Sitting on the piano stool, Emma opened the box of decorations. There was something delicious about the clumps of tissue paper, softened by years of hands unwrapping and rewrapping. She knew the Hartley heirlooms by touch—baubles, round and smooth, stars spiky and the padded angels studded with tiny beads. Then there were newer Birch decorations, like the sparkly New York taxi, the Science Museum robots, and the ogee-shaped bells Andrew had brought back from Lebanon. Her favorites were the nineties glass balls from the Conran Shop, like huge soapy bubbles. There had been two dozen originally, and there was a time when one got smashed each year, but things were more sedate now. She remembered the girls having a special order in which they hung the decorations, Phoebe passing them to Olivia, who had stopped needing a stepladder when she was twelve. They’d demanded a particular Mariah Carey song on repeat, which Emma secretly rather enjoyed, and which had always driven Andrew from the room. That reminded her, he’d been gone ages. It was already dark outside. How long could it take to dig up the tree?
Andrew
THE ATTICS, WEYFIELD HALL, 5:45 P.M.
• • •
After Andrew heard Emma go downstairs (he knew it was her, by the panting), he had stayed hidden for a while. It would be a bore to encounter her on a landing and have to invent a story about why he wasn’t outside getting the tree. While he waited, he looked idly through a kind of portfolio on the floor. It was full of Phoebe’s old drawings and collages. She’d shown promise as a child, but had lacked the focus to go to art school. Now her aesthetic eye was evident only in her extensive wardrobe, and the way she told him which shirt to wear. He recognized a school Father’s Day card that had charmed him at the time. It was titled “My Father the Hero,” and around the edge a seven-year-old Phoebe had drawn different dishes—spaghetti and salad and steak frites, like an illuminated manuscript. The written part read:
My father is a hero because he tests out restaurents, and tells people if they’re good or bad. He also makes people laugh a lot, because he writes very funny things. I often go with him to the restaurents, and he writes down what I say about the things we eat. Last time I ordered a hamberger that was disgusting, and I said it tasted like a plimsoll with ketchup, so he wrote that in the magazine. We also laugh a lot at the other people in the restaurents, and sometimes we speak in a secret code that Mummy and my sister dont understand. I love him, because he is so funny.
It was amusing to see that they’d had shared in-jokes even then. Phoebe might look like Emma, but she’d certainly inherited his humor—and his turn of phrase. He remembered being touched that she’d seen heroism in a food column, while he was still feeling like a sellout for quitting foreign correspondence. But that was always Phoebe’s gift. She could make you feel special—or, at least, she made Andrew feel heroic. Speaking of which, he must go and uproot the bloody tree, before Emma sent out a search party.
Phoebe
THE BACK SITTING ROOM, WEYFIELD HALL, 6:00 P.M.
• • •
Phoebe lay on the sofa, looking at simpering models in Condé Nast Brides and Wedding. Her mother had bought them as quarantine reading matter, which was sweet, though Phoebe knew she wouldn’t want anything in a bridal magazine. Her plan was a winter wedding this time next year—either all candlelit and Scandinavian and hygge, or brilliantly glittery and kitsch. Whichever, it wouldn’t be at all meringuey. Her mother had been obsessed with a summer date and kept saying, “But you don’t want to wait ages!” which was totally unrealistic. No way was six months long enough to get everything sorted. Besides, Phoebe loved the run-up to Christmas, and, as she’d agreed with everyone, it would make the wedding very “her.” Both magazines had an exhausting “Prenuptial To-Do List” on their back pages, each slightly different. Wedding planning looked like a full-time job—which was just as well because her contract on Dolemates would end soon. Phoebe had been a casual researcher at Bright, a “boutique TV production company,” for a year. First, she had worked on a series about diet and exercise in the Middle Ages, causing her parents much hilarity. Now she was stuck on Dolemates, a dating show for the unemployed. It was a dire blend of Jeremy Kyle and First Dates, and her colleagues found it very funny that “posh Phoebe” was involved. Her mother always made a valiant effort to sound enthused, but usually got the name wrong. Her father delighted in calling it Benefit Cheats, Phoebe’s own joke, and one she went along with to save face. She doubted Olivia even knew about Dolemates. She wasn’t sure if this was annoying or a relief. Olivia probably still thought she worked “in fashion,” because of that beauty internship at Vogue years ago. Her mother appeared in the doorway, looking anxious. “Have you seen Daddy?” she said. “He’s vanished. The tree’s still in the garden. I can’t find him.”
