The Christmas Party

by Karen Swan

  ‘Here actually. Upstairs.’

  ‘Oh. I hear the rooms are nice.’

  ‘They are. They are.’ He looked down into his drink before looking at her again. ‘You’ve never seen them?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, you should. They’re . . .’ His gaze fell to her lips. ‘Nice—’

  ‘Pip!’

  The voice made her turn on her stool. What?

  ‘Oh jeesht, you have got to be kidding me,’ she muttered as she saw Taigh pushing his way through the crowd towards her.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Jack asked, seeing how she dropped her head into her hand, trying to hide her face.

  ‘Pip, Jesus, where’ve you been?’ Taigh demanded as he got to her.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she mumbled in her best bored voice.

  ‘Didn’t Willow tell you? I’ve been trying to track you down all week. You weren’t at the flat, in the stables, at—’

  ‘Yes, all right, I get the picture,’ she said quickly, not wanting him to mention the castle. ‘You’ve found me now. What is it?’

  He looked taken aback by her abrupt tone, as he always did, as though her rudeness to him was something he forgot about between meetings. ‘I just need to do that quick check-up on you. Don’t you remember? We talked about it. That crackle—’

  ‘Oh dear God, not the bloody crackle again,’ she snapped. ‘I am clearly fine, Taigh! Look at me – I’m out having a few drinks, with my friend Jack here—’

  Taigh started, as though surprised to see the big man standing there.

  ‘Hey,’ Jack said, holding his pint and watching on interestedly.

  ‘Hey,’ Taigh muttered in reply, turning back to her. ‘Look, I just need to sign you off, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t need it, I’m fine.’

  But Taigh was scrutinizing her. ‘Your eyes are bright.’

  ‘Yeah, because I was having a nice time before you turned up.’

  He put the back of his hand on her forehead. ‘And you’re burning up.’

  ‘I am n— Jeesht!’ She slapped his hand off her. ‘Get your hands off me.’

  Jack took a step in towards him. He said nothing but there was implicit threat in the move.

  ‘I am trying to help you,’ Taigh laughed in disbelief, stepping back nonetheless.

  ‘And when will you get it through your thick skull that I don’t want your help? I am fine.’

  Taigh looked at Jack. ‘She nearly drowned last weekend.’

  ‘I did no— Pah!’ she scoffed. ‘Christ, you’d make a song and dance out of anything, Taigh O’Mahoney.’

  ‘You nearly drowned and now you’ve got a chest infection. You need antibiotics.’

  ‘If I’m feeling unwell I’ll go to a proper doctor, thanks.’

  Jack frowned. ‘So you’re not a doctor?’ he asked Taigh.

  ‘He’s the postman!’ Pip said scornfully.

  ‘I’m a fully qualified paramedic,’ Taigh said, looking angry now. ‘It’s postmaster duties that are part-time.’

  ‘And he’s a part-time fireman!’ Pip said sarcastically. ‘Just has to be helping people any way he can. Can’t help himself.’

  Taigh stared at her with a look she’d never seen in his eyes before. Gone was the happy-go-lucky, twinkly eyed lad everyone round here knew and loved. He looked furious. Pushed too far. ‘Fine! Get pneumonia then. Get a collapsed lung.’

  ‘I will!’ she said defiantly, throwing back the rest of her drink and slamming down the glass on the bar. ‘And seeing as I’m so damned lucky to be alive, I may as well start bloody celebrating it! Come on, Jack.’

  Jack looked back at her in surprise. ‘Huh?’

  ‘You were going to show me your room?’

  ‘Oh yes. Right.’ And he downed his pint too.

  She grabbed his hand and pushed past Taigh with a victorious look. ‘Tell you what, Taigh – I’ll let you know if he makes me wheeze, shall I?’

  Willow stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked around the great hall, dumbstruck by the newly revealed space. Everyone had left for the day – even though it was a Saturday – bags of tools lying squat in every corner, dustsheets thrown over the floors. It was hard to believe how much had changed in just three days.

