“I didn’t realise I was supposed to be doing intelligence gathering.”

“Fine.” Anvita sighed heavily. “I’ll share my secret stash of opposition research with you out of pure pity.”

“Good thing I have no pride or I might object to that.” Leaning in close, Anvita dropped her voice to an urgent whisper. “Okay. So. Most importantly, there are two stone-cold hotties.”

“I mean, good to know? But how relevant is that from the perspective of a baking show we’ll both just be happy to get through the first round of, but secretly want to win?”

“It’s very relevant from the perspective of me enjoying myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a boyfriend and I love him to bits, but a girl likes to window-shop.”

There was, as far as Rosaline could tell, no real reason not to go with this. “Okay, tell me what’s on sale.”

“So, there’s Ricky. He’s a student at Southampton—something something material science something. Bit young, but tall, locs, good cheekbones, great smile. He plays football or whatever and you can tell. He’ll look great when he’s whisking.”

“I feel like I know him already.”

“Then there’s Harry. I haven’t been able to get much out of him, but I think he fixes things. With his hands. His strong, manly hands. I hope he makes it to bread week.”

“Have you spoken to anyone who wasn’t an attractive man?” As questions went, Rosaline knew this was slightly hypocritical.

“Yes. I’ve spoken to Nora, who’s a gran, so I bet she’s going to win. And I’ve spoken to Florian, who I’m sure is attractive to some people, but I think he’s about fifty and really quite gay.

There’s also Claudia, who’s this terrifying lawyer lady; and Josie, who I’ve heard owns over four hundred cookbooks.”

“I couldn’t fit four hundred cookbooks in my house.” “I wouldn’t want to. I’ve got the internet and a phone. Like a normal person.”

Breakfast, as it turned out, was a kind of self-service arrangement on the veranda: long, shallow metal trays filled with rapidly cooling offerings of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and other staples of the English breakfast. Vegetarians, Rosaline assumed, would have to make do with mushrooms and toast.

“I’m trying to weigh up,” said Anvita, “whether it looks worse to get one enormous plate of everything or to go back about thirty times. Because I am fucking starving. And even if I wasn’t, it’s a free breakfast buffet and the point of a free breakfast buffet is to eat enough that you don’t need another meal until the next free breakfast buffet.”

Between the nerves and the . . . actually, probably just the nerves, Rosaline had lost her appetite. “I might start with cornflakes and go from there.”

Anvita shook her head despairingly. “Weaksauce.”

They briefly parted ways to take on the slightly soggy bounty. Grabbing a bowl of off-brand corn cereal and a glass of punishingly tart grapefruit juice, Rosaline glanced around for somewhere to sit. Then she realised she was looking for Alain and kicked herself for not focusing on the competition.

In any case, he wasn’t there and the rest of the contestants had mostly separated themselves over two picnic tables, apparently by age. Which made things a little bit difficult for Rosaline because she felt slightly too young for Group A, which consisted of an elderly lady, an older gentleman in a floral shirt, and two middle-aged women. But Group B—Anvita and two guys of university age—seemed far too young, cool, and not-child-having. In the end, she went B, on the assumption that in Anvita’s world “weaksauce” constituted a standing invitation to eat food together.

“So this is Rosaline,” announced Anvita as Rosaline perched herself on the end of the table and tried to cornflake. “Rosaline, this is Ricky and Dave.”

“All right?” Ricky waved a spoon cheerfully. Anvita had not oversold him, although Rosaline was fast getting to the age where nineteen-year-olds were losing their appeal.

Dave, a skinny man with a goatee, wearing a llama-print shirt, and an item of headwear that Rosaline feared was a fedora, nodded a silent hi. “We were just talking,” he said, “about what made us apply for the show.”

“I hate to be that girl”—Anvita pushed her glasses back up her nose—“but I’m mostly doing this for my nan. She taught me how to bake and all that shit. And I’m blatantly going to be crying about it at some point.”

“Better to cry about your nan,” Rosaline told her, “than about a flat scone or collapsed meringue.”

This was clearly too much emotions talk for Dave and he turned to Ricky. “What about you, mate?”

Ricky somehow indicated with his whole body that he was far too cool to worry about a little thing like a nationally televised test of his baking skills. “Thought it’d be a laugh. I didn’t expect to get in, to be honest. But we’ll see.”

Not seeming to notice or care that Rosaline hadn’t replied yet, Dave plonked his elbows on the table and launched into what felt like a pre-prepared speech. “I applied because I felt I had a really different take on the whole concept of”—he did actual air quotes—“‘baking.’ Like, Marianne and Wilfred are great, but they’re both very traditional in their outlook, and I wanted to show people that they don’t have to live their lives the way they’re expected to.”

In the silence that followed, Anvita, Rosaline, and Ricky signalled to each other, without speaking or moving, that none of them had a fucking clue what to do with that.

“And,” Rosaline tried, “you’re going to show them this by . . . making cakes?”

“Well, what are”—air quotes again—“‘cakes’?”

After breakfast, they were hurried through to the ballroom of the main house for a series of briefings. From some angles, everything looked exactly like it did on TV. Those angles, of course, being the ones the cameras were pointing along, where it was all rainbow-coloured workstations set against incongruous baroque grandeur. From a less flattering direction, everything was wires and booms and people in black T-shirts making incomprehensible hand gestures. It was also, Rosaline was rapidly coming to realise, a terrible cooking environment, being vast and echoing and designed for people to dance in two hundred and forty years ago. Right now, it was unpleasantly cold. But given the ten mini-kitchens and the lighting rig, it would probably be uncomfortably hot by about half past ten. And ruinously hot by noon.