Page 57 of Christmas Is All Around
“Well,” Eloise said, pouncing on this opening, “Ihavebeen thinking that perhaps we could offerChristmas, Trulytours next year! Let people see the specific spots within the house that were used in filming, that sort of thing!”
Graham sighed. “Eloise, isn’t it enough that half the house is already full of informational placards about Christian Calloway? Do we need to turn this place intomoreof a public commodity?”
“Maybe,” she said, a bit testily, “doing so would result in a few more visitors. We already get people coming here solely because they know it was used in the film—let’s try to attract more of them! Have you noticed many Christian Calloway enthusiasts popping by lately?”
“I don’t think we need to discuss this over dinner,” Mrs. Callowaysaid brightly, a note of steel in her voice. Lizzie was staring determinedly at her water glass.
“It’s the perfect time to discuss it,” Eloise said sharply. “Since we’re all here at once. I know Charlotte won’t mind us talking business for a moment—will you, Charlotte?” She flashed a sunny smile at Charlotte, who offered a weak attempt at a smile in return. In truth, she’d been trying to sink lower in her chair in the hopes that the members of the family would just… forget she was there? It hadn’t been her most well-thought-out escape plan.
“I had a call from our solicitor,” Mrs. Calloway said now, looking at each of her children in turn. This was enough to make Graham and Eloise stop staring daggers at each other and look at their mother curiously, and even Lizzie glanced up. “There’s been interest from someone at the BBC who wants to use the house’s grounds for a couple of weeks in the autumn for a period drama they’re shooting. They wouldn’t need to do any interior shots, so it wouldn’t be terribly invasive—”
“No.” Graham’s voice was curt.
“Graham,” Eloise said, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Dad hated—”
“Dad’s dead,” Lizzie said quietly, speaking for the first time during this argument. “He’s dead,” she repeated, her voice even and calm, “so I don’t know that his opinions matter quite as much as ours do.” She seemed, suddenly, very adult—older than twenty-two. Graham and Eloise both looked somewhat taken aback, but Graham quickly rallied.
“Yeah, he is,” he said, looking at his sister, affection and stubbornness warring for dominance in his expression. “Which is why I don’t think we should immediately do theone thinghe swore he’d never do again.”
“Graham, love,” Mrs. Calloway said, more gently than she’d yet spoken to him. “You know I love your father, too, but—well, he wasn’t right about everything. You fought with him often enough, after all.”
“Yeah, I did.” Graham stood abruptly, making a great show of gathering the dishes and beginning to stack them carefully. “And I can’t do anything about those fights, now that he’s gone—but I can do something about this.”
And with that, he vanished with a teetering stack of plates into the kitchen—a clear signal that, to him, there was nothing more to discuss.
The drive back to London passed largely in silence. Graham had turned on the radio as soon as they got in the car, and Charlotte was therefore treated to a never-ending array of Christmas hits on the drive north. She would have thought that he was doing it deliberately to troll her (an impulse that she would have begrudgingly respected), but she could see from the tight set of his jaw, the firm grip of his hands on the steering wheel, that his thoughts were not on taking advantage of her Christmas-averse tendencies to annoy her.
It was toward the end of the trip, as they got off the motorway and began weaving their way slowly through West London, that she decided to address the elephant in the room.
“I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve had this argument with your family.”
She kept her eyes fixed out the window at the lights of the city as she spoke, but out of the corner of her eye she caught a flicker of motion, as if he’d suddenly turned toward her before glancing ahead again.
“No.” The word was short, tense, though not precisely angry.
“Would it really be so terrible?” she asked carefully. “It sounds like it wouldn’t be at all invasive to your mom, living at the house, and while I’m sure the BBC doesn’t pay as well as Hollywood, the money would definitely help.”
She felt like she was badly overstepping, but if she’d been forced to sit through a weirdly tense dinner with someone else’s family, throughno fault of her own, then it didn’t seem completely unreasonable that she be allowed to offer an opinion on it.
“My dad would’ve hated it,” he said, quietly enough that she could barely hear him over the noise of the road. “He felt this responsibility to the legacy of Christian Calloway—he admired his work so fiercely, and he felt like he was failing—if the house was losing money under his watch, it meant that he wasn’t worthy, I guess, of caring for the family heritage.”
“You realize that’s patriarchal bullshit, right?” Charlotte asked conversationally. “This enormous, drafty, impossible-to-heat house has been passed down to the eldest son in each generation like we’re living in a Jane Austen novel, and your dad somehow internalized this to mean that it was hisdestinyto preserve the house, or whatever?” She shook her head, feeling annoyed with the whole thing. “It’s ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous or not,” Graham said, his jaw now so tight that she wondered how he was getting words out, “it was important to him, and I don’t want to be the ass that waltzes in after his dad’s untimely death and tosses out everything he cared about.” He blew out a frustrated breath, and glanced over at her again. “I’m sorry. I’m not angry with you, I just—we’ve had this conversation a dozen times, and I feel like they’re not listening to me.”
Charlotte hesitated, torn between saying what she really thought, and not wanting to argue with him any further. In the end, however, as it so often did with her, honesty won. “I think they’re listening,” she said slowly. “I just think they’re coming to a different conclusion, when presented with the same set of facts. And you guys will have to figure out how to reconcile it.”
“Right,” he said, and then laughed under his breath—a dark, bitter laugh that signaled nothing so much as bone-deep weariness. “Happy fucking Christmas, everyone.”
And to that, Charlotte didn’t have any response.
FIVE DAYS TO CHRISTMAS
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On Friday, she put the finishing touches on the final commission she was working on for the year, then stood at Ava’s kitchen sink, rolling her shoulders as she washed her paintbrushes and carefully packed them away. The rest of the morning passed in a haze of end-of-workweek admin—she was trying to dig her way out of preholiday emails, and she had a lunchtime call with her assistant (still in her pajamas, given the hour of the morning on the East Coast) as they prepared to close down the shop on Charlotte’s website next week for a brief, much-needed hiatus to recover from the holiday rush.
