Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Read online

  As always, they took a moment to soak up the smells and the sounds of the big white room where they worked their magic. To the left of them was Old Fart Arse, the pasteurizer; to the right, a vat, teak on the outside like a wine barrel, stainless and gleaming on the inside. It stood chest high, to Fee anyway, and was where their precious milk began its journey to cheese.

  Beyond the cheese vat were two long stainless-steel benches, another big half-pipe-shaped vat filled with cleaning solution and equipment, and a stainless salting bin, packed with yesterday’s cheeses. The concrete floor was painted yellow, with drainage at regular intervals, and stacked above the benches in slatted steel racks hanging from the ceiling were row upon row of gleaming molds, glittering in the late sun that filtered through the long, shallow windows at the top of the factory walls.

  At the back of the room were two staircases heading down in opposite directions to the curing rooms, or “caves” as they were known. At the top of the stairs, mirroring each other on the side walls, were twin dumbwaiter arrangements, which took racks of cheeses down to the caves below.

  If Coolarney was a religion, the factory was the chapel in which Corrie and Fee worshipped. It had changed immeasurably over the years. The pasteurizer was relatively new; the myriad cleaning facilities hadn’t always been there; and the racks and benches and in fact the vat itself had once been made of wood, not steel. Corrie, who didn’t feel the need to resist modernization, embraced the changes, but Fee was not as easily convinced. He still missed the wooden benches disposed of in the interest of hygiene more than a decade before.

  “She’s probably right about that back of yours,” Corrie said, as he watched Fee move stiffly down the factory. “You should think about the osteopracter.”

  “When did I fall off the ladder turning the top shelf, Corrie? After the Alsace Riesling. Was it 1971?”

  Fee’s gift worked very well in forward gear, but was hopeless in reverse.

  “No,” said Corrie. “It was the year Abbey was born. Remember, she was teething and the two of you were making a racket fit to bring the house down.” He sighed a sad little sigh. “Twenty-nine years ago.”

  “Well,” said Fee, ignoring the melancholy, “I’ll tell you what. If it’s still giving me a pain in me arse in another twenty-nine years’ time I’ll go to the feckin’ osteopath. Now get over here and down these stairs. There’s work to be done.”

  “What do you think she’s doing now, Fee?” Corrie asked as he moved in front of his friend to descend the blue stairs. It was nearly twenty-four years since he had seen his only grandchild and he felt her absence like a one-armed man feels a tickle in the hand he no longer has. He stalled for a moment and felt the warmth of his old friend’s hand on his back.

  “It’s not too late,” said Fee in his characteristically cryptic fashion. “It’s never too late. Don’t worry. How many times do I have to tell you not to worry? Now get your old bones down the feckin’ stairs before I give you a push.”

  Corrie opened the Blue room door, soaking up the smell of a thousand cheeses and relishing the darkness that spared him the shame of letting Fee see his eyes, crinkled with tears. He turned on the dim lighting, his heart giving a little jump at the sight of rack after rack of salty Blue cheese. Listening to the sound of 90 percent humidity, he pushed his sadness aside and surrendered to his Blues, the mindless chore of turning them soothing his broken heart.

  Not far away in the dairymaids’ cottage, Lucy had been asleep for some time. When she woke up, Jesus, Mary and All The Saints had made themselves at home, one of them on her pillow, nestled in her dreadlocks. Lucy wrenched her head away, dislodging the ginger cat, who merely stretched her paws, opened one eye and went back to sleep where she fell. As Lucy sat up, there was a knock on the door.

  “Can I come in?” asked a loud voice in a strange accent.

  “Um, ’spose,” Lucy answered, sitting up. The door opened and a large, pale-faced freckly girl with ginger hair plaited and beaded in dozens of unlikely braids stumbled into the room. “Hiya, Lucy, isn’t it? I’m Jack. How’re ya?”

  She pulled the stool out from Lucy’s dressing table and sat on it, facing the bed. “’Spose you’re a bit freaked out, eh? Don’t worry, we all are when we first arrive. Hey, you guys!” she yelled in the direction of the door in a voice that made Lucy’s toes scrunch up. “She’s awake!”

