“Your cats are called Jesus, Mary and All The Saints?” said Lucy, a look of disbelief and disdain distorting her small pretty face.
Corrie looked at Fee and smiled. “We didn’t do it on purpose, God bless us,” he explained.
“Didn’t the little gobshites take such a long time to get housetrained they were answering to Jesus, Mary and All The Saints before we’d thought of any names,” added Fee. “And it could have been a lot feckin’ worse!”
The two old men laughed.
Lucy looked from one to the other. It was possible they weren’t quite right in the head. However, it was the only job advertisement she had ever seen for which she perfectly fitted all the criteria. “Must have short nails,” the ad in the Schillies Gazette, pinned to the shop notice board, had read, “a good singing voice and enjoy a strict vegetarian diet.”
“Right so,” Corrie said, pulling the lever on his recliner and stretching his legs out as the footrest appeared in front of him. “When did you last eat meat, Lucy?”
“A lamb chop when I was five. And I remember because I stuck the bone in my brother’s eye, the bollocks,” Lucy said defiantly. “Oh, and some bastard poured meat juice on my vegetarian patties at a barbecue once, but I didn’t know until afterward.”
“What did they taste like?” asked Fee with interest.
“I dunno,” answered Lucy. “I was bulimic at the time.”
“You could be mad as a hatter and half the size and we wouldn’t give a hoot,” Fee said cheerfully. “We just want someone to milk our cows.”
Lucy’s heart sank down to the tips of her Doc Marten boots, via her torn kilt and holey fishnets. She should have known it was too good to be true. For nearly three hours she had sat here in this overheated, old man’s library listening to The Sound of Music CD and drinking peppermint tea, and of all the possibilities she had considered none included the job she was applying for being that of a dairymaid. She knew that Corrie and Fee made cheese. In fact, her mother used to buy it to give to the snooty cows at her endless bloody bridge parties in Dublin. “Coolarney, the finest in all of Ireland, quite possibly the world,” her mother would say, chipping off minuscule chunks and doling them out with expensive crackers and tiny glasses of sherry. But Lucy assumed that cheese was made with machines. In big vats. With milk from a factory.
“I thought cheese was made with machines. In big vats. With milk from a factory,” she said. “What would you want with cows?”
“She’s got that many holes in her head,” sighed Fee, “the brains have fair seeped out of her.”
“Our cheese, Lucy,” said Corrie patiently, ignoring Fee, “is the finest in all of Ireland, possibly the world. It’s made from our own cows’ milk. Do you know, they’ve been grazing on these fields for hundreds of years?”
“So everything around here’s ancient, then,” Lucy said rudely, but Corrie continued.
“What we want, Lucy, is for the cows to produce the best milk so that we can make the best cheese.” For generations, he explained, the Feehans and Corrigans had been in the business of making cheese together. The traditional deal had always been that the Corrigans provided the cows, the cows provided the milk and the Feehans provided the skills to make cheese—the profits, if any, were split down the middle.
“Thanks for the history lesson,” Lucy said with a yawn.
Corrie plowed on. Coolarney Blues and Golds, in kilo and dote sizes, he informed her, were now served at all official government functions (“and you know how that lot like to eat,” chipped in Fee); the Blue had been a particular favorite of the late Princess Diana, between diets, and was served still at Buckingham Palace; and their precious Grace was the world’s most award-winning cheese ever. It sold for £14 per one hundred grams, if you could get it on their side of the Atlantic, that was, Corrie said, most of it being exported directly to New York.
“Fascinating,” Lucy drawled sarcastically. “What do you need me for then?”
“We need you,” Corrie said, “because you’re the special ingredient.”
Lucy stopped looking bored. “Are you messing?” she asked suspiciously.
“Not at all,” answered Corrie. “We need girls who can hold a tune and who don’t eat meat to hand-milk the cows.”
The milk, Corrie said, was sweeter that way. It was as simple as that. The cheese in turn aged more peacefully, which gave it the almost honey-flavored, lingering aftertaste that had those who sought it still drooling long after it had been smeared on the last cracker, served with the last grape, sampled with the last drop of wine.
