Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Hi, Charlotte.” Lizzie met her at the door to Eden Priory on Tuesday afternoon, wearing all black and looking somewhat glum.

“Hi, Lizzie,” Charlotte said, a bit hesitant. “Everything all right?”

Lizzie heaved a dramatic sigh. “I thought we should have shown The Nightmare Before Christmas for this.”

Charlotte blinked. “A Halloween movie?”

Lizzie looked outraged. “It’s not a Halloween film, it’s a Christmas film!”

Charlotte shook her head. “It’s not. It’s a Halloween movie with a bit of Christmas mixed in—because no one wants a Christmas movie with Halloween mixed in.”

“ I do,” Lizzie insisted, which was fair enough, Charlotte supposed.

It was midafternoon on Christmas Eve; Graham had driven down to Hampshire that morning, but Charlotte had felt that some display of family holiday spirit was required, so she’d spent the morning with Ava and Simone, going out for pastries and taking Alice on a long walk, while Kit and John had labored mysteriously—and, occasionally, alarmingly noisily—in the kitchen. After lunch, Charlotte had caught the train to Upper Larkspur—which, even with a connecting train, took only about an hour and a half—and then a taxi from the train station to Eden Priory. The film screening was due to begin at three, and at half past two, the crowds were already flooding in.

Deciding to change tack, Charlotte glanced down at the potted plant she held. “I brought a poinsettia?”

Lizzie visibly brightened at this, and reached out to claim it. “Ooh! I’ll take you to the kitchen. I think Eloise wanted to speak to you for a moment.”

“Should you be abandoning your post?” Charlotte asked, eyeing the headlights farther down the gravel drive, a sure sign of more Christmas, Truly watchers on the way.

Looking untroubled by this, Lizzie unceremoniously ushered Charlotte inside and closed the heavy wooden door. “Waiting in the cold will heighten their anticipation!” she informed Charlotte cheerfully, and Charlotte decided not to argue with this extremely dubious logic.

She followed Lizzie into the house, weaving her way around happily chattering families in the entrance hall (and smiling gamely in response to the occasional “Tallulah!” called in her direction). They were screening the movie in this room, to fully lean into the Christmas, Truly vibes, and a giant screen had been set up against one wall, most of the floor space having been taken up with folding chairs. (The settee next to the Christmas tree was currently mobbed by people taking selfies sitting on it, most of them pretending to write letters, which was funny, Charlotte had to admit.)

There was a table bearing paper bags of popcorn at the base of the stairs, and Graham was currently stationed behind it, handing popcorn to parents and hastily snatching a bag back from a small child who was attempting to stick it under her sweater. He glanced up, as if sensing Charlotte’s presence, and met her eyes with a smile; Charlotte waved at him, but he was quickly distracted by a second child joining the first would-be thief with similarly larcenous intentions, and Charlotte trotted to catch up with Lizzie.

Lizzie led her through one of the doorways marked PRIVATE and into the kitchen, where the rest of the Calloway family was currently located, and which smelled, at the moment, overpoweringly of popcorn.

“Mum, Charlotte’s brought us a plant!” Lizzie said. “I’m naming it Gertrude, just so we’re all clear on that.”

“Why’ve you never named any of the flowers I brought you from my garden?” Eloise asked, sounding vaguely disgruntled as she filled a paper bag with popcorn from the enormous popcorn machine currently set up on the kitchen island. She added the bag to what looked to be a tea trolley that had been repurposed for popcorn-carting duties.

“Those are cut flowers,” Lizzie said, sounding extremely unimpressed. “Flower corpses, basically.”

“Lizzie,” Mrs. Calloway said, sounding a bit shocked. She was standing at the stove, stirring an enormous pot filled with what Charlotte suspected was hot chocolate, based on the smell. “That’s a rather dark way of looking at it, darling.”

“I’m just speaking my truth, Mum,” Lizzie said with a shrug, before absconding with the poinsettia and vanishing through a doorway.

