Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  “How long,” she asked, “has this been going on?”

  Jasper gurgled something unintelligible from the floor and Rose, clutching him now with both her arms, kissed his face, her own still streaming with a flood of tears and makeup.

  “How long?” Abbey repeated.

  “He came to see me not long after you left for the islands,” her mother said, weeping, holding Jasper’s head and looking at her daughter. “It didn’t work out in America. We consoled each other, Abbey,” she said defiantly, trying despite her distress to regain a dramatic edge. “We were both damaged goods and we found support in each other’s arms. Can you blame us for that? Is that such a crime?”

  Abbey looked straight at her mother. “I think you know exactly what it is,” she said, and in her mother’s emerald-green irises she saw that she did.

  Rose, just like Martin, had chosen betrayal over love without so much as a backward glance.

  Jasper was coughing into his hands, Rose was still weeping softly, but Abbey was silent as she reconciled herself with her situation. Really, she realized, she had only one option left.

  “Where is my grandfather?” she asked her mother. “Where is the farm?”

  Rose stopped crying.

  “I will not let you go to that wicked old man, I will not,” she said. “We swore we would never go back.”

  “No, Rose,” said Abbey, “you swore we would never go back. I was only five and, from what I can remember, perfectly happy there.”

  “How can you say that when I told you what he did to my mother?”

  “How can I believe anything you’ve ever told me? Especially after this? After him?” Abbey looked at the still-cowering Jasper. Rose stayed silent.

  “Tell me how to find my grandfather or I will sell my story to OK! magazine along with your real age,” Abbey continued. “I will tell them that you made me get rid of my boyfriend’s baby and then you banished me to the other side of the world and ran off with him.”

  Her mother hiccupped as she calculated the fallout from Abbey doing what she was threatening to do.

  “I’ll tell them my father was a gypsy traveler who worked for a sideshow carnival. I’ll tell them you didn’t even know his name.” The subject of Abbey’s father had not been broached for many years and never, ever to her satisfaction. She’d long given up wanting to know the truth but suspected, rightly, that it was still a weak point in her mother’s fabric.

  Rose let go of Jasper and collapsed on the floor next to him, her back against the telephone table, her legs straight out in front of her like a broken puppet’s. She opened and closed her mouth like a beached cod. “You little bitch,” she said eventually.

  Abbey hardened her heart. How could this woman still hurt her? “Tell me,” she said.

  “I’ll never speak to you ever again,” Rose said.

  “I never want you to,” answered Abbey. “Tell me.”

  “Coolarney House,” Rose whispered. “Schillies. County Cork.”

  Abbey turned and picked her bag up from the sitting room, then swept past Rose and Jasper and opened the front door of the flat.

  “Go to your grandfather and that is it between you and me,” her mother said in a cold, dead voice. “I mean it.”

  Abbey turned to look at her again, feeling a strange empty blackness inside. She supposed she should have felt strong and triumphant but she didn’t. She felt sad and humiliated and dirty.

  “What is there between you and me, anyway, Rose?” she said. “Apart from our two names on my birth certificate?” She looked at Jasper, still with his head hidden in his hands so he could avoid any involvement. “Oh, and him.”

  Her mother looked suddenly furious and, abandoning all question of glamour, scrambled undaintily to her feet. “Just ask that old bastard what happened to your grandmother,” she spat from the entrance to her flat as Abbey walked toward the lift. “Just ask him what’s buried in his precious factory,” she wept as it arrived and Abbey stepped into it.

  “You’ll see,” Rose cried out. “You’ll find out. That’ll wipe the—” but the elevator doors snapped shut and Abbey was left with nothing but the silent, sweeping cloak of her own remorse and shame.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Once you’ve done your stirring and your waiting and your thinking and the time is right, there is a single moment, and I’m not messing with you here, there is one single moment when it all comes together and you realize that your milk has gone and your cheese is on its way.”

  JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  By three o’clock Brian Clancy was once again hammered. He’d eschewed the sandwiches and replenished tea supplies that Avis had provided at lunchtime in favor of the contents of a hip flask of whisky. While his fellow interviewees debated world issues—such as tuna paste versus tuna flakes—he sat perfectly happy, sipping and snoozing. The same could not be said for Thomas Brennan. The poor man was positively itching for action and by midafternoon the pseudo business magnate’s patience was stretched as far as it could go.

  “This is ridiculous!” he snapped when the afternoon shadows grew so long the courtyard started to lose its sun and the hopefuls all had to lean up against the factory wall to catch its last rays. “Do they think we have nothing better to do all day than stand around here waiting for an audience with them?” Thomas demanded, looking up at the house for signs of life.

  “Well, I think I speak for the lot of us, Thomas,” Fergal drawled, “when I say we definitely don’t have anything better to do.”

  Thomas tossed him a sour look. “Speak for yourself, Fergal,” he said in a hoity-toity fashion. “But I for one have a business to run and every moment away from it is costing me money.”

  “So what is this business of yours exactly, Thomas?” Fergal asked, a dangerous glint in his eye. “We’ve been meaning to ask.”

  “That’s it,” Thomas seethed. “I’ve had enough.” He strode over to the back door and started hammering on it with alacrity. “Miss O’Regan,” he hollered. “Miss O’Regan! Open this door.”

  Inside, on hearing the racket, Fee propelled himself out of his chair and scrambled to the window. “Thomas Brennan’s having a conniption!” he reported excitedly. “He’s calling for you, Avis. Are you going to go?”

  “Well, I have to go anyway,” said Avis, looking up from her darning and checking her watch. “It’s nearly milking time.” She packed her mending away in an old-fashioned carpetbag and turned her attention to Corrie. He was not himself today and it weighed heavy on her heart, yet Fee seemed to be full of the joys of life which, in the circumstances, didn’t seem to make much sense.

  “Well, who says it has to?” Fee asked her cheekily. “Why does everybody always expect it all to make sense? Maybe it just doesn’t. Maybe it’s not supposed to. Have you ever thought of that?”

  “Ah, stop doing that, Joseph, it’s rude,” she scolded.

  “What’s he doing?” Corrie said.

  “Only reading my mind again and I don’t like it,” answered Avis. “I think it’s bad manners.”

  “G’wan with you,” Fee said sheepishly. “Is a man in my condition allowed no fun at all?”

  Corrie and Avis looked at each other and weighed up the options. “No!” they replied in unison. He was ill, but clearly not that ill. When the mischievous glimmer had gone from his eye, then they’d let him have fun. In the meantime, it was safer not to.

  “Do you want me to do something with them?” Avis asked, looking at Corrie over the top of her spectacles and nodding in the direction of the window. “Speed it all up a bit?”

  “It might be an idea. We don’t want them to get cold. What do you think, Joseph? Cheese-tasting time?”

  Fee was jiggling with excitement at his watching post by the window and didn’t even hear Corrie talking to him. Avis sighed. It was hard to get sense out of Fee at the best of times but it was a particularly hopeless task today.

  “Brian Clancy’s swi
gging out of a bottle again,” he noted gleefully. “Constitution of an ox, God bless him.” He ambled back to his chair and wriggled into it, his feet barely touching the ground by the time he was settled.

  “What’s got into you today, Joseph Feehan?” Avis asked. “Anyone would think you had won the lottery!”

  “You never know what’s just around the corner, Avis O’Regan,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling.

  Corrie looked over at him suspiciously. “Is there anything you’re not telling us, Joseph? Is there a cheesemaker out there after all?”

  Fee tried not to look too smug in case his funny feeling proved to be gas from last night’s rhubarb crumble, but as his funny feeling had never let him down before, he had no reason to think it would today.

  “I’m just saying that you never know what’s around the corner.”

  Avis rolled her eyes at Corrie and headed for the sitting-room door. “Cheese test it is, then,” she said, one hand on the open door as she turned to go out. “Just for fun. And you can mark it out the window.”

  Corrie and Fee both smiled and nodded their approval.

  “Thomas,” Avis said, opening the downstairs door just as the harried hopeful was about to batter it down. “How can I help you?”

