beholder_mod (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} beholder_mod) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} hp_beholder,@ 2011-05-18 13:52:00 |
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| Entry tags: | beholder_2011, dudley dursley, dudley/piers, femslash, fic, original character, petunia dursley, petunia/ofc, piers polkiss, rating:pg |
FIC: "Souvenirs and Lost Luggage" for florahart
Recipient: florahart
Author: girl_tarte / tarteaucitron
Title: Souvenirs and Lost Luggage
Rating: PG
Pairings: Petunia Dursley/OFC (pre-slash), Dudley Dursley/Piers Polkiss (established)
Word Count: 5900
Warnings/Content Information (Highlight to View): *none*.
Summary: In 2003, Petunia leaves Little Whinging for good. It is four years before she can talk about it.
Author's Notes: copious thanks are due to louise_lux for helping me come up with the idea and think it through, to buckleberry for beta-ing carefully as usual and helping me to be more thoughtful, and to bethbethbeth for her extreme forbearance and encouragement in adverse times. <3
The smell of wet cement ends Petunia's marriage on the twenty-second of August, 2003.
It's curious how you can go for 33 years without inhaling the specific smell of something as mundane as builders' sand and water, and yet even with Vernon leaning precariously on the trellising, haw-hawing with Mr Fooks next door about the Poles beginning work on his rear-wing extension, and with the evidence of her married life in gnomes and buddleia at her feet, Petunia is immediately back in Broomhill.
In the summer of 1970, the wall at the back of their terrace was being repointed, all along, and Petunia had stared from the back door window at the loutish boys who stripped their shirts off when the sun came out, and winked and shouted at her for tea. Lily would have shouted back and cheeked them, put too much sugar in their teas. Petunia just stared, feeling their naked backs reflecting the sun like an obscure humiliation.
Lily was rarely found in the house that summer, out shopping most days, while the boxes of bizarre equipment in the spare room reached as high as the dado rail, or talking obsessively to the rude little boy down the road. Lily's life had expanded into the weird and the speciously wonderful, places that Petunia couldn't dream of and didn't want to; her own meanwhile withdrew into a corridor, narrowing at the end, doors barely open on each side. She hadn't even been able to see the faces of some of the men who stood in front of those doors then, blocking her escape; now with the cold mineral smell of cement slopping in the mixer, a dim flash of that cramped sense of recession glimmers again in her mind. It is a mirror of the misery of that summer, faint and hard to capture, but throwing enough concentrated light to spark a dry leaf.
"Cheer up, love," one of those boys had shouted, waving an arm in her direction. "A smile don't cost nothing." She had watched as his spadeful of cement splattered on the ground. Wet sand seeped in rivulets onto the lawn, suffocating the grass.
On the twenty-third of August, Petunia leaves Little Whinging, the gnomes and the buddleia, for good. It is four years before she can talk about it.
Around the corner they are digging up the road to repair the water main. London has hundreds of miles of water mains; they leak and they complain but they have pushed the water around to a million households for over a century. A million households. Petunia pauses with a hand on the window frame, holding it half-closed. A family is walking past on the street underneath, a mother pushing a pushchair with a shopping bag in it, a little girl jump-walking at her side, dressed in vest and knickers, and tugging at her arm.
It's three o'clock and the day is beginning to breathe out its heat. There's a good time to close the windows and draw the curtains to make sure that the worst of August in London is kept outside, but Petunia hasn't hit on it yet, and she doesn't like to sit in the half dark of a curtained room at the weekends.
The dracaena in the windowbox needs watering.
The jackhammer stops for a moment, and Petunia hears the little girl's voice, singing something she doesn't recognise, getting softer as they walk away. She closes and latches the window and goes to the bedroom to collect up the laundry.
The bag of clothes bounces against her leg as she shuffles down the stairs, and she has to negotiate the Bhattacharyya girl in the hallway. They smile hello at each other, and the girl flattens herself to the wall.
"Are you going down to Soap and Glory? Mum's sending Amit later – he could take yours too."
"Oh. That's kind. No, it's really –" the door opens "Hello, Mrs Bhattacharyya."
