A Year of Small Hours

Cerys had first come through the back door on a Tuesday in October, and the following October nobody mentioned it, because nobody had noticed it at the time and there was no reason anybody would have written it down.

She noticed it herself, on the bus, and arrived at half one and said, "It's a year today," and Nabil said, "Of what," and she said, "Of me," and Nabil said, "Right," and handed her a mug, and that was the observance.

She was different. Ines had watched it happen too slowly to see, the way you cannot watch bread prove, and could only measure it against the memory of the woman in the hood who had stood by the mixer for four full minutes before saying anything at all. That woman had come off six weeks of nights in September looking hollowed out to the back, and had come to the bakery on her second evening back rather than her fourth, and had stood in the doorway and said, out loud, in front of all three of them: "I'm not all right, and I'm not going to talk about it, and I would like to do the long trays."

That was the sentence Ines thought about most, afterwards, and for a long time. It contained a request, a boundary, and an accurate self-assessment, all three delivered in about nine seconds, in a room where not one of them was required of anybody — by a person who a year earlier had come through that same door and stood by the mixer for four minutes because she could not manage any of the three. Nobody in the building had remarked on it. Ines had gone out to the yard afterwards and stood in the cold for a bit.

"You're staring," said Cerys. "I'm being sentimental." "Don't. It's four in the morning, it's not structurally sound." She did the long trays. She did them properly, and then did the round ones badly, with flair, and Nabil said "wrong" without looking up and she said "flair" without looking up, and it had stopped being a joke and become a milestone some time around June.

At half four Peter came out of the proving room with the levain and a face like a man carrying a bomb. "It's gone very odd," he said. "I want it noted that I did everything in the book." Nabil looked. Nabil sniffed it. Nabil put his finger in it. "It's fine." "It smells like nail varnish." "It smells like nail varnish because it's hungry and you're keeping it four degrees colder than I did, which is why the loaves have been better since October," said Nabil. "Feed it twice. Write it down."

Peter went back in looking so pleased that Cerys had to put her face in her hands.

Halloway opened in November — four months late, eleven thousand over, and structurally sound, with a mezzanine that Dennis from building control had signed off on the eleventh attempt while making it clear that he was doing so under protest and with admiration.

Karen offered Ines the next one in the same conversation. Ines said yes before she had finished the sentence, and then said, "Two conditions," and Karen said, "Go on," in the tone of a woman who had been expecting this for eight months.

"I keep the two nights." "Obviously. What's the second?" "You put a proper night shift at Halloway. Two people, not one. And you let Nabil pick them." Ines had been rehearsing this one for a fortnight and it still came out badly. "Because he has done eleven years on his own on that floor and he is forty-eight and he is the only person in your company who knows how any of this actually works, and if he goes over you will find out what it cost you in about a week."

Karen looked at her for a long moment. "That's a management conversation." "Yes." "You've been at my company nine months." "Fourteen," said Ines, "and I have been in that building for two years, and I have watched you be right about Terry twelve years too late."

The pause was long enough that Ines began composing an apology. Then Karen said, "Two people at Halloway. Nabil picks. He gets a title and eleven per cent, and if he refuses the title, which he will, tell him the title is for the insurer and he'll take it." She stood up. "And Marchetti. Do not do that to me again in a corridor. Book it in, like a person."

Nabil refused the title, at length, on four separate occasions and in increasingly poor temper. Ines told him it was for the insurer. Nabil said, "It is not for the insurer, and you know it is not, and Karen knows it is not, and I would appreciate it if the two of you would stop managing me" — and then took it anyway, that same week, and put the letter in the proving room, pinned up beside the piece of paper with five names on it, where the insurer would never go and where nobody would ever see it but him.

He picked a woman called Ruth who had done fourteen years at a hotel and a nineteen-year-old called Sam who had never baked anything, and when Ines asked about Sam he said, "He came in off the street at three in the morning in September and asked for a job, and nobody has ever done that, and I am not going to be the man who found out what that was for the second time."

Peter did the market stall in March, once, as an experiment, and it went badly in every measurable respect. He sold eleven loaves out of forty. It rained from nine o'clock. The pitch he had been given was next to a man selling phone cases who had a speaker.

He came into the bakery that night at half two, soaked, with twenty-nine loaves in three crates, and set them down on the bench and said, "Right," and stood there. Nobody said anything at all. Cerys got up off the sacks and took the crates through to the cold room without being asked, which took four trips, and she made all four of them without once looking at his face.

"It was a bad idea," said Peter. "It was a good idea with a bad pitch," said Nabil, from the bench, not looking up. "Those two look identical from the inside and they are not the same thing, and you will need to know the difference before April." "There isn't going to be an April." "There is going to be an April," said Nabil. "There is always an April. Whether you do a stall in it is a separate question and you are not fit to answer it tonight."

Ines, who was on that night, watched the exchange with the specific fascination of a person seeing a technique demonstrated by somebody who does not know they have one. It was not encouragement. Nobody told Peter it was fine, or that he had done well, or that they were proud of him — any of which, she understood perfectly clearly, would have finished him off before four in the morning.

What Nabil had done was decline to accept the conclusion. That was the whole of it. He had let the failure stand at exactly its own size, refused the extrapolation from one wet Saturday to the rest of a man's life, and gone back to scoring loaves.

Peter folded bags for two hours and did not speak. At half five he said, "The pitch was next to a speaker," in the flat tone of a man reading out a finding at a meeting, and Nabil said, "Yes," and that was the end of it.

He did April. He got the pitch by the entrance because he asked for it in writing, which he then told them at considerable length was the only reason anybody ever gets anything from anybody, and he sold thirty-one out of thirty-six, and came in that night so thoroughly insufferable that Cerys threatened to stop coming.

The bakery on Fenner Street opens its front door at half past six and has been awake since eleven the night before. That has not changed and is not going to. Bread is not fast; that is the entire problem with bread and the entire reason it is any good.

Nabil gets in at eleven. He turns on the two ovens that take the longest, puts the levains where they live, and stands for a moment in the proving room with the door shut — where there is now a piece of paper with five names on it, and a letter about a title he did not want, and a pencil diagram of a mixer repair on the back of an order sheet, none of which he has ever mentioned to a single person.

Ines arrives at midnight on the two nights, forty minutes early for a shift that starts at half twelve. She has never explained it, and is no longer asked, and could now explain it if anybody did — it is the forty minutes, she has worked out, in which nothing is expected of her by anyone including herself, and there is nowhere else in her week that has any.

Cerys comes Tuesdays, and occasionally Fridays, and once memorably on a Wednesday at four in the morning in a state that nobody has referred to since. Peter comes Thursday and Sunday and the levain days, and does the stall on the third Saturday, and has begun — cautiously, and with a great many disclaimers nobody requires — to talk about doing two.

On the eighth of December, once a year, an ill-tempered woman of sixty-four with a bad knee sits in the chair by the flour from two until half past five and does no work whatsoever, and talks to whoever is on, and goes home. It is on the paper in the proving room, on the fifth line, in Nabil's handwriting.

Nothing much happens on Fenner Street between two and five in the morning. Trays go in. Trays come out. The clock above the mixer is four minutes fast and nobody will ever fix it. Somebody says the rye is slow and somebody says it is fourteen degrees and somebody says it is cold for the rye.

And at some point most nights, for ten or twelve minutes, all of them are working and none of them is talking, and the room is warm, and nothing at all is being asked of anybody — which is not nothing, and cannot be put on a sign, and is the whole of what the place is for.