Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

Two days later, Charlotte was trying her very hardest not to be charmed.

“Why is this so cute?” she demanded as they walked up Regent’s Park Road and into the neighborhood of Primrose Hill; the street was dotted with small shops and restaurants, there were terraced houses painted in various shades of pastels, and the entire vibe was like what an American’s dream of a charming London street would look like. There were Christmas decorations everywhere—sparkling lights, greenery, cheerful wreaths, even windows with snowflakes painted on them. Charlotte sternly reminded herself that she was not the sort of idiot that would be taken in by a bit of festive cheer.

“Because it’s where posh people live,” Graham replied.

“Says the man whose family owns a house with a name .”

“Touché.” She glanced sideways at him in time to catch a fleeting dimple in his cheek as he bit back a smile. She personally thought men shouldn’t be allowed to have dimples. He was wearing a navy-blue wool coat over a pair of jeans, and a plaid scarf was knotted around his neck. His dark hair was mussed slightly by the wind, and there was a day’s worth of stubble on his face. None of this was at all interesting to her, obviously.

“Where is this square, exactly?” she asked.

He nodded at a street up ahead. “We’ll turn right there, and it’s just round the corner.”

Their destination was Chalcot Square, in which a Christmas party in an early aughts rom-com had taken place. Charlotte had never seen the movie in question—it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a Christmas movie, rather a movie with an iconic Christmas scene—but from what she gathered from being a human on the internet, its heroine was a magazine editor (like the heroines of approximately 50 percent of the rom-coms in existence) who lived in an improbably fabulous flat and had many romantic travails while trying to plan her best friend’s New Year’s Eve bachelorette party. (Why on earth anyone in their right mind would have a bachelorette party on New Year’s Eve was not ever addressed, as far as Charlotte could tell.) Charlotte had taken a quick YouTube journey through some of its highlights the night before, and had found it extremely annoying, with two potential love interests who had the charisma of a bowl of oatmeal.

However: the Christmas party scene—culminating with the rival love interests having a fistfight in the snow outside the posh flat where the party took place—was iconic, and so here Charlotte was.

In a few minutes, they found themselves outside the building in question; it was around three, so it would be dark in less than an hour, and the windows glowed invitingly. She surveyed the scene before her and pulled out her phone, where she’d saved a screenshot from the scene in the movie. She, obviously, could probably have done all the sketches for this project based on screenshots, but there was something to be said for seeing a location in person—and, more important, there was something to be said for not spending every waking hour of the next month trapped in family Christmas hell. (This afternoon’s outing coincided with a day trip to a Christmas event at the LEGOLAND in Windsor that sounded a) like a completely wasted effort for a baby and b) objectively terrible.)

“You don’t want me to actually include the characters, right?” she asked Graham, glancing up from her phone to find him watching her with an inscrutable expression on his face.

“Right,” he confirmed, leaning back against the wrought-iron fence that encircled the garden behind them. “Eloise likes the idea of it just being the architecture—people who recognize it will know what it is, but it will just look like a nice painting of a historic property to anyone who doesn’t know.”

“Got it.” She glanced down at her phone screen again, clocking the angle of the shot in the movie, then slid it back into her pocket. She was wearing one of her favorite coats—green wool, with shiny brass buttons and a decorative bow at the neck—and had given her blonde bob a careful blowout. Where Ava swanned around in caftans with her hair in a messy bun, Charlotte wore lots of simple dresses in solid colors, her hair carefully styled. She sometimes felt like the artistic whimsy that gripped the rest of her family seemed to have run out of its supply by the time she was born. She pulled her sketchbook from her bag and, leaning against the fence next to Graham, began to sketch.

