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The front door slammed, with a force that shook the whole house. Eileen sank down onto the sofa, weeping in helpless fury. Why did Toby have to take everything the wrong way? Why was it that even when she tried to be helpful it went wrong? She seized a cushion, buried her face in it, and gave full vent to her misery and frustration.
Gradually, through her own tears, she became aware of the thin wailing of her son. After a few seconds of trying to ignore it, she gave up the unequal struggle and made her way upstairs to see what was the matter. Severus had just been fed - he could hardly be hungry - nor, as she picked him up, did he appear to need changing. He calmed down a little as she cradled him in her arms - probably the noise and disturbance had upset him, she decided. Still holding him, she felt her way down the narrow stairs.
'Poor little Sevvie,' she said, cradling the small dark head against her shoulder. 'Mum and Dad making a row, eh?'
Automatically she picked up a newspaper that had fallen on the floor and put it on the table, beside the fresh, crusty rolls that Toby had been carrying when he had lost his temper. Well, she didn't feel like breakfast now. In fact she didn't feel like staying here - all she wanted to do was get out.
Ten minutes later, with Severus in his pram, well wrapped up against the cold spring air, she locked the front door and set off. Did Toby have his key, she wondered, and had a sudden impulse to put a ward on the door as well - that would serve him right! But no, it would just make matters worse. If he had his key he could get in, otherwise he would just have to sit on the doorstep and wait for her to come back.
She pushed the pram furiously down the street, heading for the river. Stupid Toby, for worrying so much! As if she hadn't grown up in a Muggle neighbourhood - as if she didn't know how to take precautions! No-one had been looking out of a back bedroom window, no-one was likely to be. The curtains were all drawn, the neighbours enjoying a well-deserved Sunday lie-in. And it wasn't as if Toby hadn't been saying for ages that he must get on with the extension to the house as soon as the weather got better. And building was so much quicker by magic! That was why they had chosen this house after all: because the position of the stairs allowed for a two-storey extension - bathroom downstairs, bedroom for a second child upstairs. Last summer her pregnancy had kept them from doing much, but this year . . .
'You are going to grow up in a house with a proper bathroom,' she said to Severus, who wriggled and yawned, opening his mouth in a wide pink 'O'. 'Yes you are - and then we'll have another bedroom, and then you'll have a little brother or sister - yes you will.' Severus looked distinctly unimpressed by that, but the sun on her back was making Eileen feel better.
They had reached the river-bank by now, and her mood improved still more. Even this grim industrial river could not remain untouched by spring. The leaden surface of the water sparkled in the sunlight, new leaves, a fresh, vivid green, were appearing on the stunted shrubs by the railings at the top of the bank, and there were even a few daffodils on the other bank, pushing their way through the old chip wrappers and plastic bags. A swan came swooping down in a rush of wings and landed on the water, incongruously aristocratic against the dingy backdrop.
'Look at the pretty swan, Sevvie,' she said mechanically, although he was now asleep, and was really too small to be interested anyway. But when he was bigger, she thought, they would come to feed the ducks here. She smiled. For the first time she was beginning to feel almost happy about Severus growing up in this neighbourhood. How brave the little Muggle houses looked in the sunlight, all the same, and yet all different! 'An Englishman's home is his castle' - that's what the Muggles said, wasn't it? And looked at in this light, that was what they were - little four-roomed castles for a family, like her family, to defend against the world.
And she had always wanted to live with Muggles, hadn't she? Theoretically, of course, she always had, but although there were plenty of Muggles who came to her parents' shop, she and Severus, her brother, had never had any real Muggle friends. So when she had left Hogwarts, a job in the Muggle Liaison Office had seemed the obvious choice. It had been a bitter disappointment. The head of the office was Mungo Arbuthnot - a decent old soul, to be fair, but it was not immediately obvious that he had ever met a Muggle. And while he was very worried about them, and concerned for their welfare, he clearly thought them less intelligent than the average flobberworm. Her immediate superior had been Calliope Parkinson, whom she remembered as the Deputy Head Girl in her first year. She of course was a Parkinson, proud of being able to trace her lineage back through twenty wizarding generations, with not a Muggle or a squib to be seen, who had been forced into the demeaning job of Muggle liaison through the machinations of a rival in the Ministry. She regarded it as very much beneath her, and did not hesitate to pass on her unhappiness to her subordinates. Eileen had endured five years of hell, enforcing what she considered to be patronising and infantile measures for Muggle protection, while trying to ignore Madam Parkinson's gibes and insults.
