There was a moment’s silence.
Finally, Fergal spoke. “There are more holes in that story, Mickey,” he said, “than I can poke your stick at.”
“So what exactly was the bit about the treasure?” asked a greatly improved Brian.
“How do you know it’s money?” asked Thomas. “How do you know that’s what is down there?”
“Well, why else would you get your workers to dig a great big hole, then poison them and block off the thing?” demanded Mickey.
“It sounds to me like the Cullens all got totally jarred and the boss had to finish the job himself,” said Fergal. “And it wouldn’t be the first time that has happened either, would it, Mickey?”
“Leave him alone,” demanded Dermot, keen to be on the right side should the treasure turn up.
“It’s not true,” Jamie said, shocking everyone else into silence by speaking. “The factory wasn’t built until two hundred years after the house, in the 1930s, and the curing rooms were only dug in the 1960s.” His face flushed a deeper red with every slushy sibilant. “They’re called caves because they’re dug out of rock and not lined—it’s to do with moisture and humidity. It’s nothing to do with the French. It was Corrie dug them out, with great big machines brought in from Bantry.”
Fergal looked at him and burst out laughing. “How about that, now? Two hundred years after the house with machines, you say? Those great big Cullens were fierce heavy sleepers, wha’, Mickey?”
Brian belched again. “I’m coming right, all the same,” he said, blowing a pall of smoke up into the air.
“What would he know anyway?” Dermot said, pointing at Jamie.
“I know about the buildings,” Jamie said robustly. “I know about the farm.” He stared at the ground in front of him. He’d never said so much at one time in all his life.
“Do you know something about the money, then, Fergal?” asked Thomas, nervously fidgeting with the phone in his pocket. “Like, where it is, for example?”
“Well, what I heard,” Fergal said, deflecting attention from the blushing Jamie and picking a bit of tobacco off his bottom lip, “from Seamus O’Connor was that there’s a trapdoor in the field between the factory and the dairy, the exact coordinates of which are kept in an impenetrable box in young Joey Corrigan’s sock drawer. Seamus crept in here one night with Paddy O’Toole keeping guard and made it as far as the sock drawer before a booby trap nearly blew off his head.”
“If he spent so long staking it out,” Jamie asked, bolder now, “why did he need the coordinates? Why didn’t he just go straight to the trapdoor?”
Fergal looked at him with renewed respect. He knew there was no treasure. He just enjoyed the messing.
“What’s the matter with you?” Dermot said, punching Jamie viciously on the shoulder. “How could he open the trapdoor without the coordinates, you useless feck?” There was an unbelieving silence.
“The great lump doesn’t know what a coordinate is.” Brian grinned at Fergal.
“I do so,” Dermot snapped, flustered. “It’s the numbers you need to unlock a safe.”
“That’s a combination,” said Jamie, rubbing his arm where the big brute had whacked him.
“That’s what I said, a combination of numbers,” Dermot taunted, sticking his tongue out in a duncelike imitation.
Fergal looked at Jamie and winked. “Sure, if he gets the cheese job the treasure will be safe for another few hundred years, you can be sure of that.”
“You’re barking mad, the lot of you,” said Thomas, punching numbers into his phone.
“Tea, anybody?” Avis O’Regan appeared holding a tray heaving with a teapot, cups, milk, sugar and a bewitching-smelling pile of muffins.
“You are an angel sent from God himself, Miss O’Regan,” Brian waxed, starting to stagger to his feet, then thinking better of it and lurching back instead into his sitting position.
“Now there’s the sort of talk a girl could get used to,” she said, smiling and passing the tray to Fergal. She disappeared back into the kitchen, then reappeared with a foldout table, upon which Fergal set the tea things.
“Excuse me,” said Thomas impatiently, “but what time will the interviews begin? Some of us have other appointments to go to, you know.”
The other hopefuls all snorted with laughter.