"Hello, Miss Evans." She flattens herself against the wall too. Petunia stands rigid in the middle of the hall, trying to wrangle what is an unreasonably bulky plastic bag full of her dirty clothes. "This is for cleaning? Amit can take it." She shouts up the stairs. "Amit!"
"No! No really, Mrs Bhattacharyya. It's so kind. But really, I do like – the walk." She frowns at herself.
The walk is two minutes long and takes her past a row of terraced houses, a butchers and the junk shop where she bought her coffee table three months ago. Nevertheless Petunia is sweating a little by the time she reaches the launderette, and swapping her bag of clothes from hand to hand.
A man in a damp-looking overcoat and tracksuit bottoms stops to hold the door open for her with a flourish of the hand that transmits into a stagger.
"Morning beau'iful."
The hot sweet smell of drying clothes billows out at Petunia and the man smiles at her with a surprisingly full set of teeth. She does her level best to smile back and resists pointing out that it is approaching teatime.
"Thank you."
He flourishes his hand again, ushering her in, and lurches off down the street.
"Afternoon, my love. Service wash, is it?" The girl at the counter appears no more than twenty. She's wearing something around her neck that Petunia might still refer to in her head as a teatowel. Black and white check. Her dark blonde hair is messy in a way that looks meant and pinned at the back of her head. Without waiting for an answer, she slides her top half forward over the counter on both elbows, craning towards the bag of laundry. Petunia grips it tightly, trying to hold the sides together.
"No."
The girl looks up and her mouth is open in a smile, her tongue tip touching at a white canine.
"No. Just some change for the machines, please."
"Of course, darling. What do you need?"
"I've got a five-pound note."
The girl takes the money, sliding back across the counter, keeping eye contact for longer than seems necessary, before disappearing into the back.
The only other customer is another girl, younger still, in a crumpled pink t-shirt, denim mini-skirt and enormous leather boots. Her shoulders are rounded defensively and she's looking at the machine opposite her with the dumb stare of someone who is still metabolising large amounts of alcohol. A copy of The Guardian is held loosely on a thumb and is sliding gradually off her lap. She's not likely to want to make small talk, but Petunia still chooses a machine in the corner, and loads her bag onto the plastic chair next to it.
She is bending to fill the machine, when the launderette girl comes back with her change. "Nice dress," the girl says, hovering just behind her.
Petunia hesitates, holding up a bundle of flowery print in her hands.
"No, that one. Dress you've got on. Nice on you."
"Thank you." She doesn't know if this is the opening to a conversation, and wonders about saying where she got it from, but the girl is already stalking back to the counter. The student's staring at her now. Petunia turns back and finishes loading the washing machine.
She takes out the thriller she is reading, but after twenty minutes of the drone and thump of the machines and the heat puffing out from the dryers, Petunia's attention wanders numbly. A sharp snap from the counter and she looks up, embarrassed to realise that she had been caught in a blank gaze at the crossed legs of the girl in the mini-skirt, the little outer swell of muscle where her thighs press together.
At the counter, chewing gum snaps again, and one thickly lined eye winks at her, too slow to be missed. Petunia blushes.
"You've talked a lot about when your sister left. It changed a lot of things for you. Can you tell me about a time after that when you felt happy?"
That stalls her. She stares at the radiator to the side of her armchair. An old drip from the nut at the top has been left to dry sticky and collect dirt. Petunia concentrates on the feel of her clasped hands in her lap, fingertips holding knuckles, and for a moment tries to insist to herself that there is not one particular period of four months prodding at her conscience.
"After school, a few years after… I thought about university." Her voice comes out slowly, but more smoothly than she had feared.
"You thought about it?"
"Well. I thought about it and then I went to it." She looks up. Felicity raises her eyebrows, cranes her jaw, just a little, encouraging.
"I was at Sheffield University for just over a term. I studied – art. I was quite good at drawing." She smiles because it feels easy but also crazy to admit it.
"That made you happy."
"Yes."
"Did you have friends there?"
"I. No, I don't think. I don't remember any friends. None in particular. There was a – I suppose a tutor."
"A drawing tutor?"
"Yes. We were friends – I think. She helped me. I felt a bit, oh, different I suppose. A bit behind? She said. I remember exactly – she said, 'You have more instinct than anyone. More natural understanding.'" She had said it one afternoon in her office. Pale December sun was shining through the floor-length windows and lighting the dust like the caul over an old photograph. Petunia remembers how their knees had almost touched. An open door.
