“I wrote you off the show because you spent the last three weeks doing everything in your power to get in my fucking head.”
Of this, Audrey had to admit that she was profoundly guilty. So naturally she didn’t. “I have not.”
“You have, and you know you have.”
“So itwaspersonal,” said Audrey in a tone of triumph she didn’t feel.
“I never said it wasn’t. But it was also the right call. You’re disrupting my show and I can’t have that.”
“You realise you aren’t the show?”
“That’s where you’re wrong, sunshine.”
Audrey was, she felt certain, just about to come back with the most devastating and appropriate retort ever retorted by a living human. But Jennifer slammed the door in her face before she got the chance. And so she was left standing there, the last dregs of sunlight draining over the horizon, wishing she was still angry.
Angry would have been a whole lot less confusing.
Week Four
Biscuits
Saturday
It was strange, not being at Patchley. Although given how things had gone with Jennifer, being there would have been massively worse.
That week at work had gone by quickly, Audrey letting Gavin know that she’d probably have to shelve the uplifting story about the nice old lady in the war because it had got weirdly steamy and run past VE Day. And now it was the weekend and Audrey was, for the first time in a month—more than a month, really, what with the anticipation and derustifying her baking skills before the competition even started—at a complete loose end.
She tried to tell herself that it was fine. That it was nice to have her time back. And in a way it was. Journalism—even not-especially-prestigious local journalism—was demanding enough without also trying to bake at a televised level and to use the access you got from baking at a televised level to dig into the personal history of one of the other contestants. And without the tension caused by your digging into the personal history of one of the other contestants creating a weird foe yay situation with theproducer of the televised show on which you were attempting to bake competitively.
In an absolute, objective sense, it really was good to have a free Saturday.
It was also kind of not.
Audrey had, she would be the first to admit, many faults, but she wasn’t a wallower. At least not a sit-around-your-house-not-knowing-what-to-do-with-yourself wallower. So on this particular loose-endy Saturday, she did what she always did when she felt herself sliding in a wallowy direction, and went for a walk.
Actually she went for a drive first, because while there were perfectly nice places to walk around Bridgnorth—that was the thing about Shropshire, it was perfectly nice all the way down—she had a nagging but sharply embedded desire to go back to Much Wenlock. To spend a while wandering around the fields and lanes she remembered from her childhood. To go back to Wenlock Priory and, this time, maybe not try to climb up it.
There was a strange timelessness to the British countryside. To all countryside, Audrey suspected. A time traveller from a hundred years ago, or two hundred, might notice a couple of things that were unfamiliar—if you looked in the right direction through the right set of trees you’d spot power lines, and the little roads that snaked between the fields had modern tarmac surfaces, although Audrey was pretty sure even they wouldn’t stand out to a visitor from, say, 1923.
But the more prosaic kind of temporal voyager, the kind who, like Audrey, had got here by the inevitable process of waiting while the past ticked by at a rate of one second per second into the future, could see barely anything different. The aggressivePrivate Property KEEP OUTsigns had certainly been replaced and updated in thepast couple of years to ensure they’d stay appropriately red and noticeable but they weren’t really any different than they’d always been. Than they’d been a decade and a half ago when Audrey and Natalie had cheerfully ignored them to go and lie down in whatever fields they fancied and talk about how they were going to fix the world.
“The thing is,” fifteen-years-ago-Natalie was saying, “we can’t stay in Much Wenlock forever. People justdon’t.”
And fifteen-years-ago-Audrey was trying to summon up the courage to say that she didn’t see anything so very wrong with staying in a lovely little village and being happy, although all she’d been able to manage was, “I think people do okay here, don’t they?”
And fifteen-years-ago-Natalie had come back with something like, “I swear, Aur, sometimes it’s like I don’t even know you.”
It still stung. A decade and a half later.
Strolling up to the priory proper, present-day-Audrey and fifteen-years-ago-Audrey walked hand in hand. It was still, she thought, one of her favourite places in the world. A garden in a ruin—bushes clipped into neat little shapes alongside wells that had long since run dry and walls that sheltered nothing any longer.
They’d fucked here, of course. She and Natalie. When they were seventeen and you had to pretend—at least Audrey had been pretending, though in retrospect she suspected Natalie had meant every word—that places like this were only interesting if you could have orgasms in them. And since fifteen-years-ago-Audrey had been every bit as sentimental as present-day-Audrey, there had been a kind of magic to it, for her at least. Feeling all at once so connected to a person and a place and a time.
She’d said as much to Natalie, and Natalie had laughed andcalled her an idiot, and then kissed her more sweetly than anybody ever had.
With her eyes closed, present-day-Audrey could still remember every detail. The taste of Natalie, the feel of her skin beneath her fingertips. The conviction that had been in Natalie’s voice even then that had eventually come to sound more like cruelty.
In those days, Audrey would have done anything for her. And she had.
