Blowback

by Peter May

  The place exploded. I have never seen, nor felt, such unrestrained joy. If you work in this business, be you dishwasher or head chef, it feels like the crowning moment of your life. I remembered so well those celebrations in the kitchen of the Blanc Brothers all those years before, how the champagne had flowed, and how it seemed like my life had just begun in that moment. The moment when I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was what I wanted. That this was what my life would be all about.

  Beyond that, I remember very little. Except that I cried a lot, and drank a lot. Everyone who had reserved to eat in the restaurant that day, I declared, would dine on the house, the very first customers of the three-star Chez Fraysse.

  It wasn’t until that night, when the dust had settled and the last customer been served, that I managed to find some time and space to myself. I went to my study and closed the door and sat at my writing bureau. There were unfinished and unresolved issues in my life. Regrets and sorrows. It had been in my mind for some time that if ever I won my third star I would put these things right. So I did it there and then, without pausing to think, or to remember the pain.

  Still intoxicated by my news, I wrote a long and rambling letter to my estranged brother, Guy. It was time, I told him, that we put the past behind us and together built a future for the place our parents had left us. Something that would honour their memory. Something that would have made them proud. I knew that my life was about to change irrevocably, and that I would no longer be able to run the kitchen and the business. Who better to take over the business side than my own brother? I posted that letter the next day.

  Before the end of the week he called me. It was the oddest feeling to hear his voice again after all those years.

  “I received your letter,” he said. “And I have only one thing to say.” I remember holding my breath, thinking that he was going to turn me down. And then he said, simply, “Yes.” And somehow my life felt whole again.

  Guy arrived from Paris the very next day with a crate of champagne. We hugged and cried and got drunk together, and I realized what folly it had been to have wasted so many years locked in such bitter enmity.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Enzo closed the laptop and allowed himself to sink back into the settee. Two entirely different accounts of the same moment. Guy had told him that Marc had called him the day he received the news. That there had been a party going on in the background.

  According to Marc, that telephone conversation had taken place several days later, after Marc had sent him him a letter.

  In essence, both accounts conveyed the same information, and the same emotions. Only the detail was at variance. But Enzo knew that memory often plays tricks. That a series of moments can be condensed in recollection into a single event. Several conversations into one. Guy’s account of hearing celebrations in the background of their phone call rang true, somehow. It didn’t seem like the kind of detail you would invent. Perhaps there had been some more formal celebrations going at the time of his call, and that’s what he remembered. At any event, there seemed no reason to doubt Marc’s account of the writing of the letter, the return call, and the tearful reunion.

  In fact, there seemed no reason to doubt either account, and Enzo decided that he should focus his thinking on Marc’s gambling, which seemed like a more fruitful line of investigation.

  A soft knocking at the door startled him. He glanced at his watch. It was after eleven. If it was Guy again with more mirabelle he would have to find some diplomatic way of putting him off. He eased himself stiffly out of the settee and crossed to the door, opening it just a crack. In the light that spilled out into the gloom of the hallway, he saw Sophie’s anxious face, and quickly opened the door wide to let her in.

  She breezed into the room, dragging the usual cold air behind her, and turned to face him with shining eyes. Excitement was bubbling out of her like champagne overflowing from a glass poured too quickly.

  “Papa, I’ve got news.”

  “Good.” Enzo strode past her to recover his whisky from the table. He was not feeling particularly well-disposed toward his daughter since his encounter with Philippe.

  “Well, don’t you want to hear it?”

  “Sure.” He took a sip of his whisky and she glowered.

  “Don’t I get a drink?”

  He nodded toward the fridge. “Help yourself.”

  And she did, opening a fresh bottle of Chablis and pouring herself a glass, before rediscovering the enthusiasm which had propelled her into his room in the first place. “You’ll never guess,” she said, turning to face him.

  “Not if you don’t tell me.”

  “Everyone knew Marc and Anne Crozes were having an affair, right?”

  “So it seems.”

  “But what isn’t common knowledge is that they broke up very shortly before his death.” She beamed triumphantly.

  Enzo frowned. “How do you know this?”

  Her smile contained an element of smugness. “I’ve been cultivating the Maitre ‘d.”

  “Patrick?”

  “Yes.” She twinkled. “He’s got a little fancy for me, I think.”

  Enzo pressed his lips together in disapproval. “It seems it’s not safe to let you out these days.”

  But she just laughed. “Anyway, I managed to wheedle it out of him after lunch today. He likes a drink, does Patrick. And he’d had one or two more than he should have.”

  “With your encouragement, no doubt.”

  She grinned. “Apparently he found Anne Crozes in tears one day in the locker room out back. Just about a week before Marc Fraysse was murdered. She told Patrick that Marc had dumped her, and that she didn’t know how she was going to be able to carry on. Really distressed, Patrick said she was.”

  “Did she tell him why Marc had broken it off?”

  Sophie shook her head. “No. Just that it had come out of the blue. A complete surprise.”