'Well, why don't you do something to meet them?' suggested her mother, when she complained for the umpteenth time that Muggle liaison didn't involve any contact with actual Muggles at all. When Eileen shrugged she persisted.
'I saw a notice on the Town Hall. They're looking for recruits for their choir. You can sing - why don't you try that?'
Largely to shut her up, Eileen had agreed, and had turned up for auditions in a draughty church hall without much hope in her heart. To her surprise she had been accepted, and was told to turn up for the first rehearsal for Handel's Messiah the following Tuesday.
It had been a revelation. Her parents had always liked Muggle music, but she and Severus had not been interested - the tinny radio and scratchy Muggle records had made it hard to connect with, somehow. Now, actually singing it herself, its magnificence struck her. The solemn phraseology reminded her of the spells in those old library books that Madam Hitchcock guarded so jealously - spells whose four or five words were chosen precisely with regard to weight, length and number, each reinforcing the whole, making the incantation virtually unbreakable - she caught echoes of those same rhythms here. The music too had the power of arithmancy beneath it, she could feel it: number, rhythm and harmony combined to build a thing of power and surpassing beauty - and she, Eileen Prince, had never known about it! Why did the textbooks not mention this? How could Muggles, who had such short, hard lives, produce such beauty? Wizards could not - their music sounded meretricious by comparison, all shoddy tricks and childish showing off, 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing', as she would later say to herself. She left in a daze, hardly even noticing the man who left along with her. Until he spoke.
'You really enjoyed that, didn't you? I was watching you, and your whole face was lit up. You reminded me of my first time.'
She turned to him, rapt.
'It was just grand, wasn't it? I didn't know music could be like that.'
He smiled, and she saw how it lifted his harsh features.
'No more did I.'
And that was how she met Tobias Snape. He walked her to the bus stop (she was investigating Muggle transport as well as Muggle music) and talked to her for a little - and next week she looked out for him at the rehearsal. He had a fine tenor voice, she discovered, and gradually, as he continued to walk her to the bus stop and to talk to her while she waited for the bus, she discovered other things about him. The eldest son of a poor family, he had passed the Muggle eleven plus third in the whole West Riding of Yorkshire - a display of intelligence that held immediate appeal for a Ravenclaw like Eileen. But his father had wanted to have him earning - and to be honest, some extra money for the family was badly needed - so, instead of a career of grammar school and university as his teachers had hoped, he had found himself in the mill, with the stupid and unambitious amongst his classmates. Twenty-five years later, his voice still throbbed with anger and frustration as he spoke of it. But he had not let it get the better of him. He had joined the union, and spoke with fire and passion of injustice, and of the occasions when he had been able to help to get his workmates a better deal. He had not dropped his studies either, but read voraciously through the classics of English literature, borrowing from libraries, and buying cheap paperbacks or second-hand copies when he could afford it. He had taught himself French, German and Latin, and was now taking evening classes in Italian. He went to galleries, concerts and plays. Soon Eileen was going with him, and borrowing eagerly from his collection of novels. Her obvious appreciation of the culture he could show her, its richness and depth, its sheer beauty, delighted him, and he was as happy to talk about it as she was. Their friendship deepened, became more than friendship. Hesitantly she told him she was a witch. He was fascinated - asking question after question about her gifts, and displaying a particular curiosity about the theory of magic. Arithmancy especially interested him, and how the same numerical patterns that governed the most powerful spells also underlay the finest Muggle music and literature. He was surprised at the poverty of wizarding culture, but agreed with her analysis that because everything came so easily to them - 'like spoiled children' as he said - wizards were naturally drawn to superficiality and frivolity, whereas Muggles learned the hard way and went deeper in the process. He smiled grimly at this, but she could tell that he was pleased that there were some areas where he had the edge on wizards. They were the perfect combination, she thought, feeding off one another's strengths, the two halves of the human race united in the teeth of all the Calliope Parkinsons of this world. When he proposed to her, awkwardly, after a performance of The Tempest in Leeds, she could have cried aloud with Miranda, 'Oh brave new world that has such people in't!'
So what had gone wrong? Her parents had been delighted with the match - and with her new-found happiness - and had proudly put an advertisement in the Daily Prophet. Madam Parkinson had sneered, of course, but Eileen had responded by putting up two fingers behind her back, and resigning her job without regret the moment she became pregnant.
