The Christmas Party

by Karen Swan

  ‘Oh, but . . .’ Pip blustered, feeling a hot blush spread across her cheeks. Ottie met her gaze, knowing exactly what she was going to say.

  ‘We can’t afford to pay you, Mrs Mac,’ Ottie said. It had been the first of the hard decisions Ottie had had to take when she’d stepped up to help their father with the estate. Having to be the one to break the harsh truth that they couldn’t afford to keep on their beloved housekeeper had been heartbreaking for her and she’d carried the guilt with her ever since.

  ‘Jeesht, as if I’d take your money,’ Mrs Mac scolded. ‘Do ya think it was the wages that kept me here all these years?’ She tutted, reaching a hand out to stroke Willow’s head tenderly – and enquiringly, for Willow had never been a quiet child and her silence now – another form of absence – had not gone unnoticed. Ottie saw Willow relax at the touch. ‘I’ll keep popping in to stay on top of things for you, till I’m sure you’re all back on your feet again.’

  As though her words were balm, Willow turned and rested her head against the old housekeeper’s hip, tears streaming in silence down her cheeks again. ‘There, there, pet, it’ll get better, you’ll see.’

  But the way her sister’s tears flowed – silent and endless, bitterness in the anguished pull of her lips – Ottie wasn’t so sure.

  ‘– Hello?’

  The high voice carried through the great hall, echoing and travelling down the oak-panelled corridor to the old kitchen. Ottie felt herself tense as she heard the clip of heels on the floorboards and, a moment later, the blow-dried head of her mother’s best friend appeared around the door. Her eyes were so red and puffy as to be almost swollen shut. Briefly it occurred to Ottie that it was poor taste for her to be more visibly – showily – upset than the deceased’s own family, but she forced a smile as she always did.

  ‘Hey,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Oh my goodness, here you all are,’ Shula Flanagan cried, bursting into tears with a violent sob and pressing a handkerchief to her nose. Her husband Bertie came in and stood behind her with a nod. His eyes looked watery too, though he didn’t break down, simply standing stiffly as his wife wept for them both. An ex-military man, like her father, he didn’t do displays of emotion either but Ottie could tell from the high set of his shoulders and the way his chin was raised just a little too high to be natural that his true feelings were only just below the surface.

  Mrs Mac slipped discreetly from the room with pursed lips. She had never been a fan of the Flanagans, even though living on the next great estate, Rockhurst, just past Dunmorgan, twelve miles away, meant they were frequent visitors to Lorne. They were regularly to be found around the dining table of a weekend and very often at the breakfast table the next morning too, when they and her parents had decided to dip deeper into the brandy.

  Ottie closed her eyes and submitted as Shula clutched her in a hard, perfume-drenched embrace.

  ‘You all look wretched,’ she cried, sobbing harder. ‘You poor, poor things.’

  No one said anything. Pip, Ottie knew, couldn’t trust herself not to come back with some withering riposte; she never did well with the fragrant, high-maintenance types of which Shula was a cheerleader, and Willow – well, she just wasn’t speaking at all, of course.

  ‘Mam’s in bed, I’m afraid,’ Ottie offered as Shula pulled out a chair at the table and sat down. ‘The doctor’s just been to give her a sedative.’

  ‘I bet she didn’t sleep a wink last night,’ Shula said, trying to frown as much as her top-up would allow. Always an attractive woman, she had recently succumbed to the temptations of ‘a little help’ as she put it – facials morphing into chemical peels, weight-loss retreats segueing to a chin tuck . . .

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, of course she didn’t. She must be beside herself. I mean, the shock of it . . .’ She pressed a hand to her heart. ‘I honestly thought Bertie was going to pass out when he took the call this morning. He was so white!’

