For once, the night of December 23, just for once at the Rock, everything went flawlessly. Well, as flawlessly as a dinner for quite a lot of extremely old people can go. There was some delicious lobster bisque, quite a lot of which made it onto the starched white tablecloths, and the waitstaff, many of whom were young recruits who knew or were related to absolutely everybody there, found themselves doing more cutting up of the meat than they might have expected in a normal service, and the noise levels reached an absolute cacophony even without the nice album of Christmas carols being played, so they took that off pretty sharpish.
The vast tree was beautifully decorated in scarlet and gold and gently twinkling lights, crowned with a huge golden star.
The salmon was delicious; the goose tender and pink and crispy on the outside.
Fintan didn’t actually even bother turning up at all, to the point where Joel was going to go round the farmhouse and yell at him (or, more realistically, get Innes to yell at him), but apart from that, it was great. And the fact that Mrs. O’Brien got stuck crying in the toilets, because old Seoras, whom she’d been secretly in love with since 1954 and who had been widowed the previous year, on account of which she had gone all the way to the mainland to get her hair and makeup done professionally in Debenhams, which had been all right when she’d left but had gotten somewhat blown about on the ferry back, leaving her with mascara halfway across her cheeks and a definite slipping effect, but nobody had told her about it until she went to the bathroom, they’d all told her she looked lovely, which she might if you didn’t have your glasses on, but when you could see properly she clearly looked like Haggis McBaggis, and anyway, Seoras was already cracking on, chatting to that blowsy Julie McSquire, who had always been a bit of a one, and here she was again, getting away with it, when Mrs. O’Brien had loved him for sixty-five years, so surely—surely—she had dibs.
That took a lot of talking down. But apart from that, it was flawless. Ish. Flora was a little concerned that a lot of raspberry juice from the light-as-air cranachan was adding to the lobster bisque and red wine on the tablecloths, making it look a little as if they’d been hosting a large selection of grizzly bears, but surely the laundry could cope.
In the kitchen, however, all was sweetness and light, apart from them having to occasionally turn back sweet Mrs. Piper, who had a tendency to wander, but everyone looked after her and was used to seeing her around and about, except Gaspard, who made the mistake the first time of giving her a biscuit, which meant they saw her seven or eight times. The carers from the old people’s home were doing a brilliant job, but they had only so many hands, and, to be fair, they worked very long hours in what could be quite a challenging environment, so they deserved a glass of champagne and some good red wine on a very rare evening out and it was entirely explicable that they might slightly overpartake and, okay, it wasn’t ideal that one of them had had to have a very small spew in the toilets, but other than that it was flawless.
Flora briefly thought she might sleep standing up. She found herself eyeing a spare wheelchair in the corner of the room and wondering if anyone would mind if she borrowed it for half an hour.
But to Isla and Konstantin, young and full of energy, and merry, and excited, and wildly, possibly on the brink of, well, who knew what, the evening flew in an exciting rush of suds and assembling food and washing up and dancing to music and giggling with each other, and when you were with the person you wanted to be with more than anyone in the world, work didn’t really feel like work at all.
What do you mean?!”
Candace banged her hand down on the top of the desk, which wobbled, as it wasn’t a real desk, just a table set up in a small room.
Billy, who staffed the airport, looked up at her kindly. He was used to having to give this kind of news, but normally people were either accepting, if they were local, or genuinely quite pleased, if they were tourists, that they were going to have to take another day or two of holiday.
“I’m afraid the plane can’t land tonight. Crosswinds.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well. We have a wind from the north, aye, and a wind from the west, and they’ve kind of got themselves in quite the tizzy.”
“No, I mean, how can I get back to Britain?”
“This is Britain, you know, even though it’s actually closer to—”
“No, I mean, is there another plane tonight?”
Billy laughed. “Well, no, there would be but because of—”
“Crosswinds. When’s the next plane?”
Billy shrugged. “Well, the weather forecast is not ideal, so it isn’t.”
“Can I get back on the ferry?”
“Well, you can ask them.”
“When?”
“In the morning. They leave pretty early, you know.”
“I don’t care,” said Candace furiously. She had a big Christmas planned, at her new boyfriend’s mother’s house in Fulham. His mother was absolutely terrifying, really a horrible scrawny old bat, and Candace had a lot of shopping to do to make a good impression. And she needed her nails fixed and her roots done, and she ought to have had plenty of time for this if she hadn’t been chasing this stupid story . . . She’d like to tell herself that Dan loved her for her, he wouldn’t care two shits if she had her nails done or not—nobody on this island, she’d noticed, cared about that kind of thing; nobody had their nails done—but she couldn’t be entirely 100 percent sure that Dan didn’t put quite a lot of store by his mother’s opinion, and she had a reasonable suspicion as to what Dan’s mother thought nails should be like, and it wasn’t being chipped, standing in a ridiculous blizzard, banging a wobbly desk in the middle of absolutely bloody nowhere.
“Now, you have a place to stay?” said Billy kindly. More than a few people had slept on his sofa after an unfortunate mix-up or other. It was very much part of the job.
Candace sniffed. Oh Christ, how on earth was she meant to get back? She missed the old glory days of newspapers she’d read about, where people would hire helicopters and whatever it took to get them on a story. As it was, she was back to that grubby Harbour’s Rest, which she was sure was far worse than the place she’d been sent up to do the actual exposé on.
“No thank you,” she said snottily. “Can I ask you to contact me if a plane does decide to visit?”
Billy nodded as cheerfully as he could. Generally people didn’t behave as rude as this on Mure, and he wasn’t 100 percent sure how to handle it.
Candace had already turned around, remembering with a sigh that she would need to get the island’s only taxi back and the driver had been nosy enough the first time. And she was going to have to call Dan. This was going to be tricky. Very tricky indeed.