“London,” replied Doris in an accent strong enough to make the answer entirely self-evident. “Which ain’t a long way when you’re young but is a very long way when you’re nearly a hundred.”
Audrey tried and failed to stop her human-interest sensors from kicking in. “You’re nearly a hundred?”
“And to think I don’t look a day over ninety-three.” She grinned. “That Thrimp lad says I’m the oldest contestant they’ve ever had.”
The part of Audrey that lived permanently behind the curtain put that little factoid in her mental filing cabinet next to Alanis. Oldest Contestant And Youngest Contestant On Same Series was exactly the kind of harmless and ultimately meaningless gimmick you pulled out of the box for a season that, for some reason, had to be perfect. It was also the kind of thing that would be an amazing early scoop for theEchoand exactly the kind of thing she’d signed multiple contracts saying she wouldn’t tell anybody about before the series went to air. “You must’ve seen a lot,” she said.
Doris grew oddly quiet at that. “A bit but, I don’t know. Sometimes you wonder where it all goes.”
Despite being substantially further from her telegram from the king than Doris, Audrey could relate. She’d been wondering where it was all going since she was twenty at least.It went to a career, Natalie narrated from an unhelpful part of her psyche. A career you threw away.“Yeah.”
And thatdidmake Doris laugh. “And what do you know about it? I’ve got grandchildren your age.”
“Perhaps I’m an old soul,” suggested Audrey in what she hoped was a breezy tone.
“How about we swap your old soul for my old body?”
There didn’t seem to be a good answer to that. A strong desire to avoid lawsuits had made other people’s bodies a topic Audrey avoided on general principle. “It’s seen you all right so far.”
“True, I shouldn’t grumble. Still, whoever decided we were going to have to stay at the bottom of a great big hill and do all our filming at the top of the great big hill…” Doris heaved an exaggeratedly weary sigh. “Well they can go take a long walk off a short pier.”
Doris had said it lightly, but from Audrey’s perspective making a nearly hundred-year-old woman walk up and down a hill every day was a big fucking deal. And she was about to ask Doris if she thought maybe something should be done about it when she was cut off by the sudden swarm of people with headset mics and clipboards who zoomed in to shepherd everybody off to hair and makeup.
* * *
Audrey had been right. Broadcast media was indeed even more hurry up and wait than print media. Hair and makeup had taken well over an hour, most of which was standing around doing nothing. They’d then been sent up to the ballroom where the show was to be filmed for a briefing that didn’t actually begin until half an hour after everybody was assembled.
When itdidbegin, it consisted of Colin Thrimp coming in and telling them all the basic rules of filming—don’t look into the camera, don’t swear on camera, when people ask you a question,answer it as if you aren’t answering a question—and then Jennifer Hallet coming in and telling them the exact same information, only with more swearing and threats.
“And one more thing,” she added like a vulgar executive Columbo, “this is season eight. Which means a lot of people are getting bored as piss of this formula and as a result I have bent overfucking backwardsto pick contestants who I expect tosparkle. And so you shower of arseholes hadbetterfucking sparkle or I will personally go to each of your grannies’ houses and tell them what miserable fucking disappointments their grandkids are.”
“My gran died in nineteen fifty-four,” said Doris from the row of otherwise-cowed-into-silence contestants.
“Oh, don’t you think for onesecondthat’ll stop me. I’ll dig her up and say it to her fuckingskull.”
Audrey hadalmostconvinced herself that she could learn to like Jennifer Hallet. That she was that rarest of creatures, an authority figure who actually did respond well to pushback. But hearing her threaten personal retribution to the corpse of a nonagenarian’s grandmother rather took the shine off.
Back when Audrey had been in London with Natalie and everything that entailed, she’d had a boss very muchlikeJennifer Hallet. For a while she’d let herself believe that she’d be able to earn his respect if she just ate enough shit with a big enough smile, but she’d eventually worked out that he wasn’t challenging her, just bullying her. He’d been a huge part of the reason she’d decided that the run-to-the-city-and-never-look-back path that most of her school friends andallof her university friends had taken was supremely not for her. The breakup had been part of it too, of course, but three-years-ago Audrey insisted it wasn’t the biggest part and present-day Audrey went along with it for the sake of her self-esteem.
I think you’ll find, Natalie’s voice was saying,it was the other way around.We didn’t work because you couldn’t hack it.And I wanted so much better for you.
Either way, what did it matter? It was only eight weeks. She could put up with a hot, shouty woman for eight weeks. Probably less than that given how stiff the competition looked and how likely it was that they were setting this season up for an oldest-versus-youngest challenge in the finale. Privately, Audrey gave herself until week five.
“So if you’ve got that into your tiny, squishy minds,” Jennifer Hallet was finishing, “then we’re ready for you to go to your stations, look confused but pretty, and act all awestruck when the—and, I use this termveryadvisedly—celebrities come in.” She bent down to speak into a microphone. “Colin, send in the judges and that overpaid RADA dropout we call a presenter.”
There was a brief changing of the guard as Jennifer swept out and Grace Forsythe, the long-serving host who—she took pains to inform everybody the moment she entered—did not in fact drop out of RADA, swept in. The judges followed her, and they too were, by now, long established. Wilfred Honey was the smell of fresh-baked bread given human form by a capricious wizard, while Marianne Wolvercote was to patisserie what the Queen had been to England. Which was to say, she was the queen of it. The cameras, Audrey knew, would already have started rolling, but a sad fact of the digital age was that they no longer made a satisfying clicky-whirry noise when they did. The operators just started acting a whole lot more like they were paying attention.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” Grace Forsythe began, “viewers, young”—Audrey was ninety percent sure she could spot which camera was lingering on Alanis for that bit—“andold”—here they’d cut to Doris—“to this, the eighth season ofBake Expectations. We’ve been through a lot together—me, Marianne, Wilfred, our eighty contestants and our beautiful, beautiful audience—but this season, we’re going back to basics. No frills. No sleight of hand. No tricks. All we are going to want you to do is demonstrate that you are the best amateur bakers Britain has to offer, and we’re starting—as Julie Andrews would have it—at the very beginning. And so, my delightful droplets of dulce de leche, for your first blind bake of the season, we are going to ask you to make a simple, a classic, and an absolutelyperfectVictoria sponge.”
A ripple of ill-advised relief spread through the other contestants. But much as it might ruin the shot, Audrey’s brain couldn’t make her face play ball. Therehadto be another shoe to drop here. In the last couple of seasons, the blind bakes had grown increasingly esoteric—so esoteric that disgruntled but social-media averse fans had taken to complaining to newspapers about them. Back at work, Audrey knew for a fact that there was a file—a literal physical file because a surprising number of people, especially complaint-minded people, still wrote literal physical letters—full of people who were upset about the Saint Honoré Cake last season.
“You have one hour,” Grace Forsythe concluded. “Starting from the count of three.Three, darlings.”
Audrey turned over the recipe, and there was the other shoe.
The recipe read:Make a Victoria sponge.
Which was fine. It was fine. Everybody knew how to make a Victoria sponge. At least everybody who baked to a level that they’d be selected forBake Expectationsknew how to make a Victoria sponge. It was a test of nerve more than anything else. The secret would be to stop second-guessing, try to forget the cameras were there, and throw yourself into the recipe you knew was right.
