II
There is a gentle knock at the door. It opens, and a middle-aged man in worn robes, with red hair thinning over his scalp, pokes his head in.
"Penelope?" he asks mildly. "Am I interrupting you? Do you have a minute?"
She nods. She says, "Arthur, come in."
He comes in and he shuts the door. He glances, sheepishly and reminiscently, around the outsized broom cupboard that was, for so many years, his office.
They have been friends for more than a year now. Penelope, aged nineteen, had scarcely been Assistant Director of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office for a week when Arthur first came to call, stuttering, apologetic, and congratulatory. He explained—with every appearance of regret—that he had once inhabited this office and had now been promoted to a position that was essential to the war effort and that did not involve Muggle artifacts, whether ill or properly used. He welcomed her heartily into office, tactfully explained the failings of Perkins, and assured her that she would enjoy her new position. He seemed to know quite a lot about her. He didn't tell her how he knew what he knew.
They hit it off, Penelope and Arthur, and they talk often now, voraciously and often, over morning coffee, over afternoon tea, over lunch in the Ministry cafeteria. They talk about making a career at the Ministry. They talk about feeling sidelined. They talk about families, about her siblings and his children. The talk, most often and most eagerly, about the Muggle world beyond their doors. He ogles the misused Muggle artifacts on the shelves in her office, the biting teacups, the disappearing keys, a vicious bathroom door that battered the shins of an elderly Muggle couple in the middle of the night and now hangs, shackled and ashamed, from the ceiling of Penelope's broom cupboard. Penelope has shown Arthur the first three chapters of her book manuscript and flushed under the warmth of his outspoken and innocent pride. She has even endeavored, without much success, to help him understand why airplanes stay up.
There is only one thing, one person, they do not discuss. His name has never passed between them. Penelope is certain, morally certain, that Arthur knows who she is. Who she was. How else would he have known so much about her? Penelope never met Percy's parents, in all those two-odd years of dating him; Percy never seemed to want her to. All the same, she is certain, morally certain, that Arthur knows who she is—who she was—and that there is a reason why he never speaks his name.
Now Arthur stands, wringing his hands, on a tattered scrap of carpet in her tiny office. He summons Perkins's chair to the center of the room, knocking parchment and misused Muggle artifacts to and fro. He points his wand at the chair, rotating it to a comfortable height, and he sits.
"How are you?" he asks, as if it's the most important question in the world.
"I'm fine," says Penelope. "I—well, I'm fine. How are you?"
"I'm fine," says Arthur. "I—well, I'm worried." He scarcely needed to tell her that. She can read it in every line of his face. But then, she has never seen him, not once, when he wasn't worried. It has been a worrying year.
They talk often now, voraciously and often, over morning coffee, over afternoon tea, over lunch in the Ministry cafeteria. She knows he's worried about Bill, who's just married a girl he doesn't like much, and whom he feels guilty about not liking. She knows he's worried about Charlie, who's getting restless in Romania. She knows he's worried about Fred and George, who, flushed with business success, wallowing in unfamiliar riches, and clad in lurid dragonskin clothes, think they're invincible—and aren't. She knows he's worried about Ginny, who is clever and feisty and reckless, who ran off from Hogwarts on a thestral and got mixed up in a battle with Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries when she was only fourteen. If a girl does that at fourteen, what will she do next? She knows, especially, that he's worried about Ron.
She knows more about that than he realizes he's told her.
She knows, too, that he's worried about how Molly's taking it all. He's worried about Minerva McGonagall's heart condition and he's worried about Hagrid's brushes with the law. He was worried when Remus wasn't seeing Tonks, and he was worried when Remus abruptly announced they were getting married—at once— though he's relieved now that they went through with it. He is worried about whether the Order of the Phoenix can survive without Dumbledore, he is worried about whether the Order of the Phoenix can survive without Snape, and he was worried when he realized that he had just told Penelope about the Order of the Phoenix, which he wasn't supposed to do, but oh well, he's done it now. In a world full of things to worry about, that is the least of his worries.
Through all this, through all these long quiet hesitant conversations over coffee and tea, he never mentions Percy. Once or twice, he has inquired, in a discreet, paternal manner, about her love life, but she hasn't told him much. There's nothing much to tell. She hasn't been seeing anyone, because everyone else is boring after Percy. No one knows enough, no one's read enough; her standards are just too high. No one else can stand what Penelope considers relaxing dinnertime conversation. Even the Muggle-borns treat Muggle science as a childhood illness they escaped. Arthur and Percy are the only two wizards she has ever met who expressed even the faintest curiosity about the laws of Newtonian physics.
