Chapter Text
1979
The shop underneath them had been an ironmonger's, and before that a chemist's, and now it was nothing at all. The front window had been boarded up since before Christmas. Somebody had painted a word across the boards and somebody else had painted over the word, and the second lot of paint had been the wrong colour, so that from the street it looked as though the shop had been shut up by a man in a great hurry who had also been colour-blind.
Upstairs there was one room with a hole in the floor where a stove had been taken out. Through the hole you could see the shop counter. Through the shop you could see nothing, on account of the boards, which was the entire reason the Order had taken the place.
Dorcas Meadowes had the chair. Lily had a crate.
"He's late," Lily said.
"He's not late. He's not due till the quarter." Dorcas had a Muggle newspaper spread across her knees, four days old, and she had been reading it since half past nine with the same expression she wore for everything, which was the expression of a woman being told a joke she had already heard. "Sit down. You're wearing the floor out."
"I've been sitting down for three hours."
"Then you'll be good at it by now."
The yard below was black and wet and had a mangle in it that nobody had used in ten years. Beyond the yard was the back of number eleven, and in number eleven lived a man named Whitlock who worked in the Department of Magical Transportation and who had, in the last five weeks, come home three times by a route that added forty minutes to his journey and took him past a house in Camberwell that had no business being on anybody's way anywhere.
Lily went back to the window. There was frost on the inside of it. She scraped a coin of it away with her thumbnail and put her eye to the gap.
"He's got a light on upstairs."
"He's had a light on upstairs since eight." Dorcas turned a page. "Here. Listen to this. A man in Doncaster's grown a marrow four feet long."
"Has he."
"Four feet. There's a photograph and everything. He's got his arm round it like it's the wife." She held the paper up, and then, when Lily didn't turn round, put it down again. "You want to eat something. You've been chewing the inside of your own mouth for an hour, I can hear you doing it."
"I'm all right."
"I never said you weren't all right."
Somewhere off towards the main road a car went past and the light of it came round the room in a slow bar and went out.
"They've started a register," Dorcas said. "Did you know that? Not a register, they're not calling it that, it's a — I don't know what they're calling it. Everybody who comes in the front doors at the Ministry, name and business and who you saw, in a book, on a desk, with a man sat behind it who's paid to sit behind it. Six weeks now. My cousin's on the desk two days a week and she thinks it's marvellous, she thinks it's very orderly." She rubbed at something on the arm of the chair with her thumb. "And you can say, well, it's only a book. It's only a name in a book. And then some morning the wrong man's got the book, and it isn't only a book any more, is it, it's a list of everybody who's ever gone in and out of the same building as you. That's all a list is. It's a thing that's harmless right up until it isn't and then it's the most dangerous object in the room."
"You could put a false name."
"You could. And then you're the one who put a false name, which is worse than being on it." Dorcas turned a page she hadn't read. "St Mungo's do it as well now. Have done since the summer. Everybody who comes through, and what for."
Lily scraped another coin of frost off the glass and said nothing at all.
The trouble with the room was that it had nothing in it. In a room with nothing in it there is nothing to do but talk, and Lily had spent the first hour talking about Whitlock and the second hour talking about the rota and the third hour realising that the water in the flask tasted of tin and that she was going to be sick.
She got as far as the corner before it happened. There was a bucket there, left by whoever had taken the stove out, and she went down on her knees on the boards and brought up the water and then went on bringing up nothing for a good while after the water had gone.
Dorcas did not get up. That was the kindest thing about her, and Lily was to think about it afterwards more than once: that Dorcas Meadowes sat in her chair with her four-day-old newspaper and let her be sick in a bucket in the corner of a room without once making it into an event.
When it was finished Lily sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
"Sorry."
"What for? It's not my bucket."
"It's the water. It's been in that flask since Tuesday."
"Mm," said Dorcas.
Lily got up. Her knees had gone through to the wet of the boards and the cold of it came up into her all at once, and she stood in the middle of the room with her arms crossed and made herself count to twenty before she went back to the window, because if she went straight back to the window she was going to have to hold on to the sill, and if she held on to the sill Dorcas would see her do it.
