Edward Trencom's Nose: A Novel of History, Dark Intrigue and Cheese

by Giles Milton

  Harry watched as Edward separated the two halves of the round. He, too, was shaking, excited at the effect the cheese was having on Edward and exhilarated at the prospect of tasting a smear of the rich blue mould.

  ‘Stop,’ said Harry as he moved nearer to the stilton. He wiped his finger over the moist surface then frotted it carefully into his moustache, introducing a second scent to his bristly upper lip. ‘Oh, yes! Smell, smell – what can you tell me about this cheese? Can you tell me when it was made? Can you identify the farm? Do you know the cow?’

  Edward inhaled deeply, urging the scent into the furthest reaches of his olfactory bulb. His nose seemed to be growing, expanding, as it allowed the stilton’s odour to brush past millions of hairs and pores. Within seconds Edward felt himself transformed: he could smell the cheese in his throat, his mouth, his lungs, his entire body. He was tingling all over; he felt light-headed. There was no doubting that this was a veritable giant among stiltons.

  ‘It was …’ said Edward as he momentarily lifted his nose away from the cheese, ‘it was made on St Cuthbert’s farm – the one next to the church in Colston Bassett.’ He sniffed again. ‘It’s certainly an August cheese. Yes, I’d guess at 28th August – late afternoon. But the cow? That’s tricky.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed Uncle Harry, ‘tricky-dicky.’

  Edward paused for a second as he sniffed the cheese again. ‘It’s not Buttercup – it’s too creamy for her. And I don’t believe it’s Daisy or Cowslip. Did the milk come from Wittgenstein?’

  ‘A hole in one!’ exclaimed Harold with a smile. ‘A veritable hole in one! Welcome to Trencoms, Edward. You are, without doubt, in possession of the finest Trencom nose in generations.’

  He smiled, but it was an anxious and rather nervous smile. ‘And I hope to God,’ he said under his breath, ‘that it doesn’t inflict on you the same terrible curse as it did’ – he paused in order to dab his eyes – ‘on all of the others.’

  Edward’s nostrils became ever more refined as the years unfolded. It was not long before a single whiff was all he required to detect the exact provenance of any of the world’s great cheeses. He became a Master Cheesemonger at the precocious age of twenty-four and then went on to become a Maître de Fromage. He received a gold medal from Heidelberg’s Milchprodukte Institut, and was made an honorary member of the board of the Accademia del Formaggio in Rome. A year later he received his greatest honour when he was made Life President of the Most Worshipful Company of Cheese Connoisseurs.

  He wrote four specialist books on cheese (all of which received ecstatic reviews from the critics) before embarking on his greatest project: his twelve-volume Encyclopaedia of Cheese. When published in 1967, the Daily Telegraph heralded it as the most important cheese book ever written. The Times was even more effusive, labelling Trencom ‘the Edward Gibbon of the cheese world’.

  Such praise did not leave Edward resting on his laurels – indeed, it had quite the reverse effect. Inspired to even greater heights, he envisioned writing a monumental History of Cheese – a book that was to follow the evolution of cheese from Neolithic times to the present day, ending with a chapter on the history of Trencoms. It was to be dedicated to ‘the noble epoisses’, which Edward had long considered to be the finest cheese in the world.

  21 JANUARY 1969

  Tuesday, 21 January began like any other day. At 8.31 a.m., Edward unlocked the door to Trencoms and stepped briskly into the shop. He blew his nose, checked the temperature, and sniffed at the air.

  ‘Hmm,’ he thought to himself. ‘To think that it’s still January. Why, today is unseasonably warm.’

  He made his way to the back of the shop, pausing briefly as he passed underneath the twirling fans. Then, satisfied that the air smelled as rich as ever, he cut himself a thick slice of chèvre from the Nièvre and held it to his nose.

  ‘Ah – yes,’ he said to himself. ‘What a way to start the day!’

  After savouring the fragrance of goats and the mild bitterness of the rind, he set to work, unpacking boxes and carrying cheeses upstairs. Then, at exactly 9 a.m., shortly after the arrival of Mr George, his senior assistant, he unbolted the inner lock of Trencoms’ front door and swung the sign from ‘closed’ to ‘open’.

