Sunday #2
Linda looked down dolefully. “I’m not sure.
I could go back in, but honestly I don’t think there’s any way I can make forty-eight macarons in the time left.
And then I’ll have to stand in front of Wilfred and Marianne and hear them trying to be nice about my total failure.
I’m almost—would it be really shitty of me if I just, like, quit? ”
There was a pause while Audrey thought about it.
If she’d just been a contestant on the show, she wouldn’t have hesitated to say, “Do it.” But now she was…
she was something else? And it was hard for her not to look at the show from Jennifer’s perspective; to think not only about the stories, but how to frame them.
What the numbers would do and what people would say and how it would play in the East Midlands and the U.S. syndication.
Except she was still Audrey Lane. And, while she’d kind of lost track of who that was for a time, she was starting to remember what it meant. That although Audrey Lane could be as hard-arsed as she needed to be, she also baked cupcakes. And made terrible quilts. And gave a shit about people.
“You know,” she said, “you’re here for yourself at the end of the day. If the show’s messing with your head, it’s fine to just say fuck it.”
Linda blinked. “Are you sure?”
“Completely.”
“But won’t I—I don’t know—be letting people down?”
There were a bunch of ways to go here. So Audrey decided fuck it and went with the simplest. “No. You absolutely aren’t. I know it feels like a big deal, but it’s just a TV show. It’s not worth making yourself unhappy over.”
“But what if I’m more unhappy if I leave?” wondered Linda, perhaps predictably given the role she was being edited into.
“Don’t overthink it.” Audrey laid a partly reassuring, partly restraining hand on Linda’s shoulder. “One, you are your own priority. Two, I guarantee Jennifer has gamed this out.”
“Is this the wires and the mirrors again?”
“Kind of. But it works for you this time.”
“How?”
“Because you’re here to be the one who takes everything really to heart.”
“Okay,” said Linda, with an air of unreassuredness. “But none of the other ones who took everything to heart bailed before the end.”
“Which is why,” Audrey told her, “it’ll make a good story beat. This is best for you. And it’s probably best for the show as well.”
Linda had televisually large eyes when distressed. “Really?”
“Yes.” Audrey stood up. “Now come on, let’s go tell Jennifer you’re walking.”
* * *
“…the saddest part of the show,” Grace was saying.
“Although this week, perhaps mercifully, Wilfred and Marianne have been spared the task of deciding which of our wonderful contestants won’t be coming with us into next week.
Our darling Linda, with the full support of the Bake Expectations family, has chosen not to progress in the competition—”
Audrey took off her headset and turned to look at Jennifer Hallet, who was smiling to herself. A queasy sensation stirred quietly in Audrey’s stomach.
“Did I just play her for you?” she asked.
“Paranoia doesn’t suit you, Lane.”
Across the various screens, Linda was being hugged. Audrey had been expecting tears but, while the cameras were making sure to capture looks of affection on everyone’s faces, the atmosphere was surprisingly upbeat for an elimination. Even if it was a self-elimination.
“No, but—was this the plan? Did you know I’d help her do this?”
“I knew you’d do the right thing.”
“The right thing for your show, you mean.” Audrey’s head was spinning. And she was beginning to worry she’d set it to the Jennifer cycle.
Jennifer made a noise of annoyance that Audrey was beginning to feel increasingly familiar with. “If I wanted someone to only think about the show or about what I wanted, I’d do it myself or send Colin. There’s a fucking balance.”
“But”—the contestants were being shepherded out the ballroom for interviews—“what if I made the wrong call? Maybe Linda would have been fine. Maybe I’ve taken an opportunity from her. Maybe—”
“Linda was not fine. She was definitely going out. The only question was whether she went out on her terms or on the judges’.”
“And you just happen to get an amazing watercooler moment out of it.”
“Oh, please, I can make a watercooler moment out of a slightly limp baguette. Look”— Jennifer swung back on her villain chair with the air of someone about to tell an international superspy why they couldn’t possibly thwart her evil plan—“the story was going to go one of three ways. Either she soldiered on to a valiant defeat. Or she flounced out in a huff. Or she walked out with her head held high. I’d have been fine with any of them.
She’d have been fine with one or three. You pushed it towards three. ”
It felt weird to hear Jennifer trying to be reassuring. And it felt uncomfortable to be reassured by it. “She’s still a person, Jennifer. Not a chess piece.”
Leaning forward again, Jennifer pressed a button. “Colin, send in the bishop.” There was a pause. “No, no, not literally. I’m doing a chess thing with Audrey. I mean send in the whiny one.”
The response wasn’t quite instantaneous.
As much as Jennifer would probably have liked everybody to spend all day standing outside her trailer waiting for her to yell for them, Colin and Linda were still on the terrace outside the ballroom doing postshow interviews, and so it took a couple of minutes for the door to swing open and Linda to creep sheepishly in.
“Sorry,” she said. Which was pretty much what she’d said when she first told Jennifer she was bowing out as well.
“Don’t be, you did me a favour. Always good to have something to shake up a mid-season episode.”
Linda was still looking doubtful.