“Can I do anything to help?” Charlotte asked; the kitchen was not a place she tended to feel at home, but she at least had the basic skills required for the current tasks. She hoped.

“Mum, if you want to wheel this cart out to Graham, we can start pouring the hot chocolate,” Eloise called to her mother, who happily relinquished her place at the hob. Eloise took over the stirring, directing Charlotte to find a bag of paper cups hidden in one cabinet. Once these had been procured, they commenced a fairly seamless operation of cup filling, with Charlotte carefully placing the filled cups on the counter while she waited for Mrs. Calloway to return with the cart.

“It seems like a good crowd,” she said, handing Eloise an empty cup.

“Yes!” Eloise said brightly. “We had a lot of people sign up after—well—”

“After I told Graham to shamelessly cash in on my child stardom?” Charlotte asked dryly, and Eloise looked sheepish.

“Well, yes,” she said, trading a full cup for an empty one. She bit her lip as she carefully ladled another serving of hot chocolate, looking more uneasy than Charlotte had ever seen her in their brief acquaintance.

“What’s wrong?” Charlotte asked warily, accepting the full cup and lining it up next to the others on the counter.

“I’m feeling a bit like a horrible person,” Eloise said, handing her another full cup and waiting while Charlotte reached for another empty one.

Charlotte froze in the act of reaching for the empty cup. “Why?”

“You and Graham seem so happy!” Eloise burst out. “And after Francesca, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him happy like this again.”

Charlotte blinked. “And that’s… a bad thing?” She handed Eloise the empty cup.

“No, no,” Eloise said, ladling out more hot chocolate. “I just feel bad because I nearly ruined it!”

Charlotte accepted the cup and set it down slowly, frowning. “What do you mean?”

Eloise set down the ladle and wiped her hands on a tea towel, then turned to face Charlotte directly. “I recognized you, the day of the lights switch-on.”

“Okay,” Charlotte said slowly, trying to remember their initial conversation in the car.

“Not immediately,” Eloise clarified, “but while we were talking in the car, I kept thinking you looked familiar, and when you mentioned your art, I looked you up, and worked it out.”

“And you didn’t say anything?” Nothing about this made sense to Charlotte—she couldn’t figure out what Eloise was building up to here.

“Well, if you didn’t want to admit to it, when I mentioned the film, I thought it would be sort of rude to bring it up,” Eloise said, which seemed reasonable enough, but she wasn’t done yet. “But once I’d mentioned the idea for the commission, I started thinking… that if we could… befriend you, I suppose? Then maybe you’d be willing to do something related to the film, for us.”

“Like,” Charlotte said, a sinking feeling in her stomach, “letting you use me to publicize this film screening?”

Eloise pressed her lips together. “It might have crossed my mind.”

“Right,” Charlotte said, her mind already working in overdrive, thinking back on every conversation she’d had with Graham about Christmas, Truly —about Eden Priory—about… everything.

“But,” she said slowly, “this was my idea. I had to convince Graham.”

Eloise nodded, relief flooding her face. “I know! He wouldn’t do it—he said that our arrangement with you for the commission would be it, and that we weren’t going to ask you to do anything else for us—I wasn’t even supposed to ever mention Christmas, Truly around you.”

This was, admittedly, somewhat reassuring—she would have felt pretty freaked out if Graham had somehow manipulated her into offering to do something he’d been angling for all the while, but… why didn’t she feel that reassured?

“When I finally told him about Christmas, Truly ,” she said, still trying to work out the sequence of events in her mind, “he already knew?”

The relief slowly faded from Eloise’s expression now, as if she was belatedly realizing that this confession might not be as straightforward a we’ll laugh about it later sort of thing as she’d expected.

“Um,” Eloise said. “I reckon so. He didn’t recognize you himself! I had to tell him!”

Of course he hadn’t—he’d never seen the movie. There was, Charlotte admitted to herself now, a small part of herself that had been attracted to him specifically because of this fact. After the couple of weeks she’d had before meeting him, there was something deeply relaxing about being around someone who knew absolutely nothing about Christmas, Truly , and couldn’t have cared less that she once had worn round glasses and lisped charmingly and been, briefly, adored by millions of people.

