Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
***
The whole business had been peculiar from the very outset. Mary Esmond was used to the discreet clientele of Drs. Burgess and Rosencrantz; every once in a while they saw a fair number of taciturn young men with very short hair, who wore civilian dress as if it were a costume. Those were the words Jackie gave her, years ago, when she first tried to tell her what was odd about how they carried themselves.
Jackie said yes, there were people who wore their clothes as if they had just received them from the costume shop and hadn't had a chance to rehearse in them. She'd said the same, the one time she and Mary had unexpectedly encountered Dr. Rosencrantz at the National Gallery, wearing jeans and a black jumper, but looking as if she were at a costume ball; Mary realized that Dr. Rosencrantz looked far more at ease in her discreet tweeds and white laboratory coat.
The advance man, in retrospect, was the only one of the whole lot who fit the usual profile: a tall dark man with a deep reassuring voice and the silent tread of a trained combat specialist. The referral came from highest levels, which Mary realized with a start in the middle of the first orientation actually meant Ten Downing Street.
What was his name—"Call me Kingsley," he said, with a shrewd warm smile—Mr. Kingsley, then, had said that there were certain special arrangements to be made for this particular group of veterans of a most secret conflict. It was most essential that no one in the office tell what they had seen or heard, and this was to be ensured.
Mary Esmond was a little insulted by this, because after years in that place she was nothing if not discreet. Never had the name nor the particulars of a patient passed her lips.
Nonetheless he insisted upon an odd little ceremony, with the waving of a sort of conductor's baton and the muttering of some Latin prayer. It was brief enough, and then Mr. Kingsley said with an air of assurance that there would be no inadvertent revelations of his veterans' personal details, because it would not be possible.
Then she and the doctors were given the roster of names, some of them quite ordinary and others, most peculiar. The two that stuck out, because they seemed to have wandered in from a Restoration comedy (how Jackie loved those): Percy Weasley and Narcissa Malfoy.
She and Jackie always loved that game, making up characters to go with names encountered at random.
"It would be Sir Percy Weasley, Baronet," Jackie would say. "And of course it's Miss Narcissa Malfoy—what a wonderful name! I can just picture her: blonde flibbertigibbet in sausage curls, with a décolletage. And Sir Percy is fifty and fat, and Miss Narcissa is eighteen and something of an adventuress, or maybe it's her mother who is…"
Of course, on the rare occasions that Mary made up a character to match a name on a list, she was invariably wrong, and this was no different.
***
On first reviewing the roster, she notices that there are rather a lot of women—more than she's yet seen in any of these groups—and on the very first day, it seems that at least one of them is an officer—an impression later confirmed, as most of the other patients defer to her—but most unmilitary, with wild bushy hair, that she brushes back absently as she outlines the protocol in her careful Received Pronunciation, so BBC-precise that Mary has no doubt that the girl's grandparents had spoken quite differently. Granger, the name is, one of the relatively ordinary names on the list. (Of course, Mary wonders if that's always been the family name.) She has the manner not of a soldier, but of a precocious graduate student, or a newly minted PhD, brash and somewhat pedantic, and she's ridiculously young (not quite twenty, if her forms are correct).
The men are no less strange, in conspicuously not fitting the profile, and this is clear from the moment she glimpses the advance guard. The first day, it's this Granger person, accompanied by a hefty young man with a Lancashire accent, wearing a rugby shirt and rather grubby jeans.
He immediately fixates on the sorry state of the rubber plant by the door, and proffers some suggestions for ensuring its health and long life.
Mary explains to him that there is a service that comes to the office once a week to see to the plants, whereupon he frowns and tells her solemnly that this is a living thing and not a piece of furniture. He stares at her (in puzzled disapproval), and then at the plant (with an expression of tender solicitude) and says he'll take care of it, as he is going to be coming to the office regularly.
She glances over the roster to look him up, when he offers his hand and introduces himself, "Neville Longbottom."
She remembers that she'd consigned that name to the chorus of comic bit players, perhaps not without justification. None of the young men who have visited the clinic over the years has ever said so much as a word about the rubber plant, and this one is going on about how the noble Ficus elastica attains heights of eighty feet in its native rain forest, which makes the specimen in the office something on the order of a bonsai, or more accurately, a stunted child.
Granger and Longbottom then establish themselves with tea and biscuits to greet and situate the rest of the patients, who begin arriving less than half an hour later.
The first six patients straggle in three to five minutes apart, as Mary counts by the clock over the filing cabinet. The Red-Headed League, she nicknames them mentally, for they all share the same flaming red hair and freckled faces. After she checks the third set of forms against the roster, she realizes that they share the same surname (Weasley), and the roster indicates a whole family of them. She's seen the very rare pairs of brothers in their ordinary clientele, but this is unusual in the extreme: there are five brothers, four of whom are scheduled for this day and the fifth on the next day, with his rather tony wife (so she conjectures from the hyphenated surname).
Percy Weasley, it turns out, is the tall thin one with the fez and the spectacles, and he is a most unmilitary-looking fellow (nor does he in the least resemble the middle-aged baronet of her imagination). Once he fills out his forms with a certain punctilious flourish, he interests himself in the health and safety posters, as well as the rack of brochures, which he devours in attentive silence.
His brothers leaf through the magazines on the table in the waiting room and comment to each other that the pictures are oddly static. (Photographers, no doubt, from their tone of assurance.)