  The poor lad was purple with rage. “You can pass on to your employers,” said Thomas spitting with fury, “that it is most unprofessional to keep applicants waiting in the baking hot sun for six hours just for an interview.”

  “Did you not get the morning tea?” Avis asked sweetly. “Or the lunch?”

  “You can pass on to your employers,” Thomas continued, ignoring her, “that this is not the way to conduct a search for the most appropriate person for the job and I for one cannot waste another minute of my valuable time standing here with these—these—”

  “Other applicants?” Avis provided helpfully.

  “These no-hopers,” Thomas corrected emphatically. “And I deplore the lack of protocol demonstrated here today.”

  “Shall I pass on to my employers that you are not interested in the job, then?” Avis asked.

  “That,” Thomas said as he smoothed his hair down with the palm of his hand, “is right.” And he turned on his heel and headed for the driveway.

  “Well, who needs protocol,” Fergal said, smiling winningly at Avis and watching Thomas’s retreating back, “when you can have Avis O’Regan’s baking? Weren’t the rest of us all just complimenting you on your culinary skills?”

  “You can save your silver tongue for stage two of today’s proceedings,” Avis said, giving Fergal the eye before retreating briefly to the kitchen and coming back with a large tray laden with different cheeses. She placed it on the foldout table and stood up again, rubbing her hands together as the hopefuls looked on—with the exception, of course, of Brian Clancy, who was busy taking a nap.

  “Now, I have here a selection of cheeses from Corrie and Fee’s private collection, some Coolarney and some from farther afield,” Avis said. “I’m going to leave them here with you while I go to the dairy to start the girls off with milking, then I’m going to come back and ask you to identify which cheeses are which. Do you all understand?”

  Brian snored; Fergal and Mickey looked worried; and Jamie was distracted, partly by worry that Avis had to handle the milking by herself, and partly by a strange noise he could hear coming from somewhere behind the house.

  “First,” said Avis. “I’m going to ask you a simple cheesemaking question. The answer will go toward your final score.”

  “There’s a score?” Mickey was getting nervous.

  “That’s right,” said Avis. “Now, all Coolarney cheeses come in two sizes, kilo and dote.”

  Fergal and Mickey nodded.

  “Well,” asked Avis, “what is a dote?”

  Mickey relaxed. He knew the answer.

  “Shall we open the window, Joe?” Fee asked, looking down. “I want to hear what they say.”

  “It’s the little cheese traditionally given to an Irish bride on her wedding day by the groom’s grandmother,” Mickey said proudly.

  “What bollocks,” said Fergal. “It’s not at all. It’s the shape made in the ground by the first squirt if you milk a cow without a bucket.”

  “Why would you milk a cow without a bucket?” Mickey wanted to know.

  “To see what size a dote should be, you eejit.”

  Avis raised her eyebrows at Jamie, who was looking mildly staggered. “Haven’t a clue,” he said. “I never really thought about it.”

  Avis smiled knowingly, then headed for the dairy, leaving the three men gathered close around the cheese tray. Finally, after a minute’s silence, Mickey poked his pointy stump at a glorious green and gold rind.

  “It looks disgusting,” he said, his old face crinkled and cringing.

  “Don’t poke it, Mickey,” scolded Fergal, “that stick’s been halfway up Dermot McGrath’s arse.”

  “Not this end of it, you eejit,” countered Mickey. “I’d know if I’d got it that far up.”

  Jamie was distracted again by a noise coming from somewhere in the wild rhododendrons between the house and the factory and the dairymaids’ cottage. “Did you hear that?” he asked, but the older men ignored him.

  “It smells like rotten eggs,” Mickey said, his face still scrunched with disdain.

  “I can hear something,” Jamie said, moving away from the cheese and toward the rose-covered archway. “Can you?”

  “Jamie’s making a run for it,” Fee reported, even though Corrie was standing right next to him. “And Brian’s asleep.”

  Just around the corner, Kit woke up to see a small, troll-like creature standing over him with a scowl on her face. She looked like the thing Niamh had put in his getting-fired box to bulk it up, only less green.

