Sheltering the Moonchildren

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sheltering the Moonchildren

Saturday 1 – Sunday 23 November 1986

Old Basford and Carlton, Nottingham.

Rated PG for accidental violence, mild petting, legal drugs, deceit... lots of reasons really.

On Saturday Remus walked down to the local rubbish dump. Once he had checked that he was alone amid the broken fridges and shredded car tyres, it was a simple case of sifting through the muck. He found plenty of rotten timber, ruined carpets and curtains, even sections of beds, all free for the taking.

He performed his usual trick of shrinking the useful items to portable size and arrived home with enough molecules to make his Transfiguration of the attic permanent: a floor and walls, furniture for two dormitories, even enough fabric – if Ariadne would show him how to clean it properly – to provide drapery and linen. He was well on the way to setting up his guest rooms when the doorbell rang.

The neighbours hardly ever came to call; this time it was Mrs Ponderator from next door, wanting to borrow a cup of sugar. Remus invited her in, reminding himself that she had been a great friend of his mother's, and that she must wonder why he didn't make more of an effort to be sociable.

While he was measuring out the sugar the fireplace crackled. Mrs Ponderator's jaw dropped in astonishment as the flames flared green and Ariadne stepped out of them.

"Good afternoon," she smiled, "I'm Ariadne Lupin – "

"You're... excuse me, but is that a door? The flames look so real, I could have sworn..." And Mrs Ponderator was on her feet, intent on walking through the fireplace herself.

Remus was quicker. He reached the fire ahead of his visitor, and was waving his wand in her face almost before Ariadne realised that the stranger was a Muggle.

Mrs Ponderator's eyes crossed. She swayed, then shook herself and focussed on the newcomer. "Ah, you must be Mrs Lupin." She cast an eye over Ariadne's work robes, but was too polite to comment on her peculiar dress sense. "I'm the thief who only visits when she wants to ransack your larder – I haven't been here since before you renovated the kitchen. I was admiring so hard that I didn't even hear you come in."

"We've been renovating upstairs too," said Remus, purely for want of a more imaginative line of conversation.

"Ooh, I never even noticed that you had the builders in. Can I take a look? I know I'm nosey, but I love poking around other people's houses."

Ariadne behaved impeccably. She followed Remus and Mrs Ponderator up the new staircase without for a second betraying that she too was seeing it for the first time. He hoped she would like the improvements. Mrs Ponderator's admiration was loud enough for two.

Unfortunately, Mrs Ponderator's admiration also gave anvil-sized clues about where Remus had betrayed his use of magic. She kept saying things like, "You wouldn't have thought there was so much space up in this attic – it looks quite small from the street," and, "The furniture looks wonderful – but won't it be awkward to move it all downstairs when the carpet-layers come?" and, most fatally of all, "But if you're planning for a large family, won't you need another bathroom – just here?"

Remus mumbled something about future plans when finances had recovered (which, when he came to think about it, was the truth), and he began to wonder just how this Muggle had managed for so long to deceive herself so effectively about her magical neighbours. Over a period of thirty years, she must have noticed something odd about his family.

After Mrs Ponderator had taken her sugar away, Ariadne said, "We're needing to cover our tracks better, are we not? We're giving ourselves away without even realising."

And he remembered that he had warned her that this was what living among Muggles would be like, and that she hadn't begun to understand what he had meant. "Mrs Ponderator is right," he said. "If we're to have regular guests, we will need another bathroom." It was a very, very bad moment to remind Ariadne that she had married a man who was also chronically poor.

"Can you not Transfigure the metal bed-heads into porcelain?" she naïvely asked him.

"I can make the appropriate shape, but I couldn't engineer the plumbing properly. We'd need to call in Cloaca Harington to be certain it was hygienic, or even functional, to say nothing of compatible with whatever the Muggles have already put there." There it was again – they couldn't afford the services of Cloaca Harington Ltd., located at the discreeter end of Diagon Alley, and proudly building wizarding plumbing systems since A.D. 532.

