Saturday #3
Two minutes ago, a bunch of swearing with a covertly anti-establishment worldview would have been all Audrey needed from Jennifer.
But now she’d got herself turned around and somewhere in the distance, alarms were starting to clamour.
“Okay, but, I’m not doing social commentary here.
I just mean…how she must have felt. Even if she was trapped by an unjust system, she still loves this place.
She still loved somebody who lived here. Maybe still loves her.”
And perhaps it was the light, but Audrey saw a coldness in Jennifer’s eyes that she hadn’t before. “Right. Because loving something means it can’t possibly be bad for you.”
Audrey’s breath caught. She wanted to say nine different things at once—That’s not what I was saying and Of course it doesn’t and This wasn’t supposed to be an argument and Please, please hear me—but she managed to say exactly none of them.
Jennifer half-turned to look at her, and Audrey tried so hard to see understanding in her expression and she couldn’t. “Something wrong?”
“Not really.” Staring past Jennifer, at the distant light of Patchley, Audrey tried to lose herself and come back to herself all at once. “I’m just…processing some things I suppose.”
“And?”
Something about that and made a little string inside Audrey’s heart that had been fraying for a long time now snap all at once. “Wow. You’re so easy to talk to.”
“You seem to have managed so far.”
“And you don’t want to say, I don’t know, ‘What sort of things are you processing, Audrey?’”
“I could,” conceded Jennifer, in the fashion of someone conceding absolutely nothing. “But I’m not sure I can be fucked.”
Audrey threw her hands in the air. “Great. Nice to know. And fuck you.”
She stomped off towards the house, not sure whether she wanted to cry or set Jennifer’s trailer on fire. Or both. Both could be good.
“I’m not going to chase after you, Lane,” said Jennifer, chasing after her.
“Good,” yelled Audrey. “Because I don’t want you to.”
Jennifer caught her by the elbow and spun her round. “Let me guess. You only went to London because you’d fallen for some judgmental journo bitch—”
“Natalie wasn’t—”
“She blatantly was. And either way she broke your heart or fucked you up so you moved back to pigfuck nowhere and now you’re looking for meaning in someone else’s memories and making the same mistakes all over again with a slightly different flavour of terrible woman.”
It was nothing Audrey hadn’t thought for herself. But having it said out loud, and put so bluntly, made her feel cheap and obvious. “It’s…I’m…it’s more complicated than that.”
“Are you sure? Because, if you haven’t noticed, I’m a complete piece of shit.”
Audrey stared up at her. Jennifer’s face looked especially harsh in the moonlight, all angles and ferocity. Weirdly, seeing her like this, it made it harder to be angry at her. Especially because, for once, she was directing her venom at herself. “I don’t think you’re—”
“Oh, come on, I just upset you so much you stormed off down an unfamiliar hill in the dark despite being way too countryside not to know that’s a lousy fucking idea. You can tell me I’m not a nice person, I’m big enough to take it.”
If this had been a trick to get Audrey to calm down, it was kind of working. Although that, in its own way, was also annoying.
Oh come on, said Natalie, I’m nothing like this woman. I cared about you. I tried to help you. I wanted you to be better.
“I…” Audrey tried and when that didn’t work she had a go at, “You…”
“I, you? Is that all you’ve got?” asked Jennifer, folding her arms.
Audrey folded her arms back. “Okay.”
Finally, said Natalie. Tell her—
“If that’s the way you want it,” said Audrey, “you’re a piece of shit.
You fucking suck. You drive me round the bend and up the wall and yes you do make me want to cry sometimes but…
” Natalie had a lot to say about this. She might even have been right.
But Audrey wasn’t listening and didn’t care.
“You’re not like her, because…because when you’ve hurt me or upset me or pissed me off—and you’ve mostly just pissed me off—I’ve never once blamed myself. ”
To Audrey’s strange, cathartic relief, Jennifer Hallet raised an eyebrow. “That’s ironic, because I think you’ll find I’ve been completely in the right every time we’ve disagreed about anything.”
“I think you’ll find you haven’t. But the point is, it doesn’t matter.”
“I think you’ll find it fucking does.”
“Look.” Audrey brushed an emotion-displaced hank of hair from her forehead. “When I was with Natalie, we never fought because we both took as it read that what she wanted was best and what I wanted was what she wanted. And because we never fought, I thought that was a healthy relationship.”
“And you don’t think I’m a bit of an overcorrection?”
“You might be. Or I might just like you.”
Jennifer shook her head wearily. “You think that now, Lane. But I know how this goes. At the moment, I’m sure this is fun. But it won’t take long before you realise I don’t fit in your world.”
