Dudley's attention is caught, and he tries to grab the envelope.

But Petunia grabs it first, then looks at it and raises a hand to her mouth in shock. She opens it and reads the first line, and stops there.

Victor stands nervously in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, ready to bolt if it looks like someone is about to blame him for this. It is sometimes a good idea to run away when Uncle Vernon is angry.

"I want to read that letter!"

"Get out," she whispers, "both of you."

Victor leaves the kitchen immediately.

Dudley has a short-lived fight with his father and is promptly kicked out as well, and the door closes. He immediately puts his ear against the keyhole.

He hesitates—

Yes, this is important enough to be disobedient for. He listens at the crack under the door.

"Vernon," Petunia says, in a small voice, "perhaps we should—"

"No, Petunia! I said I'd stamp out this nonsense and I will!"

"I did say we shouldn't have put him in the cupboard, and now they..."

"Yes! I know!"

...she did?

Well. That's - useful information.

"So what should we do Vernon?"

"We'll... just ignore it. Yes. If they don't get an answer..."

"But—"

"I am not having one in the house, Petunia, and that's that!"

"What did you do?" whispers Dudley.

"I don't know!" he whispers back. "Someone wrote me a letter, who on earth would do that?"

Vernon's steps can be heard walking back in the direction of the door—

He retreats down the hall to his cupboard as quickly as possible.

Dudley does likewise, running up the stairs to his bedroom as silently as his frame allows him to be, which is to say not very.

But by some providence of Fate Vernon does not hear him and merely returns to the living room to read his newspaper and calm down.

So. Ignoring the letter clearly doesn't work.

And - he has some sort of connection to these wizard people, and Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia know about it, it's not just some sort of strange crazy person spying on him and sending him weird letters, it's at very least a crazy person who's known him since he was a baby and is known to his aunt and uncle as the sort of person who'd send him a letter about wizard school - and Aunt Petunia didn't want to have him live in the cupboard -

Well. What does he do?

Try to preempt the mail next time, maybe, throw out the letter before Uncle Vernon can see it? But that won't help, they'll just send another one. He digs out the first letter and reads the whole thing over again in case he missed an instruction on how to send an owl. He did not. There is nothing. He folds it all back up neatly into its envelope and puts it away. Nothing to do but wait.

That evening, after returning home from work, Uncle Vernon knocks on Victor's cupboard.