Corrie and Fee ran a split herd of one hundred cows and milked fifty at a time. Each cow produced twenty-five liters of milk a day, in twice-daily milkings, morning and afternoon. They needed five singing vegetarians to deal with this schedule but were currently down to four, Mary-Anne’s craving for sausage rolls having resulted in her return to her family in Donegal. It sometimes happened.
“You are messing,” said Lucy, twisting a rancid-looking dreadlock in her hand, and scowling. “I didn’t come up on the last load, you know.”
Corrie and Fee looked at each other knowingly. Were the little ferrets ever any different?
“You lure me in here,” declared Lucy, “make me listen to Julie bloody Andrews for hours on end, spin me some bullshit story about making stinky bloody cheese and expect me to accept a job ‘milking’? I have seen perverts before, you know. I do know what they look like.”
She jumped off the chair and started to extricate herself from the headphones, still tangled in her dreads. “I mean, what makes you think I would be interested?” she said. “You’re both complete nutters, if you ask me.”
One earphone remained planted somewhere around the side of her head. Corrie and Fee looked on with interest.
“I’ve never even seen a cow up close, let alone pulled its tits or whatever the hell you call them. I’m from the city,” she said patronizingly, losing patience with her headphone extraction and perching on the edge of the chair as she systematically fingered her way through her dreadlocks, trying to find the one responsible for capturing the earphone. The truth was, of course, that she no longer wanted to be from the city. She wanted to be as far away from the city and her parents, her brother, her college tutors and that cheating bloody Eamon as she could, which was why she had sold her violin and bought a bus ticket to West Cork in the first place.
“And anyway, it’s dangerous, isn’t it? Don’t cows, like, kick or bite or something?” She had both her hands behind her head now, marching their way from separate sides to find the source of the entanglement.
“We’ll pay you £150 a week, board and feed you,” said Corrie. “Meat-free, of course.”
“You’ll work a split shift, starting at five in the morning and finishing two to three hours later,” Fee chipped in, “then the same hours in the evening. In between you can do what you like. Avis has the cottage set up so you can watch videos or paint or play board games with the other girls or you can earn a bit extra working in the curing room. And the pub’s only five minutes down the road. The girls—the cows I mean—don’t mind the smell of booze, in fact they seem to like it. Anyway, we’ve told Avis to get your room ready.”
Lucy’s fingers slowed and met at the errant dreadlock. Carefully, she untwisted the cable until the headphones came away in her hand.
“And what makes you dirty old bastards think I’m staying?” she asked.
There was a moment’s silence. “Nobody listens to three hours of The Sound of Music unless they’re fecked for a place to be,” answered Fee, not unkindly, but nevertheless Lucy’s face burned.
“Yeah, well, I am not so desperate for a job that I’ll jump into whatever,” she said, eyeing them both with deliberate mistrust as she threw the Discman onto the chair and picked up her bag again, getting ready to leave.
“Did you offer her the job yet?” Corrie asked Fee. “I don’t think you should push her into it, Joseph. Why don’t we just give her a place to sta
y while she thinks about it? We wouldn’t want her rushing anything, now.”
Lucy stopped what she was doing and stood still, hoping something would happen. Quickly. The fact of the matter was that she did find herself ever so slightly fecked for a place to be plus she was tired and hungry—£150 a week and all the food she could eat sounded like a pretty good deal.
Fee chuckled for no particular reason other than he’d been there a hundred times before and eased himself out of his chair. Slowly, he stood up and rubbed his back, his mouth squeezed into a silent “ow” of pain. “What’s the bet Avis is here already?” he said, shuffling to the door and opening it.
“Talk about timing!” marveled a middle-aged matronly figure with ski slopes for breasts and a sparkle behind her spectacles as she bustled in the door. Her gray hair was twisted up on top of her head in a complicated arrangement that looked like something you’d buy in a French bakery, and she had crab-apple cheeks and an impossibly smiley countenance. She kissed Fee on the cheek.
