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).
***
Jackie used to say that the human animal was distinguished by its ability to adapt to nearly any conditions, no matter how bizarre or inhuman. Mary Esmond rather agrees.
They come in and they occupy the waiting room, with their cacophony of regional accents, as if someone had swooped down and recruited a handful of soldiers from every locality in the British Isles. There's the Finnegan boy, a Dubliner if she ever heard one; Thomas, a Londoner whose voice still retains some of the warm lilt of Jamaica; the too-precise Sergeant Granger, from the suburbs of London; Longbottom from Lancashire; the Patil sisters, some generations from the Indian subcontinent ...
Jackie would have said: feast your ears. Forget your middle-class obsession about how many points above or below you they are. New York had taught her that lesson; she'd studied the Method there, studied voice for the stage, and practiced on all of the accents she heard on the streets. Coming back to London—what an irony, that she'd survived dangerous New York and come back to London, only to—
Coming back to London, Jackie had sung the plebeian tones from taxicab and pub, the pretentious plummy tones from shop counter and posh club, as if she'd never heard anything so exquisite. And more magical yet, she could turn into those people. That's what an actress was… no, an actor, Jackie would insist. An actress is a rich man's mistress. An actor is an artist. An actor is a shape-shifter, a magical creature.
Mary Esmond still isn't sure what to call them, these folk of the special dispensation. They don't name themselves, so she has no idea what regiment they are. There was a poem Jackie used to quote,about how an army of lovers cannot fail. That's the nickname she's given them, finally, after she saw Sergeant Granger kissing her fellow liaison officer in the hallway, her wiry arms around his neck and his arms enfolding her, his large capable workman's hands resting with curious primness just at her waist. It reminded her of those pictures from the end of the Second World War, sailors and soldiers and civilian girls embracing in the streets.
The rubber plant has never looked healthier.
There have been yet more curious visitors. Not only the Army of Lovers—well, they are also the Army of Mothers and Fathers, even the Army of Cheeky Teenagers, to judge from the red-haired girl who had a spat with her equally red-headed mother apparently about keeping too-late hours with her boyfriend—but some of their auxiliaries have put in an appearance as well.
There was, for example, the one she nicknamed the Rock Star, not so much for his unprepossessing appearance but the way all eyes turned to him when he entered the room: a skinny boy of middling height with permanently disheveled black hair and NHS-issue spectacles. Whatever his role was in the late war, it was both substantial and mysterious; none of them, even McConnell, will specify what it is that he did, only that it had quite a bit to do with the war being over, with a favorable outcome.
For the last few weeks there also has been the Distinguished Consultant. Never mind that this woman has that look of wearing a costume when she comes in arrayed in traditional white coat and stethoscope; Mary Esmond knows the species well, and this personage is a Medical Demigod. She is sitting in with Drs. Burgess and Rosencrantz, to learn the techniques so that they can be applied "among our own," is how she puts it.
***
It's only recently that it's settled on her that there were two sides in this war, and they're both represented in the waiting room. The pregnant widow is apparently no widow at all, but has a husband in prison… a bad lot, is all that McConnell will say. He won't be seeing daylight any time these twenty years, if he survives it.
The very grimness with which she says that brings a cold breath of the Middle Ages into the room, as if he were serving his sentence in a grim castle wreathed in the mists of the North Sea, rather than a climate-controlled warehouse for the socially dangerous. McConnell, Addie McConnell, Adelaide but all her friends call her Addie so she insists that Mary follow that usage as well, lost a sister, a brother, and her closest friend in the war. No, she's not forgiving.
Of the fate of the brother and the sister she won't say more than that there was nothing much to bury.
Of the friend… well, she died in combat. The last battle, the one that made the difference, the one where the Rock Star did whatever it was that he did… and it was a shame, because they went through training together and she'd never known anyone more full of life. It's when she shows the picture of her dead friend that Mary knows that this is more than the usual Most Secret crowd.
By some high-tech miracle, there's a film loop embedded in the photographic paper, and on the other side of the glossy surface, a girl with pink spiky hair, a heart-shaped face and a cheeky grin waves at them, and winks at McConnell. It's marvelously lifelike, and even seems to respond to them, as if it were some sentient bit of magic rather than the most amazing piece of digital technology Mary has ever seen.
McConnell says her friend was one of the best that Dimly was ever lucky to recruit, Kingsley said so, and they were lucky to have Kingsley in charge now, since he's Dimly too by training. Mary has trouble parsing that until she notices the discreet crimson letters DMLE on the sleeve cuff of McConnell's black T-shirt.
She knows better than to ask what it is those letters abbreviate, and McConnell doesn't offer.
***
It was only a matter of time, of course, with two pregnant women in the waiting room, and the Black Widow (so Mary has nicknamed her) quite far along, before the expected emergency came to pass.
Well, it would have seemed quite straightforward: a pregnant woman whose water breaks in the waiting room ought to go directly to hospital, but an unexpected fracas breaks out.
The son, of course, is useless in the crisis; for some reason, this doesn't much surprise Mary. When his mother suddenly looks seriously discomfited and whispers in his ear, he turns bright red and flees to the hall. As the door swings shut, Mary hears him shout, "Granger!" the volume of the exclamation at odds with the cut-glass accent.
He returns a moment or so later, with brisk, sensible Sergeant Granger at his elbow.
She takes him aside, and hisses, "Calm down, Malfoy. It happens all the time. You're living proof." There's a fierce exchange of whispers, and she says, "She can perfectly well give birth here." The boy's indignant reaction would be more appropriate if she'd told him his mother would be giving birth in a field or alley rather than a modern London hospital.
"Derwent will settle it, then," Granger says, and vanishes through the doors once more; Mary startles to hear a loud crack in the hallway, but the boy shakes his head when she gets up to investigate.
"It's perfectly all right," he says. Apparently it is, because a moment later Granger returns, this time accompanied by the visiting Medical Demigod. These people seem to have an instinct for showing up at the right moment, is all Mary can think; she wishes some of the consultants she's had to do with over the years would have been so prompt.
The four of them—Derwent, Granger, the Black Widow, and her son—leave together, before Mary can give them the appropriate paperwork.
***
In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning.
No, Jackie's favorite American author was wrong about that. It's more like four o'clock in the morning, when you've lost all faith that there's a morning, when it seems that there will be darkness forever, and you're tired from waiting.
Recently, something uneasy is rearing its head, a sense of something lurking under the surface of everyday life. Her feet have tried to take her back to Jackie's flat, and the answering voice under her ribs has said no, but now she's aware of them arguing.
It comes to a crisis with the next cohort. More young fighters in the Army of Lovers, the second wave, McConnell tells her, the ones they've only recently convinced to seek help. More of the youngsters who pulled off the victory in this mysterious last battle, which appears to have taken place somewhere in Scotland.
It's the name, the name on the roster, that name … Jackie used to assure her that her family was one of the few in England with that odd surname, but she was thinking of changing it all the same. Too odd for the stage.
Susan Bones. And the girl who answers to that name… looks remarkably like Jackie.
Jackie Bones, who is dead. Jackie Bones is dead. She's tried on that sentence recently, and the fog in her head is clearing. Jackie Bones is dead, and has been dead these last three years, and Mary Esmond has been stumbling through life in a grey confusion that has not been only grief… but an entire avoidance of the subject.
Which now feels very much as if it had been imposed from the outside, if that were possible.
***
Author's notes:
"In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning." Quoted (more or less correctly) from F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Crack-up.
"An army of lovers cannot fail." Plato, by way of Rita Mae Brown.