  Every item of furniture, every memento that had been theirs, was now gone, either packed up in storage or relocated to the Dower House. All that remained were the bones of the place, and what bones they were: sculpted, fine, durable. She had never even noticed the carving on the corbels before or the ornate stone pediments. She had barely bothered to look up at the hammer-beam ceilings or to take a moment to admire the heraldic coat of arms painted on shields. Rusty, her father’s beloved ancestral suit of armour, had seemed a part of the fabric of the house but he had been simply lifted up and carried out like a hoover, the floor and wall behind where he had stood faded from years of his stolid protection. Her home was like a soprano in her dressing room after the performance – make-up wiped off, clothes on the chair, hair pulled down round a pale face.

  Was the castle breathing now? Was this what Connor had wanted to see – the Lornes’ historic might stripped back to a naked beating heart?

  She sighed, the mere thought of him distracting her from the moment and spinning her back into the past again – the heat in his eyes Saturday night, the shock on Monday, the guardedness as he’d come clean on Tuesday, the way he’d stopped talking to his workmen, gaze following her as she’d walked past with the last of the remaining boxes for the Dower House yesterday . . .

  She dropped her head and stared at her feet. She wiggled her toes in her boots but couldn’t see them beneath the thick leather. If a toe wiggles in a boot but no one can see it, did the toe really wiggle at all, she wondered? And if a woman kisses a stranger at a party but it turns out he’s buying her castle, did the kiss really happen at all? Because in spite of the undercurrent that ran between them, entire conversations being spoken by eyes and not mouths, they’d been true to their word. There is no us. How could there be when there was four point three million at stake for her and the solubility of his company for him? Neither one of them could afford for this deal to go wrong.

  Slowly, she began climbing the stairs, looking around in amazement at how the castle looked so dramatically different from every angle – high, low – its history as a fortification suddenly coming to the fore now that the soft comforts of domestic life had been stripped out.

  From the galleried landing, she looked down. How many times had she stood here with her sisters, watching the shenanigans playing out below? Back then the parties had been frequent – every weekend, it had seemed to her – the three little girls swinging their legs through the bannisters and eating sweets as they watched the flirting and dancing, admired the beautiful dresses and jewels, the men sometimes in their dark kilts. How she had longed to grow up. Willow wondered if she was the only one of her sisters disappointed by the reality of being an adult. She went to enough parties herself these days, but the dazzling glitter and fuzzy edges that had seemed to frame her world view back then had gone, leaving only dull colours and hard shapes. Gilded moments such as she had known here were rare.

  A sound at the front door made her look up. A carpenter forgetting something? One of the painters? She tutted irritably. She had deliberately come up to the castle late, waiting for everyone to have left before she saw for herself what her home had become. She didn’t want an audience as she saw it gutted, for the first time certainly in her life, and she was glad to have had that moment to herself. Aside from being emptied and clad in scaffolding, half of the bedrooms had already been stripped of their country-house chintz and were being whitewashed. The teams weren’t touching the silk wallpapers and jewel paint colours of the entertaining rooms downstairs; she had stipulated that at least. Not until the castle was officially sold to them.

  Either way, coming in here this evening had been a shock. It wasn’t that the castle didn’t look bette
r – it did. But already it didn’t feel like home. The transition had begun and she didn’t know how her mother was going to react when she saw it – apart from badly.

  The sound of the lock turning and footsteps on the flags made her fall still and her elevated position meant she got to see him before he saw her; she got to see how he visibly retracted at the sight of her.

  ‘Oh. I thought everyone had gone,’ Connor said.

  ‘Everyone has.’

  ‘There were no cars outside so I assumed—’

  ‘I walked up from the Dower House.’

  He took his gaze off her like he was lifting a picture off a hook and scanned the space. ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘What do you think?’ she countered.

  ‘I think it looks a lot better.’

  ‘I can’t believe how much they’ve done already,’ she shrugged.

  ‘Yes. They’re efficient.’

