by Karen Swan
‘Shall we start in the yellow drawing room?’ she asked, pointing the way with an outstretched arm and quickly leading him onwards. Anywhere where Mrs Mac wasn’t seemed like a good idea.
‘Sure.’ He followed after her and she tried not to imagine his eyes were on her as they walked through. They stood in the opulent space in silence, his eyes roaming over the silk-lined walls, the old portraits hanging from thick wires, layered-up rugs and clusters of orange and blue chairs in chintzes and damasks arranged in groups around the enormous oak fireplace. Her eyes roamed the room too, trying to look at it with a stranger’s perspective but she could only see the Christmas mornings spent unwrapping their stockings by the fire as children; Ella – Dot’s mother – creeping in surreptitiously (or so she thought) to lie on the sofas and unwittingly leaving all her dog hairs on the mohair blankets; her eighteenth party when Tommy Callaghan, her crush at the time, had chased her in here and finally kissed her behind the door . . .
Willow risked a glance at him as he scanned the room impassively. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking and he revealed nothing at all when, finished, he looked back at her. He didn’t say a word, just gave a nod, and – feeling her nerves grow – she led him into the dining room next door. The ground felt uneven beneath her feet. In spite of what they’d said yesterday about forgetting what had happened between them at the weekend, she had felt it pulse between them anyway – silent but ever-present. But today he was like a complete stranger again, the man on the phone.
Lined in claret linen with huge landscape oils on the walls and ornately swagged curtains, the dining room was grand and stuffy. The only thing that had ever changed in it during Willow’s lifetime were the napkin choices and flower arrangements; it had looked exactly this way when her grandmother had lived here, her own mother’s gilt-edged wedding service still displayed in the dresser. The furniture in here had caused great excitement with the Christie’s team when she’d given them the initial tour – the table sat twenty-six, the Chippendale chairs ‘superb examples of their type’, apparently. ‘We’ve always used this as the dining room,’ she said weakly.
Connor looked at her. ‘So I see.’ Her nerves grew again, their mutual surprise and push–pull rapprochement yesterday morning having settled into something more reserved. Formal. She had left him with a smile on his lips – you went soft at my touch? – but they had seemingly each retreated to new positions overnight. She knew now he was a man who had tried to undercut her father by a million euros. Had he learned something about her that changed his view? Or could he simply do what she could not and pretend this was just business? Had he dreamt of her last night as she had of him? Had he been nervous about seeing her as he stood on the other side of that door?
The questions in her head kept coming; the conversation did not. They walked from room to room, Willow feeling more anxious by the minute. They climbed the stairs – the beautiful split flying staircase she had had races on with her sisters – and looked in at the bedrooms and bathrooms. Having them fitted with en-suites had been the most significant change her parents had made; that was their thumbprint on the castle as they’d geared up to opening it as a luxury bed and breakfast business two decades ago. Willow remembered how well it had done in the beginning, her parents’ excitement as the bookings had flooded in – everyone wanting to experience the romance of staying in a medieval Irish castle with drinks served by its very own living knight! The Celtic Tiger had been roaring back then, times were good: the Troubles were over, tourists were flocking in record numbers . . . But then the credit crunch had hit and the flood had slowed to a trickle, and then nothing at all.
She stood by the door of her parents’ bedroom and watched as he walked in. She felt like Judas, allowing him into her father’s inner sanctum. His clothes were still hanging in the wardrobes, her mother nowhere close to being able to go through them yet. The room was large but dated, painted a soft sage green, with swagged chintz curtains at the windows and a faded pink velvet sofa set at the end of the bed. Above the headboard were three large pastel portraits of the sisters set in pale-blue frames, and a large round table – covered with a crewelwork cloth – displayed family photographs, with a potted plant in the centre. Silk rugs were overlaid in a criss-cross mismatch over the camel carpet, some of them to hide old stains, and the several large handsome wardrobes had beribboned keys in the locks. One wall was entirely shelved with books, old 1980s paperbacks and cloth-bound volumes from the forties and fifties wedged in, but small towers of overflow titles were still beginning to rise from the floor.