  At 9.11 a.m., the first customer arrived and bought a large slice of Normandy brie. At 9.32 a.m., Mr Jançek the Polish chemist bought a 4 oz pot of creamy edelpilzkase. Edward was pleased to see that Mr George was in the process of carefully arranging a new delivery of neufchatel, sniffing at each individual cheese before placing it on its mat. Where would he be without Mr George? He was a thoroughly dependable type who knew exactly what needed to be done. ‘A safe pair of hands,’ mused Edward as he wiped his own on a muslin towel. ‘A very safe pair of hands.’ If anything was ever to go wrong, one would want a Mr George right behind one in order to put it right again.

  Mr George was a good deal older than Edward and had faithfully served in Trencoms since the time of Uncle Harold. He had always spent long hours in the shop and, ever since the death of his dear wife, had seemed keen to work six days a week rather than the customary five. Truth was, he was a somewhat lonely figure (though by no means a sad one) and enjoyed the gentle camaraderie of working in the shop.

  The two men rarely spoke of the late Mrs George, for neither of them liked to touch on personal matters. Edward had never been invited to Mr George’s house and Mr George had never been to Edward’s; that was just as it should be. Nor did it strike either of them as remotely odd that they had referred to themselves as ‘Mr’ for so long that they’d almost forgotten each other’s first names. Just moments earlier, Edward had found himself scratching his head in frustration as he’d tried to recall Mr George’s Christian name. It had gone clean out of his head and it was only when he sold Mr Jançek the piece of edelpilzkase that he remembered it was Edwin.

  The sudden remembrance of this set off a chain of associations in Edward’s brain cells. The historically minded ones latched themselves on to another Edwin, the Saxon king of Northumbria, whose reign had long been a source of interest to Edward. He surprised himself by recalling that King Edwin had married the enchanting Princess Aethelburh of Kent – and surprised himself even more when he found himself wondering, with a bemused inner smile, if Mrs George had been called Aethelburh.

  ‘What a strange and inappropriate thought,’ he mumbled in a low voice, and was in the process of admonishing himself when something caused him to look outside into the street. To his surprise, and immense disquiet, he realized that he was being watched. Yes, he was being watched by the same tall Greek man that he had first sighted a couple of days earlier. The man was peering into the shop and appeared to be studying Edward’s every movement. But no sooner had their eyes met than the man spun round, turned his back to the window and hurried off down the street.

  ‘Can you hold the fort for a moment, Mr George?’ said Edward. ‘There’s something I urgently need to check.’ And without waiting for an answer, he stepped outside and looked to the left and right.

  It was almost fifty yards to the end of the street and yet the man had already disappeared. Edward sniffed at the air and immediately picked up his scent.

  ‘Thank heavens,’ he thought. ‘This is going to be easy. He’s been smoking that revolting Balkan tobacco.’

  He set off down the street and turned left at the end, following the trail of scent. In the distance, he spied his quarry heading down King Street. ‘Where can he be going?’ thought Edward. ‘And, more to the point, who the devil is he?’

  The man was walking extremely fast, obliging Edward – whose legs were somewhat shorter – to break into an occasional jog. Yet still he fell behind and by the time he reached the junction with Gresham Street, there was no sign of him.

  Edward sniffed again at the air and took two deep inhalations of breath. ‘Ah, yes’, he said to himself. He could still detect a faint aroma of old tobacco.

  He turned right into Gresham Street and once
again caught sight of the man as he dashed along the pavement – he was now about fifty yards in front. ‘How odd,’ thought Edward, with growing disquiet. ‘I’m sure that he should be following me, and yet here I am tracking him.’

  He was alarmed by the morning’s strange turn of events yet he couldn’t help but feel a tingle of excitement. As he hurried through the city streets, he imagined himself in a detective story in which he was tracking down the villain. Just a few days earlier he had been reading Harry Barnsley’s Ten Chimes Before Midnight, in which there was a chase just like this. Detective Jim Moorhouse had dashed through the city streets in pursuit of a secret agent and he, too, had been helped by the smell of cigarette smoke. The only difference was that in Barnsley’s book, the city had been Moscow and Detective Moorhouse had ended up in the arms of a female double agent.

