The Christmas Party Read online

  The

  CHRISTMAS PARTY

  KAREN SWAN

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  For Jo Nana

  A donkey on the edge with me.

  Prologue

  The letter slipped from the book like a leaf falling from a tree, silent as a yacht peeling from its mooring and gliding out across the water. Defiantly free.

  She stared at it. The writing was familiar and yet she couldn’t place it. The uppermost edge of the envelope was jagged from where it had been ripped open in haste, the swirl of the ‘e’ at the end of the name bleeding softly into the vellum. A drip of champagne perhaps? Or a teardrop?

  It was just a letter and yet the instinct quivered through her that there was weight in its tucked-away words. Like a doe in the grass, she sensed a threat she could not yet see. An innocuous moment had suddenly turned critical and now everything pivoted on what would come next. Breath held and still, she ran her eyes over the script, seeing at once that the game was already in play, understanding that she had already lost. Like the doe, she had only one viable choice.

  Run.

  Chapter One

  Tuesday, 26 November 2019

  Lorne Castle, Kilmally, Ireland

  ‘Nobility is nothing but ancient riches!’

  ‘Oh Christ, he’s pissed,’ Pip whispered in her ear as Ottie arched a sceptical eyebrow, their father’s voice echoing around the galleried hall.

  ‘Yes, you heard me right, to be sure you did,’ Declan Lorne insisted. ‘Devil be damned, it means no more to me than the socks on my feet.’ As if to prove the point, he shook off one of his velvet slippers – embroidered with the family crest in gold thread – to reveal his pale big toe poking through the end of a red sock. A murmur of shocked amusement rippled through the crowd.

  ‘Dec,’ his wife quietly admonished him with a despairing, ladylike shake of her head. ‘Those were new too.’

  The murmur broke into a skitter of guffaws as he looked around delightedly at the gathering of friends and family who’d made the tricky and somewhat arduous trek to be here. Save for the villagers and those arriving by helicopter, it was an hour drive from Cork airport, with half of that spent on single-track lanes, navigating slow-moving dairy herds and bridging fords.

  ‘It’s important I make the point, my beloved,’ he said, looking over at her with fiercely loving eyes. ‘I don’t want a single person in this room to leave here tonight thinking I give two hoots about the damned title stopping here with me. I don’t. God gave us three wild, precociously talented, beautiful daughters and I wouldn’t change a one of them for some name.’

  ‘He definitely would have traded me in after that time I cleaned his gun with Vaseline,’ Pip whispered, leaning in again and jogging her with an elbow.

  ‘If he could have caught you,’ Ottie replied, grinning at the memory. ‘You slept in the boathouse for two nights, I seem to remember.’

  Pip waggled her strong dark eyebrows, a mischievous glint in her green eyes. With her ragged auburn crop, constellation of freckles and rangy boyish frame, she looked like an overgrown leprechaun contemplating wreaking havoc. ‘Aye, and by the time I skulked back, he was so relieved to see me, he’d forgotten why I ran in the first place.’

  ‘You always could twist him round your little finger,’ Ottie tutted.

  ‘Ha!’ Pip scoffed. ‘That was one of my rare successes. You got away with murder.’

  ‘Me?’ Ottie hissed back, scandalized.

  ‘Don’t play the innocent,’ Pip grinned. ‘You’ve always been his favourite. The firstborn. Little Miss Perfect.’

  The smile faded on Ottie’s face. She knew exactly what she was and it wasn’t that. The champagne-fuelled light in her eyes dimmed as she watched her father holding out his arm, their mother slipping into the crook of it like a silken fox. He kissed her on the cheek to a chorus of ‘aaahs’ – this was, after all, their thirtieth wedding anniversary party, and amongst their peers, theirs was the great love story: still in love after all these years.

  ‘Be in no doubt that without Serena by my side, I would have ruined meself years ago. She has been both my guiding light and my anchor these past t’irty years. I’m not an easy man to be married to, I’ll grant you that, but she’s kept me on the straight and narrow, all the while bringing the castle back to life and making it a home for our three beautiful girls.’

  He looked up, his gaze casting around the double-height great hall finding first her and then Pip. ‘Jeesht, would you just look at them? The finest beauties in all the land,’ he said proudly.

  A cheer of agreement went up and Pip groaned loudly as Ottie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh God, his cup always runneth over when his glass runneth over,’ Pip muttered beneath a forced smile.

  ‘Aye, I am the luckiest of men to have been blessed with the four women in my life. But—’ He paused dramatically, scanning the audience. He always had been able to work the crowd. ‘But I’ll put my hand up to it, I didn’t always know that.’ Ottie looked up, startled by the frank admission, and found he was looking directly at her; to her amazement, the usual merry dance in his eyes was now but a tiptoe. ‘But I do now. By Jove, I know it now.’

  She felt the thick walls of the castle fall away, the colourful party fading to white as he held her gaze, his eyes saying more than his words . . .

  ‘And many of you I know have noticed that our wee Willow couldn’t make it here tonight.’ His voice faltered fractionally, losing its customary skip and bounce. ‘It goes without saying that she is missed. More than she’ll ever know.’

