Free The Line Between Us by Kate Dunn Page A

indicated.
    “You’ve got a –” I gestured. “On your –”
    She put the bowl to one side, covering it with a cloth. “I’ll leave that to prove.” She brushed her sleeve across her forehead once again.
    I shook my head. “No … it’s not … it’s –”
    There was a lengthy pause.
    “You do it.”
    I made a start towards her, then I stopped. “It’s just on … where the …”
    “I won’t bite.”
    “No,” I said, “I should think not,” and then I laughed and it sounded loud in the silence which followed. In the end there was nothing for it: I fairly sprinted over to her, smudged the flour away with my thumb and sprinted back. “If that’s everything …”
    “Are you fond of gingerbread nuts?”
    I hesitated, “I like ginger cake.” I glanced along the corridor towards the back door, with the vaguest sense of trespass. I knew that I should go, but a part of me was curious to stay. Mrs Brown reached for her reading glasses and consulted her recipe book and the sight of her in her spectacles was oddly reassuring. She began to read the recipe aloud, savouring the instructions as if she could taste them in her mouth.
    “You take one pound of treacle and a quarter of a pound of coarse …” she lingered over the word, giving it due consideration, “… brown sugar. Then it’s two ounces of ground ginger, an ounce of candied orange peel, an ounce of candied angelica, and an ounce of candied lemon peel.” I was watching her read, all that sing-song Welsh coming out, the relish of each individual syllable. I liked the way she said “candied”. I found myself mouthing it with her.
    “These should be chopped into very small pieces, but not,” she glanced at me, “… bruised.”
    I swallowed. Worse still, I blushed.
    “I’m going to start by heating the treacle and the sugar together with a little melted butter …”
    It was the warmth in the kitchen.
    “And when I’ve mixed in all the ingredients …”
    It was the ferment of the baking.
    “… I’m going to break an egg.”
    With a smile that left her lips half-parted, she leaned over to select an egg from a bowl in the middle of the table, and the indolence of her reach afforded me a glimpse of this and that, and the candied scent of her caught me unawares, so that for a dreadful moment I found myself racked with impure imaginings, though she’s the same age as my Ma. Only for a moment, because then I thought of you, and I thought of Mr Brown and our trip to Newland, and then I thought hats off to Samuelson.
    And I fled.

 
     
    CHAPTER SIXTEEN
     
    I remembered coming home from work one day to find my sister Delyth, back from the factory where she’d been assembling circuit breakers since the war, all hot under the collar. She was in militant mood. “Have you got yesterday’s newspaper, Ifor?” she asked before I was over the threshold.
    I handed it to her, gave Ma the half dozen misshapen potatoes the kitchen had rejected and flopped down at the table.
    “Tea?” said Ma.
    Delyth had this habit of reading things under her breath so you could hear the clicking of the consonants, but not what she was saying and it used to drive me mad. She was ticking away like a clock, taking little sips of outraged air.
    “It’s not right,” she said. “It’s just not right.”
    I was watching Ma pouring boiling water onto tea leaves that we used this morning and I was sore inside that she should have to live like this and sorer still that somehow, although I was doing the job she wished me to, I was falling short in my responsibilities. A proper son would have made sure there was fresh tea when she wanted it. She felt my gaze and shrugged.
    “Did you know,” Delyth leaned both elbows on the newspaper; she brought her face, full of accusations, up close to mine, “that since the war, miners’ pay has gone down from six pounds a week to three pounds eighteen shillings?”
    “No, Delyth, I didn’t know that,” I answered, eyeing the