Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

London ten days before Christmas was hell.

“There are”—Charlotte said breathlessly, bursting through the door into Ava and Kit’s flat laden down with packages—“so many people in this city that it should actually be illegal.”

“Charlotte, darling, you live in New York,” Simone said from the couch, where she was bouncing Alice on her knee. Alice was emitting the sort of high-pitched squeals that Charlotte had learned from hard experience to be very wary of, as they tended to slip from glee into absolute fury without more than three seconds’ warning. “Every time I set foot in your city, I feel as though there’s someone sweating on me. It’s very unhygienic.”

“If we weren’t all wearing coats, I guarantee I would also be covered in other people’s sweat,” Charlotte said grimly, dumping the bags on an empty chair. “I feel like I just escaped some sort of horror movie. There was Christmas music playing everywhere .”

“It’s December,” Ava said, wafting into the room, wearing a caftan and looking strangely relaxed for a woman who was spending ten hours a day with her mother-in-law and whose baby was almost certainly about to begin howling so loudly that there was a real possibility the police would be summoned. “There’s supposed to be Christmas music. Hear it?” she added beatifically, tilting her head to the side, and Charlotte caught the unfortunately unmistakable sound of Mariah Carey coming from the kitchen speakers. Charlotte sighed. Ava beamed.

“Why are you so happy?” Charlotte asked suspiciously.

“Because I gave her one of your little marijuana gummies, darling,” Simone said casually, still smiling at her granddaughter.

Charlotte nearly fell off her perch on the arm of the chair. “I didn’t bring edibles into a foreign country! I don’t want to get arrested!”

Simone waved a hand dismissively, which resulted in Alice teetering wildly on her knee; this merely made the unhinged cadence of her squeal more pronounced. Charlotte felt a premonition of doom.

“Not yours as in yours , Charlotte; don’t be so literal,” Simone said severely. “But yours as in yours . Your generation.”

“I don’t think millennials invented weed, Simone.”

“No,” Simone said thoughtfully, “I suppose you’re right. I had a very torrid night in Paris with John when we first started dating, you know, and if memory serves, there were some substances at play.”

“I am so glad I ate that gummy so that I’m not bothered by the sound of my mother-in-law describing a torrid weekend,” Ava said cheerfully.

There was a thump from the master bedroom down the hall. “I’m fine!” came Kit’s muffled voice a moment later.

“Thanks, babe!” Ava called back at him.

“I got everything on your list,” Charlotte informed her sister now, mustering the strength to reach for the bags to continue her journey into the kitchen. “I continue to be incapable of remembering where to find eggs in grocery stores here. I wandered up and down five aisles before I found them.”

“I don’t buy eggs,” Ava said serenely.

Charlotte frowned at her. “They were on the list.”

“Yes.” Ava nodded, looking pleased. “ You bought eggs.”

“But…” Charlotte was beginning to wonder if she had taken an edible without realizing it. “I’m usually not here to go grocery shopping for you. You can’t never eat eggs.”

“First of all, vegans exist, Charlotte,” Ava said, sounding remarkably self-righteous for a woman who Charlotte had personally watched eat an entire cheeseburger the night before. “But also, husbands exist. Kit buys the eggs.”

“So when you go grocery shopping—”

“No eggs,” Ava confirmed. “I even avoid the aisle they’re on. Just seeing them sitting there in their little cartons on the shelves like they’re canned beans is horrifying.”

“You do realize that these eggs were on those shelves, right?” Charlotte said cautiously. “I didn’t fly to America to buy refrigerated eggs.”

Ava waved a hand in a gesture eerily reminiscent of Simone. “I just need to not see it with my own eyes. I can pretend these aren’t unnatural European room-temperature eggs, so long as I don’t have to see them on the shelf.”

“This is insane,” Charlotte said. “Just so we’re clear on that.”

There was another, louder thump from down the hall.

“Fine!” Kit called again, though his voice sounded a bit more strained this time.

“Any blood?” Ava hollered back.

“Not much!” Kit yelled, sounding disturbingly cheerful for such a proclamation.

“Does Kit need help with… whatever he’s doing?” Charlotte asked as she dragged the grocery bags into the kitchen and began unloading them, her sister trailing behind her.

“Nope,” Ava said, at least bestirring herself enough to open the fridge and begin unpacking the bag that was overflowing with various cheeses. “He’s wrapping presents. It’s like Santa’s workshop in there. Full of secrets. We’re not allowed anywhere close.”

