Saturday
It was strange to Audrey, in a way, how quickly she’d settled into a new pattern.
Rather than eating with the contestants, she’d got up and gone straight to Jennifer’s trailer where they’d shared a breakfast of coffee and bacon rolls, brought to them by an unquestioning Colin Thrimp.
And then instead of being herded into the ballroom to watch Grace Forsythe’s introduction from an uncomfortable stool upholstered with stress, she watched it over a closed-circuit feed.
“Welcome back, welcome back,” Grace Forsythe was saying to the remaining six competitors.
“This is the fifth week of the eighth season of Bake Expectations and in keeping with our back-to-basics theme, our ever-wise production team has chosen to dedicate it to a style of baking that is famously complex and technically demanding. But don’t worry, I’m sure they know what they’re doing. ”
Jennifer pushed a button. “Knock it off, Grace.”
And in the ballroom, Colin Thrimp echoed that knock it off to the talent, who promptly ignored him.
The blind bake for the fifth week of the eighth season of Bake Expectations was custard slices. Which to be fair to the production crew was about as close to back to basics as you could get while still keeping a patisserie theme.
It still felt distancing to be watching from, well, from a distance, but now that the initial shock of elimination was a fortnight behind her, Audrey was beginning to find she preferred it.
As a way of forcing herself to get back into baking post-Natalie, the show had been great.
But now it was behind her she could admit she didn’t miss the stress or the waiting around or the judging or the competitiveness or constantly feeling like she was letting herself down because she had this great opportunity she wasn’t super focused on.
By contrast watching the footage as it came in was almost soothing.
If there was one thing that had attracted Audrey to journalism more than anything else, it was that it let her elevate her love of people watching to the status of a career.
But in some ways having a producer’s-eye-view of a reality TV show was even better.
Something she’d always admired about Expectations, about the whole genre really, was the way it created a narrative from whatever footage its still-mostly-unscripted subjects managed to produce.
And, from here, even more than in the ballroom, she could see the stories coming together.
There was Alanis tackling every challenge like it was her GCSEs, and Reggie, tackling every challenge like it was a prototype rocket engine, and Joshua, tackling every challenge like it wasn’t a challenge at all.
There was Linda, already beginning to panic.
And Meera who never panicked about anything.
And Doris, of course, who the nation would love but never know.
Every so often Audrey would glance away from the monitors and look over at Jennifer, only to see her watching, totally focused, breaking her silence periodically to issue an instruction or—because even in her element she was still Jennifer Hallet—an insult.
From some quiet, almost domestic impulse, Audrey rolled her chair sideways and leaned her head against Jennifer’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Jennifer asked with, in the circumstances, much less hostility than she could have.
Audrey took a deep, relaxing breath. “Just enjoying the company.”
“You’re the fucking worst, Lane.”
But despite how much the worst Audrey was, Jennifer let her stay where she was. And they remained that way until filming broke that evening.
“Right,” said Jennifer with grim professional finality. “That’s that.” She pressed another button and spoke into another microphone. “Colin, Audrey’ll be needing food as well—sort something.”
Audrey wasn’t quite sure how she felt about getting her evening meal delivered by an underling or, more pertinently, how she felt about her evening meal being delivered by an underling without her really being consulted about it. “Actually…” she began.
“Hold on, Colin.” Jennifer swivelled around to face Audrey. “Are you rushing off?”
“No, not exactly. I just—how about if…as well as failing to not fuck we also sort of failed to not have dinner together?”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “You’d better not be trying to date me, Lane. That’s not the arrangement.”
“No, no.” Audrey shook her head perhaps a touch too exaggeratedly. “Just thought maybe eating somewhere that wasn’t a dingy trailer might make a nice change?”
“Excuse me, this isn’t dingy. It’s practical.”
“It’s practical for being the supreme overlord of a reality TV show,” Audrey pointed out. “It’s not very practical for, y’know, eating in. You don’t even have a table that isn’t covered in…in telly stuff.”
“I’m busy. I eat at my desk.”
“And I ate at your desk this morning. But we can’t live on bacon rolls and stress.”
“Can. Have. Do.”
This needed a different approach. “Okay then. I can’t live on bacon rolls and stress, so I’m going into the village, and I’m going to eat somewhere that’s actually nice. You’re welcome to join me.”
