I try to wriggle out of Bridie’s grasp. Nothing doing. ‘Em. Fine. He’s fine.’
She leans back to get a better look at me and lets out a little gasp. ‘You’ve your granny’s necklace!’
My granny’s?
‘It was Mum’s,’ I say, fingering the pendant. She’d been wearing it the day she died. She always wore it.
‘That’s right. Josephine gave it to her before she left,’ Bridie says.
She did?
A crooked smile blooms up into Bridie’s eyes. ‘Clare must be shiteing herself,’ she says. ‘Sit down there. I’ll put the kettle on.’
There’s nowhere to sit but behind the paper strewn desk.
‘Really, I should go. I’ve got to--’
‘Just like your grandmother. Always goin’.’ She pushes me toward the chair with surprising strength.
‘Okay.’ I sit down reluctantly. Bridie disappears into the hard white light and reappears almost immediately with two mugs of steaming, milky tea.
‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to have you! All of this,’ she throws both arms expansively, as if the place was about to come in around her. ‘It’s too much for one person, really.’
How does she know I inherited the factory? My grandmother must have told Bridie her plans. Maybe she could tell me why Josephine chose me.
‘Sit, sit!’
‘Oh, well, I’m not--’
She doesn’t think I’m staying, does she?!
‘Of course you aren’t,’ she says and props one cheek up on the desk. ‘But I thought I’d get a bit of work out of ya while you’re here.’ She slaps my knee.
I realize that I’m still clutching the invoices in the crook of my arm. I thrust them at Bridie as if they’re contagious. ‘Where should I…?’
‘Oh, just anywhere,’ Bridie smiles through a mouthful of custard crèmes. ‘I tell ya, I’m not the bookkeeper, your granny was.’
I glance up at the photograph. Saint Josephine presiding. The picture has an eerie watchfulness about it. I slink backward a step, still her eyes seem to be hard on me.
‘Did you know my grandmother well?’
‘Did I know her well?! HA!’ Bridie pulls herself up breathlessly and waddles to the back wall. ‘Knew her for fifty years. From the very beginning to the very end.’ She gazes up at the portrait as if it might speak.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I say.
Bridie hugs herself and smiles solemnly at the photograph. ‘Sure, we all were. There wasn’t a soul on this island that wasn’t beholden to her.’ She nods toward the factory floor. ‘She built St Enda’s, bit by bit, out of her back kitchen! Brought us all together--farmers, shop keepers, and the girls, of course.’ She gestures to a yellowing newspaper clipping. I read the headline: ‘St. Enda’s Showcases Handmade Cheeses at Galway Market.’ Josephine stands beaming beside a jumble of young women in surgical looking smocks. They’re all laughing at something behind the camera.
‘Is that Clare?’ I ask, pointing at a girl doubled over in hysterics.
‘Oh yes. And there’s your mum.’
The sisters are shoulder to shoulder. Mum must’ve been sixteen or seventeen. She’s already taller than Clare and seems to be leaning just slightly downward toward her.
‘This was very early days. The factory was only just opened.’ Bridie gestures to several framed clippings on the far wall--Josephine cutting a ribbon at the factory doors, and shaking hands with the ‘President of the Aran Dairy Co-op’ and holding up a massive wheel of cheese emblazoned with the St. Enda’s logo. ‘It very nearly closed right back up again.’
‘Really? Why?’
Bridie shoots me an incredulous look. ‘Maeve, of course.’
‘Oh.’ For some reason I feel a prick of shame.
‘When your mother went away, Josephine’s heart was torn in two. She says to me, “Bridie, I’m going closing St Enda’s. I’m in no condition.” And then a week later she was back at her desk, taking orders and signing checks. Just like that.’ Bridie unfolds her arms and fusses over the kettle. ‘More tea, love?’
‘Oh, no thanks.’ I haven’t taken the first sip.
