Sorcerer's Stone: Page 7

The Dursleys' late-night caffeine, Vernon's sideways conversation, Jim Dale's fantastic slowly-increasing despair, and why Uncle Vernon is so scared of a cat.

Good morning! This week on Potter Pages, we cover one of our earliest pages yet: Page Seven of Sorcerer’s Stone, in which Uncle Vernon slowly becomes convinced that the world as he knows it is slowly disintegrating but will also be just fine. Yes, it’s a weird page. Enjoy — and if you do, that “subscribe” button is calling your name!

At night, do the Dursleys drink coffee or tea? And whichever they do drink, is it caffeinated? Page seven of Sorcerer’s Stone answers one of these questions, but unfortunately not the other. That’s the kind of thing you learn in a page-by-page reread of the Harry Potter series, and the kind of thing that I’m now desperately hoping comes up in a trivia competition one day.

As the page starts, Aunt Petunia — well, not really “Aunt Petunia” yet, since this is before Harry begins to play an active role in her life — comes into the living room with two cups of tea. Uncle Vernon is watching the news, and from the disturbing stuff he’s just seen, he knows that he can’t keep a secret: he’s gotta ask Petunia about the things he’s seen.

The tack he chooses for trying to broach the subject delicately is an interesting one. Rather than using a preamble — “Petunia, don’t worry, I know you’d never want to hear this but I’m asking because I want to be open and honest” — he tries to move sideways into the answer that he’s looking for. He uses a straightforward opener: “you haven’t heard from your sister lately, have you?” Basically, he’s just opening the conversation and watching where it goes. He’s lucky that Petunia is completely aware of his tactic: rather than going off on a long-winded tangent about her sister that might indirectly answer Vernon’s question, she turns it right back around on him.

“No,” she says sharply. “Why?”

Ordinarily, the book notes, the Dursleys pretend that Petunia doesn’t have a sister. I can’t help but wonder what this means in practice. We know from J.K. Rowling’s writing on Vernon and Petunia’s early relationship that at one point, at least, Petunia and Vernon had dinner with Lily and James. That, obviously, didn’t go well. The question is, when did the Dursleys go from tolerating the Potters’ existence to ignoring it? Page seven takes place before Harry really enters their life, so they can’t blame their delusions on an attempt to stamp the magic out of him. They’re just living in a fantasy world.

Maybe what Rowling means is that they usually pretend to other people that Petunia doesn’t have a sister. Frankly, that’s probably true. But that shouldn’t impact what they’re saying and doing in private. Petunia — who seems like the fairer and more reasonable of the pair — must understand how completely sensible it is for Uncle Vernon to wonder, from time to time, about the two wizards who they once had dinner with. 

Uncle Vernon, it seems, has basically violated an implicit household-wide gag order on anything concerning the Potters. It’s not that the Dursleys don’t think about them or mentally acknowledge their existence; rather, it’s just not something they want to actually talk about. This actually doesn’t sound that outlandish. Everyone’s been to a family gathering and been told not to address something: “Don’t bring up grandpa’s moustache.” Everyone knows it’s there, and everyone knows that everyone else notices it, but it’s also commonly understood that the only way to maintain the peace and not rupture the fragile equilibrium that’s been achieved is to leave it undiscussed.

Uncle Vernon tells Aunt Petunia why he’s asking: he’s seen strange items on the news, about owls and shooting stars, and he also saw a bunch of strangely-dressed people in town. He doesn’t mention that he actually heard the name “Potter,” because he can’t bring himself to make her (or himself) that anxious, but that ship has definitely sailed. Uncle Vernon at this point is like someone who insists on seeing a doctor then says that they feel fine. It should be obvious that there’s more to the story, and it’s the doctor’s job — actually, in this case, it’s Aunt Petunia’s job — to figure out what that more is. Unfortunately, she’s no more interested in talking about her sister than Uncle Vernon is, so the topic is left unaddressed: Aunt Petunia just sits there silently sipping her tea.

Uncle Vernon then brings up Harry, but not by name. As the Dursleys do this peculiar dance, where neither of them want to say what’s happening but both understand more than they’re telling, I can’t help but think of the terrific Jim Dale American audiobooks. In Dale’s narration, you can really hear the quiet, unstated despair in Uncle Vernon’s voice, and the disdain in Petunia’s. He leans so hard into Uncle Vernon’s forced calm as he says “what’s his name again? Howard, isn’t it?” He’s equally in character as Petunia in the next line: “Harry. Nasty. Common name, if you ask me.”

