The Christmas Party

by Karen Swan

  ‘You don’t know me but I believe you met my father, Declan Lorne.’

  There was a pause – thankfully – and when he spoke next, she heard the focus in his voice. She had his attention. ‘As if I could forget.’

  She took a deep breath, hoping to sound as direct and forceful as him. ‘Am I right in thinking you were interested in buying Lorne?’

  There was a pause. ‘I was.’ His stress on the past tense wasn’t encouraging.

  ‘Might you be interested again?’

  She heard his scoff down the line. ‘Your father told me Lorne would never be available to the “likes of” me.’

  Willow rolled her eyes. She could imagine how plain her father had made his feelings about him. He’d never been one to disguise his emotions and he prided himself on calling a spade a shovel. But what could she say to this man? She didn’t want to tell him too much about their changed circumstances; the news of her father’s death wasn’t some throwaway line to pop into conversation with a stranger.

  ‘Things have changed and we’re putting Lorne on the market again. Given your previous interest, we thought we’d make contact in case you wanted to look at it off-book.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘. . . The family.’

  There was another long pause and she could almost hear the deductions clicking in his brain – the out-of-the-blue call, the evasive daughter . . .

  ‘Well, I appreciate the call, Ms Lorne, but my portfolio’s closed at the moment. I’m not looking to make any further investments at this time.’

  ‘Oh.’ She couldn’t hide the disappointment in her voice. She swallowed. ‘I see. Well, if you—’

  She heard a click.

  ‘Hello? Mr Shaye? Are you still there?’

  ‘We’re all missing you desperately!’ Hels said as they walked through the parterre, her mother’s favourite part of the garden. ‘The studio’s not the same without you there. I went to the Go Slo Flow class this week and they’ve got this interim manager in. Apparently she’s decided to economize by spraying Glade around, instead of your wonderful meditation mist.’

  ‘She has not!’ Willow said, horrified. Pyro Tink was the pyrotechnic gym with a cult following, the high-octane antidote to the yoga revolution and with waiting lists that the city’s members’ clubs could only dream of. When she had first arrived in Dublin, it had been the only way to calm her down, to beat back her anger, and she had spent almost all the money she made from waitressing taking slavish daily classes and drinking protein smoothies in the juice bar every day. She’d been a devotee before she’d been an employee and when the manager’s job had come up, she’d jumped at it. She’d never been in better shape and she was instantly everyone’s new best friend at parties whenever they found out where she worked. But her Aussie boss ran the Dublin branch to the tried-and-tested formula that had made his business a $22m success story back home and he didn’t like to deviate from the plan; every tiny initiative she’d implemented had been hard-won and getting the organic meditation mist approved for the wind-downs, although expensive, had been one of her great wins. All the clients loved it, plus they made a 46 per cent profit on every tube they sold, and she’d been on the brink of proposing they develop their own branded line of products when she’d taken the call about her father. So to hear she’d not yet been out of the city two weeks, and already her legacy was being eroded . . .?

  At their backs, the castle stood noble and impenetrable; before them, an ancient yew appeared almost to curtsey as one bough swept to the ground. It was one of those days when the very light seemed tinted, warming up the world with a rosy blush. Willow knew it was the calm before the storm, like the intake of breath the sea always took before a tsunami, or before a scream took a girl’s voice. Gale-force winds and lashing rain were forecast for tomorrow, as much as a month’s worth in three hours.

  ‘I’ve missed you too, Hels. It’s been –’ She swallowed. My father died six minutes before I arrived home. My family won’t talk to me. ‘Intense.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, babe.’ Helena squeezed her arm consolingly. She looked freshly tanned from her recent safari break in Kenya with her new boyfriend. ‘You’ve been so much in our minds.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Oh my god, look at that!’ Hels laughed delightedly as a peacock strutted across the lawn.

  Willow just smiled. There had always been peacocks at Lorne, certainly throughout her lifetime, and once they’d even had a pure-white one; Pip had called it Midnight, just to be contrary.

