Blowback

Chapter Eleven

“Oh my God, papa, that’s so sad. That was rotten of Guy. You’d think he would have wanted to look after his little brother.”

Enzo looked up thoughtfully from the laptop and slid it from his knees back on to the coffee table. “Children can be cruel,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re young, you succumb to that inner cruelty. You do and say things that you never would as an adult.”

He felt her eyes upon him. “That sounds like the voice of experience speaking.”

His smile was forced, and a little sad. “Oh, I empathised with Marc alright. But Guy wasn’t so bad, really. Just a bit insensitive, and playing to the gallery of his fellow apprentices. I had a worse experience, I think.”

“When?” He heard the surprise in her voice, and he regretted speaking.

“It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.”

She grinned. “Well, if you were just a kid, then it must have been.”

He turned to look at her and raised a cautionary eyebrow. “Be careful, young lady.”

“And you don’t have a brother.”

There was a momentary hiatus before Enzo turned away and lifted the computer back on to his knees. “Anyway, it’s going to take me some time to go through all this stuff.”

He felt Sophie tugging on his arm. “Papa?”

“Forget it, Sophie.”

But she wasn’t about to. She grabbed his head with both hands and turned it toward her. “Are you telling me you’ve got a brother?” It was incredulity now in her voice.

He could barely meet her eyes. He was such a bad liar. “I’m not telling you anything.”

“Damn you, papa!” She forced him to look at her. “I can’t believe that I’m twenty-four years old and only now finding out that I’ve got an uncle.”

Enzo pulled his head away. “It’s not like that. He’s not really my brother. He never was.”

She grabbed both his shoulders and almost shook him. He felt the strength of her indignation in the grip of her hands. “Jesus Christ, papa! I’ve a right to know.”

He retaliated with anger. “No you don’t! You’ve no rights in my life.”

“Of course I do. If you have in mine, then I have in yours.” She was breathing heavily. “Tell me, papa! Tell me!”

He gasped his frustration and pushed the computer back on to the table, standing up and moving away toward the window. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s painful, Sophie, that’s why. Because sometimes you just pack things up into little boxes and file them away in the darkest corners of your mind so that when you go trawling your past you don’t even see them.”

There was a long silence, then she said in a quiet voice, “I want to know.”

Enzo gazed at the floor, then out into the darkness beyond the glass. But he was aware of Sophie’s reflection in it, still curled up sideways on the settee, watching him. “My father was married before he met my mother. He had a son, Jack. When his wife died he was left to bring him up on his own. A bit like me with you. Jack was five when dad married my mom, and seven when I was born. I haven’t spoken to him in thirty years. Not since dad’s funeral.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story, Sophie, and I really don’t know that I want to talk about it.”

He heard the frustration in her breathing. “Tell me what he did, then, that was worse than Guy with Marc.”

“Oh, there were lots of things.”

“But you were thinking of one in particular, weren’t you?”

He refocused on her reflection in the window. “Goddamn you, Sophie! You don’t give up, do you?”

“No.” Her tone was stubbornly defiant. “So tell me.”

He turned away from the window to meet her eye for the first time, and he knew there was no point in avoiding it any longer. In a careless moment he had let the genie out of the bottle, and there was no way now of squeezing it back in. He could have kicked himself. For almost forty years he had kept such thoughts to himself. No one knew about Jack. Not his first wife, not Kirsty. Only Simon, his boyhood friend and confidante, knew about Jack’s existence. But Simon had betrayed him, fathering the daughter he’d thought was his. And so Simon, too, had been packaged up and dispatched to the darkest recesses of his mind, to be lost amongst the morass of other unwanted memories.

It was odd how powerfully he had identified with Marc Fraysse. Leaving home, the safety of everything he had known, starting an apprenticeship in a strange place amongst strangers, where his greatest enemy was his own blood. The emotions were the same, although the circumstances quite different.

His thoughts carried him back to his childhood among the crumbling Victorian tenements of the east end of Glasgow, the industrial powerhouse of his native Scotland, a tiny country which had fought for so many centuries to maintain its independence against the military and cultural domination of the English. The memory of those shabby red sandstone buildings of his early years was still very vivid to him. The Macleods had not been a wealthy family, which is why they had lived in the east end of the city. The prevailing wind came from the west, so all the filth from the factory chimneys got carried east. In those days the buildings were black with it.

Sophie’s penetrating gaze brought him back to the present.