It was a rough sketch, just enough to get her initial impressions of the facade down; she’d refine it later, at home, based on photos she’d take before they left, but a photo couldn’t compare to in-person impressions, which was why she didn’t want to base her final piece on the photos alone. She was quiet as she worked, her eyes trained on the colorful Italianate terraced house before her, taking in the intricate corbels and overhanging eaves. It was a weekday, but not yet rush hour, so the streets around them were relatively quiet—or, rather, as quiet as streets in London could be—and she could hear the scrape of her pencil against paper.

When Charlotte had pulled out her sketchbook, Graham had pulled out his phone and proceeded to frown down at it, and she couldn’t help wondering what caused the frown that the contents of his phone seemed to often provoke. Perhaps he had an extremely demanding girlfriend who bombarded him with messages at all hours of the day.

Her next pencil stroke was particularly vicious.

“So you’re not working right now?” she asked, keeping her gaze firmly fixed on her work.

“Not at the moment,” he confirmed. “Lots to do at the house, so I decided to focus on that full-time for a year.”

There was a barely concealed note of strain underlying the words, and Charlotte frowned down at her sketch. Given what he’d said about the expenses of maintaining Eden Priory, she wondered how bad things were, if he’d felt the need to take a break from work to focus on this. She got the impression that this was a man who would go to great lengths to convince everyone around him that there was nothing wrong, which was why she was not expecting much in the way of a candid answer when she asked, “What happened with your roof?”

There was a pause, and she glanced up in time to see him lock his phone screen and slide the phone back in his pocket in a smooth motion that didn’t distract her from the slight tightening of his mouth. “The house needs a new roof, because of course it does.” There was barely leashed frustration in his voice.

“And I’m guessing that’s expensive?”

He snorted. “Think how much a normal roof costs to replace, then triple the size of the roof, and add in the fact that the house is listed, so there are all sorts of historical requirements for any repairs we do—it’s a goddamn mess.”

“Have you considered making a pinup calendar of you dressed as various reindeer?” she asked, still sketching busily. “You can sell copies as a fundraiser.”

“If I’d known my stripping out of that reindeer suit would have this effect on you, I’d have been more careful not to inflame your lust.”

This time, it was Charlotte’s turn to suppress a smile. And then, belatedly, something occurred to her—something that she might have realized earlier, if she’d thought about it for half a second, or done a bit more research. “This house isn’t open to the public.” She nodded at the building she was drawing.

“No,” Graham agreed, sounding slightly startled.

“It’s just a private home,” she clarified. “No tours—so they’re not doing anything to capitalize on their connection to Ninety Days of Bessie Black .”

“Right,” he agreed, more slowly this time, clearly beginning to understand her meaning.

“And,” Charlotte persisted, “I didn’t need a ride to get here.”

There was a slight pause. “No,” he said.

“Meaning,” she finished, “that you don’t need to be here with me at all.” She kept her eyes on her work as she spoke; she didn’t know what, precisely, she was afraid that she would—or wouldn’t—see on his face, if she looked at him, but it felt safer, somehow, to look at the page before her instead.

“No,” he said, after another, longer pause. “I guess I didn’t.” There was nothing sheepish or embarrassed in his tone; it was clear to her that she was not pointing out anything that he didn’t already know. She did glance up now, unable to resist, and found him looking at her, that arrogant eyebrow slightly raised. “Shall I leave you to it, then?”

She felt suddenly off-balance, like this was some sort of test—like her answer would reveal more than she wanted it to.

“You’re already here,” she said, as lightly as possible. “You may as well stay, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” he echoed, and she saw the hint of a dimple again, and returned her attention to her sketchbook.

Silence fell once more as she continued to work, finishing a series of thumbnails, then a couple of full-page rough sketches, before flipping to a fresh page to draw some of the architectural features in greater detail. After a while, she sensed that his eyes were on her.

“This isn’t a spectator sport, you know,” she murmured, not removing her eyes from her sketchpad as she shaded a bit of the lamp blazing next to the door.

“I promise you don’t want my assistance,” came his reply. “I’m rubbish at art.”

