Page 28 of Christmas All the Way

‘Nah, they weigh next to nothing,’ he said. ‘Wait here and I’ll be right back.’

As before, Keeley was impressed at the speed with which he worked. He had an instinctive appreciation of composition, knew where to angle the lens to make the most of the dwindling light and she saw from her viewpoint behind the camera that he was capturing the cottage at its best. Eventually, he switched to his phone camera and took a long, slow-motion sweep of the drowsy garden, across the yellow walls and zoomed in on the front door with the wreath in pride of place. No wonder their visitor numbers were improving, Keeley thought, shaking her head in wonder. He made Juniper Cottage look incredible.

‘That’s the exteriors done,’ he said, lowering the camera with an air of satisfaction.

‘Have we got time for a tea break?’ Keeley asked, opening the front door. ‘Isobel made some shortbread in honour of your visit.’

Xander smiled. ‘How could I say no? Is it Eliza-themed?’

‘No, but she did have a recipe,’ she replied. ‘I can give it you if you like.’

His smile became rueful. ‘I’m not much of a baker. But a recipe would be perfect to put in the newsletter. We could ask people to tag the Juniper Cottage accounts in their post-bake photos.’

Keeley threw him a disbelieving look. ‘Are you ever off duty?’

‘Not really,’ he said, shrugging. ‘When fans feel part of something, they share it with others and the reach is more organic and authentic than anything I can manufacture. My job is finding the things that draw them in.’

It was a more intuitive reply than she’d been expecting, Keeley thought as she led him through to the staffroom and switched the kettle on. ‘Tea? Or coffee?’

‘If we’re having shortbread, it has to be tea,’ Xander replied. ‘I’ve been in England seven years, remember? I’m not a complete bozo.’

Keeley frowned. ‘I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules around biscuits.’

He raised a reproachful eyebrow. ‘Now you’re just trolling me. There’s a whole hierarchy of dunkability for a start. Jaffa Cakes don’t dunk.’

Amusement tugged at her lips as she warmed the teapot. ‘The clue is in the name. Only a maniac would try to dunk a cake.’

‘But they’re shaped like a biscuit,’ he insisted. ‘It’s a lesson I learned the hard way when I first arrived.’

Keeley pushed the plate of golden shortbread towards him. ‘I don’t recommend you dunk these,’ she said gravely. ‘Not unless you want to drink your tea with a spoon.’

‘Noted,’ he said, taking one of the buttery fingers and leaning against the worktop. ‘So what made you choose Eliza and her life as your grand passion?’

She fought the urge to blink in surprise. In the month they’d known each other, she didn’t think he’d ever asked her a personal question. Then again, she hadn’t exactly been encouraging. Clearly, something had changed.

‘I suppose I just fell in love with her storytelling,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Everyone else on my course was raving about Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, and of course I love their work too. But something about Eliza’s writing resonated with me – it was witty and clever and brilliantly observed, while also somehow feeling modern and ahead of its time. Grace felt the same way and we became friends on the back of it. When everyone else was out drinking in the student union, we were organising buddy reads and debating which Eliza characters we’d marry, snog or avoid.’ She shook her head. ‘We sound like such nerds.’

But Xander was watching her. ‘I don’t think so. It’s always good to find your tribe and you must be kindred spirits. That’s why you’re still friends all these years on.’

She couldn’t argue with that. ‘How about you?’ she said, adding tea to the pot and filling it with water from the kettle. ‘Did you always know you’d end up hoarding dead leaves and photographing biscuits?’

The last bit was because instead of eating the shortbread, he’d taken out his phone to line up a picture of the plate containing the rest of Isobel’s handiwork. He smiled. ‘No, I wanted to be a professional beach bum. But it turns out that doesn’t pay very well so my dad put me to work in his roofing company. I hated that so much I ran away to Thailand and spent the best part of a year travelling around Asia, doing a variety of terrible jobs to support myself. Then my dad got sick and I went home to help look after him.’

Keeley was silent, wishing she’d been less flippant. What was that advice about never judging others because you had no idea what they’d been through?

Xander went on, oblivious to her embarrassment. ‘After he died, I took over running the business, just like he’d always wanted me to.’ A wry grimace crossed his face. ‘It turned out I wasn’t as hopeless at it as I’d thought – the firm went from strength to strength, won a few big contracts and took on some new employees, but my mum knew my heart wasn’t really in it. One day, she sat me down and told me she was selling up, to make sure I didn’t waste my life doing a job I didn’t enjoy.’

‘Wow. She sounds like an amazing woman,’ Keeley said, impressed at both his tenacity in accepting a responsibility he hadn’t wanted and his mother’s foresight in making sure it didn’t hold him back.

‘She is,’ Xander answered. ‘She made me enrol in a college course – anything I wanted to study was fine, as long as I was learning. Social media was just starting to take off back then, and businesses were really getting into the art of digital storytelling, so I took a photography course and before I knew it, I was running a campaign for a local surf school.’

‘Which involved hanging out at the beach,’ Keeley guessed, smiling.

‘Exactly,’ he said, cocking his head. ‘Fifteen years later, here I am. Photographing biscuits for a living and counting myself pretty lucky to get to eat a few at the same time.’

She laughed, as he’d meant her to, but at the same time she was doing some rough calculations in her head. Grace had been right, she thought with a jolt of surprise. He was older than he looked. Thirty-five, at least, depending on how long he’d spent running his dad’s business before his mum had intervened, and perhaps even a year or two older. Not that much younger than her, in fact. ‘Do you still surf?’

He nodded. ‘When I can. Obviously I don’t get back to Australia much but I spend as much time as I can in Cornwall.’