Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Page 4

  Martin stared at her, thin lines of impatience quivering on his brow.

  “Goddamn it, Abigail,” he said, trying to contain his annoyance. “Why do you always have to make such a bloody fuss about everything? Women all over the world, wives all over the world, would kill to have your life. Lying in the sun all day on a desert island with nothing more than cooking a simple meal to worry about. What is the matter with you?”

  Abbey was right, she hadn’t been able to explain it. She gave up. “I’m just nervous I think,” she said brightly instead, making it up as she went along. “It’s so long since we had anyone here, Mart, and you know that I can’t cook to save myself. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you told Jim it was pot luck?”

  Martin ignored her attempt at humor, sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, a sure sign he was irritated. “How hard can it be to cook a chicken and make a salad?” he said, his exasperation giving the question its own little sea of peaks and troughs.

  “Not that hard at all. I don’t know what’s got into me,” she answered in a conciliatory tone, watching Martin retreat behind the curtain to the bedroom area to change his filthy clothes for freshly laundered ones. Did women all over the world, wives all over the world, feel lonely and empty and unloved? she wondered. Or was it just her? Abbey checked herself. Of course she was not unloved. Martin loved her. They were meant to be together. They had known that from the moment they first laid eyes on each other, across the dusty gloom of a Wimbledon church hall at an introductory meeting of Voluntary Aid Workers Abroad. Just when Abbey had needed rescuing from loneliness and heartache and betrayal, Martin had ridden in, her knight in shining armor, full of courage and strength and certainty.

  A week before that miracle of timing, Abbey had been chugging along in her final year at St. Ignatius Catholic boarding school in Knightsbridge, without so much as a clue as to what she was going to do with her life. She’d been a good student, mainly because she loved reading, but her grades were average and she hadn’t really fancied college anyway (but nor did she fancy being a hairdresser, which was where her mother felt her skills lay). That her mother had low expectations of her came as no surprise, because they were still higher than Abbey’s expectations of herself.

  She had nothing against hair, she liked it, felt it was necessary on a head, in fact, but she had no desire to make it her life’s work. She wanted her life’s work to be something special, something that would matter, something that would make her heart beat quickly and have people look up to her. The trouble was, she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. She thought for a while it might have been writing. Poetry even.

  “You must be feckin’ joking,” her mother had said to her, “or at least more of an eejit than you look.”

  When she was about fourteen she’d dreamed once—literally dreamed, asleep in her bed at night—of going back to her grandfather’s farm. But when she woke up she realized she didn’t even know where it was, as she hadn’t been there since she was five. It was somewhere in Ireland. Somewhere green, but near the sea. She knew better than to discuss this prospect with her mother, though, who was long estranged from her father and hated to be reminded of anything to do with him so she trashed that idea along with the poetry.

  So it was that at seventeen, without benefit of a clear plan for the future and in possession of a dreamy, sweet, old-fashioned sort of a disposition, she became an obvious target for recruitment into the convent.

  “You’re special, Abbey, you know you are,” Sister Clematis had whispered to her during an early career counseling session. “If our Lord comes knocking at your door, make sure not to turn him away, Abbey. Let him in. Then the glory of God will be yours forever.”

  Quite pleased with this prospect, if only because it stopped her worrying about what else she should be doing, Abbey waited patiently for the vocational tap on her shoulder. Hormones, however, beat Our Lord to it.

  One month into her final year, it was Jasper Miles from the neighboring St. Patrick’s First Fifteen who came knocking at her door and Abbey let him in, all right, a finger at a time. She knew who he was, had for years, all the St. Ignatius girls did—he was gorgeous. Tall, blond, handsome, rich, the son of a business magnate and a former fashion model. But Abbey had never considered herself his type. She was small and quiet, bookish, not unpopular but not popular either. Her report cards said “could try harder” and “always dreaming” and her mother had once accused her of having the personality of an empty jug. Abbey felt like background, and Jasper was pure limelight. So no one was more surprised than she when, at an after-match function she had gone to with a trusted selection of senior girls, she had found herself kissing Jasper Miles passionately in the hallway leading to the girls toilets after fewer than a dozen words had passed between them.

  For the first time in her life, Abbey had felt special. For the first time, real life was better than fantasy and it was a sensation like no other. She felt blessed. As though she had discovered every delicious secret in the universe and was seeing the whole world through entirely different eyes. Yes, Jasper Miles had unlocked something in Abbey Corrigan: pure unadulterated lust and lashings of it.

  Pressed up between the chocolate vending machine and the fire extinguisher, the feel of Jasper’s tongue on her lips, of his hands on her body, the hardness of his teenage boy parts pressing against her school uniform, Abbey had felt her resolve, her Catholic guilt, her good intentions, melt away. She had wanted Jasper Miles, just as much as he had wanted her. And two weeks later, after he had secured his school the Cardinal O’Keefe Cup, she had allowed him to lift her up against the damp brick wall behind the rugby pavilion and go as far as he wanted. And she had gone with him.

  For the next few months they’d been at it like mad things: at her mother’s place; his parents’; the bike sheds at his school; the science lab at hers; once in the chapel while the dead body of Sister Euphemia lay, for once not giving out about false modesty, just a few yards away. Anywhere, any time, Jasper was up for it and Abbey with him.

