Cold Feet

Later that same day, Hermione met up with her very own link to the world of the single parent.

Ginny Weasley had very recently become a single mother. Her son, Francis, was almost six months old, but Ginny hadn’t seen Francis’ father since she told him she was going to keep the baby. Nine months after the whirlwind romance that resulted in one very-much unplanned pregnancy, relations had quickly deteriorated to such an extent that, when Francis was born, Ginny merely included the man who gave him half his genes on the list of recipients for a birth announcement via owl.

Ginny wasn’t exactly thrilled to receive the owl from St. Mungo’s ‘congratulating’ her on her pregnancy, but after it appeared, there was never any question that she would be a good mother. It was the ultimate cruel irony. The weekend before Ginny met the man who would put her in that situation, she, Hermione, Harry and Ron had visited their old Hogwarts friend Neville Longbottom and his newborn baby in St. Mungo’s. Neville’s lovely wife, Carolina, had Hermione and Ginny crossing their legs with her tales of in-depth investigations at St. Mungo’s and the subsequent horrors of pregnancy and labour without any pain-relieving spells (or so she claimed). Harry didn’t get anywhere near Hermione for a week.

“I don’t think I have a maternal bone in my body,” Ginny announced that evening as they drank Firewhiskey and told each other what they really thought of Neville’s ugly bundle of joy, and Hermione very much agreed. But Ginny certainly had a maternal bone in her body a couple of months later.

“Great,” she said, casting an “Incendio!” on the letter, watching it burn to ashes, then clapping her hands together as though she had just made a decision about what to have for lunch. “I’m going to be a single mother. Better than getting myself a cat and being a garden-variety single woman, I suppose. At least people will know I had one good shag before my life ended.”

“But… how…?” Hermione began.

“How what?” Ginny asked. “How did I get pregnant? Well, Hermione, it goes like this—”

“How will you do it on your own?” she interrupted seriously. She didn’t know why, but she suddenly felt quite breathless. Her heart beat like a trapped bird in her chest, as though she had been the one who received the letter. She was much more worried than Ginny was.

Ginny always gave the impression that she drifted aimlessly through life with nothing but pure luck on her side. Certainly in the years Hermione had known her since they first met at Hogwarts, she had managed to avoid most of the crises that afflicted the average teenage or twenty-something girl. She got a fairly good degree in Charms at the same university Hermione had attended – even final examinations didn’t stop her from going on a trip to London the night before her last paper. She managed to do quite well despite hardly ever spending all night in the library. True, she hadn’t come top of her class in a very difficult discipline like Hermione had, but Ginny wasn’t bothered about things like that. While the rest of them trudged from interview to interview, desperate to find a job, Ginny never bothered. She met the man who gave her her first proper job at the Daily Prophet in the Three Broomsticks when she spilled her pink cocktail on his white designer robes.

Not that Ginny really needed a job. What with her father’s promotion to Minister of Magic when she was nineteen and Fred and George’s huge success with their joke shop business – well, joke shop empire now – her family were very comfortable and rather wealthy these days. She had accounts under her father’s name at most of the shops in Redmead and Diagon Alley, and Arthur Weasley was more than happy to indulge his only daughter and youngest child, especially after a whole childhood in which Ginny had had to go without and be happy for it.

In short, Ginny had an ideal life. She was financially comfortable, clever, easy to get along with and she was liked by men and women alike. It was as if a fairy godmother had remained by her side throughout her late teens and through her twenties, deflecting all the boredom, ugliness and low-level unhappiness that touched the average existence, making sure Ginny always had painless, amicable break-ups and never worried too much about what to do with her life. Until the fateful night on Newquay beach when the fairy went AWOL, Ginny met ‘what’s-his-name’ and conceived her son.

“How will you do it?” Hermione asked again. “How can you afford to have this baby on your own?”

At the age of twenty-six, Ginny had only recently decided she would take no more handouts from her parents but try to make her own way in life. She had taken the last handout (so she said) and was wavering between careers in robe-designing or feng shui consultancy (which was actually a serious science in the Wizarding World).

“What will you do without a partner to support you through this?” Hermione persisted.

Ginny was thinking about cheese.

“I’ll save a lot of money over the next nine months,” she told Hermione optimistically. “Even if Mum and Dad refuse to help out, which they won’t. There are plenty of things I can cut back on. Alcohol, cheese… Damn. No wine or Brie for nine whole months. I don’t know which is worse. But at least I know I’m not going to be tempted to go crazy in the summer sale at Gladrags this year. Not if I’m going to be as big as a cow.”