"What a lovely thing to say. You were obviously very talented."
"I think I was a bit in love with her." Petunia laughs, and it sounds so loud and strident that she stops almost immediately.
Felicity is smiling at her, so just for the hell of it, and because the habit of talking comes much easier these days, she keeps on.
"It felt so different from school. It felt like I had chances to be different. I think. I think I thought it wouldn't change my life, but it might make my life easier."
"What did Vernon think?"
She laughs again. "Vernon said that I had unsuitable ideas – that I wanted to be like my sister."
"Did you want to be like her?"
"I think I wanted to be like myself."
"And after that term, when you had felt like there were chances to make your life better, what happened?"
"I found I was pregnant."
On Tuesdays and Thursdays it is the woman called Delphine. Petunia has never been introduced to her or said her name, but the man who cooks the eggs in the back once shouted it in her hearing, and it flutters in her head like a butterfly in a net.
"Good morning!" Delphine's smile is so enthusiastic it is impossible not to smile back. A little scar on her top lip stretches into whiteness, pulling into the red of her lipstick. "Tea?"
"Yes please."
"And you like a cake as well today? Or toast?" She has pulled a mug from the shelf and is turning it between her palms.
"No, no cake."
Delphine sighs exaggeratedly, turning to make the tea. "Never a cake. I think maybe you need to eat more. Eat eat eat."
Petunia glances around, but no one is paying any attention. Most of them are grimly face-down in their morning papers. One or two of the workmen are taking a break from their jackhammers and jawing at each other over fried eggs, tea-stained mugs and copies of The Mirror. Petunia looks at the cakes. There is a small selection, homemade-looking, on display in the side cabinet, mostly in combinations of flavours and ingredients that would not get a hearing in Good Housekeeping.
While Delphine has her back turned, filling the mug, thumb and forefinger lightly on the tap of the hot water can, Petunia forces down the habit of frugality and tries out a smile.
"Well, maybe a scone."
"Of course! And cream."
"No!" Petunia laughs. It's a quarter to nine in the morning. "Just jam."
Delphine tuts and pours the milk into Petunia's tea. "Go and sit. I'll bring it over."
Petunia chooses a table by the window, and carefully rearranges her skirt over her knees. It's been raining this morning. It has left great grey-brown birthmarks round the outflow pipes on the brickwork of the terraces opposite and even now it has stopped the sun is strained through a low drape of cloud.
"It's like four seasons this week, eh love?" One of the workmen is gesturing out of the window with his knife.
"Yes. Yes, it is."
"Still. Good for the gardens."
His mate's smirking into an overflowing bacon sandwich. Petunia smiles uncertainly and looks away.
There's a postcard lying on the table. A row of butterfly roof terraces under sodium light. An indistinct girl in a short fur jacket, a cigarette in her hand and a shopping bag at her feet. A dirty little tart, Vernon says in her head, but her own voice is stronger these days and Petunia's not so sure. She turns the card over. It's a flyer for a photography exhibition.
"Here you go!"
Delphine arrives with a mug of tea, full to the brim and tipping a little down the sides, and a scone, halved and spread lavishly with butter and jam.
"Ah! You are going to come?" She leans down, her hands flat on the table next to Petunia's tea. She doesn't wear any makeup apart from the lipstick; it makes her eyes soft, palely lashed, small pores open on the apples of her cheeks. A twist of her bottle-red hair curls round in the shape of her ear, as if it has just come untucked.
Petunia looks down at the card again. Delphine Morel. Private view. "This is yours?"
"Yes. It's a small exhibition, just photographs of friends who are artists. Some photographs of their studios." She laughs. "We like to give each other work."
Petunia turns the card back over again. "It's beautiful. I didn't know you were a photographer."
"I know. I make tea very well."
She turns and half slides onto the table, so she's perched on it with one leg, leaning down a little towards Petunia. Her smile is careful, and not like she's making fun.
"You should come."
"To the exhibition? I – don't really know much –"
"Come. For half an hour."