  To this day, she couldn’t remember a single conversation with him. Just the fireworks he had awoken in her. Until Jasper, Abbey hadn’t realized she could be anything other than the solemn, silent type she’d always been. Yet, that big, sweaty, slightly pimply, upper crust teenage boy six days her junior had unleashed a noisiness she didn’t know she possessed. A screaming and shouting and yodeling of senses, that she’d assumed was magic and had never happened to anyone else. And because in her dreamy, funny, old-fashioned way, she had expected to be with him forever and ever, despite never having even discussed plans for the following weekend, she hadn’t hesitated to tell him, when her period failed to show up (for the second time in a row), that she thought she might be pregnant. That had been the last of Jasper Miles. She never saw him again.

  The same night her mother, ice clinking angrily in her glass, had had a heated exchange over the phone with Mrs. Miles. It became clear that Jasper’s mother didn’t want anything to do with Abbey or her little problem and neither did Jasper, who had been dispatched already to his aunt and uncle in America.

  “She has a smell of herself that one,” Rose had railed and cursed after slamming the phone down in Mrs. Miles’s ear. “The way she spoke to me! Nobody speaks to me like that, like I was some bog-Irish little floozy. Well, Margaret Miles might have a brand-new pair of diddies but her husband still prefers Pamela Harrington’s and if you think I am letting her son’s bastard into my house you can think again, Abigail Corrigan, because I’m not.”

  Instead, she insisted, she would be accompanying her daughter to an abortion clinic in Richmond, after which the name Jasper Miles would never be mentioned again.

  Abbey refused to believe that the love of her life had abandoned her but after a week of having his mother hang up in her ear she finally tracked down his best friend, Grayson Smythe, who confirmed that Jasper had indeed flown the coop. It was over, Grayson said, he was very sorry and so pro
bably was Jasper, although it was hard to tell. He’d been quite excited about going to America, apparently.

  Stunned by this, Abbey agreed reluctantly to go along with her mother’s plan. Rose made it clear that she would not allow her daughter to repeat her own mistake: bringing an unwanted baby into the world when her own life was just beginning. This depressed Abbey on so many levels she had no will to resist.

  In the absence of Jasper to kiss away her tears and tell her everything would be all right, she felt she had no choice but to climb into a cab with her pinched-faced parent and count telegraph poles all the way to Richmond.

  Rose, incensed and inconvenienced by her daughter’s stupidity, took out her rage on a bar tab at Quaglino’s and, after being waylaid in the back of a family sedan by an insurance salesman called Warren, was nearly three hours late to pick up her daughter.

  It was sitting, post-termination, in the waiting room during those three hours, as the kindly receptionist tried hard not to look too sorry for the teenager sniffling quietly in the corner, that Abbey had picked up a local newspaper and seen the advertisement for Voluntary Aid Workers Abroad. Three days later, sad and lonely and overwhelmed with what she eventually realized must be anger, she found herself walking into a church hall in Wimbledon and there found Martin, a strong, handsome, earnest twenty-six-year-old looking for an adventure and someone to take on it, and her fate had been sealed.

  Martin Kenderdine had been born in Kent, eight years before Abbey, the youngest of five siblings and the only one to suffer from acute dyslexia. His father was a doctor and his mother a teacher, and he was the only member of his wealthy, middle-class family not to go to a university and emerge with a degree, a fact he could never quite get over.

  On leaving school he worked on a farm for a year, before traveling to Kenya to become a guide for a safari company. After Voluntary Aid Workers Abroad in Guatemala, he wound up in Western Australia, where he worked in an opal mine for three years. He had only recently returned home when Abbey met him. His brothers and sisters, he had just discovered, were now all wealthy professionals, with families and big homes and nice cars. This stuck in Martin’s craw, as he knew he would never be one of them, and fueled his passion to aid those less fortunate than himself. By concentrating on Third World missions and operating in a different arena altogether, he could not be accused of failing to compete with his siblings. As he hadn’t accumulated any wealth of his own, he chose to eschew wealth altogether, thereby convincing himself he hadn’t failed at anything.

  All he needed was a wife.

  Martin had always taken on women as projects. He pursued them, often became fixated by them and was usually dumped by them because of his intensity and mildly unstable temperament. But he was nice-looking and charming and wasn’t a bad person, just a vaguely scared and disappointed one.

  When he saw Abbey he knew that she was the perfect mate. He saw in her a lack of armor, never mind chinks, that he knew would allow him to guide her into the sort of life he wanted to live. Plus, Abbey was beautiful. Small and soft and sad and needy in a way that made him want to take care of her. The timing had been perfect. They fell in love and within a month they were married; within two they were in the Sulivan Islands, right plonk in the middle of the Pacific, with nothing but a headful of dreams about doing something good, something great, something special for the planet.

  Martin had chosen the Sulivans especially for their isolation: The group was made up of a string of different islands, mostly coral atolls, many uninhabited, in the middle of the Pacific. Before moving there, Abbey had never heard of them. The Sulivans’ closest neighbors were the Solomon Islands. She had never heard of them either.

