Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

You look awful.”

This helpful greeting was Ava’s way of saying good morning on Saturday, when Charlotte staggered into the kitchen at a little past nine, which, all things considered, she thought was a completely reasonable time to awaken. It had not been an entirely peaceful lie-in—Alice had woken up at five, resisted all of Kit’s murmured attempts to soothe her, screeched fitfully for some time, and finally been removed to the living room, allowing Charlotte to drift back into a doze, which had involved a very weird dream in which she and Graham were in costume as Santa and Mrs. Claus, serving cocktails to the Grinch.

“I’m too old for drunk Christmas, I think,” she muttered, sinking down at the kitchen table and gratefully accepting the mug of coffee that Ava set down in front of her.

“I miss hangovers,” Ava said wistfully; now that Charlotte got a proper look at her, she could see that Ava was tired, too, with dark circles under her eyes and the bleary look that seemed to be common to all new parents. Charlotte wondered if Ava would be offended if she bought her an eye cream for Christmas, before immediately deciding that yes, she would.

Right on cue, there was a howl from the living room.

“But you’ve traded hangovers for the knowledge that you have contributed to the continuation of life on earth,” Charlotte informed her sister with a saccharine smile; Ava responded by flipping her off, then rose to see if Kit needed an assist.

Left alone in the relative peace of the kitchen, Charlotte pulled her phone out of the pocket of her joggers, mildly surprised to see that she had a text. Normally her phone was quiet in the mornings here, since everyone back home was still asleep.

Graham Calloway : Good morning. Was wondering if you had plans tomorrow?

She stared down at the message, her heart tapping a strange beat in her chest, warring with an urge to laugh. Of course he used completely proper punctuation in his texting.

Charlotte : Hello, sir. I do not have plans tomorrow, after careful consultation of my calendar.

Graham : . . . . .

Graham : Are you taking the piss?

Charlotte : Yes re: the weirdly formal texting manners

Charlotte : No re: not having plans

Charlotte : Why

Graham : I was wondering if you’d been to Borough Market yet—the food market? By London Bridge.

Charlotte : No!

Charlotte : I’ve heard it’s delicious

Graham : I thought we could go for lunch tomorrow?

Charlotte paused, staring down at her screen. She’d assumed some sort of invitation was forthcoming—why else would he be asking her about her plans?—and yet she still wavered for a moment. She had wondered, upon waking up this morning and remembering that she’d more or less propositioned him the night before, how he would respond—if things would be weird between them. If they’d try to ignore it, chalk it up to too many cocktails, and pretend it hadn’t happened.

Clearly, Graham wasn’t interested in doing so. But was she?

She sat still for a moment, staring unseeingly down at the screen of her phone, her mind racing—and then, without allowing time to second-guess herself, she simply replied, Noon ? and hit send.

And couldn’t help smiling when the reply came back:

Perfect.

Borough Market was a madhouse.

“How are there this many people here?” she asked Graham over her shoulder as they bumped and jostled their way through the crowds.

He leaned forward so that she could hear him, his mouth tilted over her shoulder toward her ear. “It’s central London in December. It’s always horrific.”

This was uttered with such distaste that she nearly laughed. “This was your idea ,” she reminded him as they joined the line at some sort of Middle Eastern food stall. “If you hate crowds so much, why on earth did you insist that we come here on a weekend?”

She turned around to face him, just in time to see something unreadable flicker across his face. “You mentioned that the food was one of the things you liked. About Christmas,” he clarified unnecessarily. “So I thought you might enjoy a food market.”

She stared at him for a long moment. He’d brought her here because of an offhand comment she made over a week ago?

A bit of pink crept into his cheeks. “If you’d rather go elsewhere—”

“No,” she said quickly. And then, more softly, “This is perfect.” She turned to order a falafel salad before he could reply.

Once they’d claimed their food, they staked out seats, turfing out a couple who were lingering over empty plates, staring adoringly at each other at a table in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral.

“Do you reckon that was a bit rude?” Graham asked as they sat, the couple finally having quailed under Charlotte’s unrelenting stare.

“Probably.” She shrugged. “But fortune favors the bold—or those not afraid to make it clear that they don’t want to eat standing up.”

“Yes. I do believe I recall studying that exact quote in my history books at school.”