Whitlock came at twenty past. He came the short way, up the lane and in at his own back gate like a man with nothing at all on his mind, and he stood in the yard for a minute scraping his boots, and then he went inside, and the light on the landing went on and then off, and that was that.
"Short way," said Dorcas.
"Short way."
"So he's either clean or he's finished." She folded the paper into eighths and put it inside her coat, which was what she did with newspapers, for warmth. "Moody'll want it either way. You can tell him. He likes you."
"He doesn't like me. He hasn't got a face for liking people."
"He likes you. He shouts at you the same as everybody, but he reads what you write down, and he doesn't read what I write down, so." Dorcas got up. She was a tall woman and she had a way of straightening in stages, like a deckchair. "Come on. I'm not sleeping in a room with a bucket in it."
They went down the stairs into the dark of the shop. There was a smell of old paraffin and mouse. Dorcas had her hand on the back door and then stopped with it there, and Lily, two steps behind, stopped too.
"There's a woman in Wandsworth," Dorcas said.
"What?"
"Wandsworth. She was at St Mungo's for eleven years and now she isn't." Dorcas was still facing the door. "She doesn't write anything down. That's the whole of what she does — she doesn't write anything down. If you wanted the name."
The cold came in under the door and along the floor and up through the soles of Lily's boots.
"For what?" she said.
Dorcas opened the door. Outside it had started to rain in the fine, sideways way that isn't worth putting a hood up for.
"Twenty past," she said. "Short way. Don't let him make you say it twice, he'll only sulk."
And she went out across the yard past the mangle and turned on her heel in the middle of the lane and was gone with a crack that set a dog barking two streets away, and Lily stood in the doorway of the shop for a while longer than she needed to.
She left it three days.
For three days she did the sensible things and did them all in the right order. She drank ginger. She ate dry biscuits at eleven in the morning like a woman on a boat. She told herself, with a great deal of conviction, that half the Order had had it in January, that Marlene had had it, that there was a thing going round.
On the fourth morning she got the book down.
It had come out of a crate of Order supplies eighteen months ago and she had never given it back, largely because nobody had ever asked, and it was called Somers's Practical Diagnostics and it had a coffee ring on the cover and somebody's shopping list inside the front board. She took it up to the bathroom and locked the door, which was ridiculous, because there was nobody in the house. Then she copied two charms out of it onto the back of an envelope in pencil so that she wouldn't have to keep the book open on her knees, and put the book on the floor, and sat on the edge of the bath.
The first charm was the general one. You held the wand flat and moved it slowly down, and it hunted about for whatever was wrong with you and told you in colours, and it was famous among trainee Healers for being useless, because it would tell a man with a broken neck that he was slightly dehydrated. Lily did it twice. Both times the light stayed the same clean silver the whole way down, which meant there was nothing wrong with her at all.
The second charm was further down the page, in smaller type, under a heading she had read four times without letting herself take it in.
She did it badly the first time because her hand wasn't steady. The second time the silver thinned out and drew itself into a thread, and the thread knotted, and where it knotted there was a small pale number hanging in the air over her, and the number was ten.
Ten weeks.
She sat on the edge of the bath for a long time. The number faded out the way they do, going from white to nothing over about a minute, and she watched the whole of it go and then she put her wand down on the bath mat and did the arithmetic in her head, twice, because there was a part of her that wanted very badly for it to come out wrong.
Ten weeks in the middle of January put the baby at the end of July.
She did not tell James that night. She did not tell him the night after, either, and by the third night the not telling had stopped being a decision and turned into a sort of household object, something that sat on the table between them at supper and got moved to the side when she needed the space.
She told herself she was waiting to be sure. She was already sure. She had been sure in the room above the ironmonger's with her knees wet through, if she was honest, and Lily Potter was honest about most things and had learned in the last two years to be very careful about which ones.
On the eighth night she was at the kitchen table with the small cauldron on and the window propped open two inches with a spoon, because the Blood-Replenishing took an hour of low fumes and she had gone through the book that afternoon and found the version that used dried valerian instead of the fresh, which was slower and weaker and which she was not going to be able to explain to Marlene if Marlene ever looked at the labels.
