Crinolines?”
“Family, actually. Her brother studied with Wordsworth.”
“Wordsworth who wandered lonely as a cloud?”
“The very same.”
Hermione leaned back in her chair and looked wistful. “I’d have loved the chance to talk to someone who lived through so much of history. Much better than my date: he stuck the chopsticks up his nose and made walrus noises. I’d rather date someone older than me than someone younger.”
Severus wasn’t averse to dating a woman older than him, but preferably a woman closer in age and temperament to himself than to Minerva McGonagall.
“How young was he?”
“A few years younger. Twenty,” she said, provoking a frown. He thought Hermione was around twenty. She’d graduated in 1999 instead of 1998 because of the war, and it was now 2000. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
“I’m in my mid-twenties, metaphysically, thanks to the time-turner,” she explained. “Harry’s even older. After the war ended he got stuck in a time loop and lived the same day over and over again until he broke out of it. He learnt a lot, he said. Quite often he tries to talk to me about something I have absolutely no memory of. But Ron’s still twenty.”
“That happened to me once. It was Thursday for three weeks, when I was sixteen.” He’d always thought Black and his gang had something to do with it, but Dippet wouldn’t listen.
Hermione looked agog. “What did you do?”
He shrugged. “Went to classes. We were preparing so hard for NEWTS nobody even noticed until the fourth Thursday in a row. It was probably students trying to put off exams and get extra revision time to get ahead. Which backfired, since everybody at Hogwarts was stuck in the same loop.”
She laughed gently. “The same as me, then. I only used the time-turner to study. I often wonder if I should have used it for something else, like, oh, I don’t know, practising French, or learning how to fly properly.”
“You still have time,” he pointed out.
“Time, yes. Incentive, not so much.”
They worked on their reports in comfortable silence for a while.
“Age gaps work for some people,” she mused, consulting her enormous cork board. She had enlarged it to make space for all her research; it now covered most of the wall behind her. Severus preferred to keep his notes in a single book, writing in small letters so as to save space.
“Within reason.”
“Well, yes. But age has to be a factor in the Recipe for Love, doesn’t it? An age gap of ten years is nothing shocking for a fifty year old and a sixty year old, but there’s a bigger developmental gap between, say, a sixteen year old and twenty-six year old. Do you think there’s an arithmantical equation for it? Say a five year gap in your twenties, but a ten year gap in your thirties, increasing exponentially with each decade… No one would blink an eye at a hundred-year-old wizard and a hundred-and-fifty-year-old witch together.”
Severus shook his head. “Age isn’t a factor. Loving someone becauseof their age is a recipe for manipulation. It’s loving innocence, or accrued wealth, or loving the power you have over someone.”
“When you put it that way…”
Hermione was disappointed at being robbed of the chance to puzzle over some tricky arithmancy, but she had to agree.
“What’s an acceptable age gap for you? Personally?”
For the first time, Hermione suddenly found the petals falling from the enchanted skylight unaccountably fascinating.
“It depends on the wizard,” she mumbled, not taking her eyes off the ceiling, and was very grateful for Potter interrupting them soon after.
＊
Severus was used to Narcissa’s pureblooded idiosyncrasies: cloth napkins, handwritten thank you cards, calling tea ‘supper’ and feeling reproach toward any witch who worked for a living instead of sitting at home and instructing house elves on how to raise the children. But this pureblood society ball was something else. His date had asked him where he summered.
The excess of chandeliers and shining marble made him want to throw on a pair of jeans and huddle in a dodgy pub back in Cokeworth, where he could eat a packet of crisps surrounded safely by men who could hold their own at the front of a picket line. He suffered through the extravagant sixteen-course dinner, which appeared to be a front to encourage the passing of bribes towards the upper members of the Wizengamot, by wondering what Hermione would think of it.
He knew she had experienced prejudice for being Muggleborn, ever since Draco had run into his classroom crying because a girl had slapped him. When he found out why, he’d told Draco he had it coming and that next time he used that word she’d hurt him even worse.
But antiquated magic interested her, along with the traditions of the magical world, which were necessarily tied to the pureblood families. She might have liked the glitz and glamour of it, if she had been invited. When he came to work the next day, he asked her.
“A ball?” she said. “That sounds like hard work. I really don’t have patience for wearing heeled shoes all night. My date was much more low-key, we had a pottery class in Stoke-on-Trent. Throwing on a wheel, you know, it’s much more difficult than it looks.”
“Nice man?”
Hermione blew air out of her mouth like an irritated horse. “He was at first. But he completely ruined it by coming up behind me and trying to correct my technique. He totally messed up my attempt at a vase, and I’d been doing well until that point.”
“Ghost,” said Severus.
Hermione looked around. “Where?”
“No, Ghost. It’s a Muggle film. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but there’s a scene where a woman is making pottery and her lover sits behind her and puts his hands over hers. It’s supposed to be romantic.”
