Saturday
“Welcome,” Grace Forsythe was saying over the feed, “to the last blind bake of the season. And what a season it has been. We’ve had ten wonderful contestants and we’ve lost the seven least wonderful, which leaves us here, now, with the absolute cream of the absolute crop.
And at last we will crown our extremely deserving winner, who will walk away with a slightly underwhelming cash prize and lovely souvenir cake slice. And won’t that have been worth it?”
“Tell her,” Jennifer conveyed to Colin, “to stop running down the show on air.”
“It’s classic British self-deprecation,” replied Grace Forsythe once the criticism had been passed on. “It plays wonderfully in the States.”
“It fucking well does not. Tell her I’ve got metrics.”
But Grace Forsythe, as ever, wasn’t listening.
“And without further ado, we shall launch directly into the final blind bake. And since this is our last back-to-basics challenge, we are asking you to go right back to basics. We aren’t quite asking you to catch your own hare, but we are asking you to make your own jam, and your own marzipan as part of putting together your own, utterly from scratch, perfectly rectangular, Battenberg cake.
You have four hours starting from three. Three, darlings.”
And off they went. In a strange sort of way—and despite Grace’s attempt to big-up the finality of the final—it was business as usual.
Flipping over the recipe card, discovering it was inadequate, sorting through the ingredients, some of which were misleading, all of them in greater quantities than you actually needed, then making a valiant effort because what else could you do?
It had only been five weeks since Audrey had been standing there herself, but it felt impossibly distant.
Like something from your childhood. Or an audiobook you’d fallen asleep listening to.
She was conscious of a prick of nostalgia.
Of being briefly part of something she loved.
Something that was going away. And going away more completely than anyone in the ballroom could know.
To them, this was just another final. And maybe it would be the same to the audience, who probably wouldn’t care what channel the show was on or who produced it. But it was Jennifer’s last final. The only one she would ever share with Audrey.
On the screens, everyone was hard at work.
Doris seemed to be taking the challenge the most in stride, but then she’d presumably been scratch-making jam since the war.
Alanis, by contrast, was wobbling, her relative lack of experience showing through for the first time in weeks.
But narratively, Audrey thought, she could afford the loss.
That was the great thing about having a youngest-ever contestant.
No matter how far she got, it was a win.
She could have been eliminated in week one and she’d have done well to get through auditions.
As runner-up, people would definitely remember her.
A glance at Jennifer proved, as ever, that she was hard to read.
It was business as usual in the supervillain chair.
And whether that was because she genuinely didn’t care about her legacy or because she knew doing her damn job the way she always did was the best way to secure it Audrey couldn’t say.
Actually. Strike that. She could completely say. It was the second one.
“Who’s it going to be?” she asked.
It was oddly flattering that Jennifer didn’t even pretend not to know what Audrey meant. “I’ll tell you when I know.”
“You haven’t decided already? I’d have thought you’d planned it all out weeks ago.”
Keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the monitors, Jennifer said, “I didn’t say I’ve not thought about it. But you can only work with what you shoot. The old one or the young one will be easier to spin, obviously.”
That was pretty much what Audrey had expected. But it still felt kind of bad. “So Meera’s just filler? She’s really talented.”
Jennifer shrugged. “You want to know the dark secret of this show? People are exactly as talented as we make them look.”
“And you’re going to make Meera look worse than she is so you can give it to someone with a more interesting story?”
“Yes. Or no. Or maybe. It’ll depend on how it comes out.
If the granny drops a trifle or the foetus cracks under the pressure, then we’ll give it to Meera and I’ll find some way to make TV gold out of happy children saying how proud they are of mummy-slash-daddy for the third fucking time in a row. ”
“Is there not another story you can tell?”
“Yeah,” said Jennifer. “There is. And it involves the granny or the foetus.”
“I just…” Audrey felt na?ve even as the words came out of her mouth. “I just think Meera might actually be the best baker?”
“And when the best dancer wins Strictly, I’ll give a fuck.”
Audrey would have said more but then Jennifer leaned forward and issued Colin an instruction so trivial that it was blatantly an excuse to end the conversation.
* * *
Ultimately it was a fairly quiet judging with no real surprises.
It was close because despite their very different ages and levels of experience, the remaining contestants were all top-of-their-game baking persons.
