“Not if she gets out of bed early enough.” For all the cynicism in Jennifer’s voice, Audrey was beginning to think she was cracking. This was sounding more like spite-by-numbers.
“And what about insurance? What if she has a fall?”
“Check y—”
“Yes, yes, we’ve all signed a bunch of waivers. And I’m sure if a ninety-something-year-old woman breaks a hip on the set of your family-friendly baking show, that won’t reflect badly on youat all.”
For once, Jennifer Hallet didn’t have a reply. Or at least, she didn’t have a reply beyond, “You are a fucking piece of work.”
“You know,” said Audrey sweetly, “I think I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Because, in a strange way, she did.
In place of an answer, Jennifer made an incoherent noise of frustration, then stormed off back to her trailer muttering a stream of mostly inaudible invective. Audrey just about caught the words “manipulatively tenacious.”
Which, again, from Jennifer, felt like a compliment.
Sunday
“Welcome,” Grace Forsythe was saying, “to the second baketacular of the season. In keeping with our back to basics, or should I saybaketo basics”—she waggled her eyebrows—“theme, we’re asking for something as simple as it is sumptuous. As austere as it is au…ncredible. There’ll be no bells or whistles to hide behind here. Wilfred and Marianne want you to make rolls. Twenty-four beautiful rolls of which half should besweetand half should besavoury. Which means, yes my lovelies, we want you to spend the next four hours showing us all your buns and your baps.” She turned her head slightly to camera. “And to think this goes out before the watershed. As always, your time starts on three.Three, darlings.”
Still a little—a little what exactly? Triumphant? On edge? Flushed?—a little whatever from her apparently successful confrontation with Jennifer Hallet the night before, Audrey took a beat or two to get her focus back on the competition.
The tricky thing with this kind of challenge was multitasking. Neither bake by itself was that complex, but the two of them together made for some fiddly questions of timing. The sweetrolls were harder to make, but the savoury dough required a longer rise, so that was where she started, mixing a blend of white and wholemeal bread flour in a bowl and rubbing through butter and salt.
While getting distracted by all the interesting things other people were doing hadn’t exactly served Audrey well so far, she still took advantage of the current, relatively mindless, step in the bake to…get distracted by all the interesting things other people were doing. On one side of the ballroom, the man she remembered asReggiehad taken a pencil out from behind his ear and was making some very complex notes on a sheet of paper. On another, the woman Audrey had filed as Linda—about Audrey’s age, permanently harried expression—was expositing her concerns to the camera.
“I’m doing cinnamon rolls,” she was saying, “and I know that’s really too simple and probably I’ll get marked down for it, but I’m also making spinach and cheese rolls and those need two separate proofs and I think that’ll probably be fine, but the lights make it hotter and that might mess things up and—”
Grace Forsythe swept in from out of shot. “Well this looksfascinating.” It wasn’t especially, but Audrey had a glimmering suspicion that she was just saying something, anything, to keep Linda from spiralling. “And I’m so sorry, I missed what you were telling us.” A pause, just long enough that the prompt could be edited out to make for a smoother, less humiliating piece of television. “What’re you making for sweet?”
“Cinnamon rolls.”
“Wonderful.” Although having saidwonderful, Grace made an exaggerated grimace. “But am I right in thinking thatcinnamon rollis some kind of awfulmemething that I’m far too old and pastit to understand?”
Linda nodded and blinked back what had been the beginnings of tears. “It sort of meansvery nice person. I’m not sure where it comes from, though.”
“Darling I assure you,noneof us are sure whereanythingcomes from, so in that regard you are in theverybest company.”
A little concerned that at least one contestant was making something notably more complex than she was, even discounting whatever Reggie was doing that apparently involved a slide rule, Audrey returned to her bake. She added yeast, sugar, and warm water, and began kneading the mixture into dough.
She could probably have used a dough hook, but the time they’d been given was generous and Alanis had been right, there was something satisfying about making your own bread. Something you could get lost in.
And so Audrey let herself get lost.
* * *
Despite having worked in a very time-hungry medium for a decade now, Audrey was still a bit surprised at how quickly four hours turned into zero hours. She took her rolls out of the oven and then stepped away so that the professional making-food-look-good people could film her creations from flattering angles. Privately, it was one of the things she was looking forward to the most: watching the series back with her mum and dad and getting to see something she’d baked herself put under lighting that made it look TV good instead of pretty-decent-home-cooking good.
Outside, everybody was gathered on the steps leading down to the garden. It was one of those awkward filming breaks, too shortto do anything useful, too long to not be annoying. There was something of a generational split, with the older contestants standing around making polite small talk about yeast and the younger generation taking the opportunity to catch up on whatever social media they’d been missing out on while wrist deep in sweet dough. Every so often Alanis and Joshua would exchange a glance, which Audrey was just online enough to recognise as theyou’ve sent me something I think is coollook.
Watching the little exchange took enough of Audrey’s attention that when Doris popped up behind her and said, “So I’ve given it a think,” she gave a frankly embarrassing jump.
“And?” She turned, trying not to sound too eager or anxious.
“And I figure why not. Might be nice to talk about the old days.”
For something that had been, on some level, a whim of the moment, Audrey felt surprisingly relieved. Perhaps it was just that it would have been really embarrassing to fuck up something as basic as “convince an old lady to talk about the blitz.” Only, talking to Doris had been—well, honestly, she wasn’t sure what it had been. Intriguing? Interesting? Nice?Stop calling thingsnice,Audrey, said Natalie.It’s a meaningless word and you know better.
