He gave the briefest shake of his head. ‘Wouldn’t be right, miss. Seeing as you’re my boss, like.’ But his eyes twinkled.
Franhalf laughed. ‘Tig! I’m not your boss. I know nothing about cows or anything. We’re in this together.’
This time his head movement was more positive. ‘True enough.’
‘But I really don’t mind what you call me,’ she said, ‘as long as it’s not rude.’ She smiled at him to make sure he knew she was teasing. ‘Now I’d better get to the old dairy. We really need to do something with this milk.’
‘If we still had pigs it’d be easier.’
‘Pigs? Did we have pigs?’
Tig nodded. ‘The old lady gave them up though, but they were useful. Mixed the whey from the cheese with their food, they fattened up well.’
A thought occurred to Fran. ‘If you’d like to keep pigs up here they could still have the whey, or any surplus milk. But I don’t think the farm could buy them, just yet.
Tig thought about it. ‘I’d be happy to buy a couple of pigs, if I could keep them here.’
‘Of course you could! You’d have to look after them but you’d do that anyway.’
‘I’ll see to it then.’ He paused for a few seconds and then smiled. ‘I’ll get back to work then.’
Fran smiled back. ‘Thanks, Tig. Having you here is a huge help. I couldn’t manage any of it without you, even things that don’t involve cows.’
Itwas hard to tell because Tig was so weather-beaten, but Fran rather thought he blushed.
The dairy was a treasure trove. Although it had obviously been used to dump unused equipment in recent years, the building itself was in good condition. It had whitewashed walls and a level concrete floor.
Everything was dusty, but there were some wonderful old stone crocks, probably used for setting cream, piled up in a corner, a butter churn, and a whole stack of steel buckets that had signs of something purple clinging to them. It could have been blackcurrants or blackberries. Amy had obviously made wine or jam. Fran thought it was probably jam. She’d come across a few jars in the pantry with handwritten labels and had failed to find a corkscrew.
For the first time that day, Fran felt faintly optimistic. If there was cooking involved in this farming lark, here was a contribution she could make.
She gathered together the items she thought would need sterilising and left them for Tig. The stoneware dishes she took into the house, one by one. Then she filled the ancient sink in the scullery with water and started scrubbing.
Later that afternoon Fran had several buckets full of milk. She had also filled a couple of the hugeshallowstoneware bowls, hoping to get some cream. She’d spent time on the internet and discovered there was quite a lot she could do with milk without special ingredients and cream was only one of them. While she was longing to start making cheese, common sense told her she should wait until the following day, when the cream would have risen to the top. So she covered all the bowls and buckets with clean tea towels (Amy had an amazing supply of them) and then took her laptop into the sitting room. When she’d lit the fire and settled herself comfortably, she emailed Issi with an update on how things were doing down on the farm, aware she was sounding, and indeed felt, a lot more cheerful than she had the previous evening. Hurray!
ChapterFive
‘Hey! You look great!’ Antony said when she opened the door to him the following Friday.
Fran hadn’t wanted to look too much like a city girl at the dinner party he was taking her to. It was one thing being the object of curiosity, but she didn’t want fellow guests saying, the moment she was out of earshot, that she wouldn’t last five minutes in the country, especially in the winter. She was wearing her newest jeans, a V-necked sweater that was cut low enough to look like evening wear and a pretty scarf. She was aiming for casual, practical and a bit sexy.
She was depending on Antony to know if it was still the custom to bring bottles of wine but she was fairly confident she should bring something. In preparation she had asked him, via email, if he had a cool box.
‘Thank you,’ she said briskly. ‘Now, did you bring the cool box?’
‘Yup.What do you want it for?’
‘I have some presents for my hostess.’
‘What?’
‘Cheese. That I’ve made myself.’
‘Oh!’ He was satisfyingly surprised.
‘Well, I wanted to bring something home-made as a present. People get fed up with biscuits. I thought I’d bring cheese.’ She smiled at him, hoping he wouldn’t realise why she had a surplus of milk. She didn’t want him to know it was because her track was too bad to be got up by the milk tanker and if she didn’t make cheese she’d have to throw away the milk.
The house where the dinner party was to be held wasn’t too far away and Fran hoped she’d like the hostess. With Issi in London she was beginning to feel a bit lonely. Although the past few days had been so busy with her cheesemaking project, she needed some local friends.
