Friday #2
With the caffeine helping her feel slightly more awake and the croissant helping her feel slightly more like she’d eaten a croissant, Audrey set off on the final leg of the journey.
Once she’d skirted London courtesy of the M25, she was relieved to be herself back in the countryside.
Having been born in it, Audrey had an abiding fondness for rural England, although she privately felt that the South and East couldn’t really compete with the Welsh borders.
There was an indefinable Londonishness that radiated out from the capital and made the land for miles around seem regimented and uniform in ways the North and the West never were.
She was barely over the county line into Surrey when she spotted the first sign for Patchley House and Park, which had gone from obscure hotel in a former stately home to a semi-major tourist attraction thanks to the magic of mass media.
From its iconic wrought iron gates, it was a short-for-a-road-but-long-for-a-driveway trip up to the gravelly carpark.
And then it was a matter of following the CONTESTANTS THIS WAY notices that, in contrast to the homey-but-slick presentation of the on-camera parts of the show, were just A4 paper run off on a printer and taped onto whatever surfaces could support them.
These led her, at last, to a bored-looking man who signed her in and told her to make her way down the hill to the Lodge.
As a longtime fan of the show—albeit one who’d had to watch it alone while Natalie was out networking or otherwise living the careerist dream—Audrey was still waiting for the moment when it all started to feel real.
Or at least to feel unreal in the way that she assumed it would.
In that oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-I’m-actually-here way that other people seemed to get, rather than the “welp” way that she was currently experiencing.
She found her room fairly easily, dumped her things, and checked her phone to see if her parents had resolved their “is our daughter on TV yet” debate.
As it turned out, they both had and hadn’t, the response from her dad being see, I told her and the one from her mum saying sorry, I was getting it mixed up with Auntie Beryl’s haemorrhoid appointment.
Communication, Audrey had always believed, was the basis of a healthy relationship.
But if her parents were anything to go by, it didn’t actually have to be coherent or effective communication.
She texted back to her dad apparently she was thinking of Auntie Beryl’s haemorrhoid appointment (now that’s a week next Tuesday he replied) and to her mum do you often confuse me with Auntie Beryl’s bottom (her response was: only when you act like an arse).
Between messages, she sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to have too many thoughts.
It had been long enough since the breakup that, theoretically, being alone was something she should have been used to.
But at home she had her work and her family and—not to sound too materialistic—her stuff to keep her from dwelling.
A hotel room, especially the kind of hotel room you got on a BBC budget, was precision engineered to make a person regret every decision they’d ever made in their entire life.
So-called “reality” television, Natalie was explaining in her head, constructs false narratives that pressure people into living up to unrealistic standards.
And Audrey tried to push back a little by pointing out that it was just people making cakes in a nice house, but Natalie’s voice, as always, was insistent.
It’s a parochial, whitewashed—in both senses of the word—illusion of Britishness for Brexiteers and housewives.
I honestly can’t believe you watch it. And she didn’t have an answer to that, any more than she’d had one when the conversation, or conversations very much like it, had originally happened.
She should have brought a project. Audrey was the sort of person who liked to have a project, even if the project was just a jigsaw on the kitchen table.
The bedroom in her new flat was full of bags of yarn and piles of fabric, which were slowly being converted into scarves no one in particular wanted to wear and quilts no one in particular wanted to snuggle under.
Partly, she would be the first to admit, because they weren’t very good scarves or quilts.
Just like her hand-painted bowls weren’t very well painted and her one attempt at kintsugi had left the broken vase looking both worse and still broken.
For the first couple of years of their relationship, her fondness for crafting had driven Natalie up the wall, a conflict Audrey had resolved by…
stopping. Giving up or, in Natalie’s words, acknowledging there were better ways to use her time.
Sitting on the bed, staring at the wall, Audrey remained lost with her thoughts just long enough to conclude that staying in her room would definitely suck. And while wandering the grounds aimlessly might also suck, it would at least suck in the open air.
Besides, Audrey had always been an explorey sort.