  Enzo absorbed Sophie’s news in thoughtful silence and swilled some whisky around his mouth. Why would he have split up with her? Had he been under pressure from Elisabeth, who clearly knew about the affair? Or had he simply felt that the relationship had run its course? If Elisabeth knew that it had come to an end, then that would surely have taken away any motive she might have had for killing him. Anne Crozes, on the other hand, might have been motivated by grief, or revenge, to do just that.

  “You don’t seem very pleased.”

  Enzo smiled. “No, I am. It’s valuable information, Sophie. Sadly, I’m not sure it does anything more than muddy the waters. What I lack is any kind of real evidence… of anything.”

  She frowned suddenly, taking a sip of wine and approaching to touch his cheek with her fingertips. “What happened to your face?”

  Some of his anger from earlier returned. “Your boyfriend is what happened to my face.”

  She frowned her confusion.

  “Philippe.” He took another comforting mouthful of whisky. “I had a rendezvous with a contact at the Château de Puymule earlier this evening. Your little puppy dog must have followed me down there. He jumped me in the dark.”

  Disbelief exploded from her lips. “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish I was.” Enzo rubbed his cheek ruefully. “The little shit thought I was some kind of dirty old man having an affair with you. Warned me to stay away.”

  Sophie’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. “What did you say?”

  “I told him I was your father, and that if he didn’t quit bothering you I’d set Bertrand on him.”

  If possible, her eyes opened even wider, embarrassment verging on humiliation coloring her cheeks. “You didn’t!”

  “I did. And sent him away with a flea in his ear, and maybe a couple of cracked ribs for his trouble.”

  Fear now drained the earlier rush of blood to her face. “Oh, papa, he’ll tell. My cover’ll be blown.”

  But Enzo just shook his head. “I don’t think so. I warned him what would happen t
o him if he did.”

  Now anger colored her face again, as she thought about it. “The stupid idiot! What did he think he was doing? He doesn’t own me. He’s not even my copain!”

  “He seems to think he is.”

  “I’ll kill him!”

  “No you won’t, Sophie.” Enzo’s voice carried a threat in it that she knew well from childhood, and it stopped her in her tracks. “My advice is to stay away from him whenever possible. I’ve warned him off, but there’s no telling what he might do if you start laying into him. We can’t afford for people to find out who you really are.”

  She was barely mollified and cast sulky eyes over her father’s bruised face. “He had no right.”

  “No, he didn’t. But let’s just leave it at that for the moment.” Enzo crossed to the fridge to replenish his glass. He poured slightly more whisky into it this time.

  She was briefly silent, turning it over in her mind. Then, “Okay,” she said. “I will let it go for the moment. On one condition. You tell me about you and Uncle Jack.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sophie! You don’t have an Uncle Jack!”

  “Yes, I do. If he’s your brother…”

  “Half brother.”

  “Half brother… He’s still my uncle. And I want to know why you and he haven’t been on speaking terms for thirty years.”

  “I told you, it’s a long story. And I’m not at all sure I want to tell it.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving until you do.” She planked herself down in the settee, curling her legs up beneath her, and poured another glass of wine. “I’m listening.”

  “Damn you, Sophie!”

  “Don’t damn me, just tell me.” She sipped calmly on her Chablis, while Enzo turned away, emptying his glass and refilling it again. When he looked up he caught his own reflection in the black of the window. For a moment, it was like a window on his past, and he saw himself as he had been all those years before. A gauche young man in search of his place in the world, and trying to find a way through it.

  “I was still at primary school when Jack went to university,” he said. “Still a child, while he was a young man. But a young man who’d been educated in the sexually enclosed world of an all-boys school. Like so many of his peers, he had no idea how to relate to the opposite sex.”

  “Didn’t they have school dances?”

  “Sure. Once a year. They bussed in the opposite sex from Hutchie Girls, and they were just as inexperienced as the boys.”

  He recalled his own exposure to those annual events where adolescent hormones were released to pulse frustratingly through the bodies of hopelessly ill-prepared teenage boys and girls who stood eyeing each other up across the breadth of the school hall, without the first idea of how to conduct themselves.

  “Back then, and probably still, all the female roles in the school play had to be performed by boys.” He smiled. “An early introduction to the idea of cross-dressing.”

  Sophie laughed. “Did you ever have to do that, papa?”

  In spite of himself Enzo blushed. “Once, yes. I was dressed up as a geisha to play one of the little maids in the school production of The Mikado.”

  Sophie sat up, her face shining. “Oh. My. God. You don’t have any photographs, do you?”

  Enzo laughed. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t let you see them. I’d never hear the end of it, and you’d have them all over the internet before I could say Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  Sophie’s smile was wicked. “Note to self. Must search through papa’s family photos for incriminating evidence.”

  Enzo cast her a dangerous look.

  “Anyway. So Uncle Jack went to university knowing nothing about women…” Sophie offered him a cue to take up where he’d left off.

  Enzo nodded, and a flood of memories broke over him. “He got himself into big trouble. Awash with testosterone and no idea how to handle it, he stumbled from one disastrous relationship to another. In fact, I figure he was probably still a virgin even by the time he went into his second year. Which is when he got himself into really deep doodoo.”

