***
She was carrying out the fifth bag of trash that day. I can’t believe I paid to have all this shipped across the ocean. The only thing more idiotic would be paying to ship it back. Did she want to throw it out? What did it matter, really? It seemed she’d be childless. If some stranger was going to have to throw it out when she died, it might as well be her throwing it out now.
Why had she ever started a diary, thought she’d want to know, at some later date, how she had coped with the crisis of ‘82, or ‘85, or the three of ‘87, or the magnificent flop of ‘91? She did not want to remember now, and she hoped she never would. This trip, at least, seemed the last for the morning. The fifteen years of receipts, old appointment books, personal correspondence with people who didn’t speak to her any more, notes from her many graduate school classes, drafts of scholarly articles which had not fit in with current trends were gone “ this was the very last of it. I’m not going to bother shredding all this. No one cares what I’ve got here.
This time, when she went into her backyard to drag the rubbish sack over towards the bins, she was not entirely alone. The old man who she’d heard lived next door, but had never seen, was out staring at his rosebushes.
She stuffed the rubbish sack in the dented old bin and turned. “Hello,” she called out, “are you my neighbor?” Obviously he was, but how else could she open a conversation? “The people on the other side of your house told me you’re crazy, is it true?” is no way to start being neighborly, even if they did. I have to say something.
The man looked up from his rosebushes, which were heavy with fragrant blooms. “Hello yourself! Moody!” he said expectantly, holding out his gnarled, arthritic hand.
She walked the dozen steps to the hedge between their properties, taking his hand in hers and shaking it firmly. “Stewart,” she replied. “Pleasure to meet you.”
It was, too. The other neighbor “ she had started to call the woman that in her mind “ was a sour, unpleasant creature who disapproved, it seemed, of everyone and everything except her own son. Elizabeth was quite certain he was insufferable. This man seemed very different. He looked at her, one eye focusing, the other obviously not quite right “ the eye was mostly closed and seemed to be watering a little, and he smiled at her, a very courtly smile. “Likewise. How do you like the area?” he asked in that distinctive, gravelly voice.
“I like it. Very quiet, and nice old houses “ they have some personality. I was renting over where they all look alike and it was driving me insane. The agent told me this was an Oast house, years ago. I had to go look up what that was. I much prefer this house to those.”
“Never liked those new houses myself. Mine used to be a tithe barn, six hundred years ago or so ago.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “well, when they had tithes.”
“Really? Have you lived here long?” Was that polite? I’m never sure what people think is polite. Was I prying? Will he think I was prying? Maybe I was, too, I’m…
“Well, not all those six hundred years.” He had a growly, deep chuckle that matched his speaking voice very nicely. “My family has been here a very long time, though. I grew up in this house. When I was a little boy, I used to fly…paper airplanes onto the roof of yours from my bedroom window.” He seemed, all of a sudden, to be very interested in the beetles on his roses. He picked one off, squished it efficiently between his fingers, and dropped the remains. He did the same with another, and another. Then, he looked up and caught her watching him.
All of a sudden he flushed. He was wiping his fingers on his trousers, and then seemed to think that maybe he should not have wiped them on his trousers, because he was moving them oddly, as if he was trying to convince someone that he hadn’t just been squashing fat, juicy beetles with them and gotten the beetle blood all over.
“I have lemonade in the house. I made if from lemons this morning. Would you like some?” Where had her voice come from? Of course he wouldn’t want her lemonade. She was the teacher whose students wouldn’t eat the cake she baked and brought in, wasn’t she, the one the other teachers did not want to sit with in the lunch room. Still, it really was very nice lemonade, and…
“I’d love some. And I can go over to the hose pipe and wash my hands off while you’re inside politely pretending you didn’t see that, can’t I?” he asked ruefully.
“See what?” she asked, smiling, and turned around to go for her tray, and her glasses, and her hand-squeezed lemonade.
***
“You need to get some poison for them. I’m not quite sure what they call it “ you go in, and they have it in little sticks you push into the soil by the roots, or a sort of gravel you pour on near the base. You haven’t got a cat, have you? Because I don’t think it’s all that good for cats. It really keeps some of the other pests off, though. The thing is, then you can’t use the petals in po“ in recipes, and so forth. No, you take the cutters, and you get them right here. Yes, just exactly like that. You’re doing very well. Those bushes will be lovely in a bit.” His large, patient hands demonstrated with his secateurs, and she followed, as best she could, with hers. Her hands were not quite as strong and the stems were not slicing as neatly as his. Still, there was a little pile of the deadheaded blooms on her walk.