  Beside her, Pip stiffened, drawing in a deep breath. What was this – a confessional? But after another moment, he looked away from the two of them again, reconnecting with his guests and bringing that familiar jig back into his eyes. This was a party after all!

  ‘But she’s got commitments that must come first,’ he said, airily hopping over their sea of secrets like it was a puddle. ‘. . . Work. The big social life in Dublin. After all, let’s be honest, why the hell would she want to come all the way back here to make small talk with a bunch of old farts like us?’

  A roar of laughter met his words.

  ‘Face it, my friends, we are over the hill! But at least we’re all still on this hill together.’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ Several cries went up.

  Declan laughed, his ruddy cheeks flushed brighter than ever. ‘So I want to thank you all for making the no-doubt epic trip to join us here tonight, and I’ll finish by raising several toasts to the women in my life. To my darling wife, Serena –’

  ‘To Serena!’ crie
d the raucous room as her mother gave one of her most enigmatic smiles. She had kept her figure and her looks and was used to being the centre of attention.

  ‘To my beloved girls who are here: Ottie and Pip.’

  ‘To Ottie and Pip!’

  ‘And though she be not here, she is not forgotten – to my little bird who has flown the nest, Willow.’

  ‘To Willow!’

  Ottie arched an eyebrow and clinked her glass against Pip’s, their eyes meeting in rueful silence. ‘To Willow.’

  The same night, Croke Park, Dublin

  Willow closed her eyes, feeling the deep vibrations thrum through her chest, making even her ribs buzz. She had her arms in the air, her head tipped back as she joined the rest of the crowd in singing at the tops of their voices. She swore that if the sky was a lid upon the earth, it would have been blown off by the sheer energy radiating from this stadium: laser strobes criss-crossed the night sky, the white dots of tens of thousands of phone cameras swaying in unison. On stage, graphics flashed on three-storey screens, and though the band were but pinpricks from her distant spot up in the gods, the state-of-the-art acoustics brought Bono’s voice to her ear as clearly as if he’d been standing beside her.

  But it wasn’t these accoutrements of a slick, multimillion-euro roadshow that was making the hairs stand upright on her arms – it was the intensity of being completely in sync with eighty thousand other people; sharing in one moment being multiplied and amplified eighty thousand times over. This was what it was to be alive, to belong. It was the high she was constantly chasing. Her drug.

  Beside her, Caz was jumping up and down on the spot, one arm punching the cold November night air as she sang – shouted, really – as loudly as she could. She was wearing just a T-shirt with her jeans but somehow temperature became irrelevant when the lights flashed on and the first strum of bass guitar reverberated through the amps. Caz’s long blonde hair swung from side to side, the small swallow tattoo at the base of her neck playing peek-a-boo, the multiple hoops in her left ear flashing in the lights. She stopped jumping up and down mid-lyric to take another greedy gulp of her beer, and Willow chuckled at her friend’s astonished and then outraged look as she found that her glass was nigh-on empty, completely oblivious that most of the pint was now on her boots and on the ground. She looked across at Willow with surprise.

  ‘I’ll go get us some more!’ Willow hollered in her ear, taking the glass from her hand.

  ‘No! It’s my turn!’ Caz shouted back.

  ‘I know, but I need the loo anyway,’ she shrugged.

  Caz beamed delightedly and gave her the thumbs-up. ‘Well, okay then!’ She was an uncomplicated soul, not given to false modesty or tricksy politics. What you saw was what you got with Caz and it was what made their flat-share so fun and easy: there were never any arguments about who’d finished the houmous or forgotten to buy milk, no passive-aggressive comments about the mismatched shoes strewn over the floors or jeans left wet in the machine for days. Caz had a ‘shoot from the hip’ frankness to her that Willow not just admired, but needed: Be real. Be authentic. Be fucking honest.

  Taking both their plastic glasses, Willow skipped down the steps towards the exit, past the stewards and into the pits encircling the stadium. It was still busy down there – people dashing to the toilets, the bars, queuing for the merchandise stalls. Willow took one weary look at the stationary line filing out of the Ladies and decided she could wait till she got home.

  She headed to the nearest bar instead. It was still three deep, although that was better than the twenty-strong depth before the band had come on. Well used to the drill, she scanned the crowd for signs of weakness, looking for the loose link in the chain, and slipped into a gap that suddenly opened up on the far right side. Only one back from the front.

  She felt the impatient mass jostle and immediately close behind her as the breach was discovered a moment too late. She stood firm and pushed her elbows out slightly, trying to take up more space. The guy in front of her was being served and she stood patiently, trying to catch the barman’s eye as he went to and fro, pulling pints. Willow wondered how the guy was going to carry them all back without a tray; there had to be at least six.