“Appointments me arse,” Mickey grumbled, moving Dermot out of the way with his stick to give himself better access to the tea tray.
“Well,” said Avis, wiping her hands on her apron, then making a fuss of looking at her watch. “It’s nearly half-eleven now so I would imagine that by the time you’ve all had lunch and filled out the forms and been through the tests . . . Yes,” she said brightly, “Mr. Corrigan and Mr. Feehan should get to see all of you today.”
With that she whisked herself inside before anybody could say a word and shut the door behind her, moving immediately to the upstairs sitting room to report to Corrie and Fee.
“They’re not what I would call the most promising bunch,” she said, her heart sinking at the sight of Corrie’s worried face. “And the rubbish they’re talking about the buried treasure, you wouldn’t credit it!”
“What are they saying?” Fee asked, cheered by the thought of rubbish being talked. He’d been doing his best to lip-read from his vantage point at the upstairs window but all the squinting had given him a headache.
Outside Dermot was still arguing with Fergal about the difference between coordinates and combinations. “One is a combination of numbers which when used in the right order will unlock a safe,” Fergal was saying with exaggerated patience, “and the other is a series of numbers indicating, on a numbered grid, the exact location of something.”
Dermot felt disinclined to back down. “Well, a series of numbers is a combination too, you feckin’ know-it-all. I’m not that feckin’ stupid.”
Brian and Mickey both laughed while Jamie pushed himself flat against the factory wall. He’d seen Dermot explode on many occasions and he didn’t want to be a victim when it happened today.
Dermot, realizing he had made a fool of himself, was insisting, “They’re all feckin’ numbers, what’s the difference?”
“Now it’s sentiments like that which we can blame for this country’s grand tradition of gross fraudulence and corruption,” Fergal said to Mickey.
“Well, here’s another grand tradition, you filthy bollocks,” roared Dermot, launching himself at Fergal and misfiring an ungainly punch, which shot past Fergal’s jaw and landed squarely on Mickey Cullen’s chest.
The old man staggered backward and tripped over Brian’s outstretched feet. He fell into the waiting arms of Jamie Joyce, who had seen Dermot’s work so many times before he knew how to be in the right place at the right time. Dermot was strong, no denying that, but he was not fast.
“You great gob-shite,” Mickey shouted, propelling himself with speed toward Dermot, who was still trying to work out what had happened. Before he managed it, however, he felt a rain of blows from Mickey’s stick about his head and shoulders that his own enormous arms could do little to fend off.
“That’s right,” Fergal encouraged from his position on the ground where he had fallen after dodging Dermot’s blow. “Give the poxy whore’s melt six of the best for me, would you, Mickey?”
The commotion reached the sitting room, where Corrie looked at Fee expectantly for an update. “Mickey Cullen’s giving the fat one a grand old hiding,” Fee said delightedly. “You’d never think there was anything wrong with him to see him move that stick, would you?”
“What’s Jamie doing?” Corrie wanted to know.
“Laughing his head off,” Fee answered. “You don’t see that happening too often. I told you he’d be grand.”
Outside, Mickey’s stick split in two over Dermot’s skull, freeing the younger man to escape out of the firing line—but not without a severe poke from the jagged end of the longest piece.
“I’ll get you, you old bol
locks,” he shouted, as he backed out of the yard toward the driveway. “And you won’t have your stick to help you either.”
“I’ll still have twice the brains and half the lard, you great girl, you,” Mickey shouted after him. “Now run home to your mammy before I stick me boot into you as well.”
Dermot, choking with rage and unable to speak, turned and lumbered down the driveway, where halfway down toward the lane he happened upon Kit, hot and sticky after lugging himself and his bags from Schillies.
“Pardon me,” Kit said, smiling at the fat, sweaty lad, “could you tell me where I can find Avis O’Regan?”
Dermot took in the American’s good looks, fine clothes, sleek build and slightly lost expression and knew immediately that he hated him.
