Six months ago was when Natalie had won the Orwell Prize for a nuanced yet hard-hitting article she’d written inThe Guardianabout… Actually, Audrey couldn’t remember the details, but something worthy: domestic terrorism or climate change or one of the many other ways the world was screwed and getting screweder. She should have known. It was petty of hernotto know. A mature, reasonable woman in her thirties was completely capable of acknowledging that her ex-girlfriend was continuing to be brilliant and successful and celebrated without blotting out as many of the details as she could with Lidl wine and competitive baking.
Audrey had not, in that moment, been a mature, reasonable woman. She had instead decided that it was the most importantthing in the world to show Natalie—or the gaping judgmental void where Natalie used tobe—that she was more than just a technically not failed journalist working for a second-rate local paper. She was also, she could declare with the confidence of a proud LGBTQ+ role model, pretty okay at making buns, too.
It was, in retrospect, a slight point of concern for Audrey that she’d been accepted onBake Expectationsdespite being so blitzed out of her skull that she couldn’t actually remember what she’d written on her entry form. Either it meant that she was such a fantastic writer that even completely hammered she could weave an enchanting word picture about how she would be an asset to the show, or—perhaps more likely—she was this year’s joke contestant: a loveable drunk who was going out in week one for putting far too much rum in her baba. Maybe she’d redeemed herself at the follow-up interview.
Or maybe she’d just cemented the idea that she was a charmingly incompetent buffoon, like Bernard from last season.
For about an hour and a half, Audrey let herself stew in insecurity like a plum in a syrup made of disappointment. Then, since an hour and a half only got her halfway to her destination and since she’d seen a lot of statistics about fatigue-related fatalities, she stopped at a service station. Checking her phone on the way to the loo, she found four messages. One was from her dad and saidGood luck on BE. The other three were from her mother and said, respectively:Your father keeps telling me you’re filming this week.ThenBut I’m sure it’s next week.Followed byGood luck in case it isn’t.She sent back athanksand anactually Dad was right, gave herself ten minutes of not-driving time to grab a coffee and a croissant, and then hopped back in the car.
With the caffeine helping her feel slightly more awake and thecroissant helping her feel slightly more like she’d eaten a croissant, Audrey set off on the final leg of the journey. Once she’d skirted London courtesy of the M25, she was relieved to be herself back in the countryside. Having been born in it, Audrey had an abiding fondness for rural England, although she privately felt that the South and East couldn’t really compete with the Welsh borders. There was an indefinable Londonishness that radiated out from the capital and made the land for miles around seem regimented and uniform in ways the North and the West never were.
She was barely over the county line into Surrey when she spotted the first sign for Patchley House and Park, which had gone from obscure hotel in a former stately home to a semi-major tourist attraction thanks to the magic of mass media. From its iconic wrought iron gates, it was a short-for-a-road-but-long-for-a-driveway trip up to the gravelly carpark. And then it was a matter of following theCONTESTANTSTHISWAYnotices that, in contrast to the homey-but-slick presentation of the on-camera parts of the show, were just A4 paper run off on a printer and taped onto whatever surfaces could support them. These led her, at last, to a bored-looking man who signed her in and told her to make her way down the hill to the Lodge. As a longtime fan of the show—albeit one who’d had to watch it alone while Natalie was out networking or otherwise living the careerist dream—Audrey was still waiting for the moment when it all started to feelreal. Or at least to feel unreal in the way that she assumed it would. In that oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-I’m-actually-here way that other people seemed to get, rather than the “welp” way that she was currently experiencing.
She found her room fairly easily, dumped her things, and checked her phone to see if her parents had resolved their “is our daughter on TV yet” debate. As it turned out, they both had andhadn’t, the response from her dad beingsee, I told herand the one from her mum sayingsorry, I was getting it mixed up with Auntie Beryl’s haemorrhoid appointment.Communication, Audrey had always believed, was the basis of a healthy relationship. But if her parents were anything to go by, it didn’t actually have to be coherent or effective communication.
She texted back to her dadapparently she was thinking of Auntie Beryl’s haemorrhoid appointment(now that’s a week next Tuesdayhe replied) and to her mumdo you often confuse me with Auntie Beryl’s bottom(her response was:only when you act like an arse). Between messages, she sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to have too many thoughts. It had been long enough since the breakup that, theoretically, being alone was something she should have been used to. But at home she had her work and her family and—not to sound too materialistic—herstuffto keep her from dwelling. A hotel room, especially the kind of hotel room you got on a BBC budget, was precision engineered to make a person regret every decision they’d ever made in their entire life.
