Having not yet had the optimism knocked out of her by life, Alanis took that at face value and perked up considerably. So considerably, in fact, that she was soon hugging Audrey with such a well-practiced combination of gratitude and dismissal that she suspected she was sliding back from the “me” box into the “myparents” box. Which at least meant she could go back to her room without worrying that she’d abandoned a child to despair beneath an ironically picturesque tree.
It was a pleasant walk down to the Lodge, almost an amble. And putting thoughts of baking aside—probably too far aside, given she was on a baking competition—Audrey wound her way through the grounds, stopping now and then to look back up at the Patchley House. It was partly just a fan instinct; she’d been watching the show since season one and it always, always opened with the same panning shot of the manor, and so there was a strange sense of reality-unreality to seeing it in the flesh.
But on another level, it had nothing to do with the show at all. Since long before Audrey had made her parents call 999 to get her rescued from the walls of Wenlock Priory, she’d been fascinated by the past. Or perhaps not by the past, exactly, so much as the things that called back to it. Those out-of-place relics and incomplete bridges; ruins that let you imagine all the stories in the world through the holes in their sides. Of course sometimes, for some people, the holes were all you had.
She wasn’t a historian, so she had no idea how old Patchley House actually was—it could have been anything from Tudor to Edwardian and she’d have put it in that same category of long-time-ago-but-not-so-long-ago-they-had-jesters. Still, there was something strange about the thought that this was a place people had built, that people had lived in, that was now being used for a purpose none of those people could possibly have imagined.
It was like nostalgia, only for things that had happened to somebody else. There was a sense of loss to the feeling, in some ways—although Audrey wasn’t quite such a romantic that she could say she pined for the days of domestic service and tuggingforelocks—and gain in others. What had once been the exclusive purview of the landed gentry was now creating something for everybody. Well, for everybody who watchedBake Expectations. And, she supposed, really to make money for a largely amoral media company.
But if you ignored the whole capitalism angle, it was rather a beautiful thought.
There was a story she remembered, although she couldn’t recall where she’d heard it or from whom, about somebody who’d met an old man at a dinner party in the 1980s, and the old man had shaken his hand and then said, “You have just met a man who once met a woman who once danced with Napoleon.” Audrey had no idea if it had really happened, or even if the numbers added up—it would need to have involved some lucky overlaps of some very old people with some very young people. But, as a journalist, she was keenly aware of the difference betweenfactualandtrue. And itdidcapture something true, something about the way that people and places and things formed this strange, tangled chain across time. Something that, if you looked hard enough and went far enough, connected everybody to everybody else.
Theoretically anyway. But in practice those dances through time tended to go boy-girl-boy-girl unless you looked really hard. And even if youdidlook really hard, you’d get people telling you that you were making shit up. After all, what with the world being what it was, you were extremely unlikely to meet a man at dinner and have him say, “You’ve just shaken hands with a man who once fucked a guy who was once one of Oscar Wilde’s rent boys.” Which was ironic in a way because Bosie’s boyfriend probably banged more people than Napoleon danced with.
Sighing, Audrey stared up at the house and tried to imagineit as it used to be, when it was a house instead of a hotel, and then whatever it was before that—probably a different sort of stately home. Or a monastery. Or a Roman fort. Or an empty hillside where long ago druids gathered to greet the twilight and the dawn. And then, as she always did, she tried to imagine herself there. Or someone like her.
Except that just made her feel sad. Because while she’d done the research and knew the talking points—blah, blah molly houses; blah, blah ladies of Llangollen; blah, blah Alexander; blah, blah Sappho—it didn’t actually help. It was like trying to get drunk on other people’s empties. Or build a jigsaw from pieces of other jigsaws. What stories could she tell when that was all she had? How could anyone find belonging in fragments?
* * *
About halfway up the hill between the Lodge and the house proper was a log that had been placed to give people somewhere to sit that married artificial convenience with a natural aesthetic. And when Audrey trudged back to the hotel for dinner, it was occupied by Doris. She was sitting gazing up at the stars and, if Audrey was any judge, breathing a little heavily.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
It took a moment for Doris to register her. “Fine, fine. Just giving the old plates a rest.”
Audrey had never actually heard somebody using cockney rhyming slang in the wild, but she adjusted. “Going for dinner?”
“In a bit.”
Looking down the hill back to the Lodge and then up the hill back to the house, Audrey did a quick mental calculation ofthe distance. Well, not calculation, so much as estimate. Well, not estimate so much as blind guess. “It’s a trek, isn’t it?”
“Nothing wrong with a long walk.”
“I mean, therecanbe, if it’s long enough.”
With a stifledoomph, Doris raised herself off the log. “Now, now dear, there’s no need to be silly about things. I’ve been slogging up and down hills my whole life and it’s never done me any harm.”
Audrey was no expert, but she suspected that at least seven of the nine most harmful things in the world were things that people insisted had never done them any harm. “Maybe not, but there’s a first time for everything.”
“Oh hush.” Doris gave her what she thought was a playfully stern look. “We’ll be late for supper if we don’t hoof it.”
So they hoofed it. Or at least they came as close to hoofing it as they could while going up a relatively steep incline when one of them was nearly a hundred years old. Which was to say, they progressed slowly but cheerfully, with Doris chatting away in the manner of somebody used to having to fill long walks.
“She’s a pretty thing, isn’t she?”
“Who?” asked Audrey, a little confused.
“Patchley. One of the prettiest houses in England I’ve always thought. I wish my Bobby could be around to see her.”
“Bobby?” A mix of professional training and basic humaning had taught Audrey that people opened up more when you echoed at them.
“My husband.”
“Fan of the show?”
Doris laughed, sadly. “No. Never watched it. He’s been gone more than twenty years.”
