“I think it’s a very clever interpretation of the brief.” From Audrey’s experience watching the show, this was one of the highest forms of praise Marianne Wolvercote ever gave. “And it took real discipline to get this number of different flavours done in the time.”
Wilfred Honey had tried the red velvet and was moving on to the pumpkin and cinnamon. “And each one’s worked nicely,” he added. “You’ve done well here, lad. Very well. Reminds me a bit of myself at your age.” Since Wilfred Honey was considerably quicker with the praise than Marianne Wolvercote, this didn’t land quite as hard asclever interpretation of the brief, but it was still pretty good going.
When they all gathered on their stools for the results, it was clearly down to Linda or Joshua, and Audrey—if she was honest with herself—was rooting for Linda. While she was sure Joshua was a perfectly nice young man, she couldn’t quite bring herself to cheer for a guy in a trilby.
After more time deliberating than seemed at all reasonable when the question was “Whose cakes were nicest?” the judges returned and Grace Forsythe took up her customary position at the front of the ballroom.
“And so, my little gateaux chocolates, we reach the end of the first week of the new season and we begin with the joyful task of selecting this week’s winner. Wilfred and Marianne debated long and hard, but in the end they decided that while his Victoria sponge was a touchunconventional, he really turned it around with his baketacular cupcake display. Congratulations”—she gave a totally unnecessary pause—“Joshua.”
There was a sequence of congratulations and back pats, and Alanis beamed like she’d won herself, which the part of Audreythat still thought whatever Natalie would think judged harshly and the rest of Audrey tried not to.
“But of course, with every cake there must be crumbs,” Grace Forsythe went on, “and with every victory, there must be loss. And so today, we say goodbye to our first contestant.” It was pretty obvious who this was going to be—so obvious that despite her classically trained tendency to try to build everything up like it was the state opening of Parliament, even Grace Forsythe kept it relatively succinct. “In the short time he was here he made a mark, a Victoria sponge, and a gigantic mess of the kitchen. Gerald, we’re sorry to see you go.”
This time the sequence was of goodbyes and commiserations. Although since Gerald had been so patently inept for the whole weekend, everybody had been expecting it. Everybody, in this context, including Gerald himself, who bore it with the same grace he had borne his ketchup-related travails of the previous day.
“Well, I messed that one up,” he explained to the camera afterwards. “I suppose I should really apologise to all the thousands of people who applied and didn’t make the cut. IpromiseI was better in auditions.”
Audrey’s own interview was relatively perfunctory, which was to be expected given that she had so far failed to distinguish herself either positively or negatively. Just a quick “Well, I think that went okay but I need to make sure I stand out more next week” and then off to pick up her things.
It was a pleasant summer’s afternoon as she strolled back down to the Lodge, and since she had—now she thought about it—precisely nothing to be hurrying back for, she took a moment to linger in the woods. There was a river nearby, and taking little walks by rivers was one of the small things she liked doing, which she’d beenmeaning to do more of when she got the time.It’s easy to have time, Natalie reminded her,when you’re not actually doing anything with your life. I hope your pursuit of the bucolic idyll makes up for all the things you threw away.
Blocking her ex-girlfriend out as best she could, Audrey took a stroll. She hadn’t originally meant it to be a long stroll, but with the sun dappling through the trees and across the water she went further than she’d intended, down to the faux-medieval hermitage she’d seen the previous day. It felt…not odd, exactly, but sort of nonspecifically disorienting to look closely at something designed to feel old-fashioned to people who had long since passed into old-fashioned themselves. She’d heard that sometimes landowners would hire faux hermits to live in their faux hermitages, and while that had stopped being the kind of thing you could get away with sometime in the eighteenth century, therewassomebody inside it now.
“Doris?” Audrey poked her head through the archway, hoping none of the loosely piled stones would fall on her head. “What’re you doing here?”
“What’re you?” she replied, pricklier than Audrey had expected.
“Going for a walk.”
“Same.”
“And…” It wasn’t her place to pry. But she was a professional pryer with a strong interest in extracurricular prying, so she pried anyway. “You chose here to sit down?”
“There’s a seat.” Doris, who was resting on a slab that might have been intended to represent a bed or a bench, patted the space beside her.
“Well, yes,” Audrey conceded, “but—”
“But it smells like piss?”
Audrey nodded.
“I’ve smelled worse.”
It was hard to think of a good response to a ninety-six-year-old woman reassuring you about her ability to tolerate the scent of urine, but Audrey gave it a go anyway. “And you don’t want to come out here where itdoesn’tsmell of piss?”
Doris sat for a moment, gazing at the walls of the hermitage. “Probably should. Just thought it’d be…I don’t know.”
“It’d be what?” In moments of doubt, Audrey had a tendency to fall back on open questions.
“Different.”
“Different in what way?”
Doris gave a little shrug, got up off the slab, and left the piss-smelling hermitage. To Audrey’s relief, the smell of piss did not follow her out. “Just different.”
And sometimes open questions weren’t the thing you needed. Sometimes you needed to put two and two together and hope you got a nice tutu out of it. There were a number of possible explanations for an elderly woman to have specific expectations about an eighteenth-century folly in a stately home, but they all pointed in roughly the same direction. “Have you…have you been here before?”
Doris didn’t answer immediately. She had an almost wistful look about her, and it was a look Audrey recognised. She’d had it herself when she first came back to Shropshire—that mix of nostalgia and whatever the opposite of nostalgia was, the realisation that some bits of the past were gone forever.
