Saturday #2
Jennifer had a range of scornful expressions, and the one she reached for now was number seventeen, the one that said quite specifically I am disappointed that I have to explain this to you, but I shouldn’t have expected better.
“You understand that the TV industry is an industry, right? It’s not about your heart’s secret truth.
It’s about selling shit to pricks in suits by convincing them they can sell it to pricks in suburbs. ”
“To an extent,” Audrey admitted. “Maybe. But you’ve poured your whole life into this show. It must mean something to you.”
“It means I made a lot of money and a lot of powerful friends.”
While Audrey was making her sceptical face, the waiter circled back around with the drinks.
“There must be more to it than that.”
Jennifer wrapped her hands around her cup like she was trying to stop crows from stealing it.
“Sorry, if you’re hoping I’ve got some saccharine story about how I used to bake every Sunday with my dear old grandmama and I wanted to share that feeling with the nation, then you’re out of luck. I don’t.”
“So, what?” It wasn’t clear to Audrey whether it would be more na?ve to accept that Jennifer was really that cynical, or na?ve to assume she wasn’t. “You just thought, What do people I have complete contempt for like? I know, baking!”
“You missed a couple of steps and a whole lot of workshopping, but basically.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Jennifer shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Audrey could have left it there. But she was a compulsive not-leave-it-there-er. “What about the workshopping?”
“What about it?”
This was going out on a limb and Audrey knew it.
She was familiar enough with the mechanisms of broadcast media that she could make overconfident statements to the other contestants, but Jennifer was an actual pro, so there was a good chance Audrey was about to talk largely out of her arse.
“Well, my industry’s different, but getting something all the way from pitch to finished product takes—I mean it takes some kind of motivation.
Faking it ’til you make it is one thing, but if you really gave as few shits as you say you do, I think you’d be even more miserable than you’re currently pretending to be. ”
“What makes you think I’m pretending?”
That was a good question. And Audrey hoped she had a good answer. Or else she was just making a fool of herself over another ambitious, emotionally unavailable woman who would always see her soft, sentimental, and lacking.
You do so love to blame me for things, don’t you Aur? sighed Natalie.
“Because,” Audrey went on doggedly, “if you really didn’t give a damn about anybody or anything, Grace wouldn’t like you enough to interfere in your love life, and you wouldn’t like her enough to let her.”
“Is that what you think happened?” Jennifer was sounding more guarded than usual. Or perhaps guarded in a different way—shutting off rather than pushing back.
“You could very easily have never seen me again. But you did. And you still are.”
For a long moment, Jennifer said nothing. Then she just rolled her eyes. “You know, Lane, I think I’m going to profoundly regret meeting you.”
Which was another one of those Jennifer Hallet compliments that Audrey was secretly beginning to treasure.
* * *
It was a beautiful evening to be walking home with a beautiful woman.
Not that beautiful was an adjective that Jennifer Hallet seemed like she’d appreciate.
Besides, it was too simple a word for her.
Because while she certainly could be beautiful, in the same way that a shark or a cyclone could be beautiful, it wasn’t the thing that drew you in.
And it certainly wasn’t the thing that kept you drawn.
At least if you were Audrey. It was as if some mischievous imp had appeared in a dream and said, “I bet I can find a way to keep you fascinated and annoyed for the rest of your life. Also she’ll be really hot.
” And—fool that she was—dream-Audrey had said, “bring it.”
At the edge of Crinkley Furze, a little sign pointed temptingly towards a public footpath.
“How about,” suggested Audrey, “we go that way?”
Jennifer Hallet looked at her like she’d rather deepthroat a walrus. “Why?”
“Because it’ll be fun?”
“It’ll be fun to walk across a muddy field in the dark?”
“By starlight. And it’s not going to be that muddy. It’s summer.”
“It’s the countryside. It’s made of mud.”
“You really hate rural England, don’t you?”
“I hate everything. Have you not been paying attention?”
And taking a leaf out of Jennifer’s very well-worn book, Audrey responded with an eloquent, well-thought-out, “Oh fuck off.”
Which only made Jennifer laugh.
They did, however, turn onto the footpath and stroll between the hedgerows, the fields stretching out on either side of them in great dark lakes.
“I’m still waiting,” said Jennifer, after a minute or two.
