The bakery on Chapel Street opened at seven, which meant that for Rosa and Kit the day began at eleven the night before, when the rest of the street was drawing its curtains.

They let themselves in by the back door, where the bins were, and put the lights on one at a time, because putting them all on at once felt like being shouted at. The kitchen came up out of the dark in pieces. The long steel table. The mixer, which was older than either of them and had a name, which was Gladys. The wall of proving baskets, and the racks, and the oven at the far end, which had been kept ticking over all day and now needed waking properly.

Kit did the oven. Rosa did the kettle. This was the arrangement, and had been for four years, and neither of them could remember deciding it.

“Cold tonight,” said Kit, with his hand flat on the oven door, feeling it come up.

“The dough will be slow, then.”

“The dough will be slow.”

It was not a complaint. Slow dough was just a fact about the night, like the weather, and you worked around it, and it made the bread better in the end, though Rosa would never have said that to the dough’s face.

She got the first batch out of the walk-in fridge, where it had been sitting since the afternoon, thinking about itself. Sixty loaves’ worth of sourdough, in tubs, cold and heavy and smelling faintly of apples, which was what it smelt of when it was happy. She lined the tubs up on the table. Kit brought the flour. They worked without much talking, because they had done this a thousand times, and the hands knew what to do and the mouths could rest.

The radio went on low, some station that played old songs after midnight and did not say much between them. Outside, a taxi went past, and then nothing for a long time.

Shaping was Rosa’s favourite part. You took a piece of the dough, which had no shape and no opinions, and you folded it on itself, and turned it, and folded it, and it began to hold together and push back against your palms, and by the time it went into the basket it was a thing with a surface and an inside, and it was on its way to being bread. She could do it with her eyes shut. She sometimes did, for a loaf or two, just to see.

Kit’s favourite part was the oven. He did not say so, but she knew, because when the first tray went in he always stood for a moment with his hands in the small of his back, looking at the door, the way you look at a window you have just put a bird box outside.

Between the shaping and the baking there was the waiting, and the waiting was the middle of the night.

They had a way of doing it. There were two stools, and a corner where the oven warmth reached, and the second cup of tea. Rosa would sit with her feet up on the bottom rung of the stool. Kit would sit with the stock list and pretend to read it and not read it. The proving baskets, in their long rows, did their slow work under cloths, and every so often one of them would give a very small sigh as the dough settled, which was a sound you only heard if the room was quiet enough, and by two in the morning the room was always quiet enough.

“Do you remember,” said Kit, “when we thought we’d do this for a year?”

“I remember you thought that.”

“You thought it too.”

“I thought about a year, and then I thought about the smell in here at four o’clock,” said Rosa, “and I stopped thinking about a year.”

He nodded. That was fair.

At half past two she went and looked at the dough, pressing a fingertip into the side of one loaf and watching how slowly the dent came back. Slow. Not yet. She covered it again and came back to the stool, and the radio played something with a trumpet in it, and Kit hummed along under his breath and got the tune slightly wrong in the same place he always got it wrong.

The cold night sat against the windows. Inside, the oven ticked, and the kitchen kept its own weather, warm and dry and smelling of flour and steam and the faint apple smell of dough that is nearly there.

At quarter past three it was there. The dent came back slowly, and then stopped coming back, and Rosa said, “Now,” and Kit was already up.

The first tray went in with a breath of steam. Then the second. Then the third. The oven took them in the way a tide takes in the shore, evenly and without any fuss, and the door shut, and Kit stood with his hands in the small of his back, and Rosa let him.

After that the night turned into something else. The dark outside the windows was still dark but it had a thinner feel. There was a milk float, or something that sounded like one. A blackbird started up too early, stopped, embarrassed, and then went again. The oven was full and the racks were waiting and the whole place had a held-breath feeling, the way a room does before people come.

The first loaves came out at four. Kit slid the tray onto the rack and they stood together and looked.

There is a colour that bread goes. It is not brown and it is not gold and there is no word for it that is quite right, but you know it when you see it, and the crust had it, and it crackled as it cooled, a tiny sound, like something settling into a chair. Rosa leaned in and breathed. Kit leaned in and breathed. Neither of them said anything, because there was nothing you could say that the smell had not already said better.

They did it all again, and again, for two more hours. Rosa’s arms ached in the pleasant way. Kit’s face was pink from the oven. The radio changed to somebody talking about the weather in a soft voice, and it was going to be a fine day, and that seemed right.

At half past six the street lights went off outside, and there was a knock at the front door, which they had not unlocked yet.

Rosa went. It was Mr Amos, in his cap, who lived over the road and came every morning for the same loaf, and always knocked a little before seven, and always said, “Am I early?” and was always early.

“Am I early?”

“You’re early,” said Rosa, and gave him his loaf, still warm, wrapped in paper, and did not charge him, because on a cold night you do not charge Mr Amos.

He went off across the road with it under his arm like something he had been given for winning.

Kit was at the back door, letting the cool air in. Rosa came and stood beside him. The sky over the roofs was grey turning to something paler. The bins looked less like bins in that light. A cat went along a wall.

“Bed,” said Kit.

“Bed,” said Rosa.

They turned the lights off one at a time, in the order they had turned them on, so the kitchen went back into the dark in the same pieces it had come out of. The racks stood full in the dim. The oven ticked as it cooled. Gladys the mixer waited for tomorrow, which was already today.

Out on Chapel Street the first bus went by, nearly empty.

They walked home the short way, shoulder to shoulder, smelling of bread.

And the loaves sat quietly in the shop behind them, cooling, crackling, ready.