She had gotten into the habit of looking for him on Sunday afternoons sometimes. To be honest, on every Sunday afternoon, but he was not always out in his yard. Last week it had rained, and the week before it had been too hot to even think of leaving the air conditioning, so that it had been three weeks since she had last seen him, and August was halfway over.
“Are your fish alright with this weather?” she asked by way of conversation. She knew he had fish, because she could see them glinting in the pond from her bedroom window. He had never invited her into his yard; in fact, this was only the second time he had come over into hers “ there had turned out to be a little gate in the overgrown hedge. Of course he had remembered where it was, and she had come home from the library one day to find the hedge neatly trimmed back on his side, but not on hers, and a note stuck on it. Did she want him to trim it on her side, so they could pass through? She had scrawled “Of course!” underneath with the pencil she had stuck behind her ear, and the next morning, it had been done.
It was not difficult to imagine him going out in the moonlight and snipping patiently away at the hedge using the large, sharp clippers with which she had seen him trimming other bushes. A lot of older people didn’t sleep very well, and she had noticed he limped a bit. Probably there were nights when it hurt too much to sleep. She could imagine him going out there and looking at the fish then, although she’d never seen him do it.
“Yes, yes, they are. They’re from the Indian Ocean, actually, like the hot quite well.” He seemed uncomfortable for a moment, and then said, “I have to put salt in the pool for them. Had to rather, it doesn’t evaporate with the water, so I only had to do it once. “
“Really? I didn’t even know you could do that? I’m terrible with fish, though. The tanks get all green, and I never buy very nice looking fish to begin with, so they aren’t that much fun to look at, and then I feel terribly guilty because of course it isn’t their faults they don’t have the big, fancy tails, and it isn’t like they’re any worse at being fish, they’re just as fishy as the fancier fish, just not as fancy.”
He was silent, and she looked up. She was embarrassed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, the poor fish…” Would he think she was that shallow about people? He was looking at her with great interest. Finally he spoke.
“But the tails waving are pretty. They do look quite different than the others “ ribbony, and graceful, instead of darting and swift. I think they’d suit you better. Tell me, do you dance?”
She glanced at him. He was pretending to look at the faded rose in his hand, but she could feel his eye on her. He was probably just looking away when she turned her face up. She shifted her mouth a bit to the side and frowned.
“Well, I like to dance, and I did take dance lessons in school, but you know, there isn’t really any call for me to be dancing like that unless I get into some theatre group, or something, and I don’t have the time. I’ve got a lot of research I’m doing. And I love to ballroom dance “ I used to swing dance when I was younger, but there hasn’t been anyone for me to dance with for “ many years now.”
He tilted his head a bit to one side and considered her with interest. “Surely you’re not old enough for Jitterbugging?” he asked.
“Well, my parents taught me how to Lindy for the fifties revival in the seventies, so I suppose no, but yes. Did you…”
Before she could get flustered over having asked a lame man if he had liked dancing, he answered, thoughtfully.
“Well, there were times when we all did. I haven’t in years though, missing part of my leg.”
He said it expectantly, as if waiting to see what she would say. She considered carefully, and looked him straight in the eye when she answered. “You’re more graceful than darting and swift. I can’t see you in ribbons though. The imagination fails.”
She said it very seriously, except for her laughing eyes, and stood back, waiting to see how he would take it. Her reward was vast, when it came. He laughed, a deep, flowing laugh, and shook his head. Smiling, he turned back to the bush.
“Pretty color. Like that cotton wool you were playing with when I came out.” He was carefully examining the bush for aphids and might not have caught her smile.
“Not cotton wool, Mr. Moody. Actual wool. I dyed it myself with the color from drink mix packets. I hadn’t realized I matched the rose, but you’re right, they’re quite alike.”
She had halted in her snipping, a rose in her left hand and the clippers in her right. “I’m waiting for you to ask me what I was dyeing wool for,” she confided in a conspiratorial low voice.
“I was rather hoping you’d tell without my asking,” he replied in the same low tone. “Thought I might be able to fool you into thinking I knew more than I did.” He grinned at her.
“Ah, yes, men! Well, I spin it. I’ve got a drop spindle, and I take that fluffy stuff and spin it into yarn. Like Rumplestitskin, you know, only wool, not straw. And it stays wool, doesn’t turn into gold.” She looked up and smiled very broadly at him from under the brim of her large straw hat, “It’s like magic, you know. You start with fluff and end up with string “ yarn, I mean.”
“Really? Like magic?” He smiled at her with an odd expression, and she smiled even more broadly.
“Well, like I’d imagine magic. There is no such thing, of course, but when I’m spinning, it seems magical. It seems “ oh “ like just anything could happen. Having the wool a pretty color only makes it even better. It’s very convenient, the thorns on the bushes do help keep it from blowing away as it dries.”