“Maybe he’s escaped. He was in the smoking room after lunch.”
“Phoebe—I’m serious, he’s not there, he’s not outside and he’s not anywhere in the house.” Her voice was getting the panicky note it got in train stations.
The sound of someone yanking the front door, and the scrape of branches against wall, answered her.
“Andrew, thank God, where were you?” she said as he came in, nose red with cold.
“Getting the tree.”
“But when I went out a moment ago you weren’t anywhere!”
“Had to send a text. Bloody Vodafone only works at the bottom of the drive. Now, are you two going to help me?”
For some reason, Phoebe immediately wondered if her father was having an affair—simultaneously feeling disgusted by her own mind. He’d never do that. Though he had seemed a bit weird in the smoking room earlier. Why do you have to think such psycho things? What’s wrong with you? she asked herself. Intrusive thoughts, she remembered Nicola calling them. She hoped she wasn’t going to end up as stressy as her mother.
Once the three of them had got the tree up, slightly lopsided in a copper coal scuttle, she felt better. The drawing room was freezing, as usual, but Phoebe had always loved its terra-cotta walls, rococo cornice, and film-set chandeliers. She and Olivia used to sock-skate across the expanse of polished floor, and set up house in the huge fireplace. It was a shame her parents let the decor at Weyfield get so tired. The house could have been amazing if they spent money on it. She stood by the tree and took a deep sniff, the rush of piney resin transporting her back to seven years old—shaking presents with Olivia and praying for a Sylvanian Families windmill. “Wiv! We’re decorating!” called her mother. The opening chords of “Once in Royal David’s City” rang out from the ancient Hi-Fi, as Emma put on Carols from Kings.
Olivia walked in, holding her iPad. She didn’t stop looking at it as she sat down.
“Seventy new cases, diagnosed today,” she said.
“Oh, how dreadful,” said her mother. “Those poor people. I must donate.”
Phoebe wanted to say: “Can’t you stop talking about Haag, for a second?” but she knew she couldn’t. Olivia had only just got back. She was wearing her Cambridge college hoody, the one Phoebe found inexplicably irritating. It was like she still had to rub her high-achiever-ness in everyone’s face. At least she’d taken off the backpacker harem pants.
“It’s not that simple. Corruption is so endemic there, the charities can only do so much.”
“Well, it’s still terribly sad,” said her mother weakly.
Phoebe knew better than to offer an opinion. Not that she really had one. It was awful, of course, when you read the news, or thought about how some people had to live. But what could you do, unless, like Olivia, you were prepared to give up on your own life to go and help them? And hadn’t George said the only way to genuinely help Africa was to stop sending money, so that the countries had to sort out their own problems? It all made her head spin.
“Now,” said her mother, after a pause, “bigger decorations low down, delicates at the top.”
Phoebe began laying the familiar trinkets
out on the rug. “Ooh, this one!” she shrieked, finding the Elvis Santa she’d bought on a road trip from Vegas to San Francisco. Christmas Tree Decorations were listed, truthfully, on her Instagram profile as one of her “likes.” She loved the excuse for glitz, the way the tree was the same, yet different, year after year. “George’s family have a color-themed tree every Christmas,” she said, to nobody in particular. She always felt slightly depressed by this when she visited George’s family on Boxing Day. His parents also had a second home in Norfolk, a barn conversion in nearby Blakenham. In fact it was this common ground, discovered at a sticky-floored student bar, that had led to their first kiss. But despite its proximity, the Marsham-Smiths’ house couldn’t have been less like Weyfield. It was brand-new, with whole walls of glass like cinema screens, and dinghy-size sofas.
“Gosh, how smart,” said Emma, in her polite voice. “But I rather like our mishmash.” Phoebe knew that she probably thought a coordinated tree was a bit naff, just as she did herself. She wondered why she had mentioned it at all.
“I love our mishmash,” said Phoebe. “It’s the only thing hotels do wrong. Artificial Christmas trees and tinsel.”
Olivia looked up and raised unplucked eyebrows.
