Page 44 of Looking for Group

Please enjoy this sneak peek of Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot , coming soon…

She found her room fairly easily, dumped her things, and checked her phone to see if her parents had resolved their is-our-daughter-on-TV-yet debate.

As it turned out, they both had and hadn’t, the response from her dad being see, I told her and the one from her mum saying sorry, I was getting it mixed up with Auntie Beryl’s haemorrhoid appointment .

Communication, Audrey had always believed, was the basis of a healthy relationship.

But if her parents were anything to go by, it didn’t actually have to be coherent or effective communication.

She texted back to her dad apparently she was thinking of Auntie Beryl’s haemorrhoid appointment ( ow that’s a week next Tuesday her dad replied) and to her mum do you often confuse me with Auntie Beryl’s bottom (her response was: only when you act like an arse ).

Between messages, she sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to have too many thoughts.

It had been long enough since the breakup that, theoretically, being alone was something she should have been used to.

But at home she had her work and her family and—not to sound too materialistic—her stuff to keep her from dwelling.

A hotel room, especially the kind of hotel room you got on a BBC budget, was tailor made to make a person regret every decision they’d ever made in their entire life.

So-called “reality” television , Natalie was explaining in her head, constructs false narratives that pressure people into living up to unrealistic standards .

And Audrey tried to push back a little by pointing out that it was just people making cakes in a nice house, but Natalie’s voice, as always, was insistent.

It’s a parochial, whitewashed—in both senses of the word—illusion of Britishness for Brexiteers and housewives.

I honestly can’t believe you watch it. And she didn’t have an answer to that, any more than she’d had one when the conversation, or conversations very much like it, had originally happened.

She should have brought a project. Audrey was the sort of person who liked to have a project, even if the project was just a jigsaw on the kitchen table.

The bedroom in her new flat was full of bags of yarn and piles of fabric, which were slowly being converted into scarves no one in particular wanted to wear and quilts no one in particular wanted to snuggle under.

Partly, she would be the first to admit, because they weren’t very good scarves or quilts.

Just like her hand-painted bowls weren’t very well painted and her one attempt at kintsugi had left the broken vase looking both worse and still broken.

For the first couple of years of their relationship, her fondness for crafting had driven Natalie up the wall, a conflict Audrey had resolved by…

stopping. Giving up. Or, in Natalie’s words, acknowledging there were better ways to use her time.

Sitting on the bed, staring at the wall, Audrey stayed lost in her thoughts just long enough to conclude that staying in her room would definitely suck. And while wandering the grounds aimlessly might also suck, it would at least suck in the open air.

Besides, Audrey had always been an explorey sort.

And, much as she wanted to pretend it was part of what made her an excellent—well, an adequate…

well, a former—investigative journalist, mostly it just meant she’d spent a lot of her childhood increasing her mother’s risk of cardiac arrest. She’d once enlivened a summer picnic by trying to climb up Wenlock Priory.

And, in her defence, she’d managed it. The climbing up part, at least. Getting down had been more of a challenge and had, eventually, involved fire engines.

To this day, Audrey felt guilty around a National Trust logo.

That probably wasn’t going to happen at Patchley House, though.

Not unless she got really, really bored.

Mostly she was hoping a good, old-fashioned wander would keep the more infuriating parts of her brain quiet.

With enquieting in mind, she scoped out the woodlands and, once she’d finished scoping, found her way down to the stream, locating the faux-medieval hermitage that her pre-visit research had told her was located somewhere on the grounds.

Once she’d had all the faux-medievalness she could take, she looped back to the Lodge just in time to see a girl coming out the front door.

And she was definitely a girl , probably—if Audrey was any judge—no more than sixteen.

Also probably no less than sixteen, unless the show was violating its own terms and conditions, along with a couple of child labour laws.

Neither of which, given what she knew of reality TV, she would have ruled out.

“Hi,” Audrey said, discovering as she got closer that, sixteen-ish as she may have been, the newcomer was still a good inch taller than she was. “Are you one of the other contestants?”

The girl nodded and, not being from a handshakey generation, waved. “Alanis.”

“Alanis?”

“Yeah. After this singer my mum likes.”