Except, as it turned out, that wasn’t true. Not entirely, at least.

“My point was that I’m so glad Graham didn’t listen to me,” Eloise said now, stumbling over her own words in her rush to get them out. “I’m so happy about the two of you— he seems so happy—and I’m so glad I didn’t manage to mess it all up!” She looked, suddenly, incredibly anxious—which seemed about right, Charlotte thought darkly. She would look anxious, too, if she was gripped with the dawning realization that she’d just massively fucked up her sibling’s love life.

At that exact moment, Mrs. Calloway returned with the empty tea trolley. “Shall we send out a round of hot chocolate?” she asked brightly, oblivious to the tension that filled the kitchen. She hummed “Jingle Bells” to herself as she began moving the full cups from the counter to the trolley; Charlotte began to help her, carefully avoiding Eloise’s eyes as she worked.

The conversation she needed to have with Graham—the argument that was brewing, the anger burning beneath her skin—would have to wait.

But not for long.

By six, the house was empty again, nothing but popcorn kernels and a few sticky hot chocolate spills remaining.

Charlotte was helping Mrs. Calloway break down folding chairs, lining them up against a wall to be collected in a few days by the company they’d been rented from, when Graham approached. “Let me give you a lift to the train station—your ticket is for six thirty, right?”

“Right.” Charlotte straightened, brushing her hands against her skirt (black; she’d paired it with a black turtleneck, because there was absolutely no chance she was wearing anything remotely Christmassy to a screening of Christmas, Truly ; she had to draw the line somewhere). She had managed to avoid Graham for the entirety of the event; once she’d helped Mrs. Calloway deliver the hot chocolate to the refreshment stand, she’d found herself swept into a number of interactions with enthusiastic-but-basically-benign strangers, who wanted a selfie with Tallulah, or to ask her what filming the movie had been like, or to ask if she’d visited any of the other filming locations. And, yeah, a few people asked her about the reboot—a line of inquiry that she politely but firmly shut down each time—but she could sense that the collective cultural attention had moved on.

And, honestly, the whole thing had been fine . It was a few hours out of her life, it involved cringe-watching her own (in her opinion, somewhat questionable) child acting, but the room was packed, everyone seemed happy, and she knew the ticket sales would be a huge boon to Eden Priory.

It should have felt like some sort of record-scratch moment—an afternoon during which she made her peace with the Christmas, Truly thing, once and for all—but after that conversation with Eloise in the kitchen, she’d barely been able to focus on anything happening around her. She’d tucked herself away in a corner, once the movie had started, in a spot where it would have been impossible for Graham to reach her without disturbing about twenty other people in the process, and so she’d seen him vanish into the kitchen instead, presumably to help his mom with cleanup.

But now, there was no avoiding the conversation they needed to have.

She managed to make it through the leave-taking while behaving more or less normally—perhaps her one childhood foray into acting had been worthwhile after all?—and it was only when they were in Graham’s car, headed to the train station in the village, that he at last seemed to realize something was wrong. To his credit, it was only about fifteen seconds into the drive—enough time for Charlotte to offer one monosyllabic reply, and for him to catch a proper look at her expression—that he caught on.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, wariness writ plain in his voice.

“Did you cozy up to me to use me to promote Eden Priory?” she asked, not mincing words. She’d never been one to beat around the bush, even under the best of circumstances, and she was not exactly in a diplomatic frame of mind at the moment.

To Graham’s credit, he didn’t lie. There were plenty of men she’d dated in the past that she knew would have offered some sort of excuse at this point, tried to weasel their way out of trouble. Graham, however, simply let a long, painful beat of silence elapse before he reached over to switch off the radio.

“Did Eloise tell you that?” he asked at last, his voice quiet.

“She did,” she responded, equally quiet, trying not to let any of the hurt gnawing at her chest creep into her voice. If Graham had just explained, early on, what had happened, she could have forgiven him—probably would have found it funny, in fact. But this deliberate, ongoing deceit? She had a much harder time swallowing that.

