As the minutes ticked by, it became clearer and clearer to Audrey that, much as she’d been dreading the idea of having to bake for five hours, having to bake for maybe two hours and sit in silence staring at a mixing bowl for the other three was way worse. Nothing quite encouraged you to stew in your own thoughts likestaring at a mixing bowl.
Was Jennifer right? Had Audrey become the kind of person who assumed her way was the only way? Of course, part of her job was guiding people to the conclusions she wanted them guided to, but there were some places you didn’t go and some lines you didn’t cross.
Sometimes, said Natalie,you’re right and other people are wrong, and they just have to live with that.
The problem was—and this was also something Natalie had frequently reminded her—Audrey didn’t have that confidence. At least, as one of the people just living with being wrong, she’d always thought it was confidence. From the other side, she wasn’t so sure.
In the end it was Linda who broke the filo stalemate, only managing to wait an hour and a half before the mounting pressure to do something, anything, other than sitting down waiting for the seconds to drain away overwhelmed her and she started frantically rolling her pastry into sheets. Most of the rest of them went at around the two-hour mark, which seemed comfortable, leaving them enough time to finish up their pastry without cutting too much into the pie-making window.
For a while, at least, assembling her pie gave Audrey something to do other than dwelling. But once it was in the oven, her choices were another round of unwelcome introspection or intrusively spying on the other contestants. She chose spying. But, unfortunately, there was very little to spy on. Alanis and Joshua were still giving each other looks that Audrey really hoped didn’t qualify as flirty, Doris was stacking all her things up neatly to make life easier for the techs who came and did the washing up, and Reggie was doodling something with that pencil he alwayscarried.
Despite what Natalie had said about her reality-TV-viewing habits, Audrey had always been deeply aware of the artificiality of the medium. And one thing that had struck her as particularly artificial was the sense of companionship you typically saw contestants displaying. The way people would be declaring that they’d made friends for life after one or two weekends making cakes in vague proximity and breaking down in tears at being parted from somebody that Audrey, watching from home, barely remembered was on the show. Except now she was here, she was realising that it was way less fake than she’d thought.
She was…investedin these people, and not how you were when you watched from home. They were part of her life. Well, part of part of her life. And it really did feel that there was a bond between them, forged by the whiplash mix of tedium and intensity that you got with filming. She was weirdly going to miss them: Reggie’s pencil and Meera’s quiet confidence and Linda’s nervous energy. And, of course, Alanis and Doris whose lives, in their own way, had drawn her in.
After what seemed at once far more and far less than five hours, the bakes came out of the oven—some looking sorrier for themselves than others and Audrey’s, to her relief, not looking especially sorry at all—and were set down at the front of the ballroom. And that was it. There was nothing to do now but wait for judging.
* * *
In the framing that Inveterate Productions had apparently chosen for the series, “a summer vegetable pie” was meant to be another simple task that the contestants were required to execute well. Inreality it had involved making filo pastry from both scratch and memory, making it quite technically complex, and not especially about nailing the basics.
This, Audrey suspected, would be quietly elided in editing. But it didn’t change the reality that it had been a tough challenge, and that performances had been decidedly mixed.
“Now this one,” Wilfred Honey was saying, looking at Linda’s pie with an air of sympathetic disappointment. “You can see that the pastry wasn’t let sit long enough, and that’s thrown the texture off. Which is a shame because it’s otherwise lovely. Whoever this was they just needed to have a little bit more nerve.”
Linda gave a perfect reaction. A shot that said,This is my arc for this season and I know it.
“This one,” Marianne Wolvercote took over narration, with much more disappointment and much less sympathy. “It’s too thin, so it’s fallen apart, and I don’t know quite how but the filling’s come out too moist.”
To Audrey’s relief, that wasn’t hers, although the next one, which was “too thick, just a touch, mind, but a touch matters” was, placing her firmly in the middle.
Doris, Joshua, and Alanis had all done well, although Reggie had just pipped them, which was about what Audrey would have expected from a man with his sense of precision. Meera’s never-using-store-bought-filo strategy, however, had paid off and put her comfortably at the top of the pack.
Afterwards, the remaining contestants gathered around the picnic benches either celebrating or lamenting their success or failure. Audrey’s little group, on this occasion, consisted of Alanis, Joshua, and a deeply despondent Linda.
“So,” Alanis was asking in a keeping-people’s-spirits-up kindof tone, “who do we think’s going all the way?”
“You,” said Joshua immediately, and apparently sincerely. “And I reckon you’re in with a chance as well,” he added to Linda.
Linda looked glum. “Not after today. I messed up really badly.”
“Your nerve went,” Joshua told her. “Happens to everybody.”
She looked unconvinced. “Didn’t happen to you.”
“Well, I think,” offered Alanis, with an encouraging smile, “that we’re all in with a good chance of making the final.”
Audrey—whose head was still twelve percent elsewhere—gave something a bit like a laugh. “That’s very diplomatic of you, since there’s only three people can be in it.”
“Which is why I saidchance.” Turning to Audrey, Alanis gave her a playfully challenging look. “But okay then. If you’re going to be like that. Who are yourexactly threechoices?”
To be fair, Audrey had sort of brought this one on herself. She shuffled slightly uncomfortably. “I do have some thoughts but, fair warning, they’re probably a bit unfun.”
Alanis blinked at her. “Wow, you’re really selling this.”
“Sorry. It’s my inner journalist. It tends to make me think about things from a very specific perspective.”
For the first time in three weeks, Joshua looked almost respectful. “Nothing wrong with thinking about things differently.”
