One Day Later
The next morning, as promised, Hermione gave Minerva the tour of the compound.
When she arrived by the guest quarters at nine on the dot, Minerva had already spent a pleasant hour on her terrace, watching the matutinal activities over a cup of tea. A whole flock of youngsters had passed her cottage as they headed towards the school, where they were greeted by a schoolmistress whose no-nonsense manner distinctly reminded Minerva of a librarian of her acquaintance. Some sort of briefing-cum-break was being held under a tree in front of the central building, and a young man had climbed the roofs of the guest cottages to clean out the tanks. She'd also caught glimpses of Hermione, dashing through the picture here and there, now with a clipboard, now with a ladder, now with a wallet. Minerva suspected that she'd started her shift early to get some work out of the way before their tour. She didn't seem as though she minded the extra working time, though.
"Good morning!" Hermione called out when she arrived as the clock struck nine, clipboard-free and beaming all over her face. "Got your mosquito-repelling charm and your sunscreen on?"
"Yes, Madam."
"Very well. Off we go."
They walked along a path of reddish soil that led them past the schoolhouse. Voices came from inside, and Minerva felt a curious draw to the building. Hermione laughed. "I thought you might consider this the prime attraction. I've arranged with Mme Emele that you can sit in on her lessons whenever you want. She's done a marvellous job here. No literacy or numeracy - there's an elementary school close by, no need to eat into their business, but she offers prep courses for grammar schools, for students who want to apply for scholarships, and technical instruction, mathematics, economics, ecology and such, to complement the vocational centre run by her son. That's the one over there."
They continued towards the dispensary, then passed a reccy with football goals on either side, the medicinal herb garden, and a small plantation, and on the way, Hermione explained how it had all started.
A few years ago, Angelina Johnson's brother Theo had done his dissertation with Professor Marie Ndong from the Yaoundé Institute for Agriculture and Forestry. Both were Squibs, and both had long been thinking that it might make sense to bring the Wizarding community into technical cooperation. Then, one day, on a field trip down coast, they had stumbled upon a half-eroded strip of forest not far from a river. They both agreed immediately - it seemed the perfect location to try putting some of their ideas into practice. So that night, they brought up the topic at a dinner with a local dignitary, who embraced it with her arms wide open, and thus, a project was born. Two years later they had a concept and a contract, and all that remained to be done was to find someone with a talent for fundraising and organising who was willing to live on the spot for a few years. "And this," Hermione said, "was where I came in - recently divorced, frustrated by my job, and generally looking for something new to do now that both my children were at Hogwarts." Well, something to do was exactly what she had found: little by little, the whole thing had turned out to be a success (with a few setbacks, as they always happened, but nothing insurmountable), and little by little, they had expanded the project into what it now was.
Minerva and Hermione had circled the compound once, and turning right by the pier, they made their way back towards the schoolhouse. Hermione indicated a tree with a bench.
"It's getting hot; we better leave it at this. Tomorrow I'll show you the anti-erosion project and the hydropower installation."
"The what?"
A dimple appeared on Hermione's cheek as she sat down. "I'll explain tomorrow."
She opened a bottle of water and handed it to Minerva.
"Thank you." Minerva accepted gratefully. She took a sip, let her gaze trail around the compound, and let the bottle sink into her lap. "You've done well," she said quietly, looking at Hermione. "I'm impressed."
"What, with this?" Hermione asked, shaking her head. "None of it is my doing. I'm just ..."
"I take these to be the usual protestations in conversations such as these," Minerva interrupted her, "and they do you credit. But no, I don't mean this." The corners of her lips broke into a half-smile. "I think you can assess your talents and achievements quite well yourself, and I daresay that the poor, wretched bushman isn't the only one you're uplifting with your activities." She gave Hermione a questioning look across her spectacles. "Is he?"
Hermione laughed, and she blushed a little. "Very perceptive," she said, "and very true. Few people ever recognise it, and if they do, they usually call me selfish."
"Poppycock," Minerva said. "We always do these things at least as much for ourselves as for others. I can't find anything wrong with it, or I'd have to doubt all the years and the lifeblood I have poured into the well-being of other people's offspring." She took another sip from the bottle. "No, what I meant is the fact that you took the leap to come here. It seems to have done you good." Minerva hesitated briefly, then patted Hermione's hand. "I'm glad you did it."
Hermione smiled. "Thank you." She took the bottle that Minerva handed back to her and brought it to her lips.