  “Have you seen Jesus?” the troll asked.

  Kit blinked and sat up. He must have been asleep for a while because the sun was sitting substantially lower in the sky than it had been when he first collapsed on the wooden bench, and his neck had a hell of a crick in it.

  “Hello-o-o-o,” the troll said again, quite sarcastically for a Christian, Kit thought. “I asked you had you seen Jesus?”

  “I’m a Baptist,” Kit answered, rubbing his sore neck. “Well, my folks are anyway, so I guess that means, yes, I have seen Jesus.”

  As if he didn’t already have enough reasons to kill Niamh next time he saw her, he thought. The troll looked at him, confused, and then smiled a smile so radiant Kit wondered if perhaps he was still asleep and she was a dream.

  “You’ve got me all wrong,” the troll finally said, laughing. “Jesus is a cat. A fat ginger cat. I can find Mary and All The Saints but there’s no sign of Himself and it’s after four so the dear little dote’ll be starving.”

  Kit looked at his watch in horror. The troll was right. It was nearly 4:30. He must have been asleep for more than three hours.

  “I’m Lucy,” said the troll, smiling again, and he saw at once that she wasn’t a spooky creature at all. In fact, she was pretty cute in a punky little girl sort of a way, with a pile of dreadlocks scooped up on top of her head, too many layers of black clothes and runs in her tights.

  “I’m Kit,” he said, with a smile that was not lost on Lucy either. He held out his hand and took hers when she finally offered it, enjoying its smallness and warmth as he did.

  “I’m waiting for Avis O’Regan,” he explained.

  “Out here?” laughed Lucy. “You’ll be lucky. There’s only one thing she hates more than the sun and that’s the garden. She says flowers make her feel sad. Desperate, isn’t it?” She looked at Kit’s slightly crestfallen face. “You haven’t been waiting long, have you?”

  “I met some guy coming down the driveway when I arrived and he told me to wait here for Avis. Said she was in some fierce mood and I should keep out of her way.”

  “Avis in a fierce mood? I don’t think so,” said Lucy, thinking how handsome Kit looked when slightly
crestfallen. “She hasn’t a fierce bone in her body. In fact, she’s so nice it makes you want to puke. She’ll be up at the dairy now but you can wait inside the house. Corrie and Fee won’t care. Well, they won’t even know. They’re interviewing for a new cheesemaker today and a bigger load of peckerheads you’ve never seen in all your life. In fact, it must have been one of the peckerheads who told you to wait for Avis out here.” She rolled her eyes and looked contemptuous. “Was it a great big bollocks with a silly hat?”

  Kit laughed at this apt description. “Yeah,” he said. “Claimed he was covered in rat bites. Pretty strange, huh?”

  “Come on,” said Lucy. “I’ll bring you inside.”

  Kit picked up his bags and followed her around to a glass and wood-framed conservatory on the opposite side of the house. Inside, a dark passage led to a big cozy kitchen, where Lucy indicated Kit should wait at the big wooden table pushed up close to the rear wall.

  “I’d better go,” she said, pulling her heavy leather jacket closer around herself. “I’ll tell Avis you’re waiting.”

  Outside, one of the cheesemaking applicants was asleep between two of the flower barrels lining the factory wall; two more were looking stupidly at a tray of rotten cheeses. Lucy ignored them as she had done all day and headed up the path to the cottage to get her milking gear. Halfway up she was disconcerted to see a blue-denimed rear poking out of the greenery.

  “It’s all right,” the other end of the rear was saying into the ground. “It’s okay. Sccchhh. Scchhh.”

  The noise was frightening so before she could think much about it, Lucy gave the rear a boot.

  “Owwwww,” Jamie Joyce cried as he extricated himself from the foliage. He turned to see Lucy scowling at him. “What did you do that for?” he asked in a hurt voice.

  Lucy took in his blushing sweet face and thought perhaps the kick in the arse might have been a bit premature.

  “It was poking out,” she said, nevertheless keeping her scowl in place. “And making the place look untidy.”