Correspondence Course

Chapter Five: One Must Be Open to All Manner of Things in Life

I had a fair amount of time to carry on our letter-writing campaign, since I had lost both of my own students by the end of July. D. J. Prod, as I have already mentioned, cancelled his lessons after successfully Transfiguring his wife into a yak; Sue Hurdabirg met a rather more spectacular demise at the end of a hot and boring day.

The Potters had gone away to the seaside for a week and taken Sirius with them. My mother had likewise left town for an academic conference in Tibet. My father, who was inclined toward overprotectiveness, insisted that I was not well enough to go flying or do much of anything else, despite the fact that it was three days after the full moon and I protested (not entirely truthfully) that I felt fine. So I was left with nothing much to do until Peter came over in the afternoon, and even then there didn’t seem to be very much to do. We tried playing Scrabble, but unfortunately, he had never really got the hang of Muggle games, and all I seemed to be able to draw was consonants. If I had been playing with anyone other than Peter, I would have suspected him of cheating, but Peter still hadn’t got the hang of wordless magic and the idea of him cheating at Scrabble without anybody noticing was absurd.

The game ended when I spelled the word DO along the bottom edge of the board, and he countered with:

W

E

NERDOG

“What’s that supposed to be?”

“It means a dachshund. One that’s going around a corner.”

“You’re not allowed to do that!”

“Show me the place in the rules where it says I can’t.” (Which, of course, it didn’t, since the inventors of Scrabble could not possibly have anticipated the existence of a mind like Peter’s.)

“It’s not even spelled right. It’s missing an I.”

“Right. It’s a blind dachshund turning a corner.”

I laughed and threw a tile at him. “You’re mad.”

“So do I get to count it as a word?” Peter asked, and started writing down the score before I could say yes or no.

“Of course you don’t! Why would you get to count it as a word?”

“It made you laugh.”

“So?”

“James and Sirius always let me count things for points if it makes them laugh.”

This was true, I realized. It had been true since the very first game of pickup Quidditch we had played in first year, when we discovered that the closest thing Peter had to a flying-related talent was making comical faces when he fell off, and nobody had ever questioned it. I was hot, tired, and rather unwell, and suddenly I was heartily sick of it. I judged that there was no reason why he should get free points in Scrabble. He might not be brilliant at magic, but he wasn’t stupid or a bad speller.

“I don’t care what James and Sirius do,” I said crossly. “I say it’s cheating. Besides, you ought to have more pride.”

He sniggered. “Pride about what? Being able to spell two-letter words?”

“No, about not letting them treat you like a little kid or a mascot!”

“I AM NOT A MASCOT!” To my surprise, he was really, genuinely angry.

“I didn’t say you were. I just said don’t bloody behave like one.”

Peter ended up going home in an extreme state of the sulks, leaving me alone to clean up the board; but I felt exhausted and bored and already a bit guilty, and decided that I couldn’t be bothered. I ended up idly playing with the Scrabble tiles instead. I picked out the letters that spelled SUE HURDABIRG and began moving them around...

U GRAB RUSH DIE

I RUE BARD HUGS

RUB SUE HARD IG

My hand froze as I pushed the last tile into place. Slowly, I rearranged the letters to spell one last anagram:

RUBEUS HAGRID

Oh no. It hadn’t been a good day to begin with, but it had just got about ten thousand times worse.

And it got worse still when I thought of the smirk I had occasionally seen on Sirius’ face when I had sat down, blushing, to pen another letter to Miss Hurdabirg. He knew. Oh yes, he must have known all along. I’d seen him solve half a dozen anagram clues from the Daily Prophet crossword before most people had time to get the paper open.

I grabbed the two-way mirror that sat on my dresser and snapped, “Sirius Black!”

“What’s up, Moony?” Sirius answered after the third or fourth time I’d called his name. He was obviously enjoying his holiday with the Potters, even if they were paying for it with filthy capitalist lucre. He looked sunburnt, windblown, and carefree.

I started to explain what was up, but I didn’t get very far before he burst out laughing.

“Padfoot. Do you realize that I’ve been having sexual fantasies about Rubeus Hagrid all summer? This is NOT AMUSING!”

“No, it isn’t, mate, it’s bloody hilarious. James and I were taking bets about when you’d catch on.”

“Well, I hope you lost,” I said. I threw the mirror aside and stomped downstairs to get a drink of water and some fresh air.