She tops up my mug and heaves a sigh. ‘All the love she had left she gave to St Enda’s. Your grandfather was long gone, of course. And Clare. Well, she had to do what she had to do to get on. I thought it would’ve been a better job, her staying on here, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She never cared a jot about the factory, really.’
I squint at the photograph of Clare and my mum smiling behind the market stall. ‘She looks like she cares here.’
‘Oh well, that. That was Maeve’s doing. Her mum had asked Clare, and she’d been too busy. She was studying then. But, when Maeve asked. It used to be there wasn’t a thing your mother could’ve asked, and Clare wouldn’t have jumped to do it for her.’
My heart clenches. ‘Until she abandoned them all,’ I say softly. I try to, but I can’t look Bridie in the face.
‘Who was it told you that?’ she said and reached out as if she might hug me to her again.
I can hear Clare’s strangled voice, feel the reaching depth of pain there. You remember what she did to us.
‘Julie?’ Bridie puts a hand on my shoulder.
All of a sudden I want to run, bolt down to the pier and hop the first boat and never look back. ‘I really shouldn’t be here,’ I say, my voice faltering.
‘Don’t be silly! This place is yours,’ Bridie chuckles and claps a hand on my shoulder.
‘It’s not. I’m selling it to Clare.’
Bridie laughs so hard she spills her tea.
‘I am,’ I spurt.
Why is this funny?!
‘Okay so,’ the old woman gasps through her guffawing.
She’s crazy. Flat out crazy.
‘Did your mother ever tell you how St. Enda’s got its name?’ Bridie asks.
‘No.’ Up until yesterday, I didn’t even know there was a St. Enda’s.
‘Your mother never told you that story?’ she spurts. ‘Well.’
I don’t have time for a story!
Bridie takes a big gulp of tea. ‘Enda was the son of a high king--a great warrior--and his sister, Fanchea, was an abbess. She didn’t care at all for his fighting, course she didn’t, so she asked him round to the abbey and pleaded with him to lay down his sword. He said no, grabbed up his helmet, and would’ve been off when he caught sight of this stunner of a nun.’
I can’t help but smile.
‘True story!’ Bridie titters. ‘Straightway he kneeled before his sister and agreed to lay down his arms if she’d marry him to her young charge. Fanchea agreed, and Enda set off home to share the great news with the king. But while he was away, his beloved died suddenly of a mysterious illness. He returned to wed her, and you know what he found? The poor girl laid out cold on a funeral slab! The sight so affected him he renounced his princehood! He came here, to this very island, to undertake the life of a monk!’
‘But what has that got to do with cheese?’ I ask, unexpectedly intrigued.
‘After your grandfather died,’ replies Bridie, ‘Josephine did what she had to do to carry on, even though it meant making a great sacrifice. Just like St. Enda. And she did it again when Maeve went away.’ She folded her arms in her lap.
The hair on the back of my neck pricks up. Sacrifice? If anyone sacrificed anything, it was Mum.
‘I’ve really got to go,’ I huff at Bridie and push back from the desk.
‘Go where? Don’t be daft,’ she straightens up and wipes at the splatter of tea on her leg.
‘I’ve got to make some calls.’
Bridie pushes the old fashioned rotary phone towards me.
‘Actually, I need to go online. To Skype my friend Kate. I haven’t been able to get through to her with my phone,’ I ramble.
‘Ohhh,’ Bridie nods along.
‘We’re starting this new business, and my head is just--’ I fling my hands up to my temples and shake them emphatically.
Why am I telling her all this?
Bridie shakes her head sagely as I hoist myself up and shoulder my bag. ‘There’s an Internet connection here you’re very welcome to.’
Shut up.
Bridie registers my shock and smiles. ‘Your granny was always miles ahead of the rest of ’em.’
I blink twice, sincerely amazed, and pull out my laptop. Just as it whirs to life, the side door flings open. In bursts a clucking troupe of women, all of them in head to toe white, talking at and over one another. They look like misfit nuns in their hairnets and orthopaedic shoes.
