We'll Always Have Paris

by Natalie

“Cut!”

That was Albus’s idea of how the director of a Muggle play is supposed to indicate that it’s time to break for dinner.

Severus Snape got up gratefully from the floor where he had been kneeling uncomfortably (and awkwardly) for the last twenty minutes.  His palms were full of splinters and his triceps screamed for relief.  But he wasn’t going to say a word of complaint… not while she was in the room.

Hermione Granger-Snape-Krum sat up on the wooden floor and tried to massage the frown from her forehead.  She glanced slyly at the scuff marks on the floor near her – the fraying hex she’d used had worked remarkably well, considering it wasn’t usually used to make a wood floor into a mess of needle-thin strips of demonic torture.  Now if only she could get away with fraying him.  Or at least his wench of a wife, Sybill.

“Here.  Allow me.”  Hermione looked up in surprise to see her ex-husband extending a hand to help her up.  She almost had a heart attack before she saw her own husband, Viktor, out of the corner of her eye making his own way towards her.  Of course.  Severus had offered her a hand in order to make Viktor look lazy.  Not that that would be hard.

“Don’t look so surprised, my dear.  You were beginning to melt a little under the hot lights – and I wouldn’t want to see Albus’s masterpiece debauched with a gummy leading lady.  Oh, hello Viktor.”

Hermione was deprived of the opportunity to retort by the plodding arrival of her husband, Viktor (or was that the arrival of her plodding husband Viktor?).  Hermione knew that Snape could see in her very eyes her disappointment with ‘Always-one-step-behind-Viktor’, ‘I-can-only-keep-up-on-my-broom-Viktor’, ‘I’ll-show-my-love-with-hours-of-dumb-admiration-Viktor’, but she’d be damned if she would admit it.

“Darling!”

Snape groaned and rolled his eyes as the man who took his ex-wife off his hands shuffled over like an old man, with that witch of his manufacturing a gushy, giggly greeting.  It was patently obvious that their honeymoon was over – why did she even bother?  Nothing more unappealing than an unhappy woman fawning over a simpering weakling of a man she was pretending to love.

But he was forced to look artificially cheerful himself when his wife Sybill glided up to join the trio in the middle of the marked-off area of the dining hall at Beauxbatons.  He’d rot in the dirty-socks-room of Hell before he’d show the grating irritation he felt in his insipid bride’s presence.  He knew that he’d gotten re-married just to prove to Hermione that she was not the only woman in the world who’d have him – but he’d be damned if he would let her know it.

“Darling!”

~~~

Dinner at Beauxbatons was a different affair from Hogwarts, especially now that it was out of term.  All twenty of the members of the WSPBBFT (Wizards’ Society for the Promotion and Betterment of British Fancy-Dress Theatre – although some people called it the ‘Wanking Social Pariahs Bloody Bollocksing Foppish Theatrics’) were bunking up at the French wizarding school during rehearsals. 

By some machinations, be they divine or profane, Mr and Mrs Snape and Mr and Mrs Krum (although Hermione hated being called that) were seated together at a table for six.  The other two seats were empty, the rest of the play’s cast and crew having learnt that to sit beside any two or more of those four people was to endure a night of either a metaphorical ‘death of a thousand cuts’, severe indigestion or an irresistible urge to wash someone’s mouth out with soap.

“Oh look Viktor, the plates have little menus on them.  How droll!”  Hermione tapped the square of cardboard on her plate with one of the long, pointed nails she had adopted as part of her ‘gay divorcee’ look.  Although she was no longer a divorcee.

“Vwat iss Vool-ow-vwent awek peeteet sowseese meenwee, Darlink?”  Viktor never did manage to get Hermione’s name right, and when he said her name ‘Her-my-yo-nynee-ee’ during the wedding vows he’d written himself, she’d demanded he stop using her name in public.

“It’s pastries filled with little sausages, dear,” she said, baring her teeth in a failed attempt at a smile.  “I don’t think you’d like it.  Choose the other one.”  Hermione leaned forward and tapped her wand to her glass for wine.

“Bot I don’t lyik syefohd.”  Viktor’s accent became more pronounced the more stubborn he was acting.  The effect was tedious as well as unintelligible.

Hermione rolled her eyes.  “Then. Get. The. House. Elves. To. Fix. You. A. Steak.”  Tonight she was treating herself.  No pretending to be happily married.  She turned to her ex-husband and his wife.  “So, how are you two liking France?  Did you go sightseeing in Paris yet?  I have a flat there,” she said brightly, gleefully noting Severus’s pursed lips and knitted brows.  “I hope he’s taken you around, your husband knows the city like the back of his hand.”  Hermione purred the last sentence knowing full-well that Severus would rather gouge out his own fingernails with a box of toothpicks than take Dribble-Sybill on a sightseeing tour of the most romantic city in the world.

And knowing the creepy ex-Divination teacher, she wouldn’t want to go anyway.  “The auspices have been importunate thus-far, Mrs Krum,” she said with less of the wispiness of yore and a little more steel in her voice.  Or was that steel wool?  “I have been keeping myself occupied by communicating with the displaced spirits of the castle.”

In the ensuing uncomfortable silence the foursome practiced round-robin face-making.  Viktor stared at Sybill as if she were a wayward spark he thought might land on his broom; Snape scowled at Viktor; Sybill gawped at Hermione like a frog in a Muggle school science experiment, and Hermione made a face at Snape.

Hermione finally broke it.  “You know those natural silences that occur sometimes in conversations?  Well this isn’t one of them.  Severus, when on earth did you start combing your hair that way?  Or should I say, when on earth did you start combing your hair?”

“Oh, about the same time I began waking up to something more attractive than my own split ends.”

“Ha. Ha.  Don’t tell me – you’ve taken to sleeping in the Gauguin room at the Tate Gallery?”

“Why, is there a picture of you there?  I’ll keep my eyes peeled for you.  Perhaps you looked better naked in 1883 than you did in 2004.”

Krum’s face had just started to register that a conversation was going on – perhaps he had a very primitive nervous system, like a bug – when Severus and Hermione both dissolved into genuine, helpless laughter and leaned back in their chairs, sighing.

“Well, you’ve got me there, Severus,” Hermione said, inclining her head towards him in a mock-bow.

“I have, have I?  Well, this is my lucky day,” Snape replied.  “Hang on, let me make a note in my diary.  I don’t ever want to forget this day.”  Snape gracefully conjured a small black book while simpering and fawning in a fair imitation of Lavender Brown, who along with Ron Weasley was a close friend of the Snapes (that is, Severus and Hermione) when they were married.

Hermione had taken him ruthlessly to task over his monstrous treatment of the dim Gryffindor – ‘Darling, she isn’t smart enough to realise I’m making fun of her, so what does it matter?’ – ‘That’s not the point.  We were friends in school.  Therefore ridiculing her is like a slight against me.  Oh, you wouldn’t understand!’ Hermione would always march off crying.  Snape would follow her into the bedroom where she would be hysterically tossing clothes and bric-a-brac into trunks.  ‘I can’t stand this.  I feel stifled, I’m suffocating.  You’re suffocating me.  Let me go!’ – He always stopped her.  With an extra-large Tom Collins and a promise of a massage after her bath.  Except for the last time.