Delphine slides back off the table and goes back to the counter. Petunia looks again at the picture on the other side of the card. For a second she's convinced she sees the figure move, put the cigarette to her mouth. A familiar fright rushes at her, but her mind is playing tricks and the image is still.
At the counter Delphine serves another customer, calling the food order into the kitchen. She's busy suddenly, and Petunia can watch her serve coffee and toast without calling attention to herself. Shy of asking, Petunia wonders about Delphine's life. She imagines a little top-floor flat, photographs on the walls, beautiful ancient furniture. Perhaps – a girlfriend. The scone is heavy and a little dry, but the jam slides into her mouth and sticks to her lips.
The workmen have finished and left by the time Petunia gets up to pay. She has to scrape one of their chairs back under the table to get through, and Delphine looks up and grins.
"Two-fifty, please. How was your scone?"
"Lovely." The idea of the scone feels suddenly heated and indecent. Petunia unclasps her purse and fumbles in it for change.
"And you will come to the exhibition? I think you will like it."
"Perhaps."
She puts the coins into Delphine's hand, and Delphine's fingers close around them like a flytrap, catching her own fingertips for an instant.
"Sorry, I don't know your name. You come here every day –"
"Petunia. Evans."
"Petunia." She pronounces it as if it's Russian, Petchunya, someone else's name. Delphine looks at her steadily. "Sometimes I take photographs of people as well. I like faces that are beautiful and not so beautiful."
"Oh. I see. I'm – a little late for work." She angles her body towards the door of the café, feeling ridiculous. As if Delphine wants to sit her down right now and take her photograph. As if she wants to at all.
"Have a good day at work."
"Yes. Thank you. You too."
Petunia leaves the café and walks the five minutes to Careslow and Partners with the taste of jam in her mouth.
At seven months pregnant, Petunia had lost her footing climbing out of the bath and nearly fallen. She sat naked on the bathroom floor for 45 minutes until her bottom felt bruised and she shook from cold, one hand on the tight round of her belly, realising for the first time that what was in there was her child. Only when her heartbeat had finally slowed, and her sweat dried to a grubby skim, did she get to her feet and wrap herself in a dressing gown.
It's four oh six. Petunia has been woken by a strong cramp in her calf and now she is lying on her side staring at the red display of Vernon's new digital alarm clock. Four oh seven. She reaches down underneath her belly to try and pull the pillow into a better position, but the fluttering of her internal functions will not stop and she cannot keep still.
She has been awake long enough that she doesn't need to turn on the landing light to find her way to the stairs. The new curtains are double-lined, but still Privet Drive beams anaemically into her house. A grunt comes from the open bedroom door as she lowers herself off the top step. She stops for a moment; it's just her and the baby, breathing stealthily together so that he doesn't get up and follow them down to the kitchen.
A cup of tea has become a force of habit. When it is made, she sits at the kitchen table and props her feet on a chair, something she would not do during daylight hours. She's become an inhabitant of the night in the last few weeks: a person who sits in the dark and drinks tea. Sleep is becoming more and more elusive as labour gets closer, but at the same time Petunia's need for silence and privacy is growing.
She rubs slow circles on her stomach. Her entire body is colonised by this baby, her skin tight and full like an unpricked sausage, and she holds onto it greedily. A little girl, perhaps, the first of two sisters. Yes, a girl – she is sure of it. A short letter from Sheffield a month ago told her about a cousin, too, but Petunia is going to construct a new family out of herself and her own desires, and there won't be space in it for cousins. Petunia and her girls, with good strong names that are not flowers, girls who know real human languages and meet her in cafés to talk and drink tea.
In twenty minutes the stirring in her abdomen has ceased and Petunia dozes at the kitchen table. Outside, the car doors of Privet Drive are beginning to clunk, engines hacking into life.
"It's a geranium."
"Yes, I –" Petunia holds the pot in both hands. A little soil is escaping onto her fingers. "Thank you."
"You're welcome." Piers's smile exposes his canines. "I thought it would add a little colour to that window box."
Her cheeks prickle. "Yes."
For a long moment Petunia is at a loss, caught in the glare of Piers's grin, then Dudley suddenly flaps the paper shut and stands up from the sofa. He claps Piers on the shoulder. "I'll put the kettle on."
"No, I can do that." But she's stuck, plant pot in hand, Dudley's Sunday papers all over the coffee table.