  Edward glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost 10.30 a.m. ‘I’ll give myself twenty minutes,’ he thought. ‘If I haven’t caught up with him by then, well – I oughtn’t to leave Mr George all alone for any longer than that. Unless, of course, there’s a female double agent waiting for me.’

  The man in front turned suddenly into Old Jewry and quickened his pace still further. When he reached the end of this street, he turned a sharp right into Cheapside. Edward was by now so puzzled that he stopped in his tracks for a second. ‘He seems to be going round in circles,’ he thought. ‘At this rate, he really will end up chasing me.’

  But no. The man veered left into Queen Street – where Edward’s oldest friend Richard Barcley had his offices – and began walking much more slowly. He took a quick glance over his shoulder, as if to ensure that Edward was out of sight, then reached for his keys and opened the door to Number 14. By the time Edward turned into Queen Street a few seconds later, the man had disappeared from view.

  ‘Gone,’ said Edward to himself. ‘He must have gone into one of the buildings. Right opposite Richard’s office.’

  He followed the rapidly vanishing scent along the street until he reached the door to Number 14. ‘And this,’ said Edward to himself, ‘is where he’s gone to.’

  He stared at the plain wooden door for a moment or two before glancing at the plaque on the wall. It read ‘Christos Makarezos and Sons, Piraeus’.

  ‘So he is Greek,’ thought Edward as he rubbed the end of his nose. ‘At least I know that much. I wonder if Richard knows him.’

  He thought about calling on his friend, but a quick glance at his watch reminded him that he ought to get back to Trencoms.

  As he retraced his steps to the shop, and recalled the strange man who had approached him two days earlier, he felt a wave of goose pimples spread over his body. He was shivering and sweating at the same time, partly from exertion and partly from fear.

  ‘Could it be that the man from the tour group really was trying to warn me about something?’ he thought. ‘Could it be that someone really is spying on me?’ And as Edward thought these thoughts, it dawned on him that perhaps his life really was in danger.

  But from whom, and why, he had absolutely no idea.

  Before plunging any deeper into the terrible fate that was to befall Edward, we must first make the acquaintance of the Trencom wives. The womenfolk had long been the heart and lifeblood of this extraordinary family. It was they who provided the Trencoms with their sensitivity and their souls; they who breastfed their offspring and first gave them milk. Indeed, it is certainly true to say that were it not for the women – or one woman in particular – the Trencom males would never have acquired their magnificent noses.

  For centuries, the Trencom men had joshed that their women distinguished themselves in one of two fields. They were either childbearers (like Dorothea, wife to Joshua Trencom), or cheese-makers (like Constance, wife to Emmanuel Trencom). The childbearers were – according to received male wisdom – treble-chinned, of rounded girth and adorned with ample bosoms. Jovial and with a tendency to guffaw, they generally died young but happy after bearing enormous numbers of children.

  The cheese-makers, by contrast, were said to be wiry, bony and in possession of chests so flat that even the tightest corset (with whalebone upthrusts) failed to introduce any hillock or dimmock to the barren plains of their upper bodies. They had shrew-like eyes and sharpish noses, unnaturally small ears and uncommonly pointed chins. They were devoted and hardworking folk, and their husbands would have one believe that they had spent the greater part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries compiling notes on cheeses with a pince-nez clipped to their noses.

  There were grains of truth in all of this, yet the men had never really understood the essence of their wives. A tendency towards dullardness, overlaid with an unfortunate streak of superciliousness, rendered them incapable of seeing the wood for the trees. And there were times – entire generations – when they didn’t even see the trees.

  When Constance Trencom went into labour for the sixteenth time, she survived the pains of childbirth by delving into the depths of that much-mocked voluminous belly and finding there an inner strength that was quite lacking in the Trencom men. And when Dorothea gave her vexatious husband a violent arm jab to the belly, winding him so badly that he couldn’t eat a morsel for fully three days, she demonstrably proved to herself and her adoptive family that she had her own internal powerhouse.

