finally declared which was the best and, more significantly for your future in the competition, the worst. And again Rosaline was struck by the triviality of it all. Her father had probably saved at least three people’s lives that week and millions were definitely benefitting every day from her mother’s research, and what had Rosaline achieved? If she was very, very lucky, she’d got some nuts to a nice texture.
The critiques mostly passed in a blur, not helped by the fact that the contestants were, to Rosaline, also a bit of a blur. Dave—who was still wearing his fedora—had done notably poorly, having left his cake in the oven far too long. And Alain, either because he was a genuinely brilliant cook or because she’d shown him the fucking recipe that fucking morning, had smashed it.
When they came to Rosaline’s offering, Marianne Wolvercote pronounced the bake good and the distribution of fruit excellently even. Then she pried an almond from the top, placed it carefully between her teeth, and bit down.
“Underblanched.” Rosaline almost cried.
She wasn’t sure how she got through her end-of-day interview. Mostly she nodded and smiled and tried to think of different ways to say, “Well, I thought that went okay, but it could also probably have gone better.” Her sense of reality was still on the wibble. Maybe it was just because what they were doing was so artificial anyway, but filming involved so much stopping and starting and waiting to be told what to do that nothing felt connected to anything else.
Her mind kept drifting to what she’d be doing if she were home. If she’d really A-plussed her mothering, she’d already have convinced Amelie to do her spelling, and if she’d really A-plussed her life, she’d have done the laundry on Friday and would have managed to put off visiting her parents until Sunday, so Saturday—assuming she didn’t have a shift at work—could be officially declared an Our Day. That meant they each got to choose something they wanted to do—or, in practice, Amelie got to choose something she wanted to do and Rosaline chose something she secretly knew Amelie wanted to do. Sometimes they’d go to the park, or the swimming pool, and sometimes, Amelie would want to go to space and they’d have to improvise a rocket out of two armchairs and a vacuum cleaner. Quite often, they’d bake. And admittedly, Amelie’s help tended to make the final product a bit more, as the judges might have said it, “rustic.” But—crammed into the tiny kitchen with her daughter, covered in a range of ingredients Rosaline would swear they hadn’t been using—it was also one of the few things that made her believe everything was going to be okay. That maybe they were okay already.
Of course for the next eight weeks every Saturday would consist of Amelie waiting at home with whoever Rosaline could beg to babysit for her while Rosaline herself missed out on yet another sliver of the too-short window in which her daughter would enjoy spending time with her. And how was that worth it? She’d spent hours on a train and a night in a farmer’s attic just so she could put in a mediocre performance in a baking competition.
She should have called home, but with the baking and the judging and the underblanched almonds and the increasing sense of having made yet another terrible decision, she wasn’t totally sure she’d be able to keep it together. And while Amelie probably wouldn’t have minded if she didn’t keep it together, it wasn’t exactly parent-of-the-year behaviour to ring up your kid and have an existential crisis at them.
Maybe she could go and find Anvita and have an existential crisis at her. That was the kind of thing you could do with someone you’d met once, right? But then, as she was crossing the lawn she caught sight of Alain finishing up his own post-victory interview. The long day was just beginning to catch up with him, although that only meant his artfully tousled hair was looking slightly less artful and slightly more tousled. It suited him, in a way, that faint hint that his composure could be gently unravelled given the right circumstances. Or the right unraveller.
“Well, obviously I’m very pleased,” he was saying, with a little half-smile that Rosaline was certain several key demographics would go nuts for. “I do think I got a bit lucky, but . . . yes. I’ll take it. And as for tomorrow, well, let’s