“What can he possibly be wrapping that’s making so much noise?” Charlotte asked curiously as she attempted to rearrange the contents of Ava’s cabinets enough to allow room for more canned goods.

“The collection of erotic garden statuary I found for Simone, probably,” Ava said, putting a carton of milk in the fridge door.

Charlotte blinked, opened her mouth, and then decided it was probably best not to reply. “You remember that I won’t be home for dinner tonight, right?” she said instead.

“Yes, yes,” Ava said absently, frowning down at the packet of extremely expensive French butter in her hand. “You’re going to a sexy ornament workshop.”

“No,” Charlotte said severely. “I’m going to a very professional work opportunity that I am being compensated for. Not sexy in the least.”

“Hmmm. Being compensated for at your normal rate?” Ava asked slyly, to which Charlotte had no good reply. “As I thought. The rest of your fee is being rendered in other services .”

“Ava, for god’s sake.” Charlotte was torn between exasperation and the insane desire to laugh. At that moment, at the exact same time, there was a third, even more ominous thump from the bedroom, what sounded suspiciously like a yelp of pain from Kit, and, as predicted, a shriek from Alice that veered suddenly from delighted to enraged.

“Charlotte?” came Kit’s sheepish voice from the hallway. “Could you fetch me a plaster?”

As Ava wafted away into the living room to retrieve her baby, Charlotte rummaged in a drawer in the hallway bathroom until she found a box of Bluey -themed bandages (Alice was not permitted screen time yet, but Kit had gotten weirdly hooked on the show, which Charlotte found both worrying and adorable at the same time), which she carried to Kit, who was hovering just outside his bedroom door, holding one hand in the other, trying not to drip blood on the rug.

“I’m about to leave for Eden Priory,” Charlotte told him, taking a bandage out of the box and unwrapping it for him.

“You’ll miss all the fun!” Kit said earnestly, looking distressed. From the living room, Alice’s howling grew louder, mingled with the sound of Simone singing her what Charlotte thought might be, mystifyingly, a sea shanty. “My dad’s just off buying a blowtorch, and then we’re going to try our hand at making crème br?lée this afternoon!”

Charlotte, privately, could not think of a less wise idea than introducing complicated French cooking and open flames into a situation that already involved one (1) demon-possessed baby, and one (1) mother of said baby who was currently in an altered state, as well as one (1) father of said baby who was bleeding copiously from his right hand, but she decided that this was not going to be her problem today, and instead offered a smile and a nod as she waved him off and went to her room to grab her coat and bag.

When Graham knocked on the door and she opened it, she informed him, quite seriously, “It will be a miracle if anyone in this flat is still alive when I return tonight. Ready to paint some ornaments?”

Eden Priory was in a state of frenzied activity when they arrived. Eloise and Lizzie were both present, but Charlotte barely had the chance to say anything beyond the briefest of hellos to them before Lizzie was swept off to the kitchen, where there was some sort of large-scale shortbread-making operation in progress. The ornament workshop was due to start in an hour, but there had evidently been some delay with the arrival of the supplies—“I don’t want to tell you how long I spent on the phone dealing with it yesterday,” Graham said darkly—and so things were being set up at the last minute.

Eloise beamed as Graham left Charlotte with a squeeze of the hand to go off in search of his mother, who was evidently looking for him. “I’ll show you where we’re setting up.”

Eloise led her into a room that Charlotte thought might have once been used as a ballroom, but which now had been cleared out and was arranged with several smaller tables clustered in a loose circle. The room itself was spectacular: high-ceilinged, with a wood floor that looked to have been recently polished to a shine; enormous windows allowed the weak winter sun to pour in; bunting and fairy lights were strung from the ceiling. A tree—smaller than the iconic tree in the entrance hall, but still enormous for a regular-sized house—was strung with lights and beautiful glass ornaments, and unseen speakers were piping in (sigh) Christmas carols.

The workshop had been only partially set up thus far: boxes of ornaments, paints, and paintbrushes had been scattered around but not yet unloaded; along one wall, a couple of battered chests of drawers had been repurposed into refreshment stations, covered in platters offering a number of cakes, shortbread, and some sort of delicious-looking pastry that smelled strongly of cinnamon. There were a few cut-glass bowls laid out, presumably awaiting mulled wine and other drink options, and there were mismatched teacups and tumblers to choose from.