That, perhaps, was where the trouble had started. Without her job, money was much tighter. Toby had been adamant that his wife was not going to have to go out to work when she wanted to be at home with their child, but his wages didn't quite cover their expenses, and he knew it, and became bad-tempered as a result. Her parents knew it too, and she became adept at hiding their well-meaning little gifts from Toby - but she knew he suspected their existence. She found, too, that she missed the Ministry. She might despise the cliquishness and petty-mindedness of wizards, but the Muggle world wasn't all Bach and Shakespeare either, and without her own people to fall back on, it could feel very claustrophobic. And then Toby had started becoming difficult about her magic. Not about all of it. He still grinned in amazement as she filled their tin bath tub with a simple 'Aguamenti' and vanished the dirty water afterwards, and spoke feelingly of his poor mother lugging heavy cans of hot water about - but more and more often, when she tried to save him labour by doing magically what would have taken him much longer to do by hand, it did not seem to please him. This morning was a case in point. She sighed, decided that she had come far enough along the towpath, and turned the pram, with the peacefully sleeping Severus, for home.
That morning she had woken to the sound of birdsong and the sight of sunlight pouring round the edge of the curtains, and the fog of gloom and exhaustion that seemed to have fallen on her since Severus's birth lifted slightly. The weather seemed to have lifted Toby's spirits too, for he turned to her and said, 'How about a real lazy Sunday for once, Eileen my lass? Good crusty rolls for breakfast - none of that sliced blotting paper - and a long slow morning reading the papers. I'll change the boy and everything - you won't need to do a thing. You deserve a good rest!'
As he had hurried out to buy the rolls and newspapers, she had decided that she, in turn, would do something to show her appreciation of him. And what better could she do than work on the extension? She had checked the neighbours' back windows - checked and checked again, all along the street. No-one was going to see her. But Toby had stamped and shouted and sworn at her, and eventually he had flung down the rolls and papers, and stormed out of the house.
She sighed. It all seemed so petty. She supposed that she had been frustrated at the slow progress that doing things the Muggle way entailed. Toby talked a lot about getting on with it, but all he seemed to be interested in these days was Severus. She would often come upstairs and find him by his son's cot, looking down at him, stroking his face or smiling as the tiny hand gripped his finger. That was natural enough - he was forty-two after all, he must have thought that he would never be a father. But he saw a Muggle Severus, that was the problem - a boy like himself, who would have all the chances in life he had longed for and never had. The white tower of the University of Leeds had loomed larger and larger in his conversation since their son's birth, and always with a triumphant Severus emerging, a first class honours degree in his hand. On a good day this was replaced by the dreaming spires of Oxbridge, a hazy world of punts and gowns which would pave the way to a glittering, though unspecified, career. Timidly, she would correct him. Remember, she said, he'll probably be a wizard, he'll go to Hogwarts, it won't be like that. But he didn't listen. Even their son's name showed the way his thoughts were tending. He could hardly refuse her Severus - the piety owed to a much-loved brother who had died too young saw to that - but he had insisted on Alexander as a middle name, 'so that he can call himself Alex if he wants to': a clear indication of where he saw his son growing up.
She sighed again. There would be trouble ahead. Severus would be a wizard, and Toby would just have to learn to accept a clutch of Os at N.E.W.T. level instead of the degree, and a prestigious job at St Mungo's or in the Department of Mysteries. She caught herself and laughed. I'm getting as bad as he is, she thought.
'You be what you want to be, Severus Alexander,' she said aloud, reaching forward to pull the blankets up round her sleeping son's neck, 'and never mind anyone else!' After all, she might be the one to be disappointed.
They were turning into Spinner's End now. No Toby sitting on the doorstep of number twelve, but when she got there, she found the door open. He must have had his key after all. Leaving Severus asleep in his pram in the front room, she went timidly through.
The kitchen table was set for breakfast, with the rolls, jam and butter, and the papers, untouched, lying invitingly alongside. Through the window, her husband could be glimpsed in the back yard, at work on the extension. He looked up as she came out and grinned.
'I mixed up a fresh batch of cement,' he said. 'Your stuff wasn't really quite right. But you're right - it's about time I got on with this.' He put another brick in place and stood up. 'Breakfast?'
In the kitchen he washed his hands as she put the kettle on. When she turned round he was holding a small packet.
'I meant to get this the first time I was out,' he said, 'so I went back and got it just now. My Eileen deserves the best, that's what I said.' He opened the packet. A wonderful aroma of fresh coffee filled the tiny room.
Oh Toby, Eileen thought, what have you done? Real coffee! We can't afford that, you know that.
But the smell was intoxicating, and when she looked up and saw the expression on her husband's face, humble and pleading and at the same time oddly defiant, the only thing that seemed possible for her to do was to rush into his arms.
We'll manage, she thought, from under the flood of mumbled apologies and fervent kisses. We'll manage somehow, we'll just have to!