Breaking off the hug, Doris looked calm, almost contemplative. “Some days I thought she was,” she said. “Some days I thought she wasn’t. Some days I thought I was wasting my time trying to work it out.”
Audrey nodded. “Yeah. She was a lot like that.”
“I reckon,” said Doris, with a deliberate slowness that suggested she only half trusted the notion, “I reckon that’s good to hear. I’d not have wanted her to change. Not really.”
Honestly, Audrey wasn’t sure if she agreed. Then again she wasn’t sure if Doris really agreed either. But you got through life by telling yourself what you had to tell yourself, and probablyThe woman I love has always been a beautiful disaster and it comforts me that she still iswas the safest way to go.
Better than just admitting the whole thing was a miserable pissing letdown.
Week Eight
Final
Saturday
“Welcome,” Grace Forsythe was saying over the feed, “to the last blind bake of the season. Andwhataseasonit has been. We’ve had ten wonderful contestants and we’ve lost the sevenleastwonderful, which leaves us here, now, with theabsolutecream of theabsolutecrop. 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 gorightback to basics. We aren’t quite asking you to catch your own hare, but weareasking you to make your own jam, andyour 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’slastfinal. 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 thatwas 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 naïve even as the words came out of her mouth. “I just think Meera might actually be the best baker?”
“And when the best dancer winsStrictly, I’ll give a fuck.”