“On your way out, Colin will give you the details of our in-house counsellor. You don’t have to use them, you can find somebody else if you want, but you do need to speak to somebody.”
“I don’t want to make—”
“A fuss, I know. But look at me, Linda.” Jennifer fixed Linda with her most no-nonsense stare, which was very, very no-nonsense, indeed. “Do I look like somebody who lets people make fusses?”
“No,” Linda admitted.
“You made the right call. It’s intense while you’re here, but this is just a TV show. Say goodbye to the cast, go home, put your feet up, and remember it’s not really important.”
Linda just nodded, murmured something vaguely in the direction of thanks, and went back out to liaise with Colin.
When she was gone, Audrey gave Jennifer a distinctly unimpressed look.
“Was that supposed to prove something?”
“Yeah,” said Jennifer. “It proves she’ll be fine. And it proves that you’re good at this. And it proves you don’t have to tie yourself in fucking knots just because you did something with slightly higher stakes than reporting on a teenager stuck in a swing.”
Audrey didn’t know whether to be flattered or freaked out that Jennifer still seemed to be reading her articles, even though she’d been off the show for a fortnight. “Hey, that was the second time it had happened to the same kid, which is why it was newsworthy.”
“Because teenager makes bad decision twice is such a rare event.”
“Yeah…” Standing, Audrey de-cricked her neck from an afternoon hunched over footage. “I’m not sure low-key manipulating reality TV contestants is exactly my calling either.”
“Doesn’t have to be. I’m just saying that your options aren’t limited to working yourself to death on Fleet Street or boring yourself to death in Felton Butler.”
Jennifer was trending pointwards and Audrey didn’t like it. “Frankly, I’m just impressed you know where Felton Butler is.”
“Well, I’m a very impressive woman. And right now, I’m an impressive woman with a job to do, so you can either shut up and let me get on with it. Or piss off back to Shropshire and cuddle your tortoise.”
This was definitely new. This whole being offered a choice whether you pissed off or not.
In Jennifer Hallet world it was practically a candlelit dinner.
And, on a different day, Audrey would have stuck around.
But she also had things to do because she was—as Jennifer had reminded her—in her own way also a very impressive woman.
* * *
Audrey managed to catch Doris in the carpark, where she was waiting for a taxi to take her to the nearest train station.
“Hi,” she began, a little self-consciously.
“Hello.” Doris shuffled over on the bench to make room, and Audrey sat down next to her.
Probably it was best not to jump straight into Can I try to locate the woman who broke your heart half a century ago? so Audrey went for a more neutral opener. “What a week.”
“Yeah,” agreed Doris. “All excitement here on Bake Expectations. I think Linda made the right call, though. No sense in the poor thing staying if it was going to be tough on her.”
“And I think it was brave of her, in a way,” added Audrey, not quite sure who she was trying to convince.
Doris nodded. “S’pose so, s’pose so. And young Reggie deserved the win.”
Audrey hadn’t even paid attention to that part of the competition, but it seemed rude to admit it. “Patisserie was always going to be his week,” she said. “He’s so precise.”
“Oh yeah, Marianne loved how identical his macarons was.”
If there was ever a man who could make four dozen identically shaped and sized macarons it would be Reggie. And while Audrey didn’t think he was making the final, patisserie week was a prestigious one to win.
“Beginning to think you’re wrong about the final, actually,” Doris went on. “I’ve not won one yet, and I don’t see as how they can let me through without at least one win under my belt.”
“Maybe. Like I say, I’m not an expert. But they do pay attention to story. And I think your story’s pretty compelling.”
Doris gave her an almost melancholy look. “Maybe. But if you mean about, you know, about me and her, then that’s not what the show’s about and there’s not that much more to tell.”
“Actually”—this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up—“there was something I wanted to ask you about that.”
Doris nodded. It wasn’t quite a wary nod, but it was the nod of a woman who knew there was another shoe to drop.
“How would you feel if hypothetically I…I’m sort of thinking I could maybe find Emily. If you wanted.”
For a long while there was no reply. Doris just sat there, processing and looking for words. And Audrey let her sit because if bringing this up in the first place had been borderline unfair, pushing the issue now would be flat-out mean.
“I reckon,” said Doris at last, “that I’d always figured she was dead. Not always, I mean, but eventually. Most everybody else is.”
Audrey didn’t want to interrupt, but she told herself that there was nothing wrong with sharing information. “I’ve not found a death certificate. And I’ve looked.”
“Oh.” There was a long pause, followed by, “Well that’s a thing.”
“I can stop,” Audrey volunteered, perhaps more urgently than she meant to.
Doris didn’t immediately say no, which made Audrey uneasy. And not just because she might say no but because if somebody took too long to get to yes, Audrey always felt like she’d twisted their arm.
“I think”—Doris wasn’t normally hesitant, and that wasn’t doing wonders for Audrey’s confidence—“I think I’d like to at least know where she is. What happened to her and everything.”
“Are you sure?” asked Audrey, more out of conscience than strategy.
“No,” admitted Doris. “But—well—can’t be no harm in looking, can there?”
It was all Audrey needed, in theory. Although privately she wondered if maybe there could be.
But aloud she just said, “No. No there can’t.”