"You know," she said after a while, "after the war I really thought that I wantedthe life that I'd chosen. Marriage, all the emotional safety of a traditional family, of course without making compromises either as a mother or as a professional. I thought it was the reward for the fighting." Her gaze trailed over to the beach, where a few young children were playing. "And I thought that the bonds we had formed back then would carry us for a lifetime." She shrugged. "Turned out that's not how the world works."
"No," Minerva said. "It rarely is."
Hermione didn't have to know this, or not quite yet, but Minerva knew exactly what she was talking about. No, it hadn't worked like that for Minerva and Rolanda Hooch, either. And hadn't their plans been lofty, after they'd been through so much together during the Grindelwald years. The resistance, the underground messenger service, the grief and the relief when it was all over. Hadn't it only been natural, then, to take a small flat together, with curtains and a double bed and all that? Because wasn't a blissful forever the natural epilogue to stories like theirs? Well, in their case, forever had lasted exactly two years and three months.
Hermione screwed the cap back on the bottle. Wiping her hands on her trousers, she got up from the bench. "Right," she said. "It's time, I better get going. Will I see you on my terrace this evening?"
"If I'm not keeping you from anything."
"Absolutely not!"
-/-/-
Over the next few days, Minerva set about establishing her routine. She liked a bit of structure, even on her holidays, and she was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. She woke up at dawn (there wasn't much choice; everyone woke up at dawn) and began the day with a walk. She then had a cup of tea in the dining hall and spent the rest of her mornings exploring. Hermione lived up to her promise to show her the anti-erosion work and the hydropower installation ("Why didn't you say it was a watermill?"), and two mornings were spent in Mme Emele's class (and this Minerva had to say - it was a fineclassroom discipline her friendly and sympathetic colleague kept, it was. The girls especially seemed to be all over her.)
After a few days of this, however, Minerva felt quite ready to venture out into the wider country. When she brought up the desire, Hermione insisted on assigning guides to her (more to prevent her from blundering than to ensure her safety, she said), and that worked rather well, but after about a week, Minerva got impatient with that, too, and held that it was high time she started getting around by herself. (She had a feeling that this sentiment was shared by her guides.) The day she took the ferry to the nearest town, did some shopping at a market, held little chats here and there with the vendors - in French, no less! -, and arrived back home somewhat damp but otherwise in prime condition, qualified for nothing quite short of Minerva's proudest moment of the year.
Each day, when the sun had climbed too high for comfort, she took a nap, and afterwards she read a little (or rather, sat under a tree with a book watching people), or worked on a translation she had brought with her. Or she wrote letters to Poppy. After all, Poppy, that meddling, mothering busibody of a best friend, was the reason she'd come here. "Nothing better when you're overworked than a place with no Floo, no newspapers, and a few new impressions," she'd said. Once again, she had been exasperatingly right, and Minerva thanked her with almost-daily accounts. Of course, being Minerva, she expressed her delight and gratitude with reports of deplorable food, zoological traffic obstacles, and the utter ineptitude of the Marmis scolaris Scotiaefor life in the tropics. But then, everything else would probably have worried Poppy sick.
And evenings, after dinner, were mostly spent on Hermione's terrace, sipping on gillywater or tea and talking people and politics, daily life and world affairs, spiced up with the occasional foray into magical theory and the lives of working women in times of change.
Bit by bit, Minerva and Hermione had come to discover that their careers had taken surprisingly similar turns. Or perhaps not so surprisingly after all, Minerva thought one night as she walked back to her cottage, about a week and a half into her stay. Both of them had made it into powerful positions after the war ("Isn't it strange how when the mess has got so bad it's impossible to sort out, women can suddenly get promoted to high office?"), and both had been determined to use their powers for the betterment of the community. Granted, Minerva had been the more conservative one of them - but then, in terms of progressiveness it was hard to match Hermione's project for a comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation that included magical beings, family law, and all sorts of gender issues, some of which Minerva had never even heard of. But even Minerva, with her tentative plans for slow and gradual reform of the House system, had encountered her share of resistance. While she had had trouble with both those who thought she moved too slowly and those who thought she shouldn't move at all, Hermione had been under fierce attack from a sizeable and influential group of veterans who claimed that they hadn't fought a war against pureblood tyranny to be subjected to a dictatorship of political correctness.