“Your grandfather was a welder in the shipyards. He was an honest hardworking man, who only ever tried to do his best for his family. God knows how he survived in the years between his wife dying and meeting my mom. Back then, a single dad had no support. I think my grandmother was the only one he had to help him out.”

He crossed the room and perched on the edge of an armchair, hunched forward, leaning on his thighs, staring at the floor as if it might provide some kind of clearer window on his past. It seemed strange to be talking about his family after all these years.

“My mom’s family owned a cafe. There were a lot of Italians in Glasgow at that time. I think many of them had been interned during the war and stayed on afterwards. Anyway, they all seemed to open cafes or restaurants. Tallys, the cafes were called, and no one made ice-cream like the Italians. My mom worked at the cafe, my dad at the shipyard, and between them they made enough for us to lead a reasonably comfortable life. There was no such thing as credit in those days. Not for the likes of us, anyway. You bought what you could afford, with the money that you had. But I don’t ever remember going without. Neither me nor Jack. They were good folk, your grandparents.”

He glanced up to find her watching him intently, transported back through the years to a heritage he had never spoken of, to a place and time in which the seeds of her own future had been sown.

“The thing was, my dad was ambitious. They both were. But not for themselves. For us. For me and Jack. They both saw it as their goal in life to make better lives for us than they’d ever had themselves. And that meant education. My dad was obsessed with the idea that the only way out of poverty was through learning. So we lived a frugal existence, and every spare penny they had went into a savings account to pay for our education.”

Sophie frowned. “But there was state education in Scotland, wasn’t there?”

Enzo nodded. “There was. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Scottish education system was reckoned to be just about the best in the world. Everyone had access to it. Rich and poor. Why do you think so many inventions of the industrial age are attributed to Scots?”

“Oh, papa, not again!” Sophie sighed, and was almost tempted to join him in the incantation. She had heard it so many times. But nothing would stop him.

“Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone. John Logie Baird, the television, John Boyd Dunlop, the pneumatic tire, John McAdam, metalled road surfaces.”

“Yes, yes… anaesthetics, bicycles, color photography, decimal points, radar, ultrasonic scanners.”

He laughed. “Peter Pan. Sherlock Holmes. Damnit, even the concept of capitalism was invented by a Scot. And you can put virtually all of that down to the quality of the Scottish education system. So you can see why my father invested such faith in it.” Enzo shook his head. “But the state system still wasn’t good enough for his boys. He wanted to send us to a private school.”

Sophie whistled softly. “That must have cost a fortune.”

“It just about broke them. Jack was seven years older than me, so he went first. To Hutchesons’ Grammar School, a private boys’ school in the toffee-nosed south side of the city. Hutchie, they called it. It took the last three years of primary school, and five years of secondary. So Jack was going into his fifth and final year of secondary as I went into the first year of primary. When he finished, he was going to university. That was already ordained.”

He remembered that first day at Hutchie as vividly as Marc Fraysse had recalled his introduction to the Lion d’Or. Trudging along Beaton Road on a wet September morning in his new uniform. The obligatory cap. The blazer. The short trousers that he would have to wear until the fourth year of secondary, chaffing his thighs red raw when wet. The knee-high grey socks with their blue band at the top. The belted blue raincoat that dwarfed the nine-year-old Enzo, turning him into a ridiculous caricature of some classic noir detective. He felt lost, having just left behind all the friends of his first four years at state primary. And he recalled how miserable he was.

“Anyway, Jack was the old hand, a prefect by then. A stalwart of the school rugby team, excelling on the sports field as well as in the classroom. I thought he would take me under his wing, show me the ropes, as Jacques Blanc asked Guy to do with Marc. What I didn’t know then was that Jack’s school life was one big lie.”

Sophie tipped her head to one side, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’d invented a whole history about himself that bore no relation to reality. The boys who went to Hutchie came from all over the city. So they weren’t in the habit of going back to each other’s houses after school. But almost without exception, they came from middle and upper-middle class well-to-do families living in the poshest parts of town.

“The exception, of course, was Jack. And he couldn’t bring himself to admit to his peers that his father was a welder and that his step-mother was an Italian. He was ashamed of where he came from. He was ashamed of us. So he’d made up a story about where he lived and who his parents were, and I guess over the years it had grown and grown, like all lies, until it was just out of control.”

“Oh, my God. And suddenly his younger brother turns up at school, and the whole lie is in danger of crashing down on him.” Sophie’s eyes were wide at the thought of it.