‘Christ on a bike!’ a broad shouldered woman squeals when she catches sight of me. ‘She came!’
‘Didn’t I tell ya?’ another says.
‘That’s a fiver you owe me, Aoife,’ a third pipes up.
‘Come and get it so.’
They all cluster outside the door and, for a moment, fall silent. You’d think I was some rare, spitting beetle the way they’re all standing back, peering at me.
‘I love her hair,’ Aoife whispers loudly to the ginger haired woman beside her.
‘Fine head of hair,’ the ginger woman nods.
‘You can’t get a cut like that here, sure you can’t,’ Aoife says.
‘And that top!’
‘Will you stop that now!’ Bridie shoos them away. ‘Worse than a pack of magpies.’
‘Who is that at all?’ a woman with Coke bottle glasses asks, squinting from the back of the pack.
Bridie sets a hand on my shoulder. ‘Ladies,’ she says, all of a sudden very official. ‘May I introduce you to Julie Quinn. Maeve’s girl.’
Silence.
‘She’s inherited St Enda’s,’ Bridie says, chest puffed out with pride.
A giddy flare of exclamation rises from the huddle.
‘Is she not very young to be running a factory?’ the woman in the glasses asks.
‘No younger than myself!’ a woman with over plucked brows spurts.
‘But I’m going to--’ I blurt out.
‘Shall we give her a tour?’ Bridie asks.
‘Absolutely!’ They scutter off to their workstations.
This is not happening.
Bridie clasps my hand. ‘You can spare a minute, can’t you?’
Do I have a choice?
Bridie yanks me onto the factory floor.
Guess that’s a ‘no’.
‘Do you want to know the secret to making the best cheese?’ she asks.
Not in the least.
Bridie steers me to the far end of the production line so that I have a sweeping view of the curing vats and the conveyors, the molding racks and walk-in coolers. ‘The secret is to not make it. You stand under me?’
‘Sure.’ Just nod and smile, Julie.
‘We’re a factory, NOT a processing plant,’ Bridie says.
‘But… you do make cheese.’
‘We do. By hand. Which is a different thing altogether.’
Ah.
‘See that first table there?’ said Bridie. ‘That’s Aoife and Emer’s station. What they do now is heat up the milk, slow like, in those two vats there. It’s unpasteurized, of course, so we don’t have to throw in any cultures or that sort of malarkey. Aoife keeps an eye on the curd--that’s those solid bits there--gives it a stir every now and again, and then Emer drains off the whey when the bacteria’s done all she’s gonna do.’
Yum.
‘How ya keeping there, girls?’
‘Grand sure,’ they wave.
I reach out to shake their hands, but both are covered in a slick looking goo. I give them both an awkward wave instead. ‘It’s lovely to meet you.’
‘And yourself!’ Emer gushes.
‘Isn’t it just,’ Aoife winks from the back lip of a dented vat. ‘High time we got some new blood in here.’
‘Oh, I’m just--’
‘Thennnn,’ Bridie yanks me onward, ‘Orla and Teresa ladle the curd into these molds here. They go onto the racks then and are turned every hour. See how even more whey’s coming out of them there? Now, the more you turn and press, the harder the cheese. Lovely hurling, ladies!’
Orla and Teresa smile and say hello to me.
‘And the last step--where’s Róisín gone?’
‘She’s in the cellar, Bridie,’ Orla says.
‘Right. The last step is curing. Come on with me so.’
I follow Bridie down a corridor under hissing pipes. Two rust hinged aluminum doors gleam dully at the end of the hall. The deep moaning of an old diesel motor seeps through the concrete walls. An ancient oil stain has leeched into the concrete floor.
‘Isn’t all of your equipment a bit--’
‘Run down?’
‘Dated, I was going to say.’ But yeah, run down’s spot on.
‘I s’pose,’ says Bridie. ‘But it’s been here from the beginning! And anyway, we haven’t the money to replace it now.’
