“Yeah. I get men don’t like being turned down for sex, but that’s a level of pettiness I was genuinely not prepared for.”
“I reckon it was tactical. I mean, he’s obviously narked he didn’t get to have a threesome with you, but he also takes the competition way too seriously and I think he saw a chance to get rid of someone what could beat him.”
She was about to say something reflexively self-deprecating, but then she changed her mind. “You know, I think I can kick his arse. There’s only so many times you can put handpicked lovage in something that doesn’t need it.”
“I know it’s not nice of me,” Harry offered. “But I really would like to see his face if he doesn’t win.”
“He honestly seems to think he’s the only person who deserves to.” She drove her toe into the grass. “God, I can’t believe I dated him.”
“To be honest, mate, I can’t either.”
“Hey.” She couldn’t tell if they were both working hard to make this feel normal or if it felt normal because they were that comfortable with each other. And probably she should stop fretting about it in case it went away. “That was a complicated low-self-esteem-slash-quarter-life-crisis thing we’ve discussed at length and you’re not allowed to be mean to me about it.”
“I’m not being mean. I’m just saying, it never made much sense to me on account of how he’s a dick and you’re not.”
A feature of Rosaline’s love life that she’d previously taken for granted was that none of the people she was romantically interested in had ever watched her previous relationship play out in its disastrous entirety. “Aren’t you always telling me how your best mate’s a dick?”
“No, he’s a knobhead. It’s a very different thing.”
“Is it? Because it sounds like it might be quite similar.”
Harry stroked his jaw. “Like, a knobhead usually don’t mean nothing by it. But a dick just don’t care.”
“And a ballsack?”
“Kinda . . . hangs there, not doing much good to anyone.” “Speaking as someone who wanted to be a doctor,” said Rosaline, “I’m pretty sure they do have a useful function.”
“Speaking as someone who has to live with one, they don’t half get in the way. I mean, sitting on your own balls is, mate, it’s like, it hurts, and it’s embarrassing, and you shouldn’t be able to do that to yourself. Oi, what are you laughing at?”
“Sorry.” She made a valiant attempt to control her giggling at Harry’s testicular misadventures. “The human body is weird like that. There’s a whole bit of your nervous system dedicated to making sure your muscles don’t break your bones.”
“Tell you what, if there’s a God, he’s taking the fucking piss.”
“I know, right? A girl in my class once dislocated her elbow pointing too vigorously.”
“What was she pointing at?”
“Funnily enough,” Rosaline told him, giggling again, “that’s not the detail I most remember from the incident.”
Harry gave a low, answering chuckle. Then abruptly stopped chuckling and glanced over Rosaline’s shoulder. Turning, she saw Alain—who she hoped had ignored Jennifer Hallet’s advice to masturbate over a picture of his mother—striding away from the Lodge and towards the hotel. He had that very fixed posture that said he knew they were there but was making a point of not looking.
“Oh shit,” she whispered. “It’s dinner, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure I can hack it, to be honest.”
“We could go to the pub again, but that didn’t end well last time.”
“We won’t have Anvita, though, so there’ll be no one to cheat at I Spy and get us lost in the dark.” He paused. “Sort of miss her, mind.”
“Me too. It’s so strange with the four of us. It feels like you’ve survived some horrible catastrophe and then you remember everyone else has just gone home and is fine.”
Harry nodded. “I had Ricky round to play FIFA the other week. Good bloke. Not very good at FIFA.”
“Did he make it explode in the oven?” asked Rosaline.
“Nah, but he kept getting own goals. I think he was doing it deliberately at the end.”
They watched Alain disappear into the hotel.
“Do you fancy . . . ” Harry jerked his thumb backwards. “There’s a chippy in one of the villages we went through. We could drive out and grab something.”
“Actually, that sounds really nice. As long as we don’t punch anyone, trespass anywhere, or upset any livestock.”
“I reckon we can give it a go. Come on, mate.”
They climbed into Harry’s van and wound back through the countryside until they found the chip shop, which was, in fact, called the Old Village Fish and Chip Shop. Once they’d received their newspaper-wrapped parcels of steamy goodness, they decided it was best to get somewhere inconspicuous and unobjectionable in case they got hauled up in front of Jennifer again. And so they drove on to a quiet lay-by near a little hill and a copse of trees, where Harry parked and opened the rear doors of the van. The two of them sat side by side in the back, next to Harry’s neatly packed shelves of electrical supplies, eating their fish and chips in quiet satisfaction.
It was another beautiful evening—English and golden, and full of hope and birdsong. And for once Rosaline wasn’t running late for anything or trying to catch up with anything. Well, she had a certain amount of Jennifer Hallet’s goodwill to claw back. But for now this moment was just for her. And she got to share it with . . . with a friend. With someone who mattered to her.
Maybe it was the quiet and the wide-open sky, but a sense of contentment was settling over her, warm in the summer haze. And the strangest thing about it was that it didn’t feel unfamiliar. It felt like a cup of tea at the end of a long day. Like taking Amelie to the park and watching her claim the big tyre swing before anyone else. Like singing along to Mitski while she did the washing-up on a Wednesday afternoon. It was the scent of cupcakes fresh out of the oven. It was Lauren and Amelie bickering over a jigsaw spread across the dining room table. A soft thread of certainty that had always been there.
If only she could allow herself to believe in it.
Sunday
IT WAS A tense weekend of baking. The theme of the week, as tended to be the case in the semifinal, was highly spurious. In this case, Regency. And the blind bake had been, of all things, Turkish delight—which was apparently big back then, and not even Nora had made it before. As far as Rosaline could tell, it involved stirring continuously for a full hour and created a strange glutinous substance that just about stood up and tasted a little bit of roses. She’d come first sort of by default in that hers had been the least awful. But nothing anyone had put forward that round would have tempted an annoying child to sell his siblings to a witch. Probably he’d have taken one look and gone back through the wardrobe.
On top of which, being endearing on camera was borderline impossible with that much resentment seething between three quarters of the cast. Nora, at least, was on good form, grumbling placidly that life was too short to spend this much of it whisking cornflour, and she would know because she’d had most of hers already.