Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Read online

  And the cheese, more miserable again. Fine for cooking no doubt, but where was the magic? And Fee. You wouldn’t know to look at him, tucking into the crumbly cheddar, that his days were numbered, but the curd was never wrong. And did he seem even slightly bothered by the distressing turn events had taken? He did not, thought Corrie, sinking further into the mire.

  Just then, Abbey burst in the door. It was the first Corrie had seen of her all day and she looked flushed and defiant yet anxious at the same time. He’d been right to think she was scared of him and it saddened his old heart more than anything else that had happened.

  Fee’s fat hand stretched out for another chunk of cheese and it was all he could do to keep a smile off his face. Perhaps, now, they were going to get somewhere.

  “What happened to my grandmother?” Abbey demanded breathlessly, standing, legs apart, arms folded, in front of Corrie. “What did you do to her?”

  Corrie put down his wine glass and looked at Fee in an I-told-you-so sort of a way. He couldn’t help but notice how much Abbey looked like her mother, standing there in front of him, raging. Yet even in her fury there was a softness to Abbey that he realized at that moment Rose had never, ever had.

  “I don’t know what your mother has told you,” he started.

  “Don’t give me that shite,” Abbey interrupted rudely, shaking her head angrily. “I am sick of all that shite. I’ve had a lifetime of shite.”

  “It’s shitey, wouldn’t you say?” Fee interjected, earning a dark look from both of them.

  “I’ve asked you a direct question,” Abbey said, hands on her hips now, “and I want a direct answer. What happened to my grandmother?”

  “There’s nothing I can tell you about your grandmother that will make anybody feel any better,” Corrie said calmly, but Fee could see his hands were trembling. “There’s no good can come from it.”

  “Well, I can’t stay here if I don’t know,” Abbey said, stamping her foot like a five-year-old. “I can’t and I won’t.”

  Good girl yourself, Fee thought from the sidelines. Perhaps she had balls after all.

  “Well, I can’t tell you,” Corrie said sadly. “But I don’t want you to go.”

  “Well, I think you should tell her,” Fee piped up.

  “And what would you know?” Corrie said crossly.

  “More than the two of you put together,” Fee answered.

  “Excuse me,” Abbey said, trying to steer the conversation back to herself. It was now or never, she knew. “What can’t you tell me?”

  “There you go,” said Fee. “If you tell her what it is you can’t tell her, then officially you haven’t really told her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Corrie said to his friend. “You’ve been watching too much Father Ted. I keep telling you that real life’s not like that.”

  “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud,” Fee said robustly. “Real life’s what you make of it. Just put the poor girl out of her misery.”

  “Ah, Joseph.” Corrie shook his head. “Didn’t we always say . . . ?”

  “Ah, Joseph, yourself,” Fee scoffed. “Didn’t we always say we didn’t want the truth to hurt anybody but it’s not knowing the truth that’s hurting yer woman. I don’t want to put any pressure on you, Joseph, but as she holds the future to the entire Coolarney empire right there in her hot little hands, why don’t you just go ahead and tell her?”

  Abbey turned and looked at Fee, who was filling his glass again. She swore for a moment she could actually see the aura of unusual emanating from his armchair.

  “There’s nothing to be gained from dredging up the past,” Corrie insisted.

  Abbey could not believe his callousness. “I’m not asking you to exhume her,” she said incredulously. “I’m asking you to tell me what you did to her.”

  Exhume her? Fee mouthed across the room. So Rose had been up to her old tricks.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Corrie said. “Sit down, Abbey. It’s really not what you think.” There really was nothing else for it. He looked at Fee, took a deep breath and faced his granddaughter. “Your grandmother left me for another woman,” he said.

  Abbey was stunned. “For another woman?” she repeated stupidly. “Who?”

  “Mary-Therese McGrath,” Fee answered. “The one-time future Mrs. Joseph Feehan.”

  Corrie and Fee both reached for the cheese.

