“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Alain told her.
“You see, it was Schroedinger’s tractor.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I had a glass of wine while we were arguing about ceps.”
“Why were you arguing about sex with Anvita and Harry?”
“Not sex. Ceps.” Rosaline had just about managed to calm down, but this set her off again. “Because he thought they were a bean and I thought they were a caper—”
“They’re a mushroom,” interrupted Alain.
“I know. We checked. And also coco beans aren’t cocoa beans. And the tractor wasn’t a tractor and the bull,” she finished triumphantly, “was a goat.”
There was a long silence.
“I’m glad,” Alain said finally, “you had fun. But that made very little sense and you’re still getting mud on me.”
“Sorry.”
She pulled off her blouse, which she’d intended primarily as a practical gesture rather than an erotic one, but Alain—his eyes darting to her breasts—seemed less concerned by the distinction. They kissed again, and Alain unhooked her bra, and they fell back on the bed together.
And afterwards, Rosaline lay in the dark with her head nestled against Alain’s shoulder wondering what the fuck was wrong with her. Because she liked sex. She liked sex with Alain. And yet the whole time she’d only been half-there, constantly having to drag her mind back to the room she was in.
Instead of wondering what Harry and Anvita were talking about in the bar. Or remembering how it felt to fly across the field in the dark like there was nothing in the world that could hold her back.
Anvita exulting in her ceps-related triumph.
Harry blushing as he let them tease him about his mermaid cake.
The way he’d moved so carefully around her kitchen, like he didn’t want to take up her space. The way he just accepted that Amelie was part of her life. The deep rumble of his voice when he said “All right, mate” as if it was their secret.
How warm his brown eyes could be. His broad shoulders. That slow half-smile that seemed at once so shy and so knowing.
Sunday
“...CANNOT BELIEVE,” JENNIFER Hallett was saying, while Harry, Anvita, and Rosaline were lined up in front of her like naughty schoolchildren, “that you pack of maladjusted oven-fuckers are forcing me to negotiate a pissing out-of-court settlement over a traumatised goat.”
“Hey now.” Anvita was the first to speak up. “If anything, the goat traumatised us.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your trauma. I give a fuck that you were fucking trespassing. Because, funnily enough, if something happens in the local area when we’re filming the show, it comes back on the show. And when I get an angry call from a farmer the same night you three bewildered cockmanglers limp home covered in mud it is not hard for me to work out whose tits and/or balls I have to nail to the fucking table.” Jennifer Hallet started pacing. “And if you’d bothered to read your contracts, my little sacks of shit and sunshine, you’d know you’re supposed to behave in a way that supports the values of Bake Expec-fucking-tations. Which means, and I can’t believe I’m having to fucking say this, you don’t do any fucking crimes.” She kept pacing. “My job is to make you look like the kind of adorable pieces of flaccid scrotum that my Tory auntie could take to her bridge club, and I can’t do that if you’re on page three of the Mail naked in someone else’s field ramming chickens up each other’s rectums.”
A little shocked, Harry put up his hands. “Wait a minute. We didn’t do nothing to no chickens.”
“Nor,” added Rosaline quickly, “I really want to clarify, to each other’s rectums.”
Jennifer Hallet stopped pacing. But it was only to glare. “You three had better be on your best fucking behaviour until next fucking season. And if I see so much as a slightly insensitive tweet from any of you, I’ll sue you so hard your grandkids will be selling blow jobs to pay your legal fees.”
Coming to an unspoken consensus there wasn’t much they could say to that, they hurried away to grab something resembling breakfast and then were hustled into the ballroom to start filming for what promised to be a gruelling day of baking.
Although it was a macaron challenge, Rosaline was starting with the cake. Because while macarons were fiddly, you could actually make them fairly quickly, and the last thing she wanted was to be serving up a plate of macarons next to an unfinished pile of sponge pieces.
“The trouble is,” she told Colin Thrimp without being asked, “I’ve somehow reached the stage of the competition where the things I’m being asked to make aren’t things that fit in my kitchen. So, while I’ve practised all the elements, the finished product is a bit theoretical.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Marianne Wolvercote had clearly scented weakness from the other side of the room. And now she pounced. “This is week six, Rosaline.”
“I know, but I also couldn’t risk doing something”—Rosaline tried to strike a balance between I’m taking on feedback and I’m being passive-aggressive—“joyless.”
Marianne Wolvercote arched a single cold eyebrow. “Very wise.”
“So what have you got in store for us?” asked Wilfred Honey.
“Well, I’m doing a simple three-layered chocolate cake with a Swiss meringue buttercream, but the icing is going to have a sort of dark-blue marbled space effect, and I’m going to make macaron planets, and then dust the whole thing with edible glitter so it looks all starry.”
Wilfred Honey nodded approvingly. “That sounds very nice, pet.”
“And of course,” Marianne Wolvercote added, in that tone that made it weirdly hard to tell approval from contempt, “marbled buttercream is very in right now.”
“Yep, that’s me.” Rosaline gave a kind of awkward thumbs-up. “Totally on fleek. Um, I meant that ironically. People are going to know I meant that ironically, right?”
Wilfred Honey now just looked confused. “What’s a fleek?”
“Nobody knows, darling,” drawled out Grace Forsythe. “It’s the Voynich manuscript of the modern age.”
“I’m not sure I know what that is either,” Wilfred Honey admitted.
Grace Forsythe got that I went to Cambridge, darling look on her face. “Neither does anybody else. That was rather the joke.”
“Well”—Wilfred Honey got that I’m from Yorkshire, don’t fuck with me look on his face—“my mam always said that if you’d have to explain it to the milkman, it’s not funny.”
Still bickering, the party moved on, leaving Rosaline to finish her sponge. The atmosphere in the ballroom was pretty tense, but she couldn’t tell if it was because it was a big challenge or because they were so close to the semifinal or because sixty percent of the competitors had spent their morning being chewed out by the producer for holding an imaginary goat orgy.
“I think,” Alain was saying from his workstation, “that this is going to come down to flavours. I’m guessing most people will do chocolate or vanilla, so I’m hoping I’ll stand out because the whole thing is shot through with a hint of matcha. So it’s a matcha green tea sponge with a matcha buttercream . . .”