“That I could,” he said, wiping his brow and catching his breath. “Haven’t I only just seen her? She says she wants you to wait for her on the garden bench through the gate there, first on your right in front of the main house.”
“Oh,” said Kit. “Wait for her? In the garden? Sure. If that’s what she wants.”
“It’s a madhouse up there today,” Dermot said, removing his tiny baseball cap and wiping the sweat off his dome. “I wouldn’t get in her way if I were you, she’s looking awful fierce.”
Kit felt his heart sink in his chest. What had Niamh gotten him into? He was exhausted enough by Maureen McCarthy and she wasn’t even particularly fierce. Just nosy. The strain of her not asking any more about his personal circumstances over breakfast had plum tuckered the two of them out. By the time he had reached the cheese farm after a mile-long walk, he was dreaming of a friendly face, a darkened room and a cool glass of water. He sighed and hitched up his bags.
“Thanks,” he said to Dermot, whom he suddenly noticed was covered with red welts. “Hives, huh?”
Dermot looked confused before examining his arm to find marks in the shape of bits of Mickey’s stick all over it. His eyes hardened. “Fleas,” he spat, darkly, “the size of rats. Look out where you sit.”
And with that he lumbered past Kit and down the driveway to the road.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Some people should never make cheese. Liars make bad cheesemakers: It looks good but tastes desperate. Cheats make bad cheesemakers too, and there’s never as much of it as they say there’s going to be.”
JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives
Abbey looked up at the pillar-fronted white-stucco building and scrutinized it for signs of her mother but did not find any. She wasn’t really sure what she expected. But the building was pretty much exactly as she remembered it, although the Kensington street, like much of London, seemed tidier. Smarter. Taking a deep breath, she hitched her bag higher on her shoulder and climbed the front steps, not completely surprised to see her hand shaking as she reached out to press the buzzer for apartment C.
As the brass button reverberated under the touch of her fingertip, she felt a moment of panic. This couldn’t altogether be considered sudden, as she’d been suffering similar moments since kissing Shirl good-bye at Brisbane International the day before, or the day before that, or whenever it had been. Did she really want to subject herself to Rose’s particular brand of nurturing and support? Were eleven years without it enough? Abbey felt an overwhelming wave of emotion roar through her and for a moment she considered turning and fleeing. But turning to whom? Fleeing where? She took another deep breath and pressed the buzzer again. She was only on Rose’s doorstep because she had absolutely nowhere else to go in the world, literally. It wasn’t as though she was choosing Rose over anything. Or anybody. Rose was it.
There was her friend Virginia Barker from school but in her last letter, more than two years ago now, Virginia had been in the process of moving to Scotland with her husband and twin sons. Abbey didn’t even know which bit of Scotland. Or if Virginia had changed her last name. Or if she’d had more babies since then.
Babies. Abbey buzzed forcefully a third time.
“You’d forget your balls if they weren’t in a sack.” Her mother’s unmistakable voice crackled loudly out of the speaker as the door clicked unlocked. Abbey, unprepared for such a response, gaped wordlessly at the intercom before deciding to simply push open the door and proceed upstairs. Whose balls? she thought uncomfortably. What sack?
She approached her mother’s third-floor apartment, the elevator door closing with a clatter behind her, her heart thumping in her chest. She was just about to rap on the door when it opened, her mother’s rear end disappearing behind it again before she saw who was there.
“. . . the useless bollocks has only lost his keys again,” her mother was saying into the hall phone. “Didn’t I just tell him he’d lose his balls if they weren’t in a sack?” She laughed into the receiver.
Abbey moved slowly inside the door. This wasn’t how she had imagined her homecoming.