"Never mind. We'll manage," said Ariadne bravely.

* * * * * * *

Ten days later Remus was wondering if they would manage. Connell Dewar was tremendously excited to be introducing the glories of the Wolfsbane Potion to the new friends who had suffered the same problems as himself. But before they even sat down to their first dinner together, Marcia Lovell was already complaining that he spoke too loudly and too fast. "Why couldn't he just help peel the vegetables instead?"

Marcia was not one to shirk her share of the chores, and she resented anyone who was less principled. But none of the other werewolves was capable of Marcia's almost demonic energy. Connell was far too excited to settle to any task for longer than five minutes. Ulrica Phelan was, as Ariadne said, "like somebody who's been standing too close to a Dementor." She could sit immobile for hours on end. When Marcia snapped at her to "come and wash up," Ulrica dragged herself somnambulantly to the kitchen and stood in front of the sink, but she seemed unable to turn on a tap. And Blethyn Wolcott left the house immediately after dinner, provoking a bitter tirade about freeloaders who eat other people's food but sneak away before it's time to wash up.

Adolphus Randall had the best of intentions. He certainly never meant to be any trouble to anyone. But it never occurred to him to initiate an offer of help; he even had to be asked to pick his own dirty socks up off the living room floor. Ulrica wept her eyes out in protest at the smell of his cigarettes, but it never occurred to her to ask him to stop smoking, or even to leave the room herself. While Adolphus generally complied with polite requests, he seemed completely deaf to demands that he not smoke indoors – he really didn't seem to know he was doing it.

Then there was the inevitable problem of practical resources. The larder was empty after three days. On Wednesday Blethyn Wolcott bought fish and chips all round. On Thursday Marcia demanded that everyone donate to a kitty. Adolphus complained about her high-handed tone, but no-one refused to contribute. However, everyone's resources were already strained. They were all on low incomes, and they had had to sacrifice a week of wage-earning to travel to Nottingham.

And of course having only one bathroom wasn't working. Remus tried to assert his authority as the host and organise a staggered bathroom roster. But Connell drank around a gallon of water a day; Ulrica was frequently nauseated by some medication prescribed by her Muggle Healer; Adolphus freely announced to anyone who cared to listen that he was constipated; Marcia complained that the hours she spent locked in the bathroom with her hair-dryer were necessary if she wanted to keep her job... In short, they all wanted to be exempted from the roster. As for Lycaonia Tungsten, she didn't bother to join the queue. At first she tried to Conjure a spare toilet and shower in the attic cavity between the two dormitories. Remus was only just in time to prevent Adolphus Randall from using it. It took him a long twenty minutes to explain to Lycaonia why plumbing didn't work that way, that any workable bathroom had to be integrated into the existing Muggle network. Lycaonia was agreeable about the rebuke, but after that she simply took the Floo back to her own house every time she needed the bathroom, or anything else that the Lupins couldn't immediately supply. When the Muggles asked her what she was doing, she showed them how to use the Floo and invited them to make free use of her house. Remus saw that if they kept this up even the Floo powder bill would be unmanageable.

Lycaonia found it difficult in general to remember that her fellow-guests were Muggles. She knew that werewolves were already informed about the existence of the magical community, that the Statute of Secrecy didn't apply to them in the same way as to other Muggles, so she saw no reason to minimise her magical behaviour. Indeed, she didn't have a very clear idea what was magical behaviour. She would leave ten pairs of knitting needles merrily flashing away in the air, while she sat down to concentrate on the tricky turn in the eleventh, or she would Summon and Banish the cooking utensils with gay abandon. When it became obvious that Lycaonia couldn't be warned ("Oh, was that magic? Mr Randall has never commented on it, so I thought everyone could do that") Remus took to warning the Muggles that it was wiser not to discuss this kind of thing outside the household.

