Page 49 of Christmas Is All Around
“Dare I askwhyyour sister has such a charmingly criminal hobby?”
“I don’t ask too many questions.”
“You would have done well under a totalitarian regime. Shouldn’t you be sketching?”
“I’m too busy trying to defend my reputation from slander,” she told him through gritted teeth.
“We don’t want to interrupt, of course,” Rajesh said, looking impressed as he watched her extract her preferred pencil and turn her attention to the cottage before her. “Only, I’ve never seen an artist at work before, and itdoesseem awfully fascinating.”
He paused, and an expectant silence fell, as if the entire caroling troupe expected her to narrate her creative process to them as she worked. She cast Graham a pleading look, and, mercifully, he took the hint.
“I’m afraid you won’t be able to see her at work now, either, if we don’t give her some space. A watched kettle and all that.”
There was some impressed murmuring—clearly the carolers now viewed Charlotte as some sort of eccentric creative genius whose methods they could not understand, an impression she was not going to dispute if it meant that they would leave her alone so that she could actually get some work done.
“We’ll just be down the road,” Nadine said brightly. “We’ve found that the acoustics of the intersection back there lend themselves particularly well to ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.’ Makes us sound especially angelic, you see.”
“Must take advantage,” Graham agreed. “I look forward to listening to your angelic offerings from a distance.”
This, apparently, was a suitably rapturous response to permit Graham and Charlotte to now be left in peace, and Charlotte sagged slightly against the stone wall she was resting her hip upon.
“This village is terrifying,” she murmured, her eyes on the sketch slowly forming beneath her pencil. They were, admittedly, currently standing in front of a row of stone cottages with charmingly rustic little wooden signs on their gates, all proclaiming the cottages’ names to be things likeHoneysuckle CottageandOur Evergreen Nook, but still: terrifying.
“I do sort of feel like I’ve wandered into the pages ofCold Comfort Farm,” Graham agreed. “I cannot express to you enough how abnormal this is. I grew up in a small village, and nothing quirky or charming happened there. We just bought snacks at the corner shop and rode our bicycles around a lot.”
“I could do with about 75 percent less quirk and charm,” Charlotte said darkly, before lapsing into silence. She hastily created a series of thumbnail sketches, done from slightly different angles, before deciding on the best option and flipping to a new page in her sketchbook. She spent a while working on a sketch of the exterior, then created a few more sketches of some of the details of the window frames and features in the garden, and finally took a series of photographs of the cottage and the surrounding village lane that she could refer to later.
Once again, Graham was quiet while she worked; she glanced over at him at one point to find that he was replying to an email on his phone, his brow furrowed as he tapped away. A weak winter sun had crept above the roofs of the village at some point, and he’d replaced his usual glasses with a pair of sunglasses; these, combined with the second-day stubble and the vaguely tousled hair, created an overall look that was a bit rougher around the edges than his usual oxford-shirt-and-well-tailored-trousers vibe. She didn’t hate it.
At last, she was done, and she replaced her pencil pouch andsketchbook in her bag with some relief. “Let’s go,” she said to Graham, and he glanced up at her, slipping his phone back into the pocket of his jeans. “If we walk fast, we might be able to slip past the carolers without them noticing us.”
This turned out to be wishful thinking on Charlotte’s part—theyalmostmade it, but Nadine (of course it was Nadine) spotted them as they scurried past, and called out, “Don’t tell us you’re leaving so soon! Stay for a carol or two!”
And, of course, her pleas were immediately joined by Anjali, and Rajesh, and half of the caroling troupe, which meant that Charlotte and Graham had little choice but to stand politely among a crowd of delighted schoolchildren while “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was sung three times in a row (because the children kept screeching, “Again! Again!” and Nadine, who seemed to be in charge of the troupe’s song selection, was incapable of standing up to a bunch of seven-year-olds).
Eventually, however, they were free—though not without having received a flyer advertising the troupe’s upcoming tour stops (Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds, this coming weekend), with copious use of some sort of deliberately old-fashioned-looking font and the overly liberal deployment of clip-art Christmas trees. (“A fascinating historical text,” Graham had deemed it, rescuing it when Charlotte was about to throw it in a trash can next to their parking spot. “You’re just worried Nadine will see us tossing it,” Charlotte shot back.)
Now they were once again ensconced within the cozy confines of the Mini Cooper, having made it down all the winding country lanes (sans sheep-induced traffic jams today) while cheerfully abusing the vocal stylings of the Jingle Janglers. It was only now, on the highway, that they’d exhausted this topic and a slightly uncomfortable silence fell.
Charlotte decided to address the elephant in the Mini Cooper.
“So,” she said, would-be casual, “I suppose we should discuss whether we plan to continue having oral sex in showers for the rest of my time in England.”
“You know, when your conversation partner is driving a car at sixty miles an hour mightnotbe the best time to utter that sentence.” Despite this, his grip on the steering wheel was firm, the car’s path steady.
“You’re fine,” Charlotte said dismissively. “If I thought you were the type to crash a car over the mention of cunnilingus, I’d have waited, but I knew you were made of sterner stuff.”
“Your confidence in me is flattering.” His eyes were still on the road, but she could tell, just from watching him in profile, seeing the telltale dimple attempt to make its presence known in his cheek, that he was amused. Shelovedamusing him, she realized in a rush; this was a somewhat disconcerting realization, because Charlotte had never spent much time going out of her way to make people laugh. The rest of her family loved to entertain, to put on a show for whoever they were with; Charlotte was quieter, steadier than that. But when Graham laughed at something she said, it made her feel like he saw her—knewher—in a way that many people didn’t.
And she liked it.
“Seriously, though,” she said, not willing to drop this. “Obviously I’m leaving at New Year’s, and it sounds like you got out of a pretty long relationship recently—”
“Not recently,” he interrupted, his eyes still on the road. “It was before my dad died.”
Which had been, Charlotte recalled, a couple of years ago. She shouldn’t have cared that this woman, whoever she was, was long in his past… but something within her eased, knowing that he wasn’t hung up on her. That this wasn’t a rebound.
He seemed to sense her curiosity, because he glanced sideways ather, quickly, before looking back at the road. “Her name was Francesca. We dated for…” He paused, clearly doing some rapid mental math. “Six years.”