  “Another couple of weeks,” Fee said, holding up a wedge of the zingy cheddar, “and it would be eating us.”

  “My grandmother ran off with your girlfriend?” Abbey looked at Fee.

  “Fiancée,” Fee said nonchalantly, licking his lips, “and that’s the truth of the matter.”

  Abbey’s head was awhirl. Whatever she had expected Corrie to tell her, it wasn’t that. Her defiance fizzled out, leaving confusion in its place. “So she’s not dead, then?” she checked.

  “Not according to the latest postcard,” Corrie answered.

  “Postcard?” echoed Abbey.

  “Ah, sure we get a postcard once a year from the two of them. Alive and well and living it up in Portugal,” said Corrie uncomfortably. “They’re having a grand old time.”

  “Apparently they cook a very nice chicken in Portugal,” Fee added. “And of course they have their own swimming pool.”

  Abbey was totally flummoxed. So her grandmother was living in Portugal with a woman, eating nice chicken and swimming in a pool. She was not underneath the curing room floor at all. Which left a flurry of questions to be answered.

  “Why didn’t Rose tell me that?” she asked Corrie. “Why would she tell me it was you? Why does she hate you so much?”

  The question sent a shooting pain through Corrie’s heart. He supposed Rose did hate him and for the millionth time in his life he wondered what he had done and to whom to invite such pain.

  “Well,” he said, trying not to let Abbey see how shaken he was, “there are a couple of reasons for that, the first being that no twelve-year-old girl wants to believe that her mother would abandon her.”

  “For a sunny climate and somebody else’s fiancée especially,” added Fee, slipping another slug of wine into his glass. “Although she had a great set of legs on her, Mary-Therese, you have to give her that. Much better than Maggie, beef to the heels and all that.”

  “No twelve-year-old girl wants to believe that her mother would abandon her for anything at all,” Corrie continued, ignoring him. “And rightly so. I didn’t want to believe it myself.”

  “Well, I can understand that,” said Abbey, because she did, “but why would she come up with such a horrible story? Why would she be so awful?”

  “Ah now,” said Corrie, “Rose wasn’t so awful. Just confused and resentful on top of being a little bit difficult in the first place.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. It wasn’t territory he enjoyed going over but he realized now that if Abbey was going to move on in her life, in his, she needed to have all the family secrets laid bare in front of her.

  “Before we got the postcard we didn’t know for a fact that Maggie and Mary-Therese had run away together,” he explained, “although the fact they both disappeared at the same time sort of pointed in that direction. And Fee, of course, had his suspicions, although for a few years there Mary-Therese had jammed his radar or whatever he likes to call it. Anyway, for the first few days I didn’t know what to tell Rose so I just said her mother had gone away and I wasn’t sure when she would be coming back.”

  “And that was the truth,” Fee interjected, his mouth stuffed with the last of the cheese. “You were telling her the truth.”

  “But a couple of nights after your grandmother left me—Rose was very upset, Abbey, she was very angry—she saw something that she shouldn’t have and the poor girl was in such a state she sort of put two and two together and came up with, well . . .” He petered out.

  “Came up with what?” Abbey demanded.

  “Well, it wasn’t four,” Fee added, not particularly
helpfully.

  “What did you do? What did she see?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” said Corrie. “There was a bit of an incident here at the house—you wouldn’t be helping me out at all would you, Joseph?—after Rose went to bed and we were sort of trying to clear all that up when . . .” He petered out again, much to Abbey’s exasperation.

  “When what?” she cried. “What did Rose see that was so terrible?”

  “It was Mr. O’Regan,” Avis pronounced from the doorway. “And may God rot his soul.”

  The three of them turned around in surprise.

  “Colonel Mustard in the ballroom,” Fee, a big time Clue fan, breathed, impressed.

  “I couldn’t stand back and let you face the music on your own,” Avis said, moving to Fee’s grubby armchair and standing behind him, her hand on his shoulder.

  “Music?” Corrie said stupidly.

