‘Bloody money men ruin everything. Happy solstice!’
They chinked goblets.
‘We are halfway out of the dark,’ she said. ‘Of course, in my line of work that’s not always a good thing.’ She looked at Carmen. ‘You are my guest,’ she said. ‘You must have a gift.’
‘Oh, please, no, don’t worry,’ said Carmen.
‘No, no, no I insist.’
She took a large bunch of keys from a buried pocket in her velvet gown and reached up to a little glass box.
She looked straight at Carmen.
‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘How interesting with you. A man problem … ?’
‘Yes, well, that’s hardly difficult to guess,’ said Carmen. ‘Seeing as I’m here on my own looking completely miserable.’
This was getting really embarrassing. She was grateful to Bronagh, she really was, but now she really wanted to be … where? She thought about it. In fact, completely to her surprise, she wouldn’t mind being in the house, on the big cosy sofa, watching The Muppet Christmas Carol again with Phoebe curled up under her arm, and Pippa making sarcastic remarks about it and Jack pretending to shoot people on the screen with a banana （no guns were allowed in the house of course, not even Nerf guns）。
Huh. What a strange thought.
‘No,’ said Bronagh, giving her that dark intense gaze again. ‘No. I think that’s all fine.’
Carmen laughed. ‘It is so very much not fine, I can assure you.’
‘No, it’s rather closer to home. It’s family. A sister?’
‘What?’ said Carmen, but just as she did so, she heard someone say her name. Waving cheerily across the room, his top knot bobbing above everyone else, was Oke.
‘Hello!’ said Carmen, eager to get out of the conversation. She was going to head over to him, but he pushed his way through the crowd.
‘Bronagh! Thank you so much for the invitation.’
‘You know each other?’
‘Happy solstice, Sister Witch,’ said Oke courteously.
‘Happy solstice, Brother Quaker,’ said Bronagh, nodding her head.
‘I like the cloak,’ said Oke in his deep voice. The purple set off Carmen’s dark hair, even though she immediately giggled and would have renounced it had Bronagh not been standing there doing Fierce Witch Face. He noticed, though, the flush that spread across her face, and the slight twitch she made to the cape as she turned around.
‘I brought more!’ came a voice behind Oke, and Dahlia, the girl from the coffee shop, appeared with two more goblets.
‘This is so delicious, Bronagh,’ she said, her face flushed. ‘We should serve it in the coffee shop.’
‘You’d get shut down by the procurator fiscal,’ said Bronagh, patting her arm. ‘And we need you.’
The girl smiled, then caught sight of Carmen for the first time and turned pinker. She blushed easily, obviously.
Carmen froze to the spot and looked at them both.
Oke read her look immediately and wanted to explain but couldn’t think of a way around it. He knew Dahlia had a crush on him – he taught enough undergraduates to recognise the signs – and she had obviously known he’d been invited to the party along with everyone else from the Quaker meeting house, and had hovered in the freezing cold waiting for him to walk past so they could ‘accidentally’ arrive together. Now Carmen would think he was even more of a creep than she did already, sneaking up on her in the hall of mirrors, which he deeply regretted, and, that having crashed and burned, having moved straight on to the next girl who worked in a shop in the same street.