Two-Day Curd

by John Henry Newman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Yesterday's curd had kept well in the back dairy, under its cloth, in the long galvanised tub that had been a sheep-dipping bath once and had not been one in anybody's memory; and when Ruth Hesketh turned back the cloth at a quarter to six on the Tuesday morning it had the smell it ought to have, sharp and clean and a little like the inside of a new loaf, and it broke under her thumb into pieces the size of a hazelnut and did not smear. She stood a moment with her hand in it, feeling the cold come up through her wrist. Then she went to look at the vat.

The milk had come across the lane at five, as it had come every morning since the second week in June, in the trailer tank behind Barry Whiteside's quad bike, with Barry's lad driving and Barry's collie riding on the lid. It was good milk. That was the first thing to be said about it, and Ruth had said it to Geoff, and to the woman from Environmental Health, and to herself, a good many times: it was clean, and cold, and tested every month, and there was a great deal of it. And it was not Shorthorn milk, and it did not behave like Shorthorn milk in the vat, and she had spent the whole of the summer finding out how.

The make-book lay open on the shelf by the door, where the steam would not reach it. It was a ledger of the old long kind, bound in green cloth gone black at the corners, and the first forty pages of it were in a hand nobody now living could have written, small and upright and economical with ink: Martha Hesketh's, from the April of 1951, when she first made cheese at Hollins to use up the milk the lorry would not take, to the autumn of 1958. After that, for forty-six years, it was Agnes's, rounder and larger and given to underlining; and after that it was Ruth's. Every make had its line: the date, the weather, the gallons, the heat of the milk at renneting, the time to set, the time the curd was cut, the salt. Nothing else. The book did not say what anybody had felt about a cheese; it said what had been done to it.

Since June, Ruth's lines had acquired a second column, in pencil, crowded into the margin: pitch +20 min. Cut finer. Salt up a handful. Off whey 1° cooler. She had written them in pencil because she might want to rub them out. She looked down the page now, as she tied on her apron, at five months of pencil, and she had not rubbed out one.

She renneted at six, and at seven she cut the curd, drawing the knives through the vat lengthways and then across, and then lengthways again with the other knife, finer than Agnes had ever cut it, because the new curd held its whey like a sponge and gave it up sulkily, and if she cut it Agnes's way it went into the moulds wet and came out of the press with a sour streak through the middle like a seam of clay. She had lost eleven cheeses that way in June before she understood it. They had gone to the pigs at Whiteside's, and Barry had said the pigs had never been so contented, and had meant it kindly.

By half past nine the new curd was drained and broken, and she brought the tub of yesterday's to the bench beside it and began to mix. This was the thing about Lancashire that nobody outside the county believed until they had seen it done: that the cheese was not made from one day's milk but from two, the old curd and the new, crumbled together by hand until a man could not have said which was which, and salted, and packed down into the calico-lined moulds, and pressed. Yesterday's curd brought the sharpness and today's brought the butter; and what came out of the press was neither of them, and both. Martha had made it from three days' curd. Ruth had seen the line in the make-book where that stopped.

She salted, and packed three moulds, and wound the press down on them, one turn and a rest and another turn, so as not to burst the curd; and wiped her hands, and went through to the store to see to the turning before Simon came.

---

The store was the old cheese-room on the north side of the house, with a flagged floor and slatted shelves of Baltic pine to the ceiling, and the air in it was cool and close and smelt of butter and cloth and, faintly, of the stone. The cheeses stood in their ranks, round and squat, each bound in calico and rubbed with butter until the cloth had taken on the colour of old ivory, each on its own square of board with its date in pencil on the edge. On the top shelves, nearest the ceiling and the warmth, were the last of the Shorthorn cheeses, eighteen of them, made in the March and April and May, all promised. Below them, on the four lowest shelves, stood the rest: the summer's making, June to October, something over three hundred cheeses of Barry Whiteside's milk.

The Shorthorn cheeses each had, stamped on the calico just above the shoulder, a small purple mark: a capital H inside a ring. The others had nothing.

The stamp lived in a jam jar on the window ledge, a little brass thing with a turned wooden handle, and beside it, with its lid on, the ink pad, which Ruth had not opened since the spring and which she supposed by now had dried to a biscuit. She did not look at it. She began at the bottom shelf and worked up, turning each cheese end over end on to its other face, so that the butter and the moisture in it would not settle, and setting it down square on its board; and she had done the June and July and was half through August when she heard Simon's car in the yard.

