Anyway, her work was done. She was out. She packed her neat little wheelie bag and headed through the snow to the airport.

Chapter 57

F or 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.