Then she left.
With the quilt.
Saturday
“Welcome back,” Grace Forsythe was saying. “It’s week two and I’m going to be brief. I won’t beat about the bush. It’s bread. It’s back to basics. It’s baguettes. Wilfred and Marianne have given you four ingredients, they want you to make four perfect, identical loaves, and you have four hours starting—well for consistency, what do you say this time we start on four?Four, darlings.”
Audrey turned over her recipe. She was unsurprised to discover that in addition to the four ingredients, four loaves, and four hours, there were also four lines of instructions. Helpful lines like “Make a shaggy dough using flour, salt, water, and dissolved yeast” and “Once it’s rested for an appropriate amount of time, turn out onto a floured work surface and press into a rectangle.”
So far, Audrey was enjoying the do-simple-things-well nature of the competition. Of course, she wasn’t necessarily thatgoodat doing simple things well, at least not relative to some of the other contestants, but aesthetically it appealed. Part of thepointof baking, as far as Audrey was concerned, was that it was simple. Shefelt like a gigantic millennial cliché being allOoh, modern life is too complex, let me cling to the trappings of a simpler time. But the fact was, you knew where you were with a baguette. It didn’t ask you difficult ethical questions or force you to confront your complicity in an unjust system. It just sat in the oven and browned.
Well, for the moment it was sitting in a bowl, gently expanding, but soon it would be sitting in the oven, and she’d be watching it brown and there’d be a calm to that. A little window where she didn’t have to think about deadlines or what the hell she was doing with her life, and she could just enjoy the wholesome-to-the-point-of-parody smell of bread baking.
Making baguettes, Audrey could vaguely remember from the few times she’d done it, was mostly downtime, and she had a feeling that the real test in this challenge was going to be having the confidence to leave the dough proving for long enough. The rule was almost always to let it double in size and when an hour had passed and Audrey’s dough had definitelynotdoubled in size, she began to worry that this was a test she would fail.
But they’d been given four hours, and if she’d worked out her timings right—which wasn’t guaranteed—she’d only need about thirty to forty minutes for the final bake, so it was okay to give it a bit longer—maybe a lot longer if need be.
Thirty minutes later, things weren’t looking much better, and Audrey decided to go for it. The dough was meant to make four loves, each of a good size, but there only seemed to be enough of it to fulfill one of those criteria. Probably best, Audrey decided, to make the requested number and accept the dimensions being a bit off. As she was working on her third loaf of four, Grace Forsythe appeared at the end of her bench with a glint in her eye that said she wasn’t going to let a baguette challenge pass without givingsomebodya full run of penis jokes, and it seemed like Audrey was first in the firing line.
“I must say you handle that very well,” said Grace Forsythe, smirking.
Audrey wasn’t really sure how to play this one.Actually I’m a lesbiansounded both dismissive and implicitly transphobic, but anything along the lines ofwhoar I love cock, mewould be both inauthentic and kind of squicky. All in all, best to play ignorant. “Well I do make a lot of bread.”
“No risk of working it too roughly, then,” Grace continued. “Getting it too stiff.”
Still massaging her bag into a guette, Audrey did her best to think of a response that came across as suitably demure yet witty. Then, when she couldn’t, tried a different tack. “Are we…are we still doing this, in the twenty-first century? The French-bread-looks-like-a-willy thing?”
With the dramatic instincts of a woman who had literally been trained to have dramatic instincts at a school of revered dramatic-instinct trainers, Grace Forsythe pressed a hand to her chest in mock-aghastitude. “WhyAudreyyouwoundme. Here I am asking perfectly innocuous questions about the technical details of your approach to baking, and you somehow decide that I’m talking about willies.”
This was a run-with-it situation. “So sorry. Don’t know what came over me. I’m sure as a beloved television presenter you’ve never alluded to a willy in your life.”
“Quite so.” Grace Forsythe took a deep, theatrical breath. “Nary a willy have I spoken of in all my days, and with God as my witness I shall go to my grave with my body of work untainted by willies. A willyless legacy shall I leave, and should ever a willyinveigle its way into my life I shall not hesitate to whip it out again.”
Colin Thrimp sidled up to the far end of Audrey’s bench and raised a hand. “Grace? Jennifer says that if you don’t shut the fucking fuck up with the fucking willy shit right fucking now she will cut offmywilly, stretch out the foreskin over a large teapot, and make you wear it as a hat.”
“Understood.” Grace Forsythe gave Colin Thrimp a look of almost sympathy. “Got to say, though, I think you actually came out of that one worse than I did, old boy.”
Wincing, Colin Thrimp nodded.
“I suppose she’s right.” There was an almost melancholy tone in Grace Forsythe’s voice. “All this willy talk is a bit immature, isn’t it?”
Hoping she hadn’t offended a relatively major celebrity, Audrey gave a reassuring smile. “A bit, but if you can’t be immature on the BBC wherecanyou be immature?”
“You see?” Grace Forsythe gave Audrey a chummy pat on the shoulder that just about managed to avoid messing up her fourth loaf. “I knew I liked you. Good luck with your willies.”
Unable, now, to think of her loaves as anything but pleasant-smelling squishy phalli, Audrey transferred them to a towel, covered them with oiled plastic wrap, and left them for a final rise. None of which were thoughts that followed well from the willy conversation.
* * *
At the judging, Audrey kicked herself when the judges tried her baguettes and found the crumb too tight.
“Not proved long enough,” Wilfred Honey explained to the camera. “You can see here it’s just too dense. Didn’t need much longer, maybe twenty minutes, but even though it’s only week two, we’re holding you to a very high standard.”
“Yes, the thing about these bakes,” Marianne Wolvercote added, although Audrey sincerely wished she wouldn’t, “is that there’s nowhere tohide.”
Doris didn’t do so well this time, presumably not having made quite as many baguettes down the years as she’d made Victoria sponges, but Alanis surprised herself by coming out on top while last place went to the man with the extreme dad energy, who Audrey’s inner Rolodex had finally managed to file as “John.”
“I will admit,” he said to the camera afterwards, “I make a lot of cakes at home for the family, but I don’tquitehave the commitment to bake my own bread. So this might not be my week.”
