Nora was looking crestfallen. The three-cake gambit had clearly not been the right call in this situation.
“But I’m afraid, and you’re all wonderful bakers, we have to lose one of you. And this week it’s Harry.”
Everyone looked shocked. Except Alain, who looked borderline triumphant.
“It’s . . . Harry?” said Nora.
Grace Forsythe cleared her throat. “It was a very close week and the judges felt that the last place in the final had to go to the more consistent performer over the whole competition.”
“Makes sense.” Harry got off his stool in preparation for the farewell scene. “I’d be first to admit I ballsed up a bunch of times.”
Colin Thrimp fluttered into view. “Um, actually, we might want to use some of this footage so if you could keep the balls to a minimum, that would be very helpful.”
“Well deserved, Nora,” offered Alain with infuriating sincerity.
Harry drew Nora into a hug. “Yeah, well done.”
“All in, please,” trilled Colin Thrimp. “Show the viewers how much you’ve bonded.”
And they had in a way. With one notable exception.
“This is bullshit,” yelled Rosaline, bursting into Jennifer Hallet’s trailer. “No one who watches the show is going to believe that Nora stayed in this week because she baked better than Harry.”
Jennifer swung her chair round from her wall of screens. “Magic of editing, sunshine. And I’d rather not have had to do it. But let me remind you that your Cockney goatfucker of a boyfriend fucking punched a fucking contestant in the fucking face. And if Jeremy Clarkson can’t get away with it, he certainly can’t.”
“But Alain apparently can.”
Leaning back, Jennifer Hallet adopted an expression of mock horror. “Oh no. A middle-class white man might get away with pressuring his girlfriend into doing sex stuff she wasn’t into. What an unexpected development. My understanding of the world, it is shaken.”
“Don’t act like this is out of your control,” said Rosaline, pointing in a way that was probably ill-advised. “You’re in charge here. You get to decide what happens.”
“And is that what you want? For me to kick Mr. Streak of Piss and Lemongrass off the show so he can always be the guy who should have won season six of Bake Expectations? You want to send him home? Beat him. Then get on with your life.”
Rosaline wasn’t much good at righteous indignation at the best of times. And this wasn’t the best of times. She drooped. “What about Harry?”
“What about him? The little bit of rough who’s there to give forty-five-year-old women something to whack off to and to make everyone else think, Oh, I’m surprised he bakes. It’s a miracle he made it past week three.”
“Is this how you see everyone? Is Nora just the comforting granny and Alain the guy you want your daughter to marry? Am I just the nice girl with the sad life story for the eighteento thirty-five demographic?”
Jennifer Hallet threw back her head and unleashed a grating laugh. “Think very carefully about this, sunshine. Do you really want to hear the answer to that question?”
As it turned out, Rosaline did not need to think very carefully. “No. No I don’t.”
“Fabulous. Now fuck off. Because I’ve got to make this completely avoidable shitfire look charming and relatable.”
In the car park, she found Harry waiting for her.
“Ready to go?” he asked. Followed by, “What’s wrong, mate?”
Rosaline was struggling with tears—she hadn’t expected yelling at Jennifer Hallet to help, but now she’d done it she’d run out of actions and was stuck with nothing but emotions. “I got you kicked off the show.”
“I got kicked off ’cos it’d be unfair for Nora to go out from one bad week and ’cos I lamped Alain one.”
“But you only hit him because of me.”
“I didn’t. I hit him because where I come from, bloke puts his hands on you and you tell him nice to take ’em off and he don’t, you hit him.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I didn’t like the way he was treating you, mind, but I reckoned you was already dealing with that on account of you leaving. What happened between him and me was between him and me.”
That made Rosaline feel slightly better, but only slightly. “I still don’t think you should have gone out.”
“Yeah, but I did. Just TV, init? So we heading off or what?”
“I guess. We’ll need to get Amelie from my parents, though. To add insult to injury, I had to pass my child between two different sets of babysitters this week so I could be pressured into a threesome I didn’t want.”
“Not a problem, mate. Where do they live?”
“Kensingon.”
He chuckled. “Course they do.”
Truthfully—after everything that had happened in the last couple of days—Rosaline was not quite ready to face Cordelia and St. John. But it was the only way she could get Amelie back. So she had to.
“Blimey,” observed Harry as they pulled up outside Rosaline’s parents’ house. “Is your dad the bloke from Mary Poppins?”
Rosaline gazed somewhat sheepishly at the extremely desirable Earl’s Court residence in which she’d grown up. “What? Dick Van Dyke?”
“No, the one with the bowler and the moustache. Did Bedknobs and Broomsticks and all.”
“Yeah. My parents are kind of . . . actually incredibly rich now I think about it.”
“See.” He grinned triumphantly at her. “I said you was posh.”
“We’re not posh. They’ve just . . . both been very successful in their fields.”
“You know the two poshest things in the world?”
“Um, the Queen and Victoria Beckham?”
“Saying you ain’t posh,” he told her. “And saying the words ‘very successful in their fields.’ My dad’s successful in his field. But because his field’s electrics they say, ‘That’s Ringo Dobson. He’s an electrician.’”
There was a pause. “Sorry. Your dad’s called Ringo?”
“Yeah, my nan’s a big Beatles fan.”
“And you think my name is weird.”
“To be fair, mate, Ringo Starr is still alive, was actually in the thing he’s famous for being in, and ain’t a nun. Also, I reckon you’re stalling. You know, I can wait in the van if you want.”
She was stalling. But not because of Harry. “You don’t need to do that. Unless you want. Which you might. Because my parents can be . . . a lot?”
“Nah, you’re all right. Be good to stretch my legs.”
They stretched their legs—Rosaline’s quite reluctantly—up to the front door. Where she knocked and waited.
“Ain’t you got a key?” asked Harry in the brief silence that followed.
“If I had one to their house, they’d want one to my house, and that would be a whole big thing.” Rosaline hoped he wouldn’t ask for any more explanation, and as the mixed luck of the moment would have it, he never got the chance.
The door opened to reveal Cordelia Palmer in her at-home wear, which honestly wasn’t that different from her picking-her-daughter-up-from-a-baking-show wear, which wasn’t that different from her giving-a-speech-at-a-conference wear. “Rosaline,” she said, “who’s this?”