  Helena inhaled deeply and stopped walking, throwing her arms out and her head back. ‘God, it’s so unbelievably quiet here.’

  ‘I know,’ Willow murmured, wondering if it was a good thing. She was all for noise and distraction herself. ‘It’s so heavy and dense, sometimes I think you could bite down on it.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to put that in the particulars – edible peace,’ Hels laughed. Always chic, even in a sweaty pyro class, today she looked especially smart – or perhaps that was just because Willow felt like a bumpkin in her old jeans and jumper, a mud splatter up the backs of her calves; her urban gloss was already getting gritty. She had left Dublin in such a rush, there’d been no time to pack and she was getting by in the old clothes left in her wardrobe from three years ago.

  Hels, by contrast, wearing a pleated navy dress and Tabitha Simmons Mary Janes, looked like a chess piece from the city chequerboard, groomed and sophisticated, and everything this gently crumbling, leaking, battered and windswept estate wasn’t. Just the sight of her was a stinging reminder of everything Willow had left behind by coming back here and she felt even more desperate now to get away again as soon as she possibly could. Every day that passed, she could feel the city slipping its bonds and moving further away from her. Leaving her behind.

  ‘It really is incredible, Willow. I had no idea this was your home. You never made any reference to who your father was. I mean, what a heritage! You’re a knight’s daughter. How could you never mention that?’

  Willow looked away quickly. ‘Yeah, well . . . it’s not something to be particularly proud of,’ she shrugged. ‘Besides, what was I supposed to say? “Hi, Willow Lorne, general manager at Pyro Tink and knight’s daughter”? It’s not like it’s anything to do with me. It’s just a title – and a male one at that.’

  Hels’ smile faded. ‘It is so sad – having to sell and the title dying out . . .’

  Willow could feel her body stiffening. ‘Well, you know what they say – all good things must come to an end sooner or later, and we had a good run here: seven hundred and twelve years is a good innings by anyone’s standards. Besides, it would never be the same here without Dad. He was Lorne.’

  ‘And there was no way to get the knighthood transferred to you or your sisters?’

  Willow shook her head, feeling a wave of heat, anger, rise up inside her. ‘He did try but there was no budging on it. Had to be a “sir”.’

  ‘Honestly in this day and age . . .’ Hels sighed wearily.

  ‘I know.’

  Hels turned to face her squarely. ‘So then you’re absolutely sure this is what you want to do? Sell the lot?’

  ‘Depends what you think we can get for it,’ Willow said non-committally, even though ‘anything at all’ could only be an improvement on their current financial predicament.

  Hels laughed as though she’d cracked a joke. ‘It’ll be an enormous upheaval for you – emotionally as well as physically.’

  ‘I’m bang out of other options,’ Willow shrugged. ‘Can’t give it away, can’t afford to keep it and can’t think of a great business idea with which to make my millions.’

  Hels turned on the spot again, taking in the projecting bow windows on this facade, the many leaded windows, corbelled chimney stacks . . . ‘Well, something of this calibre deserves to find a sensitive buyer, someone who knows how to do what needs doing, sympathetically. As you said, there’s a fair of amount of restoration work that’
ll have to be done by the new owner. It’s not for the faint of heart – the scale of it would frighten a lot of people – but the right buyer is out there, that’s for sure.’ She looked back at Willow again. ‘At this level though, it’s a matter of waiting for them. You know that, right? There’s not that many of them around.’

  ‘And what level are we talking about, roughly?’

  Hels blew out slowly through her cheeks, making even that look elegant. ‘The team thinks five and a half, maybe even six million—’

  ‘Holy shit!’ Willow exclaimed. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘If we had the right buyer on the right day. And if there was a following wind.’ Hels grinned. ‘A lot of ifs. And it could take a long time – months, definitely, but maybe even a year or two . . .’