  Another braided head peeked around the corner. Its face was black and unspeakably beautiful.

  “All right?” she asked Lucy coolly as she brought the rest of her body into the room. “Cat got ’er tongue?” she asked Jack.

  “Oh, bugger off, Wilhie, she’s only been here five minutes. Don’t worry about her,” Jack said to Lucy. “Doesn’t take much to get her tits in a tangle. She’s a hairdresser after all. And this is Tessie and May.”

  The last two girls to come into Lucy’s room were identical twins. They wore their hair in the same style, in little coiled bunches that seemed at odds with their far less funky thick spectacles and protruding front teeth. They looked at Lucy, then at each other, and giggled.

  “You’d better get used to that,” advised Jack. “They’re at it all the time, aren’t you, girls?” The twins, on cue, looked at each other and giggled again. Jack rolled her eyes.

  “All right?” Wilhie said again.

  Lucy sat stock-still on her bed, unable to speak as her eyes flicked from one girl to the other and back again. Their hair. Their faces. Their big googly eyes. She clutched a pillow and pulled it over her midriff. Something was wrong. Horribly wrong. Their bellies! Each of the four girls crowded in here staring at her was undeniably, completely and utterly, without shadow of a doubt, 100 percent pregnant.

  “Jesus H. Chrrrist,” Wilhie said, rolling her eyes as she took in Lucy’s expression. “She don’t know!”

  The twins looked at each other and bit their lips.

  “Know what?” said Lucy, frowning and doing her best to look tough, even though her insides were heaving with terror.

  “Know that you don’t end up here unless you’ve got a bun in the oven and no bastard to help you cook it,” said Jack.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Your raw material needs to be pure and good. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Between the jigs and the reels you can always sort it out, as long as it’s pure and good in the first place.”

  Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  Ed did the decent thing and vacated his office so that Kit could blub like a baby in private. Every time he tried to pull himself together, a crack of a thought would appear in the dam of his mind and he’d lose it again. Jacey. The baby. His mother. His brother, Flynn. George. Ed. So, he’d let them all down. He’d let himself down, too. That old chestnut.

  As he sat on Tom Foster’s warm patch, his shoulders shaking with shame, Kit realized he couldn’t even muster up any anger toward the so-called friends who were ruining his career. He deserved it. He had blown it big time and he had nobody to blame but himself. This was all the more incredible because he, more than anyone else, knew that without his career he was nothing. A nobody. Just some great-looking guy from Burlington, Vermont, as George had so rightly put it. Just another Wall Street burnout with a drinking problem.

  He laughed, or half-laughed, despite himself. At least he was great looking. “Do not joke,” he said out loud, his voice thick with tears as he wiped his eyes with his jacket sleeve. “This is so not funny.” Looks were accidental, he knew that. He’d had nothing to do with that. But there’d been nothing accidental about his career. It had been years of deliberate, carefully planned hard work. All for nothing.

  As this desolate realization hit him, the door behind him opened and closed again with a soft thump. Turning in his chair, he was relieved to see it was Niamh, standing inside the office door looking as though she too were about to burst into tears, holding a cardboard box which he could only imagine contained the personal effects from his office.

 
“They really do that, huh?” he said, sniffing and wiping his eyes again.

  Niamh raised her eyebrows quizzically.

  “Put your photos and favorite pens and old school football in a cardboard box?” Kit smiled wetly. “I thought that only happened in Jerry Maguire.”

  Niamh laughed and silently thanked Kit for making it easy for her. She moved toward him and plonked the box on the corner of Ed’s desk. “It’s gas, isn’t it?” she said, leaning her pert little rear on a pile of paperwork and facing Kit. “Only I couldn’t find any photos or an old school football, and to be honest the box was looking a bit empty so I put a few of my own things in to flesh it out a bit. Oh, and a paperweight I filched off Tom Foster’s old desk. You know, so you’ll have something heavy to throw at his head while you’re being escorted from the building.”

  Kit laughed. “I was just telling myself before you came in that this is really not that funny.”

