Sunday #3
Not quite sure what to make from such a mixed review, Audrey nodded the politest thanks she could muster and returned to her place.
It hadn’t been the worst feedback so far.
Alanis had been the first up to the plate and while they’d been kind to her on account of her age, the chilli hadn’t come through in her chocolate and chilli cake.
The two who’d come after that—Jim and Reggie, Audrey told herself; getting names down fast was a point of professional pride—had received similarly equivocating feedback, but Linda’s intricate icing work had won her high praise and set her up as the one to beat.
Neither of the next two contestants (John and Meera, Audrey name-checked) showed much chance of beating Linda and neither did Doris, whose carrot cake was praised for its story but was a little plain.
That just left Gerald and Joshua, and Gerald, from what Audrey was seeing, did not seem likely to be taking the week one crown.
He was staggering forward with a platter full of something that could—on a good day, in the right light—just about be called cake.
Having started life overflowing its bowl, it had overflown its tin as well, which meant it was now an uneven splurge of half-burned rivulets running down from an almost certainly raw centre.
He’d iced it somewhat hastily, making the whole thing look like the monster of the week from a seventies science fiction series.
“So this,” Gerald explained as he set his slightly wobbly creation down before the judges, “is a giant sponge cake.”
“Well it’s certainly giant,” agreed Wilfred Honey, who was always the show’s designated good cop.
“But as for whether it’s a sponge cake…” Marianne Wolvercote stabbed at it gently. “That remains to be seen.”
Eventually a slice was cut out of the cake and laid on a plate for inspection. Audrey didn’t have a good angle, but the fact that the judges were hesitating to taste it implied that things had gone about as badly wrong as they possibly could.
“Don’t eat that, Wilfred,” said Marianne Wolvercote, inspiring gasps of dismay from the other contestants.
Gerald gave a nervous hop. “Oh my.”
“It isn’t baked,” Marianne Wolvercote continued. “I understand what you were trying to do here, Gerald, but it hasn’t remotely worked.”
“You do seem to have had a bit of a day,” Wilfred Honey agreed, “don’t you, lad?”
Gerald nodded. “Looks like. But you know what they say: you win some, you lose some.”
He seemed oddly chipper as he made his way back to his station, but then he’d been oddly chipper ever since Audrey had first seen him and from what she knew of Jennifer Hallet he’d probably been cast precisely for that odd chipperness.
We need a quirky weird one to go out in the first week, she’d have said. And that prick looks the part.
Joshua was already coming forward, his I-can’t-be-defined-by-a-single-item-of-confectionary cupcakes arranged rather prettily on a stand that also looked handmade.
“Now, I was worried about this,” Marriane Wolvercote began, examining the display with the eye of a connoisseur.
“But it seems to have come together remarkably well. My concern was that you’d either do too little—cupcakes are rather simple, after all—or too much. But you’ve actually done wonderfully.”
Wilfred Honey reached out and grabbed a cake. “Tell us what flavours you’ve got.”
“Well”—suddenly, Joshua was coming across a lot more sincerely than he had earlier in the day—“the one you’re holding is red velvet, these ones here are lemon, those are chocolate, those are vanilla, that’s pumpkin and cinnamon, and those ones are also vanilla but they have strawberries on top.”
“I think it’s a very clever interpretation of the brief.” From Audrey’s experience watching the show, this was one of the highest forms of praise Marianne Wolvercote ever gave. “And it took real discipline to get this number of different flavours done in the time.”
Wilfred Honey had tried the red velvet and was moving on to the pumpkin and cinnamon.
“And each one’s worked nicely,” he added.
“You’ve done well here, lad. Very well. Reminds me a bit of myself at your age.
” Since Wilfred Honey was considerably quicker with the praise than Marianne Wolvercote, this didn’t land quite as hard as clever interpretation of the brief, but it was still pretty good going.
When they all gathered on their stools for the results, it was clearly down to Linda or Joshua, and Audrey—if she was honest with herself—was rooting for Linda. While she was sure Joshua was a perfectly nice young man, she couldn’t quite bring herself to cheer for a guy in a trilby.
After more time deliberating than seemed at all reasonable when the question was “Whose cakes were nicest?” the judges returned and Grace Forsythe took up her customary position at the front of the ballroom.
“And so, my little gateaux chocolates, we reach the end of the first week of the new season and we begin with the joyful task of selecting this week’s winner.
Wilfred and Marianne debated long and hard, but in the end they decided that while his Victoria sponge was a touch unconventional, he really turned it around with his baketacular cupcake display.
Congratulations”—she gave a totally unnecessary pause—“Joshua.”
There was a sequence of congratulations and back pats, and Alanis beamed like she’d won herself, which the part of Audrey that still thought whatever Natalie would think judged harshly and the rest of Audrey tried not to.
“But of course, with every cake there must be crumbs,” Grace Forsythe went on, “and with every victory, there must be loss. And so today, we say goodbye to our first contestant.” It was pretty obvious who this was going to be—so obvious that despite her classically trained tendency to try to build everything up like it was the state opening of Parliament, even Grace Forsythe kept it relatively succinct.
“In the short time he was here he made a mark, a Victoria sponge, and a gigantic mess of the kitchen. Gerald, we’re sorry to see you go. ”
This time the sequence was of goodbyes and commiserations.
Although since Gerald had been so patently inept for the whole weekend, everybody had been expecting it.
Everybody, in this context, including Gerald himself, who bore it with the same grace he had borne his ketchup-related travails of the previous day.
“Well, I messed that one up,” he explained to the camera afterwards. “I suppose I should really apologise to all the thousands of people who applied and didn’t make the cut. I promise I was better in auditions.”