  Efficient? He did like his understatement. ‘I see what you mean now about SWAT team,’ she said. ‘I assumed you’d been exaggerating.’

  He looked up at her, his body still and she had to force herself to stay standing on the spot, not to run down the stairs to him. ‘I never exaggerate.’

  ‘Still think you’ll get it all done by next weekend?’

  ‘We’re on target, yes,’ he nodded. ‘Although I realize it may not look like it at the moment. Top coats tomorrow—’

  ‘They’re working on a Sunday too?’

  ‘Needs must,’ he shrugged. ‘It means double pay but we’ve got to pull everything out of the bag to get it done on time. Woodwork’s getting done Monday and Tuesday; scaffolding down and furniture in through Wednesday; caterers and staff in Thursday. Officially open first thing Friday, although the guests aren’t due till late afternoon so we’ll have an extra few hours for snagging.’

  He looked up at her again, his focus seeming to shift, and she felt a small ball of tension gather in the pit of her stomach. She watched as he began walking up the staircase, the treads creaking underfoot because he didn’t know – yet – which ones rubbed and which ones didn’t. And maybe he never would; the problem might simply be fixed by one of his two hundred-strong army and fastened back into perfect silence. He would never know this place the way she did.

  She realized she was holding her breath as he walked up to the landing; it was like getting closer to the sun, the heat building exponentially as he walked towards her . . .

  Past her, his eyes grazing over her like a breeze.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked after him, feeling the cool chill of his wake.

  ‘To see what the guys have done today.’ He disappeared into the green room or, rather, what used to be the green room – crashing disappointment flooding her. He emerged again a minute later. ‘Can you help with something?’

  She walked over, stepping into the room that had always been her grandmother’s when she had come to stay. She had liked getting the morning light as she always woke so early anyway – she said it made the nights feel shorter to see the dawn rays creeping up the wall. ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s this, do you know?’ Connor was crouched down, pointing to a small perfectly round hole in the floor, set almost up to the outside wall. It had been hidden for years behind a rosewood armoire.

  She squatted beside him, bemused. How could he not know this? ‘That’s a meurtrière. Or murder hole.’

  ‘A mur—?’ He looked down at it again.

  ‘It was a secondary line of defence for when the castle was breached – which it only was four times in seven hundred years. They’d throw burning tar, oil, wax, you name it, on invaders downstairs.’

  ‘A murder hole,’ he repeated, looking back at her with a grin. She wished he wouldn’t; he was so close.

  She stood up, and he followed. ‘This is a castle, remember.’

  A light shone in his eyes from the discovery, boyish delight animating his usually aloof demeanour. ‘Any other architectural peccadilloes I should know about?’

  ‘Numerous. There are three of those across each wing. Then there’s the sally port down by the postern—’

  ‘The sally –’ he echoed, watching her talk, his gaze blowing over her face like a feather dancing in the breeze.

  ‘The priest’s hole off the morning room. The secret tunnel from the library.’

  He looked at her, intensity in his eyes, and for a moment, it was like he forgot to speak, a silence sitting where words were due. ‘. . . This place has a hell of a past.’

  ‘And a bright future too,’ she said simply, breaking the spell and moving away. How easy it would be to fall into him; the effort not to was making her sway.

  He carried on looking at her and it was like he could rev up her heart, making it go faster and faster . . .

  She took another step back. ‘Anyway, look, I should go. I was just about to leave—’

  ‘Willow, wait.’

  ‘What?’ she asked from the safety of the doorway.

  He hesitated. ‘I’m staying at the Hare tonight. If you’re free we could . . . have a drink together? Get some dinner? Talk shop.’

  She stared at him, wanting exactly that and nothing else: air with him. A drink with him. A meal with him. A night with him. The everyday and mundane became somehow vital with him. He was an alchemist, making the air shimmer, her skin tingle.

  ‘Besides, it’s our anniversary,’ he added with a smile as her hesitation lengthened. ‘A week today since we met.’