“And he’s a ghost?”
“Possibly. Not at that point, I think. Your date must have been imitating it.”
“Well, I didn’t get the reference. And it’s not romantic, it’s very unhelpful. You need a lot of concentration to make pottery.”
Severus laughed. “Were you there to find love, or to make good pottery?”
“Yesterday? Pottery.”
This made him laugh even harder, and feel a curious sense of relief. Once he’d recovered, he thought carefully about how to phrase his next question.
“Is having a similar background important to you, in a relationship?”
“Blood, you mean? Being with someone who comes from a non-magical family?”
He nodded.
“Honestly, I’ve never thought about it. It’s not like there’s much choice. The only other Muggle-born in my year was Justin, and he can’t shut up about how he almost went to Eton. Harry grew up like I did, so he understands. He’s there to help whenever I have to explain to Ron what Jenga is, or something. It’s not a problem for me if someone’s pureblooded, as long as they’re not a Death Eater,” she joked.
“Not a practising Death Eater,” she corrected awkwardly, upon catching Severus’ expression.
“But it’s not crucial that they’re au fait with Muggle culture?”
She sighed. “I don’t know if I’m au fait with Muggle culture anymore. I don’t have any friends who are non-magical. Ever since I became a boarder, the gap’s been widening. My parents keep nagging me to get an email address – they say it’s much quicker than sending letters, but computer keyboards are like typewriters; I’d have to press a button for each letter, one at a time, and they’re not even in alphabetical order. It seems terribly time-consuming and inefficient compared to writing. Sorry, what was the question? Oh, no, it’s not crucial. But I suppose competence in Muggle things is always attractive.”
Their conversation was coincidentally interrupted by a musical ringing somewhere in the vicinity of the coat stand. Severus fished the Nokia out of his cloak pocket and pressed the green button. Draco’s excited voice came twittering down the line.
“Hello! Hi, hello? Hello? Ahoy! Can you hear me?”
“...Yes.”
Jubilant noises crackled through the tinny speaker. “Unbelievable! Where are you?”
“At work.”
“Wow! I’m miles away! Hell, these things really do work over a long distance. So Wiltshire to London definitely works, but I’ll need to test them further.”
“Was that all?” Severus asked, but Draco had already hung up on him.
Hermione was gaping at him, open-mouthed.
“I didn’t know you had a mobile. I don’t even have a mobile.”
“I’m full of surprises,” he said, tossing a licorice allsort into the air and catching it in his mouth.
“I still don’t know how you can eat those,” she said, shaking her head to cover up how flustered she was.
“They’re sweets.”
“I dread to think what you’d be like at a pick ‘n’ mix.”
“That was my first accidental magic, that I remember.”
She looked up, surprised again. “Hm?”
“Summoning charm. Two coke bottles and a fried egg flew right into my hand.”
“Did you get caught?”
“As if,” he said proudly.
＊
Narcissa Malfoy swirled chardonnay around a crystal glass and delivered her judgement.
“Severus, it’s about time I set you up with someone.”
“No,” he shouted instantly.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
Draco pulled a disgusted face from where he was lying on the chaise longue, tinkering with a portable radio. Every so often it crackled and played a snippet of a song in which some men had lost their dogs and were very curious as to who had let them out.
“He’s too old,” Draco whined. “It’s too late for you, old man.”
“Nonsense,” Narcissa said sharply.
“I’ve been on enough dates,” Severus argued, nonverbally hexing Draco’s hair grey. “I went on a blind date just yesterday.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said flatly.
“Well, the great thing about facts is that they’re true whether or not you believe them.”
“Hmph. How did it go, then? Nice woman? Not imaginary?”
Severus sighed. Esmerelda Truss had been perfectly friendly, but she’d started the date by removing her chewing gum and sticking it to the side of her water glass. Then she’d moved on to chewing her hair.
“Hopeless.”
“That’s a shame. But it’s no reason to give up. In fact, I noticed you’ve been happier recently.”
“Well, that’s probably because–”
He stopped himself.
“Yes?”
He had been about to mention Hermione Granger, but that seemed like a dangerous road to go down given the topic of conversation, so he switched tack.
“Because I’ve been renovating my house, as you know. Now the kitchen opens out onto the garden and I’ve put in larger windows, the airflow is much improved. I’m looking forward to when it’s finished.”
“Really? I thought you were happier because of those pornographic novels you’ve been reading.”
An exaggerated retching sound came from the chaise longue.
“That’s not– I’m analysing the genre, for research purposes, it doesn’t mean I condone…”
“Of course,” said Narcissa coolly.
“I tried reading one of those,” said Draco, shaking the radio by his ear and twiddling the dials when it rattled. “None of it made any sense. What’s a turgid member?”
“Ask your father,” Narcissa said swiftly, her face a porcelain mask of composure.
Severus privately congratulated himself on not spontaneously combusting.