Connor stood by the window and looked down into the gardens. Directly outside, looking west, the formal parterre led to a fountain and beyond that a walled garden with fanciful wrought-ironwork gates which opened onto the estuary, the open sea and their special curve of golden beach just around the promontory from here. From her position at the door, Willow could see the tide was coming in, a few moored clinkers nosing out to sea, curlews picking through the shallows.
‘Great view,’ was all he said when he eventually came away again, his eye casting over the bowing shelves and piles of books, and she saw suddenly what he saw: clutter. Dust. Old lives.
He looked in on all the other bedrooms from the doorways, seemingly assessing their proportions, dimensions, fireplaces, direction of light, and she said nothing, expecting – hoping – he would do the same at her room. Too late, she realized she hadn’t thought this far ahead – in the rush to get the horses done and be back in time to do her hair, she’d forgotten to tidy up after herself: a wet towel, clothes strewn on the floor as she’d tried and discarded multiple options. There was no way of hiding her presence here.
‘Another bedroom,’ she said almost under her breath as she reluctantly pushed open the door. ‘There are twenty-four in total.’ Her point was: move along; nothing to see here. But her eyes instantly fell to the black silk blouse she’d been wearing on Saturday night, still thrown across the back of the chair. Did it still smell of him?
She saw him see it too. She moved away back into the hall, hoping he would follow her, but to her mortification, he stopped and stepped in instead. She clutched the door frame as she watched the walls close around him, as though spilling all her secrets. His expression didn’t change but she saw him absorb every detail: a white china ballet slipper – a prize for top dancer in her class when she’d been eleven – hanging by its ribbons from a nail on the wall; her favourite teddy, Snowball, sitting in the armchair by the window; her collection of vinyl – most of them her parents’, which she’d rescued from being taken to the dump. He clocked the book she was reading (a memoir of Hemingway), the empty tea mug and half-drunk glass of two-day-old water; hairbands, lip balm, phone charger . . . She swallowed. It all felt so horribly intimate; no glamour – just the minutiae of her daily routine suddenly laid bare before him.
His gaze skimmed over the dozens of framed photographs of her on the windowsills – high-jumping at an athletics meet, a hurling match, at college in her graduation gown, playing with Dot as a puppy, lying on the grass in a ballgown with her sisters, jumping off a boat in Ibiza . . . She saw him stop at the picture of her with Albie Mconaughie, a friend who’d become something more for a while, and then a friend again. The photo had been taken whilst they were an item, Willow sitting in his lap in the pub, her head thrown back in laughter at something he – or someone else – had said. She’d never thought to move it before. He was a friend, not an enemy; it simply made her happy to remember those times. But now, to a stranger’s eyes, did it suggest more than was there?
He looked back at her and she found she couldn’t hold his gaze – as though it had been her clothes he had been peeling back and now he saw everything about her. She was revealed.
He walked past her back into the hall but made no move to look at the other bedrooms. He seemed agitated suddenly. Restless.
‘Look, Willow, there’s no point going any further. There’s something I have to t
ell you.’
Oh God. She’d known it. She’d felt it the second he’d walked in. He was pulling the deal.
‘You don’t want it.’ She felt the weight of responsibility for this place settle straight back down on her shoulders again, pushing her earthwards. Escape denied.
‘It’s not that.’
‘What then?’
‘Look, you know what I do?’ He shook his head as though the question was ridiculous. ‘Of course you do, stupid question. You called me.’
She nodded. She did know – but not because she had asked the right questions about to whom exactly she was entrusting her family home. It had simply been enough for her that her father had dealt with him in the first place; it had been enough that her mother didn’t like him. No, she only knew what he did because she had spent all last night googling him, poring over his profile on LinkedIn and reading interviews in newspaper articles, examining in microscopic detail the many photos of him at gala dinners, charity events and of course the races, checking out the invariably stunning women in shot with him. One, a blonde in dusty blue at Royal Ascot, had been holding on to him particularly tightly. But then he did rock a top hat.
