Chapter 7: Muggle Interludes
If Remus asked himself—as he did more than once in the ensuing weeks—what his intentions were towards Tonks, he had a number of comforting answers at his fingertips. He was improving his acquaintance with a valuable new colleague. He was improving his knowledge of both the wizarding and Muggle worlds (for Tonks evinced great curiosity about the latter) by judiciously sampling what each had to offer. He was refreshing his mind through healthy diversions, for he had to acknowledge the justice of Tonks's allegation that he had hitherto known few diversions other than Molly's Sunday night suppers at Grimmauld Place. And last but not least, he was doing a good deed, for it now appeared that Tonks was in much the same boat and equally in need of diversion. After the prison break, after the flight of the wizard who slew the Prewetts, the witch who tortured the Longbottoms, they all needed something to feel happy about. He wanted her to be happy.
Sirius had, from the first, expressed skepticism about whether bookstores remained open until 12:30 in the morning. In the course of his explorations, Remus discovered a bookstore in Muggle London, Waterstone's by name, that was in fact open until midnight. He helped himself to several of the store's bookmarks (on which the hours were printed) and left them around Number 12, Grimmauld Place, in spots where he thought Sirius might notice them. Remus kept one for himself; the notion of a bookstore that remained open until midnight retained a certain allure.
Tonks wanted to see a Muggle Library, so Remus took her to the British National Library, where she marveled alike at the architecture and the Muggle's absurd ideas about what needed to put in the restricted section.
"Fourteenth-century," she scoffed. "Surely anyone could repair those old books with a flick of her—!"
"Tonks!" Remus said warningly, as a Muggle family of five passed them, staring.
She pulled his sleeve and laughingly whispered, "fingers" in his ear.
Tonks also insisted on going to see a Muggle grocery store, where she manipulated the automatic checkout machine with a dexterity that amazed Remus, and a Muggle laundromat, where she laundered her own and Remus's robes laboriously in two loud, swishing machines. Tonks watched the robes' perambulations through the glass doors of the washer and dryer with a look of such ecstatic concentration that Remus felt sure the Muggles were staring. As Tonks removed the robes from the dryer, an elderly Muggle, slightly lame, limped up to Remus and said, with his eyes revolving between the black bundle in Tonks's arms and her pink hair, "You lot actors or something?"
"Oh—um, er, yes. We're staging an amateur production of Macbeth," said Remus quickly.
"Thought so," grunted the Muggle amiably. He limped away as Tonks stifled her giggles on the sleeve of a freshly laundered robe.
Remus often wondered what the Muggles made of them, shabby and awkward-looking as they were and mismatched in age to boot. He did, he hoped, still look too young to be Tonks's father, while at the same time he was obviously too old to be brother or boyfriend. At least Tonks was beginning to choose more conservative hair tints for her forays into Muggle society—if one could call Weasley red a conservative tint. Once he persuaded her to leave her hair in its natural, mousy brown state, which made her look oddly naked. Surveying Tonks in her Muggle attire, which outlined the curves of breast and hip so much more emphatically than wizarding robes did, Remus could almost imagine her naked. He did not, of course, want Tonks to know that he was imagining her naked; she wouldn't like that at all. But Remus had grown from boyhood to manhood in the knowledge that werewolves could not marry, and he was inclined to think there was not much harm in imagining as long as he never acted on it and Tonks never knew.
Tonks wanted to make him dinner. For this purpose she invited Remus to her modest three-room flat in Hogsmeade, the ground floor of a building too dilapidated to be occupied in its upper story. She had planned an ambitious menu consisting of matar paneer, dal, naan, basmati rice, and mango ice. It was clear from the sounds within, when Remus arrived, that things were already going wrong.
"Come in!" called Tonks merrily. "It's not charmed!"
Remus opened the door, and a round of naan hit him squarely in the face. It was buttery and hot to the touch.
"Sorry, Remus, I was just trying to puff them up a bit, I guess I got carried away with my wand—" Tonks gestured helplessly at half a dozen rounds of naan zooming briskly around the living room like miniature flying saucers. On the stove, a cauldron of peas and paneer was stirring itself merrily and a little over-zealously; every ten seconds or so, a cube of cheese shot straight up into the air, hovered for a moment, and then plunked back down into the cauldron, spraying tomato sauce on the kitchen counters. Beside it, a pot of dal was clearly becoming jealous; as Remus watched, a string of lentils shot up like a geyser and started assaulting the paneer cubes. It looked for all the world like a game of Gobstones, suspended in mid-air.