*WARNING: PREPARE FOR OFFICE CROSSOVER*

This whole scene reminds me of season six of The Office, when Pam and Jim come into Michael’s office to give him a gift, and Jim knows that Michael has just started dating Pam’s mother. Pam sees that Michael has a date, and he reveals that he’s dating the mother of one of his employees, but in the brief moment before it becomes completely clear what he’s talking about, you see Pam repeatedly asking who he’s talking about, but more and more despair enters her voice each time as she starts to comprehend that it’s her.

*END OF OFFICE CROSSOVER*

The Vernon/Petunia dynamic is fascinating, because while they’re both pretty terrible people for the majority of the series, they don’t treat each other badly at all. Uncle Vernon occasionally gets angry, but he’s not verbally or physically abusive; he just sort of gets all purple and starts pulling out tufts of his moustache. Petunia is always attentive to Vernon’s needs, both practical and emotional, and while they obviously spoil Dudley to a pretty ridiculous point, it’s out of genuine care for him. It’s not like Aunt Marge, who gives Dudley things only so she can drive home the point that she’s not giving Harry anything; the Dursleys just really love Dudley, want him to have as many nice things as possible, and don’t love Harry as much. When you think about it, it’s a strange twist on the “cruel aunt and uncle” trope. Without Harry, the Dursleys are just a nice, boring couple from the suburbs with a spoiled son who eventually matures emotionally, a few years later than he should. They’re not two aunts who live together in an old house on a hill in a scraggly forest; they’re not a power couple who lives at the top of a skyscraper. They really are just ordinary people, and when you think about it, you’d never imagine them doing the things they do to Harry. If you spent time with the Dursleys, you might realize they were full of themselves and a little pompous, but what you’d never imagine is that they made their nephew sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. It’s not that they’re particularly good at hiding what they’re doing, I don’t think: rather, it’s that their treatment of Harry is genuinely out of character for them. That, in turn, speaks to just how afraid of Harry they are, how repulsive magic is to them, and how radically they were shaken just by having a remnant of Lily in their house.

It’s also worth noting — if only to point out that it’s a really strange thing to say on Uncle Vernon’s part — that his question to Petunia is phrased in the weirdest possible way. “He’d be about Dudley’s age now, wouldn’t he?” Maybe I’m forgetting something, but the way I understand ages, once you’re born you stay pretty much the same age as everyone born around the same time. If Harry is about Dudley’s age now, it’s not like Dudley put his aging on hold and he’s staying one age until Harry catches up with him: he and Harry have always been the same age, now, in the past, and in the future. To say “he’d be about Dudley’s age now, wouldn’t he?” is sort of like saying to your older sister “I can’t wait until I’m older than you!” It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the passage of time, almost as bad as having Professor McGonagall at Hogwarts in Fantastic Beasts 2 (just kidding, actually; I loved that part). 

There’s a great moment — a precursor to the “mimblewimble” moment (if you know, you know) — when Uncle Vernon, with his heart sinking, listens to Petunia basically destroy the fabric of the world he knows, and says “Yes. Yes, I quite agree.” Then they go upstairs to bed. As Petunia gets ready for bed, Vernon creeps to the window and looks down at the street — and sees the cat, still waiting. I must say, of all the elements of the story that are shaking Vernon up, the cat seems like the least shocking. It’s only a cat, after all. Put it this way: if you looked out your window right now and saw a cat standing still, would you be shocked? Panicked? Convinced that your world was about to unravel?

I don’t think so. Obviously there’s more context than just the cat, but still, it’s interesting that once Vernon’s mindset turns negative and he’s convinced that something is up, he can’t even dispel the more ordinary parts of the earth-shaking conspiracy that he’s set up. The other things he’s done, up to this point, would indicate that he’s really good at screening facts he doesn’t like out of his head and just looking at the world the way he likes to see it. But apparently, it’s not quite that straightforward: once he’s genuinely convinced that something is wrong, he loses that ability to block out bad things, and instantly switches from the best possible interpretation of things to the worst. 

The page ends with a question: was he imagining things? Could this have anything to do...and it cuts off. Obviously, we know that he’s not imagining things, and that this has a lot to do...Honestly, I don’t envy Vernon in this moment. That kind of uncertainty is completely torturous. He thinks something is seriously wrong with the world, but he also can’t discount the possibility that he might just be crazy. 

The only saving grace is that he doesn’t have long to wait. We’ve already seen the next scene from Harry’s point of view, so we know pretty much how it goes. Vernon will awake to Aunt Petunia’s scream as she puts out the milk bottles, just like Harry does. It’s going to be a strange seventeen years for Vernon, and honestly, the next night will probably be far stronger than this one, and it’s going to be a long time before he can lie down to bed at night and feel completely normal and at peace with the world. That may never happen again. He and Petunia used to pretend that Petunia didn’t have a sister — but that’s about to become a lot more difficult.