Saturday #2
Together, they walked on a little, Doris sharing fragments of her recollections about Patchley House in wartime and Alanis spinning off from them into anecdotes of her own.
Audrey, meanwhile, trailed a little behind them just listening, which was another professional habit she probably needed to shake off.
The trouble was she found it so much more interesting to listen to a story she hadn’t heard than to talk about one she’d been over too many times.
“Umm,” Audrey tried to break out of the fly-on-the-wall space, “on the subject of, you know, the evacuation thing?”
“Yes, love?” The look in Doris’s eyes was the very definition of grandmotherly.
“How would you, I mean—look, I know it’s pretty intrusive and you don’t have to, but, well, I’ve been speaking to Jennifer and—”
“Are you okay, Audrey?” asked Alanis, looking more concerned than a sixteen-year-old should be looking about an adult woman with an interesting career. “You sound like you’re choking on a Cadbury Button.”
“Can I write you up for my paper?” asked Audrey very fast.
The fact that Doris didn’t react with immediate betrayal struck Audrey as a good sign. “What paper?”
“I write for the Shropshire Echo.” Audrey didn’t expect that to mean very much so she followed it up, as she always did with, “We’re the second biggest regional newspaper in Shropshire.”
Alanis went straight to the obvious question. “Who’s the biggest?”
“We don’t like to talk about it.” Hoping that her credentials would be solid enough to be reassuring but also small enough to be nonthreatening, Audrey turned back to Doris. “Anyway, what do you think?”
Doris gave the slightest shake of her head. “I don’t know, love, I think people are probably a bit tired of war stories.”
They probably were. But what they weren’t tired of was tie-in stories about popular TV shows.
Although having articulated it in her head, it seemed gauche to say out loud.
Besides, there were other reasons that Doris’s story mattered.
Or at least, Audrey was pretty sure there were.
Although it seemed gauche to mention them out loud, too, since Doris hadn’t.
“Right,” she tried instead, “but your story is actually here.” She put her arms out and rotated in a circle to indicate as much of the grounds as possible, which got her some funny looks from her companions.
“Isn’t that… I don’t know, it feels like something to me.
Maybe it’s not a big important exposé about, I don’t know, corruption at the highest levels of whateverthehell, but I think it’s sweet and interesting and people do like things that are sweet and interesting. ”
“It does seem like they might, actually,” said Alanis. “My mum loves this show and I think she’d think it was cool to hear that one of the contestants used to live here.”
“Would she now?” Doris seemed to be considering it, but Audrey had been in this game too long not to be able to spot reservations. “Well, I’ll give it a think.” They were approaching the sitting-down log, and Doris took the opportunity to sit down on it. “You two go on without me, I’ll be fine.”
Audrey really, really hoped she hadn’t blown it, but since worrying that you’d blown something—or more precisely acting on the worry that you’d blown something—was often the best way to ensure that blowing definitely occurred, she walked on.
Beside her, Alanis followed along talking about the next day’s challenge.
“I’m doing salted honey for sweet,” Alanis was saying. The task, in keeping with the back-to-basics theme of the series, was the classic twelve sweet and twelve savoury rolls. “And sun-dried tomato and herb for savoury. They’re pretty simple, but I figure simple’s what the season’s about.”
It was a good call. At least Audrey hoped it was a good call because it was the call she’d made, too. Even if, privately, she was beginning to worry that her choices of “blueberry jam” and “seeded” might have gone through simple and into basic. “Feeling prepared?” she asked instead.
“Yeah, actually. I like bread. It’s got a sort of”—Alanis made a cheerful kneading gesture—“plus it’s got this, like, you know—making your own bread.”
Audrey nodded. “I know what you mean. There’s that this-is-something-my-great-grandmother-would-have-done feeling.” Because your great grandmother, began Natalie, didn’t—
“Right? When I’ve finished university I’m going to have a little house with a garden and I’m going to bake all my own bread, and people’ll come round and I’ll be all, Would you like some bread? and it’ll be a whole big thing.”
“That”—Audrey scrunched her face into a look of confusion—“is a very specific ambition.”