~~~

The dress rehearsal was held at the venue, in the amphitheatre of the French Ministry of Magic building in Paris

Hermione was standing in one of the little recessed balconies that dotted the sixty-foot-high curved walls of the theatre.  The building was the original of the Paris Opera, cleverly disguised from the outside to fool the Muggles.  She was massaging her shoulder, where Snape had cheekily bitten her during the dress.  Albus had loved the gesture, wanted it added to the scene; and she was thinking of something she could do to make Snape’s subsequent experiences of chewing on her less pleasant – was there a charm to turn part of her flesh to stone, and break those yellow canines of his?  Or perhaps an old-fashioned, bad-tasting potion she could apply to her skin.

She ruminated on the plan as she stared down at the few who still remained; that witch Sybill was engrossed in a conversation with one of the paintings, while Hermione’s dullard of a husband was just sitting.  Staring into space as usual, content to do nothing, be nothing and give nothing.  Sigh.  She had married him because he was as different from Severus as she could ever hope to find in a man – her only satisfaction in it was in thinking that Severus had done the same when he chose his new bride. 

“Did I hurt you?” Came a soft voice from behind her.

“No more than usual,” she replied lightly, without turning.  She felt him come up behind her then abruptly slip to the side to stand by her against the railing.  She turned her face towards the figure beside her but kept her eyes fixed on the scene below.  “I’m used to being marked by you.  I’m not your property anymore, but I suppose you are having trouble accepting that.  I wonder how Sybill feels about it, though.”  Hermione regretted the words the moment she spoke them – the three hastily-spoken sentences could open up way too many neatly-sealed cans of worms.

But to her surprise, he didn’t take up the gauntlet.  “It’s a long way up here,” he said, glancing back and forth between his new wife and Hermione’s new husband.

“Why, are you thinking of jumping?” She couldn’t help herself saying.

“No.  But I find it interesting to observe, how distance can enable one to gain perspective.  Don’t you find?  How art imitates life?”

“Don’t you mean, life imitates art?” She asked, looking pointedly at Sybill.

“No.  I suppose, being back in Paris, I’ve just become overly-sensitive to the influence of symbolism,” he whispered, trailing a finger over her tooth-marked shoulder as he turned to depart.

~~~

They opened on August 13.  Most of the audience was foreign (or at least not English), but they seemed to take to Dumbledore’s vision of the play.  Backstage after opening, Albus could be heard deep in conversation with the velvet-robed theatre patrons expounding enthusiastically about something called …’zeitgeist’. 

They had four performances in the run, after which they were all to return to England and their private lives.

The closing-night party was at the MoM canteen (which sounded naf but was really more like French fine dining but with counter service).  The foursome was together again, this time at two tiny, modular plastic tables filched from a disused McDonalds sometime in the early 90s.

“So tell us about this ‘pied a terre’ of yours – I sincerely hope it is not one of those ten-by-ten mouldy hole-in-the-walls over a curry takeaway.”

“By no means.  It’s more like a cross between a reformed cathouse over a Vietnamese takeaway and a condemned indoor mushroom farm over a Jamaican takeaway.  Does that give you a better idea?”

“Mmm, yes.  A kind of ‘East meets Yeast’ feel.  Or maybe a ‘Kitty-Patty Hot Pad’?  Or maybe ‘Hot Patty Cat Pad’ … or … ‘Hot Catty Pat Pad’?  The possibilities are endless.  I see why you never go there.”

“Well, I don’t never go there – but Viktor doesn’t like Paris, and I don’t like to go alone…”

“Mmmm.  That is a problem.”

“Yes.  An in-sur-mount-able problem.”

There was a moment of silence while Hermione counted to ten in her head.  “Well, would you all excuse me?  I have to go to the ladies’.”  She stood up and Snape stood with her.

“I’ll walk with you.  I need to go too.”

~~~

About eighteen minutes later, Viktor shook his head and said to Sybill, “…And vere iss my vife?  Her-my-yo-nynee-ee?”

And Sybill said, “Do you really want to know?”

FIN

2115

SilentG – gnat67@telus.net

A/N: Any resemblance to the Noel Coward play Private Lives is completely intentional.  A Tom Collins is made with gin and soda and lemon or sour, garnished with a twist.