  The Sulivans had a population of around 3,000 people, mostly Melanesians, with the majority living on the three main islands of Ika, Oma and Afo, Ate’ate’s closest neighbor. Ate’ate was about two miles long and one mile across, with a tropical sandy beach running the length of the northern side and the village nestled on the southern side. Its deep natural harbor was protected to the east by Turtle Rock, at the foot of which the Ate’ate Stream formed the freshwater inlet where Abbey did her laundry. In the ’60s, the island had been used by the Americans as a refueling base, which explained why for an island with a population of only around a hundred, it had a runway that could land, at a pinch, a Boeing 737. Not that that was ever likely to happen. Despite the idyllic beauty of the island it was largely bypassed by tourists. Even advertising men who had given up the rat race and spent their days sailing the Pacific in luxury yachts gave Ate’ate the swerve, heading instead for the bright lights of Afo and its tiny string of restaurants and bars.

  Electricity and running water were commonplace on the three main islands, but in the outlying islands life continued in a fairly primitive fashion. In a 1980s United Nations study, the Sulivans had been classified as one of the world’s least developed countries. This, of course, was what had attracted Martin, the UN report forming the basis of his case to VAWA to send he and Abbey there for aid and development purposes. Unluckily for them, at exactly the same time, a tiny atoll at the far east of the island group was discovered to be so rich in mineral deposits that the Sulivanese were told they could name their price for international mining rights.

  No slouches in the fiscal department, the combined elders had worked out a foolproof trust and benefit deal that would see no man, woman or child want for anything until the year 2090, after which interest on their investments would continue to feed, clothe and educate the islanders in perpetuity.

  Monthly supply drops from Brisbane in Australia were introduced, courtesy of Jim Fuller’s Hercules, providing the villagers with everything from Heinz baked beans to hair gel. Generators were shipped to give the islands electricity and the appliances to go with it. Over the years the islanders had even given up drinking the fresh water on their doorstep in favor of Evian water imported directly from France. They wore clothes from the Gap and Country Road, often ordered over the Internet, and at least one hut on each island possessed a cappuccino machine.

  Naturally, this was not quite what Martin had had in mind when he brought Abbey to the isolated island group. He had wanted to build bridges, clear jungles and get his hands dirty—and that was precisely what he had proceeded to do, despite there being absolutely no need for it. Voluntary Aid Workers Abroad had subsequently withdrawn its sponsorship when it became clear that the country could get along just fine without it. In fact, the Sulivanese Islands had loaned the organization a significant amount to go away and leave them alone. Martin, however, would not budge.

  He and Abbey lived on the smell of an oily rag and the meager interest from Martin’s savings, topped up once a year by his parents. Martin filled his days by working on a fantastically complicated irrigation scheme he had devised for a five-acre block in the middle of Ate’ate, which he said could one day grow all the produce the village needed to be self-sufficient.

  That the villagers preferred John West Frozen Fish Fingers was of no import to him. He was a man obsessed. He was also convinced that when the mining stopped at the end of the century, the Sulivanese would have no money and no clue how to return to subsistence living. That all the evidence pointed to them never needing to was a matter he chose to ignore. His arrogance in this and his other opinions won him few friends on the island, although the Sulivanese were a tolerant race, and they liked Abbey.

  Her original plan to teach the island children to read and write had been somewhat overshadowed by the Sulivanese government’s insistence on providing quite advanced and compulsory schooling for all children from six to fifteen without her. Still, she taught an English class every now and then, baby-sat at any opportunity, tried to keep house like a good wife, read whatever she could get her hands on, and daydreamed way more than was good for her.

  It wasn’t a bad life, but she wasn’t entirely sure it was her life. She clung to her love of Martin like a drowning man to an inflatable life raft. But that afternoon
as she sat at the kitchen table, her chin in her hands, her husband’s disapproval still hanging in the air even though he had long gone, she felt truly troubled. She wasn’t herself, Martin was right about that. But then who the hell was she? She didn’t belong in this paradise, but she didn’t belong anywhere else, either. She was nobody. Nowhere. That was what kept her daydreaming her life away.

  That was what drowned out the steady ppppffffsssshhhh of the air escaping the life raft.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “On top of all the obvious old yoke, every good cheesemaker needs a secret ingredient. That’s what makes your cheese better than the next bollocks’s.”

  Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  How are you getting on with ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ then?” Fee asked, looking at the girl’s fingernails.

  She snapped the Discman headphones off her ears and flicked them lower around her neck, where they all but disappeared into her dirty-blond dreadlocks. “Do me a favor,” she said, in a sweet little voice that belied her tough girl grubby ferret look, as she pulled her hands away. “I’m still puking my way through ‘My Favorite Things.’”

  “Will you look at that!” Fee said delightedly, ignoring her rudeness, his short fat cheesemaker’s fingers now holding her by the jaw. “Here’s another one of those tongue studs. Jesus, Mary and All The Saints, will you look at it!”

  The three fat ginger cats sleeping in front of the fire raised their heads simultaneously and stared at him.

  “Never mind, girls,” said Corrie from the comfort of his recliner.