Last of all, looking somewhat flustered, arrives the older man with thinning flyaway red hair, whom she thinks at first might be their officer, but turns out to be their father (Arthur, it says in the roster). He shows a most peculiar interest in the ball-point pen at the check-in desk, as well as the light fixtures and the electric outlets set into the wall. Rather than reading magazines, he spends his waiting time tracing all of the electric cords from the lamps and radio to the walls—most disconcerting, although not dangerous.
In any case, if he were dangerous, there is McConnell. Mr. Kingsley had said that he would have one of their own people on duty, just in case. Hence McConnell—brown hair cut in a sharp bob angled along her jaw, and the most inconspicuous face that Mary had ever seen. Whatever McConnell does, she is very good at it, as Mary can't even remember her face when she thinks about it after work.
On the other hand, she has had problems with memory, ever since Jackie…
… ever since the last night she saw Jackie, now almost three years ago, the night whose end she cannot remember. Only that she's never been back to that flat, and whenever her feet wander in that direction, something deep in her chest tells her, don't.
At any rate, Mary is not sure what sort of army this is—certainly they seem to have been involved in some sort of covert operations—but whoever they are, they are unlike any she'd ever seen.
***
The next day, the routine establishes itself. Once more, the advance guard of Granger and Longbottom; once more, Longbottom casts an indignant glance in the direction of the rubber plant, while Granger reviews the roster and adds tick marks against the names for that day's arrivals.
Five of them, four blonds and a ginger, to be exact.
The first arrival—a lovely girl whose blonde glory absolutely glows, far brighter than one would expect for the slight swell of early pregnancy under her elegantly draped tunic—disconcerts Mary. Her eyes irresistibly gravitate to the girl's face and figure, in spite of the plain signal that she is spoken for: not only the belly but the solicitous husband, one of the Red-Headed League, whose scarred face makes it quite clear he's seen combat, and been lucky to escape alive.
Mary Esmond is a thorough professional, and she certainly has never had a problem with eyeing up the patients before—well, it might be that they were mostly men—but there's something about this one that's most distracting…
The next arrivals are a boy and girl in their late teens, whose similar pale coloring makes her think they might be brother and sister, but apparently they're not. They sit as far as possible from each other in the waiting room. The girl smiles vaguely into the middle distance and the boy carefully avoids eye contact with her. The girl's hair is in violation of regulations in any army on earth, as it cascades in long flaxen waves past her waist, and she's wearing most peculiar earrings: ceramic globules that look nearly exactly like radishes. Her expression is beatific and somewhat abstracted: more mad scientist than soldier, that one.
The boy she mistook for the brother is lanky and thin and sharp-faced, what Jackie called the "you-will-be-shot-at-dawn" school of blond: naturally suited to play the SS officer hanging about the periphery of a World War II drama by way of ornamental menace. He strides up to the counter to sign in, his posture radiating aristocratic hauteur, and then looks about in puzzlement. The ball-point pen on its chain lies close to hand, but he's frowning as if he expects to see something else.
The bushy-haired Sergeant Granger (she's tentatively assigned the girl rank as an NCO, given the way that the others react to her) sees his confusion, steps up to the desk, and demonstrates the writing implement and its use, then places it in his hand.
He flinches as her fingers brush his, frowns at her, and then inclines his rather sharp chin in an acknowledging nod. Then he pulls the forms toward him and starts filling them out with excruciating slowness and attention, as if he were doing so in a foreign language. He is definitely one of the ones in stage costume. His clothes are new but quite ordinary—black pleated trousers, a charcoal-grey jumper, and a crisp white dress shirt, under the V-neck of the jumper—but in spite of their elegant drape, he wears them as if they did not fit.
It's not only his costume that is monochrome; he looks like a black and white photograph of a young man. As he frowns in concentration over the forms, the only color is the glimpse of pink tongue in the corner of his thin-lipped mouth.
Mary Esmond reads the name upside down, and remembers her mental groan on first reading the roster. Some people ought to think before they name their children.
The last member of this mostly blond cohort, whom at first she takes for the eldest sister, enters a little behind the boy: an absolutely stunning blonde dressed all in black. She's wearing an opera cloak or the like, under which Mary glimpses a floor-length fall of black velvet. La belle dame sans merci, she thinks, as she meets those piercing blue eyes, cold as jewels in a face with nearly perfect bone structure.
The boy—her younger brother? at any rate, not so lucky an inheritor of the family beauty as his presumed sister—shows her the pen and whispers something in her ear, as she lowers those marvelous eyes and writes, then pushes the completed form back across the desk to Mary.
This, according to the form, is the actual Narcissa Malfoy. Mary stares at the birth date—1955—incredulous that this blonde vision is forty-four years old… and, yes, a mother, or at least that's how the boy next addresses her in his petulant aristocratic drawl.
That's the first McConnell speaks to her. "Not for the likes of us, my girl," she says, with an utterly deadpan expression that nonetheless conveys a nod and a wink.
When Narcissa Malfoy doffs her long cloak, it's clear that she's pregnant (as Jackie would say, "Very pregnant indeed") and when she turns to sit down, assisted with old-fashioned chivalry by her son, her long shining hair cascades down her back like a waterfall seen by moonlight.
Two pregnant blondes, a brother and sister who aren't, and none of the lot of them seem to be familiar with the use of a pen. (Curiouser and curiouser, Jackie would say, quoting Alice.) According to Mr. Kingsley, all of them—and there are more to come on succeeding days—are veterans of a most secret war that has been in progress for decades, on English soil, and which has only ended this past May.
***