  “What happened?”

  He wasn’t quite sure now where all the details had come from. Things he had heard Jack say. Gossip among his peers. Conversations between his parents, conducted in hushed tones and overhead through half-shut doors. “One of his friends was having a New Year’s party at his house. One of those big red sandstone terraced houses off Highburgh Road in the west end. The father was some big wheel lawyer, but the parents had recently got divorced and the father had moved out. The mother, Rita, was this…” he hesitated, searching for the right word, “…diaphanous sort of creature. Almost winged. Beautiful and breathless. Delicate, like an Arthur Rackham illustration. She was lonely and sad, but sexually experienced. And she took a fancy to Jack. In fact, took him to bed that very night, from all accounts, and probably took his virginity, too.”

  Sophie was rapt. Eyes fixed on her father, wide with wonder, and trying to picture the moment.

  Enzo shook his head. “A chance encounter, really, and it changed his life. He fell for her. Completely, unreservedly, insanely.”

  “What was wrong with that?”

  “Rita was almost thirty years older than him. Nearly fifty.”

  “So? An experienced woman, an inexperienced young man. Why shouldn’t they enjoy the moment?”

  “They didn’t just enjoy the moment, Sophie. Rita took up almost every moment of his life from that day on. He dropped out of university before the end of the spring term, and they were married within six months.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh.” He paused. It had been a period of great turmoil in the Macleod household, with Enzo little more than a fascinated spectator. “My parents did everything they could to dissuade him. Of course, he never listened to my mum anyway, but dad couldn’t talk him out of it either. No one could. I suppose if I’d been older, I might have tried. But I was just a kid, way in the background somewhere, kind of aware of all the rows and tension in the house, but not really a part of it.”

  “Did you go to the wedding?”

  “Of course. We all did. A pretty lavish affair it was, too. Rita paid for it herself. Her divorce settlement had left her financially independent and she owned that big terraced house in the west end. As much for his own self-respect as anything else, Jack felt he had to work, having quit his studies. He got a job in the civil service, way below the level he’d have gone in at if he’d finished his degree. We hardly saw him for two years.”

  “What happened?”

  “Rita hated him being out of the house. Hated being left alone. She was lonely and depressed, and increasingly hypochondriac. It was clear to my parents, on the few occasions they saw him, that it wasn’t going well. He never brought her to the house. And any time they visited him she was ‘indisposed’. Not feeling well, and taken herself off to bed.”

  “That must have been awful for him. Embarrassing.”

  “It was worse than any of us knew. We didn’t find out the whole truth till later. It seems she had started drinking and took to her bed full-time, spending her life in a darkened room with the curtains drawn. Jack remained faithful and dedicated, doing everything for her. Bringing her meals to her room, organising a maid to come in three days a week, and learning to do the laundry himself.

  “But increasingly she saw him as errant and absent. Finding fault with everything he did. Arguing over every little thing, flying off the handle at the slightest excuse.”

  He paused, catching sight of his reflection again in the window, recognising that in retrospect he felt much more sympathy for Jack than he ever had at the time. Then, he had believed his elder half-brother to be foolish and selfish. But looking back, he could see now what a living hell it must have been for him. It was strange the way that time and experience changed how you saw things, lending an insight you’d never had in the moment.

  “Anyway, one day he came home from work to find her dangling at th
e end of a rope in the stairwell. She’d left a note for him, full of self-obsession and self-pity, but somehow she had managed to spill a bottle of perfume over it and the ink had run, obliterating most of her words. So he never really understood why she had done it. Except that she had been a deeply troubled soul. He blamed himself, of course, even though he had been dedicated to her and done everything for her that he could. There was no consoling him.”

  “I can imagine.” Sophie finished the last of her wine and filled the glass again. It was clear that her father’s story was not yet over.

  “After the funeral everything got messy. Jack should have inherited the house, but there was no will. And Rita’s ex, who had paid for it in the first place, didn’t see why he should get it, so contested it in court. Of course, being a lawyer himself, it was no contest. Jack lost everything and came back home to live with us.”

  “Hah,” Sophie said. “You must have loved that.”

  Enzo remained silent for a long moment. “There were only two bedrooms in our flat. My parents had one, and when I was wee, Jack had the other. I slept in a recess off the kitchen that they drew curtains over at night. When Jack left home, I got his room.”

  “And when he came back, you got tossed out and into the recess again?”

  Enzo nodded. “It was like the cuckoo had returned to the nest.” He paused. “Actually, more like the prodigal son. He was welcomed back with open arms, the total focus of my parents’ attention. My father did all but kill the fatted calf.”

  “And you resented that?”

  “At the time yes, I did. I was in my teens by then. Not an easy age at the best of times. The kitchen was where the family cooked and ate and lived. There was a big, black range along one wall with a coal-burning stove that heated the hotplates and the oven. The sitting room was only ever used when we had visitors. The kitchen was the warmest room in the house and there was always someone in it. So I lost all my privacy. And at that age, when you’re only really beginning to discover yourself, privacy is important.”