Eloise made a beeline for the boxes now as Charlotte set her bag down behind a chair at the front of the room and unloaded the sample ornaments she’d carefully wrapped in newspaper for the journey down, having spent the past couple of days practicing various designs on a pack of cheap ornaments she’d found at a craft shop in London. She then crossed the room to help Eloise finish unloading the boxes, setting up an array of craft supplies at each table.

“This is pretty casual,” Eloise explained as they worked. “Nancy—our usual instructor—is just a lady in the village; we’ve known her for ages. She’s lovely, but she’s got to be at least eighty by now, and is a bit scattered. She tends to spend most of her time during the workshop downing mugs of wine—most of the people who show up for this are just looking for an afternoon out, so you don’t need to worry too much about teaching proper technique or whatever to anyone.”

“Got it,” Charlotte said, setting a last cup of paintbrushes on one of the tables and stepping back to survey the room. “I did make some sample ornaments, though, just in case anyone wants to use those as examples.” Eloise scampered over to look at the ornaments in question and squealed in delight.

“These are incredible ; gosh, maybe we should have had you teach a proper course or something—”

“Too late now,” Charlotte cautioned, and Eloise laughed.

“I’m just glad we didn’t have to cancel it—the tickets don’t cost that much, but Graham would’ve been stressed if we’d had to refund people their money. More than he’s already stressed these days, I mean,” she clarified with an eye roll. “We also had loads of messages from people at the last minute, saying they were going to come!” Eloise added happily. “I think it was your face on the Instagram post I made yesterday that did it.”

Charlotte blinked. “My… face?” she asked a bit cautiously.

Eloise beamed, distracted, as she whipped her phone out to take a few photographs of the room. “Yes! Graham told me that you were willing to help us advertise the film screening, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to use you for this, too! So I posted that the star of Christmas, Truly herself would be running the workshop—that’s when I started getting messages from people asking if they needed to book tickets in advance, that sort of thing.”

She sounded delighted by this, which made Charlotte feel guilty about the swooping feeling of dread in her stomach. She had told Graham that they could use her to market the Christmas, Truly screening, after all; was this really so different? Why should this bother her so much?

Because , said a petulant voice in her head, the one that represented the darkest, worst parts of herself, it’s my art, the thing I’m actually good at, and now that stupid movie is ruining that too .

But she didn’t want to listen to that voice—not today, not when she so desperately wanted this to go well, for Graham’s sake. So she shoved it—and all of her misgivings—aside, and offered Eloise the best smile that she could manage, determined that Christmas, Truly of all things was not— not —going to spoil her day.

Graham found her later, as she was packing leftover supplies into the boxes they’d arrived in.

“How’d it go?” he asked, the sudden sound of his voice in the empty room making her startle, not having heard his approach. She glanced up to see him leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed over his chest, watching her cushion unused ornaments in bubble wrap. She carefully placed the last one in the box, then straightened.

“It was fine,” she said cautiously. “I thought I saw you a couple of times, during?”

He nodded. “I was in and out, trying to keep an eye on the food and drink. Best turnout we’ve had in a few years, I think—thank you so much for stepping in.”

She bit her lip, weighing whether to tell him why , precisely, the turnout had been so good—something about the way Eloise had phrased it made her think that this had been an executive decision she’d made that Graham might not be aware of. Given all the disagreement between Graham and Eloise on the future of Eden Priory, she didn’t want to be the person who tossed a grenade into an already tense situation.

He, however, must have read something in her expression, because he took a couple of steps toward her. “What’s wrong?”

She decided to tell a truth, a small part of the larger one. “There were some Christmas, Truly fans.”

A frown darkened his face, and he reached out to take her hand. “Were any of them rude?”

“No.” She shook her head quickly, and his frown eased slightly. “They wanted to take selfies—one of them asked me about the reboot, but she was chill about it.” She shrugged. “It was… fine.”

It had been fine, was the thing; she hadn’t realized how much the unending wave of messages on social media, the run-in with the teenager in New York, the constant feeling that she was some sort of Christmas movie villain, had been wearing on her. Until now. Until she met some people who’d seen a movie and liked her character and said some nice things, and then got back to painting their Christmas ornaments like it… wasn’t that big of a deal.

Because it wasn’t.

Which meant that she definitely didn’t want to make things worse between Eloise and Graham by informing him how, exactly, it was that these people had come to this ornament workshop in the first place.

