“This,” she said with a slight tremor in her voice, “is a beef bourguignon savoury pie, and a summer apple sweet pie.”
“Puff pastry was a risk in the time,” Marianne Wolvercote told her, cracking the pastry lid of the beef bourguignon and then peering at it like a coroner at an autopsy. “And I don’t think it’s entirely worked. I’d have expected better lamination and it’s alittleunderbaked.”
Audrey didn’t have the best view from her bench, but from the tone she suspected that “a little underbaked” was an understatement.
With an unerring instinct for the right time to good-cop, Wilfred Honey dug in and chewed. “Although I think Marianneisright about your pastry,” he said gently, “your filling has cooked well, and it’s got a real richness of flavour to it that I like a lot.”
“And the apple pie is much better executed,” MarianneWolvercote added. “Although it isverysimple, it’s well baked and”—she took a forkful—“it has a pleasing tartness, but we are looking for alittlemore from you, even this early.”
“I think it caught a bit,” Alanis admitted, looking shamefacedly at a corner of singed crust that she’d made an obvious-now-she-pointed-it-out attempt to cover up with icing sugar.
“Word to the wise, darling,” volunteered Grace Forsythe from the sidelines. “They already know, and if they’ve not mentioned it, you probably shouldn’t either.”
Alanis nodded, by now visibly shaky.
Wilfred Honey had gone full grandfather-to-the-nation. “Well, I think they’re both smashing. There’s a couple of mistakes, but I’m a straightforward man and a beef and mushroom pie followed by an apple pie is my idea of a proper dinner.”
His tone was gentle but reading between the lines—and also, for that matter, reading a few of the actual lines—it was pretty clear that Alanis hadn’t done well that week, and she walked back to her bench looking somewhere between downcast and devastated.
When the judges retired to deliberate, the contestants gathered around to share their congratulations, commiserations, and fears.
“You’ll be okay,” Linda was saying to Alanis. “I did badly, too, and, well”—she glanced up at Audrey—“I think she’s right about them wanting you for the final.”
This, Audrey felt, had dropped her right in it. Everybody was turning to her now with looks of nervous confusion.
“What do you know?” asked Jim, a little warily.
“Nothing.”
This didn’t convince anybody.
“I’ve just”—Audrey made a frantic attempt to de-escalate—“watched a lot of reality TV.”
Alanis was looking at Audrey with unhelpful faith. “She’s in media. She understands how these things work.”
“I’m in local journalism,” explained Audrey. “I’m not an expert.”
“No, but…” Linda looked so sheepish that she was at serious risk of winding up in a traditional roast dinner. “What you said yesterday. It made sense.”
“What made sense?” This was Jim, still more warily.
“It’s not big a deal,” said Audrey. “Obviously a show like this needs characters and arcs, and one of the more obvious arcs theycouldbe going for is oldest contestant versus youngest contestant.”
Meera frowned. “Now you’ve said it, that does make sense. Although it also makes the whole competition feel a bit pointless.”
De-escalation had spectacularly failed. “It’s not pointless,” said Audrey, as firmly as she could. “Mostly the judgeswillbe basing their decisions on how well you do. It’s just there’s, you know, wiggle room.”
“Wiggle room?” It sounded worse when Jim said it.
“Only in the sense”—help—“that there’s no objective criteria that the judges are actually held to. They’re the only people who taste the bakes. They get to decide what’s too simple and what’s too ambitious, if the flavours compensate for the appearance, things like that.”
Everyone was nodding. But not in a we-get-that-this-is-complex way. More in a we’ve-just-learned-about-the-doomsday-planes way.
“So really”—double help—“the only rule is that what the judges say goes. Which meansifthere happened to be a situationwhere, say, two bakes were mostly even and it made a better story for them to pick one over the other, then they’d be able to…wiggle?”
There was a long, long silence.
Then Linda straightened her spine and put a reassuring hand on Alanis’s shoulder. “There you go. It’s going to be me, not you.”
