Blowback

Chapter Twelve

Enzo wandered into the bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth. He felt tired, slightly heady from the mirabelle, and still heavy with the emotion of unburdening himself to Sophie about Jack. It was something he had never intended to do, and yet now it was out in the open, he wondered how on earth he had been able to keep it from her for so long.

He thought, too, about Marc Fraysse. How, in some ways, they had a lot in common. The dominating elder brother, the early lack of ambition or direction in life.

But while Marc had found his raison d’etre in a career-long quest for les trois etoiles de Michelin, Enzo had found his motivation in a more negative way. The overweening desire to do better than his brother. To prove himself superior in everything he did. School grades, university degree, career, marriage. It had taken a long time, and Jack’s complete indifference, to make him realize that measuring yourself against others was a futile pursuit. But some lessons come too late in life to be able to undo the mistakes you make in learning them.

He went through to the bedroom and undressed before slipping between the cool sheets of his bed. Despite his fatigue he lay for a long time unable to sleep, turning on to one side, then the other, before lying finally on his back and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. He cursed the restless thoughts that filled his mind and held sleep at bay, before throwing back the covers and padding through to the sitting room again to retrieve his laptop.

He carried it to the bed, propping the pillows at his back so that he could sit up with the computer balanced on his thighs. The screen cast a strange blue light around the bedroom, and he felt the glare of it illuminating his face. He reopened the file of Marc Fraysse’s fragmented memories and scrolled through them in the dark, searching for… what? He had no idea.

Then something caught his attention, and he brought his cursor to a stop on the scrollbar. It was the name ‘Elisabeth’ which had registered on his consciousness, and as he sped read through the first few sentences at the top of the screen, he realized it was Marc’s account of their first meeting.

It was one of those secret meals that Elisabeth had told Enzo about, which the apprentices from the Lyon d’Or had cooked for the trainee nurses in the lakeside boathouse. A first rendezvous organised by one of the older apprentices, co-opting the assistance of the others to partake in a night-time raid on the kitchen, borrowing pots and pans and stealing food from the larder.

I remember the first time I saw her, Marc wrote. There in the boat house as we all sat around the fire. Her face was caught in the light of the flames. A soft, warm, flickering yellow light. And I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had no idea then how that chance meeting would drive a wedge between Guy and me, a war of hatred and attrition that would last for the next twenty years.

Enzo sat up, startled by the unexpected revelation. There had been no hint in anything the family had told him so far of any kind of a feud between Marc and Guy. He spent the following ten minutes scrolling back and forth through the notes and anecdotes. But there was nothing to explain exactly how, or why, Elisabeth had caused this rift between them.

He closed the lid of the laptop, and slid it down on to the floor, lying back again in the dark, feeling the warm arms of sleep enticing him into their soft embrace. And as he slipped, at last, into a restless, dream-filled slumber, he was conscious of a final thought flitting through his mind: that here was yet another parallel between him and Marc. It had been a woman who had deepened the rift between Enzo and Jack. But while somehow the brothers Fraysse had found resolution and closure, the brothers Macleod never had.

Peter May

Blowback