Le Cirque d'Umland
July 08, 2021 10:13 PM
The Dinner Party by Le Cirque d'Umland
OOC: Sammy's inclusion approved by her author. BIC:
Paul Umland smiled at his girlfriend as she joined him at the table, but the look in his pale blue-grey eyes was possibly the most guarded Delia had ever seen, even compared to how he’d been at the very beginning of their acquaintance, which was no easy feat. He stood at her approach, and they exchanged proper, reserved cheek pecks before he pulled out her chair for her.
Sitting down, Delia bit her lip, caught by a thought of how they must have looked from the outside, and when Paul returned to the other side of the table, she saw him reflecting her amusement as well.
“Of all the things and places,” he drawled, “I’d never believe you, if you’d told me I’d end up in twenty years ago….”
Delia allowed herself to laugh. Paul unbent enough to chuckle, but the shutters came down again almost immediately.
“So,” he asked. “What did you think of the circus?”
Delia was spared answering immediately by the waiter coming for her drink order. Then she took a moment longer to think before she said, “somehow, I think it was both exactly and nothing at all like you’d led me to expect.”
Paul, of course, would have to be the member of the family who was most nervous about his girlfriend meeting their family, but Julian thought she was doing her part to keep him from taking the prize for granted. The event was going to occur at her house, and she couldn’t help but feel this meant everyone was counting on her to make sure the event was a success.
Irrational, of course. The only reason this was happening at her house was because of logistics; it had been really impractical for them to have full-family events in her parents’ house as soon as Julian had gotten married, but since she had had two children, and then John had added Sammy to the family, and then Stephen had gotten married...there wouldn’t be room to swing a kneazle in her parents’ house, never mind to make a newcomer feel welcome in. And Julian was determined that this Delia would feel welcome.
Paul had been twelve, the day they’d met, and even as a little girl, Julian had noticed that he was exceptionally self-contained, even compared to Mom, who she had previously thought was one of the most unfathomable people alive. The first time she had seen John have one of the flip-outs he’d sometimes had back then (an emotionally unstable and magically precocious five-year-old was capable of moving very suddenly from just sort of being there to being a very uncomfortable companion indeed) she had been amazed, afterward, to see that Paul’s expression had barely changed through the whole experience. When he spoke about Delia, though, she had more than once noticed a flicker of a smile that didn’t seem entirely conscious. It was obvious that this one was, somehow, special to Paul, and Julian would be damned if the Umland family circus was the thing that ruined things for him.
One of her first priorities, therefore, was to prevent the poor woman from going through the intimidating spectacle of being put on display in front of the whole assembly of brothers and parents and in-laws and outlaws and the kids. Therefore, it was just Julian and Joe setting up the final arrangements: Julian fretting over whether they had done a good enough job of concealing that the house had been almost entirely vacant for a year, and Joe being sarcastic to keep her from working herself up too much.
“You’re sure you got everything I asked you to?” she asked nervously, smoothing the front of her robes and trying not to fidget with her hair. “Everything’s in place?”
Joe sighed. “Julian,” he said patiently. “I’m happy to see you acting happy. I am. But there are limits to how much nagging I can take. We’re approaching that limit now, Julian. It’s not like Paul’s dating the Princess Royal.”
“Of course he’s not,” said Julian. “I’m pretty sure it would be illegal for me to receive the Princess Royal here, I doubt she’s considered ‘need to know’ enough to know about magic.” The P.M. did, and Julian was relatively sure the current monarch was still supposed to be informed, but what about the Governor-General? She couldn’t remember. “What do you mean, though, I’m seeming happy?”
Joe shrugged. “You just...maybe happy is the wrong word to use,” he said. “But you’ve been really into this, not just...going through the motions.”
Julian frowned slightly. “You think I’ve been going through the motions?”
Joe hesitated, but then, all at once, his smile snapped into place like a piece of Lego. Julian’s automatically followed suit, just in time for the door to open on their brother and his friend.
“Paul!” Paul and Joe met halfway in a brief but warm hug. “Good to see you, man, it’s been too long - “
“The affairs of the splinching office wait on no fraternal sentiments,” said Paul, dismissing the issue. “I assume it’s the same with whatever the hell John’s doing - “
“Don’t ask me,” said Joe. “He ranted at me about it for twenty minutes last month, but I couldn’t even tell if that meant it was going well or if he was having a nervous breakdown.” He glanced at the woman with Paul and then added in a clearly audible undertone, “You know it’s not too late to un-invite him, right? There’s still time to save your chances in this relationship of yours, you know.”
