“No, it’s fine. It’s just the reality of a certain height-to-girth ratio. And I’d rather own it than hide.”
“You’re definitely owning it.”
“Okay, now you’re overcompensating.”
“No, no,” protested Alanis, whose limited life experience had yet to teach her the benefits of quitting when you were behind. “You look really good for your age.”
Audrey stared at her. Over the past thirtysomething years she’d got pretty comfortable with her body. Having to be comfortable with her age as well had snuck up on her. “Which you think is…what exactly?”
“Like maybe twenty-five?” said Alanis with complete andbewildering sincerity. “Or twenty-eight?”
This was flattering. But also not flattering. “Oh my God, Alanis. How do you think time works?”
“I don’t know. I’m not Einstein.”
“No, I mean, twenty-five isn’t old enough to lookgood for your age. And, by similar reasoning, in no universe do I look twenty-five.”
“Look”—Alanis spread her hands in a gesture ofI give up on everything—“you seem like you’re older than me and younger than my mum. I don’t know what else to do here.”
Tiny twinge of nostalgia aside, Audrey was pretty glad that she no longer lived in a world where the categories of people were yourself, your parents, and everybody else. “How about we leave gerontology for now and talk about baking? Because I’m beginning to sense a generation gap and I really want to get onto a topic that doesn’t make me feel ancient.”
“Works for me.” Cheerfully, Alanis looped her arm through Audrey’s and began to drag her up the hill. “Totally crepuscular.”
Audrey was not falling for that one. “Crepuscular?”
“Yeah, it meansgood.”
“No it doesn’t. It means of or relating to twilight. This is because I said there was a generation gap, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be such a zymurgy.”
“Study of fermentation. You’re not going to get me on this. I’m old and uncool but I know a lot of weird words.”
“How?” By a process of contrarian logic known only to the young, Alanis sounded almost impressed.
“I told you,” said Audrey. “I’m old and uncool.”
“You’re not uncool. You’re peripatetic.”
“Wandering. Which we actually are. So I think one of us haswon but I can’t tell which.”
Alanis flashed an Instagrammable smile. “How about both of us?”
Which—damningly—was the most mature thing Audrey had heard all week.
The lights of Patchley House were golden against the darkening sky, almost magical and, funnily enough, crepuscular. Had she not been getting yoinked along by an overenthusiastic teenager, Audrey might have stopped to take it in. The problem with living somewhere beautiful—and she’d lived in beautiful places for much of her life—was that you got inured to the specifics of it. Sure, sometimes a new, hitherto unnoticed, specific would sneak up on you, and it would be like you were seeing the world for the first time all over again. Except that feeling got rarer the longer you stuck around. And, for a while, especially living in London, Audrey thought she’d lost it entirely. That it had just faded away, like so many other things.
Coming back to Shropshire had taught her that it hadn’t, and moments like this—looking up a hill at a stately home in the twilight—reinforced the lesson. But that sense of wonder still felt fragile enough that she regretted having to let it go. Unfortunately the alternative was to turn to her teenage companion and say,Hey can we just stop and appreciate some quiet beauty because we might never see it again, which might just have pushed her, in Alanis’s eyes, from uncool into irredeemably sad.
“I’m starving,” declared Alanis, substantially less concerned with the ache of the transient and ephemeral than with the buffet, which was being served al fresco outside the main dining hall.
They were making their way over to join the other contestants when a weaselly looking man with a clipboard descended onthem from somewhere in the small city-state of technical vehicles and trailers that were parked on the less conspicuous side of the grounds.
“I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” he began in the tones of a man who was always sorry to bother you but would never allow his sorrow to detract from his bothersomeness. “Are you the journalist?”
He was looking directly at Alanis when he said it, which Audrey tried to blame on the light but which she suspected was more to do with the fact that serious reporters weren’t meant to get yanked around country estates by actual children.
“I’m the journalist,” Audrey clarified.