  “Well, you’ve got that right,” said Niamh. “You’ve got no one to blame but yourself though, Kit.”

  He sighed and looked at his Italian leather shoes. “I was just telling myself that, too,” he said, his voice wavering before he checked it. He really couldn’t afford to be any more pathetic. He leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, and tried to get his wits together.

  Niamh, sensing his despair, gave him a sisterly rub on the back. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do now?” she asked, the kindness and worry plain in her voice.

  “Getting to a bar would seem to be in order,” Kit said, wondering if he was joking again.

  Niamh’s soothing back rub finished abruptly with a sharp slap to the back of his head.

  “Ouch! What did you do that for?” he said almost angrily, sitting up straight and rubbing where she had hit him. He’d forgotten she took boxing lessons twice a week.

  “Is there not an ounce of sense in that head of yours, Christopher Stephens?” Niamh snapped, almost incredulously. “A bar is the last place you should be going to. A bar is where you got yourself into this mess in the first place. Jaysus, man, what’s happened to you?”

  Kit sighed, his shoulders slumping even further. He was getting tired of that question. But only because he was asking it himself and he didn’t know the answer. He couldn’t understand where it had all gone wrong. He never used to drink at all. A couple of beers in a night was about the limit. A glass of champagne when they clinched a big client or scored an important deal. What had happened?

  Jacey had happened.

  Kit closed his eyes.

  “And don’t give me that Jacey bollocks, either,” Niamh said, poking him in the ribs.

  Whatever happened to good old-fashioned respect, Kit thought to himself. Why was everybody sticking the boot into Jacey now that she was no longer here to defend herself? Niamh, in all fairness, had been sticking the boot in since Jacey first arrived on the scene. Always frank and upfront (often to a fault, he’d joked more than once), she’d made it plain she never liked Jacey.

  “Jaysus, Kit,” she was saying now. “Don’t throw your whole life away over Jacey. She’s not worth it. Nobody’s worth it. You’ve worked so hard to get where you are—or were,” she corrected herself. “I can’t believe you’d give it all up like this. You’re not setting much of an example to the rest of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks brigade, now are you?”

  Her attempt to lighten the atmosphere only reminded him how true it was. Niamh was the daughter of Irish immigrants who had settled in the blue-collar suburbs of Chicago, and she had wriggled her way into Wall Street with two well-made suits, great legs and a determination to be better at what she was doing than anyone else who had ever done it. Long, shiny black hair, a stunning pair of green eyes and great curves had obviously helped her along the way, but mostly Niamh had gotten where she was with plain, old-fashioned hard work. Just as Kit, a natural salesman, had gotten where he was with two well-made suits and a line in genuine charm that had even the existing experts gaping in awe.

  “Maybe once on the wrong side of the tracks, always on the wrong side of the tracks,” he said gloomily.

  “And the Oscar for best dramatic performance in a tragedy goes to . . .” Niamh said, rolling her eyes. “Come on, Kit, you can’t sit here feeling sorry for yourself all day. Fast Eddie will be wanting his office back. I’ll take you home.”

  “You don’t have to,” Kit said, slowly getting to his feet.

  “Yes, I do,” said Niamh. “George thinks you might try to do him a mischief on the way out so I’ve been ordered to escort you.”

  Kit didn’t know which he’d rather believe: that George was fearful for his safety or that Niamh didn’t think he could be trusted to get home in one piece. Or without drowning his sorrows.

  As they got to the door of Ed’s office, Niamh stopped and handed Kit the cardboard box containing his paltry belongings. “Hold this, would you?” she said, shrugging off her tailored jacket and draping it over the carton.

  Kit looked down at the box. She hadn’t been joking about putting her own things in there, he could see. There were two unopened packets of stockings and an ugly green troll that someone had given her as a joke in the Christmas gift pool. Niamh undid a couple more buttons on her blouse and rolled her skirt up at the waistband until it barely covered her butt.

  “What are you doing?” Kit said, taking in her long legs in their sheer stockings and Jimmy Choo shoes.