Phoebe knew what she was thinking. She wanted to snap, “I was joking. And could you either go away or help?” but turned back to the tree.
Olivia picked up one of the large glass baubles and hung it near the top.
Phoebe automatically moved it to a lower branch. “The big ones go lower down.”
“Right.”
“I just meant, we’ve always done small ones at the top.”
“Always . . .”
Phoebe couldn’t tell if she was teasing or picking a fight. She stopped herself from saying, “You’d know, if you weren’t always working at Christmas.” There was no point. Olivia was an expert at holding the high ground. She’d just say something about junior doctors’ hours, or how Phoebe would be glad to find ER open if she broke her arm tonight.
“Now, who shall we have at the top—the angel or Elvis?” said Emma.
“I need to check my e-mail,” said Olivia, walking out.
• • •
An hour later, Phoebe lay in the bath in the Green Bathroom (so called because of its mint-colored lino). She had put the heater on full, but forced open the little window so it didn’t get stuffy. There was something delicious about the wafts of snowy air mingling with the scented steam, like a kind of après-ski spa. But she couldn’t quite relax. Having Olivia at home always put her on edge. And this year, with her mother hailing her sister as a saint (which, of course, she was), would probably be worse than ever. Why did Olivia have to ruin fun stuff with one look? Just because she was so politically aware, so obsessed with Africa. Tension balled in her throat—a groping, too late, for a just-cutting-enough retort. Just enough to make Olivia reflect on how patronizing she could be—and how she, Phoebe, was the pretty one who was getting married, who had the buzzy job and hectic social life and loads of Instagram followers. Although Olivia probably wouldn’t care about any of that.
She stood up, feeling the blood rush to her head with the heat, and reached for the landline phone, which she’d brought in. Lying back down, she stuck boiled-lobster feet out of the water, and tried to cool them against the old, curly taps. It was impossible to get the water temperature right at Weyfield; it either came out scalding or tepid. She’d long had a campaign to get all the bathrooms redone, or at least the one that she used, but her mother seemed to have a bizarre attachment to the house’s awful plumbing. It was a running joke she had with her father—Emma’s insistence on Weyfield remaining as uncomfortable as possible. Phoebe’s room was so cold she’d slept in a jumper last night.
“Hey you,” said George, just as she was thinking he wasn’t going to pick up, and that maybe she couldn’t be bothered to talk.
“Hiii.”
“How’s quarantine?”
“Annoying. Already. We were just decorating the tree, and—”
“Hang on a sec, Phoebles.”
Phoebe waited while George said, “Cheers, mate, have a good one,” in the voice he used for cab drivers and people in shops. He must be paying for something. She hoped it was the Dinny Hall earrings she’d told his sister she wanted—and then remembered he’d already given her a wrapped present for Christmas Day. It was small and square, but she had a feeling it wasn’t the hoops. Trust Mouse to mess it up. She didn’t get that kind of thing.
“So quarantine’s a ’mare, you were saying,” he said.
She’d lost the urge to rant about Olivia now. It would be hard to explain anyway.
“Yeah, just, you know. Families. When are you driving down?”
“Tomorrow morning. Back for New Year’s. Short and sweet.”
“Cool.” She couldn’t think of anything else to tell or ask him, so she said, “OK, well, talk later.”
“Talk later, Phoebles. Chin up.”
“Love you.”
“You too.”
She hung up, pushing away the thought that, in six years, George had never actually said “I love you.” He’d proposed, for God’s sake. The “I love you” issue was becoming another intrusive thought. She reached for a towel—it was rough and smelled of festering laundry, like all the towels at Weyfield. She made a mental note to keep it in her bedroom, just in case Olivia used this bathroom. Whatever her sister said about there being no risk, she was still a teeny bit nervous about catching Haag. At least she’d lose loads of weight for the wedding, if she did.
Jesse
SHERINGHAM STATION, NORFOLK, 8:12 P.M.