Enzo said, “Yeah. A wee brother called Enzo. He must have been dreading the day I would start at Hutchie. But he’d never said a word about it to me at home. Maybe he thought I would just run straight to dad. He saved it all for my first day at school. He only had one more year to get through, you see. Then he would be away to university. Home free. No one would ever catch him in the lie then.”

“What did he do?”

“I was barely through the gates when he grabbed me and dragged me into the gymnasium. He banged me up against the wall-bars and made it clear to me that I was to keep my little mouth well and truly shut. We were not brothers. There was no relationship between us whatsoever.

“And to make it clear to me what kind of hell I could expect if I made even the slightest slip, he’d arranged a little bizutage welcoming committee for me. A hazing, he called it. He and a bunch of other fifth formers grabbed me just after the bell had gone to end the first break. The playground had emptied and they carried me out into the quadrangle, or the quad as it was known. There was a pond right in the center of it.”

His memory of the moment, the place and time, was acute. He could still see the colonnade that ran below the gymn, the cafeteria on the ground floor, with the science labs and art rooms above it, the classics rooms on the west side, where Latin and Greek were taught. And in the center of the quad, the Hutchiepond, as he came to know it. Two connected oblongs of murky water where lilies grew among the detritus of the playground. A strange feature for a boy’s school, plucked from the mind of some deluded architect.

“They didn’t!” Sophie gasped.

Enzo nodded, and couldn’t resist a smile. “They did. Completely submerged, I was. Soaked and half drowned. And they all ran off, leaving me in the water to be discovered by my new form master who thought I’d got lost. Of course, I was sent home in disgrace. A stupid boy who’d fallen into the pond on his first day at school. It was unheard of.”

He looked up to find Sophie stifling a grin. “Oh, papa. I guess it must have been awful for you at the time. But looking back, you’ve got to admit it was maybe just a little bit funny?”

Enzo grinned, too. “Sure.” But his decades-long feud with his half-brother prevented him, still, from fully appreciating the joke. “I never did snitch on him. So the lie went undiscovered.”

Sophie shook her head. “And that’s why you haven’t spoken to him for thirty years?”

“No.” Enzo stood up and pushed his hands in his pockets again. “We spoke for the last time at your grandfather’s funeral, though the feud between us dated from well before that. And it wasn’t anything to do with that first day at school.”

“What was it, then?”

“Like I said, it’s a long story.”

“I want to hear it.”

“And if I don’t want to tell it?”

“I won’t let you not tell it. You know that. You’ll never hear the end of it until you do.”

Enzo drew a deep breath and closed his eyes, and was saved by a knock at the door. Three soft raps. He froze where he stood, and he and Sophie exchanged panicked glances.

“What’ll we do?” Sophie whispered urgently

Enzo nodded toward the toilet door. “Go into the bathroom and stay out of sight. I’ll see who it is and get rid of them.”

She slipped off the settee and hurried across the room. As soon as she pulled the bathroom door shut behind her he straightened out the cushions where she had been sitting and crossed to the door as the knock came again.

With apprehension beating in his chest, he opened it a few inches to see Guy standing beaming at him from the darkness of the hallway. He had a conspiratorial air about him and was clutching a bottle and two glasses. Enzo let the door fall open a little wider and tried to adopt a casual air of surprise. “Guy?”

“I hope you weren’t in bed.” He glanced up and down then and grinned. “Ah. I see not. I hope you don’t mind me disturbing you like this, Enzo. But this is a mirabelle that I don’t share with just anyone.” He held up the unlabelled bottle. “And I knew you’d want to try it.”

Enzo didn’t see how he could refuse the invitation without seeming churlish, and he needed to keep Guy on-side if he was going to make progress with his investigation. He forced a smile. “Just a quick one, then. I’m pretty tired.” He held the door open to let Guy in, then shut it quickly, remembering the laptop, and moved hurriedly past him to close its lid and hide the screen.

“Doing a bit of homework?”

“Just checking my email and making a few notes.”

“Elisabeth said you were looking at Marc’s old laptop today. Find anything interesting?”

Enzo wondered why he would ask, when Elisabeth would surely have relayed to him the answer he had already given her to the same question. “Not really, no. Just looked back through some of his old emails. I tried to open a couple of files, but they were locked.”