So-called “reality” television, Natalie was explaining in her head,constructs false narratives that pressure people into living up to unrealistic standards. And Audrey tried to push back a little by pointing out that it was just people making cakes in a nice house, but Natalie’s voice, as always, was insistent.It’s a parochial, whitewashed—in both senses of the word—illusion of Britishness for Brexiteers and housewives. I honestly can’t believe you watch it. And she didn’t have an answer to that, any more than she’d had one when the conversation, or conversations very much like it, had originally happened.
She should have brought a project. Audrey was the sort of person who liked to have a project, even if the project was just ajigsaw on the kitchen table. The bedroom in her new flat was full of bags of yarn and piles of fabric, which were slowly being converted into scarves no one in particular wanted to wear and quilts no one in particular wanted to snuggle under.
Partly, she would be the first to admit, because they weren’t very good scarves or quilts. Just like her hand-painted bowls weren’t very well painted and her one attempt at kintsugi had left the broken vase looking both worse and still broken. For the first couple of years of their relationship, her fondness for crafting had driven Natalie up the wall, a conflict Audrey had resolved by…stopping. Giving up or, in Natalie’s words, acknowledging there were better ways to use her time.
Sitting on the bed, staring at the wall, Audrey remained lost with her thoughts just long enough to conclude that staying in her room would definitely suck. And while wandering the grounds aimlessly mightalsosuck, it would at least suck in the open air.
Besides, Audrey had always been an explorey sort. And, much as she wanted to pretend it was part of what made her an excellent—well, an adequate; well, a former—investigative journalist, mostly it just meant she’d spent a lot of her childhood increasing her mother’s risk of cardiac arrest. She’d once enlivened a summer picnic by trying to climb up Wenlock Priory. And, in her defence, she’d managed it. The climbing up part, at least. Getting down had been more of a challenge and had, eventually, involved fire engines. To this day, Audrey felt guilty around a National Trust logo.
That probably wasn’t going to happen at Patchley House, though. Not unless she got really, really bored. Mostly she was hoping a good, old-fashioned wander would keep the more infuriating parts of her brain quiet. With enquieting in mind, shescoped out the woodlands and, once she’d finished scoping, found her way down to the stream, locating the faux-medieval hermitage that her pre-visit research had told her was located somewhere on the grounds.
Once she’d had all the faux medievalness she could take, she looped back to the Lodge just in time to see a girl coming out of the front door. And she was definitely agirl, probably—if Audrey was any judge—no more than sixteen. Also probably no less than sixteen, unless the show was violating its own terms and conditions, along with a couple of child labour laws. Neither of which, given what she knew of reality TV, she would have ruled out.
“Hi,” Audrey said, discovering as she got closer that, sixteen-ish as she may have been, the newcomer was still a good inch taller than Audrey. “Are you one of the other contestants?”
The girl nodded and, not being from a handshakey generation, waved. “Alanis.”
“Alanis?”
“Yeah. After this singer my mum likes.”
The realisation that it was perfectly possible for a woman who listened toJagged Little Pillat a formative age to now have a daughter old enough to be baking on national television rose up in Audrey’s heart, killed a part of her, and went back to sleep. “Audrey,” said Audrey. “After—”
“Audrey Hepburn?” asked Alanis.
“Honestly a bit surprised you know who that is.”
“I’m really into retro stuff.”
Audrey could probably have guessed that for herself, since Alanis’s personal style appeared to have been culled from the greatest hits of the last two centuries: a pleated miniskirt like it was2001, a chunky black-and-pink cable-knit like it was 2020, tube socks like it was 1974, and ribbons in her hair like she was about to get snubbed by Mr. Darcy at a country dance. “Oh,” she said. “Cool. So kind of cottagecore?”
There was a certain look teenagers got when they felt an adult had been embarrassing in a way that inspired pity rather than loathing. “I don’t really want to put a label on it. But I’m liking your whole thing.”
“I’m not sure I have a thing.”
There was another look teenagers got when they felt you were full of shit. “Sixties glasses? Fifties silhouette? That’s a thing. You just don’t want to admit it.”
Great. Now Audrey was being called out by a child. On the other hand, the child seemed to be enjoying it. Which was probably a win on aggregate. “Fine. You got me. I’m a plus-sized stereotype.”
Alanis looked immediately mortified, like she was cancelling herself. “Oh fuck, sorry. I did not mean that in, like, a shaming way.”