She had the delivery note in front of her. She was supposed to be counting bottles on it. She had turned it over instead and she was writing on the back.
She wrote the month the baby was due. Then she wrote, underneath it, the seventeenth of April, and then a two, and then she sat and looked at the two for a while.
Two, in April. Two and three months at the end of July.
Then she wrote three. Then four. She wrote them in a column down the side of the delivery note, one under the other, in her small upright hand, and the column was the answer to a question she had been asking herself since a Tuesday morning nearly two years ago in a room in a hospital with the curtains drawn, and the question was: how old will she be when I get her back.
The plan had a shape. The plan had always had a shape, and the shape of it was this — that the war ended, and she went up on the train to Cokeworth, and she sat in her mother's front room and said the sentence she had rehearsed several hundred times, and then she brought her daughter home. There was a room for it. There was a room at the back of this house with her father-in-law's tea chests in it and a window that got the sun in the afternoon, and Lily had stood in the doorway of that room more times than she would ever admit to anybody, working out where a bed would go.
Three was fine. Three was nothing. A child of three wouldn't remember a thing about it.
Four was fine.
She got to six and put the pencil down and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw green, and when she took them away the cauldron had gone over to a rolling boil and the whole thing was ruined.
She was still swearing at it when James came in.
He came in the way he always came in, which was all at once, with the door banging back on the coats and the cold coming in round him and his glasses steaming over immediately so that he stood there blind in the middle of the kitchen making a speech at what he sincerely believed was her.
"—and I said to him, I said, Padfoot, it's not that I don't think you can, it's that I've watched you do it, and the man's got no more sense of self-preservation than a — Lily?"
"By the window."
"By the window. Right." He took his glasses off and wiped them on the front of his jumper, which made them worse. "Anyway. So Sirius has got it into his head that the thing to do with the bike now is to take the whole engine out and put it back in the other way round, and Marlene's stopped arguing with him, which I think is the most frightening development of the entire war, and there's a piece of it in her mother's sink. In the sink, Lily. Her mother came down at six in the morning to fill the kettle and there's a — what's happened to that?"
"It's boiled."
"Is it meant to?"
"No."
"Ah." He came over and looked into the cauldron with his hands behind his back, like a man at an exhibition. "It smells like the greenhouse at school."
"It smells like eleven Sickles' worth of dried valerian and an hour of my life."
"That's what I said." He straightened up. "Why's the window open? It's January."
"Fumes."
"There's never been fumes before."
"There've always been fumes. You've never noticed the fumes because you're never in the room, you're in Kent with Sirius putting an engine in a sink."
"It wasn't Kent." He wandered off towards the stove, opened the door of it, shut it again, and came back. He had a burn on the side of his hand that hadn't been there on Sunday and she was not going to ask about it tonight. "It was Marlene's mother's, I said. Kent's Thursday. Are you all right? You've gone a funny colour."
"I'm pregnant," said Lily.
James went on standing there for a moment with the look of a man waiting for the second half of a sentence.
"You're what?"
Lily put the spoon down across the top of the cauldron, which was the wrong thing to do with a spoon and ruined it further, and she did it very carefully and with a great deal of attention, the way you do a small job when the alternative is looking at somebody.
"Pregnant," she said.
"With — " He stopped. "Yes. Obviously with. Sorry. Sorry." He put both hands flat on the table, and then took them off it again, and then looked at the cauldron as though it might have something to add. "Are you sure? How sure? Sorry, that's — you'd know, wouldn't you, that's a stupid — "
"Ten weeks. It's the end of July."
"Ten weeks," said James.
"About."
"Ten," he said again, and something went over his face that she had seen exactly twice before, once at the very end of their last summer at school and once in a churchyard in the rain with his mother's flowers still in his hand, and then he laughed. It came out of him like a cough. He put his hand over his mouth and laughed into it and his eyes had gone bright and appalling behind his glasses.
"Don't," said Lily.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're going to pick me up."
"I'm going to pick you up," James agreed, and did, and the chair went over backwards, and Lily said something into his shoulder that neither of them could hear afterwards and hung on to a fistful of the back of his jumper for rather longer than she had intended to.