“The state of you! Have you not had that back seen to yet, Joseph? I tell you, one of those osteopracters will sort it out in no time at all.” As she spoke she grasped Fee by the shoulder and leaned around him to run her fingers up his spine like a piano player. The old man straightened to his full height, about level with her chin.
“And Joseph,” she said, turning to Corrie. “How are you today?” She leaned down and gave him a quick peck, then turned to Lucy, who was still standing, stunned, next to her chair. “And this must be our new recruit. How are you there, girl? I’m Avis O’Regan. The cut of you! I’ll have to get Jackie on to the nut roast again, I can see that. Did the old so-and-sos give you the full treatment? Take no notice, just come with me and I’ll get you all settled in. Now, is there anyone I should ring to let them know you’re in safe hands? You’re not the first to arrive here in a state of confusion and still be in the exact same state four hours later, let me tell you . . .”
Without seeming to notice what was happening, Lucy was steered out the door by Avis, who paused, only momentarily, to tut-tut at the old men over her head.
Fee settled back in his chair and stared into the fire as Corrie leaned in to poke at the coals.
“Will she stay?” Corrie asked, when the fire was spitting and crackling again.
“She will,” said Fee, smiling to himself, “and be all the better for it. She and the little one.”
Corrie raised his eyebrows. How Fee knew these things, no one could figure, but know them he did. “I’m thinking of the very last of the Princess with a glass of something sweet and sticky,” he finally said, after pondering the predicament Lucy possibly didn’t yet know she was in.
“Is that right?” said Fee, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair, a happy smile tripping across his face. “Are you thinking Australian Botrytis Semillon?” he asked.
“I could be.”
“Are you thinking De Bortoli Noble One?”
“I could be.”
“But are you?”
There was a silence while Corrie marveled at his old friend’s gift. “I don’t know how you do it,” he said, standing to go and get the bottle.
Outside the smoking room, Avis had hold of Lucy’s rucksack and was marching through the house. With Lucy almost running to keep up, she strode down the hallway and through a huge cluttered kitchen, then into an anteroom choked with Wellingtons and raincoats and out into a concrete courtyard. Wine-barrel halves singing with red geraniums flanked the back door; their other halves, exploding with giant purple poppies, rimmed a stone building opposite.
“The cheese factory,” Avis said almost reverentially, stopping momentarily and nodding in its direction. To the left of the stone building was the top of the sycamore-lined driveway up which Lucy had walked some hours earlier; to the right was a tall, thick hedge with an archway in the middle, over which was threaded a thick covering of sweet-scented, tiny pink roses.
Avis turned through the archway. Following her, Lucy breathed in the cool country air and for a second almost forgot how unhappy she was. The afternoon’s summer light cast a kaleidoscope of green and gold on the ground in front of her tatty boots as she followed Avis up the narrow pathway, blooming on either side with wild purple rhododendrons.
As soon as she realized she felt happy she wondered what she was doing there, following Mrs. Doubtfire or whoever the hell she was through the undergrowth to God knew where. Her footsteps slowed and she felt an imaginary cloud block out the sun and leave her feeling chilled and shivery. Perhaps she should run out to the road, flag down a car and hitch back to Dublin. Perhaps there would be no car. Or worse, perhaps there would be, it would stop and give her a ride, she would get back to Dublin—and then what? Nobody would give a shit either way so what did it really matter what she did? She just felt so incredibly tired. And angry. But mostly tired. And alone.
Lucy stopped on the pathway. She couldn’t seem to help the single tear that made its way uninvited down her cheek. Shaking, her head bowed in shame, she sniffed and wiped the tear with the too-long sleeve of her scuffed leather jacket. But another followed, and another, and then her nose started to stream, and before she knew it, weeks, or maybe months, years, of tears were making a boisterous bid for freedom. Unable to control her distress, she seemed equally incapable of avoiding the enormous bosom of Avis O’Regan as it came bearing down upon her, sweeping her up in its ample embrace. On the narrow pathway in the middle of the purple forest of flowers, she howled with inexplicable pain and let Avis clutch her tightly and rock her gently, all the while murmuring into her hair that everything would turn out all right, no matter how she felt about it all now.