  Willow blinked, feeling her euphoria dissipate. A year or two? She didn’t have that kind of time; certainly not that kind of patience. She couldn’t be saddled with this place – and everything it had done to her – for anything like that long.

  Hels saw her expression and rubbed her arm sympathetically. ‘Listen, market conditions are challenging. Which is corporate speak for shite,’ she smiled. ‘Everything’s sticking at the moment. It’s a buyers’ market. But you could always sell it for less if you wanted a quick sale. People act fast when they think they’re getting a bargain.’

  ‘Right,’ Willow murmured, but it was hard to get six million out of her head now it had been planted there. ‘And what about the contents sale – when could that happen? Assuming my mother goes for it, I mean.’

  ‘Well, there’s a hell of a lot to get through. Your family’s collected a lot over the years! We’ll need to get a team onto it. Inventorying it all will take weeks, if not months.’

  ‘But when could we go to auction, do you think?’ she pressed.

  Hels considered. ‘I’m thinking probably around Easter.’

  Damn. ‘Really?’ Willow bit her lip. Even that felt too long to wait. She wanted to get back to Dublin and her proper life. Her temporary replacement was spraying Glade around in her absence for Chrissakes while she was losing her edge out here, she could feel it – the ever-present threat of lapsing back into who she’d once been here: sweet, pliable, gullible Willow. The baby. The idiot. The—

  ‘Well, an estate of this scale and importance, we need to get it right. And, listen, you’ve had a huge amount to deal with lately. You’ve been through so much. It’s important you take time to really think about what’s right for you and especially your poor mother—’

  ‘I don’t need time to think,’ she said sharply. Decisively. Her mother wasn’t the victim here. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Hels looked astonished. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ Willow said, looking up at the ancient castle that had once been her home, her safety, her refuge and was now none of those things. Her father had left her this place specifically to get rid of it and her mother would just have to deal with it. ‘I need to be shot of this place once and for all. Let’s sell.’

  Chapter Nine

  The same day

  Ottie stood in the rain, shivering violently, clipboard in her arms again as she waited to mark off the runners as they passed by, writing down the time and the numbers pinned on their chest and backs. The race had started at 6 a.m., weaving a looping course from the Flanagan estate along the coastline, and although she’d been at her post for over an hour now, clocking on at 7 a.m., it would take even the fastest runners two hours to get here as the course wended along the jagged coastline.

  Every so often, one of the race marshals would drive up on a quad bike, a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, checking up on the pit stop stations and stewards and handing out bottles of water. It wasn’t water she wanted though – coffee, tea, hot chocolate, anything warm. Weather conditions were a lot harsher than had been hoped and exactly as had been predicted – driving rain, and a strong offshore wind that kept a permanent chill in her fingertips and toes. Ottie was certain it was harder going for the stewards than for the competitors, at least they got to move around and generate heat; she on the other hand was stuck on her watch, an especially narrow stretch of the Way with a steep drop on one side straight down to the sea and nowhere to shelter in either direction for several miles. Her particular station was positioned on, if not quite a promontory, a small belly, meaning the wind and rain caught her from all sides. In vain, she had dragged the little striped canopy and table and chairs slightly further round the bend, trying to get at least some protection from the severe conditions, but the towering blackened clouds stacking in the sky promised little respite.

  Most of the race along the Wild Atlantic Way was run along the top of the cliffs, exposed to the wind but wide and firm underfoot at least, but here the path dropped fifty feet below the summit and was dug into the side of the cliffs, rendering it both narrow and prone to erosion. That heavy rain was not going to help anyone here. It was one of the most perilous sections of the course – far too dangerous to attempt at night, which was why the course was run this way round, so that it was always tackled first thing in the morning light. Bertie had given it to her, knowing she knew it better than anyone, for it was on Lorne land after all; she and Pip and Willow had spent their childhoods racing up and down this trail, their parents walking hand in hand behind them.