“I mean, I also want a good job and everything, but I’ve still not worked that bit out so much. Bread though, you know where you are with bread, and it’s not like I’m ever going to not need it.”
“True.”
“Compare that to, say, SOHCAHTOA.”
“Bless you?” The moment she’d said it Audrey wished she’d picked any other joke. But Alanis laughed anyway. It was a bit of an indulging-the-old-person laugh, but Audrey was willing to take it.
“Seriously though, teach a girl to bake, you feed her for life. Teach a girl the cosine rule, you just make her quite bored.”
The walk to the Lodge was short once they were no longer walking at Doris’s pace, and when they got to their rooms Audrey realised that, since she’d only been heading that way to raise the can-I-ask-you-a-bunch-of-intrusive-questions-about-your-personal-history topic with an elderly woman, she didn’t actually have much reason to be there.
So after about ninety seconds sitting down staring at a wall, she got up again and made her way back up the hill towards the bar.
On the way she crossed paths with Doris, just getting up from the sitting-down log and beginning the second phase of her walk to the Lodge.
Not wanting to crowd a potential interviewee, Audrey gave her a polite nod, walked past, walked a little further, caught herself looking over her shoulder for the third time, and then paused.
In an absolute sense, it was none of her business.
And there did come a point at which helping people who didn’t want to be helped was obnoxious.
Especially if the specific form of help you’d chosen to offer happened to also give you an excuse to see someone who you, at the very minimum, liked looking at. And maybe kind of liked arguing with.
Definitely nothing to interrogate there. Moving on.
* * *
“No,” Jennifer said loudly and clearly through a closed door.
“I’ve not said anything yet.” And since Audrey hadn’t said anything, another thought occurred. “Also how did you know it was me?”
“Playing the odds. I’d gone nearly a full day without Audrey pissing Lane showing up at my door to—”
“Yes, yes, I’m shitting in your coffee or wanking over your favourite teddy bear or something—can you just come out here?”
There was a silence, followed by, “Wanking over my favourite teddy bear?”
“Or something?”
“You are fucking twisted. How the fuck did you get to fucking teddy bear wanking?”
Conversations through doors weren’t exactly the thing Audrey liked best in the world, but given how talking to Jennifer usually went, she rolled with it. “By listening to you speak for fifteen seconds?”
“I have never suggested anybody wank over a teddy bear. I told a guy to go wank over a picture of his mum once, but he had it fucking coming.”
“I feel this is getting off topic.” Audrey was really beginning to wish she’d picked a different opener.
Another silence. “Did you mean over as in physically onto or over as in while imagining?”
“I hadn’t given it that much thought?”
“And I’m not even sure which would be worse. The idea of you—”
“Okay, stop.” On some level, Audrey suspected, this was a game of vulgarity chicken, but playing vulgarity chicken was probably just giving Jennifer an intense home-field advantage. “Will you just please come out here?”
“No.”
And now it was a different game. One Audrey hoped she was substantially better at than Jennifer Hallet, on account of it requiring patience.
Then again, Jennifer Hallet had stood glaring on her doorstep while Audrey had been stuck in traffic coming out of Telford so maybe she was underestimating her.
She waited. And waited.
Finally, “You’re still there, aren’t you?”
“Yup.”
There were sounds of movement from inside the trailer, and the door opened, revealing an irate-looking Jennifer. Not that there was really any other sort. “You…you know you fucking suck? Just as a person.”
Not for the first time in her life, Audrey wondered if she needed therapy. Because being told she fucking sucked shouldn’t be that reassuring. She half-shrugged. “I can live with that. Come on.”
Jennifer reared back like a pissed-off lamia. “Don’t you fucking come on me. What do you think I am? Your fucking teddy bear?”
“Look”—Audrey made a gesture of despair—“I’m sorry. I drew a line between soft toys and ejaculation that I should never have drawn. Can we let it go?”
“Never,” said Jennifer Hallet. “Now, what’s this about?”
“I want to show you something.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“No,” protested Audrey, her gestures still somewhat despair adjacent. “What I say to all the girls is Hi, you look nice. Would you like to get a coffee? Because I’m not a grandstanding swear demon.”