"Don't be silly, Mother."
"Milk and two, please, love!" Piers calls towards the kitchen.
"God, you're a disgrace."
Piers looks back at Petunia, his smile a touch less confidently blazing. "Bit of a night last night. Need a little sugar boost."
"Oh."
"Here, let me." He shuffles the newspaper together and sets it in a pile to one side, gently takes the pot from Petunia's hands.
"It's leaking a bit."
"Oh, that's okay. We'll plant it out once we've had tea."
"Yes. Well. Shall we – sit down." She gestures towards the sofa behind him, lowering herself into the armchair opposite in time with him as he sits. He takes up less space on her furniture than Dudley: wirier, but with voluminous wavy hair; Dudley is starting to recede. They've been friends since secondary school, and a couple for over four years, and it is a hurt that Petunia can acknowledge, if only to herself and her counsellor, that so much of Dudley's life was lost to her.
It's only the second time they've been in her flat together, but Piers sits on her sofa with the ease of a friend, shoving the cushions about as if he doesn't notice the mismatch of colours. While Petunia consciously unclasps her fingers, a lingering fragment of Dursley notes his jeans and running shoes. There is the clacking of cupboards opening and closing in the kitchen.
"Tell Mum about the pub!"
"Oh yes! Dudley's licence came through. We've been celebrating."
Dudley sticks his head round the side of the door. "I am now a Designated. Premises. Supervisor." His voice is a parody of unchallenged fifteen-year-old pride. "I can sell booze to the masses. But I can't find your teabags."
Petunia puts a hand to her mouth. "Teabags!"
"Let's go out for tea." Piers is standing, kicking out his feet to straighten his jeans. "My treat."
They go to the café next to the station because it is close and Petunia fears striking out for the possibility of something smarter or more fashionable and finding nothing. She had not expected to see Delphine standing at the counter on a Saturday, coffee pot in hand. Her hair is twisted into a bun today, but she has the same red lipstick. It's a moment or two before she looks up, and surprise registers before the smile.
"Hello, Petunia."
"Hello."
"This is a surprise." She glances at Dudley and Piers who are flanking Petunia like bodyguards. "Please. Sit down. I'll come and take your order in two minutes."
The café is busier at the weekend. A family Petunia recognises has entirely occupied one corner of it and is building up a pile of plates and napkins, spilling pools of sauce. The two small boys, usually to be seen hurtling down Romola Road on three-wheeled scooters, are tugging at either end of a crumpled piece of paper, crayons held like knives. The mother nods at Petunia as they negotiate their way to a table in the corner.
When they sit, her head is suddenly full of the boys she brought up, who likely never fought with each other over a colouring book. She cannot imagine it.
As if he's thinking the same thing, Dudley says, "We were at Harry's last weekend. Did I tell you?"
"No. No, you didn't." She stares at him. They haven't talked about this in front of anyone else. From the corner of her eye she sees Piers pick up a laminated menu. She wants to ask how Harry is, but her brain feels like a stone in her head.
"I don't know what they're feeding that baby. It's huge."
"It is enormous," Piers says, from behind the menu. "Like it's wearing a fatsuit."
"Harry told me they're planning to have number three, which I really didn't want to know, but apparently he's on some mission to repopulate the planet. They've just exchanged on a massive house in Clapham so they can fit them all in. Moving next week."
"To Clapham?"
"Exactly. Five minutes on the number 37. You wouldn't even have to go through the whole fireplace business."
Piers clears his throat.
"Hello everyone. Have you decided what to have?" Delphine drops to a crouch next to Petunia's chair.
Dudley orders coffee. "What's the fudge cake like?"
"Amazing. Sarah made it this morning. My boss. Very chocolatey."
"Slice of that, then."
"Tea for me. And could you just leave the sugar bowl?"
"Of course!"
She looks up at Petunia through pale lashes.
"I'll have a coffee, please," then an impulse, "and a scone."
"A scone," Delphine smiles to herself as she writes it down, "and a coffee?" She shakes her head. "You are trying to surprise me coming in with men on Saturday and ordering coffee. Being mysterious."
"Oh yes. Mysterious woman, my mother."