• • •
Sheringham (did you pronounce the second h? Jesse had no clue) was the end of the line. Jesse trundled in from Norwich on a ludicrously small train, practically a toy train. There wasn’t even a station, just an unlit platform, with a rickety gate separating it from the sidewalk. He inhaled cold, salt-spiked air, thinking how crazy it was that he had started this day by the Pacific, and now here he was beside another ocean in Norfolk, England. No, wait, in Britain there was no ocean. Just the quaint-sounding “seaside.” Sheringham High Street had the trippiest Christmas lights—twinkling red shrimps and yellow crabs revealing a time warp of shop fronts below. He took a couple of pictures on his phone to WhatsApp to Dana, before seeing he had no signal. There was a tiny cab office with a sign that read “Cliffords Taxi’s” by the platform, and he was soon in the back of a beaten-up Ford, headed for the Harbour Hotel, Blakenham. “You from Ameeerica?” asked the driver, as the car looped round the coast road. His accent was like nothing Jesse had ever heard. It had this insane lilt, rising at the end of every sentence—not Kardashian-style, just kind of wistful. He would have to interview some locals for his film. “Yeah, but I have English blood. I’m visiting family here,” he replied. He was about to explain that he was looking for his birth father, but the man just grunted and turned on the radio. That was cool. He had to learn to hold back some more anyway. He’d already gone and told the lady in the airport the whole thing, in a red-eye stupor. He and Calgary were always working on this need to blurt. Or, as Dana put it, his “obsessive-compulsive sharing syndrome.” But somehow, it still happened. He’d see something like the cute sign and hear himself remark on it, before he’d even realized he was thinking out loud. It was like the emotional outbursts he’d worked hard to tame, but which still—on occasion—erupted. His adoptive parents, both so measured, jokingly blamed these traits on Jesse’s “hot-blooded” Lebanese heritage. Now, Jesse wondered if he’d inherited them from Andrew. His birth father had no problem sharing his personal life, and he definitely had some anger issues.
The car slowed as they entered Blakenham “town.” This turned out to be two tiny, winding streets—literally cobbled—leading to the quay and his hotel. Getting out, he saw an ornate facade like a Victorian seaside postc
ard, overlooking a moonlit harbor. Inside, the lobby smelled of bleach and stale beer, the floor carpeted in maroon swirls. The Band Aid Christmas song chanted quietly in the background. A girl with painful-looking acne, wearing a Santa hat, gave him his key. “What number is room service?” he asked. He was starving, having shunned all the junk in Norwich station. She looked blank, and he had to repeat the question three times, asking first for “concierge,” then “the menu” and finally “dinner.”
“Ohh,” she said. “Kitchen’s closed, sorry. Closes at eight.”
“Can I get, like, some chips?” he asked, feeling slightly desperate. Clearly, his standards would have to drop.
“Chips? No, kitchen’s closed.” She was starting to look at him as if he was very stupid.
“I mean, crisps, potato crisps,” he said, remembering that “chips” meant “fries” in Britain.
“Ooooh, crisps. Yeah, we got Pringles in the minibar, if y’like? Or, I s’pose we could do you a soooup?” she said, seeming to take pity on him.
“Soup would be awesome! Thank you, you’re a doll!” he said, putting a note on the bar. She looked bewildered. “We’ll put it on your bill,” she said.
“No, that’s for you. I appreciate it.”
“Ooooh. Right, thanks!”
He set off down miles of musty corridor, hoping he’d be able to communicate more smoothly with his father.
The room was done in the same maroon as downstairs, the bed covered in a glossy quilt and the curtains thick swags, like a puppet theater. There were little signs everywhere. “Please do not throw anything other than toilet paper down the toilet.” “Please reuse your towels, wherever possible.” “Kindly note that a late checkout will incur an extra charge.” He considered documenting his arrival on camera, but right now a shower was priority. It was over a bathtub, the water pressure pitiful. He heard a knock and got out quickly, grabbing a towel. The girl from the lobby was standing outside with a tray. She blushed, looking for a second like she might drop everything, before handing it over and scurrying away. Clearly, what they said about the Brits being uptight was true. Although perhaps it was a little cruel to greet a teenage girl fresh out of the shower, he thought, catching sight of his torso in the mirror. Dana and his mom were always reminding him that being gay wouldn’t stop him from breaking female hearts. Cross-legged on the bed, he tore the spongey bread roll and took a cautious sip of tangerine-colored soup. It was tepid, custard textured, and so sweet it might have been dessert. Too bad. He couldn’t expect Whole Foods here. He dug out his iPad and e-mailed Dana.
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