“I meant ,” she said, with what she considered to be infinite patience, “that you could go do… something else. While I’m working.”

There was a long pause, during which his gaze did not leave the side of her face, and hers did not leave her sketchpad. “You don’t try to make people like you, do you?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never seen much point—some people like me, some people don’t. Just like everyone else—I just angst about it less.” She had realized this at a young age; one thing that was to be said for having a brief period of being a child star and general movie darling was that it had taught her how little other people’s adoration really mattered, overall. There had been an awful lot of people, all those years ago, telling her how cute she was and how sweet and how absolutely darling she was in the movie, but it hadn’t mattered to her—not when she, at the age of ten, had realized that acting wasn’t something that made her happy, even if it had made people like her. For a little while, at least. She narrowed her eyes at Graham. “ You care about being liked, though.” She barely knew him—and yet, somehow, she knew this.

He immediately looked defensive. “Why do you think that?”

“Because,” she said, on a sudden, uncanny hunch, “you always have been, and so you don’t know what to do when someone doesn’t immediately fall under your spell.”

He crossed his arms and tilted his weight slightly sideways so that he was leaning toward her, which she should have found annoying but didn’t, because apparently she enjoyed attractive men leaning against things, which was infuriating.

“Let’s say you were correct,” he said, a wry, amused edge to his voice that she hadn’t expected. It made her like him a bit more; she realized, in a sudden flash, that each thing she’d learned about him had had that effect so far. “That would still do nothing to explain why you, specifically, seem to not want to like me.”

“I don’t not like you,” she protested, which was the truth.

“I know,” he agreed, a bit smug. “But you don’t want to like me. It’s against your will.”

“You surprised me, when you found me at Eden Priory,” she admitted, realizing that he was right; this was quite perceptive of him, and it made her wonder, for a brief, uncomfortable moment, if he was paying more attention to her than she realized.

He lifted an eyebrow. “You were at a Christmas lights switch-on attended by hundreds of people. You can’t possibly have expected to be alone.”

This was fair, and she hesitated. She avoided explaining anything about her past to people she didn’t know well; she wasn’t constantly recognized, but it did happen from time to time, and so she avoided making the connection for people who didn’t make it themselves, to spare herself more conversations about both a holiday and a movie that she disliked.

However, she was beginning to think that it was inevitable that Graham—or, more likely, one of his sisters—was going to figure out who she was, and that the longer she went without telling him, the weirder it would be.

“Okay, so,” she said, taking a deep breath, and bracing herself as if she were about to jump into a freezing lake. “I may have had a brief moment of fame as a child star.”

To his credit, Graham didn’t blink. “May have?” he repeated slowly.

She sighed. “My dad’s a director, and a friend of his was directing a—a Christmas rom-com.” She paused. “ Christmas, Truly , to be specific.”

“Ah,” he said, his expression unreadable, and Charlotte suddenly felt the pressing urge to explain this better.

“I had no idea that Eden Priory had been used in the movie until we got there on Saturday and I recognized it,” she said in a rush, suddenly concerned that—what? That he’d think she was so obsessed with her elementary school glory days that she’d deliberately seek out the filming locations of the one movie she’d ever acted in?

“Anyway,” she said, “I ended up in the movie—I was the kid in New York that was getting letters from the poor little rich English kid.”

“Pip.”

“Yes, Pip. And I was Tallulah.” She allowed herself an eloquent eye roll. “Anyway, I didn’t actually like acting, turns out—I’d never done it before, so when they had me do a screen test I thought it seemed like fun—an excuse to get out of school, at least. And filming the movie was… fine, I guess. But it’s a lot of people, a lot of waiting around—I had no desire to ever do it again. My parents were disappointed—Ava, my sister, she’s a stage actress and has played a lot of prestigious roles, and was already really into acting even when we were kids—and my dad directs art-house films, and my mom’s a playwright. They assumed after Christmas, Truly that I’d get the acting bug, too, and I’d have a career in the movies. They were genuinely confused when I decided to go to art school, and they could not give less of a shit about my art. They don’t think it’s bad , I don’t think, but it just… doesn’t interest them. And they don’t understand why I’m interested in something that the rest of the family isn’t.”

