Page 59 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
She opened the computer and started to type, not that it mattered anyway.
Hogmanay To-Dos
1. Find a new band
2. Finalise menu – with Bella
3. Make ballroom look incredible
4. Sell all the tickets
She wasn’t going to do any of this, obviously. Cutting her losses was the best choice, but while she was still here, there was no harm in doodling a little.
She opened a web browser and started searching again for ceilidh bands, sending the same plea to all of them. Was anyone at all still available for Hogmanay? Or could they recommend someone who was? Lowbridge, she emphasised, had been badly let down. She threw herself on the mercy of band leaders across the West Coast, Highlands and Islands.
On to number 2 on this list. Bella had already talked her through the canapés, and the rest of the food would be incredible as well. Jodie knew that. They just had to give it to people to eat. She stopped. A hundred and fifty tickets. You couldn’t simply hand food to 150 people around the kitchen island, could you? They’d need a bar, wouldn’t they? And someone to staff the bar. Were you even allowed to run a paid bar or did you need a licence of some kind? Bella had talked about hiring serving platters and heat lamps, hadn’t she? And they’d need crockery and glasses and servers. Jodie quickly added 2b, c, d, e, f and g to her list.
The fog in her head was starting to descend.One thing at a time.That was what her mother had always said. She reminded herself that it didn’t even matter. She wasn’t going to have to do any of this anyway. It was just a list. No danger in just making a list.
Jodie checked the time. Coming up to two a.m. Gemma would definitely go to bed now. Jodie was still too twitchy. Instead she searched for glassware hire, and catering supplies, and agencies that offered waiting staff. On the latter she quickly established that getting staff in the Highlands on New Year’s Eve would cost them an arm and a leg, which she was pretty sure they did not have to spare. She checked Gemma’s extensive plan for Hogmanay once again. No staffing costs listed.
Stupid Jodie. Staffing was so self-evident that the real Gemma hadn’t even needed to write it down. Of course they were going to need staff. But who? And how would they pay for them?
By three a.m. the practicalities of serving food to so many people had officially defeated her. She told herself she was tired. She told herself she should definitely go to bed and in the morning she could slip away. But the itch in her brain wouldn’t stop. And it was almost morning already. Maybe the problem wasn’t that she needed to sleep. Maybe the problem was that she’d been cooped up in the Dower House all night. What she needed to do was move around.
The side door to the castle was open, as it always was, so far as Jodie could tell. She stepped in and along the corridor to the ballroom. She pulled the door closed behind her and switched the light on. She could see in her mind how the party itself would flow. People would arrive through the main castle doors into the hallway. For anyone who came from the village that would mark the event out as special, given how used everyone seemed to be to wandering in and out through the kitchen like they owned the place.
They’d serve welcome drinks in the hallway and then shepherd people through to the dining hall, which Jodie now knew was different to the small dining room, the dining room or the small hall. They’d have tables in the dining hall and at one end of the ballroom, all to the sides to allow the smooth flow of people through the doors, and the band and space for dancing at the other end of the ballroom. At midnight they’d open the side doors to the outside so people could watch the fireworks shooting into the night over Raasay and Skye.
The only things standing between her and this vision were several decades of accumulated grime and junk. Sod making lists. Sod breaking things down into bite-sized chunks. Sometimes it was a question of getting the bit between your teeth and powering through the big horrible job so quickly that your brain didn’t get a chance to notice how overwhelming and impossible it all was.
She started at the corner nearest to the doors to the dining hall, not for any other reason than that that was where she found herself standing. There was no system to what she picked up first. There was no plan to sort things for storage, versus rubbish, versus things she would use in the ballroom. She picked up the first thing and started.
And the first thing was a chair. Or at least she thought it was a chair. When she picked it up she discovered that it was a chair back and seat, rather precariously balanced on a set of legs which, on closer inspection, didn’t actually match the rest of the chair at all. She moved it to one side.
Next up was a heap of dust-covered fabric that turned out to be curtains. She hit as much of the grime away as she could to find a rather nice deep green colour. She unrolled one curtain. It was big, presumably big enough to hang at the grand, and currently undressed, windows to the ballroom. She gathered all the curtains she could find together and created a new pile.
And on she went.
Pavel checked his watch. Having foregone his morning workout he should make it to the castle in time to get the last few little jobs he needed to finish done before Tiny Strachan turned up to take over. Strach was delighted with the whole idea of working on the coach house in secret, out of view of the main castle.
Pavel headed into the main building before making his way over to the coach house. It was barely seven in the morning so the household would most likely still be in bed, but he wanted to check before he started bringing kit in and out. The sound of banging from the side corridor surprised him.
Burglars were all but unheard of in Lowbridge, but sheep wandering in through open patio doors were a much more present danger. Pavel readied himself to shoo a confused ewe away from the building, but opened the door instead to find a slightly wild-eyed, distinctly cobweb-covered Gemma Bryant, standing in the middle of the castle’s ballroom surrounded by what looked like varying sizes of mountains of junk. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Tidying.’
Pavel looked around the mounds of stuff. ‘Are you though?’
She stopped and slowly turned around. ‘Yeah. I’m organising.’
‘Right.’ He moved to the middle of the room. ‘What’s this pile then?’
‘Furniture – not broken.’
‘And this one?’
‘Furniture – broken but fixable.’