This wasn’t even a trap. It was a call and response. “You want me to say, ‘waiting for what?’ don’t you? So you can say something devastatingly cynical.”
“I’m waiting for whatever experience you expect me to have that’s going to make this better than the shorter, easier walk up the road we could have been having.”
“Does this help?” The part of Audrey that, despite Natalie’s best efforts to kill it with self-consciousness, was having a serious crack at living its best life took Jennifer’s hand.
“You could do that anywhere,” Jennifer pointed out. Although she didn’t pull away.
“Yes, but it’s less…” Audrey stopped herself from saying romantic at the last minute. “Nice?”
“Have I told you today,” said Jennifer, still holding Audrey’s hand, “how much I don’t like you?”
“You tell me that pretty much every time I meet you.”
“And it still doesn’t fucking stick.”
“I must think you lack conviction.”
“I have conviction,” retorted Jennifer Hallet, going full Jennifer Hallet. “I have so much conviction that—oh, forget it.”
This brought out Audrey’s helpful side. “You have so much conviction that you’re currently serving six concurrent sentences?”
“Stop it, Lane.”
“You have so much conviction that they’re putting you on a ship to Australia.”
“Lane.”
“You have so much conviction that you’ve been removed from the bench for—”
She got no further because Jennifer kissed her with the ambiguous ferocity of someone who either found her utterly irresistible or just really wanted her to be quiet. Which seemed the ideal reward for deliberately riling up an easily rilable person.
“See,” said Audrey, post-kiss giddy in a way that fifteen-years-ago-Audrey had taken for granted. Had assumed she would always feel. “We’re having a lovely walk.”
Jennifer just growled.
“There’s trees and grass and the moon.”
“Literally all things you can see everywhere.”
“What about that”—Audrey cast about for something more iconically countryish—“that tractor.”
“That’s a combine harvester.”
Audrey strongly suspected that Jennifer couldn’t tell a combine harvester from a cheese sandwich. But contrary for no reason seemed to be her love language. “That sweet little goat?”
“Are you sure,” murmured Jennifer Hallet, with a private smile, “it’s not a bull?”
“No. How could you possibly mistake a tiny goat for a bull?”
“To this day, I have no fucking clue.”
“Should I ask?”
“No.”
“But I’m curious now,” Audrey definitely did not whine.
“God you’re cute when you’re needy.”
“I’m not needy,” Audrey protested exactly the right amount. “I just like to know stuff. That’s a good trait for a human being to have. Otherwise, we’d still be eating raw mammoths and pooing in holes.”
“Are you implying that all human progress has been caused by slightly annoying people asking intrusive questions?”
That one glass of wine, or that one kiss, must have packed a hell of a wallop. Because Audrey was still feeling weirdly…bubbly? Hopeful? Happy? “Ooh,” she said, “I’m only slightly annoying now.”
“Stick around,” Jennifer told her, “and I might upgrade you to mildly vexatious.”
“And you want me to stick around.”
“Oh fuck off.”
Before Audrey could challenge Jennifer on her mixed messages re: around-sticking versus off-fucking, they crested a low rise, and the gabled roofs of Patchley pierced the skyline.
Exterior lighting brushed the facade with gold and, although that was probably a recent addition, it made it easy to imagine a time when a house like that was its own fairy tale.
Albeit one where the princess ran off to New York and Cinderella went back to Stepney.
You’re pathetic, said Natalie in tones that Audrey had once read as affectionate. Getting so worked up over something so…pedestrian.
And for once, Audrey let herself disagree.
It wasn’t pedestrian, it was…it was complex.
It wasn’t just complex, it was fucked. She’d been drawn to Doris because she’d wanted so badly to know that people like her had been at that house and walked on those floors and lived and loved in those rooms. To feel connected to the past as the whole of herself, not just the parts of herself that fit into the visible bits of history.
And you got it, said Natalie. So what are you complaining about?
Like her, Doris had fallen in love with a woman. Which was affirming. But like her, Doris had fallen in love with a woman who could never, ever love her back. And that was something else entirely.
Audrey sighed the messiest sigh she’d sighed in her life.
“What’s that about?” asked Jennifer, with an air of warranted suspicion.
“I was just thinking what it must have been like. For Doris.”
“It was shit. The whole system was shit. The whole system is still shit. It’s just slightly less shit.”