"People won't believe it anyway," said Ulrica gloomily. "They don't believe in werewolves, so why should they believe in automatic knitting needles?"

"But if the Ministry for Magic found out that you'd been discussing it, you'd be in trouble regardless of whether anyone believed you."

"We're in trouble anyway. Being a werewolf is trouble."

Remus knew he could not rely on the werewolves' discretion, but he still wasn't prepared for the weekend. They were making so much noise over a Muggle game called Monopoly that he didn't hear the doorbell ring. He had no idea that Muggles were entering the house until – between a count-out of imitation cash and a roll of the dice – he caught Ariadne's gentle tones murmuring, "Of course it's no trouble. Remus will be pleased to see you. Do come in."

Remus was not pleased to see Mrs Reed, triumphantly bearing a folder that he had accidentally left at school on Friday, and he was certainly not pleased to see that she was followed by all three of the other Year Two teachers, together with the student-teacher of one of them.

"But this is a bad time," Mrs Reed faltered. "You're having a party."

"It's not a party," said Ariadne. "Just a few friends who – "

"Ulrica," interrupted Blethyn Wolcott, "if you complain again about how wizards persecute werewolves, I'll put my next hotel on Mayfair."

Remus froze. The silence was so profound that he could hear Lycaonia Tungsten's racing pulse. Every Muggle in the room knew that someone had overstepped some invisible mark.

"As you heard," Ariadne cheerfully finished, "a few friends who are liking to play board games. Ulrica generally chooses to play the werewolf. And I'm thinking that Lycaonia is the witch."

"Let's not disturb the game," said Remus, hoping frantically that the teachers hadn't seen that the game was only ordinary Monopoly. "We can talk shop in the study."

"But, my dear, there's only one chair..." began Lycaonia in her most helpful tone. As the living room door closed, Remus heard an ominous pop! behind him. He tried to lead the way upstairs slowly, but he wasn't slow enough, for as he pushed the study door open, Lycaonia was still inside, merrily Conjuring chairs to place around a card table laid with a Derby tea service. The teachers exchanged startled glances, which at least prompted Lycaonia to use the door to exit the study, but only Mrs Reed spoke.

"Thank you so much for agreeing to let work intrude on your private life," she said. "I'm afraid this is the price-tag of teaching – you can never have an absolute plan for a day without your pupils This meeting is rather impromptu, Remus. Originally I only dropped in at Barbara's because she'd left some folders behind. But then we discovered that one folder was yours, and we started talking about the students, and we realised there were problems to discuss. So we rang the others to ask if they could spare an hour, but we don't seem to have your telephone number anywhere. Anyway, I had planned to pick you all up and take you back to my house, but Mrs Lupin very kindly said we could talk here. We feel it's time to make a full analysis of literacy levels in Year Two..."

Remus caught himself wondering what on earth Ariadne could have been thinking. But the other teachers were eagerly explaining their concerns, and they had actually begun to make a list of Children at Risk of Not Reading by Easter before the study door flew open again.

Lycaonia Tungsten was bearing a teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl, teaspoons and two plates of biscuits.

The problem was, she wasn't carrying a tray.

Remus toyed with the idea of Conjuring a glass one into her hands, but there was too much risk that this would surprise her into dropping the lot. So he simply grabbed as much of her load as he could handle and asked how the game was progressing.

"Oh, it's finished. Blethyn bankrupted all of us in two more moves – those Muggle games are fun! So now they're all Flooing to my house to borrow the bathroom, and then I'm going to charm Connell's wireless to receive WWW so that we can hear the Bats play the Catapults – I'm teaching them the rules of Quidditch. Ariadne is boiling the werewolf potion."

"More jargon from that fantasy game," Remus muttered to his visitors, but this time there was no disguising how "eccentric" his friends were. He didn't know how to hint to Lycaonia that her conversation was inappropriate, so he just thanked her for the tea and switched the conversation back to the children before the teachers had a chance to ask any more questions.