  Was it really a week since she had first set eyes on him? A week since those kisses that saw her press her fingers to her lips every time she thought of them? A week since Pip had gone for a midnight swim? Almost three since her father had died? Life was changing faster than she could keep up. She had struck a notional deal on her home, stripped out in a few days a castle her family had occupied for seven centuries. All her anchors were gone. The ground felt like it had been whipped from beneath her feet and she wasn’t sure if she was flying or falling.

  He walked over to her and looked into her eyes.

  It was both.

  The Hare was heaving, locals jostling for a spot at the bar with the vast influx of workers drafted in to the castle works, Joe and Betty, his mother, working at full stretch to keep the orders coming.

  ‘Perhaps this wasn’t the best place to come to,’ Connor said, as yet another workman passed by their table with his hands full of pints, tipping the boss a knowing wink as he passed.

  ‘Actually, I think it’s perfect,’ she demurred, relieved to have an audience. They clearly couldn’t trust themselves. The moment that had passed between them at the castle . . . it had been too close.

  They were sitting at the table between the window and the fire. The windows were fogged up but the lights of the Christmas tree that had been erected on the village green shone through indistinctly. The festive fairies had been at work inside the pub too, bushy strands of red and green tinsel swagged along the beams and walls, bunches of holly and snowberries tacked to the mirrored bar, a slightly too large tree in the corner near the loos, the top having been hacked off and the angel bending forward at a precarious angle.

  ‘What do you recommend?’ he asked her, scanning the menu.

  ‘The beef. Joe gets it from Paddy Mahoney, down the lane at Finnegan’s.’

  ‘Does he now? And if I ordered the lamb?’

  ‘From Bob and Liz at Fairgreen Farm, the other side of the village.’

  ‘Chicken?’

  She pulled a face. ‘That gets shipped in, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Cork.’

  ‘All the way from there?’ he teased.

  ‘I know. Shocking.’

  ‘How about the . . . pheasant?’

  ‘Bertie Flanagan’s estate. Always good.’

  He put the menu down and studied her. ‘It’s a tight-knit place here then.’

  ‘It is. Everyone knows everyone.’

  ‘And everyone�
��s business too?’

  She shrugged. ‘Of course.’

  ‘So us having dinner here will be seen as . . .?’

  ‘A business meeting. With food. I’m simply telling you the local suppliers you need to tap if you want to run a restaurant in your new club.’ She gave another casual shrug but the words felt funny to say. Her castle – her home – a clubhouse.

  ‘I see.’ His finger tapped lightly against his pint, condensation trickling down the side of it as the fire crackled and popped beside them.

  ‘Oh, hey, Willow.’

  She looked up to find Taigh shrugging off his coat as he came in. His cheeks were flushed and he wasn’t in a uniform for once.

  ‘Hi, Taigh. Off duty?’

  ‘Thank God. There’d better be a beer barrel down here with my name on it.’ His eyes glanced at Connor questioningly.

  ‘Oh, this is Connor Shaye. He’s . . . hiring the castle for a function next week. We’re just discussing logistics.’

  Taigh reached over to shake his hand. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey,’ Connor replied.

  ‘You’ve got a big team working for you,’ he said, nodding his head towards the full bar.

  ‘There’s a lot to do. It makes for thirsty work.’

  ‘Taigh, by the way, did you catch up with Pip?’ she asked, taking a sip of her gin and tonic.

  ‘No. Well, last night but –’ His expression changed, his bright, open face darkening. ‘I’m afraid I gave up there. She wasn’t having any of it and I’ve got better things to do than try to convince her otherwise.’

  Willow wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. She’s stubborn as a mule when she wants to be.’

  ‘Aye . . .’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, I’d best sharpen my elbows and go into battle for my pint. Jeesht, it’s busy . . . See you anon.’

  She turned her attention back to Connor. ‘Pip’s the most bloody-minded—’ She stopped as she saw how he was looking at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just wondering what you’ll do when you’ve sold here. You seem pretty embedded into the place.’

  ‘My family is, but I’ll go back to Dublin. Frankly, it can’t come soon enough.’