“Iacta alea est,” said Paul philosophically. “I’ll take my chances. Delia - “ he turned to his companion, a blonde woman who forcefully brought the phrase ‘neatly assembled’ to mind. “Meet my baby brother, Joseph Umland - Joe, this is Miss Cordelia Carraway.”
Delia smiled and shook hands with Joe. “So nice to finally meet you,” she said. It was a canned response, precisely what one would expect, but it sounded reasonably warm and sincere. “Paul’s told me so many stories about his family - “
“Oh, no!” said Julian, hugging Paul and then turning, smiling, to the newcomer. “I promise only the good things are true.” Delia laughed politely. “I’m Julian Welles,” she introduced herself. “The only sister in the bunch. Welcome to my house, please make yourself at home.”
“Thank you,” said Delia. Hazel eyes blinked at Julian from behind big tortoiseshell glasses. “It really is, um, such an honor to meet you, Mrs. Welles - “
“Julian, please,” said Julian. Correcting her like that was probably less than perfectly gracious, but….
“Julian,” Delia repeated. “I can’t tell you how surprised I was when Paul finally told me who you were - he’d always talked about his sister, but he’d always just called you ‘Jules.’”
“Yes,” said Julian. “He’s the only one who does that. I can’t actually remember why I let you do that…” she added to Paul, greatly wanting to change the subject before her public role became any more of a subject of conversation.
“Our family by-laws are many and generally inexplicable,” joked Joe. “Anyone want a drink while the others trail in?”
Julian caught his eye for only perhaps half a second, a gesture replied to with the merest ghost of a smile. Of course Joe had known what she was thinking. They almost always knew what the other was thinking.
“Joe and Julian are close, aren’t they?”
Paul was slightly surprised by the question, but shrugged without questioning its existence. “I suppose so,” he said. “They were in the same House at that American school they went to, and they see each other more often than most of us get to see each other these days....” But he trailed off as Delia shook her head.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “At least - I don’t think it is, anyway. They...almost seem like they’re working together just in a conversation, almost like I do with Corinna.” Corinna was her twin sister - virtually identical in every way, except a few subtle differences, like Delia’s pointier chin and Corinna’s longer nose, and that by some cruel twist of fate, Corinna was magical and Cordelia was not.
“They have a lot of practice,” said Paul. “The Jays - that’s Joe and Julian and John - they’ve always looked out for each other particularly, even compared to how we all are.”
Julian was still smiling and bustling, but Joe could tell she was worried, or at least very close to it, and more than a little annoyed as well. She had just checked her watch for the fifth time in twenty minutes, only, he assumed, to have it confirm what she already knew - specifically, that her husband was running late.
It wasn’t by much, admittedly. They had been careful to build in room for things to go wrong when telling each parent or sibling when to show up, and had staggered arrival times so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious something was wrong if someone was late. If Julian had been in a better frame of mind, he thought, she wouldn’t have been so irritated by William’s delay - but she wasn’t.
Joe grimaced behind his drink and wondered how tasteless it would be to finish it and have another. Or, perhaps more to the point, whether it would impede his ability to do his job, when it was inevitably necessary for him to do so again at some point tonight….
At least it wasn’t serious yet. Julian hadn’t done any of the baking herself, and as far as he knew, she was planning to go back East within the week. Since she’d been old enough to use an oven, it had been a bad sign if Julian started baking; not as bad a sign as actually leaving her husband, of course, but still - not good.
He glanced at Julian, and saw Delia, who he’d thought was comfortably absorbed in conversation with his mother, looking at him. Before he had time to read too much into that, though, the fire abruptly roared and changed color again, rising to the height of a tall man – specifically, one of Joe’s brothers. John, predictably enough, managed to almost trip over the grate, resulting in an almighty clang as he knocked over the fire tools while narrowly avoiding sending both himself and the hearth rug flying across the room.
“I despise international travel,” John announced to no-one in particular upon regaining his footing.
Julian folded her arms. “Then why don’t you stop living abroad?” she asked.
“Reasons,” muttered John, moving aside to make way for Sammy and waving his wand to right the things he’d knocked over.
