Sunday #2
“Yes.” Marianne Wolvercote was doing one of those slow nods. “The seeded rolls in particular are…well on the one hand I can’t fault them but on the other hand I think you could have been just this much”—she held her fingers so close together they were practically touching—“more ambitious.”
“You’ve got real skill,” Wilfred Honey followed up. “And more importantly, you can taste that these were made with heart.”
“Metaphorically,” added Grace Forsythe from the back row.
It was still more praise than Audrey had expected. She replied with a “thanks” and a wide smile, and almost floated back to her workbench.
Next up was Reggie, still with a pencil behind his ear even though he had a perfectly good breast pocket. He was carrying two platters that looked more like traybakes than rolls, irregular lumps forming two neat rectangles overall.
“So these,” he said with a mix of pride and awareness that he’d gone out on a bit of a limb, “are my tangram rolls.”
Wilfred Honey shook his head. “Sorry lad, you’ve lost me.”
“Those”—Reggie indicated the first rectangle, golden-brown rolls in a variety of different shapes and sizes—“are olive bread, and those”—he indicated the second—“are Chelsea buns.”
Marianne Wolvercote was looking decidedly unimpressed. “They’re not very uniform.”
“They’re not meant to be.”
Somehow, Marianne Wolvercote managed to glare at Reggie over the top of a pair of glasses she wasn’t wearing. “I think you’ll find they are.”
“They’re not.” For a man who seemed to have an engineering background, Reggie seemed surprisingly confused about the efficacy of digging as a hole-exiting strategy. “Because they’re tangrams.”
Either out of mercy, or a terrible realisation that she’d been off camera for fourteen seconds, Grace Forsythe stepped forwards.
“Perhaps I can help. You see, as I explained in my three-part docuseries about the history of geometry, The Shape of Things, tangrams are a kind of puzzle in which you have seven different polygons that can be rearranged into a variety of different patterns.”
Wilfred Honey looked down. “And you made your rolls into one of these?”
“Yes.” Reggie’s initial look of confidence was fading. “I made two sets for each, so there’s actually fourteen rolls total because you asked for twelve.”
“Fourteen isn’t twelve,” pointed out Marianne.
Grace Forsythe waved a hand. “It’s a baker’s twelve.”
“It’s not.” Wilfred Honey was looking sceptical, but he’d cut a piece off the corner of two triangles, one exactly twice as large as the other, and was inspecting them closely. “Mind you, it’s a surprisingly even bake. Did you need to do them for different times?”
Reggie nodded. “Yeah, took some trial and error at home.”
“The flavours,” Marianne Wolvercote announced, having turned her attention instead to the Chelsea buns, “are excellent. Which means I’m torn.
Because on the one hand this was a highly technical bake, executed well and actually mostly on brief, but on the other hand I can’t help thinking you’re taking the mickey just a little bit. ”
Grace Forsythe pressed a hand to her bosom. “Marianne, darling, I have been watching this dear man all day, and I swear to you he has been resolutely mickeyless.”
Reggie returned to his place with that aura of coming-first-or-going-out that you sometimes saw when somebody took a swing for the fences.
And once the remaining contenders had faced the music—all doing fine, none so polarising as Reggie nor generally well-received as Alanis—the judges retired to deliberate.
They didn’t take long in the end. Just long enough for everybody to share a few nervous glances and to agree privately amongst themselves that if Reggie didn’t win this one, then it was probably going to be his last week but that at least he’d be going out in style.
The presenters returned, and Grace Forsythe took up her place of honour in front of the contestants.
“We will start, as ever, with the good news. Our winner this week delivered baguettes that were ba—hang on, I had something.” She waved a hand at the camera.
“Let me have that one again—delivered baguettes that were absolute bally bangers, and a range of rolls so exquisitely crafted”—Audrey shot a look at Alanis, who was trying not to look excited; exquisitely crafted wasn’t the language Grace Forsythe would use for tangrams—“that you could stick the word Royce on the end of them and sell them in a high-end car showroom.”
Across the ballroom, Colin Thrimp put his hand to his ear.
“Jennifer says who the fuck do you think you are, noted Dadaist Marcel Duchamp?” And Audrey’s brain not so helpfully offered her a very clear mental image of Jennifer saying it, her lips half smiling as they dripped that slightly-trying-too-hard sarcasm.
“I actually did a BBC special on Duchamp years back,” replied Grace Forsythe, ever unperturbable. “Fascinating fellow. Now where were we? Ah yes. In a high-end car showroom. That’s right, our winner this week is the wonderful Alanis. Now isn’t that ironi—”
“Jennifer says don’t you dare,” shouted Colin Thrimp in a great hurry.
While Grace and Jennifer-by-proxy were debating the validity or otherwise of nineties music references in a contemporary work of reality television, the contestants passed congratulatory hugs to Alanis and early commiseratory hugs to Reggie.
“But now”—Grace Forsythe’s RADA training took her from joy to sorrow in a heartbeat—“it’s time to say goodbye to our second contestant. Yes, it’s that heartbreaking point in bread week when we have to reveal which of our perfectly risen bakers is actually toast. And this week, I’m sorry to say…”
Reggie was already wincing.
“It’s John.”
* * *
John was nice about it. From what little Audrey had seen, he seemed a nice-about-it sort of guy.
And while the group consensus was that, despite straying from the brief, Reggie did definitely deserve a second chance.
Audrey couldn’t help wondering if John had been doomed from day one by the fact that a wholesome stay-at-home dad with two kids had won the last season.
“Just over the moon to have made it this far,” John was saying in his exit interview, “and looking forward to getting back home to my family.”
Meanwhile in a slightly different filming location, Reggie was making an exaggerated phew gesture and trying one more time to explain what tangrams were.
Audrey finished up her own interview and, with a big-sisterly impulse she was increasingly worried might be patronising, had a quick look around for Alanis, who she found perfectly happy giving an interview of her own.
Which just left Doris. She’d already been debriefed and was now sitting on a bench a little way from the entrance to the ballroom, looking out over the garden with a quiet smile on her face.
“Are you…?” Audrey began. “I mean shall we…?”
“No rush, is there?” asked Doris, looking distinctly unrushing.
“No, I suppose not.” Audrey sat down beside her putative interviewee at a comfortable I am interested but not crowding you distance. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Whenever Doris was ready, it turned out, wouldn’t be for a while. She sat quite contentedly people watching, saying the occasional hello or goodbye as contestants filed away to the carpark and standing up to give John a kiss on the cheek as he left since they wouldn’t be seeing each other again.
It wasn’t until they were alone that Doris finally turned to Audrey and said, “Right, about that cup of tea.”