He nodded, and then, looking at the sky, in which, if he looked carefully, he might see a wisp of white, he reacted as if it were full dark clouds. “Come on. Let’s get this one done. Didn’t you say you’d be leaving for a visit home on Tuesday?”
She had. She’d asked him to take in her mail, and he hadn’t answered directly. “Yes, and I’ll be gone till the thirtieth.”
“I’ll still be here when you’re back then. I’ve got a teaching job myself, up North. More a training academy type of position. It relates to my former line of work. I can take in the post for you though; I don’t leave until the first.”
“Oh! Does your mail need taking in while you’re gone?” she countered immediately.
“No, no I don’t think I’ll be getting much. If you could just clear away whatever sort of bits of rubbish they come and stick in my front gate. That other one is rather particular…and I ought to be back from time to time, to check on things.” He snipped off another dead bloom, and then yet another.
“I can do that.”
She could do that, and if it was just like her life that after more than a year in a country she should finally make a friend, only to have him miraculously find a job in another town almost immediately thereafter, well, at least it was just her luck, and pretty much what she would have expected.
Maybe, she was thinking as she fell asleep that night, I can check for the town junkyard. They might have a half starved dog I could make friends with. If she was sad, very sad, it was a sadness she was used to, and she did not cry much before she fell asleep.
***
There was a commotion of some sort going on out there by Mr. Moody’s house. There were police cars in front, and Mrs. Pain-in-the-Butt out there gesticulating.
It had started early. She was up, watching from her window, meaning to go downstairs and offer him a cup of tea over the hedge to wish him well in his new job. It was no joke to take up teaching; she hoped they wouldn’t make mincemeat of him, although she rather thought they wouldn’t. Whatever his former line of work was, he didn’t talk about it, and since as far as she knew organized crime did not have formal training academies she tended to think he had worked for the government or the military in the sort of position you gloss over at cocktail parties. A man like that ought to have no problem with a group of at young adults “ or older adults, for that matter. How many times have I wished I had a few weeks at the State Police Academy when I’m staring down a character in my classroom? No, he ought to be alright.
It did seem odd that such a solitary person “ she’d never seen anyone come visit him in the past few months, although, of course, she did not keep an actual watch on his house “ that such solitary individual would have anyone come to see him off. Those two didn’t look very friendly, either. They looked menacing, actually, and she was not very happy about that. And there they were “ he’d been out by the pool, saying goodbye to his fish, she supposed, and…
There were more people arriving “ a red-headed man was arguing with the police. Mr. Moody was out of the house again- he’d gone into the kitchen half an hour earlier. She hoped he’d look up as he went, but he didn’t. Well, he was off on a new adventure, and why would he think she’d be pathetic enough to be watching his departure out the window.
Because all he’s done is help you a bit with your rosebushes. He can’t possibly know he’s the closest thing to a friend you’ve got on an entire continent. A real friend, not just someone who was willing to sit with her at the cafeteria table, like that little Miss Walters had been willing to at orientation. Well, that wouldn’t last long. Miss Walters would realize she was the odd man out on staff and retreat, unless Miss Walters was even odder man out than she, which, who knew, she might be.
Taking out her garbage half an hour later that morning, she realized the fish were jumping and splashing, making quite a bit of noise. She let herself through the gate and made her way over to the pond.
“What ugly pond fish,” she actually said aloud. “There’s no accounting for taste. They’re probably really rare and worth a thousand pounds each. You’d think they knew he was gone though. I hope they catch enough flies and things for themselves; I have no idea what you feed them.”
The fish were darting around, very agitated, and flipping out of the water in front of her.
“I know he’s gone,” she said, “But he’s just gotten a nice job. He probably needs it to feed you. How about I come visit you every day? Well, most days. I wouldn’t want you to be upset if I miss one.’ She stood next to the pond, talking, almost crooning, in a calm voice, but they were still agitated when she finally had to turn and, sighing, make her own way to work.
Muggle Matters by ProfPosky
Chapter Notes: It has taken me a very long time to get this chapter up, but not because I'd lost interest in the story - this has been written since before chapter one was posted! If you are a loyal returning reader, bless you for remembering If you are a new reader, bless you too, for taking a chance.
As always, I do not own the Potterverse or its normal inhabitants. Elizabeth and the roses are my own.
One million thanks to my betas Ravensgryff and coolh5000!!
Chapter Endnotes: I have a definite idea of where this house is, and no idea at all if there are any Oast houses or Tithe barns nearby. I have been in both, but far away from this secret location!