Ginny never really looked like a cow. Over the next three months, she was an exemplar of that mythical pregnant woman who ‘glowed.’ No varicose veins. No spots. No piles. She got pretty big, of course, but she was hardly a blimp. Her copper-red hair got thicker and glossier and nothing seemed to bother her, not any of the physical symptoms of pregnancy that tortured other women or the terrifying thought of what she was about to take on for the next eighteen years. Ginny was the very image of a modern Madonna. She gave *Hermione* morning sickness.

“I don’t know how you’re going to do it,” Hermione told her the day she found out.

She just did.

That evening in February, Hermione and Ginny met, as had become their custom, at a small Muggle pizzeria near Hermione’s apartment. They’d completely overlooked the place until Ginny got a craving for anchovies in her second trimester. Now, they favoured it as a favourite place to eat because it was one of the few places they knew that had a door wide enough to admit a fully laden pushchair.

“And my post-natal arse,” Ginny sighed.

As Ginny wheeled in his pushchair from the cold, Francis already looked faintly disgruntled at having to be out with the girls again. His stylish, fur-trimmed hat with earflaps made him look like a miniature Elmer Fudd. He strained his small body against the straps that held him. But even when he was pouting, Francis Weasley was cute. He had the Weasley freckles and sky-blue eyes, but also straight, light brown hair. “Must be from his father,” said Ginny, whose own red hair was wavy and thick. But she wasn’t sure; Francis’ father had a shaved head during the brief time Ginny knew him. But whatever his father looked like, Francis wasn’t one of those babies who looked like a wrinkled alien. He was beautiful. A Christmas card Cupid. An angel.

Hermione pushed back his cap to smile at him. “He’s grown! I swear, he grows an inch every day.”

“Stop with the growing stuff. You’ll be pinching his cheeks next.” But Hermione could tell Ginny was pleased when she noticed the way he was changing from day to day. She undid the harness that held Francis in place. “Hold him for a second?” she asked Hermione.

She lifted Francis out and handed him over. Hermione took him, concentrating on getting that ideal soft yet secure grip on his wriggling torso, and then she attempted to give him a hug. He protested at once, arching his body away from her as though she was planning to strangle him. She handed him back to his mother as soon as Ginny’s arms were empty again.

“Hold on, will you?” Ginny still had a packet of wet-wipes between her teeth.

“He can smell my fear,” Hermione explained, deftly swapping baby for baby product.

Ginny tutted and rolled her eyes at her. “Well, practice makes perfect.”

But Hermione knew that both she and Francis were much happier when he was on Ginny’s knee at the table, grabbing everything within reach and trying to get it into his mouth before his mother spotted and intervened.

“Not the knife!” Ginny cried. “He’s started grabbing.”

“I noticed,” Hermione said dryly when she leaned too close and he gave the silver pendant around her neck a hefty tug.

“Give your Aunt Hermione a smile,” Ginny suggested when she had totally freed her from his determined grasp. “He’s got the smiling thing figured out, now. He’s been doing this really cute grin.”

Francis immediately turned his face away from Hermione, arched his back again and started preparing himself to scream. No cute grin for Auntie Hermione, then. He could definitely smell her fear.

“He’s tired,” Ginny sighed, and indeed, his eyelids were drooping. Hermione’s shoulders relaxed slightly at the thought he might soon be asleep for the whole meal.

He yawned and seemed to close his eyes tightly. After a moment, to be sure, Ginny carefully laid him back down in his buggy. The second his backside touched the canvas seat, however, his eyes flipped wide-open like the eyes of an evil baby doll. He protested until Ginny picked him up again and hugged him close to her shoulder, and then he screamed as though she was pinching him. Hermione’s shoulders went back up by her ears and she found herself looking around the restaurant uneasily, even though she and Ginny were the only customers there. Ginny just kept on talking above the racket.

“Did you read that article about that Quidditch player’s boyfriend in The Daily Prophet today?” she asked.

Hermione couldn’t concentrate on a word she was saying.

“I have to say, I always thought he wasn’t entirely straight.”

Francis yelled so hard, Hermione had to sit on her hands to stop herself covering her ears, but Ginny didn’t even flinch as she got the full force of his yell in her face. Hermione felt excruciatingly uncomfortable by the time their drinks arrived.

