shop on New Quebec Street, where I’m due to collect forty quid’s worth of eye-wateringly expensive (and probably just eye-watering, ha-ha) cheese that I ordered a couple of days ago. It’s for Olly, as a thank-you gift for all his help with the move and the furniture. I racked my brains for quite a while to come up with something I knew he’d love – a sci-fi movie box-set, a kitchen-y gadget for messing about with when he’s cooking (for fun, staggeringly) at home – but in the end I thought some serious cheese was a great gift for someone who’s … well, as serious about cheese as Olly is.
As we both are, in fact. Cheese was one of the very first things we bonded over, and cheese has continued to play a front-and-centre role in our friendship ever since. We sometimes go to cheese-tasting evenings – right here, at Le Grand Fromage on New Quebec Street, or at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden; we once went to an entire cheese festival, at some Nineties rock star’s country farm down in Somerset; when I was nineteen and he was turning twenty-one, we celebrated his significant birthday by taking the Eurostar over to Paris for the day, wandering around the first arrondissement, from fromagerie to fromagerie (with l’occasional stop-off at le bar on the way), buying more cheese than we could possibly afford, and eating most of it on the Eurostar on the way back home. Le Marathon de Cheese, we called it, and we’ve long talked about repeating the performance.
The owner of Le Grand Fromage recognizes me by now, and waves to me from behind the counter as I make my way through the door and into her shop.
‘Hi, there! Libby, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right!’ I don’t know her name; she did mention it to me once, but I’ve forgotten it and now it’s too embarrassing to ask again. In my head I just call her The Big Cheese Woman. Which makes her sound like she’s made entirely from wheels of cheddar, with mini Babybels for her eyes and nose, when in fact she’s a pleasant-looking forty-something with a petite figure and an enviable choppy haircut. (Enviable even before I burnt half my hair off this morning. Right now, I might actually kill to have hair like hers.) ‘You called to say my cheese order was ready?’
‘That’s right! All cut and ready to go. The Brie de Meaux, the Fourme d’Ambert, and the aged Comté. Oh, and something else …’
‘No, no, nothing else,’ I say, hastily, because I’m not sure my precarious bank balance can take any more posher-than-posh cheese just now.
‘No, I was just going to say that I’m popping in a little sample of something for you to try. A goat’s cheese. Because don’t I remember you asking about a particular goat’s cheese the last time you were in? Something rolled in ash, with a cross shape printed in it?’
Oh, my God.
Is it possible that she’s found the ‘mystery cheese’ from Le Marathon?
There was this one particular goat’s cheese, in all the cheeses we stuffed ourselves with on the way back home on the Eurostar that day, that Olly and I still talk about in mystic, hallowed terms, the way football nuts might talk about a incredible volleyed header that won a cup final. It was light as a soufflé and tangy on the tongue, it was rolled in ashes with a cross shape on the top, and we’ve never been able to track it down before or since.
‘Hold on a sec.’ The Big Cheese Woman is heading off the shop floor and into the cool, straw-lined room at the back where all the cheeses are kept.
If this really is the mystery cheese, it will be a big moment. I know it sounds silly, but the search for this cheese has been a bit of a thing for me and Olly for the past decade.
Though I suppose, if I’m being entirely honest, that some of our obsession with tracking down the cheese is – for both of us – our unspoken way of detracting attention from the Mistaken Thing that happened on that Paris trip, in a corner booth in a quiet bar somewhere on the Left Bank.
Which is that, just after we ordered a second bottle of white, we suddenly, somehow, found ourselves kissing as if our lives depended on it. An extremely Mistaken Thing to do when you’ve been friends for years and when, thanks to your Best Friendship with his sister, his entire family have sort of unofficially adopted you as one of their own.
I’m still not sure how it happened exactly. All I can really remember is that one minute we were talking about unrequited love, and Olly was telling me about the girl that he’d loved from afar for, well, it sounded like years, but I must have got that bit wrong and then the next minute we were snogging as if the world was about to end. I’ve no idea which of his friends it was, even all these years later – Alison, probably, the old college friend he eventually went out with for several years. The kiss was finally interrupted by the arrival of that bottle of wine. Realizing what we had just done and in a bit of a panic, I blurted out, ‘Well, when you get to kiss the real love of your life just make sure you’re not as drunk as we are!’ and laughed like some sort of crazed lunatic – just to make absolutely sure that Olly knew I understood that he was unrequitedly in love with another girl, and that I wasn’t going to get all silly and take that kiss as anything other than a Chablis-induced mistake. I think that is what I thought anyway. Now I just remember the look on his face as I spoke the words and the feeling of teetering on the verge of something and of stepping back from the edge.
And thank God we did! Olly must have been as drunk as I was or utterly appalled by the fact he’d just ended up in a drunken clinch with his little sister’s best mate. Either way, he didn’t have much to say at all until we caught our Eurostar a couple of hours later, by which time the mystery cheese had found its way into our lives and we could spend the journey home talking about that instead) because neither of us has ever mentioned the Mistaken Thing since. I’ve barely even let myself think about it, in my case, and I’m certain in Olly’s case, too.
‘Was this the one you were looking for?’
The Big Cheese Woman has re-emerged, and is holding a cheese out towards me. I stare at it: it’s flat, and circular, and ash-covered, with a cross on the top.
‘Um … I’m pretty sure it could be … I’d have to taste it to be certain …’
‘Yep, well, that’s why I thought I’d pop one in your order. It’s called Cathare, and it’s made near Toulouse. You must let me know if it turns out to be the right one or not.’
After a morning like the one I’ve had, I actually feel like I could leap across her counter and kiss her. Blow the fact I’d squash the precious cheese in the process.
‘That’s so nice of you!’
‘Oh, it’s nothing! Happy to try to help. Now, the other cheeses will be … thirty-seven pounds in total, please.’
I can feel myself actually wince as I hand over my debit card.
‘Sorry,’ the Big Cheese Woman says, clearly noticing my wince. ‘The Comté was a pricey choice, I’m afraid.’
‘No, it’s fine. I mean, it’s not your fault. I just … well, I lost my job today, that’s all.’
‘Oh, my God! I’m so sorry to hear that!’
‘Oh, no, don’t worry. It’s absolutely fine. Better than fine, in fact.’
She gives me a funny look. ‘Really?’
‘Yep. Losing my job,’ I tell her, ‘is going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.’
This