‘You’re one of the founding partners of Home James,’ she replied. It was a young but thriving and very exclusive private members’ club franchise. Currently they boasted two classical, Grade 1-listed properties in England, townhouses in Dublin, Edinburgh, and several others scattered across Europe; one newspaper article in the summer had conjectured he was scouting for sites in New York when he was photographed with a top realtor at Sant Ambroeus.
‘Yes.’ He shifted his weight, looking uncomfortable. ‘And right now I have two problems.’
Two? ‘Go on.’
‘The first is we have a liquidity issue.’
‘Oh jeesht—’ she said, turning away in disgust, already knowing what he was going to say next. He was a million short . . .
‘No, hear me out. It’s liquidity, cash flow. That is all. The money is good, it’s just not . . . immediately accessible.’
‘You’re wasting my time, Connor, you’re doing exactly what you did to my father!’
‘No, I’m not.’
She shot him a disbelieving look.
‘Okay, yes, I am, sort of, but—’
‘I cannot believe you! I cannot believe you’ve got the nerve to behave in this way to us, all over again!’
‘It’s not what you think.’
‘No? Can you buy my castle or not?’
He hesitated. ‘Not yet. But I want to.’
‘I want a black Chanel jacket and a foot massage every day for the rest of my life, but they’re not going to happen either.’
‘Look, I wasn’t expecting your call last week, okay? Out of the blue, Lorne suddenly up for grabs again.’ Stress inflected in his voice. ‘A lot has changed since I was here last. We’ve just closed on a property in Copenhagen. We weren’t banking on having to find another four-plus million out of thin air. I have to go back to our private equity team.’
‘So then what was yesterday about – you talking numbers with me on the drive?’
‘I needed to establish what number you’d accept. Now that I know, I can go back to our investors and get it from them.’
‘And how long will that take?’
‘Several weeks, a couple of months tops.’
‘A couple of months?’ she scoffed. ‘I was only selling it to you at that price on assurance of a quick sale. A couple of months is not a quick sale.’
‘It’s not worth six, Willow.’
‘In your opinion.’
‘It needs a million spending on it.’
She bit her lip, staring at him, knowing that he was right. Knowing that even if it was another few months before he could buy, that would still, in all likelihood, be a lot quicker than any other sale. He was the bird in the hand. Hels – and Pip, that renowned real estate expert – had left her in no doubt as to the stagnation at the top end of the property market. ‘You said there were two problems.’
He looked down at the ground for a moment, his hands on his hips. Slowly, he looked up at her again, locking onto her gaze. ‘This is where I need you to trust me . . .’
She felt her stomach pitch at his words.
‘Please. Just hear me out.’
‘Said every conman ever,’ she quipped.
He took a deep breath but there was guardedness in both their eyes now. ‘Last night I received an unwelcome phone call regarding our Christmas pop-up. It’s a loss-leader but vital for the brand USP of providing unique experiences.’
Willow frowned at the corporate jargon. She didn’t know what any of that meant. ‘I’m sorry, what’s a Christmas pop-up?’
‘Temporary clubhouse. We did one in Formentera in the summer and it was a massive hit so we decided to set one up for the festive period too: we take over a location for a weekend – or a week, as we did in the summer – and our members get to enjoy our signature hospitality, but with the novelty of being somewhere new: world-class DJs, food by Noma, black-tie ball, chartered plane from London.’
‘So basically a glorified house party then.’
‘Ye-e-e-s,’ he said slowly. ‘Although tickets were twenty grand a pop.’
‘How much?’
‘And we’re completely sold out. We could have sold twice as many tickets but we were restricted by bedroom space at the venue.’
‘Who would spend that kind of money on a party weekend?’
‘To a lot of our members, that’s a bargain. It costs more than that to take a table at most charity galas in Manhattan.’
‘Well, if that floats their boat,’ she spluttered, half amazed, half appalled. ‘It all sounds grand but what’s that got to do with me?’