“Where did you go to school?” she asked him curiously.

“LSE for uni. What about you?” he asked, taking a bite of his wrap. “You went to art school, right?”

She nodded. “RISD—the Rhode Island School of Design. I think that’s when my mom started despairing—I think she thought that she’d still be able to convince me to stick with acting, but that was a pretty clear signal that it wasn’t going to happen.” She shrugged. “The good news is, my parents moved to LA a few years ago, so I don’t see them nearly as often anymore, which I think is best for all of us. And, of course, they spend a lot more time thinking about themselves than they ever have about me, and the distance keeps them off my back.”

He frowned. “Doesn’t that bother you, though? They’re your parents.”

She sighed. It was hard to explain her parents to someone who had never met them. “I think Ava and I have both got used to it over the years.” She speared a piece of falafel with her fork. “The problem is, my parents love us, and even love each other—in their weird, extremely dramatic way—but they love themselves the most. They love their own careers, their own reputations, and I think they view everyone around them through that lens. Which probably explains why they’ve spent most of my life having dramatic arguments and fleeing to remote, glamorous corners of the globe to nurse their wounds, and then coming back together again.”

“I can’t imagine growing up with parents with a relationship like that,” he said slowly, shaking his head. “My parents got married quite young, and they were always sickeningly in love, right up until—”

He broke off sharply, his gaze dropping to the paper plate on the table before him.

“It must have been hard,” she said carefully. “Losing your dad so young.”

“I got to spent thirty years with him, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain,” he said, offering an attempt at a smile that didn’t remotely pass muster. “If I’d known he’d get sick, though, I might not have spent so much time arguing with him.”

“Did you not get along?”

He grimaced. “He… had a lot of ideas. About how things should be done. And he wasn’t always good about listening to other people’s ideas—and if he did, and he didn’t like the idea, or something went wrong, he’d remind you about it forever. Like the damn Christmas film,” he added ruefully, shaking his head. “The house brought out the worst in him sometimes.”

He paused, his brow furrowing, and then glanced up to meet her eyes. “But also the best. He loved that house—he loved his family—he was so proud to be a Calloway, so glad to be raising his kids in the same house he’d grown up in. So even though we often disagreed, especially as I got older, I always knew he only got so worked up because he cared so much.”

“Which is why you’re so afraid to let him down,” she said.

He’d lifted his wrap to his mouth to take another bite, but froze now, his hand suspended halfway to his mouth. “I’m not afraid of letting him down,” he said mildly.

“Yes, you are,” Charlotte said definitively.

“He’s dead,” he said, an edge creeping into his voice. “There’s no way to let him down anymore.” He inhaled sharply through his nose, set the wrap down again on his plate. The breath he exhaled was ever-so-slightly shaky. On an impulse, Charlotte dropped her fork, reached across the table, and rested her hand atop his.

“I know,” she said softly. “I just meant—you want to do him proud. You don’t want to do anything that he would have disapproved of, since he’s not here to do things himself.”

Her hand was still resting on his; after a moment, he turned his hand to face palm-up, then squeezed her hand in his before drawing his away. “No, you’re right—I just—I don’t speak of him often.”

Then why, Charlotte wanted to ask, was he speaking of his father to her?

But she didn’t ask—because she already knew the answer, sort of. It was the same reason she had told him about her parents’ complicated relationship with each other, with her, their thoughts on her career. It was the same reason she’d told him in his living room on Friday night that she wanted to stay. And the same reason that she had still, hours later, been able to feel the phantom touch of his fingers on her cheek when he’d brushed her hair behind her ear.

She couldn’t put a name to it, whatever this was between them—but it was there, and she felt it, and she knew that he did too.

He glanced down at his watch. “I have good news.”

She cleared her throat, trying to dispel the heaviness of her thoughts. “Oh?”

“It’s after one, which means it’s officially a socially acceptable time to drink on a Sunday. Can I shout you a pint?”

“Here?” she asked, raising her eyebrow at the surrounding crowds.

He shook his head. “No. I know a spot not far from here where we should be able to get a seat—and hear ourselves think.”

But thinking, Charlotte thought, was precisely what she didn’t want to do at the moment—because if she started thinking, she’d think about all the reasons it was a very, very bad idea to let him take her by the hand, lead her out of the teeming crowds and down the nearby streets, never once dropping her hand.

