Page 39 of Christmas Is All Around
“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, youknow, 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 iscovered 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 itlooks Christmassy,but not in a tacky way, you know? In aclassicway. Plaid, wool, that sort of thing. No sequins, for god’s sake, she’s ababyand couldchoke 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’sbecause 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.” Sheshrugged. “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.
