Chapter 14: The cousin from the hills remembers the wrong awning

Look at the cutting board on the cheese stall in the Long Hall. A slab of elm as thick as a doorstep, black at the edges with forty years of rind and salt, with a long, shallow valley worn down its middle by the wire. Or rather, look at what it looked like on the first morning of August: scrubbed raw and pale, and smelling of soap.

Why? Because the woman who arrived that morning to mind the stall had scrubbed it, top and bottom, with a brush and a bar of yellow soap, before she sold a single slice. She was proud of it. “Forty years of dirt,” she said, beaming. “Gone in an hour.”

Mrs. Fenn, passing with a tray, stopped as if she had walked into a glass door. “Philippa scrapes that board with a knife and a handful of salt,” she said faintly. “Soap gets into the wood. Every cheese will taste of it till Christmas.”

The woman laughed and rang the little brass bell on the counter, for no reason at all. Nobody came.

First: The cheese seller takes her first holiday

Philippa Kemble had sold cheese from that stall for forty years and never once taken a holiday.

In the market's last summer her friends finally bullied her into it. She went to the coast for August, and she spent most of July at Mrs. Fenn's window table, under the red awning, telling everyone who would listen who was going to mind her stall.

It was to be Magda Lorne, her cousin's daughter, who makes cheese up in the hills. Philippa had not seen her for twenty years.

But as a girl Magda had spent every August at the stall, standing on a milk crate to ring the little brass bell when a customer came. “She's made cheese all her life,” Philippa said. “She'll turn my wheels for me.”

The wheels mattered. In the cellar under the stall sat three great wheels that Philippa had been ageing for two years, to be cut on the market's very last night: the farewell wheels.

They must be turned every morning, Pim says, or they settle on one side and grow a damp grey patch underneath. He has watched her turn them every morning for forty years.

Mrs. Fenn has her own markers of time. She pointed up at her awning that July, as she always does when a new customer admires it. “Red these eleven years, since the hailstorm tore the old one,” she said. “Green for thirty before that. People still call it the green café.”

Philippa left the cellar key with Pim, to give to Magda on the first of August, and went off to the sea with a new straw hat. She left no address. “A holiday with letters,” she said, “is only work in a deckchair.”

Second: A friendly stand-in who sells too well

The woman who took the key from Pim on the first was cheerful, quick and very good at selling. Takings, she told Inspector Elena Dorn proudly at the end of the first week, were up by a third. “Price it to move,” she said. “That's the secret.”

Pim had handed her the key without a second thought. She knew his name before he gave it. She knew the bell, the stall, the cellar. “Who else would she be?” he said later, miserably. “She walked straight up to me like family.”

She was certainly moving it. The old customers grumbled that the good hard cheese tasted faintly of soap. Pim grumbled that she never went down to the cellar in the mornings.

Holidaymakers queued anyway, pink from the sun, and the old customers went off to buy their cheese from the stall in the Flower Hall, shaking their heads, as if a favourite team had sold its captain.

And once, at closing, Pim saw a dealer's van at the back door and two men carrying out something round and heavy wrapped in sacking.

She talked to you over the counter one hot afternoon, while the flies circled the lamps. “I spent every August here as a girl,” she said, cutting you a slice you had not asked for. “I can still see it. The café across the way with its red awning, and Pim's bell, and the pigeons on the glass. Nothing has changed.”

Third: Dorn's list between the hanging cheeses

That evening Dorn took you down to the cellar with Pim's spare key and a lamp, and stood among the hanging cheeses as if she were in a chapel.

The cellar is the coolest place in the market in August, low and vaulted, smelling of rind and stone and forty years of patience, and every wheel on its shelves has a date chalked on its side in Philippa's round, upright hand. Then Dorn gave you her list.

Check the hands before the stories. Anyone can learn a story; a craft lives in the hands and takes years.

Check what has been neglected. A person shows what they really know by what they never think of doing.

Check every memory against the market's own calendar. The market keeps a record of itself, if you know where to look.

Check what has gone missing while everyone was busy admiring the takings.

Two farewell wheels sat on the cellar shelf where three had been. Both had a flattened side and a damp grey patch spreading underneath. Neither had been turned for a fortnight.

There was no quick way to ask. Philippa was somewhere on the coast without an address. Magda, if this was not Magda, was two days away by post in the hills. Dorn did not mind. She likes a case she has to win on the board, without waiting for a telegram.

Now stop and think. Is the woman behind the counter really Magda Lorne?

Fourth: The first way, by the soap and the unturned wheels

Philippa said Magda has made cheese all her life. A cheesemaker knows, the way a goalkeeper knows which way to dive, that you never put soap on a cutting board. It soaks into the wood and into every cheese that touches it.

A cheesemaker also knows that a wheel in the cellar must be turned.

Two weeks of neglect left the farewell wheels flat and grey underneath, a thing Philippa had not allowed to happen once in forty years. The woman at the stall did both of the things no cheesemaker would ever do. One slip could be carelessness. Two slips, both of the kind that every cheesemaker learns before she can reach the counter, are not carelessness. She is not a cheesemaker, and so she is not Magda.

Fifth: The second way, by the colour of the awning

Now leave the cheese alone and listen to her memory. She spent every August here as a girl, she said, and she can still see the café's red awning.

But Magda's last August at the stall was twenty years ago. The awning has been red for only eleven years. Twenty years ago it was green, and the whole market called it the green café. The real Magda would have remembered green. This woman remembers the market as it has looked for the last eleven years, which is the memory of a grown customer, not of a girl on a milk crate.

She even added, to make it sound true, that nothing has changed. It is the one thing in the Old Market that nobody who really knew it as a child would ever say.

Sixth: The farewell wheel comes home

She was Nerys Pryce, who had bought her cheese from Philippa every Tuesday for ten years and had heard all about Magda across that very counter, because that July Philippa told every customer.

The real Magda had broken her wrist and written to say she could not come. Her letter reached the stall on the first of August, and the first person to reach the stall that morning read it and put it in her pocket. She had meant to be gone the day before Philippa came back, with the takings in one bag and the last two farewell wheels in the dealer's van.

Dorn found the letter in Nerys's bag and the third farewell wheel in the dealer's storeroom, still in its sacking, a little the worse for its journey. The dealer had paid half its worth in cash and asked no questions, which is how dealers who ask no questions stay in business.

Philippa came home at the end of August, sunburnt, heard the whole story on the platform from Pim, and went straight down to the cellar to turn the remaining two wheels with her own hands before she took her hat off. It was like watching a tennis player walk back onto her own court after someone else had been playing on it all month.

Then she scraped her poor board with a knife and salt for a whole evening, and wrote to the hills to tell Magda that there would be a place at the counter for her on the market's last night, broken wrist or not.

Remember: a borrowed name comes with no memories, so ask about the past and listen for the colours.

A few nights later Pim, who sleeps badly in the August heat, sat at his window and watched the market's dark roof. And why did he see the old red lantern of the Fish Hall watchman moving through the Clock Gallery, where it had no business to be?