  “I’m making sure that everybody looks at me while we wait for the elevator,” said Niamh, grabbing the carton and holding it under her breasts so that they rested dangerously on top of it.

  “If I ever go into battle,” said Kit, forgetting his misery just long enough to admire his assistant’s strategic planning, “I am taking you with me.”

  “Puh-leeze,” Niamh said in her best New York accent, “you’ve been there, done that and you did take me with you, you eejit.”

  She opened the door of Ed’s office and sashayed into the open-plan trading area, Kit trailing behind her, transfixed himself by the rear in front.

  “Hey, anybody seen my paperweight?” he heard Tom Foster calling from his new corner office.

  Niamh turned to Kit as they waited for the elevator, every moment feeling like forever, and winked. As he stood with his back to the place he had called home for more than nine years, Kit felt his heart beating the Edinburgh Tattoo again as eighty pairs of eyes burned a hole in the back of his suit. Stepping into the elevator and turning, he looked at the view that had lifted his spirits every minute of every day he had spent here. It was the last time he would ever see it.

  The cloud of doom that had been hovering over his head while he was fired and ejected followed them down twenty-seven floors, through the foyer and out into the street, where it suddenly burst and poured rain down upon them, thereby keeping them from getting a cab for nearly twenty minutes. Niamh put her jacket back on and rolled her skirt down to a more modest level, which Kit suggested was perhaps a bit premature in the circumstances.

  “I don’t see you getting your legs out to get a taxi,” Niamh said sniffily. “Given that this is Manhattan, we might have more luck if you did.”

  By the time they finally hailed the most broken-down taxi on the island, complete with toothless, foul-smelling driver, the city was in the throes of its lunchtime bustle. The driver pulled out, oblivious to all other traffic, and Kit felt an ache as they pulled away from the building. As angry horns tooted and blared around them, he looked over at Niamh just in time to catch a tear falling from her cheek onto her lap. At that point it occurred to him that she must have been fired, too. Because of him, no doubt. Because of loyalty to him. He and Niamh had been a team for eight years and her devotion had been beyond extraordinary. He didn’t deserve her. And she certainly didn’t deserve him. The need for a drink washed over him again. God, when had he turned into this guy? This guy who woke up with strange women and had a stash of coke on his hall table that he couldn’t remember anything about? This guy
who craved a drink from the moment his eyes opened? This guy who was not the Kit Stephens he thought he knew.

  “Jesus, I need help,” he murmured, more to himself than anyone else, as he stared out the window at the Manhattanites dodging the rain.

  “I know,” he heard Niamh say and, for a moment, he felt safe. He felt maybe everything would be okay after all. But his happiness was short-lived. It was that kind of a day.

  Benny looked at him sadly when he walked through the door of his apartment building. “You’d better check your mailbox, Mr. Stephens,” he said balefully, cheering up only at the sight of Niamh and her legs.

  Kit did as he was told. The box held one envelope. It was from the building co-op and it had a Day-Glo orange sticker on it that read URGENT. He stuck it in his pocket and headed for the elevator, Niamh at his side.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t been paying the rent, either,” she said. “What kind of eejit are you?”

  “The kind of eejit who would get fired and evicted in the same day, I guess,” he answered, unlocking the door to his apartment, dumping the carton of pathetic personal effects on the hall table and heading straight for the kitchen.

  “Can I get you a drink?” he asked Niamh over his shoulder.

  “You can certainly show me what you’ve got,” Niamh answered, looking around the kitchen’s latest Gaggenau appliances, the Bang and Olufsen phone, the jars of Balducci’s preserves lining the glistening white shelves, the near-empty bottle of Grey Goose on the spotless counter.

  “Well, I’ve got vodka,” said Kit opening the refrigerator. “Jesus!”

  He might have forgotten Princess Grace but she had certainly not forgotten him, and showed her contempt by directing a wave of nauseating stench directly at his nostrils.

  “What the feck is that?” Niamh moaned, her face contorted in horror as she fanned her hand in front of her nose. “Something has crawled in there and died. Kit, what is it? You haven’t got a cat, have you?”