“And what’s my world exactly?” asked Audrey.
“A cosy little flat in Shropshire with hand-stitched quilts and a special place on the chair for a cuddly tortoise. Cupcakes in the oven and walks in the countryside. All that lovely bullshit.”
Maybe Jennifer was rubbing off on her, but Audrey snorted. “You know I’m a lot more than lovely bullshit, right? Remember, I threatened to embroil you in a nightmare storm of litigation to get what I wanted.”
“I’m not saying you can’t hack it. I’m saying you’ll get sick of it.
The late nights staring at audience metrics.
The constant carousel of focus groups. The endless fucking meetings about BBC neutrality.
Screaming down the phone at Americans about syndication rights.
And one compromise after another after another until all you can think about when you look at me is how disappointing I turned out to be. ”
“That seems highly specific.”
“You don’t have a monopoly on shitty relationships, Lane.”
It was weird as hell hearing Jennifer Hallet say the R word. Especially since she’d made it so abundantly clear that they weren’t dating. “What if I make you a deal,” said Audrey into the crisp silence of the night. “I won’t turn into your toxic ex if you don’t turn into mine.”
“She wasn’t the toxic one. That was the problem.”
“I think making your partner feel that they’re disappointing you is pretty toxic.”
Stuffing her hands in her jacket pockets, Jennifer let out a defeated huff. “She just wanted a nice fucking life. In some ways, so do I. But I don’t want it to be something someone does for me. I want it to be something someone builds with me.”
“So you are a romantic?”
“Oh fuck off.”
If it had been anyone else, Audrey would have considered this a poor end to a discussion. With Jennifer Hallet it felt like peace.
“Did we just have our first fight?” asked Audrey, after they’d tromped a bit further down the hill.
“No.” Jennifer sneered at the darkness. “We had our first fight when you waltzed into my trailer and asked me not to call you a spunkstain.”
“Excuse me. I didn’t waltz. You invited me.”
“Aye, for the express purpose of calling you a spunkstain.”
“Those fights don’t count,” Audrey protested. “They were about things. This was about…us.”
“Stop being a spunkstain.”
As they walked, Jennifer radiating slightly less hostility than usual and Audrey smiling to herself for reasons she didn’t want to name in case they went away, Patchley House only grew closer, and bigger, and more golden.
“You’re going to start sighing again, aren’t you?” said Jennifer.
Audrey sighed. “Well, it’s beautiful. You have to admit, it’s beautiful.”
“It’s all right.”
And then, because Audrey was always going to Audrey, “I found her, you know.”
“The posh bitch?”
“Well, personally I think of her as Emily. And I’ve not found her found her. But I’ve got some pretty promising leads.”
This time Jennifer sighed. It was quite a different sigh to Audrey’s sighing. “Of course you fucking have.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you never give up anything and you’re clearly obsessed.”
“I’m not obsessed. I’m interested.”
“Listening to an old lady talk about her girlfriend is interested. Tracking the girlfriend down when she hasn’t been seen for fifty years is obsessed.”
This was fair. This was worryingly fair. “I don’t like loose threads. It’s a quilting thing. Or a journalist thing. Or both.”
“And you’re sure you’re not trying to get closure on your ex-girlfriend by tracking down someone else’s ex-girlfriend?”
“No,” said Audrey, too quickly. “Well. I don’t know. But even if it’s true, is that bad?”
“Yes. Obviously. You can’t go around confusing other people’s shit for your shit.”
“Says the woman who just gave me a huge speech about how we could never have anything nice together because of something that happened with a completely different person.”
“This isn’t about me. And Doris isn’t about you.”
“But doesn’t Doris deserve—”
“Don’t give me bollocks and tell me it’s a delightful lychee salad, Lane. You want to do this because you’re curious or you’ve got your own baggage or because you’ve read so many Sarah Waters novels you want to live in one.”
“I…” Audrey would have debated the accuracy of that characterisation except there wasn’t a lot to debate. “This will probably end better than the average Sarah Waters novel.”
“So you’re saying it might end in betrayal or misery instead of betrayal and misery.”
“Not all Sarah Waters novels end in betrayal and misery.”
“Name three where they don’t.”
“They’re together at the end of Fingersmith.”
“Yeah, after betrayal and misery.”
“And technically there is a happy successful lesbian couple in Affinity.”
“Neither of whom are the protagonist, who suffers betrayal and misery.”
“Okay, but Tipping the—”
“Is the worst one because she winds up with a boring woman named Florence.”