He came in rubbing his hands. He was a tall, untidy man in a quilted jacket, who had a cheese shop in Exmouth Market in London and had been brought up in Chorley, and who came north twice a year to buy and spoke on these visits with a great deal more Lancashire in his voice than he can have used in Exmouth Market. He had his own cheese iron in a canvas roll, as some men carry their own cue.

"Quiet today," he said, looking out across the yard to the empty shippon.

"It's a Tuesday," Ruth said, which was true, and meant nothing.

She gave him a June cheese, from the bottom shelf, five months old, and he set it on the bench and bored into it with the iron, turning it a half-turn in the body of the cheese and drawing it out, and broke off the end of the plug, and smelt it, and ate it. Then he broke a second piece and ate that more slowly, looking at the wall. Then he slid the rest of the plug back into its hole, rind end outward, and pressed it home with his thumb, so that nobody would ever know the cheese had been entered.

"That's it," he said. "That's the one."

"You think so."

"I know so. There's that lemon right at the front, and then the butter comes up behind it and sits there. It's lovely. It's the best you've done, honestly." He wiped the iron on a handkerchief. "Forty, for Christmas. Same as last year. I'll want them by the eighth."

Forty cheeses at that price was six thousand pounds. Ruth knew it to the pound, because she had worked it out in July, at the kitchen table, against a letter from the bank, on the back of the letter.

Simon was looking along the bottom shelf. "You've stopped stamping them," he said.

"I've not got round to it."

"I like the stamp. People like the stamp. I tell them about the stamp." He put the iron back in its roll. "Ring me by Friday, will you? I've got the van booked."

---

At twelve she took Geoff his dinner in the kitchen, and he ate it with his bad leg up on the other chair, as the physiotherapist had said he should and as he would not do if anybody was looking. He had sold the herd at Gisburn in May, forty-one cows and their followers, in a morning, after the second operation on his hip and the business with his heart; he had stood at the ringside with a stick and watched them go, and had driven home, and had not been into the shippon since. He looked at the field from the kitchen window a good deal.

"Simon," he said.

"He wants forty."

"Then let him have forty." He buttered his bread. "It's cheese. It's good cheese. He's said it's good cheese, and he's paying for it. I don't know what else you want."

"I want your mother to taste it."

Geoff put down his knife.

"She won't," he said. "She said in June. She'll not taste it green, and she'll not taste it to please us."

"It's not green. It's five months."

He looked at her for a while. "Then take it her," he said. "And don't ask me what she says, because I'll not want to know."

---

Agnes's bungalow stood across the yard behind the Dutch barn, where it had been put up in 2004 when her hands gave out and her knees after them, so that she could see the dairy door from her chair. She was eighty-nine. She saw very little now with the middle of her eyes, but a great deal with the edges, and she had heard Ruth coming across the yard and had the kettle on before the door opened.

Ruth had cut a plug with her own iron from the same June cheese, and wrapped it in greaseproof paper, and she put it on the table by the chair without saying what it was, which was unnecessary.

"Sit down," Agnes said. "You're stood over me."

Ruth sat. Agnes unwrapped the paper slowly, and lifted the plug to her nose, and held it there; and then she broke it in two, close to her face, and looked at the break, turning it towards the window, where the light came in from the side; and then she ate the smaller piece with her eyes shut and her hands folded in her lap, and said nothing for so long that the kettle boiled and clicked off and Ruth did not get up for it.

"It's clean," Agnes said at last.

"Yes."

"Cleaner than ours. That'll be the parlour. He's a tidy man, Barry, I'll say that." She ate the other piece. "You've salted it up."

"A handful."

"More than a handful." She opened her eyes. "The butter's further back. It's there, it's not where it was. It comes later in your mouth." She wiped her fingers on the greaseproof. "And it'll go short. I can feel it at the edge, where the iron's been. Come next summer that'll be breaking up on you, the old ones. You'll want to sell it before it's a year, I should think. Or you shan't. I don't know."

"Simon wants forty for Christmas."