The teachers' meeting proceeded smoothly for half an hour: Mrs Reed cheerfully accepted the duty of tutoring the At Risk group, and they began to explore strategies for distributing her other pupils among the other classes. The main impediment was that this began to look very like Streaming – the wicked practice of grouping students according to academic ability. The Local Education Authority had, of course, utterly prohibited Streaming, and the Headmaster would not support such a seditious strategy.

And then... the fatal clatter of footsteps sounded up the stairs: Blethyn's heavy stride, Ulrica's shuffle, Marcia's tapping, Adolphus's creaking limp, Connell's lithe jump (which presented a serious threat to the upper-storey flooring), the swish of Lycaonia's outlandish skirts... the Wolfsbane Potion must be ready to drink. And the chatter that filtered through the door was lethal: "werewolves", "transformation", "full moon", "Ministry for Magic". Connell Dewar's voice sailed clearly above the rest:

"Dinna forrrget Rrrremus, Arrriadne! Eh'll take him his potion. We're not wanting those teachers to fehnd out he's a werrrawolf!"

Ariadne began to say that the teachers shouldn't be disturbed, but within thirty seconds Connell Dewar stood in the doorway, a goblet of steaming Wolfsbane Potion in his hand.

Retreat was impossible: Remus had no option but to accept it gracefully.

"I hope you don't mind my asking, Remus," said Mrs Reed, "but is that drink part of the role-playing game? What exactly are your friends doing?"

Remus drained the goblet, wondering how he was going to escape this one. When he looked up, Ariadne had replaced Connell in the doorway.

"Did Remus not explain that they are rehearsing a drama?" she asked. "The effect of the smoke rising from the goblet... we managed that very nicely, did we not? Connell's very enthusiastic about it, and he's not understanding about not interrupting people who are at work; I'm hoping you can sympathise."

She removed the goblet and closed the door. A kindly light beamed in Mrs Reed's eye: she understood perfectly well about young people with sub-normal intelligence.

They stumbled through to the end of the discussion, as only Mrs Reed was still interested in it. All the other teachers exchanged questioning glances every time anyone downstairs made a sound. They were bursting with curiosity about Remus's private life, and he wondered if, after all they had seen and heard, they would still feel comfortable working with him at school.

Finally they descended the stairs. He wanted to show them the door, but of course Mrs Reed just had to say good bye to Ariadne, and the others were dying to check out the latest antics of the eccentric friends. They all entered the living room just as Marcia Lovell was emerging from the Floo. The Quidditch commentator on the radio was describing the acceleration and precision of the Cleansweep Ten. Lycaonia had set up six pairs of autonomous knitting needles. And she herself was in the process of Summoning her Derby tea service down from the study and Transfiguring the pieces back into plant pots.

The girl from teacher training college could no longer restrain her discomfort. She shrieked that she was hallucinating and collapsed in tears on the sofa.

* * * * * * *

Remus wanted to join her. But Lycaonia Tungsten's nervous suggestion that it might be time to call in the Ministry Obliviators prodded him to produce an alternative solution now. So he scraped the last of the Floo powder from the jar (yes, the new stock of Floo that Ariadne had brought home on Thursday) and called the Auror Dormitories to explain their predicament to Kingsley Shacklebolt and beg for for emergency assistance.

When Kingsley stepped out of the hearth he swiftly herded the student-teacher to the foot of the stairs. He Memory-Charmed her, showed her to the front door, and Accio-ed Mrs Reed to repeat the procedure. They were all still in the post-Obliviation daze when Kingsley firmly closed the door on the last one.

"Have a nice cup of tea, Auror Shacklebolt, " said Lycaonia, apparently unaware of her personal contribution to the chaotic situation.

"Actually I'm not yet an – " Kingsley began, as he accepted the tea. "Bother, this is complicated. I'll have to file a report on this, Remus. I can see that the situation was complicated. Would it be better if I didn't know too much about what was happening?"