The corner of Jennifer Hallet’s mean but irritatingly tempting mouth kicked up slightly. “Word of advice, Lane. You catch more flies with honey, but you get more pussy with vinegar.”
This was getting further and further from the elderly lady on the hill. Which was ironic because they were actually pretty close to the elderly lady on the hill. “Can you please just humour me?”
Jennifer heaved a sigh so theatrical Grace Forsythe would have been proud. “I suppose I’ll get no fucking peace ’til I do, will I?”
“None whatsoever.”
Audrey led Jennifer back from the trailers to the steps outside the ballroom and stood looking towards the woods, the river, and the Lodge.
And between the Lodge and the steps, Doris was still struggling down the hill, about three-quarters of the way along now, the rapidly diminishing sunlight casting a long shadow beside her.
As a print journalist, Audrey wasn’t normally inclined to emphasise the power of visual storytelling over the written word, but there were times when she had to admit that a striking image really added something to an argument.
“And?” Jennifer sounded beyond unimpressed.
“And,” said Audrey, “she does this every day. Twice a day, really, if you count both ways. Four times if she needs to go back to her room for anything.”
There was no trace of a reaction on Jennifer’s face, but she wasn’t looking away.
She was just watching Doris’s steady progress down the hill with the cool impassivity of, well, of a professional television executive, if Audrey was honest. “You’ve already told me about this.
And I’ve already said we’re not doing anything. ”
“I thought it might help to see it.”
This was enough to break Jennifer’s focus.
She turned to Audrey with an expression that was probably meant to be withering.
Although Audrey was mostly struck by her eyes, which were flecked hazel in the half light.
“Oh did you? Because apparently she’s Tiny Tim now, and I’m going to get all upset because you’ve shown me a sad picture of a sick frog. ”
Despite everything, despite Doris still working her way down the hill and Jennifer definitely not being worth the time or the energy, Audrey couldn’t quite let that go. “You know Tiny Tim isn’t a frog in the book, right?”
“Muppet version of that story’s the best version. Including the original.”
Was that cause for hope? Somebody with opinions about the Muppets couldn’t be totally unfeeling. “Okay, but she’s not a puppet, she’s a person. She’s a person you could help, and pretty easily, if you’d just stop being an arse.”
“Do you think maybe calling me an arse isn’t the best way to get me to do what you want?”
Audrey made a play of considering the question. “Not really. I think you’ve got pretty thick skin, and I think you also know that this is the right thing to do.”
“How about you stop calling me an arse, and stop telling me what I know?”
“How about you stop making Doris spend two hours a day walking up and down a hill?”
“She does not—” If Jennifer’s instinct had been to quibble about the timing, that instinct faded as her gaze turned, not totally unsympathetically, back to the hill. “Fuck, she is fucking slow isn’t she?”
Seeing Jennifer Hallet, even for a moment, acknowledge that another person was a human being instead of a bundle of story beats and performance metrics was a bit like having a butterfly land right next to your face.
Slightly magical. But also liable to poke you in the eye.
“Would it help,” Audrey tried, “to think of it as being about production schedules? Isn’t it extremely inconvenient? ”
“Not if she gets out of bed early enough.” For all the cynicism in Jennifer’s voice, Audrey was beginning to think she was cracking. This was sounding more like spite-by-numbers.
“And what about insurance? What if she has a fall?”
“Check y—”
“Yes, yes, we’ve all signed a bunch of waivers. And I’m sure if a ninety-something-year-old woman breaks a hip on the set of your family-friendly baking show, that won’t reflect badly on you at all.”
For once, Jennifer Hallet didn’t have a reply. Or at least, she didn’t have a reply beyond, “You are a fucking piece of work.”
“You know,” said Audrey sweetly, “I think I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Because, in a strange way, she did.
In place of an answer, Jennifer made an incoherent noise of frustration, then stormed off back to her trailer muttering a stream of mostly inaudible invective. Audrey just about caught the words “manipulatively tenacious.”
Which, again, from Jennifer, felt like a compliment.