The Staff Party

I had meant to stay in East Two with the kettle. At nine Priscilla knocked on the door in a green dress I had never seen, holding two glasses of something.

“Shona says you’re coming,” she said. “Neil says anybody who’s run his pass is staff whether they like it or not. I said you’d hate it.”

“I would.”

“So I’ve brought you a drink to hate it with.” She looked past me at the kettle on the desk, steaming slightly in the lamplight, and at my face, and she did not ask. That is one of the reasons she is the best person I have ever hired. “Put some shoes on. Not the wellingtons.”

· · ·Scene break

The ballroom was the house with its jacket off.

Saturday’s round tables had been folded and stacked against the far wall. What was left was the sprung floor, bare, the six tall windows open on the terrace, the vine-and-bird ceiling under ordinary lights with nothing clever done to them, and about sixty people who knew each other. The band was on a low platform at the end: a fiddle, an accordion, a drummer with one drum, a man on a keyboard who looked as if he taught physics. A trestle table by the service door held a tea urn, crates of beer, a great deal of Neil’s soda bread and the forty lemons, sliced, for the gin.

The bar was still between the terrace doors and the room. Nobody here minded. They were not paying.

I recognised more of them than I had expected. Mrs Imrie, in a good blouse, at a table by the wall with two women her own age who looked up when I came in and then, together, down. Rab, in a shirt with a collar, red from a Strip the Willow. A man with a white beard by the band who had once told me about sea trout for forty minutes at Hector’s Sunday lunch. A woman who had done the flowers. Faces from the town and the farms and the pub on the harbour where Duncan and I used to go on Friday nights when we came out from Leith.

They had been in the chapel.

Not every one of them. But the room was full of people who had sat in those pews, in hats, at twenty to eleven, and every one of them knew me, and had decided before I came through the door how they were going to do it. It went round the room in about four seconds, the way a good front-of-house team passes a warning. Nobody stopped dancing. Nobody stared. Everybody saw.

“I can go,” I said to Priscilla.

“You can,” said Priscilla. “It’s a long way to come to go.”

Morven was at a table near the band with her coat still on and a glass of sherry. She lifted it an inch when she saw me, and that was all, and it was more than all.

Duncan was at the trestle table cutting soda bread with his sleeves pushed up, talking to Ross. He did not look round. I saw his shoulders do the small thing they had done on the steps on Sunday, and then go on cutting bread.

· · ·Scene break

Neil found me in the first half hour.

He came off the floor at the end of a Dashing White Sergeant in a shirt with parrots on it, pink and enormous, with his arms out like a man rescued from the sea, and saw me by the urn, and changed direction.

“The arithmetic,” he said.

“Chef.”

“Not tonight. Tonight I’m a guest in my own kitchen.” He poured himself a cup of tea from the urn and put two lemon slices in it, which I have never seen anyone do before or since. “Tell me something straight. You’re the one with the pen. If your lot buy us, do I keep my kitchen?”

The band had stopped to change something. Gemma, three yards away, was not looking at us, in the way that people who are listening do not look.

“Two years,” I said. “That’s what’s written. Everyone keeps their job, on their terms, for two years. After that I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Nobody at that table knows. Anyone who tells you they do is selling you something.” I held his eye, because he deserved it. “I’ve asked for three. I haven’t sent it.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll say no.”

Neil drank his tea with the lemons in it and considered me over the rim.

“Hector used to say you never find out what a man’ll say no to by not asking him. He said it about the bank. The bank said no to him eleven times.” He put the cup down. “Mind, the twelfth time he went somewhere else.” He did not know what he had said. I did. I let it go past. “Ask for four,” said Neil. “Then they’ll give you three and feel clever.”

He went back to the floor, and took Gemma with him.

I got my phone out and opened the email to the partner’s lawyers I had drafted at six and not sent. I changed the 3 to a 4 and then, because Neil was right about how clever people like to feel but I had never in my life asked for a thing I did not want, changed it back. I added one line. This is a condition, not an ask. The vendor won’t sign without it, and neither will I.

That last part was not true when I started typing it. It was true by the time I got to the full stop.

I sent it by the tea urn at a quarter past ten, with a reel going on behind me and nobody watching, which is how the best things I have ever done at work have been done.

· · ·Scene break

The man with the white beard came over at half past ten. His name was Fergus Beattie, and he played the fiddle, and he had played it at the reception that did not happen.

“Hector paid us anyway,” he said. He held his fiddle by the neck like a bottle. “Full fee. He said people had come a long way and they’d want something to do with their feet that wasn’t talking. So we played to the ones that stayed. About eighty. Half seven till midnight. Worst night’s playing I ever did. Nobody wanted to be dancing and nobody wanted to be the first one to go home.”

“Did he come down?”

He knew who I meant.

“No. His aunt took him up a plate. It came down again.”

I had moved that aunt. At one in the morning in my father’s office I had moved her from table six to the top table, because Duncan had asked me to and I had forgotten, and that was why I had been in the office at all. She had not sat at it.

“I’d written him a waltz,” Fergus said. “For the first dance. You’d asked for something nobody else would have, and he asked me. I called it The Shore.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You weren’t meant to. It was a present.” He turned the fiddle in his hands. “Never got played that day. We played it the next spring at somebody else’s do, because it was a good tune and I’m not proud, and some comedian at the back shouted that’s Duncan’s Waltz. And that was it. Ten years. It’s Duncan’s Waltz at every wedding in the county. It’s in the book of every band from here to Berwick. Folk here don’t let a thing go. It’s not cruelty. It’s how they keep you.”