And she didn’t want to think about that—instead, she just wanted to enjoy the weight of his palm against hers.

So she did.

They were nearly at the pub when she felt her phone buzz in her pocket, then buzz again—a call, not a text. She fished it out and glanced at the screen. Ava.

“Sorry, it’s my sister,” she said, and then pressed the green button on her screen. “Hi. What’s up?”

“Charlotte?” Ava sounded breathless.

“Yes? You called me?”

“Right, right,” Ava said, now sounding flustered. Good Christ, Charlotte hoped this hadn’t been a pocket dial in the middle of some salacious moment with Kit—she’d never be able to look either of them in the face again. “Um, when were you planning on coming home again?”

“I’m not sure,” Charlotte said, frowning. “We’re in Southwark right now.”

“Well, if there’s any chance it’s going to be in the next hour and a half or so, I was hoping you could do me a massive favor.” Ava injected a winsome, slightly wheedling note into her voice that Charlotte instantly distrusted.

“Possibly,” Charlotte said cautiously, having had too many years of experience with her sister to agree to anything without a bit more information.

“Do you think you could buy Alice a new Christmas dress?” Ava asked. “It’s just, we have a bit of a… situation here…”

“What sort of a situation?” Charlotte asked suspiciously.

“Well, we’ve been trying to introduce different solid foods, you know, and I gave her sweet potato today and I don’t think it agreed with her because—”

“Please do not finish that sentence,” Charlotte interrupted.

“Well, the long and short of it is, all six of her Christmas dresses are currently… nonoperational. And we’re supposed to meet John and Simone at the zoo to meet Santa—”

“Where are they now?” Charlotte asked.

“Kit took them to an exhibit at the Tate to get them out of my hair, so I could have five seconds to myself while Alice was napping, but now none of them are answering their phones—probably left them at coat check—and I am holding a baby that is covered in shit . Charlotte, I cannot express to you how much—”

“Please don’t.” Charlotte heaved a great sigh. “Does this replacement Christmas dress need to come from any shop in particular?”

“Just… somewhere nice?” Ava asked, a bit pleadingly. “And make sure it looks Christmassy, but not in a tacky way, you know? In a classic way. Plaid, wool, that sort of thing. No sequins, for god’s sake, she’s a baby and could choke on one —”

“Ava,” Charlotte said, realizing that when her sister began to approach this level of theatrics it was best to cut her short, “I promise not to attempt to kill Alice via a Christmas dress. And I’ll see you at home in… well, as soon as I can get there.”

“Thankyouthankyou,” Ava said, before there was an ominous howl in the background. “Sorry, I need to go. Hurry, please—”

The line went dead before Charlotte could offer some sort of comforting reply.

She looked at Graham, who was regarding her inquisitively. She thought longingly of a happy hour or two whiled away over pints in some cozy, darkened pub, rather than amid the teeming crowds of Christmas shoppers flooding the city, and sighed.

“How would you feel about going shopping?”

An hour later, Charlotte had to confront a fact that probably should have been obvious: she knew nothing about babies.

Reasoning that it made the most sense to return to Ava’s neck of the woods, rather than brave the horrors of central London on a Sunday at Christmas, she and Graham had quickly hopped on the Tube and headed back to Chiswick, getting off the train at Turnham Green and striking out for the high street, where there would be plenty of bougie shops to choose from.

“She’s how old?”

“Six months,” Charlotte said helplessly. “Do you think she needs a three-to-six months dress, or a six-to-nine months one?”

“Well, is she a particularly large six-month-old?”

“How should I know?”

“Because she’s your niece? And you’ve been living with her for weeks? I thought that at some point during that time you might have taken in her general… proportions,” Graham said, gesturing bizarrely with his hands, the way you might size up a particularly nice watermelon at the grocery store.

“Have I ever done anything to give you the slightest impression that I know what I’m doing right now?” Charlotte protested.

“You do seem to have used me as an excuse to escape spending time with this baby on multiple occasions,” he conceded.

“Well, that’s because of all the Christmas… things,” she said, waving her hands vaguely. “Not because of the baby. But the baby encourages the Christmas things—I mean, she doesn’t, personally, she’s only six months old, she doesn’t know what Christmas is or why everyone around her has suddenly lost their minds—”

“Blaming a baby. Some might consider that underhanded, Lane.”