  Ottie looked across at him. He didn’t look like most fifty-eight-year-olds. An avid fitness fanatic, he regularly ran marathons around the world and could easily have passed for being in his mid-forties. Where her father had ‘grown’ a paunch, Bertie had a six-pack and pecs, and her father’s whiskery jowls could never pull off the designer stubble Bertie got away with. In fact, it was Bertie’s obsession with fitness – fostered in the army – that was now earning him his second fortune. A canny businessman, he’d already built and sold a business importing teak furniture from Asia in the 1980s, but latterly, he’d tapped into the burgeoning market for extreme-endurance races: thirty-six-hour marathons run over hostile terrain in punishing seasons. Her father had laughed and scoffed over his brandy when Bertie had first floated the idea but he’d been on to something because now his Ultra brand was looking set to eclipse his first fortune. The man just couldn’t seem to stop making money, it seemed. Unlike her father, who always complained he was ‘born with holes in his pockets’.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ Bertie asked, looking back at her. As the eldest and her father’s right-hand on the estate, everyone always automatically deferred to her; besides, Pip was too fiery and unpredictable; most people knew to stay away. But the sincerity in his words stirred up the emotions she had been trying to keep lying still in her heart – at least until she got back to her bedroom – his question like footsteps through a pond, muddying the water. Because this was it – the beginning. After the shock had to come the action. The doingness of death. Funerals needed to be arranged. Affairs sorted. Phone calls made.

  She looked away, unable to hold his gaze. She didn’t want to cry in front of everyone. ‘Actually, yes,’ she said after a moment, talking to the floor. ‘Could you contact Dad’s old army friends, work contacts – let them know what’s happened and pass on the funeral arrangements once we’ve got them?’

  He nodded sombrely. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She bit her lip, hardly able to believe she had just mentioned her father and funeral in the same sentence, the memory of him waggling his big toe in front of everyone just yesterday still fresh.

  ‘Would you like me to draft something for the obituary too?’

  She looked up at him. ‘The obituary?’

  ‘For the Irish Times,’ he nodded. ‘They’ll want to run something on him, for sure.’

  Ottie flinched. Of course they would. Her father had been no ordinary man. He had been the 29th Knight of Lorne and the last surviving knight in all of Ireland. Of the three historic Old English knighthoods to have survived since Norman times, Declan Lorne had been the last man standing. It wasn’t just a husband, father and best friend who had died last night; a legacy had been extinguished with him too. Seven hundred years of uninterrupted lineage, which had seen off three revolutions, a siege, two fires and numerous bankruptcies, hadn’t been able to survive the simple genetic bad luck of producing three daughters and no son.

  Ottie bit her lip, trying to hold her emotions down as she nodded. The day she – and her father – had spent her whole life dreading was finally here, for she was no heir. She was the firstborn, yes. And the first disappointment.

  Chapter Three

  Pip had never noticed how colourful her home was until it was filled with people wearing black. The sunflower silk-lined walls of the drawing room, exuberant oils of faraway landscapes, blue and white Chinese lamps, threadbare rugs of indiscriminate provenance and size overlapping each other so that scarcely a patch of floorboard remained . . . But today, with mourners drifting the halls like black poppies, it was hard to feel the verve that had been carefully nurtured and cultivated within the castle.

  Leaning against the wall in the shady recess beside the heavy curtains, she watched the proceedings with detached disinterest. Grief was like a cloak that everyone shared, faces that she had grown up with – locals who’d worked at the estate, old babysitters, secret crushes when they’d been teenagers – transformed today as frown lines were deeply embedded into brows. She looke
d down at herself, changed too, for she was wearing a dress – a dress for Chrissakes! – and a dab of blusher on her cheeks, which Mrs Mac had forcibly dusted on her as she went to leave for the church. Her hand self-consciously reached up to her bright auburn hair – always cropped short over kitchen sink, it was in sore need of a trim, tufty bits curling at her ears and neck. Her hand dropped down again, her ill ease as evident upon her as a scarf. She was so rarely ever out of her jodhpurs and boots that this strange uniform of ‘civilian dress’ made her feel even more exposed and vulnerable – really not what she needed today of all days. She personally had felt her father would have approved of her standing grave-side in her riding kit. It was who she was; who he had loved.

  Ottie was circulating the room with her usual poise, a black velvet ribbon tied in her long strawberry-blonde hair, a tray of canapés in her hands and a forced smile on her face, nodding politely as sympathetic hands were placed on her shoulder and condolences ladled upon her like gravy.