He sighed heavily and she noticed for the first time the strain at the corners of his eyes. ‘The venue hosts bailed on us last night – it was supposed to be held in a castle in Lichtenstein but with all the snow they’ve had this winter, half of the roof has caved and an avalanche of snow fallen in with it. Everything’s flooded. Ruined. It’s going to take months to sort out.’
‘Oh.’ And then her eyes widened, as she suddenly guessed what was coming next. ‘. . . Oh!’
‘If we have to cancel the pop-up and refund everyone, it’ll be a PR disaster – we’ll look incompetent – not to mention having to refund everyone will wipe out our cash flow for the house clubs over Christmas. The company’s solubility is at stake.’
She stared at him, hardly able to believe what she was hearing. ‘So you’re saying you want to hold the thingy here?’
‘I am.’
‘Before Christmas?’
‘The weekend after next.’
She laughed scornfully. ‘You want to host a fancy shindig in my castle, the weekend after next, even though you haven’t actually bought it yet and can’t buy it for another few months?’
‘I know it’s a long-shot but we’d pay you a very generous hire fee.’
She frowned. ‘How generous?’
‘High six figures.’
Her frown cleared momentarily, before resettling again. ‘No. This is bullshit Connor. You can’t honestly expect me to go for this.’
‘Believe me, I do not wanting to be standing here proposing this to you.’ She saw the muscle ball at the edge of his jaw. He was tense, agitated, embarrassed. ‘I wanted the deal to be clean and quick.’
‘And instead it’s the exact opposite,’ she said drily.
‘I’m not in the habit of explaining our company’s cash flow issues to the people we do business with but . . . shit happens.’ He gave a hopeless shrug. ‘This is the only thing I can think of to keep all the balls in play: buy Lorne and keep the pop-up alive. It’s an all-or-nothing punt. You either trust me and come all in. Or you walk away – and I wouldn’t blame you if you do – and we sink.’
She stared at him, seeing the tension in his eyes. ‘That’s emotional blackmail.’
He stuffed
his hands in his trouser pockets, looking more like a chastened schoolboy being told off for running in the corridors than a businessman closing a deal. ‘No. That’s all my cards on the table. No smoke and mirrors. It’s where we are right at this moment.’
She didn’t reply. Their gazes were locked, both of them searching for answers from the other. He was asking her not just to trust him, but to save him.
‘What exactly is involved with this party?’ she asked finally.
‘Pop-up.’
‘It’s a house party, Connor. Doesn’t matter what you call it.’
A tiny smile lit up in his eyes. ‘Fine. It would mean a full-scale takeover, by which I mean we’d need to have complete control over the venue: decor, usage of space . . . It would have to fit in with our branding, and clearly –’ he gestured to the lamps, vases, paperweights, photo-frames, little bronze sculptures that filled every nook – ‘this is very much still your home.’
‘You’re saying we’d need to move out all our stuff?’ Her eyes sparkled with amusement. Clearly he wasn’t being serious. That alone would take weeks, if not months.
‘Just for starters.’ He turned round in a small circle, assessing, evaluating . . . ‘Then we’d need to strip it back to exposed floors, neutral walls, bleached wood . . . Get the place breathing again. That would mean lifting the carpets, redecorating the bedrooms and bathrooms, getting the centuries’ worth of varnish off all this woodwork on the stairs and the panelling.’ He ran a hand over the squared oak newel post as he looked back at her. ‘It would be a comprehensive overhaul.’
Comprehensive? It sounded invasive.
Willow blinked at him, open-mouthed with disbelief. ‘Even if I did agree to it – and I’m not saying I am – there is no way on God’s earth you could get all that done in two weeks.’
‘Actually, I was up most of last night working out exactly that – and it could be done. Just. Our teams are in-house so we’ve got all the trades on standby: plumbers, sparkies, decorators. And our interiors department has a whole warehouse of things they find at auction and stockpile, ready to use in the next club. They’re like SWAT teams – they come in, get the job done, bugger off again. But if you were to agree to this, we’d have to start immediately. I’d need to prep the teams today.’