Guy nodded solemnly. “He was very secretive in some ways, Marc. There was a part of him he never let anyone into. Not even Elisabeth. I think he shared more secrets with that damned computer than he did with his family.”

“Well, if he did, he didn’t leave them accessible to anyone else.” All of which was true. Still, Enzo felt he was indulging in a deception and felt uncomfortable with that. He changed the subject. “What’s so special about the mirabelle?”

“It’s made by an old farmer on the far side of the village. Wonderful stuff. You know, the government is taking away the inherited right to distill a certain quantity of your own alcohol each year, so whatever his secret is, it’s going to die with him.” He set the two glasses down on the coffee table and uncorked the bottle. He poured two small measures of the crystal clear liquid, and the perfume of mirabelle plums suffused the air around them. “It’s about eighty percent proof, so go easy. It’s got a helluva kick, but a taste to die for.”

Each raised his glass, they chinked them together, then sipped in silence. The taste of the plums filled Enzo’s mouth, and the alcohol burned all the way down to his stomach. It almost brought tears to his eyes. He blinked several times. “Wow!”

Guy grinned. “Told you it was good.” And he sank down into the settee where Sophie had been sitting only a matter of minutes earlier. “Take the weight off your feet, man.” He nodded toward the armchair opposite. “Elisabeth said you wanted to learn everything you could about Marc.” He chuckled. “And I’ve got a few stories I can tell you.”

Reluctantly, Enzo eased himself down into the armchair. There was going to be no easy escape. And Guy looked as if he was settling himself down for an extended stay.

Sophie had long ago given up hoping that Guy would make an early departure. He had been regaling Enzo for some time now with stories of adventures that he and Marc had shared during their apprenticeship together chez Blanc. She had all but stopped listening, standing with her back to the wall, then slowly sliding down it to squat on the floor counting the minutes till she could get out of here, back to the staff annexe and her bed. She glanced at her watch. It was gone midnight. She closed her eyes and sighed deeply.

“The thing about Marc and Jacques Blanc was that they just didn’t get on,” she heard Guy saying. “Jacques hated Marc, and Marc was terrified of Jacques. Once Marc found his feet in the kitchen he’d become a bit of a smart ass. And Jacques, I think, figured he was trying to peter plus haut que son cul. Accusing the apprentices of trying to fart higher than their asses was his favourite insult.” He chuckled. “The Blanc brothers had complete control over us, you see. You did what they told you, or else. And when you got asked to do something, they would stand over you and watch you do it. And, believe me, with just one of those sets of eagle eyes on you, it was only too damned easy to screw up.”

Enzo nodded. He knew how difficult it was to do anything well under the watchful gaze of a critical eye.

“So there was this one time… Marc was busy charging the firebox with coal. It was right before dinner service, and Jacques suddenly barked at him. He wanted him to add some ingredient to a jus that had been reducing on the grill for over two hours, and he slapped it down on the worktop beside the stove. Marc stood up in a panic and lifted it up. Can’t remember what it was now, but he had the ingredient in one hand, and a scuttle of coal in the other. ‘Well, go on then, kid!’ Jacques shouted at him. And in a moment of total confusion, Marc emptied the scuttleful of coal into the stockpot.”

Guy roared with laughter at the recollection of it. “Well, I don’t think I ever so Jacques Blanc so angry. A two-hour reduction totally ruined. And inexplicably. What on earth possessed Marc to do it, I’ll never know. But in a fit of temper Jacques swept the pot off the stove, and it went everywhere. Damned lucky that nobody got scalded. Anyway, he refused to let anyone clean it up, and it got tramped all over the floor, and dried in on all the work surfaces, and burned on to the stove top. And when the dinner service was finally over, he brought a toothbrush into the kitchen and handed it to Marc. ‘Use that to clean it up, kid,’ he said. ‘Every last drop of it. Even if it takes you all night. And if I find a single trace of it in the morning, you’ll be out of here, sweeping the streets where you belong.’

“Well,” Guy shook his head, “Marc was up all night. And Jacques got himself out of his bed several times to check on him. But in the morning, there wasn’t a damn trace of it anywhere. I really think Jacques was quite disappointed. It would have been his perfect excuse to get rid of Marc once and for all.”