Now, Minerva didn't share confidences easily, least of all with people she still very vividly remembered as round-faced, big-eyed tots standing awestruck in front of her as they awaited their Sorting. She'd never been the type, and opening up to strangers wasn't exactly a habit one developed as part of a secret society, or as a boarding school teacher who was constantly under the scrutiny of pupils or parents - or as the female lover of a high-ranking also-female Ministry official, for that matter. And thus, at first, Minerva had merely volunteered a few tidbits of experience here or there as she listened to Hermione's story. After all, it could be helpful for a young woman to know that she wasn't alone in having tired herself out trying to do what was right against fierce opposition, been passed over for promotions due to political reasons, or felt left in the lurch by her boss.
Little by little, however, Minerva had begun to feel that she was getting something out of those conversations herself. Hermione might be much younger, but the views that she held and the sense that she made of the world were not at all uninteresting, no matter how young she was. It could offer one some rather new perspectives at times.
And so, as the nights on the terrace progressed, Minerva gradually found herself granting more and more glimpses of her life, and enjoying the response she got, too. She spoke of her uneasy relationship with Albus Dumbledore, for example, and the debates she had had with herself about whether unconditional subordination was an acceptable price to ask in exchange for protection. Of her time with Rolanda, both during the Grindelwald war and afterwards. And, finally, one night, when they'd been talking about possibilities for a working woman to find love and partnership, of the happiness that Minerva had found with Amelia Bones. Now, this especially wasn't something she readily shared; their relationship had been private, and even after Amelia's death Minerva hadn't often spoken about just how deep their friendship had been, except to a few close friends.
But then, perhaps there was something about those sweltering nights, with the sounds of the forest and the light of the candles and the scent of flowers, that had an effect on her privacy wards.
Minerva sidestepped a chamber choir of frogs on a nocturnal parade as she turned into the path that led to her quarters. Amelia. Champion of the Righteous Way. Believer in the primacy of the law, and Albus Dumbledore's staunchest critic. Minerva couldn't count the evenings they had spent in hot debate of political versus moral legitimation ("What do you mean, versus?"), or the advantage of being able to act fast versus the disadvantage of being able to act rashly. Agreement, for them, had always been a question of degrees. Love and respect had not.
They had had nineteen wonderful years like that. Both had loved Rosmerta's cooking and the National Theatre, and the look of calf-length Muggle skirts on the other. Both had needed their space and been willing to give it, too. With Amelia, Minerva had come closer to a happily ever after than she'd ever thought possible, had found happiness with someone as like her in situation, character, and inclinations (if not political ones) as she had ever met. And after Amelia had been taken from her, she had found that she'd never once felt the desire to look for what only could be a second best from now on.
Of course, it wasn't as if Minerva had never craved company again. Not a relationship, not really, at least not one with plans for growing old together, or, Heaven forbid, a domestic one. But perhaps some tender friendship, with a little touching in addition to a meeting of minds, and perhaps, perhaps, the possibility of some slow and gentle lovemaking on occasions, with no demands and no obligations. The kind that didn't rush to an end, didn't rush her, most of all, because that had never been who she was, and certainly not since she'd begun to feel some of the effects of age. However, one had to face it: there weren't many likely candidates. Few and far between were the available female nonagenarians with a desire for independence and their own sex, and with a few non-negotiable qualities such as a strong will and some intellect, and the ambition to do the good thing, whatever that was.
But then, there were other kinds of company. She had her friends, had Poppy and Wilhelmina, and Filius for the occasional game of chess and some philosophy. She had a place in life. And now, here, she had evenings on a terrace in animated conversation with a young and rather handsome woman who pronounced the words "Intelligent Magical Beings Empowerment Act" with a sparkle in her eye worthy of Amelia Bones.
Well, one could certainly do worse for company if one was Minerva McGonagall.
Not to mention that Minerva liked a bit of bravado, and trading the safety of a Ministry job for a poorly-paid life among flying tiger prawns - well, what qualified for bravado if not that?
Smiling, Minerva opened the door to her quarters, stepped inside, and lit the reading lamp by the bed.
Beautiful hands, too.
And a way of being just a little endearingly exasperating at times, with her strong will and her sharp intellect and her ambition to do the good thing, whatever that was.
Well, Minerva thought as she slipped into a clean chemise and under the thin cotton bedsheet.
Hermione was young. Too young. But that didn't have to stop one enjoying her conversation just a little more than one's usual political debate, did it? In all propriety and respectability, of course. The pleasure of a good-looking woman's intelligent conversation, after all, came in many shapes.
And on this thought, Minerva switched off the light.
-/-/-
... not knowing, dear Reader, that next week, she will be in for a surprise. Stay tuned to watch Minerva get a lesson in canoe-paddling! And let me hear from you if you want to - I answer every signed comment.