My father was in the kitchen; I hadn’t expected to find him there. He usually spent the afternoons in his Potions lab and emerged only when somebody reminded him about dinner, so I had thought I was alone in the house. Reluctantly, I stopped stomping.

“You are of age,” he said. “Come and have a drink with me.”

“All right,” I said, although I didn’t particularly want to. He was talking strangely and gazing at me with a peculiar, intense expression that I found unnerving, and I wondered what I had done to warrant such scrutiny. Had he somehow discovered the joke we were playing on Snape? If so, why didn’t he say so?

“It will have to be a strong drink, I think,” he said, rummaging among the dusty and disorderly collection of half-empty bottles that constituted my parents’ liquor cupboard. “I have it, we shall have cognac. I have never drunk cognac in the afternoon before. It will be a change. One must be open to all manner of things in life.”

He looked at me as though he expected me to recognize that this last statement held some sort of profound and private meaning. I nodded, not knowing what else to say.

“Salut!”

“Cheers, Dad.”

I had never drunk cognac at all, and one sip convinced me that I hadn’t been missing much. I tried not to cough or gag.

Dad, who was not ordinarily much of a drinker, drained his glass in three swallows and poured himself a second generous measure of cognac. I poured about half of my own drink into one of the pot plants while his back was turned.

“Eh bien, as I have said, one must be open to all manner of things. Me, I thought when I was young that I would have a very ordinary, simple life. I would teach at Beauxbatons and pass the holidays in the little village in Provence where I was born. I did not plan that it should be a life full of Dark wizards and werewolves, or that I should be mocked by my former colleagues and called a ‘mad scientist.’ Nor that I should fall in love with an Englishwoman and have a very English son who has a slight problem with the moon. But so it goes. Sometimes the things we do not plan are for the best, yes?” He smiled at me, but there was still something faintly strained in his expression.

“Yes, I suppose so,” I said cautiously, and took another tiny sip of my drink. I could not for the life of me see where this was going.

“And now that I am older, I have often looked forward to having grandchildren. I did not expect them for many years, of course, but I have sometimes thought, someday my son will meet a nice girl, and when I am very old I shall have a few young ones to listen to my stories.”

I felt even more at sea. Did he think that I had got some girl pregnant? This seemed unlikely, as I could not imagine how he might have got that impression, but I couldn’t think of any other reason why he would be talking about grandchildren. “Dad, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I –”

He held out a hand. “Silence, hear everything I have to say before you speak. I am telling you what I have thought and hoped in the past, but in the end, that does not matter. What matters is that you are my son, and that you should be happy.” He tossed back what was left of his second drink and began a third. “This ... Rubeus Hagrid, if he is what makes you happy, that is a good thing and I should be pleased to meet him one day.”

The light dawned with such clarity and force that it caused me to spit cognac halfway across the living-room floor. My father pounded me on the back, and then, being slightly tipsy, enfolded me in a fierce hug. He was clearly one step away from loudly proclaiming his love for his gay lycanthropic son, and I did what I could to head off such an embarrassing declaration.

“Dad. I think you misunderstood something you overheard. Sirius and I were –” For a split second I contemplated the prospect of explaining about the Swedish model, and decided that this was absolutely impossible. “We were rehearsing a play.”

I watched as his entire universe rearranged itself. “You ... are going to be ... in a play?”

“Yes.” This seemed the simplest of all of the possible responses.

“With Sirius?”

“Yes.”

“But that is wonderful! My congratulations! Shall we have another drink to celebrate?”

“No! Not yet, I mean. It’s, er, very experimental drama. Sirius just wrote it. I don’t think it’s actually going to be produced.”

“Ah, Sirius wrote it. Now I understand it all. Is it a Communist play?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“I see.” My father wiped the sweat from his forehead. “You are a very good friend, Remus.”

“You don’t have to go see it if you don’t want.”

“You are a good son, too.”

“Thank you,” I said, as this seemed by far the simplest answer, and I tried not to think about how many layers of deceit had led up to this moment.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Dear Mr Prince-Snape,

I tried out the interior decorating spell you recommended as your favourite, but it seems to have turned the entire church BLACK!!! And there are dead roses and houseflies everywhere! The bazaar is tomorrow morning, and the place looks AWFUL!!! I must have misunderstood the instructions. Please tell me what I can do to fix it, and I will be forever in your debt.

Sincerely,

Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley

 

                                                            *          *          *

Miss Yeardley:

You have not misunderstood the instructions. That is the kind of interior decoration I like, and if you dislike it, that is not my problem. Stop bothering me.