  She could see her mother sitting on the George II settle, Shula beside her, untouched cups of tea in their hands resting on their laps, as friends clustered around them with pale faces. Even in the throes of despair, her mother was the most beautiful woman in the room, doll-like in her petite proportions but with sharp, refined features: angled green eyes, button mouth, planed cheekbones, thick wavy russet hair which these days was kept in a bob. She had always been able to command a room with just a slip of her smile and her father had been no exception. Declan Lorne’s famous heritage as the 29th Knight of Lorne had fostered a notoriously wild and riotous bachelorhood which came to a distinct and final stop the very moment he laid eyes on the elegant Serena O’Shaughnessy. It was a coup de foudre for him, although her mother had taken rather more convincing to agree to dinner – but by the night’s end, she had known she would never meet a man more dangerously exciting than this modern knight and they had fallen madly in love.

  Theirs had been the aspirational love story, and back in the day they had been quite the ‘It’ couple, always in the pages of Tatler and friends with everyone from Prince Charles to Bryan Ferry. Life had always just seemed to fall in place for her mother, so to suffer the bad fortune of becoming a widow so relatively young . . . Pip half assumed that was what most people found shocking, that this tragedy should have happened to them.

  Mrs Mac was moving around the room too, with the teapot, refreshing cups and pointing the way to the toilets. She had worked tirelessly the past few days, getting the castle ready for this, polishing the woodwork, vacuuming the rugs and tapestries, arranging flowers in all the vases – of which there were many – changing the sheets in all twenty-four bedrooms ‘in case of guests’. Pip sincerely hoped there wouldn’t be. All of them seemed to share an obsessive need to be alone. Only Mrs Mac was allowed free movement in their inner sanctum.

  Willow wandered, blank-faced, back into the room and Pip realized she had been absent. Again. She had a glass of wine in her hand and seemed ever so slightly unsteady on her feet. Pip moved over to her quickly.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, looking directly into her sister’s bright-blue eyes; though glassy and unfocussed now, they were the reason she and Ottie had catcalled her ‘gypsy’ during their fights growing up, both of them so jealous of how the colour seemed to ‘pop’ against Willow’s dark hair.

  ‘Fine. Ab-so-lutely fine.’ Willow held her arms out as if to prove the point, a bead of Merlot flying from the glass and landing on the rug. Pip watched it sink into the fibres, disappearing almost immediately in the melange of red, orange and green tones.

  ‘How much have you had to drink?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

  ‘Enough to make this bearable,’ Willow sighed, a look of desolation washing over her face like a wave.

  Pip put a hand lightly on her arm. ‘We’re nearly through it, okay? Just . . . hold on. They’ll be gone within the hour. And then we can put our pyjamas on and, if we’re lucky, Mrs Mac might let us have supper in front of the fire.’

  ‘And then what?’ Willow asked her simply.

  Pip stared at her, knowing her baby sister wasn’t asking what they would be watching on telly later. ‘And then we . . . carry on carrying on. It’s what Dad would have wanted.’

  Willow gave a small scoff and took another angry glug of wine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, poor Dad – he never had much luck getting what he wanted, did he?’ she mocked.

  Pip scowled, though she couldn’t deny it.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ Pip whispered, but so quietly she wasn’t sure her sister had even heard.

  ‘It all just seems so . . . empty now,’ Willow murmured, her gaze casting around and over the drawing room, every possible surface filled with some trinket or photograph or portrait. But Pip knew exactly what she meant – like staying at a wedding after the newlyweds had left, their ancestral home lacked purpose suddenly.

  They stood in silence, watching as the room buzzed with sympathy, knowing that at some – possibly subconscious – level, many of the mourners were also delighting in the chance to sip tea and make conversation in the grand old castle, like it was a birthday outing for an aged aunt.

  ‘Devil on horseback?’ Ottie asked, stopping in front of them with the tray.

  ‘Ah, so is that what we’re calling Pip these days?’ a bemused voice enquired.

  They turned to find Taigh O’Mahoney approaching; the Lorne postmaster-slash-firefighter-slash-paramedic, he was the closest thing the village had to a hero. He kept a defibrillator in the back of his car as well as in the post office, and had made the cover of the Lorne Echo in the summer when he’d ‘brought back’ old Joanie Fitzgerald after she’d collapsed collecting her pension.