Delia was staring at this tableau. Her expression was always hard to read behind her big, slightly tilted tortoiseshell eyeglasses, but Joe was pretty sure that at present, it was ‘startled.’ Paul glanced at her, and then he and Joe exchanged looks which were roughly equivalent to shrugs before Paul stood up.
“Delia,” he said. “This is my brother John, and his friend Sammy Meeks. Sammy, John - this is Delia.”
It was amazing, exactly how much John could seem like he had just moved miles away without physically moving at all. Joe was not surprised exactly (he remembered very clearly how it had been when their brother Stephen had introduced his now-wife Aimee to them all), but was a bit disappointed as John’s expression became very blank and shuttered, to the point that Joe was concerned that Delia might misinterpret it as hostility.
“Delia,” repeated John finally. “Better than Phelia, huh?” Joe assumed this was a joke of some kind, but he had no idea what the joke was. John did not visibly react to the lack of reaction to that remark. “Er - hello. I’m John. Nice to meet you.” He sort of awkwardly half-waved at her.
“Hi,” said Delia. “You’re the brother who’s in advanced studies, right?” John looked startled, but nodded. “Are you as well?” she asked Sammy pleasantly.
Julian had not been idle while these awkward introductions went on. She had slipped over to where their father was sitting and playing patty-cake with George and picked her son up, drawing George’s attention to the newcomers. George, who had been unusually quiet because he was shy around new people, grinned in delight at the sight of one of his favorite adults.
“Hi Sammy!” he called out. “Hi Sammy!”
“Well, if everyone’s here, now,” said Julian, having apparently decided to ignore William’s continued absence. “Should we go eat?”
“It’s just how they are,” said Paul with a shrug. “Julian relies on Joe - John relies on Julian - Joe….” He hesitated, seeming to need to think about that one. “I think Joe might actually be able to take care of himself, you know, if he had time. Or a reason. He might pick up so much of the slack for John and Julian just to keep from getting bored.”
“How many problems do they have?” asked Delia.
Paul thought about it for a long moment. “More than they have to,” he said finally. “John - well, you met him. And Julian…” He shook his head. “Well, you met her, too.”
Perhaps, Delia thought, it was because it had been so long since she had had much of a proper family beyond Corinna, but as she watched Paul’s family interact, she felt almost like she was playing anthropologist in the nursery.
Technically, there was no head of the table, as it was circular, but if there had been, Delia thought it would have been Mrs. Umland. She was slight, middle-aged, and soft-spoken, but it was fascinating to see how her five adult children all appeared to fall instinctively back into deferring to her as she first asked her sturdy, balding husband to say grace over the food and then smiled around at them all.
“It’s so lovely, to have everyone together again,” she said warmly, apparently happy enough to include John’s friend and even Delia herself. “You only came home today, right, Joe? Are they keeping you terribly busy at the Ministry?”
This, it seemed, was the cue for everyone else to begin serving themselves as Joe Umland nodded and began to elaborate on how his department had seen a lot of business over the holidays, with all the witches and wizards both traveling more than usual and traveling drunk more often than usual. This led to Stephen and Aimee being asked how all that was affecting their work at the hospital - a subject which in its turn allowed Stephen to turn the subject back to Joe, complimenting how well Transport was doing with some new initiative to prevent splinching incidents from reaching the hospital and taking up even more space. Joe then passed the conversation over to Julian Welles, complimenting Julian’s husband’s support for some budgetary increases, which set Julian to elaborating on the couple’s goals for the next year….
Delia worked up the courage to put in a word. Apparently, everyone was going to have the conversation steered in his or her direction at some point, and if she spoke now, she was at least more in control of when it was her turn. “I’ve read a few of your speeches in the papers,” she informed Julian. “They were very good.”
Julian smiled, but something - the look in her eyes, perhaps, or the set of her shoulders - made Delia think she might appreciate and feel embarrassed by compliments in equal measures. “I’m glad you thought so,” she said. “And that you read them instead of hearing them!” she added, and there were chuckles.
John Umland glanced up at his sister - the first time he’d stopped apparently taking an intense interest in the grain of the wood of the table. “What’s wrong with hearing them?” he objected. “You sound all right.”
“It was a joke, John,” said Julian in a tone of deliberately excessive patience before looking back at Delia. “I’ve never really gotten comfortable with public speaking, but since I, um, ended up where I did in life…” She sounded now almost as though she were looking for absolution of some kind. She toyed with her fork, her dark blue eyes turning down toward her plate for a moment. “I never really looked for it,” she explained. “It just...sort of happened, and one thing led to another…”
“Velut luna,” said John. “Statu variabilis.”