“Be quiet. My point is, I don’t object to Alice. She’s fine.” She shrugged. “Once she’s older, I’m going to teach her how to sneak out of the house, just to annoy Ava. But she’s not very interesting right now, is she?”

“I find her delightful,” he said, a trace smugly. “And since you seem incapable of making any sort of decision around which of those little ruffled monstrosities to buy her”—the dress Charlotte had spotted was, admittedly, a bit ruffly—“then I suppose I’ll have to take this situation in hand.”

“Right,” Charlotte scoffed, “because you’re some sort of expert on babies and—”

“She’s six months old, but she’s large for her age—a bit tall, I think, though it’s difficult to tell when she spends so much time in a carrier or a pram, but definitely chubby. I think the six-to-nine month will fit her fine,” he said definitively. “And if she’s already had a shit-related catastrophe this afternoon, then I think you’ll want to buy her the matching bloomers, just in case—it might protect the dress long enough to salvage the situation for a photo with Father Christmas, should disaster strike again.” He reached around her for the bloomers in question, checking the tag on the ones he pulled from the pile to ensure they were the right size. He then plucked the correct dress from Charlotte’s hand, replaced the other one on the rack, and tilted his head. “Shall we?”

“I—what—you—what the fuck?” Charlotte asked, eloquent as ever.

He leaned closer to her. “I have a younger sister,” he reminded her. “An eleven-years-younger sister.” He led her toward the cash register. “I know my way around some baby clothes, let us just say.”

Charlotte gaped at him mutely, so distracted that she didn’t even protest when he paid for the outfit before she could fish her wallet out of her purse. She seemed to have been temporarily deprived of the power of speech, in fact, her mind racing at a feverish pace as he steered her down the crowded Chiswick high street and around a corner, until they arrived outside Ava’s flat.

Charlotte found her footsteps slowing as they approached the door, reluctant for the afternoon—despite its unexpected detour—to conclude. She came to a halt at the foot of the front steps, and turned to face him.

“Thank you for your help,” she said, nodding at the paper bag in his hand. “I’m impressed by your secret baby knowledge.”

“I’ve a large and diverse skill set, Lane,” he said, taking a step toward her and giving her a small, private smile that made that dimple appear in one cheek again, and that made her regret the fact that they were not alone, but instead standing on a public street at two thirty in the afternoon.

As if summoned by this thought, the door to Ava’s flat opened and she poked her head out. “Thank god. Please tell me you have something for my offspring to wear.”

“Hello, Ava,” Graham said, reaching out to hand her the bag from the—extremely overpriced—boutique. “We thought Alice seemed somewhat round for her age and purchased accordingly. Hopefully that wasn’t a mistake.”

“ Graham thought,” Charlotte clarified. “I’m not qualified to make size assessments of babies.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” Ava said, peering into the bag. “I’ve seen how you flee the room whenever anyone mentions a diaper change.” She offered Graham a grateful smile. “This is perfect, thank you.”

He waved her off. “Anything for a baby’s first visit to Father Christmas,” he said, bowing his head slightly, as solemn as if he were in church. Charlotte was torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to whack him in the back of the head.

He turned to face her now. “I’ll text you?” he said, a slightly inquisitive note turning it into a question. “We still need to choose a day to go to Buckinghamshire.”

“Right,” Charlotte said; that was the location of the final village she needed to visit—one whose lack of a train station meant Graham’s escort in the Mini Cooper was more or less necessary. “We can work out the details later, I guess.”

He smiled crookedly at her, hesitated, and then—despite the fact that Ava was watching with breathless interest from the front steps—reached out with a hand to touch Charlotte’s cheek, his hand warm against her skin. She took a step toward him, and his free hand brushed hers, his fingers curving around hers with fleeting tenderness, gone again a moment later.

He stepped away first—and then, with a wave, he was gone.

“You’re swooning,” Ava said smugly from the front steps, as Charlotte watched Graham’s back retreating down the street, his shoulders broad in his wool coat.

Charlotte opened her mouth to retort, but before she could speak, her phone buzzed.

Graham Calloway : To be continued.

And she couldn’t help herself: she smiled.