He set her down. He kept hold of her arms.
"July," he said. "That's — that's summer. That's a summer one."
"That's how it works, yes."
"No, but it's — " He let go of her and pushed both hands through his hair and left it worse. "It's good, that. Nobody's got a summer birthday. Sirius has got January. Remus has got March, which is nothing, March is a nothing month. Do you know what Peter's got? He's got — I don't know what Peter's got, but I'd bet money it's February. It's going to be a summer one, Lily. We'll have the — there's the garden, we'll have the garden by then, I'll do the garden."
"You've been going to do the garden for two years."
"I'll do the garden," said James, with enormous dignity, and picked the chair up. "What are we calling it?"
"We're not calling it anything, it's the size of a plum."
"Everything's got to be called something."
"Then call it the plum and leave me alone."
He sat down on the chair he had just picked up, backwards, with his arms along the back of it, and he was still grinning like a lunatic, and then quite suddenly he wasn't, and she watched it happen and knew what was coming about half a second before it came, which was not enough time to get anywhere.
"How long have you known?"
"A week."
He didn't say anything.
"Eight days," said Lily.
"Right." He took his glasses off. He always did that when he wanted somewhere to look, and there was never anywhere, so he ended up looking at the glasses. "Eight days. And you've been — "
"I've been brewing."
"You've been brewing." He turned the glasses over. "Was there a reason?"
"There's no reason. There isn't a reason. I was going to say it on Sunday and then Moody came, and then it was Monday, and then it was — " She stopped. "There isn't a reason."
"All right," said James.
And then, because he was James, and because he had never once in three years made her ask him for anything twice, he said, "She'll be — "
And Lily said, "Two and a half."
It came out of her without any run-up at all. It came out flat and fast and entirely finished, the way a thing does when it has been sitting behind your teeth for eight days waiting for somebody to open the door, and James stopped with his mouth still open on the shape of the rest of his own question, and looked at her.
He had never met her. He had seen four photographs and he had never once asked to see a fifth, which was a kindness so exact that Lily had never been able to work out whether he'd thought about it or whether that was just the sort of man he was.
"Two and a half," he said.
"In July. She's two in April."
"I know when she's two in April."
"I know you do." She sat down. Her legs had gone, rather. "Sorry."
"Don't."
"I only meant — "
"I know what you meant."
The cauldron had stopped boiling and started to go quiet and thick, which meant the whole batch was cement by morning, and neither of them looked at it. James put his glasses back on. Then he took the delivery note out from under her elbow, and she let him, and he turned it over and looked at the column of numbers going down the side of it — three, four, five, six — in her small upright pencil, with nothing else on the page at all, no words, no dates, nothing that would have meant a single thing to anybody in the world who wasn't the two of them.
He looked at it for a while.
"That box room wants clearing," he said.
"It's your father's things."
"It's four tea chests of a man's fishing tackle, Lily, he never caught anything in his life, my mother used to buy the fish on the way home." He put the note down on the table, face down, and squared it up with two fingers, twice, the way he did with cards he wasn't going to play. "I'll do it Saturday. There's only the one bed in it."
Lily did not say anything.
James did not say anything either. He got up and went over and shut the window, and stood there for a moment with his hand on the spoon that had been propping it, and then he said something about whether there was anything to eat that wasn't valerian, and went to find out, and the moment went past them both like a bus neither of them had put a hand out for.
Later, when he had gone up, Lily scraped the cauldron out and washed it and stood it upside down on the draining board. She put the book back on the shelf with the spine turned in. She wiped the table.
Then she picked the delivery note up, and folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in the pocket of her cardigan, where her fingers found the corner of it about nine times in the following fortnight without her ever once meaning to.
A year, she thought, going up the stairs in the dark. It was a year. That was all a baby was, when you looked at it squarely — a year of not being able to move quickly, and then a year of not being able to move quietly, and then it was over and the war would be over too, one way or the other, and she would go up on the train.
She was twenty years old and she had a plan with a shape to it, and she went to bed believing every word of it.