Sunday #2
“It sounds like you were kind of doing what she wanted and not what you wanted.”
That was probably true, but even that, Audrey didn’t really feel Natalie could be blamed for. “If we’d done what I wanted, we’d have never left Shropshire.”
“So?”
“What do you mean, so?”
For a second or two, Alanis just gathered her thoughts. “Well, I don’t know but from what you’ve shown me, you come from this pretty little village that lots of people would love to live in, and I don’t really see what’s wrong with wanting to stay there.”
That was silly. “Would you want to stay where you were born your whole life?”
“I think that’d depend on where I was born. And even if I don’t want to stay in London forever, that doesn’t mean it’d be wrong if I did.”
“Right, but that’s London. Everything’s in London.”
Alanis took a contemplative sort of breath. “Maybe, but I’ve been talking to my dad’s family more recently and I don’t think being able to stay in the place you grew up in is something you should take for granted either. No matter where it is.”
“Even if it’s Shropshire?”
“Especially if it’s Shropshire. I mean, I’ve never been, but I’ve told you, when I’m old and rich I’m moving to a little village exactly like the one you grew up in. Getting a little cottage with roses around the door.”
“You know,” Audrey said to the ceiling, “door roses are actually a bit of a pain to look after.”
“I’ll be rich. I’ll pay somebody.”
They lapsed back into silence for just long enough that Audrey started to feel like she’d done a terrible job of whatever it was her job was actually supposed to have been.
“Sorry,” she said. “My plan was honestly just to get you to stay on the show. I didn’t mean to dump my extremely boring adult baggage on you. ”
Alanis waved a dismissive hand. “It’s fine. I think it helps to realise that grown-ups are just as screwed up as we are.” She sat up. “Come on, we’re going to be late for breakfast.”
The we in we’re going to be late for breakfast was a bit awkward because Audrey absolutely did need to eat, but at the same time she didn’t really feel comfortable eating with the contestants on account of no longer, strictly speaking, being one.
Of course since she also wasn’t crew that meant eating with them didn’t feel right either.
Also, she probably wasn’t technically entitled to eat anything so having breakfast at the show’s expense would be stealing.
Alanis, of course, had been very keen for her to come join her former peers and screw the consequences, but Audrey decided against it. There’d just be too many questions to answer, and while Audrey wasn’t sure of much, she was sure she didn’t want to answer them.
So instead she mooched, hovering on the periphery of the production and trying not to feel like she’d lost something irreplaceable.
It turned out, however, that melancholy mooching got dull fast, and so with a strong sense of anticlimax, Audrey made her way towards the carpark and settled into her car.
Then she sat there feeling like a pillock.
Deciding that doing something was a good deal better than doing nothing, and that at the very least she needed to eat, Audrey took a short jaunt up to Crinkley Furze and then, because literally everything was still closed, a rather longer jaunt into Tapworth.
She arrived just in time to catch the opening of the local Co-op and without quite being able to explain why, she decided that what she really wanted for breakfast was a loaf of crusty bread and a jar of honey.
Tapworth was big enough that finding a decently picturesque sitting-around-and-eating space involved a long walk or a short drive, but eventually Audrey found one.
A little field that was probably private property (check that, definitely private property, there was a sign) commanding pretty views over Surrey.
Out of deference to the rights of the landowner, Audrey didn’t go into the field, but she leaned on the gate overlooking it and let herself savour the rustic simplicity of her bread-and-honey breakfast.
Not that it really was rustic simplicity, of course.
Even if the bread had been baked in-store, which the little tag had said it was, the honey was pure off-the-shelf, and while the co-op tended to be okay-ish on its sourcing, it still wasn’t quite the same as a girl in a white dress squeezing a honeycomb with her own fingers as the sun set over the hills.
Where the girl in the white dress had come from, Audrey couldn’t say.
Having made it as far as Tapworth, the logical thing for her to do now would be to go home.
It was a Sunday after all, and having a nice, quiet, relaxing day would be good for her.
She might even be able to get an early night, which would leave her well set up to go into work on Monday and crack on with—she checked her email to remind herself what the next big story was—ah yes, interviewing a woman whose social media account was documenting abandoned shopping trolleys in Bagley Brook.
