My arm tightens where it’s around James’s and I snuggle a bit closer to him as he pulls my arm tighter against his side and holds it there.
He doesn’t loosen his grip as we cross the icy shrub border and walk over the car park, and he only lets go to dig his keys out and let us in.
It’s dark inside, illuminated only by the light of the moon filtering in through the glass ceiling. James shoves his keys back into his pocket and holds his hand out, and I slip mine into it like I’m physically incapable of not holding his hand when there’s even the slightest opportunity. Our footsteps echo through the empty lane, sounding loud in the complete silence that’s the opposite of how noisy it is during daylight hours. Even with things as quiet as they’ve been in recent years, Nutcracker Lane is always full of noise – the hiss of steamers in the coffee shop, the jingling of bells and tinny music coming from battery-powered Christmas decorations, or the carollers or the hum of chatter from the few customers we do have.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see when we get there.’ He looks over at me and even in the darkness I can tell how wide his smile is.
‘Are we supposed to be here? Are we going to get done for breaking and entering over this?’
He laughs. ‘I assure you, we’re good.’
We pass the darkened doors of the Starlight Rainbows and Twinkles and Trinkets until eventually we come almost to the end of the lane, and then he tugs us to the right, to the narrow corridor between us and the nutcracker factory.
The mechanical village we put there is still in darkness in its display case, as silent as everything else is tonight, and it’s even darker in this part of the building without the see-through roof.
James stops in front of the door to the nutcracker outlet shop, pulls another set of keys out of his pocket and unlocks the door.
‘What are you doing? How do you have the keys for that?’
He grins, but he clearly isn’t going to let me in on his secrets, and the door swings shut behind him as he goes inside and floods the shop with light, bright enough to lighten up the whole corridor.
‘This way, Madame …’ He pulls the door from the inside and holds it open for me.
‘I can’t afford bail money, James.’ I go through the glass door anyway and he closes it softly behind us.
‘I promise I have permission. The shop’s never open these days and you haven’t got this year’s addition to your nutcracker collection yet. I couldn’t let Christmas pass without doing something about it. So there you go.’ He gestures to the huge shop that used to be such an integral part of Nutcracker Lane. ‘Take your pick. It’s on me.’
‘James …’ I shake my head, struggling not to tear up at his thoughtfulness. Of all the things I thought he might be up to tonight, I was not expecting this. It’s such a sweet, kind gesture, to go to all this trouble, to square whatever he had to square with the factory operators to let us in here after dark and get their keys, and how attentive he is to have given my nutcracker collection a second thought.
I feel like a kid in a sweetshop … well, like an adult in a sweetshop because I’m no less childlike when I go in a sweetshop even at the ripe old age of thirty-five.
The shop smells of freshly sanded wood and acrylic paint, the scent stronger than usual because the doors have been shut for so long. The carpet is a warm mulled wine colour under my feet, and every shelf is lined with silver tinsel and fairy lights in the exact same shade of purply red as the carpet. I look forward to stepping inside this shop every year, and I hadn’t realised until this moment how much I’d missed it this year.
Nutcrackers line every shelf in any size you can dream of. There are thousands of them, standing like sentinels, holding swords and sceptres and drums. They range from tiny ones to hang on your tree to huge six-foot-tall display ones like the one I knocked over in James’s shop all those weeks ago. Each shelf is crowded with them, from floor to ceiling at some points, rows and rows of their serious little moustached faces stare down at us, and while I can imagine that many of them might freak some people out, to me they’ve always been comforting. It’s said they bring good luck and guard a home by baring their teeth at evil spirits. I don’t know about evil spirits in Wiltshire, but anything that wants to bring me luck is welcome.
This shop was always a huge part of the lane – the giftshop that children used to go in at the end of their school tours, a big draw for tourists, and the last place my grandma and I used to visit on our way home. It was the one thing that made Nutcracker Lane stand out from any other outskirts-of-town shopping centre at Christmastime. The whole lane developed from this one shop – from the factory needing a place to get rid of excess makes that couldn’t be sold wholesale like the rest of their stock.
This is