“That’s good, then,” he said hesitantly, still holding her hand. He was searching her face, clearly a bit puzzled by her mood. “Isn’t it? Unless you’re having second thoughts about the film screening? It would be fine if you didn’t want to come, you know—I think Eloise has already posted about it, but it’s easy enough for her to put out another message on Instagram, telling everyone you were canceling.”

She smiled at him. “The film screening will be fine,” she said firmly. “These people today weren’t out for my blood, which feels like an encouraging sign.”

“All right, then,” he said slowly, still looking at her a bit oddly. “You’ll let me know if you change your mind, though?” She nodded, squeezing his hand. “Mum wants to know if we’ll stay for dinner,” he added now, dropping her hand and reaching out to lift one of the boxes of leftover supplies. “She’s ordered a full Sunday roast from the village pub—if we eat soon, we’ll not be too late in getting back to London.”

“All right,” she said, turning to pick up another box. “I look forward to observing a vegetarian eat a Sunday roast, by the way.”

As it turned out, Graham could eat more without eating meat than Charlotte could as an omnivore. She watched in frank astonishment an hour later as he polished off his second Yorkshire pudding, using it to mop up the remaining gravy on his plate.

“I don’t want to be a jerk,” she said, “but… gravy?”

Lizzie cackled. “He’s the laziest vegetarian! At least when I do it, I do it properly.”

Graham cast a baleful look in his sister’s direction. “But you do it for about six months at a time every third year or so, whereas I actually manage it on a nonstop basis, so I’m not sure you’re in a position to throw stones.”

“I was doing so well the last time, too,” Lizzie said mournfully—though not mournfully enough to have prevented her from eating every morsel of roast beef on her plate, Charlotte noticed. “But then I happened to walk into a restaurant just as someone was having a rasher of bacon set down before them, and I was doomed.”

“An inspiring tale of moral courage,” Graham said dryly.

“Charlotte,” said Mrs. Calloway, seeming determined to prevent her children from veering into a philosophical debate at the dinner table, “Eloise showed me some of the pieces you’re working on for us to sell in the shop at Christmas next year—they’re beautiful. You’re very talented.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, smiling at her. She was a tall woman—taller than either daughter, though still a bit shorter than her son—in her early sixties, willowy, with hair that had gone completely gray, which she kept cropped to her chin, glasses that were remarkably similar to Graham’s, and extremely kind eyes.

“I wonder if we should unveil one of them at the film screening,” Eloise said thoughtfully now. “Perhaps show everyone a peek of one of the ones you’ve done at Eden Priory, as a teaser for next year?”

After further consultation, Charlotte and Eloise had decided that Charlotte should do two pieces featuring Eden Priory—one of the exterior of the house, to match the others in the print series, and one of the famous interior from the movie, featuring the Christmas tree and the settee, which she’d already started working on, based on the sketches she’d made the day of the switch-on. During spare moments before and after the ornament workshop today, she’d made sketches of the exterior and taken some photos.

“We could collect email addresses from people who want to be alerted when they’re available for order next fall,” Graham said thoughtfully. “Even offer some sort of small presale discount for the people on that list?”

“Graham,” Eloise said, startled, “that’s very clever.”

“I do have the occasional good idea, you know,” he said with a wry smile at his sister.

“Not where Christmas, Truly is concerned,” she muttered, and he frowned slightly at her.

“I’ve agreed to the film screening—and to the prints for the gift shop,” he said, his voice low. “What else is it that I’m supposed to be signing on to now?”

“Well,” Eloise said, pouncing on this opening, “I have been thinking that perhaps we could offer Christmas, Truly tours next year! Let people see the specific spots within the house that were used in filming, that sort of thing!”

Graham sighed. “Eloise, isn’t it enough that half the house is already full of informational placards about Christian Calloway? Do we need to turn this place into more of a public commodity?”

“Maybe,” she said, a bit testily, “doing so would result in a few more visitors. We already get people coming here solely because they know it was used in the film—let’s try to attract more of them! Have you noticed many Christian Calloway enthusiasts popping by lately?”

“I don’t think we need to discuss this over dinner,” Mrs. Calloway said brightly, a note of steel in her voice. Lizzie was staring determinedly at her water glass.

“It’s the perfect time to discuss it,” Eloise said sharply. “Since we’re all here at once. I know Charlotte won’t mind us talking business for a moment—will you, Charlotte?” She flashed a sunny smile at Charlotte, who offered a weak attempt at a smile in return. In truth, she’d been trying to sink lower in her chair in the hopes that the members of the family would just… forget she was there? It hadn’t been her most well-thought-out escape plan.