It didn’t seem like the most exciting plan, if she was honest.
And it also felt like running away.
Of course, if she was being totally objective, it wasn’t.
It was being told quite firmly to go away, and then being told to come back for a specific purpose, coming back for the purpose, making a probably ill-advised sexual decision in the middle of it, being told to leave again, finally fulfilling the original purpose, then leaving.
Her whimsical desire to eat bread and honey while leaning on a gate and absorbing the timelessness of everything satisfied, Audrey got back in her Mini and set off towards the M25. With Sunday traffic, if she got a good start, she’d be able to make it home before noon.
She did not get a good start. She was only about two minutes out of Tapworth when she stopped, did a probably illegal U-turn, and began driving back towards Patchley House.
Because sure, the mature thing was to put all of this behind her and never think about Bake Expectations, or any of the contestants, or Jennifer fucking Hallet ever again.
But sometimes being mature could go fuck itself.
So twenty minutes later she was parking again, just as the people who were still actually competing on this season were filing out of hair and makeup and heading into the ballroom.
As Audrey strode with more purpose than she really felt past the house itself and towards Jennifer’s trailer, she saw Grace Forsythe and the judges coming the other way.
With no cameras around, each of them looked slightly different—Wilfred Honey a little less warm, Marianne Wolvercote a little more relaxed.
Even Grace Forsythe, who Audrey suspected was one of those performers who was on 24/7 seemed to be having a moment of being merely effusive rather than ebullient.
“She’s in a foul mood this morning,” Grace Forsythe warned her as they crossed paths.
A more on-the-ball Audrey—not necessarily a version of Audrey that had ever actually existed—might have taken the moment to pretend that she didn’t know which she Grace Forsythe was talking about, or at least to pretend that her assumptions regarding the she Audrey was looking for were unfounded.
But she didn’t. She just pivoted mid-stomp and said, “Isn’t she in a foul mood every morning? ”
“When you’ve known her as long as we have,” explained Wilfred Honey, “you’ll learn that there’s a lot of different flavours of foul.”
Marianne Wolvercote nodded. “And in case you were wondering, this very much isn’t a blasted heath situation.”
“Come again?” Audrey was not, all told, in the mood for riddling.
“Where Jennifer is concerned,” clarified Marianne Wolvercote, “foul is most definitely not fair.”
The three more famous people continued on their way to the ballroom, but, as Audrey was getting back to her own journey, Grace Forsythe broke off from the group and tapped her on the shoulder.
“By the way, old thing,” Grace Forsythe was saying before Audrey had even managed to turn around. “I’ve told Jennifer that she should definitely keep fucking you.”
“What?” It wasn’t the last thing Audrey had been expecting. The last thing she’d been expecting was probably something like I’ve been working undercover for the CIA this whole time and now I need your help to save the president. But it was pretty near the bottom of the list, expectation-wise.
“If you want her to. Obviously.” Grace Forsythe put her hands into the mea culpa pose. “Not suggesting anything untoward. It’s just that the impression I got from her was that you’d given her indications and that you’d, y’know, like her to and that she’d blown it as usual.”
There were several things to unpack here. “So…first of all, I’m not sure I like that she was discussing this with you.”
“It wasn’t a professional conversation, darling. It’s just that as it turns out I’m the closest thing young Jennifer has to a friend. Which must be pretty miserable for her, now I think about it.”
Filing that away under too complex to deal with at the moment, Audrey pressed on. “Okay, but I’m also not super comfortable talking about…”
“Or you could fuck her, of course,” Grace Forsythe continued with the blithe insouciance of a woman who has made a career out of insouciant blitheness. “Whichever works for you. Actually, might work even better that way around because honestly Jennifer is carrying a lot of tension.”
There were many things that could have gone wrong banging Jennifer Hallet. Audrey had known that. She’d never quite realised that being gossiped about by a beloved eighties television personality was on the list. “Oh my God, this is not—”
“She also told me that she kicked you out immediately afterwards.”
Audrey covered her face with her hands. She should have just gone home. This was getting beyond humiliating. “Please, just stop.”
“I told her she was being an arse, if it helps.”
It didn’t, especially. “And how did she take that?”