"It was just Muggles who burst in without knocking, so we didn't have time to turn the Wireless off," said Lycaonia. "They heard about Quidditch, that's all."

"I see. Some Muggles had hysterics because they heard about a new sport. Yes, very convincing..."

But how many more times could they rely on Kingsley to bail them out? For one moment, Remus indulged the unworthy thought that he didn't care if no werewolf in the world ever tasted Wolfsbane again.

But they did, of course. Their final dose was due the next day. And the six wolves slept soundly in their dormitories. Remus slept at the top of the stairs, guarding the space between Ariadne and her monstrous guests. However, Ariadne had been right to assume that the correct dosage depended on body mass. She had measured carefully, and no monsters haunted their house that night.

On Monday the exhausted werewolves camped in the dormitories, including Remus, who had to send Ariadne next door to borrow Mrs Ponderator's telephone to plead illness to the school. Ariadne had never used a telephone before, and reported, "I was not knowing how many of those teachers were listening, so I spoke softly, and the secretary did not understand me. She thought I was saying that you're ill because you've been drinking. I'm hoping she did not say so to the academic staff."

On Tuesday the guests went home. They waved good bye with a cheery, "See you in three weeks!"

And Remus tried not to let his heart sink.

* * * * * * *

Mrs Reed mentioned, almost dreamily, "It's funny how I can't remember much about that meeting at your house, Remus. But the minutes indicate we managed some very good work. You can run today's spelling test while I mark the maths."

Remus wondered how one spelling test could be helpful for twenty-five different children. Terry Boot pulled his pencil laboriously across the page, writing out leef, teecha, beed, while Jacqueline Sutton tapped hers impatiently against the desk to draw attention to her neatly scripted bread, head, threaten, and Dolly Clott made scratches that didn't look like any word at all. Search, year, learn...

"Dolly's are all wrong," said Jacqueline smugly. "She didn't learn the E–A sounds."

"Let's not talk about other people's work," said Remus.

"But when I finished writing each word I could see over to the next table. And Dolly was just writing rubbish."

"That's enough, Jacqueline," said Remus.

Perhaps he spoke too sharply, because Jacqueline glared at him before vengefully leaning over to Dolly's chair and hissing, "When you aren't good at things you should take more trouble to hide your mistakes. You're stupider than Silly Sammy!"

Dolly's gap-toothed mouth crumpled, while Terry Boot's blue eyes narrowed and he clenched his chubby fists silently.

"Jacqueline," said Remus, "stop talking in class and hand out a maths sheet to everyone."

Jacqueline stood up and began to hand out maths sheets, but she couldn't resist muttering angry asides to her classmates. As she passed Jonathan Miller she was in exactly the right place for her murmur to carry to every ear equally. "When Dolly's a bald old woman in a wheelchair, she might have just begun the first page of the Violet Book."

Dolly's face dissolved in tears and Terry's exploded with red at the same instant as Silly Sammy levitated himself from his perch on Mrs Reed's desk and hurled himself through the air. He landed with a resounding clonk on Jacqueline Sutton's head.

Jacqueline crumpled silently to the floor before Remus had time to catch her.

Several children burst into tears.

"Sammy!" gasped Gershom Wallace, his mind firmly on the most important matter.

"She's dead!" shrieked Terry above the din.

And while Mrs Reed herded the children back from crowding around Jacqueline, Sammy leapt nimbly into the air and shattered into a thousand smithereens. The pieces crashed to the floor and rolled around like marbles.

Ten minutes later Remus returned from the school office. An ambulance was on its way and the Suttons had been informed. Jonathan Miller had brought a blanket, Autumn Silverstone had provided a cushion, and all the children were assembled in a semi-circle around Mrs Reed and a feebly-stirring Jacqueline. They were all mute except Gershom, who was still gabbling about Silly Sammy, but only Terry remained tearful. By the time the ambulance arrived, Wayne Elliot was ready to be excited about seeing a real one, and asked if he could go to hospital too, "because I'd be a real help to the doctor, holding his steffiscope and shaking his barometer and all."