“I had a call from our solicitor,” Mrs. Calloway said now, looking at each of her children in turn. This was enough to make Graham and Eloise stop staring daggers at each other and look at their mother curiously, and even Lizzie glanced up. “There’s been interest from someone at the BBC who wants to use the house’s grounds for a couple of weeks in the autumn for a period drama they’re shooting. They wouldn’t need to do any interior shots, so it wouldn’t be terribly invasive—”

“No.” Graham’s voice was curt.

“Graham,” Eloise said, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Dad hated—”

“Dad’s dead,” Lizzie said quietly, speaking for the first time during this argument. “He’s dead,” she repeated, her voice even and calm, “so I don’t know that his opinions matter quite as much as ours do.” She seemed, suddenly, very adult—older than twenty-two. Graham and Eloise both looked somewhat taken aback, but Graham quickly rallied.

“Yeah, he is,” he said, looking at his sister, affection and stubbornness warring for dominance in his expression. “Which is why I don’t think we should immediately do the one thing he swore he’d never do again.”

“Graham, love,” Mrs. Calloway said, more gently than she’d yet spoken to him. “You know I love your father, too, but—well, he wasn’t right about everything. You fought with him often enough, after all.”

“Yeah, I did.” Graham stood abruptly, making a great show of gathering the dishes and beginning to stack them carefully. “And I can’t do anything about those fights, now that he’s gone—but I can do something about this.”

And with that, he vanished with a teetering stack of plates into the kitchen—a clear signal that, to him, there was nothing more to discuss.

The drive back to London passed largely in silence. Graham had turned on the radio as soon as they got in the car, and Charlotte was therefore treated to a never-ending array of Christmas hits on the drive north. She would have thought that he was doing it deliberately to troll her (an impulse that she would have begrudgingly respected), but she could see from the tight set of his jaw, the firm grip of his hands on the steering wheel, that his thoughts were not on taking advantage of her Christmas-averse tendencies to annoy her.

It was toward the end of the trip, as they got off the motorway and began weaving their way slowly through West London, that she decided to address the elephant in the room.

“I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve had this argument with your family.”

She kept her eyes fixed out the window at the lights of the city as she spoke, but out of the corner of her eye she caught a flicker of motion, as if he’d suddenly turned toward her before glancing ahead again.

“No.” The word was short, tense, though not precisely angry.

“Would it really be so terrible?” she asked carefully. “It sounds like it wouldn’t be at all invasive to your mom, living at the house, and while I’m sure the BBC doesn’t pay as well as Hollywood, the money would definitely help.”

She felt like she was badly overstepping, but if she’d been forced to sit through a weirdly tense dinner with someone else’s family, through no fault of her own, then it didn’t seem completely unreasonable that she be allowed to offer an opinion on it.

“My dad would’ve hated it,” he said, quietly enough that she could barely hear him over the noise of the road. “He felt this responsibility to the legacy of Christian Calloway—he admired his work so fiercely, and he felt like he was failing—if the house was losing money under his watch, it meant that he wasn’t worthy, I guess, of caring for the family heritage.”

“You realize that’s patriarchal bullshit, right?” Charlotte asked conversationally. “This enormous, drafty, impossible-to-heat house has been passed down to the eldest son in each generation like we’re living in a Jane Austen novel, and your dad somehow internalized this to mean that it was his destiny to preserve the house, or whatever?” She shook her head, feeling annoyed with the whole thing. “It’s ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous or not,” Graham said, his jaw now so tight that she wondered how he was getting words out, “it was important to him, and I don’t want to be the ass that waltzes in after his dad’s untimely death and tosses out everything he cared about.” He blew out a frustrated breath, and glanced over at her again. “I’m sorry. I’m not angry with you, I just—we’ve had this conversation a dozen times, and I feel like they’re not listening to me.”

Charlotte hesitated, torn between saying what she really thought, and not wanting to argue with him any further. In the end, however, as it so often did with her, honesty won. “I think they’re listening,” she said slowly. “I just think they’re coming to a different conclusion, when presented with the same set of facts. And you guys will have to figure out how to reconcile it.”

“Right,” he said, and then laughed under his breath—a dark, bitter laugh that signaled nothing so much as bone-deep weariness. “Happy fucking Christmas, everyone.”

And to that, Charlotte didn’t have any response.