Head-canon and fugue (variations on TMI) - Vernon Dursley

[wemyss]

 

1. He’s a complete parvenu, a Muggle Lucius Malfoy.
2. Wherefore the fee-paying school passing as a public school (Smeltings, really), the ‘refainment’, the attempted gentility….
3. His sister - whom he secretly loathes and fears - has much the same temperament, but apes the manner more successfully.
4. There’s something very wrong in that family - more than the paternal flirtation with the Blackshirts in the late ’30s, quickly denied and ever after Not Spoken Of.
5. Possibly magic. Eccentricity is so much an English virtue that Vernon’s paranoid ‘normality’ is startlingly abnormal.
6. He comes from a long line of twisters and businessmen with a purely commercial sense of honour, who climbed successfully but came to the Home Counties because they made Gloucestershire too hot to hold them.
7. Really, he’s a lower-middle-class Del Boy, when it comes to it.
8. But a much better businessman, to give the old devil his due.
9. This may be because his Alf-Garnettish brutal bonhomie goes down a bomb with his counterparts, and he can smarm for England towards his superiors.
10. Even so, in trade, at least, he’s clearly and surprisingly no fool.
11. The best one can say for him is that he was devoted to promoting his family as well as himself.
12. So long - to turn the praise to damnation - as they did as he demanded and filled the roles he’d crafted for them.
13. Most fatally, his idea of who were his family was too limited (‘And who is my neighbour?’: Luke, chapter ten, beginning at the twenty-ninth verse).
14. He and Pet - with similar secrets and insecurities - really are made for one another.
15. It’s remarkable that Dudley didn’t turn out far worse than he did.
16. Not that they think he didn’t.
17. Being the sort of person who’s fully capable of holding two contradictory ideas at once, Vernon is pleased that Dudley went to any sort of university, although It Wasn’t Good Enough for Dudders, and took any sort of degree, Although Why Not Business, Damn It, Boy?
18. And Dudley’s wife is both satisfactory and alarming in being more than a cut above the Dursleys.
19. That she’s a Squib is, however, appalling.
20. That their daughter was named Harriet after her godfather, Dudley’s cousin, is intolerable.
21. That Harriet’s a Witch….
22. Vernon’s twitchier than ever now.
23. Even whilst stoutly - too stoutly: he doth protest too much - denying the evidence of his own eyes.
24. He’s a sharper and a twister, but, at home, not, actually mean with money (although only an eye for the main chance w/r/t his business reputation keeps him from evading the timely buying of his rounds).
25. Partly this is for showing off, but it’s also because he likes to do himself well.
26. He’s a climber, as far as money and business go, but, unlike Pet, blessedly uninterested in pretending to a high social class as such.
27. He prefers that he be thought a self-made man, albeit with an old school tie, if Smeltings counted, which it doesn’t.
28. He’s a bluffer and a bit of a blagger, not least about golf (which he’s too fat to play) and bridge (which he plays badly and stupidly) and that sort of thing.
29. He pretends to flirt with typists, but he’s loyal to Pet and frankly more interested in the Sunday joint and extra servings of pudding than in getting his greens.
30. He simply wishes to be thought a manly man and a bit of a devil. No one obliges.
31. Well: bar Pet, whose primary attraction to his mind is that she’s been, from the off, the one person willing to take him, rather worshipfully, at his own estimation and value.
32. That ungrateful Potter wretch, like his sneering toffee-nosed father - good riddance to bad rubbish - never did. For this, he shall never forgive or cease to loathe Harry.
33. But he’s damned well afraid of the boy, and he has one response to fear, and has always had: bluster. He’ll bluster until he dies.