"Then he can have forty for Christmas. It'll eat very well at Christmas." Agnes folded the paper into a small square, and then a smaller one, with care, along the creases. "That's not what you've come to ask me."

Ruth said nothing.

"When I married into this house," Agnes said, "your Geoff's grandmother made it with three days' curd. Monday's and Tuesday's and Wednesday's, all in together, and it was a beautiful cheese, and it took a whole woman to do it. And I had Geoff in the October of 'fifty-eight, and I hadn't a whole woman to give it. So I dropped to two days. I didn't ask her. I put it in the book and I did it." She put the folded paper in her apron pocket. "She never said a word. Not a word, the whole of that winter, nor the spring. I used to watch her at the table. She'd cut herself a bit off the old Wensleydale we had in for visitors, and she'd eat that, with her bread."

"What happened?"

"Well, nothing happened. It was the next back-end. One teatime she cut into one of mine, a big one off the bottom shelf, and ate it. And that was all." She turned her face towards the window. "You can't tell anything at five months. Not what you want telling. You can tell if it's sound, and it's sound. I'll tell you if it's Hollins this time next year, if I'm here, and if I'm not you'll know for yourself, because you'll have eaten it."

"Simon's van's booked for the eighth."

"Then you'll have to make your mind up without me," Agnes said. "Shan't you."

---

Ruth rang him on the Thursday, at eight at night, from the dairy, with the door shut.

She told him about the cows. She told him about Gisburn, and the hip, and Barry Whiteside's Holsteins across the lane, and the eleven cheeses that had gone to the pigs, and the pencil in the margin of the make-book. She did not tell him about the bank, because that was not his business; and she did not tell him what Agnes had said, because she found that she could not have repeated it so that it came out meaning what it had meant.

There was a long pause at the London end. She could hear a till, and somebody laughing.

"Does it matter?" Simon said.

"I don't know."

"It tastes right. I tasted it. You saw me taste it."

"I know you did."

"The card on the counter says made at Hollins by the Hesketh family since 1951. That's still true. Every word of it."

"It is," Ruth said. "I wanted you to know what it was true of."

He was quiet again. When he spoke, it was in his Exmouth Market voice, the Chorley gone out of it. "I can't sell forty of a thing I've got to explain, Ruth. Not at Christmas, not at that price. People don't want a story with a footnote in it." Then, after a while, less briskly: "Twenty-four. The June and the July. And I'll put a line on the card about the milk, and if they ask me, I'll tell them. And you ring me in the spring."

"Twenty-four," Ruth said.

"I'm sorry."

"No," she said. "Thank you." And she wrote it down on the back of the envelope from the bank, under the July sum, and drew a line under it, and did the subtraction, and went in.

Geoff was asleep in front of the television with his leg up. She did not wake him to tell him, and he did not ask in the morning.

---

The frost came down hard that night, the first real one of the year, out of a clear sky.

Ruth crossed the yard at twenty to six on the Friday with the torch, as she always did, to look at the press before the milk came. The concrete was white and stiff underfoot and her breath went up in front of her. She was at the dairy door before she saw that the light was on in the store.

She went through. There was nobody there. The store was cold, as it always was, and smelt of butter and stone; the cheeses stood in their ranks; and on the bench under the window, where the jam jar stood, the lid was off the ink pad, and the pad was dark and wet again, and beside it, on a saucer, was the small brown bottle of stamp ink that had lived for twenty years in the left-hand drawer of the bureau in Agnes's front room. The stamp was back in the jar, handle up, as it had always been put back.

The low stool from the dairy had been drawn up to the far end of the bottom shelf. Just above the shoulder of every June cheese, on the buttered calico, was a capital H in a ring. They were not quite straight. Some of them were very faint, where the pad had still been drying, and one or two were doubled, where the hand that held the stamp had not been sure it had pressed hard enough and had pressed again. The July cheeses had them, and the August. So had the September and the October, which were nowhere near ready, and which Simon was not having, and which nobody would cut until the spring.

Ruth turned the light off and stood in the doorway of the dairy.

Across the yard, in the frost, from the bungalow door to the dairy and back again, went the two lines of small, short, shuffling footprints, close together, and beside each one, going and coming, the round dark hole of a stick.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (20 October 2026), ab Iōanne Henrīcō Newmannō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Henry Newman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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