“And him?”

“First two years he’d leave the room when we started it. Third year he stayed. Now he stands at the bar and says not this again, so we know he’s heard.” Fergus looked at me sideways, with no particular kindness and no particular unkindness, the way a man looks at weather he has seen before. “You’ll be sorry to hear the lads at the back have had a drink.”

· · ·Scene break

It came at twenty to eleven. I do not think anyone had planned that. I think a boy from one of the farms looked at the clock over the service door and made a joke of it, the way nineteen-year-olds do, without knowing what they are holding.

“Fergus! Play Duncan’s Waltz!”

The room stopped.

A room of sixty people who have had a drink does not go silent. It went quiet in a ring around the voice, and the ring spread, until there was a place in the middle of the floor that nobody was standing in, and the boy who had shouted had gone scarlet, because someone beside him had said something in his ear.

Fergus had his fiddle under his chin. He did not play. He looked across the room at the trestle table.

Mrs Imrie had put her glass down. Isla, by the terrace doors, had turned right round, with the face of a woman who has said her piece once and is watching somebody else say it for her, badly, in public. Priscilla had gone still in the way she goes still when the other side’s junior has blurted the number. Morven was looking at her sherry.

Duncan put the bread knife down.

He wiped his hands on a cloth, and folded the cloth, and put it beside the bread. Then he nodded to Fergus, once. The same nod he had given clause five.

“Play it,” he said.

It was a slow tune, in three, with a lift in the second half like the tide coming over a step. I knew within four bars why a room would ask for it, and why it would have hurt, for two years, to be in the same room as it.

Duncan came across the floor. It was about fourteen yards. Sixty people watched him do every one of them, and he did them at the pace he did everything, and stopped in front of me by the urn.

“It’s a waltz,” he said.

“I can hear that.”

“Can you still?”

“No,” I said, which was a lie, and he knew it, and something moved at the corner of his mouth.

“Good,” he said. “Neither can I.”

He held out his hand. I understood what he was doing about a second after I would have liked to, which is the usual distance between me and Duncan Kerr. He was not going to let them tell it without him in the room. And he was not going to dance it properly, because a proper waltz, him and me, to this tune, would have been the first dance: the thing they had all come for ten years ago, handed over at last, at a staff party, for free.

So we would do it badly. On purpose. Where they could all see.

I put my hand in his.

· · ·Scene break

He trod on my foot on the first beat. It was a masterpiece: deliberate, heavy, perfectly timed. I said “Ow,” clearly, so the back of the room could hear. He turned me the wrong way and I let him, and we went off down the floor against the tune, and I led, which he had always hated, and he let me, and we missed the corner and went into Rab.

Rab, to his eternal credit, bowed.

Someone laughed. It was Gemma. Then Neil, a big helpless noise from the far side of the floor, and Ross, and the farm boy who had shouted, with enormous relief. We went round again. I stepped on his foot, back. He stopped dead in the middle of a bar so that I walked into him, and said, “Sorry, sorry,” to nobody, like a man who has lost his car keys. The room was laughing properly now, with and not at, and people were coming onto the floor. Neil took Priscilla. Isla did not move from the terrace doors, but she had put a hand over her mouth.

And in the middle of the second time through, where the tune lifts, for three bars, he got it right.

I don’t know if he meant to. I felt it happen: his hand come flat against my back, the step lengthen, the turn arrive where it was supposed to arrive. For three bars we were two people who had once learned to waltz in a flat above a chandler’s with the table pushed against the wall, to a tune on a phone, because we had not got one of our own yet. He was warm through his shirt. I could feel the breath go in and out of him. My hand was on his shoulder, where I had once known its exact width, and it was wider, and I was looking at his collar, because I could not look anywhere else.

“Wren,” he said. Very quietly. Just the once, into my hair, the way you’d say the name of a place you were passing through.

It was the first time.

Then he stood on my foot again, hard, and I said “Ow” again, louder, and we were back in the joke, and the room was dancing round us, and nobody but the two of us knew about the three bars.

· · ·Scene break

Fergus finished and put the bow up in the air and the room cheered as if something had been won. The farm boy came and shook Duncan’s hand, scarlet, and Duncan said something that made him laugh and go away looking ten years younger.

Duncan let go of my hand. He did it without hurry.

“Thank you for the dance, Ms Halloway,” he said, and went back to the trestle table, and cut a slice of soda bread for Mrs Imrie, who had come over for it, and I understood from the way she took it that she had not come over for it at all.

I stood by the urn. My foot hurt. I had not been this happy in a room in ten years, and I had no idea what to do with my hands.

Isla found me there. She had come round the edge of the floor, not across it.

“He laughed,” she said. She was looking at her brother, cutting bread. “I’ve been in a room with that tune about forty times. He’s never once laughed at it.”

I waited. It was what I had learned to do, this week. It did not come easily.

“I’m driving to Haddington in the morning for the flowers,” Isla said. “Eight o’clock, from the yard.”

“All right.”

“You’re coming.” She looked at me then, with her brother’s eyes and none of his patience. “There are things you don’t know about that day. I’m going to tell you them. You’re not going to like it, and you’re not going to be able to get out of the car.”