Bridie swings the doors open and we step across a narrow threshold into a cavernous walk-in cooler. The air is heavy and edged with cold, and there’s a strong smell of feet.
‘Hiya, Bridie,’ Róisín hollers from a dim corner. ‘Two seconds now.’
She climbs down from a stepladder and waltzes over, hands on her generous hips.
‘Julie, this is Róisín. She went to school with your granny, same as me.’
‘She was a force of nature, your grandmother,’ Róisín says and pumps my arm.
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘Show Julie what you’re at there.’ Bridie nods her chin toward the wheels of cheese, row upon row of them. A fine dust of gray mold rims the nearest tier.
‘This is where we let the cheese rest and mature,’ explains Róisín. ‘Some of them we soak in a brine to get that started a bit quicker. Some of them, like these ones here, we brush with spores, and they make their own casing.’
‘And you eat that?’ I point a finger at the mottled skin.
‘That’s the best part!’
Yick.
‘You’ll try some, here,’ Bridie pulls one of the wheels down off the shelf.
I swallow. ‘That’s alright--’
‘Have you a knife there?’ she asks Róisín.
Please say no.
‘I do indeed.’ Róisín slices a humongous wedge and hands it to me.
The strong, yeasty smell of the rind shoots up my nostrils. My stomach curdles. ‘You wouldn’t have a cracker, would you?’ I cringe.
‘Go on!’ Bridie says.
I shake my head a tad too emphatically. ‘I’m fine, thanks. Big breakfast.’
‘You’re sure, now?’ Róisín asks.
One-hundred percent. ‘Uh huh.’
‘More for me, so,’ Bridie winks and pops the cheese into her mouth.
‘The factories in New York must be massive!’ Róisín says and prods my side.
‘Oh no, I don’t work in a factory.’
‘Do you not?’ She frowns slightly.
‘I’m in advertising.’
‘Well. La de DAH.’ She prods me again, and this time it’s sore.
‘You could give us a hand in the shop!’ Bridie says.
‘It’s more of a museum,’ Róisín mumbles.
‘It isn’t! And with Julie’s help--she’s a world class ad woman, you see--we could really make something of it.’
For the love of… How am I going to get myself out of this one?!
‘It’s this way, love.’ Bridie drags me back up the corridor and into a storeroom. ‘Mind yourself.’ She opens another door and sweeps her arm in front of her like Vanna White.
I step past her into a beamy cottage room with a tremendous hearth and a creaking timber floor, my eyes bugging. Marmalades and chutneys, chocolates and honeys, all of them ‘homemade on Inishmore’, line the sideboard shelves. A deli cooler, stocked full with cheese, purrs in the corner beside the till. It’s like a page out of a story book.
‘This was your great-grandfather’s house.
When the warehouse went up, Josephine insisted they leave it be. Everyone thought she was mad, holding on to a thing like that. The roof had fallen in. Floor nothing but mud. But look it.’ Bridie twirled on her heel half a turn.
‘It’s very nice.’
I run a finger along the gingham labels. Whiskey jam? Jeez!
‘The Yanks eat it up, alright,’ she chuckles.
‘I bet.’
‘Sure I don’t blame them. It’s everyone of us that’s looking for the same thing.’
‘And what’s that?’
She smiles serenely as if she’s about to reveal a mighty secret. ‘To come home.’
There’s a screech of brakes outside the window.
‘Jesus, is it gone noon already?’
I peer through the wavy glass. ‘Who’s that?’
‘The tour. Lord, where’s me glasses?’ She rummages in her bag. ‘We used to do three tours a day, and now it’s all I can do to fill the one!’
The man in the minibus lays on the horn.
‘That Aidan is an awful bollix,’ she huffs. ‘Come on. You can give me a hand with these.’ She nods out the window at the string of tourists standing in a kind of daze beside the minibus.
Made With Love: I Love You Forever Page 11