Guy leaned forward and refilled the empty glasses on the coffee table before Enzo could stop him. Guy lifted his and took a mouthful. Enzo reluctantly followed suit. “But Marc got his revenge,” Guy went on. “About a month later, we had a couple of days off and went up to Paris the two of us. First time there. Went on the train. Well, we visited the catacombs. You know, the bit that’s open to the public, where they dumped all the bones from the cemeteries they redeveloped for housing. A spooky place. Human bones floor to ceiling.”

Enzo nodded, his mind suddenly flooded with recollections. He knew the catacombs only too well.

Guy chuckled. “Marc managed to filch one of the skulls and sneak it out with him. About a week later, back at the Lion d’Or, Jacques had a big stock pot bubbling away on the stove. And when no one was looking, Marc slipped the skull into the pot. You can imagine Jacques’ reaction when he went to check on the reduction about half an hour later, and saw a foreign object in there. And then his horror when he fished out the skull. None of us could look. He was apoplectic, demanding to know who was responsible. Of course, no one owned up, and he was never able to prove it was Marc, although I’m sure he knew it was.”

He drained his glass. “I’m certain he must have heard us all laughing our asses off up in the attic that night and cursed the day he ever took on les freres Fraysse.” He lifted the bottle. “Another?”

“No, no thanks,” Enzo said hurriedly. “I’ll not sleep if I do.” He hoped that Guy would take the hint.

But Guy was lost in his memories again. “You’d have thought it would be Marc that would drop out and not me.” He shook his head. “My problem was, I just didn’t really have the talent. But Marc hated it. I mean he really hated it.” Guy looked at Enzo, frowning at the recollection. “Until we came down one morning. And everything changed.”

Enzo found his interest piqued, in spite of his pressing sense of Sophie still hiding in his bathroom. “How?”

Guy grinned. “I don’t think any of us had ever seen the Blanc brothers smiling. But they were like two Cheshire cats that morning. The whole family was in the kitchen, the daily routine abandoned. They were opening bottles of Champagne. And, damnit, if they weren’t pouring glasses for the apprentices, too. Unheard of, Enzo. Unprecedented.” His eyes were wide and shining as he recalled the moment. “They’d just had a call from the director of the Guide Michelin. They were to be given a third star in the forthcoming edition. Well… the phone never stopped ringing. There was a constant procession of folk in and out of the kitchen. It was magical, glamorous. A crowning glory. Here were these two surly, bad-tempered brothers whose magic in the kitchen had elevated them to the status of superstars. And Marc saw that. And suddenly he knew exactly where he wanted his life to take him. He wanted that superstardom, too. More than anything. And it changed his life.”

He sat for a while, still lost in the moment, then slapped his thighs and stood up. “A quick pee and I’ll leave you in peace to get to your bed.” And he headed for the bathroom door before Enzo could dream up some excuse for stopping him.

Enzo got slowly to his feet and waited for the commotion that was certain to follow. But all he heard was the sound of Guy urinating in the toilet and then flushing it. The sound of rushing water came from the taps, and then a few moments later Guy emerged to recover his bottle and the two glasses. Enzo was still tense, but Guy seemed oblivious.

“Listen, Enzo, I want you to have lunch in the dining room tomorrow. On me. The full three-star treatment, a true taste of the vrai style Fraysse.”

Enzo was both astonished, and excited. He knew that the full menu ran to nearly 200 euros. It was a rare privilege even to sit down to a three-star Michelin meal, never mind have someone else pick up the tab. “That’s very generous, Guy,” was all he could think to say.

Guy grinned. “See you tomorrow, Enzo. Good night.” And he vanished off into the hotel.

Enzo closed the door behind him and hurried into the bathroom. There was no sign of Sophie. Where the hell had she gone?

He was startled by the sudden sound of the shower curtain on the bath being pulled roughly aside, and a pink-faced Sophie stood perched in the bath glaring at him.

“You couldn’t have got rid of him sooner?”

Enzo shrugged helplessly. “I tried Sophie.”

“Not very hard.” She spoke through clenched teeth as she stepped out of the bath. “Seemed to me you were more interested in scoffing that damned mirabelle.” She sniffed the air. “I can even smell it off you.” As she strode out into the sitting room Enzo followed. “Next time someone knocks on the door when I’m here, let’s just pretend you’re asleep, huh?”

She opened the door a crack and peered out into the hallway before opening it a little wider. Then she turned back and lowered her voice.

“And don’t think I’ve forgotten about you and brother Jack. I want that story, papa. The whole, unexpurgated truth.”

And then she was gone, slipping off into the darkness, pulling the door softly shut behind her.