Now Arthur sits on a twirly chair in her tiny office, picking at the frayed cuffs of his robes, and she can see that he didn't come to talk to her about Newtonian physics. She assumes something has happened to Ron, or possibly to Ginny, because Ginny sounds like a handful, even worse than Samantha, but it's just possible, she thinks, that Scrimgeour or someone else who shouldn't know too much has found out something about the Order of the Phoenix.
He opens his mouth, and he says, "You know my son Percy."
Penelope's heart sinks. She has been longing for news of Percy for a year, but she realizes now that she really, really, really does not want to talk to Arthur about Percy. She's been hurt by Percy, and he's been hurt by Percy, and she knows that he's been hurt, and for all she knows, he knows that she's been hurt, but she doesn't want to lay that burden on his shoulders now. She doesn't want Arthur to know that she still loves his son, who isn't speaking to her, and she fears she cannot let a sentence about Percy escape her lips without revealing, all too plainly, that she loves him. Still, she forces herself to say, "I do."
And then she qualifies it. She says, "I used to."
Arthur looks stricken.
"We broke up three years ago," says Penelope. "I—I've scarcely seen him since."
Arthur's expression softens into gentle, hopeful sympathy. "He always spoke very highly of you," he says. "He always put a lot of stock in your opinion."
"He isn't speaking to me," says Penelope with quivering self-control.
"He isn't speaking to me," says Arthur painfully, in an unthinking echo. "He came to the Burrow on Christmas Day, with Rufus Scrimgeour. He said hello to Molly and he hugged her, but he wouldn't say a word to the rest of us."
Penelope has no answer to that. She has long since heard the story of Percy's Christmas visit, but she didn't hear it from Arthur. She heard it from Tessa Templeton, Rufus Scrimgeour's very bright, very good-looking, very nosy press witch.
"He wouldn't look at me," says Arthur.
Penelope is silent.
"Will you talk to him?" says Arthur. He sounds like a little boy, a pleading little boy, balding and careworn.
"Arthur, Percy isn't speaking to me," says Penelope gently.
"I don't know what else to do," says Arthur. "I'm sorry to ask this of you. When Dumbledore died . . ." He hesitates. "I'm doing dangerous work," he says, looking at the biting teacup on the shelf above her head. "So is Bill," he says, looking at the vicious door shackled to the ceiling. "I think—Ginny—Ron—I don't know—who next." He says, "Molly's sick with worry."
Penelope looks at him and thinks, Molly's not the only one. And she wonders about the "dangerous work." She knows what happened to Bill. She knows a lot about Ginny and Ron. She hadn't quite realized, somehow, that Arthur was doing dangerous work, because he never talks about himself. Always about others. Muggle customs, Muggle artifacts, reckless friends, and reckless children. Worried wife and frustrated dreams. But never himself, never his weekend work, never the risks he's taking.
Middle-aged, jovial, balding, and scruffy, he reminds her in the oddest way of Albus Dumbledore. He is, like Dumbledore, the father she pined for. But Dumbledore was too brilliant, too gifted, too experienced, too old, almost, to die, and Arthur's just a person. A kindly person, a reliable person, a parental person.
A person to whom it's hard to say no.
In the end, she doesn't say no. She says vaguely, as she used to say to Samantha when Samantha asked the impossible, she says vaguely, "I'll try."
Not until Arthur leaves does she wonder if he realizes quite what he's asked of her.
Arthur, like Percy, is a wizard to the bone, schooled to expect the impossible, tutored in unpredictability, ridden with naiveté.
Penelope is Muggle-born, raised in the conviction that what's broken is broken, schooled to accept all the limitations of the physical world. The limitations of the physical world have been weighing ever more heavily on her shoulders as she comes face to face with adult life.
Limitations can be comforting sometimes. Limitations can be all right. The Muggle world does not breed such frail hopes of reconciliation, such romantic clinging to dying flames. Muggle schools do not breed the hot reckless integrity, the do-or-die drama that Hogwarts seems to breed. Muggles are allowed to give up sometimes. Muggles are allowed to be humble, as Penelope would like to be humble. Muggles are allowed to be salary men. Muggles are allowed to be children.
In the Muggle world, she thinks, biting her lip, no one would think she was grown up at twenty. In the Muggle world, she wouldn't have a job. She'd be reading physics at Somerville or Balliol, or if she felt rebellious, at Cambridge, not an exhibitioner perhaps, but a safe First all the same.
In the Muggle world, no one expects to marry her teenaged sweetheart. It isn't done, it just isn't done, not, at least, among the sort of Muggles that Penelope knows. Her parents were both past thirty when they married, leaving trails of brief failed relationships behind them—which is normal, these days, for a couple of Oxford exhibitioners. But in the wizarding world, a good many people do marry their teenaged sweethearts, and it generally works out well.
It is one of the few concrete advantages of living in the wizarding world.