"Behave yourself!" muttered Tonks, flicking her wand testily at the dal, which retreated to its own pot and belched grumpily. "The lentils won't stay put and let themselves cook, they're going to be rock hard when everything else is done . . . I never did have the knack of disciplining food, I've never seen beans act up for my mother—"
"You know," said Remus mildly, "if we were Muggles, we'd just go for pizza."
Tonks greeted this suggestion with such an excess of relieved enthusiasm that Remus had to remind her to conceal her wand and collect her Muggle purse before departing. She then announced they would perform the pizza run "authentically," which involved apparating into Diagon Alley, sneaking out the front door of the Leaky Cauldron, and transversing the cold, foggy streets of London until they identified a pizza parlor. For added authenticity, Tonks refused to enter the pizza parlor directly but instead noted the telephone number, walked on two blocks to a Muggle phone booth, and placed a call, "because that's how Muggles do it. They don't just show up, they ring first. I've seen my grandfather do this a dozen times."
Remus's stomach was growling with hunger by the time Tonks hung up, announcing delightedly that the pizza would be ready in twenty minutes—"and really that's quite remarkable, Molly could do it quicker of course, but I don't think I could prepare a pizza in twenty minutes with magic." She offered to summon a bag of peanuts from the bar of the Leaky Cauldron to tide Remus over, but between the security breach and Tonks's way with food, he thought it safer to wait.
"Thanks, Tonks," he said.
"Thanks for not being able to cook?"
"Thanks for making me get out of Grimmauld Place occasionally for something other than guard duty and shadowing Death Eaters. You're one of the only bright spots in this war we're about to have."
Tonks turned slightly pink in the foggy lamplight, but all she said was, "I would have said the war was already happening, myself."
"No," said Remus quietly. "Sooner or later the Death Eaters will start working systematically, Voldemort will come out in the open, and the Ministry will have to acknowledge what's happened. And everything will get much worse. You have no idea."
"I can remember the last war, you know, Remus. I have some idea."
"I'm sorry, Tonks. I didn't mean to talk to you as if you were a child. It's just—you were eight years old when James and Lily were killed, when Sirius went to Azkaban. Somehow I can't seem to forget that."
"I was already studying to be an Auror when Sirius went to Azkaban."
Remus smiled warily.
"I'm serious. I sent an owl for the pamphlet when I was seven—not saying how old I was, of course—and then I used to study in bed at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I snuck my father's old wand from his dresser, he never noticed it was missing—and it was perfectly good for lumos spells, though it wasn't good for much else."
"What an enterprising child you were!"
"Then, when I got older, I used to baby-sit for Neville Longbottom in the Hogwarts vacations—"
"You know the Longbottoms?"
"We know all the really old pureblood families. My mother likes the Longbottoms. I would put Neville to sleep with a bunch of silly morphs—we had a little song about it, actually—and then I had free run of the library until Mrs. Longbottom came home. Or sometimes, even before he went to sleep—if he got tired of the morphs, I would read to him . . ."
"You read Auror training manuals to Neville Longbottom?"
"For a six-year-old, he had unusual taste in literature." Tonks pursed her lips. "All those blasted aunts and uncles of his, telling him he was almost a Squib—he didn't believe he would ever be able to work any of the spells we read about, but he used to fantasize about my doing them. I couldn't actually try them out until I got back to school, of course. It was very frustrating for me. I used to feel ready to burst by the first of September."
Remus shook his head slowly in the lamplight. He laid his arm across the back on the bench and looked at her. "Tonks, James and Sirius used to call me a bookworm, but honestly, I cannot imagine studying to be an Auror at the age of six or seven or even thirteen. I just never would have thought of such a thing. Even in my OWLs year, I was still a bit of an idiot."
Tonks shrugged. "Autre temps, autres moeurs. I grew up in a different world. Dark Marks and Death Eaters. Not much time to be an idiot. Come on," she said, standing and pulling Remus to his feet, "let's get our pizza."