  “It was the dead body of Owen O’Regan,” Avis continued, addressing Abbey, “and your mother saw these two precious gentlemen lumping his useless lifeless corpse across the courtyard and into the factory where they buried him under the curing-room floor.”

  Fee choked on his Merlot while Corrie grew as pale as a Camembert.

  “Your mother got up in the night,” continued Avis, looking at Abbey, her chin trembling, “and saw them from the stairway landing and thought that what she had seen was her own poor mother being done away with.”

  “But why was Owen O’Regan dead in the first place?” Abbey asked. “Why was he even here?”

  “He was here because he followed me here after giving me the hiding of a lifetime,” Avis said, tears falling on her cherry-apple cheeks. “I was pregnant with his child and I ran here for help from a mile up the road and then I pushed him down the stairs because the drunken oaf had belted me for the very last time.” She was fierce now. “And I would kill him all over again if I had the chance.”

  There was a stunned silence.

  “Actually,” Fee said, “you might well get it.”

  “He wasn’t dead, Avis,” said Corrie.

  It was Avis’s turn to change color.

  “We gave him £200 and put him on the bus to Limerick,” said Fee.

  “Limerick?” whispered Avis.

  “Sit down, Avis,” said Corrie. Abbey stood up and helped the stunned woman into her chair then perched on the arm of Corrie’s recliner, a tiny gesture that warmed the cockles of the old man’s heart.

  “I think a glass of wine might help sort your head out,” Fee said, his own hand shaking as he poured more wine into his glass and gave it to Avis.

  “All these years, you thought you had killed Owen?” Corrie asked her.

  Avis nodded. “It was an accident,” she said. “And I really didn’t mind. In fact, I thought the world was an altogether better place without him.”

  “And you thought we got rid of his body?” Fee asked.

  “I asked you what had happened and you said not to worry,” Avis replied defensively. “You said he wouldn’t be bothering anyone where he was going.”

  “Well, I was talking about Limerick, not the great hereafter,” said Fee.

  There was another bewildered silence as everyone took in what had just happened.

  “So no one is dead, then?” Abbey asked, just to make sure.

  “That’s right,” agreed Corrie. “No one that we know of, anyway.”

  “Slip a bit more wine in here would you, Joseph,” Avis said, waggling her glass in front of Fee.

  “Did you never get a funny feeling, with Avis thinking she was a murderer and we were accessories?” Corrie asked Fee in a slightly accusing fashion.

  Fee blushed to the roots of what little hair he had. “Not about that, no.”

  “And yourself always claiming to know everything in advance,” Corrie said in an exasperated fashion. “Why do you know what color knickers Patsy O’Connell wears to church but not that we’re harboring a murderer?”

  “What’s Patsy O’Connell’s knickers got to do with any of it?” asked Avis.

  “She’s not a murderer,” insisted Abbey.

  “But she thought she was,” Corrie retorted. “And he could have saved her a lot of distress by telling her that she wasn’t.”

  “I wasn’t distressed,” Avis interjected. “Although I am now. All these years with Himself only in Limerick and not so much as a postcard.”

  “Anyway, I was only messing about the knickers,” Fee grumbled. “I saw her pegging them on the clothesline. They’re all purple.”

  “There’s not a lot to be said for postcards, Avis,” Corrie said. “You’re probably better off without them.”

  “And we may have banged his head a tiny little bit getting him down the stairs to the curing room,” Fee confessed. “He may have been a bit confused when he came to.”

  “When he came to?” Abbey asked, dumbfounded.

  “He hadn’t quite slept it off by the morning, but he would have worked out it was Limerick eventually,” Fee said crossly. “There are signposts there, you know.”

  “Avis,” Corrie said. “You stayed here all these years thinking we had your dead husband’s body buried under the cave floor? Whatever must you think of us?”