But Doris’s years of getting by on one egg a week and darning her own stockings had paid off and put her just at the top of the Battenberg-from-scratch challenge, while Alanis’s squares had been called out as being slightly uneven by Marianne Wolvercote, which—at this stage of the competition—was enough to consign her to the bottom of the pack.
Once the last interview had been concluded—something that happened a lot more quickly when there were only three people—Jennifer took off her headset and snapped her laptop closed. “Get your coat, Lane. You’ve pulled.”
Audrey blinked at her. “Sorry. What?”
“It’s our last night on set. I need to be top of my game tomorrow morning. A single bed fucking sucks. And I’m fucking horny.”
“Okay? How do these all fit together?”
“I booked us into the main hotel.”
The part of Audrey that was slightly on guard against deeply controlling women wasn’t sure if she should be fine with this.
The part of Audrey who had spent the past couple of weekends having fumbly, slightly elastic sex—and then trying to sleep—in a bed that was barely designed to fit one adult, let alone two, was very, very fine.
“Great,” said that part of Audrey. “Let’s go. ”
Having not that long ago visited the Hotel Metropole in Monte Carlo, Audrey found Patchley House, despite its venerable history and excellent Tripadvisor ratings, a bit of a…
if not a letdown, then at least a comedown.
It didn’t, for example, have a gargantuan glass sculpture hanging from its lobby ceiling or a dazzling view of the Mediterranean or a jaded aristocrat gazing enigmatically at the horizon.
But it had one of those sweeping staircases so beloved of the rich and landed, and the décor was a well-chosen mixture of the modern and the traditional.
“Don’t get too excited,” said Jennifer, storming purposefully down a hallway. “I got this room because it was the only one that wasn’t shit.”
“It’s not, like, a bridal suite or something is it?”
“Fuck no. But it’s a bit…historicalish. And that kind of sentimental fuckbilge makes you all wet and gooey.”
“Can you not?”
“I can not. I don’t not.”
Swiping the keycard, Jennifer pushed open a door and Audrey—neither wet nor gooey—followed her into a room that she couldn’t help noticing was called the Branningham Suite.
And it was, indeed, very historicalish. With a four-poster bed draped in red velvet, panelled walls of very dark wood, and oak, oak everywhere.
“Okay,” said Jennifer, putting her laptop down on an old-fashioned writing desk and dropping her bag to the floor.
“I’m going to give you two minutes to bask in the melancholy of a bygone age and two sad old women you’re desperate to connect to.
Then I’m going to pull the strap-on out my luggage and you’re going to fuck me into seventeen sixty-four. ”
“Why,” asked Audrey, still processing that entire speech. “Why seventeen sixty-four?”
“Is that really the detail you want to focus on?”
“Well, I don’t want to overshoot. What if I accidentally end up fucking you into seventeen sixty-three? Or sixteen ninety-one?”
“It’s fine. I’ll use the safe word.”
“We have a safe word?”
“Yeah, it’s cut it the fuck out.”
“You realise”—Audrey had now worked backwards into the two minutes basking part of the deal—“this was probably Arthur Branningham’s room?”
“And probably the room where his son died with a leaky prostate. But I’m sure they’ve changed the sheets since.”
“Jennifer, you’re massively diminishing my desire to fuck you into any time period.”
She gave a familiar frustrated-sounding urghf. “Look, Lane, it’s an old house. It belonged to rich dead men. We can’t get rid of them, but we can still fuck on their bones.”
Put like that, Audrey was almost willing to consider it subversive rather than icky.
Because actually there was something that felt…
if not right, then at least the good sort of wrong, banging her girlfriend in Sir Arthur Branningham’s private quarters.
Not, of course, in the study where he’d sat Doris down and told her that his daughter loving her brought shame on the family.
But where he’d probably slept easy afterwards.
Christ, no wonder Emily was so fucked up.
“Okay,” Audrey said, “I’m in.”
“Great.” Jennifer rummaged in her bag and, like a much lewder Mary Poppins, produced a sexual aid of impressive length and girth, along with a complex arrangement of straps and panels.
These she tossed to Audrey, who completely failed to catch them. “When you said you were going to pull the strap-on out of your luggage, I thought you meant…metaphorically?”
“Who would a metaphorical strap-on get off?”