While Mrs Reed reasoned with Wayne, Remus had one minute to ensure that he would be the first one back in the classroom. In the doorway he Summoned the fragments of Silly Sammy, reassembled him with a Reparo, and held him aloft as the children stampeded through the cloakroom.

"Mr Lupin fixed him!" said Jonathan Miller. "He must have found a really strong glue in the stock cupboard. Did you use UHU, Mr Lupin?"

"Stupid, he didn't have enough time to fix anything," said Wayne Elliot. "Silly Sammy couldn't have broke after all. He must have just rolled away so we couldn't see him, and Mr Lupin simply picked him up again."

Terry snatched his glance away from the intact puppet and scuttled back to his seat. Remus knew he must try to speak to him alone. But Terry steadily avoided him all day.

It was the last day of his teaching round. Most of the children shook hands with him on their way out of school. But Terry hid behind Mrs Reed until he saw his sister standing on the step. Then he marched out of school clinging to Lucy's hand.

* * * * * * *

Remus had no homework, but Ariadne spent the evening scratching away at her report on the Moondew potion. He sat down next to her, watching the torchlight dancing on the red lights in her hair, hoping – what? That she would read it to him? He knew he wouldn't understand a word.

Finally, as she paused to turn a page, he asked, "Does it bother you to work so long and hard – that we never do anything?"

She smiled ruefully. "I'm always telling myself that it's only for eight more months. But there are days when eight months seems a very long time."

And then, quite abruptly, she began to write again. He hoped she wasn't remembering that if only they could afford domestic help... if only they could pay to transport the Wolfsbane Potion... if only he were the kind of man whom her parents didn't want to criticise – in short, if only they had more money – then everything would be smoother.

In fact, he wondered what she was thinking. He found he had no idea. It seemed a long time since she had confided in him. When – and why? – had that stopped? Once she had let him feel her feelings, think her thoughts and dream her dreams. Now she suddenly seemed impenetrably other.

"Ariadne," he tried again. She looked up, and he found he didn't know what to say.

She laid down her quill and stood up to hug him. "Dearest, what's really bothering you?"

She had always been a very affectionate wife. When he was holding her in his arms it seemed foolish to suspect her of coveting worldly goods. When he did not speak, she began to kiss him; her mouth was warm, and he didn't understand why he was thinking: but this is evading the point.

Ten minutes later she said, "I really do have to finish this report, Remus."

He released her, and she continued to write. Her hands were small and slim: they looked so fragile as her quill flew over the page, not at all like hands that had changed the world by first brewing Wolfsbane. How long had it been, he asked himself, since they lost the miraculous intimacy of their first six months of marriage?

He had answered his own question. It was now almost a year since he had begun to feel that Ariadne was somehow remote from him. At first he hadn't worried; they had both been busy, and he had accepted that ups and downs were to be expected. Then she had revealed the Wolfsbane Potion, and with it a rapturous renewal of intimacy. But after that first flush of success, she had had to negotiate the realities of her actions: that her brew was illegal, that it would cost money, that their home would be crowded with strangers, that they could never rule out the terrifying possibility of accidentally poisoning someone. Throw Professor Jigger into the equation, and he completely understood why Ariadne must be too exhausted to spare any energy for a perpetual honeymoon.

He reminded himself how he had always been whatever she wanted of him – teacher, confidant, comrade-in-arms, lover. Now, it appeared, she just wanted an ordinary husband. That wasn't an unreasonable requirement.

But she was still the glowing hearth in his winter, the flowing river in his desert, the steady shelter in his rainstorm, the lilting melody in his routine, the bright sunrise that banished the terrors in his night, and everything else the poets had ever promised. And he wasn't ready to give it up. He didn't think he would ever be ready to think of Ariadne as ordinary.