  The back of the bar was mirrored and as she waited, she caught sight of her own reflection. There was a momentary time lag before recognition. It was odd – startling even – to suddenly glimpse herself in the crowd, to see herself as a stranger did – the thick, shaggy, almost-black hair which had always made her stand apart now roughly cut to her shoulders, eyeliner like a tattoo around her glacial blue eyes, her pale narrow face and full mouth, multiple earrings in her left ear, black ‘hot lips’ T-shirt from last year’s Rolling Stones summer tour here. Even without being able to see the buckled boots and tight black jeans, she looked pleasingly ‘rock chick’, which was the whole idea. No one would ever guess she was a knight’s daughter.

  The guy in front, having paid up, splayed his fingers wide, precariously clutching three pints in each hand, and everyone immediately around him took a half-step back, not wanting his beers to be spilled down their fronts as he slowly turned.

  Willow dipped slightly, turning herself sideways around him so that he could move into her space, and she his. Immediately the crowd shifted and swelled forwards towards the gap again, like hot oil spreading in a pan, but she was nimble and slim and well practised in the art of getting served.

  ‘Hi,’ she grinned, lunging into the spot and making immediate and direct eye contact with the barman, leaning both her elbows on the bar so that she was on tiptoes. The counter was sticky and wet but she didn’t care.

  ‘Hey, what can I do you for?’ he asked with an interested tone, angling himself in towards her to hear over the rabble.

  ‘Four pints, please,’ she said to his ear. She wasn’t going to queue again.

  He nodded, turning to make eye contact again. ‘Coming right up.’

  Willow gave a pleased grin as she looked up and down the bar. It was an unfair fact of life, but pretty girls always got served first, legions of burly, grumpy men standing behind her with arms outstretched on the bar – trying to physically claim a place – tenners stuffed in their fists.

  She looked in the mirror again, checking her reflection, and saw someone further along was watching her – a guy with a buzz-cut, a razor slash through his right eyebrow. He looked edgy. A little dangerous. She immediately smiled at him and his chin lifted fractionally in return. Acknowledgement of the moment. Confirmation of the attraction.

  Willow looked away again but she couldn’t stop the grin from stretching across her lips. This would be interesting. He was two back from the front of the queue, a couple of guys now jostling behind him. Would he forsake his place to catch her on the way past? Was he interested enough? Was she?

  Her phone buzzed in her jeans pocket and she reached back for it. Caz wanting her to get some crisps? She always got the munchies after beer.

  ‘Yeah?’ she shouted, her eyes returning to the barman as he came back with the pints.

  ‘Willow?’

  She hesitated at the voice: unheard for so long, and yet so familiar too. ‘Ottie?’

  ‘Jeesht, where are you?’ her sister asked, raising her voice to be heard.

  ‘Out,’ Willow said, more snappishly than she’d intended. But it was a shock having her past suddenly step back into her present like this. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You need to get back here.’

  ‘Twelve euros,’ the barman said to her. She looked at him blankly. Suddenly, there was too much happening at once. ‘I . . .’ She patted her jeans, remembering the twenty in her pocket. The barman had his hand out waiting, all the other outstretched and bunched fists tapping impatiently, waiting for their turn. Even pretty girls could only get away with so much at a bar this busy. She handed over the note with a frown. ‘No.’ Her response was simple and brutal because it was brutally simple: she would never go back.

  ‘Willow, please, it
’s urgent.’ Ottie’s voice sounded strained, like a length of yarn that had been untwisted and stripped apart. ‘You need to get home as soon as you can.’

  ‘Otts, I’m sorry, but I’ve said no.’ She held out her hand as the barman handed her back the change, his gaze already on the next punter, her temporary hold on him gone again. ‘That’s my answer. I’m not going to—’

  ‘It’s Dad!’ Ottie burst out. ‘He’s dying.’

  What?

  The music switched to silence, the press of the crowd suddenly falling away, gravity loosening its hold upon her. She felt light, spectral.

  Down the other end of the line, 180 miles away in Cork, Ottie burst into tears, her sobs wretched. ‘He’s not going to last the night,’ she gasped, struggling to speak, to push words past the tears. ‘Please, Willow. You’ve got to come home.’

  Her fingers tightened around the wheel as she tore passed the sign that signified she was officially back on home turf: Welcome to Lorne. Please drive slowly through our village.

  No chance.

  It was the middle of the night now, the populous stars studding the sky like a wedding tent threaded with tea lights, drawing the eye ever upwards. Her car’s main beam was the only light to be had: the street lamps were off at this witching hour and there wasn’t a light on in a single house as she sped past in her battered, albeit trusty black Golf. Her gaze swept over the village green and the silhouetted low-slung cottages that fringed it, the blue and white awning of the Stores now rolled back in, the fruit and veg crates carried in from the pavement for the night.

  Nothing ever changed here – well, only by single degrees. The Hare might debut a new pub sign, or a flag might fly from the short stubby tower of the church in the far corner on a saint’s day, but that was the extent of it. She could point to exactly which oaks would be circled by snowdrops in January and primroses in April; she could recall word for word the dedication on the brass plaque on the bench by the pond; no doubt the gum she had stuck to the underside of the slide in the playground aged thirteen was still in situ too.