DISCLAIMER: Anything you recognise belongs to JKR.


Hotel


The hotel walls were plain, ordinary white. A single still life, a bowl of ordinary red apples and green pears added colour to the otherwise plain ordinary room. Vernon caught her eye across the room where he was manhandling the plain brown trunks full of sensible ordinary clothes towards the foot of the bed.

Vernon had chosen their honeymoon location, a small hotel overlooking the Ipswich waterfront. There were two art galleries and a small cinema nearby, and they would take their breakfast while watching the passage of a variety of boats. At first they had thought to go overseas but Vernon's work commitments had put an end to that. He was a junior executive after all and was required at an investor's meeting in five days time, cutting their honeymoon rather short.

Petunia was looking forward to returning to their house in Surrey. It was larger than either of the houses she grew up in, neat and tidy and wonderfully plain, with a small orderly garden and a perfectly trimmed lawn. She would spend her days keeping it that way, she supposed, now that she was married and no longer had to work. Eventually she would raise their children, their perfectly normal children.

A boy and a girl, she had decided, two or three years apart. Her son would be strong and brave and polite and handsome; he would play rugby with his friends and he would do well at school and would follow his father into Grunnings when the time came.

Her daughter would be competent and bright and proper. She would help her mother with the cooking and the gardening, she would find a good man to love and marry, and Petunia would help her make her own wedding dress. Both children would be happy and loving and completely normal, and she would see to it that they wanted for nothing.

She smiled at her husband as he seated himself on the bed beside her, making it dip a little as he shifted to kiss her cheek. Life was going to be wonderfully, ordinarily perfect from now on.