"Very mysterious. Something a little bit amazing in her eyes." Delphine's looking up at her, a smile almost but not quite breaking, and Petunia feels light-headed and self-conscious. "I'm going to take her picture when she says yes."
Delphine tucks her pad in the pocket of her jeans then and is gone. When Petunia looks up, Dudley is gaping at her. Piers jabs him sharply with an elbow.
"Chocolate cake. You just can't help yourself."
"I remember opening the door and seeing it. I didn't know what it was. For about half a minute. I remember thinking that maybe Vernon had got a girl at his work pregnant. That was the first thing that I thought."
"What did that mean to you?"
She pauses for a moment, smoothes the end of her scarf where it drapes into her lap, smiles. "Relief. I thought – I really did – 'I can leave him'."
There is a letter. Mr and Mrs V. Dursley. Mrs V. Dursley. So it can't be. Petunia's stampeding pulse slows. The baby grunts in its sleep, shifts, crumpling the paper against the side of the basket. Petunia bends down, pinches it between thumb and forefinger and draws it slowly free.
She reads the letter three times and then drops it to the floor. Her hands are shaking, and she says to herself 'It's cold' and shuts the door on the bundle outside. Her bare foot slides on the letter – Albus Dumbledore's regret – and she presses it into the carpet with her toes.
"So you took the baby in."
"Not. Not at first. I remember thinking about the mess that was left in the sink. We had Vernon's area manager for dinner. I can't remember his name, but I remember we had Beef Wellington. I was soaking the roasting tin. I went into the kitchen and finished the washing up."
She stares at her reflection in the back of a spoon as she lets the water out of the plughole. Dark eyes glare back, then the reflection fogs and Petunia feels the burn of tears filling her eyes and spilling down her cheeks. Some awful physiological reflex trying to melt the frozen spike of her body into the shapes of grief. Well she won't have it.
When she brings the basket in and puts it on the floor at the foot of the sofa, the baby inside is trembling, its face is screwed up with some tremendous internal effort. There is a little wound on its forehead, which is beginning to leak blood from the stretch of its skin. Dried blood smears up into its hairline. Petunia runs a finger over the baby's sparse dark hair, and her hollow body fills up with a heat which feels nothing like love.
"Do you know why you hated him?"
"I don't think I really did then. I wasn't aware of thinking about anything except that I had a sort of a balance before. I was managing. There were things I didn't have to think about."
"Lily and her husband?"
"That was part of it. A big part."
"You missed her at that time?"
"Yes, I did. Yes. Every second."
The baby settles a little in the warmth of the house, and slowly blinks awake, makes a noise like parrot.
"Petunia! Petunia, what's going on down there?"
Petunia allows it to stare at her from dark green eyes for no more than half a minute – "Petunia!" – before she pushes the basket under the coffee table with a foot and folds herself double, gasping into her knees.
News comes on Sunday that Vernon's sister Marge has died. Petunia knew a little about the start of her illness, but almost nothing about the final stages. Marge had cut ties with Dudley in a way that Vernon had never quite managed.
On Monday the heat returns, and when Petunia comes in from work, she undresses to her petticoat and bare feet. In the bathroom she soaks a flannel in cold water, wraps it round one wrist and then the other and begins to feel cooler and calmer.
She sits at the little kitchen table to write the letter she has planned and her reluctance allows her to be distracted at first by the way the table rocks gently on uneven legs. She holds the pen firmly in her hand, presses down, and forces herself to write.
Dear Vernon,
Thank you for opening this letter –
Marge was a woman who bullied and disparaged endlessly, and Petunia is aware that to write kindly of her is self-serving. But she knows too that Vernon loved his sister as much as he ever loved anyone. Everyone, even a Dursley, has an allowance of love.
Petunia takes a breath, and for the five minutes it takes to write the letter, she locks up the guilt she shares with Vernon and with Marge, thinks of sisters, and writes a measured reflection of her own love instead.
When the letter is written, she seals and addresses it and leaves it on the kitchen table. She fills a glass from the tap and takes it to her windowbox. A hosepipe ban will be in place by the weekend if the weather reports are right. The soil is bone dry, and the water is sucked quickly in; a second glass turns it black and rich. A bud is beginning to open on Piers's geranium, a soft scarlet petal that folds itself tightly over Petunia's fingernail.