“Well, just as well he’s good at that then, isn’t it now?” her mother tinkled into the phone, lifting one delicately manicured foot to push the door closed from her position on the padded chair next to the hall table. She looked casually at Abbey’s feet, then her eyes traveled slowly up her calves, her expression changing in slow motion as she took in not the hips and torso of whoever she was expecting but the body of her only child. The body she assumed to be sitting in the sun on the other side of the world. Her eyes landed on Abbey’s with a look that defied description.
“Jaysus,” she said, her perfectly lipsticked mouth falling open in shock, a column of cigarette smoke wafting moodily out of it. “I’ll ring you back.” She dropped the phone back in its cradle, blindly stubbed out her cigarette and slowly rose, staring disbelievingly at Abbey all the while.
“Hi, Rose,” said Abbey. “I’ve come home.” She was struck by, had forgotten somehow, just how exquisitely beautiful her mother was. Her dark red hair was shoulder length and set like a movie star’s from the 1940s, and her skin was the color of milk. The delicate bones around her mother’s neck and shoulders that she remembered so clearly were still in prime position, every stitch of clothing worn to show this feature off to its maximum potential. The makeup was perhaps a layer or two thicker, but the eyes were still an incredible shade of spring-forest green and the lashes outrageously thick and long. Her mother, Abbey thought with a jolt, didn’t look a day older than when she had last seen her eleven years ago.
“Jaysus!” her mother said again. She was wearing an off-white floaty negligee arrangement with impossibly wide, sheer long sleeves, feathered at the wrists. It was a strange getup for the late afternoon but just the romantic sort of Zsa Zsa Gabor outfit her mother had always favored.
“I think I’m in shock,” Rose said.
Abbey moved cautiously half a step closer. “You do know who I am, don’t you?” she said, only half-joking. She could see her mother performing mental gymnastics behind her foundation and for one terrible moment wondered if she had in fact forgotten about her. There was a terrible, frightening corridor of silence then the curtain was lifted and Rose the actress emerged.
“Darling,” she said, suddenly dramatic, holding her arms out for Abbey to walk into them, her face rearranging itself into warm maternal repose. “It’s so wonderful to see you, of course it is. Just such a shock, that’s all. A terrible shock. Mind the hair.”
She kissed the air on either side of Abbey’s face and then pulled back, but Abbey didn’t mind. She’d never really been comfortable in her mother’s embrace and now was no exception.
“I just can’t believe it’s you, Abbey,” Rose said in a strange tone, giving her daughter the once-over. “Just look at you. That’s quite a body you have on you now, girl. Give us a spin.”
Abbey dropped her bag and dutifully did as she was told. It came as no shock that her mother would check out her measurements before her mental health, marital status or plans for the future. Some things would never change.
“I’ve been in the air for twenty-seven hours,” Abbey expla
ined, picking her T-shirt away from her slightly sweating midriff. She doubted that the too-big hand-me-downs that she couldn’t afford to ditch despite their awful memories were doing her justice.
“Come in and sit down, you must be exhausted,” Rose said, reaching for her cigarettes on the telephone table and turning Abbey with the tip of her talon toward the tiny sitting room. “Have you been working out, have you?”
“I have been in the islands for more than eleven years, Rose,” Abbey pointed out. “Gyms are kind of in short supply in that part of the world.” Actually, there had been an entire Nautilus weights system, two treadmills and a running machine in Tomi Papara’s back room but she’d never felt the urge to use them.
“Of course you were, darling,” Rose said, arranging herself on the sofa and pretending to scoff at her own silliness. “The shock of it all. Did you get my letter?”
Abbey looked at her mother. “The letter you wrote me, what, eight years ago?” she said brightly. “Yes, Rose, I got it. Did you get the letters I wrote you, you know, every Christmas and birthday and most months in between?”
Her mother caught the tenor of her tone and looked momentarily chastised. “Ah, don’t look at me like that, Abbey. You know I’m hopeless at corresponding. I’m an immediate sort of a person, you know that. I’m an ‘in there, in your face’ sort of a person. Don’t give me a hard time. You know I was never much good at writing letters.”