“Do you think I’d get in trouble for putting some of this in his bottle?” Ginny joked with the waitress, nodding at her glass of wine. “He’s so bloody active now,” she added to Hermione. “Oh, for the days when I could carry him around like a rather cumbersome bag.”

“I looked forward to you guys coming in. He’s so adorable,” the waitress clucked.

Francis threw his head back and gave her a view of his tonsils, complete with warrior battle-cry sound effects.

“Don’t you think much of this restaurant, eh?” the waitress asked him as she stroked his reddening cheek. “Don’t you like to eat pizza? Not good enough in here for you?”

Francis squealed.

“Awww!” the waitress cooed.

Awww? Sometimes, Hermione felt she was the only person who could actually hear it when Francis bawled. Like the boy who had noticed that the emperor’s new clothes were, in fact, a birthday suit, Hermione seemed to lack the filter that turned a baby’s cry into birdsong.

Francis continued to struggle on for quite a while that afternoon. It took an emergency bottle of milk and a good deal of hugging from a well-practised mother before he closed his eyes again. But, as usual, once his face was all angelic and serene once more, it was almost impossible to imagine what he had looked like while screaming. Ginny and the waitress gazed in awe for a moment. Hermione gazed along with them impassively.

“Quick,” Ginny said then. “We’ve got approximately forty-five minutes to talk before he wakes up.”

The waitress brought them both another drink.

“Here’s to not breastfeeding.” Ginny downed hers in one and slammed the glass on the table.

Being a mother had hardly changed her friend at all.

Personally, Hermione didn’t have much news. She was getting married. Apart from Harry’s brush with the treacle, her life had become a thrilling round of weekdays at work and weekends spent buying shelving units. Harry seemed to have an infinite appetite for new shelving units, though she wasn’t quite sure where he was putting them up anymore. Lately, the wedding planning especially was starting to lose its appeal as a subject of discussion for her. Just after the engagement, Hermione had studied bridal magazines and couldn’t wait for the year to tick away. Now, the feeling she had as she flicked through the pages of her diary was more akin to the way she felt in the run-up to her N.E.W.T’s. It had started with six months to go, but Hermione didn’t feel as though she could talk about it. Who would understand?

Ginny, by contrast, always seemed to have some scandalous tale up her sleeve, even though she was now a stay-at-home mother who was back living with her parents.

Just the previous week, she had announced she was ready to jump back into the dating scene. It didn’t seem that long since she was complaining about the agony of being in labour and claiming she would never have sex again. Never, ever. Not even if a stunningly handsome millionaire male model dropped by with flowers with his twin brother. But then, all of a sudden, it was if the sun came out in her life again and she decided she would just die if she didn’t get to do some flirting soon.

“I feel as if I’ve been invisible for the past fifteen months,” she had complained to Hermione. “First because I was pregnant. Now because I have so obviously just been pregnant, with the big sweatshirts and wild ‘got no sleep last night’ hair thing going on.”

She didn’t look that bad and Hermione told her so. In fact, she had been admiring the dark blue sweater she now described as an old fisherman’s cast-off, and her hair was nowhere near as awful as Hermione’s had been in her younger, less well-groomed days.

Ginny dismissed her compliments. “Well, it’s time to get back in the game,” she declared. “I want someone to flirt with, even if it’s just by owl-mail. I’ve been thinking about joining a dating agency.”

Yes, the Wizarding World had dating agencies, too. Hermione had discovered this rather amusing fact several years ago. Only, it involved rather less emails and rather more owls, so it was a little bit slower and messier than the Muggle version. They had even done a segment on dating agencies on the show. “It’s a good place to start,” she agreed. “You don’t have to even change out of your pyjamas.”

“And I can send photographs of me before I got pregnant. You’ve got to help me think of something funny to say about myself.”

“That you’re gagging for it?” was Hermione’s first suggestion.

“A good start,” Ginny quipped back. “But I’m serious, Hermione. If I don’t get some male company soon – some *adult* male company – I’m going to have to buy a cat. Except, I can’t even buy a cat anymore.”

“Why not?” Hermione asked.

“In case the baby catches something horrible and dies.”

She whipped out a sanitising wipe and carefully cleaned her hands before she even thought about reaching for the garlic bread. When Hermione hugged Ginny hello these days, she always caught a faint smell of something antibacterial.