  The Trencom women knew – though never admitted – that they had the upper hand. They would assemble at the frequent family gatherings aware that their only obvious bond was conjugal: viz. they were all married to Trencoms. Yet they had among themselves a complicity of behaviour and camaraderie that made them feel very much at home in one another’s company. Like sheafers in a meadow, they worked as a team – and the cut and thrust of their conversation followed a tidy and intuitive pattern that, in most people, would develop only after years of shared intimacy.

  ‘Our menfolk are like mice,’ joked Claire Trencom at one family gathering, while the men were guttling grog.

  ‘And we,’ added Theodora, ‘are the cats to play with them.’

  ‘I pounce,’ said Eliza. ‘And he jumps,’ rejoined Grace.

  ‘I snooze,’ laughed Katherine. ‘And he comes out from the wainscot,’ added Anne.

  ‘And when I want my milk,’ purred the ribald Bertha-Louise, ‘then I’ll ’ave myself away with ’im.’

  The Trencom men often joked that they changed their taste in women with every generation, a pattern that had stood them in good stead since the seventeenth century. They would choose a childbearer if they were in need of children to work in the shop and a cheese-maker if they were short on supplies.

  By the nineteenth century this see-saw pattern had become the unwritten rule of the family; when Henry Trencom chose a lumbering childbearer in 1835 (and fathered twenty-two offspring), it was both inevitable and necessary that his eldest son, Emmanuel, would choose a skinny, bony cheese-maker.

  But such self-regulation was unable to survive the pressures of the modern age. When Edward’s grandfather married a large-bosomed cheese-maker, tradition could be seen to be on the slide. When she went on to catch brucellosis – a disease more prevalent amongst dairy herds than young women – it was feared that the two types of wives had become inextricably confused.

  Edward threw yet more spanners in the works by marrying a slight woman who had never made cheese. Elizabeth – for it is high time we made her acquaintance – was a pale and rather delicate woman whom Edward met in the spring of 1957.

  She gave the outward impression of having rather more defences than most women of her age and it was true to say that she sometimes appeared demure in the company of men. This was not due to nerves – nothing could have been further from the truth – but because of a certain self-imposed reserve. Elizabeth had an absolute abhorrence of impinging on other people’s territory. Indeed, there was a side to her that was peculiarly English – not in the patriotic sense of flag-waving and hymn-singing and cabbage that’s been boiled for so long that it’s no longer green.
It was more the fact that she valued more than anything else in the world the much underrated virtue of respecting one another’s space.

  She fully understood why commuters on the train to London liked to hide behind the vast acreage of The Times. After all, she thought, didn’t everyone have the right to a few snatched moments on the way to work, simply enjoying the privacy of their own company? She, too, took the train into town each morning and was visibly angry when Mrs Powell from Number 7 would sit next to her and chatter, chatter, chatter. ‘And then she said, so I said, but she said …’ and so on and so forth until Elizabeth had very little option but to close her book and take part in a conversation that was neither stimulating, nor informative, nor of any interest to anyone except Mrs Powell herself.

  ‘It drives me to distraction,’ she remarked to a friend she met up with after work. ‘I cannot abide people who thrust themselves upon you like that. Next time, I shall tell her that much as I would like to help her out of her predicament, I am a very bad listener at that hour of the morning.’

  And so she did, with a quite remarkable effect. On the following day, Mrs Powell clambered into a different carriage of the 8.23 a.m. to Victoria and spent the next fifteen minutes assaulting the ears of one of the other commuting neighbours who lived on the same street.

  On the day that Edward first met Elizabeth, she was dressed in her most conventional clothes. These included a Burberry skirt, pleated blouse and shoes that would have been sensible almost everywhere except on the beach of a tropical island. Other men might not have given her a second glance – yet for Edward, it was the very attributes of primness and apparent shyness that enabled him to be more at ease in her company than he usually felt when talking to young ladies. Little matter that he had completely misread Elizabeth’s outward reserve. It would be many years before he discovered that it actually concealed a fathomless pool of what in those days was usually referred to as ‘spunk’ – a spunk that placed her in a very similar (though rather less bawdy) basket to the Trencom women who had preceded her.