Audrey’s own interview was relatively perfunctory, which was to be expected given that she had so far failed to distinguish herself either positively or negatively. Just a quick “Well, I think that went okay but I need to make sure I stand out more next week” and then off to pick up her things.
It was a pleasant summer’s afternoon as she strolled back down to the Lodge, and since she had—now she thought about it—precisely nothing to be hurrying back for, she took a moment to linger in the woods.
There was a river nearby, and taking little walks by rivers was one of the small things she liked doing, which she’d been meaning to do more of when she got the time.
It’s easy to have time, Natalie reminded her, when you’re not actually doing anything with your life.
I hope your pursuit of the bucolic idyll makes up for all the things you threw away.
Blocking her ex-girlfriend out as best she could, Audrey took a stroll.
She hadn’t originally meant it to be a long stroll, but with the sun dappling through the trees and across the water she went further than she’d intended, down to the faux-medieval hermitage she’d seen the previous day.
It felt…not odd, exactly, but sort of nonspecifically disorienting to look closely at something designed to feel old-fashioned to people who had long since passed into old-fashioned themselves.
She’d heard that sometimes landowners would hire faux hermits to live in their faux hermitages, and while that had stopped being the kind of thing you could get away with sometime in the eighteenth century, there was somebody inside it now.
“Doris?” Audrey poked her head through the archway, hoping none of the loosely piled stones would fall on her head. “What’re you doing here?”
“What’re you?” she replied, pricklier than Audrey had expected.
“Going for a walk.”
“Same.”
“And…” It wasn’t her place to pry. But she was a professional pryer with a strong interest in extracurricular prying, so she pried anyway. “You chose here to sit down?”
“There’s a seat.” Doris, who was resting on a slab that might have been intended to represent a bed or a bench, patted the space beside her.
“Well, yes,” Audrey conceded, “but—”
“But it smells like piss?”
Audrey nodded.
“I’ve smelled worse.”
It was hard to think of a good response to a ninety-six-year-old woman reassuring you about her ability to tolerate the scent of urine, but Audrey gave it a go anyway. “And you don’t want to come out here where it doesn’t smell of piss?”
Doris sat for a moment, gazing at the walls of the hermitage. “Probably should. Just thought it’d be…I don’t know.”
“It’d be what?” In moments of doubt, Audrey had a tendency to fall back on open questions.
“Different.”
“Different in what way?”
Doris gave a little shrug, got up off the slab, and left the piss-smelling hermitage. To Audrey’s relief, the smell of piss did not follow her out. “Just different.”
And sometimes open questions weren’t the thing you needed.
Sometimes you needed to put two and two together and hope you got a nice tutu out of it.
There were a number of possible explanations for an elderly woman to have specific expectations about an eighteenth-century folly in a stately home, but they all pointed in roughly the same direction. “Have you…have you been here before?”
Doris didn’t answer immediately. She had an almost wistful look about her, and it was a look Audrey recognised. She’d had it herself when she first came back to Shropshire—that mix of nostalgia and whatever the opposite of nostalgia was, the realisation that some bits of the past were gone forever.
“In the war,” she said at last. “Lifetime ago. And I come back after, back when I was a domestic.”
Audrey did not especially like the part of her brain that was constantly dissecting other people’s lives to see if they’d make good human interest pieces.
If she was honest, she’d always had it. Even now she was only half sure which of her childhood stories were things she actually remembered and which were things she’d told herself over and over again until it felt like remembering.
“So”—Audrey tried to convince herself she was taking a friendly interest, not an intrusive one—“were you evacuated here?”
Doris’s eyes grew sharper and warier. “No flies on you, are there? That’s right.
I come off the train in thirty-nine, got picked up, brung out to Patchley, and stuck in one of them rooms like the ones we’re in right now.
” She pointed up the hill towards the Lodge.
“They was put up for us, originally. Meant to be temporary but it would’ve cost more to take ’em down.
Used as servants’ quarters for a bit they was too. ”
Audrey was trying extremely hard to stop her auto-narrativiser from piecing this woman’s scattered recollections into a Timeless Tale Of How Far We Have Come and was failing, hard. “You must have some stories.”
“A few. But not as the likes of you would care for I’m sure.”
“The likes of me?” Doris had been okay with Audrey telling her she was gay, so she probably didn’t mean it homophobically. But the phrase had such connotations that Audrey’s mind went there anyway.
Doris smiled in what Audrey was pretty sure was a non-homophobic way. “Young folk have better things to do than listen to an old woman talk about rationing.”
“I really don’t.” The sad thing was it wasn’t even a lie.
“Well, you should.”
This seemed like a good time to deflect.
Admitting her social life was so limited that anecdotes about doodlebugs and painting your stockings on with gravy browning looked good by comparison felt like a personal low.
“It’s heritage,” said Audrey instead. “Heritage is important. Like the recipe you made today—that’s part of where we come from, and it was good to have it on the show. ”
“I just thought Wilfred’d like it.” Doris looked almost embarrassed. “And the judges was right, him-in-the-hat did better this week.”
“Joshua,” Audrey filled in instinctively.
“Why don’t men wear hats no more? I used to like a man in a hat.”
Audrey took Doris gently by the arm and started leading her back up the hill towards the Lodge. “I don’t want to be dismissive of Joshua’s preferences or yours, but I think a big part of it is that they make you look like a wanker.”
“Didn’t make you look like a wanker in my day. Made you look very dashing.”
“I’m not sure I’d be the one to judge,” Audrey admitted. “Not really how my bread’s buttered.”
Doris gave a wistful smile. “Reckon girls can look dashing in hats, too. Some girls, anyway.”
“Some, maybe,” Audrey agreed, trying not to think about Natalie, who had been known to rock a hat or two when she was feeling particularly His Girl Friday about things.
Slowly, they walked back to their rooms. And as they walked, as if to nobody in particular, Doris started talking.