  ‘Taigh, just the man,’ Ottie said, turning and offering him a canapé as well. He took two.

  Pip watched as he winked his thanks, his dark curly hair flopping as he ate. He had a face she wanted to slap – it was covered with freckles, like hers, but his hazel eyes were perpetually laughing as though he was in on some ongoing joke.

  ‘I was going to come and find you.’ Ottie frowned. ‘Is it true they’re not going to rebuild the village hall in Agmor?’ she asked.

  Taigh’s smile faded. ‘Aye. The rebuild cost the insurance company is quoting is too low. Won’t cover getting the roof on, last I heard.’

  ‘But that’s awful. It’s pretty much the only meeting place in the village besides the pub, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aye, ’tis.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Willow asked flatly, out of the loop of all the local news.

  ‘The village hall in Agmor burned down a few weeks ago,’ Taigh said sombrely.

  ‘Isn’t there something they can do?’ Ottie pressed. ‘Appeal to the insurers? Get a fund going?’

  ‘Well, given the church roof fund has been stuck at seventy per cent of its target for three years straight now, there’s not much appetite for more do-gooding. People are strapped enough as it is.’

  ‘Do they know how it started?’ Willow asked, sounding underwhelmed, almost bored, by the provincial drama. She lived a bigger life these days.

  ‘Arson, for sure. We found a rag stuffed in a bottle just in by the door.’

  ‘No!’ Ottie gasped. ‘But who would do such a thing?’

  ‘Kids.’ He said it so matter-of-factly.

  ‘But . . . why would they . . . I mean, they have nowhere else to go but there. I can’t believe that!’ Ottie spluttered, sounding almost angry about it. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Boredom,’ he shrugged. ‘Fire’s exciting.’

  ‘I guess it must have been exciting for you too, having a real fire to go to for once,’ Pip said tartly. ‘Beats rescuing cats, surely?’

  Pip saw Ottie flinch and even Willow seemed taken aback as a stiff silence opened up at her words. She wasn’t entirely sure herself why she’d said it. Her feisty attitude often had a kamikaze element to it and this was no exception, for there w
as no love lost between her and Taigh. They had dated briefly as teenagers – she had loved what she thought was the scandalousness of the Knight’s daughter snogging the butcher’s son, but it had all gone wrong when their fathers merely shrugged at the news and Taigh promptly broke it off with her, saying he wasn’t ready to be in a relationship – only for her to catch him steaming up the bus stop with Lizzie Galloway that same night. Try as she might, she had never quite been able to forgive him that humiliation.

  Taigh gave a small sigh and forced a smile, well used to Pip’s ongoing hostilities, though he always appeared prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt any time they met. ‘And with that, I will bid you adieu, ladies. I just came over to offer you my condolences. Not that you need any more of those, I’m sure, but I’m sorry all the same. It’s a terrible loss. You know how highly I thought of your da.’

  ‘Oh, Taigh, no, wait—’ Ottie protested as he turned to leave.

  ‘And it’s good seeing you back here, Li’l Will,’ he said to Willow, using another of her childhood pet names. ‘I can’t remember the last time I saw you. Don’t be a stranger now. Come by to say hi before you go back. It’d be nice to catch up.’

  Willow nodded as they all watched him walk away.

  ‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ Ottie hissed, slapping Pip lightly across the stomach. ‘That was just plain rude.’

  ‘Actually, he was the rude one for interrupting us.’

  ‘He came over to offer his condolences.’

  ‘He called me a devil on horseback!’ Pip said indignantly.

  There was a surprised pause, but then she saw the first hints of grins flicker on both her sisters’ faces. ‘Well . . .’ Ottie mused wryly. ‘It’s not an inaccurate description of you.’

  Willow gave a giggle, the sound escaping like a bubble through water. It was such a surprise to hear anything at all from her that Ottie cracked a grin too and even Pip allowed herself to feel a ripple of amusement at the riposte. She supposed it was reasonably droll. Devil on horseback.