And while Jennifer didn’t say yes, she did get up, grab her bag, and follow.
* * *
It was late enough in the day that the eateries of Crinkley Furze had opened, traded, and then closed again, which meant that Audrey and Jennifer’s choices for dinner were restricted to the village’s two pubs, the Duke’s Arms and the Rusty Badger.
“Overpriced crap?” asked Jennifer, indicating the Badger. “Or just regular crap?” She indicated the Duke’s Arms.
Audrey gave a smile that was just shy of a smirk. “You make them both sound so tempting. Let’s go overpriced, I’m sure we can afford it.”
The Rusty Badger was the studied kind of rustic, the sort of place that had tables where you could still count the rings from the tree and chairs that felt hand-carved but almost certainly weren’t.
Running her eyes down the menu, Audrey was pleased to see it fell on the acceptable side of rip-off, which meant her only problem now was working out how to navigate dinner with a foul-mouthed, habitually confrontational workaholic she’d spent more time fucking than talking to.
“So,” tried Audrey, “this is nice.”
“I’m beginning to think I should have stuck with the bacon.”
“Just trying to get the ball rolling.”
Jennifer’s gaze was momentarily withering. “And you decided to start with ‘This is nice’?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Audrey pointed out, determinedly unwitherable.
“It did not. It was shit.”
“But you are actually speaking to me.”
“Only about how shit your opening line was.”
Under normal circumstances if you went on a date—not that this was a date—and it started with the woman you were not-on-a-date with telling you that you were shit at mouth words, it would be a bad sign.
Of course, maybe the fact Audrey wasn’t seeing it as a bad sign was, in fact, a bad sign.
“And how would you have started?” she asked.
“I’d have said”—Jennifer withered harder—“‘Given the myriad challenges facing the world today and the existential absurdity of living a finite life in an endless cosmos, how about we shut the fuck up and eat?’”
“Is ‘shut the fuck up’ and verb your rule for all interactions?”
“Yes,” said Jennifer Hallet.
“Okay.” Audrey glanced at the menu. “Do you want to split the cassoulet?”
“Do I want to what?”
“They do a cassoulet that serves two. Do you want to split it?”
“Sure.” Jennifer made a subtle but unmistakably commanding gesture towards a waiter and, when he hurried over, immediately said, “We’ll have the cassoulet, a coffee, and…” She gave Audrey a pointed look.
“Glass of the house red,” said Audrey. And then when the waiter had gone added, “Well that was very take-charge of you.”
“You’re the one who said get the cassoulet.”
Audrey looked at Jennifer coyly over her glasses. “Not complaining. It was very sexy and domineering.”
“Oh fuck off.”
“Really, I’m feeling very into you right now.”
“Can it, Lane.”
And because there was something in Jennifer’s voice—something that wasn’t quite her usual snarling confidence—Audrey canned it. “Jennifer, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be? I’m having glorified bean soup in a second-rate gastropub with the most frustrating woman I’ve met in my entire life. And, may I remind you, I work with Grace Forsythe.”
“All of which you’ve chosen to do.”
“Chosen’s a strong word. We had a limited budget for season one and Grace is so desperate to stay relevant she’ll work for gin and peanuts.”
This was pretty typical Jennifer evasion.
But she didn’t normally seem this uncomfortable.
And that was complicated, because Audrey didn’t want to be viewing every interaction she had with Jennifer through the lens of a low-dose SSRI.
But also, you shouldn’t ignore people’s context.
And Jennifer’s context was that she preferred standing behind a camera being inventively rude to people to, for example, talking about her feelings.
Or about anything. At least anything she couldn’t control.
Which made the show a pretty safe topic.
And Audrey, sap that she was, wanted Jennifer to feel safe.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Expectations is too well put together for me to believe that you didn’t pick Grace for a reason.”
“I told you. She was cheap.”
“And?”
“And”—Jennifer sighed—“she tests well. She’s got a good relationship with the BBC.
The public loves her. The contestants love her.
And for all she’s a washed up, pretentious, overrated, pseudo-intellectual luvvieish fame junkie, she’s got strong instincts.
The three darlings thing is pap but it works. ”
It’s pap but it works seemed to be how Jennifer saw the show in general. Which was something Audrey had always found odd. “You keep saying things like that,” she tried. “But if you feel that way, why make a show like Bake Expectations in the first place?”