She broke off, realizing that she had detoured a bit from what she’d actually intended to tell him, but he hadn’t interrupted—was instead watching her intently, a faint frown wrinkling the skin between his eyebrows.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said, so simply and without any elaboration that Charlotte, who had opened her mouth to continue speaking, snapped it shut again.

It was ridiculous, of course. But something about the way he said it—without trying to flatter her by telling her how worthwhile her work was, how talented she was—made this feel unlike any other time she’d had this exact conversation with someone. Usually, people were indignant on her behalf—one weekend in college when Padma and Charlotte had gotten drunk on cheap wine, Padma had spent an entertaining twenty minutes coming up with increasingly creative, though decreasingly logical, insults to describe her parents—but something about his calm, quiet rejection of the very premise was even more reassuring.

“Right,” she said slowly. “I mean, yes—thank you.” She waved a hand. “It doesn’t really matter, except that earlier this year, I was approached—through my dad, of course; I don’t even have a film agent or anything—about doing a reboot.”

“A reboot.”

“Of Christmas, Truly ,” Charlotte confirmed. “Set twenty years later.”

“Dear god,” he muttered. “Is anyone asking for this?”

“Apparently, yes,” she said darkly. “At the time, I told them that it would be a cold day in hell before I ever got in front of a movie camera again.”

He choked on a laugh. “In those exact terms, I hope.”

“I’m guessing my dad softened the blow a bit when he passed it on. I kind of forgot about it, until there was a Variety article a couple of weeks ago full of quotes from an ‘anonymous source’ about how the entire cast was on board for the reboot… except me.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“My thoughts exactly,” she agreed. “The reporter did some digging—it’s not hard to figure out who I am; I’ve done some interviews in the past to promote my work that mentioned that I’m the Charlie Rose Lane, which is… I mean, it’s fine. It’s whatever. If it helps my art sell, I’m not above cashing in on this incredibly dumb and specific bit of fame. But whoever this ‘source’ was claimed that I thought my art was more important than Christmas, Truly —which I can’t even be mad about, because, uh, I do?”

By this point, Graham was laughing—actually laughing, not just chuckling—and she felt something unclench within her at the sound.

“As you might expect, since it’s the internet, a bunch of rabid Christmas, Truly fans—”

“I was unaware such a thing existed.”

“Come on!” Charlotte protested, laughing now as well. “It’s on TV every year . It’s a modern Christmas classic!”

“I’ve never seen it,” he admitted with a smug smile, and she rolled her eyes.

“Of course you haven’t,” she said. “A gentleman with his own manor house would never deign to do something as low as watch a holiday rom-com , even if it was filmed there.”

“Coming from the woman who is, by her own admission, a holiday-romance-hater? Who has seen none of the films Eloise wants her to paint scenes from?”

“Because,” she said, leaning toward him conspiratorially, “they’re all really bad .”

He huffed out another laugh at that, low and intimate this time, entirely different from the way he’d been laughing a moment before.

“What I was saying was,” she said, determined to actually finish this godforsaken story, “the deranged Christmas, Truly corner of the internet found me—apparently it’s really taken off with Gen Z, god only knows why—and my DMs have been full of a mix of death threats and genuinely funny burns. Someone told me that my art looked like the paint by numbers their grandmother worked on in the nursing home. I figured it would all die down, but then this, um, extremely passionate teenager accosted me when I was running in Central Park, and I thought it might be time to get out of New York for a bit.”

“So, just to be clear, you were scared out of town by a child who can’t even drive?”

