Saturday
It was strange, not being at Patchley. Although given how things had gone with Jennifer, being there would have been massively worse.
That week at work had gone by quickly, Audrey letting Gavin know that she’d probably have to shelve the uplifting story about the nice old lady in the war because it had got weirdly steamy and run past VE Day.
And now it was the weekend and Audrey was, for the first time in a month—more than a month, really, what with the anticipation and derustifying her baking skills before the competition even started—at a complete loose end.
She tried to tell herself that it was fine.
That it was nice to have her time back. And in a way it was.
Journalism—even not-especially-prestigious local journalism—was demanding enough without also trying to bake at a televised level and to use the access you got from baking at a televised level to dig into the personal history of one of the other contestants.
And without the tension caused by your digging into the personal history of one of the other contestants creating a weird foe yay situation with the producer of the televised show on which you were attempting to bake competitively.
It was also kind of not.
Audrey had, she would be the first to admit, many faults, but she wasn’t a wallower.
At least not a sit-around-your-house-not-knowing-what-to-do-with-yourself wallower.
So on this particular loose-endy Saturday, she did what she always did when she felt herself sliding in a wallowy direction, and went for a walk.
Actually she went for a drive first, because while there were perfectly nice places to walk around Bridgnorth—that was the thing about Shropshire, it was perfectly nice all the way down—she had a nagging but sharply embedded desire to go back to Much Wenlock.
To spend a while wandering around the fields and lanes she remembered from her childhood.
To go back to Wenlock Priory and, this time, maybe not try to climb up it.
There was a strange timelessness to the British countryside.
To all countryside, Audrey suspected. A time traveller from a hundred years ago, or two hundred, might notice a couple of things that were unfamiliar—if you looked in the right direction through the right set of trees you’d spot power lines, and the little roads that snaked between the fields had modern tarmac surfaces, although Audrey was pretty sure even they wouldn’t stand out to a visitor from, say, 1923.
But the more prosaic kind of temporal voyager, the kind who, like Audrey, had got here by the inevitable process of waiting while the past ticked by at a rate of one second per second into the future, could see barely anything different.
The aggressive Private Property KEEP OUT signs had certainly been replaced and updated in the past couple of years to ensure they’d stay appropriately red and noticeable but they weren’t really any different than they’d always been.
Than they’d been a decade and a half ago when Audrey and Natalie had cheerfully ignored them to go and lie down in whatever fields they fancied and talk about how they were going to fix the world.
“The thing is,” fifteen-years-ago-Natalie was saying, “we can’t stay in Much Wenlock forever. People just don’t.”
And fifteen-years-ago-Audrey was trying to summon up the courage to say that she didn’t see anything so very wrong with staying in a lovely little village and being happy, although all she’d been able to manage was, “I think people do okay here, don’t they?”
And fifteen-years-ago-Natalie had come back with something like, “I swear, Aur, sometimes it’s like I don’t even know you.”
It still stung. A decade and a half later.
Strolling up to the priory proper, present-day-Audrey and fifteen-years-ago-Audrey walked hand in hand.
It was still, she thought, one of her favourite places in the world.
A garden in a ruin—bushes clipped into neat little shapes alongside wells that had long since run dry and walls that sheltered nothing any longer.
They’d fucked here, of course. She and Natalie.
When they were seventeen and you had to pretend—at least Audrey had been pretending, though in retrospect she suspected Natalie had meant every word—that places like this were only interesting if you could have orgasms in them.
And since fifteen-years-ago-Audrey had been every bit as sentimental as present-day-Audrey, there had been a kind of magic to it, for her at least. Feeling all at once so connected to a person and a place and a time.
She’d said as much to Natalie, and Natalie had laughed and called her an idiot, and then kissed her more sweetly than anybody ever had.
With her eyes closed, present-day-Audrey could still remember every detail. The taste of Natalie, the feel of her skin beneath her fingertips. The conviction that had been in Natalie’s voice even then that had eventually come to sound more like cruelty.
In those days, Audrey would have done anything for her. And she had.
On the Saturday of the fourth week of filming the eighth season of Bake Expectations, Audrey Lane was leaning by a stone wall at Wenlock Priory, her face turned to the sun.
