On the Saturday of the fourth week of filming the eighth season ofBake Expectations, Audrey Lane was leaning by a stone wall at Wenlock Priory, her face turned to the sun. On the day of her A-level results she was tangled with Natalie in an alcove in the same ruin and learning what it was to love somebody who would always be just a little beyond you. In 1947 Doris and Emily were meeting for the first time in three years, and in 680 Merewalh, king of Magonseate, was ordering the construction of a monastery that in 1080 Roger de Montgomery was refounding and in 1540 Henry the Eighth was dissolving. And for all those thousand years, families and friends and monks and nuns and puritans and lovers were walking under these stones and looking up at this sunlight and standing on this ground and—it was a carrying away feeling, an anywhere-but-here feeling, and if she’d wanted to, Audrey could have stayed lost in it all day.
To some extent, shedidwant to. It would stop her thinking about the show, about Doris and Alanis (were they both doing okay?), about Jennifer Hallet (what the fuck was going on there? with both of them?), about the enigmatic Emily Branningham, and about bloody Natalie. But spending the whole of Saturday absorbing the melancholic immensity of everywhen was probably a touch on the self-indulgent side. Besides, she was backhome—in the where-she-was-born sense rather than the where-she-lived-now sense—and if her parents found out she’d been in Much Wenlock without stopping by, there’d be hell to pay.
Well, okay, maybe not hell. Her parents weren’t really the hell-to-pay type.
* * *
“Audrey, love, you’ve come at the worst time,” said Audrey’s mum as she was opening the door. It was a pretty standard greeting in their household.
And the standard response was to sigh and say, “What’s he done now?”
From a little way into the house, her father’s voice echoed from up, under, or inside something. “Downstairs loo.”
“Whataboutthe downstairs loo?” Audrey asked in an I-dread-to-ask tone.
“Painting it.”
“Eleven years,” Audrey’s mum said between furrowed brows and folded arms. “He’s been saying he was going to do it foreleven yearsand what’s the weekend he picks? The weekend our only daughter was kicked off the telly. He won’t learn.”
“She wasn’t kicked off this weekend,” argued Audrey’s dad from the loo-ey depths. “She was kicked off last weekend. And we said then that we’d be here if she wanted to come by, and she didn’t, so I thought, well, why don’t I use the time to do something useful…” His voice grew momentarily muffled then louder as he came to join the rest of the family in the hallway.
“And will you look at him?” added Audrey’s mum.
Audrey did, and the sight was a reassuringly typical one. Herfather was a short man, balding, and usually covered in something. In this case, the something was paint in an unfortunately lavatorial shade of dark brown.
Audrey shook her head at the mess that was apparently her father. “What have you beendoing?”
“Painting.” On the one hand, it was a materially correct answer. On the other, it didn’t quite explain why he’d looked like he’d been dipped in…for comfort’s sake, Audrey went with chocolate.
“And”—Audrey tried to phrase the next part as delicately as she could because insulting her parents’ decorative choices wasn’t necessarily what she was here to do—“is itallthat colour?”
“It’s what your mother wanted,” explained her father.
“It bloody well was not,” replied her mother.
“Taupe, you said.”
“I saidteal.”
“Ooh, you never did.”
Eventually, the parental instinct to avoid leaving their child standing on a doorstep overrode the Lanes’ matrimonial instinct to bicker about paint colours, and they ushered Audrey inside to the sitting room where Audrey’s mum sat down while Audrey’s dad went off to make tea.
“Are you very disappointed?” her mum asked with that slight excess of concern that Audrey had always found strangely comforting.
“Honestly, not really?” It felt almost like a confession. “At least not about the competition. I think I could have made it a couple more weeks, but I don’t think I’d have ever got near the final.”
Audrey’s mum leaned forward to give her an encouraging pat. “I’m sure you would, love, you’re very good.”
It was nice to hear but not, Audrey felt, remotely true. “Notcompared to some of the other contestants. There’s a girl there who’s only sixteen and already well out of my league.”
“I won’t hear it.” Audrey’s mum was holding up her hand in that highly specific way that suggested you should talk to it because of the face’s relative disinterest.
“Won’t hear what?” asked Audrey’s dad, who came in still empaintened but now at least bearing teacups on a little tray.
“She says that there’s a sixteen-year-old girl on the show who’s a better baker than she is.”
Setting the cups down, Audrey’s dad gave an apologetic smile. “Well I suppose she’d know. And that girlisstill in the competition.”