“Your heart might be full of anger or hate or emptiness, Lucy, but the thing is that you’re among friends here,” Avis almost whispered in a soothing singsong voice. “There’s not one of us who hasn’t come here looking for something; love usually, my darling, as the girls you’re about to meet will surely tell you, and I’m not talking about the sort of love that can be found inside a farm lad’s trousers either, in case you were wondering. I’m talking about the sort of love that makes you feel warm all over when you’re just about to drop off to sleep at night or when you’ve just opened your eyes in the morning and have worked out it’s not a dream you’re having, it’s real life. I’m talking about the feeling that if you hadn’t woken up, you know, ever, that there would be people who would notice. People who would cry. People whose lives would be worse because you’re not there anymore. You’ve already got more of those people than you know, did you know that? And now you’ve got people like Corrie and Fee. Yes, already! And me. And you’re about to get Jack and Wilhimina and Tessie and May. What do you say to that?”
Lucy had calmed down enough to pull herself out of Avis’s cleavage. She looked up into the friendly bespectacled eyes and sniffed.
“I thought you were going to bloody well suffocate me!” she said, her tears left behind in Avis’s substantial brassiere but her voice shaky with an emotion that couldn’t altogether be described as her usual anger. She wiped her nose on her sleeve again, then looked beyond Avis at the cottage behind her. “What is this?”
She was looking at a small, two-story, gray stone cottage, not unlike the cheese factory but with a red corrugated-iron roof and red window boxes brimming with a mixture of the poppies and geraniums she had seen back at the main house.
“This is your new home,” Avis said, opening the wrought-iron gate that enclosed a messy cottage garden and motioning to Lucy to walk up the path through the wild lavender to the front door. “This is the dairymaids’ cottage.”
Avis gave a polite knock before opening the door and showing Lucy in. The ground floor seemed to be an all-in-one kitchen, dining and sitting room. It was small but beautifully sunny and at the rear, straight ahead of them, French doors opened out to a garden patio. On the right were two doors, and the wall that housed the kitchen appliances hid a staircase that led to the next floor.
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“There are four bedrooms for the five of you girls, with the twins quite happy to share,” Avis was explaining. “You can always call on me in the main house but out here you have, you know, your own space.” She emphasized the word “space” proudly, as though it was a new term she had only just learned, then opened the first door on the right and led Lucy in.
“This is your room,” she said, putting the rucksack on the dressing table. “Wardrobe over there, dressing table here obviously, writing desk, nice view of the woods and garden, radiator, extra linen in the chest at the end of the bed. Bathroom’s through here—you share that with Jack. What do you think of it, then?”
The same dappled light Lucy had walked through earlier shimmied on the pink-and-white striped bedspread.
“It’s a bit Laura Ashley but it will do,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and testing its bounce.
“I’ll leave you to take a rest, then,” said Avis, ignoring the jibe. “The girls are milking so I’ll be over in the dairy if you need me. It’s out the kitchen door and around the side of the hill, about a five-minute walk. We’ll be back after seven and the girls usually have something to eat then. But if you’re starving and can’t wait, there’s Wilhie’s bean casserole in the refrigerator. Delicious! Can you cook?”
“Toast,” said Lucy, starting to take her boots off. A rest was indeed required.
Back at the main house, glowing from the benefit of said sticky Semillon on a summer afternoon, Corrie and Fee were heading for the cheese factory. They crossed the courtyard and stopped in the lobby just inside the factory door. On their left was the door into the shop, and on their right the little office where they tried not to spend any time at all but kept their cheesemaking clothes. Corrie pulled on his white overalls and Fee slipped into a white coat. The overalls, he had long complained, pulled on his paunch and gave him indigestion but the coat made him feel important. They stepped into white Wellingtons, dipped their feet in the in-tray and pushed open the door into the factory proper.