“Then let me provide a bit of context that she might not have added,” he said.

“Oh, there was zero context,” she said, her voice sounding bitter to her own ears now.

“Eloise recognized you the evening we met you,” he said, his voice carefully even, his eyes on the road ahead. “And she had just read that goddamn article a few days earlier, so she knew you were—um…” He hesitated, clearly looking for a delicate way to say hated by an unhinged faction of people on the internet . “… on the minds of people, at that moment.”

Charlotte snorted at this, and his mouth twitched.

“So she was thinking that if we all became friends somehow, you might agree to do us a favor. And when she cooked up the idea of the prints to sell at the gift shop, she thought it would be killing two birds with one stone if we could also… befriend you.”

“Befriend,” she repeated, incredulous.

“I swear, that’s all it was,” he said, glancing over at her. “This isn’t a bad novel, and she didn’t ask me to play a Jane Austen villain and try to seduce you for my own gains, or whatever. It doesn’t matter, in any case, because I initially said no—it seemed invasive and sort of disturbing.”

“And then you slept on it, and used your little accountant brain, and realized that this was too good a possibility to pass up?” she asked with considerable acid in her voice.

“No.” He shook his head vehemently. “I wasn’t lying to you in the coffee shop that day. I looked up your website and was truly impressed by your work—it had nothing to do with your name, and I genuinely thought it was a good opportunity for both us and you. It’s why I came to discuss it with you, rather than Eloise; I told her point-blank that I wasn’t going to try to—I dunno—weasel my way into your affections, or whatever the fuck she had in mind.”

“So you’re expecting me to believe that everything that happened between us was real, and you just happened to fall for the person who your sister had specifically targeted for, like, some sort of weird publicity scheme?”

“Why do you think I never asked you to do anything?” he asked, sounding frustrated. “Why do you think I seemed so reluctant when you offered to let Eloise use your photo for the film screening?”

“Guilty conscience?”

“Well, yeah—and because it just all seemed extremely fucking creepy, honestly. I didn’t want anything that was happening between us to be… tainted , I guess.”

He fell silent then, and Charlotte turned in her seat to study him for a long moment. She could believe him, largely; she didn’t think he was some sort of sociopathic mastermind who had been hunting her down for his purposes, despite what her initial thoughts had been. She thought he was human, and he made mistakes, and he’d made a big one, this time, and had handled it the best way he could see to do so.

But…

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked softly. Sadly.

He didn’t respond for a long moment, his eyes on the road ahead, the increasingly bright lights of the village as they approached the high street.

“I couldn’t work out a way to tell you that you’d believe,” he said at last, turning at a roundabout to head to the train station.

“If you’d been honest, I’d have believed you,” she said as he slid the car into one of the parallel spots in front of the station. He pulled up the parking brake and turned off the car, but she was already unclicking her seat belt, her hand on the door handle. “Lane—Charlotte,” he said, the slightest pleading note entering his voice for the first time. “I should have told you sooner, I know that—but please don’t leave like this.”

She looked at him for a long moment—at his stupid, handsome face. She noted how tired he looked, with dark circles beneath his eyes, visible even behind his glasses. She wondered how many sleepless nights he’d spent poring over Eden Priory’s finances, trying to work out a way to save this place that he loved so much.

“I’ve spent twenty years trying to escape Christmas, Truly ,” she said. “I literally came here because I didn’t want anything to do with it—because I’m sick of even talking about it, Jesus Christ. It would be nice to not have to think about something I did when I was nine years old for more than a week at a time, you know. And now, with this… I’d always think about it, when I thought of you. Of us.” She shook her head. “I can’t let this be something else that it hangs over. I just… can’t do this.”

And then, feeling like a bit of a coward, she opened her door and fled into the station before he had time to reply.

And told herself, as she stood on the platform, awaiting her train, that she didn’t care what he would have said anyway.

But deep down, she knew it wasn’t true.