The Line Between Us by Kate Dunn Page A

the edge of them.
    “You’re home early,” she said, her voice a mite too casual.
    I stared with hostility at that lace. “Yes.” I had a ludicrous picture of myself setting off for work tomorrow, with no work to go to, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. Could I pretend the day after? And the day after that? And what would I do when pay day came? “Samuelson was off with the strikers. There wasn’t much for me to do.”
    “He’s a fool, that man,” Ma said curtly.
    “Where’s Delyth?” I asked, thinking that Samuelson wasn’t half the idiot that I had been.
    “It would appear that she’s a fool as well,” she swiped the washing basket and the peg bag off the ground. “She went off with a placard she had made. I didn’t ask.” My mother sighed and the heaviness of the sound singed my conscience till I felt burned up round the edges with it, sick at what I’d done.
    “Oh Ma, I’m so –”
    “You can lose your reputation in this village overnight and then it’s a life’s work to get it back again.” The basket was made of sea grass which was unravelling at one edge. She started worrying away at it with her thumbnail, splitting the loose stalk. “People are very swift to judge round here. They might be your neighbours, but …” She took a breath, then buttoned it up somewhere inside her. “I don’t know what your father would say. He’d be very –”
    “Ma, I’ve –”
    “ – disappointed.”
    The silence was broken by the clicking sound of the latch and Delyth breezed her way through the yard and into the kitchen. “I’m starving,” she ranged around from cupboard to cupboard. “I’ve had the most thrilling time – there were about twenty of us.”
    “Thank you, Delyth,” Ma crisply closed the cupboard doors. “Your tea will be at half past five, the usual time, and not a minute sooner.”
    “Ifor?” My sister deigned to notice me. “Your boss was out with us,” she said with emphasis. “For a short while, anyway. He’s got principles, at least. Oh,” she started, recalling something. “Are these yours? I found them on the doorstep. You must have dropped them.”
    She handed me my secateurs.

 
     
    CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
     
    I remembered going to work the next day in trepidation. Samuelson was looking green around the gills and I waited for him to ask me why on earth I had bothered turning up, but he made himself comfortable on a pile of sacks in the fermentation shed and waved me away as if I were the chief cause of his evident headache. His rough rawness rose from him like civet. “What are you staring at?” he asked, opening one bloodshot eye. “Finish off the tying in, boy.”
    I didn’t need telling twice.
    I made my way to the vineyard, the late spring singing like a hymn around me. At the top of the slope the knuckled walls of the old part of the house gleamed white as bones in the sunlight. Brown once told me that the nuns made wine here back in the fourteenth century. They supplied the bishops of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester. He said that Nanagalan meant women, singing, in Old English and if you were a lad green in the green world like I was, when the wind stirred the leaves on the vines and whispered through the arches of the beech trees soaring round the Drowning Pool, you could almost believe it was ancient voices you could hear, raised in plainsong.
    I pulled my secateurs out of my pocket and weighed the meaning of their return in my hand. I was full of all the things that it might signify. I set to work at double quick time to make up for what I had not completed the day before, steaming my way along the rows all morning. Perhaps it was the heat unfurling round me, or the smallness of my lunch, but after a while I began to imagine that I could hear music. I stopped to listen. It wasn’t a ghostly Gregorian chant, but fragments of something fraught and feverish. I snipped at a side shoot, then another, but all the while these ragged phrases