Nina tried spreading her papers on the bar, tutting to find them getting damp from the condensation rings.
‘You’re working on Old Year’s Night?’ Mutt couldn’t help asking.
‘Onwhat?’ She dabbed at the bar with a fist full of napkins.
‘Old Year’s Night?’
‘You mean New Year’s Eve?’
‘Same difference.’
‘Not really. One sounds optimistic for the future; the other one is all maudlin and backwards looking.’
Mutt sniffed a laugh. ‘Maybe so. The end of the year’s for saying goodbye to the past as well as partying. Itcanbe a bit maudlin for people. You know in Scotland, just after the midnight bells, we all take a minute to think about the people not coming with us into the next year?’
Like Luke, thought Nina, and her emotions churned once more. She couldn’t let this smirking bloke see it though, so she said, ‘I thought you were supposed to love New Year, you Scots? I thought you were supposed to celebrate it bigger and better than anywhere else?’ Mutt was smiling back at her, quizzically. ‘Except maybe New York,’ she added, thinking of the way the whole city comes alive with celebration and glamour. She held in the sigh.
‘We’re nothing if not sentimental,’ Mutt told her. ‘If you’re not weeping by ten past twelve, are you really Scottish?’
‘Hmm, well, I’ll be asleep by twelve, thanks very much. I don’t fancy seeing a room full of drunk Scots crying and singing Old Lang Zine.’
‘Syne.’
‘You like correcting people,’ she observed with an exasperated slow blink.
Mutt held his hands up and turned to lean the small of his back on the bar, looking out at the room. Nina faced her papers once more just as Kitty reappeared twisting at a champagne bottle. When the cork popped, a small cheer went up around the bar.
‘Champagne, Mutt?’ Kitty asked, after she’d poured Nina’s tall glassful and passed it to her, saying she’d put it on her room tab.
‘I’d rather have a malt than that stuff,’ he told her.
‘I’ve a fifteen-year-old Dalmore new in from our supplier. Let me know when you fancy one and I’ll open it,’ said Kitty, before drifting off to serve the long line of customers that had accumulated while she’d been gone, one of whom was Seth waiting patiently for a top-up.
Nina downed her champagne like she’d been wandering in a parched desert for a week. Mutt noticed but seemed to reconsider saying anything. Instead he greeted Seth at the other end of the bar by raising his glass before surveying the room in silence.
Atholl was busy bringing stacks of chairs into the centre of the room, setting them out in two long rows facing one another across a line of trestle tables. He turned down Mutt’s offer of help with a wave of his hand.
Sullen, and with her head down over her papers, Nina said to herself, ‘I wouldn’t care if I never heard the word whisky again.’
‘Uh, did you say something?’ asked Mutt.
‘Whisky.’ She ran the point of her pen down a printed spreadsheet with slumping shoulders. ‘Not one of these local distilleries wanted to meet with me.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ Mutt told her, ‘they’re all closed for Christmas. Nobody’s malting this week.’
‘How was I supposed to know that?’ Nina looked defeated and held her empty glass up for a refill. Kitty was still busy, so Mutt reached behind the bar for the bottle, doing some kind of sheepdog whistle to make sure Kitty saw him doing it – this made Nina shrink in disbelief and annoyance – and he poured Nina another drink.
She lifted her glass once more and took a sip. ‘And none of them would open up for me,’ she said, addressing her papers again.
‘Like whisky that much, do you?’
‘Not especially. I needed to connect with them, for work.’ She drank again, this time slower but still giving the impression of being very much on the edge of a full-blown champagne mini-bender.
‘Speed dating will start in five minutes,’ Atholl shouted. ‘If you’ve a ticket, take a chair. There’s still time to buy one, if you like. Five pounds at the bar.’
A chorus ofwoosand laughter rang out, and some of the fishermen and farming lads slapped shoulders and jostled one another in mock encouragement, but no more tickets were sold. Only old Seth took his seat in the centre of the room, looking around expectantly at the crowds and making good-humoured comments about ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’.
Mutt, however, was still observing Nina quizzically. ‘Gene said you were a… what did he say? A trend predictor?’
