“I have no idea what happened,” he said in his interview afterwards. “I’ve never heard of that pie, I’ve never seen that pie, I’ve never eaten that pie. Didn’t have a clue what I was doing. But I guess it paid off. Because I won.”
By contrast, Florian seemed a little down. “Well, it was a simple mistake, albeit one with profound consequences. In fact, I’m taking it rather poorly. I’m not at all used to being on the bottom. Oh my, can I say that on television?”
Rosaline’s own interview involved muttering “I think it went okay” about six different ways and trying not to sound too deflated because she really had no reason to. Assuming she didn’t totally screw up tomorrow, or Florian didn’t utterly nail it, she was pretty sure she wasn’t in danger, but all she’d managed to prove so far was that she wasn’t bad enough to get eliminated immediately. Which wasn’t even a little bit the same as being good enough to win.
“You all right, mate?” asked Harry, who’d also just finished saying he thought things went okay, but had, at least, got to say it in front of a rhododendron.
She sighed. “Yeah. I shouldn’t be complaining, but I hoped I’d done better.”
“Well, you didn’t win. But you didn’t lose either.” Tucking his hands into his pockets, he hunched his shoulders slightly. “Consistency like that gets you into the semifinals.”
“But only as the boring one who they never quite got around to kicking out.”
He gave her that ridiculously sweet and perfect grin. “Hey, that’s my strategy you’re having a go at.”
“For what it’s worth,” Rosaline told him, laughing, “I don’t think you’re going to be remembered as the boring one.”
“Why? What one do you think I’m going to be?”
There was no good answer to that. Because while she’d been happy to playfully imply he’d be remembered as “the hot one,” there was no way she could say it to his face. “Ask Anvita.”
He looked comically dismayed. “I’m not sure I want to know now.”
“No, it’s—” At that moment she caught sight of Alain coming up from the Lodge, and for the first time that day, he was looking at something other than his workstation. He was, in fact, looking at her. “No, it’s good,” she finished absently.
Alain lifted his hand in greeting. “Rosaline. Hi.”
“Hi.” She tried to sound casual and collected, like they were both totally the sort of person who could kiss somebody and then go a whole day without speaking to them.
Harry gave one of those man-to-man nods. “All right, mate? Well done last week.”
“Oh yes, thank you.” Alain’s brows arched their shadiest arch. “Your praise means the world to me.”
There was a slightly weird lull in the conversation because Rosaline had a bunch of things she really wanted to say—such as, Are you ignoring me? and Am I a terrible kisser?—but couldn’t with Harry standing right there. And Harry himself was either incapable of recognising sarcasm or unwilling to rise to it.
“Got something else fancy planned for tomorrow?” he asked finally.
Alain laughed. “I like that you think basil is a fancy ingredient. But I actually wanted to see if Rosaline felt like coming for a walk. Of course if you’re”—his eyes flicked between the two of them—“busy, then I can see you later.”
Busy? What kind of evening did he think she was likely to have planned with an electrician whose primary interests seemed to be Spurs and long silences? Rosaline took a sharp step away from Harry, hoping she hadn’t given anyone the wrong impression. “Oh no, we’d just finished our interviews and got chatting. A walk would be lovely.”
“Have a nice evening, mate.” Harry also did the “no wrong impressions” backstep. “You too, Alain.”
Rosaline followed Alain across the lawn, away from the main house. They seemed to be taking a different route from last time, down a slightly overgrown path towards a little knot of trees and a mound of stones piled up in an arch. And it was another balmy summer’s evening, with the sky swirled into a perfect watercolour and the air heavy with the scent of pollen and meadow flowers. She’d say this for Alain, he certainly knew how to take a girl for a walk.
“What I find fascinating about these old houses,” Alain remarked, “is the way they accumulate the trends and fashions of centuries.”
It wasn’t something she’d ever considered before. But then she hadn’t been around a stately home since her parents had stopped dragging her to them when she was a kid. “Oh yes. I suppose they do.”
“The thing with people”—Alain sounded unexpectedly sincere—“is that you only ever see them as they’re presenting themselves, and their context always has to be the world you find them in. But buildings are different. They reflect every self they’ve ever been.”
“Do you think so?” she asked.
“Well, take this house.”
“What about it?”
There was, Rosaline thought, something captivating in hearing somebody talk about their passions—it felt intimate, like they were giving you access to some slightly tender part of themselves. Of course, with Lauren it had always been pussy and words, so architecture was a nice change of pace.
“In the late eighteen hundreds,” Alain told her, “it was fashionable to have a hermit living on your property. Unfortunately, people who wanted one were confronted by the tiny detail that there weren’t actually any hermits anymore. So what they’d do was build something they could call a hermitage, and if anyone asked, they’d say the hermit wasn’t in at the moment.”
Rosaline considered this. “Hang on a second. A person who lives on their own but regularly goes out to get stuff or do things isn’t a hermit. They’re just single.”
“Which would probably have been a point of contention had the hermit existed.”
“It should have been a point of contention anyway. Because people would go, Hey, where’s your hermit?, and you’d say Oh, he’s nipped down the shops, and they’d say, Well, he’s not a hermit then is he?”
“I think,” said Alain, laughing, “that’s more or less what happened. So landowners took to hiring people to live in their hermitages and pretend to be hermits.”
Rosaline slanted a smile at him. “Honestly, I’ve had worse jobs.” They stepped into what appeared to be an actual grotto—a slightly crumbling archway, twined about with ivy, the rocks velveted with moss.
“You say that, except”—Alain gestured around them—“you’d have had to live somewhere like this.”
It was rather pretty at the moment, with the dappled light and the warm breeze, but it was small enough to really put her kitchen into perspective. “Okay, maybe I haven’t had worse jobs.”
“You see what I mean, though?” Alain’s voice had softened in the green-shaded gloom. “About the way history accretes to places like this?”
It was quite a change to go from talking with a man who said “ain’t” to a man who said “accretes.” “Doesn’t it accrete to people, too, though? After all, I might not still wear the leather pencil skirt I had when I was sixteen, but I wouldn’t be who I am now if I hadn’t been who I was then.”