Petunia looks out of the window. Felicity's consulting room is in her third-floor flat. The gardener is clipping the hedge in the communal garden below. He stops and stretches, a fist at the small of his back.
She breathes out. "I hated myself. I hated everyone around me." It's more of a necessity than a relief to say it.
"It must have been a difficult way to live."
"It was difficult. I do see that now." There is a long pause, but Felicity says nothing. "I think you can become trapped, though. It gets to the point where it's easier not to remember that there are other ways to live." She thinks for a moment. "I gave myself excuses to be cruel."
"What were your excuses?"
"I told myself that people were cruel to me."
"Who was cruel? Who in particular?"
Petunia's hands are beginning to tremble; she clasps them in her lap. Suddenly tears are threatening. "I was," she gets out, and has to press her lips together. "Just me."
She packs a week's worth of underwear, two dresses, a spare pair of shoes. When she has money, she will replace it all.
"Stupid woman, you've got nowhere to go."
"There are places. I'll – find Dudley."
She zips the bag, and Vernon snatches it from her. "You don't talk to that boy."
"He's my family. Haven't I given up enough?"
"This!" Vernon sits down hard on the bed; his finger stabs towards her. "This is about her. Isn't it? Your abomination of a sister!"
The jolt of rage that goes through Petunia almost makes her shout out. She breathes for a second through her teeth. "Oh, Vernon. Don't be such a fool. This is about me."
She grabs the bag and her coat and stamps down the stairs. Outside the living room she pauses and looks at the photos on the mantelpiece. There is room in her bag, but she doesn't want to take anything with her. The Dursleys will stay where they are, to grin out smugly at Vernon for as long as he can stand it.
"You blamed Vernon."
"Yes. I blamed him for a very long time. He was never a good man. I – thought that excused – everything I did."
"You don't think that anymore."
But Petunia is in tears and can't answer.
It is five minutes before they can resume talking.
"We've talked about your nephew before. I think you blamed him too?"
"I did." She is exhausted. "And I was afraid of him. It felt unbearable."
"It wasn't his fault, I can see that. But, Petunia, you can't change how you felt then."
Petunia looks up. There is an ache behind her eyes that will not go away.
"Do you want to change things now?"
"I – Dudley – Dudley wants me to."
"I'm not talking about Dudley. Do you want to?"
They both wait for the answer. "Yes."
The sun is low and mellow when she leaves Felicity's flat. Petunia's breathing has evened out, and she fills her lungs, one breath for every six footsteps. Twenty yards up the road a short queue of people are boarding the number 37. Petunia breaks into a run, her heart beating with a dozen different fears and a totally alien excitement.
"Wait!"
Petunia glances at the clock. It is half-past six. She'll leave in five minutes.
The light isn't strong in her bedroom, and she has to angle her head to try and catch the low sun so she can see her face more clearly in the mirror. She has curled her hair and it lies in a neat wave, black intercut with silver, touching her face at the temple and cheekbone. Her lips are glossed pink, and grey eyeshadow and mascara make her eyes wider, almost surprised.
Her face shows its age, she thinks. She is fairly sure which side of beautiful and not so beautiful she falls on; she has lines and pores that do not flatter but do at least tell the truth. Still, it doesn't hurt to help things along. Petunia rummages in her makeup box. A dab of loose powder on her nose, a tentative swipe of rouge.
Petunia smoothes imaginary creases from her new dress, and touches a finger to the corner of her mouth to blot a smudge of lipstick that is not yet there.
She picks up a card from the coffee table on her way out, stops for a moment to look at it – the girl in the fur jacket is entirely still – then puts it in her handbag.
Mrs Bhattacharyya is on the stairs.
"Good evening, Miss Evans. How lovely you look."
Petunia smiles despite herself, flattered. "Thank you."
"You are going somewhere special?"
"I think so. Yes, somewhere special. I'm a little late." Petunia hurries down the stairs, heels clacking. "Have a lovely evening, Mrs Bhattacharyya."
"And you! And you!"
Outside it is warm still, the day sighing to a close. Down the street a single jackhammer is puttering. Petunia puts her hand to her brow to keep the low sun from her eyes, and heads out into the evening.