“Try the dating agency. It could be the best thing you ever did,” Hermione encouraged. “And what possible harm can come of it, so long as you’re careful, take your wand and don’t go meeting up with a virtual stranger in the middle of the night on a deserted beach?”

Ginny grinned, and Hermione remembered she was talking to a girl who had conceived her son under almost exactly those circumstances.

*

Just seven days later, back in City Pizza, Ginny was proud to announce that her mission to fill that flirtatious gap in her life was going well. Very well, in fact. She had joined three dating agencies as soon as she got home from discussing the idea with Hermione and claimed to have had several dozen replies by interested wizards.

“Any good ones?” Hermione asked.

“Oh, yes.” Ginny reached into the tray beneath Francis’ pushchair and pulled out a sheaf of parchment. These were her favourite letters and some photographs.

“You’re very popular,” Hermione said as she started to leaf through them.

“Just help me eliminate the losers.”

So, while Francis napped on in his pushchair, Hermione and his mother sifted through the candidates for step-fatherhood. She quickly narrowed the contenders down to the three who’d dared to send photographs, then read some of their letters and immediately had to discount the best-looking one on the grounds that he asked what kind of underwear Ginny liked to wear in his very first attempt at correspondence. In line one, in fact – top of a list of ten questions. “Bikini-style or g-string?”

“What’s wrong with him?” Ginny asked as Hermione flipped him onto the reject pile.

“Where do you want me to start? Question two was, ‘Au natural or Brazilian’?”

“So, he’s a little forward.”

“Forward?” Hermione snorted. “He’s a pervert. You can forget any man who asks whether you’re wearing tights or stockings before you’ve even had coffee.”

The other two were better correspondents, sticking to niceties such as their favourite music, towns and food, and what House they had been in at Hogwarts. At least until the fifth letter, by which time, Ginny’s own smutty sense of humour was creeping in.

“Shit.” Hermione handed back a couple of particular steamy pages. “Too much information.”

“I’m going to keep that one,” Ginny smirked, lips twitching upwards at a joke she should have kept more private.

“All very funny, but how do you propose to take it from owl-mail to real life?”

“All in good time, my friend. But this is the one I’m really interested in at the moment.” Ginny pushed the guy in question’s profile back towards them.

His name was Connor Stephens. He was single, six feet tall and twenty-eight. His profile said he enjoyed eating out and dancing, city breaks and Muggle cars. There was no photograph – which was why Hermione had previously consigned him to the reject pile; you had to be more suspicious of someone who wouldn’t send a picture. “Perhaps he’s intimidatingly handsome,” she joked. But now she was examining the evidence more closely, she found that his letters weren’t only impressively long but witty, charming and thoughtful. She liked him.

“I sent him my last owl first three days ago,” Ginny continued. “But he hasn’t sent me one back yet. I guess that part of dating hasn’t changed at all since I was last out there. Someone always ends up waiting around.” She sighed loudly. “Perhaps I was too pushy. What do you think?”

“Maybe he’s a little shy. Maybe he’s been too busy. Maybe he fell off his broomstick and broke his neck.”

Ginny shook her head and smiled.

“Give him a chance. He’ll owl you.”

“And when he does, he’ll turn out to be some twelve-year-old kid who’s been pretending to be an adult for a dare.” Her shoulders slumped. Meanwhile, Francis had woken from his all-too-short nap. Ginny quickly started unbuckling him to pre-empt any screaming.

“Or he could turn out to be just as gorgeous as him over there,” Hermione said, nodding towards a guy who had just walked into their empty restaurant and looking like he should be followed by paparazzi. “In fact, that could be him! We’ve got no photo. We just can’t tell.”

“Quick,” Ginny hissed. “Hold Francis and pretend he’s yours.”

She handed Hermione the baby and started to preen. Her best pouty-lipped face started them both laughing, which certainly drew the attention of the man now being shown to a table right next to them. And his boyfriend.

“I so knew he was gay,” Ginny whispered as the guys huddled over a menu and shot them the occasional uneasy glance.

“Yeah, right. You can have Francis back now. I think there’s something going on in his nappy.”

“There’s always something going on with that child’s nappy!” Ginny lifted her nose until his well-padded backside was level with her nose and sniffed. Francis gave them his gummy smile. “Can’t smell anything now, though. Are you sure you haven’t just farted, Hermione? Trying to blame it on a baby! For shame!”