  She stepped side to side, squinting into the rain and looking hopefully up and down the track for signs of another runner or anyone bringing coffee – she didn’t care which. She was bored and cold and just wanted something to break the monotony, for there wasn’t even a visible horizon to watch. Only the prospect of fleetingly seeing Bertie cheered her; supporting him was the sole reason she volunteered to help with this, hidden in plain sight. They’d shared a magical hour together last night and he’d made a promise to try and throw off any neighbouring competitors as he neared her post, to share a quick kiss as he passed. He could afford to slow up if required; in spite of his still-formidable fitness, at two years shy of sixty, even he no longer harboured any hopes of running the race in a competitive time – Ottie just wanted him to get round safely – but as the competition owner, and a once notable participant, he was at least afforded the courtesy of setting off ahead of the predicted race leaders, as an official ‘hare’. Going by Ottie’s chart, he’d already been overtaken by three runners who’d passed by her just a few minutes ago and she kept eagerly putting up her binoculars in the hope of seeing him coming along the track. It should be any minute now. According to last year’s race stats, he’d already passed this point two minutes ago.

  But no one appeared on the horizon the abysmal weather slowing the race down. That was the drawback to this event. The qualifying standard was far beyond the reach of mere mortals: just to take part required fiendish levels of fitness, stamina and mental grit that bordered on SAS-levels, but the gap between the race leaders and the stragglers could be immense, sometimes as wide as fifteen to twenty hours between first and last place. She could be waiting here for a while before she saw anyone else at all.

  She paced, trying to stay warm, trying to ignore the growing sense of urgency in her bladder. She had quickly got through her thermos of tea in an effort to wake up, warm up, and stave off boredom but now it was beginning to tell. She carried on stepping from side to side, trying not to think about it, but the cold and the lack of anything else to do made that difficult.

  Pulling the toggles of her hood tightly, she jogged a little way down the track, back towards the direction of the start line and away from the exposed bend, trying to get out of the wind just a little. A few boats faint on the horizon sailed past, the heave and trough of the stormy grey seas tossing them like soap suds.

  She got to the small fork in the track where the path divided, the outermost branch splitting into an even narrower tributary and winding down the sharply angled bank for a short distance before disappearing into the grass like smoke into air. Devil’s Fork it was known as, for good reason, and she had never been allowed do
wn there as a child; they even used to walk the dogs on leads on that section.

  She checked the time again, beginning to feel desperate to pee. The marshal had only just gone past her twenty minutes ago and wouldn’t be back again for a while. Should she radio for cover? But it’d be a couple of miles to the next station on a quad bike – plus she’d have to wait for that to get here first.

  ‘Jeesht, great weekend, Otts,’ she muttered to herself as a particularly strong gust almost knocked her backwards and whipped off her hood. Righting herself, she checked the path’s horizon again. Still no one. What were they all doing back there? Hopping?

  Sod it. She couldn’t wait any longer. Her bladder was crying out for mercy. She looked left and right uncertainly. The track might be clear, but it was also completely exposed: the moment someone appeared, she would be in their direct line of sight. Reports of one of the stewards relieving herself path-side was not the kind of PR Bertie wanted. She looked around apprehensively. Unless . . . She looked back at the bend behind her. If she was to lean in against the steep hillside just around the far side of that corner, she might be hidden from view for just long enough . . .?

  Jeesht, what else was she to do? There really was nowhere else to go.

  Jogging back to the shallow blind spot behind the bend, she undid her jeans as quickly as she could, her fingers fumbling in the cold and struggling with her long raincoat and all the many layers she put on to get through today. Quickly, she relieved herself, closing her eyes happily as her bladder released, and mere minutes later she was straightening up again and rearranging her clothes. No one would ever know.

  She looked left and right again. Not a soul—

  No, wait. Someone was coming.

  She frowned. That would have been Sod’s Law, she tutted to herself, jogging back to the little hut and grabbing her clipboard, preparing to record their times. A few moments earlier and she’d have been hard-pressed to protect either her modesty or dignity.