“It’s New York City— I can barely drive,” Charlotte said, in the interest of fairness. “But essentially, yes. I always come to see Ava for the holidays—or I have, ever since she and Kit got married, because my parents are exhausting and usually in the stages of either separating or reconciling, and I just want somewhere quiet I can sleep for a week after the holiday rush—so after I was verbally assaulted by a sixteen-year-old, I decided to come earlier this year. But when we were at Eden Priory on Saturday, someone there recognized me—a big fan of the movie.”

“I wish I’d run into this person,” he muttered. “Could’ve asked them how to lure them and their fellow Christmas, Truly enthusiasts to the house without staging a reenactment of the entire film.” Catching sight of Charlotte’s raised eyebrows, he added dryly, “A genuine suggestion of Eloise’s.”

“I am not reprising my role,” she warned, and he grinned at her. “But anyway—given recent events, running into this fan of the movie was a bit much for me, which is why I went and hid.”

“And then I interrupted you,” he said, comprehension dawning.

“And started removing clothing ,” she reminded him.

“A reindeer suit! A felt reindeer suit.”

“How was I supposed to know what you had on underneath? I thought it might be like Scottish people and their kilts. I will admit that I might have been a bit short with you, though.”

A smile curved at his lips. “A bit. I’m not overly vain, but abject horror is not usually the reaction women have to my arrival.”

At this, Charlotte snapped shut her sketchbook—long abandoned, in any case—and, without the slightest hesitation, used it to whack him in the head.

“Jesus Christ! I knew Americans were blood-crazed lunatics, but I hadn’t heard that they were so creative in their choice of weapons.”

“Shut up, you’re fine,” Charlotte said, slipping the sketchbook in her bag and pulling her phone out of her coat pocket. She glanced down to see a couple of texts from Ava, including photos of a furious-looking Alice in front of a series of elaborate holiday-themed LEGO creations, and said a prayer of thanks to the heavens that she was not going to be present for what she suspected would be an absolutely epic meltdown.

“My ears are ringing,” he said.

“You’re just angry because I messed up your hair,” she said, snapping several photos of the house. This, combined with her sketch, would be sufficient for her final painting. She returned her phone to her bag, eyed him speculatively, and said, on a whim, “Where can we get a drink around here?”

“I don’t understand how it is that you’re the one who assaulted me, yet I’m the one who paid for the drinks,” Graham said twenty minutes later, sliding into the booth opposite her and slipping a glass mug of mulled wine across the table toward her.

“ You’re the one who said you’d get the drinks,” Charlotte said, exasperated. “What’s your Venmo handle? PoshTwat07?”

He waved her off. “Nice use of the native dialect, though.” He took a sip of mulled wine, surveying her thoughtfully. “Why do you dislike Christmas so much? Beyond the film, I mean?”

Charlotte cupped her own mug in her hands, savoring the warmth. The pub Graham had chosen was a Victorian-era hole in the wall, all antique mirrors and worn velvet booths and cozy lighting. She hated to admit it, but she loved it.

“My family has never been terribly… good at Christmas.”

“How can you be bad at Christmas? It’s not an exam.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure your family is great at Christmas,” she said. “Historic family home, lots of vibes, zero time spent listening to your parents arguing in the other room or, god forbid, being asked to fly off to some remote location to meet your mother’s latest paramour.”

“They sound like a treat, your parents,” he said, frowning down into his mug of wine.

“That’s one word for it. It’s what you get when two capital- A Artists marry each other.”

“You know that being an artist doesn’t automatically make you an ass, don’t you?” he asked conversationally.

“I’ve got a lot of evidence to the contrary,” she said shortly, before reluctantly amending, “Myself excluded, obviously. And Ava’s fine—selfish at times, but I love her, and she’s a good sister. Mostly.”