Sincerely,

Severus Prince-Snape

 

                                                            *          *          *

Hi, Moony!

Guess what? I’ve been named Head Boy. (I don’t know what McGonagall was smoking, but we need to find out how we can get some.) Lily’s Head Girl, and my mum wants to have a party for the two of us next Friday. Hope you can make it. (Maybe I’ll invite Hagrid so you two can declare your love for each other in person, ha ha.)

Cheers,

James

P.S. I think Lily will be hanging out with us a lot next year, and I really think it’s time that you told her what we talked about telling her the last time. You know what I mean.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Dear James,

Congratulations, and tell your mum I’ll be there. (I was going to elope to Sweden with Hagrid, as you have probably guessed, but we can put it off until next week.)

Remus

P.S. Later.

 

                                                            *          *          *

It had been a much better party than the last one. Sirius and Peter and I had patched up our various quarrels, and James had persuaded his mother to keep the guest list down to a bare minimum, so nobody had to be fawned over by Professor Slughorn or dodge Sybill Trelawney. It was just the five of us and James’ parents, although Mrs. Potter kept asking Lily whether she was sure her sister wouldn’t want to come.

Sensibly, the elder Potters left us to our own devices after dinner and turned a blind eye to the extra bottle of wine that Sirius had sneaked out of the pantry. We were all feeling quite cozy and happy when, inevitably, the jokes began.

“What howls at the moon and never has to be ironed?” James asked.

“I don’t know,” said Lily, batting her eyelashes at him. “What?”

“A wash-and-wearwolf,” said James.

I began to have an awful sinking feeling about where this joke-telling session was going, which was confirmed when Sirius began, “A wolf walks into a bar and says ‘Shit! Bollocks! Arse!’”

Peter looked faintly scandalized at the idea of using this sort of language in front of Lily, and even James made a gesture that was intended to signal Sirius to tone it down. I was frantically signaling him to stop as well, for an entirely different reason.

Sirius sailed forth, nothing daunted. “So the barman says, ‘Excuse me, but we don’t allow foul language in here.’ And the wolf says, ‘I can’t bloody well help it – don’t you see this tuft on the end of my tail?’ ‘Yeah, what’s that got to do with anything?’ says the barman. And the wolf says, ‘It means I’m a swearwolf.’”

James groaned, and Lily giggled. I tried to catch Peter’s eye before he could attempt a joke of his own, but he refused to be intimidated. “Why did the werewolf cross the road?” he propounded.

I tried to think of a suitably Wormtail-ish mangled punch line. “To peruse the Chinese newspaper, although I, personally, prefer the Daily Prophet?”

“It was trying to get to the other side,” James suggested, “but halfway across the road it remembered it was Yom Kippur, so it went to the synagogue instead.”

Peter started laughing so hard that he had to be pounded on the back before he could deliver the punch line. “N-no. Because he w-was trying to get away from the fangirls who wanted to make him gay.”

We looked at each other, mystified, and then Lily burst out laughing, just before Peter clarified, “Oh yeah. What I meant to say was, to get away from his father who wanted to make him gay.”

I had to admit that was a pretty good one, given recent events, but I didn’t expect Lily to get it. But she kept laughing and laughing, until she was choking for breath and the tears were running down her face.

“Lils, are you all right?” James ventured to ask after a minute or two. “Would you like a glass of water or something?”

“I’m fine,” she said, making an effort to pull herself together. “It’s j-just ... who ever heard of a w-werewolf ... with fangirls... It’s so r-ridiculous.” She collapsed into helpless giggles once again.

I glared at James, feeling that he was clearly the ringleader in all this, and he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “If you don’t like this way, do it your own way, mate.”

“What?” said Lily when she could speak again.

“Nothing,” said James.

“Would you like to go outside and get some fresh air?” I asked her.

“All right,” she said, still giggling a little.

I followed her out on the patio. I felt shaky at the knees, and my knuckles were wrapped tightly around one of the Potters’ wineglasses. Sirius touched me on the arm as I passed.

Godric’s Hollow spread out before us, a cluster of dark little houses huddled sleepily against the great rolling hills and a river that shone faintly in the starlight. I drew a few deep breaths and felt better.

“It’s a pretty night, isn’t it?” said Lily. “I think I like it better when the moon isn’t out, don’t you?”

I stopped breathing again. “Lily,” I said, clutching desperately at the wineglass, “I think it’s time that you and I had a conversation ... because otherwise I think my friends are about to have it for us.”