“Vita detestabilis!” exclaimed - or rather, she realized, sang - Joe Umland, as though finishing a quote; Julian gave him an exasperated look, shaking her head, and Joe looked around in mock-offense. “What? We’re not supposed to sing medieval drinking songs in front of Delia? That’s practically lying about what sort of family we are.”
“Alison studied medieval literature, before she met Chris,” Paul explained to Delia in an undertone as Joe attempted to convince Aimee and Sammy to support his thesis that they ought to sing medieval drinking songs in front of Delia. “John was quoting from a Latin lament against Fortuna - ‘like the moon, ever changing’ - that’s one of the descriptions of, well, Fortune.”
“What did Joe say?” she whispered back.
“‘Life detestable,’” translated Paul. “From the same song.” Delia raised an eyebrow. “Well, it is just lines of complaining about Lady Luck,” he excused - what? Medieval singers? His brothers’ odd taste in references?
“It’s not as bad as all that,” said Julian, either because she’d heard them or in response to her brother. “Really, it’s for the best. You always told us, Mom, we had a duty to do whatever good things we could, where we could - “
“More or less,” agreed Mrs. Umland.
“ - Which is why I’m still badgering you, John, about what you’re going to do with your life,” concluded Julian, with a curious air of triumph, as though she’d just put the opposing king into check (chess, according to Paul, was a bit of a competitive sport in his family, and Julian the best in their family at it). John, however, was shaking his head.
“What kind of good am I supposed to do if I’m locked up in the ministry basement under a vow of silence?” he asked crossly.
“Where else do you plan to get the money and resources to continue your research?” Julian countered. “You’d talk your way out of employment your first day in the private sector, and God knows you can’t teach.”
“Unless it’s teaching six-year-olds to make explosives,” Joe put in.
“That was an accident!” John protested, as the six-year-old in question - at least, Delia assumed - dissolved into laughter and Julian shook her head ruefully.
“Really, though,” she said, apparently not wanting to deal with having a daughter who could make explosives right now. “You know you can’t just - live in the woods and do science in a trunk forever. It’s against nature to live apart from the city.”
“Oh, no,” said Paul. “Julian, think about what you’re doing. We cannot start arguing about Aristotle before the main course is even on the table.”
“He’s right,” said John. “How many times have you told me it’s Incorrect to talk about philosophy when there’s guests?” He jerked his chin toward Delia without quite looking at her. “Besides - even if secrecy had ever been my strong suit - “ beside her, Delia heard Paul’s sharp intake of breath at that remark - “forget about the polis, and what either of us wants - what do you want me to do, divorce Sammy just for a job?”
Delia frowned, confused. Hadn’t Paul introduced Sammy as John’s friend?
“Oh, God,” said Paul, laughing. “I forgot to tell you about that. It’s a long story...the shortest version is that John let her stay at his place for a bit, and then she decided not to leave. Then Julian stopped by one day and drew all the wrong conclusions, and Sammy’s joked that he’s her husband ever since. And that another person is his boyfriend. I think she might do that mostly to annoy William, though,” he added charitably.
“I was thinking, didn’t you say he was the very, very Catholic one….”
“That’s the one,” Paul confirmed. “It’s all bizarre, but I think it’s all Sammy’s sense of humor. I assume John has his own reasons for going along, but all that’s probably one of the less strange things you’ll hear between the two of them - they don’t seem to bring out each other’s social skills.” He paused, and then added, “assuming, of course, that Joe wasn’t right about one evening with all of ‘em being enough to send you running for the hills?”
He was just a touch too studiously casual for the comment to come across as genuinely unconcerned. Delia smiled. “I can’t see much of a point in running from wizards,” she said lightly. “They can Apparate and get there ahead of me.”
“This is true,” conceded Paul, with a slight smile which made her think he’d interpreted the joke correctly. “It’s really annoying when they do that, isn’t it?”
“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to be equally obnoxious to Corinna for years. I'm still working on it." Delia took a sip of her wine. "I assume that's why I didn't get to meet your brother-in-law?"
"I assume," said Paul. "Odd that Julian didn't mention that he was tied up beforehand - guess it must have slipped her mind."
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Le Cirque d'Umland
The Dinner Party
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