“My sister’s an artist, you know,” he said slowly. “Not Eloise—Lizzie, our little sister. She’s in her final year at Central Saint Martins, studying fashion design. She’s incredibly talented,” he added, with an unmistakable note of pride. He loved his sisters—she could hear it in his voice, every time he spoke of them. “And she’s one of the least selfish people I’ve ever met. She’s very weird, don’t get me wrong, and slightly terrifying to strangers, I think—but she’s not selfish at all.” He shook his head. “I just think… if your family has convinced you that it’s acceptable, or understandable, for your parents to be shit parents, just because they’re devoted to their craft or whatever… well, it’s bullshit. And you deserve better parents than that.”

She stared at him, a bit astonished. “Are you secretly kind ?” she asked, leaning forward conspiratorially.

He spluttered. “I don’t think I’m secretly kind. There are plenty of people who would call me kind.”

She crossed her arms across her chest, leaning back against the soft, upholstered booth. “Name them.”

“My mother.”

“Doesn’t count. Mothers can’t see their children objectively.”

“My sisters.”

“Would they, though?” she asked shrewdly. “I’ll bet you were a nightmare of an older brother. You probably gave them absolute hell.”

He grinned suddenly—a wolfish, fierce grin unlike any of the smiles she had yet seen cross his face. “I hid Eloise’s hairbrush every evening after she went to bed.”

Charlotte blinked. “Her… hairbrush?”

“Yes. She read an article in a magazine telling her how many strokes she needed to brush her hair every morning and every night and became fixated on it. It was extremely annoying—she kept making us late for school, because she wouldn’t stop brushing her hair.”

Charlotte could imagine, in a sudden flash, child Graham, in his school uniform, tapping his foot impatiently, checking his watch, absolutely horrified by the notion of being late.

“So one night I hid it in a closet. She had an absolute fit the next morning, wouldn’t stop shrieking about her hair—we were late for school anyway, but it was worth it just to get to watch it all. So the next night I hid it again, in a different spot. She worked out it was me pretty quickly, but instead of telling our mum, she started creating elaborate traps inside her room to catch me when I tried to sneak in to steal it.”

“Please tell me it involved chocolate syrup being dumped on your head and a fan spraying feathers on you,” said Charlotte, who had watched The Parent Trap a possibly worrying number of times.

“Nothing quite that elaborate, but she did once manage to rig up one of those contraptions where the door opens and tips flour down on the head of whoever is walking through the doorway.”

“Why didn’t she just lock her door?”

Graham snorted. “Because it’s a three-hundred-year-old house with old-fashioned locks and my mother hid the keys from us because she didn’t trust us—probably a good call,” he added thoughtfully.

“Probably,” Charlotte agreed, and they lapsed into a comfortable silence for a moment, each sipping at their wine.

“So,” she said slowly, lowering her mug of wine. “Where’s our next stop on this holiday movie tour?”

“Our,” he repeated, and looked at her over his mug, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“If you wanted,” she said. “To do more research, of course.” She took a breath. “My point is, I… wouldn’t mind.”

“Neither would I,” he said quietly. He pulled out his phone and glanced down at his list from Eloise. “We need to go to Sloane Square, so that’s easy enough. I’ve plans this weekend, though, and I have to go down to Hampshire for a couple of nights starting on Monday.”

“That’s fine—I do have other work to do, you know,” she added, a bit acerbically. “I should just wait and see what nightmarish Christmas activity my family has planned for next week and choose the best day to escape.”

“I would hate to interrupt any family bonding experiences,” he said solemnly. “Shall we invite them along? Go on a little artistic outing, then a trip to see Father Christmas afterward? A photo shoot in matching Christmas jumpers, perhaps? I am here to make your holiday dreams come true, Charlie Rose Lane.”

He ducked in time to avoid the coaster she tossed at him.

“Ugh. Do not call me that—I don’t know what my parents were thinking. Charlie Rose? Horrifying.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and then added, “Lane it is.” He grinned at her again, and she liked it, too much. Liked the sound of her last name in his voice.

And, in retrospect, that should have been the moment that she first realized that she was in trouble.