And, much as she wanted to pretend it was part of what made her an excellent—well, an adequate; well, a former—investigative journalist, mostly it just meant she’d spent a lot of her childhood increasing her mother’s risk of cardiac arrest. She’d once enlivened a summer picnic by trying to climb up Wenlock Priory.
And, in her defence, she’d managed it. The climbing up part, at least. Getting down had been more of a challenge and had, eventually, involved fire engines.
To this day, Audrey felt guilty around a National Trust logo.
That probably wasn’t going to happen at Patchley House, though.
Not unless she got really, really bored.
Mostly she was hoping a good, old-fashioned wander would keep the more infuriating parts of her brain quiet.
With enquieting in mind, she scoped out the woodlands and, once she’d finished scoping, found her way down to the stream, locating the faux-medieval hermitage that her pre-visit research had told her was located somewhere on the grounds.
Once she’d had all the faux medievalness she could take, she looped back to the Lodge just in time to see a girl coming out of the front door.
And she was definitely a girl, probably—if Audrey was any judge—no more than sixteen.
Also probably no less than sixteen, unless the show was violating its own terms and conditions, along with a couple of child labour laws.
Neither of which, given what she knew of reality TV, she would have ruled out.
“Hi,” Audrey said, discovering as she got closer that, sixteen-ish as she may have been, the newcomer was still a good inch taller than Audrey. “Are you one of the other contestants?”
The girl nodded and, not being from a handshakey generation, waved. “Alanis.”
“Alanis?”
“Yeah. After this singer my mum likes.”
The realisation that it was perfectly possible for a woman who listened to Jagged Little Pill at a formative age to now have a daughter old enough to be baking on national television rose up in Audrey’s heart, killed a part of her, and went back to sleep. “Audrey,” said Audrey. “After—”
“Audrey Hepburn?” asked Alanis.
“Honestly a bit surprised you know who that is.”
“I’m really into retro stuff.”
Audrey could probably have guessed that for herself, since Alanis’s personal style appeared to have been culled from the greatest hits of the last two centuries: a pleated miniskirt like it was 2001, a chunky black-and-pink cable-knit like it was 2020, tube socks like it was 1974, and ribbons in her hair like she was about to get snubbed by Mr. Darcy at a country dance.
“Oh,” she said. “Cool. So kind of cottagecore?”
There was a certain look teenagers got when they felt an adult had been embarrassing in a way that inspired pity rather than loathing. “I don’t really want to put a label on it. But I’m liking your whole thing.”
“I’m not sure I have a thing.”
There was another look teenagers got when they felt you were full of shit. “Sixties glasses? Fifties silhouette? That’s a thing. You just don’t want to admit it.”
Great. Now Audrey was being called out by a child. On the other hand, the child seemed to be enjoying it. Which was probably a win on aggregate. “Fine. You got me. I’m a plus-sized stereotype.”
Alanis looked immediately mortified, like she was cancelling herself. “Oh fuck, sorry. I did not mean that in, like, a shaming way.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s just the reality of a certain height-to-girth ratio. And I’d rather own it than hide.”
“You’re definitely owning it.”
“Okay, now you’re overcompensating.”
“No, no,” protested Alanis, whose limited life experience had yet to teach her the benefits of quitting when you were behind. “You look really good for your age.”
Audrey stared at her. Over the past thirtysomething years she’d got pretty comfortable with her body. Having to be comfortable with her age as well had snuck up on her. “Which you think is…what exactly?”
“Like maybe twenty-five?” said Alanis with complete and bewildering sincerity. “Or twenty-eight?”
This was flattering. But also not flattering. “Oh my God, Alanis. How do you think time works?”
“I don’t know. I’m not Einstein.”
“No, I mean, twenty-five isn’t old enough to look good for your age. And, by similar reasoning, in no universe do I look twenty-five.”
“Look”—Alanis spread her hands in a gesture of I give up on everything—“you seem like you’re older than me and younger than my mum. I don’t know what else to do here.”