On the day of her A-level results she was tangled with Natalie in an alcove in the same ruin and learning what it was to love somebody who would always be just a little beyond you.
In 1947 Doris and Emily were meeting for the first time in three years, and in 680 Merewalh, king of Magonseate, was ordering the construction of a monastery that in 1080 Roger de Montgomery was refounding and in 1540 Henry the Eighth was dissolving.
And for all those thousand years, families and friends and monks and nuns and puritans and lovers were walking under these stones and looking up at this sunlight and standing on this ground and—it was a carrying away feeling, an anywhere-but-here feeling, and if she’d wanted to, Audrey could have stayed lost in it all day.
To some extent, she did want to. It would stop her thinking about the show, about Doris and Alanis (were they both doing okay?), about Jennifer Hallet (what the fuck was going on there?
with both of them?), about the enigmatic Emily Branningham, and about bloody Natalie.
But spending the whole of Saturday absorbing the melancholic immensity of everywhen was probably a touch on the self-indulgent side.
Besides, she was back home—in the where-she-was-born sense rather than the where-she-lived-now sense—and if her parents found out she’d been in Much Wenlock without stopping by, there’d be hell to pay.
Well, okay, maybe not hell. Her parents weren’t really the hell-to-pay type.
* * *
“Audrey, love, you’ve come at the worst time,” said Audrey’s mum as she was opening the door. It was a pretty standard greeting in their household.
And the standard response was to sigh and say, “What’s he done now?”
From a little way into the house, her father’s voice echoed from up, under, or inside something. “Downstairs loo.”
“What about the downstairs loo?” Audrey asked in an I-dread-to-ask tone.
“Painting it.”
“Eleven years,” Audrey’s mum said between furrowed brows and folded arms. “He’s been saying he was going to do it for eleven years and what’s the weekend he picks? The weekend our only daughter was kicked off the telly. He won’t learn.”
“She wasn’t kicked off this weekend,” argued Audrey’s dad from the loo-ey depths.
“She was kicked off last weekend. And we said then that we’d be here if she wanted to come by, and she didn’t, so I thought, well, why don’t I use the time to do something useful…
” His voice grew momentarily muffled then louder as he came to join the rest of the family in the hallway.
“And will you look at him?” added Audrey’s mum.
Audrey did, and the sight was a reassuringly typical one. Her father was a short man, balding, and usually covered in something. In this case, the something was paint in an unfortunately lavatorial shade of dark brown.
Audrey shook her head at the mess that was apparently her father. “What have you been doing?”
“Painting.” On the one hand, it was a materially correct answer. On the other, it didn’t quite explain why he’d looked like he’d been dipped in…for comfort’s sake, Audrey went with chocolate.
“And”—Audrey tried to phrase the next part as delicately as she could because insulting her parents’ decorative choices wasn’t necessarily what she was here to do—“is it all that colour?”
“It’s what your mother wanted,” explained her father.
“It bloody well was not,” replied her mother.
“Taupe, you said.”
“I said teal.”
“Ooh, you never did.”
Eventually, the parental instinct to avoid leaving their child standing on a doorstep overrode the Lanes’ matrimonial instinct to bicker about paint colours, and they ushered Audrey inside to the sitting room where Audrey’s mum sat down while Audrey’s dad went off to make tea.
“Are you very disappointed?” her mum asked with that slight excess of concern that Audrey had always found strangely comforting.
“Honestly, not really?” It felt almost like a confession. “At least not about the competition. I think I could have made it a couple more weeks, but I don’t think I’d have ever got near the final.”
Audrey’s mum leaned forward to give her an encouraging pat. “I’m sure you would, love, you’re very good.”
It was nice to hear but not, Audrey felt, remotely true. “Not compared to some of the other contestants. There’s a girl there who’s only sixteen and already well out of my league.”
“I won’t hear it.” Audrey’s mum was holding up her hand in that highly specific way that suggested you should talk to it because of the face’s relative disinterest.
“Won’t hear what?” asked Audrey’s dad, who came in still empaintened but now at least bearing teacups on a little tray.
“She says that there’s a sixteen-year-old girl on the show who’s a better baker than she is.”