  “I think you are two of the kindest, dearest, sweetest men in all of Ireland,” Avis said, blushing to the roots of her bunlike arrangement. “I thank God for the day Owen O’Regan clipped me around the ears and brought me to the two of you. I lived because of it and my baby lived because of it and there’s not a minute of the day goes by without me being grateful to the two of you. You’re the best sort of men and I love you both.” She sipped weepily at her wine.

  “There was a baby?” Abbey asked.

  “Yes, there was a baby,” Avis answered, smiling at her with tear-filled eyes. “The first Coolarney baby. We’ve had dozens more since then but my Josephine was the first.”

  “And she was beautiful,” crooned Corrie. “Wasn’t she, Joseph?”

  “Beautiful,” the little man replied, misty-eyed himself.

  “Where is she now?” Abbey wanted to know.

  “She’s living up in Galway, a nurse, with two grown-up children of her own. She was adopted by a lovely couple. They were, weren’t they, Joseph? A doctor and his wife. She’s had a fantastic life, Josephine, she really has. I see her once or twice a year and I write every week.”

  “Why didn’t you keep her?” Abbey couldn’t keep herself from asking.

  “Oh, it wasn’t done in those days,” Avis answered, slurping at the bottom of her empty glass, her cheeks glowing but her eyes bright and clear. “There I was, a widow, or so I thought, with nothing to my name but a month of overdue rent and a baby on the way . . .” Her voice frittered away to nothing. “That’s a point,” she said dazedly. “I thought I was a widow.”

  Fee started to squirm uncomfortably in his chair.

  “But you knew I was still married.” She pointed one stout-booted toe at Fee. “So all these years that’s why you never . . .”

  Fee’s eyes were flicking from wall to wall as though searching for an escape.

  “Never what?” Corrie and his granddaughter asked in unison.

  Avis suddenly snapped out of her daze. “Never nothing,” she said brightly, sitting up straight. “Never nothing at all.”

  Abbey looked suspiciously from Avis to Fee and back again. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was something in the air. “You two!” she exclaimed.

  Fee and Avis swapped looks of fear and delight and guilt and joy and the absolute horror of being discovered. Corrie felt his heart slow down to a languid, loud ba-boomp as he sat forward in his chair, his eyes near popping out of his head.

  “You two?” he whispered.

  Fee and Avis remained frozen, their eyes locked on each other.

  “How long has this been going on for?” Corrie finally asked in a voice that didn’t sound like his.

  “Only since 1977,” Avis whispered.

  “We were going
to tell you but then Rose took Abbey and it didn’t seem the right time and I thought we were better off waiting,” said Fee.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Avis asked, worry crinkling her brow.

  “Mind?” said Corrie. “Mind?” His best friend in the world had been snatched out from underneath his very nose by a woman he’d been harboring all these years. Did he mind? He thought about it, sitting there in his La-Z-Boy rocker recliner. Well, he hadn’t even noticed—so what difference did it make?

  “Of course I don’t mind,” he said, meaning it. “In fact, I’m delighted for you, Joseph. I couldn’t be more delighted. All this time I’ve worried about you having no family, being lonely, you old bollocks, and here you were—”

  “There’s no need to forget we’re in mixed company,” Avis interrupted rather primly.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind,” Fee said, rather cautiously, “but I can’t always trust my funny feelings where Avis is concerned.” He looked up at her and smiled as she squeezed his shoulder. “She jammers my radar too, you know.”

  “Is there any more of that wine?” Abbey asked. It was all a bit much, really.

  “And you never talked between you about whether Owen was dead or in Limerick?” Corrie asked. Fee and Avis both shook their heads.

  Please God don’t let them say they’ve got better things to do than talk, Abbey silently pleaded.

  “I heard that,” said Fee, and winked at her.

  At the end of the second bottle, Abbey joined Corrie for a walk. He liked to go down the lane to look at the sea, he told her, especially after such excitement. It soothed him. To his great joy, Abbey wanted to go, too. She was in the mood for a bit of soothing herself, it seemed. Despite the tying of so many loose ends, she had the oddest sensation that an itch she couldn’t pinpoint was still in need of scratching.