The realisation that it was perfectly possible for a woman who listened to Jagged Little Pill at a formative age to now have a daughter old enough to be baking on national television rose up in Audrey’s heart, killed a part of her, and went back to sleep. “Audrey,” said Audrey. “After—”

“Audrey Hepburn?” asked Alanis.

“Honestly a bit surprised you know who that is.”

“I’m really into retro stuff.”

Audrey could probably have guessed that for herself, since Alanis’s personal style appeared to have been culled from the greatest hits of the last two centuries: a pleated miniskirt like it was 2001, a chunky black and pink cable knit like it was 2020, tube socks like it was 1974, and ribbons in her hair like she was about to get snubbed by Mr. Darcy at a country dance.

“Oh,” she said. “Cool. So kind of cottagecore?”

There was a certain look teenagers got when they felt an adult had been embarrassing in a way that inspired pity rather than loathing. “I don’t really want to put a label on it. But I’m liking your whole thing.”

“I’m not sure I have a thing?”

There was another look teenagers got when they felt you were full of shit. “Sixties glasses? Fifties silhouette? That’s a thing. You just don’t want to admit it.”

Great. Now Audrey was being called out by a child. On the other hand, the child seemed to be enjoying it. Which was probably a win on aggregate. “Fine. You got me. I’m a plus-sized stereotype.”

Alanis looked immediately mortified, like she was cancelling herself. “Oh fuck, sorry. I did not mean that in, like, a shaming way.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s just the reality of a certain height-to-girth ratio. And I’d rather own it than hide.”

“You’re definitely owning it.”

“Okay, now you’re over-compensating.”

“No, no,” protested Alanis, whose limited life experience had yet to teach her the benefits of quitting while you were behind. “You look really good for your age.”

Audrey stared at her. Over the past thirty-something years she’d got pretty comfortable with her body. Having to be comfortable with her age as well had snuck up on her. “Which you think is…what exactly?”

“Like maybe twenty-five?” said Alanis with complete and bewildering sincerity. “Or twenty-eight?”

This was flattering. But also not flattering. “Oh my God, Alanis. How do you think time works?”

“I don’t know. I’m not Einstein.”

“No, I mean, twenty-five isn’t old enough to look good for your age . And, by similar reasoning, in no universe do I look twenty-five.”

“Look”—Alanis spread her hands in a gesture of I give up on everything —“you seem like you’re older than me and younger than my mum. I don’t know what else to do here.”

Tiny twinge of nostalgia aside, Audrey was pretty glad that she no longer lived in a world where the categories of people were yourself, your parents, and everybody else.

“How about we leave gerontology for now and talk about baking? Because I’m beginning to sense a generation gap and I really want to get onto a topic that doesn’t make me feel ancient. ”

“Works for me.” Cheerfully, Alanis looped her arm through Audrey’s and began to drag her up the hill. “Totally crepuscular.”

Audrey was not falling for that one. “Crepuscular?”

“Yeah, it means good .”

“No, it doesn’t. It means of or relating to twilight . This is because I said there was a generation gap, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be such a zymurgy.”

“Study of fermentation. You’re not going to get me on this. I’m old and uncool but I know a lot of weird words.”

“How?” By a process of contrarian logic known only to the young, Alanis sounded almost impressed.

“I told you,” said Audrey. “I’m old and uncool.”

“You’re not uncool. You’re peripatetic.”

“Wandering. Which we actually are. So I think one of us has won but I can’t tell which.”

Alanis flashed an Instagrammable smile. “How about both of us?”

Which—damningly—was the most mature thing Audrey had heard all week.

The lights of Patchley House were golden against the darkening sky, almost magical and, funnily enough, crepuscular.

Had she not been getting yoinked along by an over-enthusiastic teenager, Audrey might have stopped to take it in.

The problem with living somewhere beautiful—and she’d lived in beautiful places for much of her life—was that you got inured to the specifics of it.

And sometimes a new, hitherto unnoticed specific would sneak up on you, and it would be like you were seeing the world for the first time all over again.

Except that feeling got rarer the longer you stuck around.

And, for a while, especially living in London, Audrey thought she’d lost it entirely.

That it had just faded away, like so many other things.