Blowback Page 8

  I looked from the window, then, at the view I had always taken for granted, and knew that I really didn’t want to go.

  Papa drove me to Clermont Ferrand in his old Quatre L. I was seventeen years old and I had never been to the city. It was a wonder to me. All those buildings that towered over you, casting their gloom on the rain-sodden streets. The traffic and the trams, and all those people. I had never seen so many people. It gave me a perspective on my life that I had never had before, and made me feel small, and terribly insignificant. My world had been the auberge, my school, my parents, my brother. Suddenly it all seemed like nothing at all.

  I remember passing the Michelin factory on the way into town. The huge, smokey, industrial complex churned out the tires that turned around the wheels of France. Of course, I had heard of the Guide Michelin, but I had no idea then how those two words, and the stars that went with them, would shape my life.

  The Lion d’Or stood in a narrow street off the grand Place de Jaude. The theatre was nearby, and the cathedral and the synagogue, so it was well-placed. The building dated from the nineteenth century, five stories high, and for decades had provided meals and accommodation for the VRPs, the voyageur représentant placiers, or travelling salesmen, who motored the length and breadth of this vast country peddling their wares. But the brothers Blanc had changed all that, bringing back from their respective apprenticeships a mastery of French cuisine learned at the feet of the then undisputed practitioner of the art, Fernand Point, in his hotel-restaurant, La Pyramide, on the banks of the Rhone.

  They had transformed their parents’ establishment, winning first one star, then two, in the space of just five years. And much of the resultant profit had been poured back into the building to raise it to quite another level. Its clientele no longer consisted of the chattering VRPs in their threadbare suits, but businessmen, successful commerçants, politicians, some of whom were now making the trip from Paris just to eat and be seen there.

  For the first, and last time in my life, I entered through the front door of the Lion d’Or. Monsieur and Madame Blanc greeted my father like a long lost friend, one of their oldest and best loved clients from the fondly remembered and informal days of the workmen’s lunches. Papa kissed me then, on both cheeks, handed me my suitcase, and left.

  When he was gone I was taken into the kitchen and introduced to Jacques and Roger. They were big men, both. Tall, corpulent, and perfectly intimidating. Roger sported classic French moustaches which curled up over each cheek. Jacques had a big, florid, clean-shaven, round face that seemed set in a permanent scowl. Each in turn, crushed my hand in his, watched by a gallery of silent apprentices relishing the arrival of a new boy, on to whom they could offload the most unpleasant of their tasks. Among them was Guy, of course, and he could barely conceal his glee.

  “Your brother can show you the ropes and take you to your room,” Jacques said.

  The “ropes”, it turned out, consisted of responsibility for the great cast-iron coal-burning stove that fuelled the kitchen, heating the ovens, and bringing the grills and hotplates up to searing temperatures. That meant shovelling the coal from the cellar below the kitchen into buckets, and hauling it up to keep the stove well stoked. It also meant scraping out the ashes from the night before, setting and lighting the firebox so that the stove was up to temperature by the time the chefs arrived at eight-thirty, a task I had to perform twice a day, for lunch and dinner services.

  I was also to be responsible, every other week, for cleaning out the black, oily deposits of soot left in the firebox beneath the rings on which the Blanc brothers conjured their culinary magic. And I would have nothing more than a wire brush to do it with. Guy had been doing it for the last year, and was only too delighted to be passing it on to me.

  He showed me the garbage cans I would have to empty, and took enormous pleasure in telling me how I would have to scour clean, wash and dry, every counter top and stove surface in the kitchen every night. And God help me if Jacques or Roger found a speck of dirt on them the following day.

  And here was me thinking I had been going to learn about cooking!

  I was to share, it transpired, a room up in the attic with my brother. A small, dark, dank room up in the Gods, with a tiny window from which you could just see the twin spires of the cathedral of Notre Dame de l’Assomption. You might have thought that having my brother for company would have softened the experience. But Guy couldn’t be bothered with his little brother. He was offhand, almost cruel. Thick with all the other apprentices. And I felt shut out and desperately alone.

  That night, after showing me our room, he and the others went off to gather in one of the other bedrooms to play cards. I asked if I could join them. But Guy just laughed and said no one would have any time for a kid like me. They played for money, and I was far too young. He left me to sit on the edge of my bed, staring gloomily into the darkness outside. Rain was battering against the window, and the wind seemed to whistle through every crack and slate in the roof. I don’t think I’d ever felt so alone.

  I had wept on leaving home. And I wept again now. Tears of loneliness and misery. And I pulled back the ice-cold sheets of the unforgiving bed I would sleep on for the next three years, to cry myself dry, so that my brother wouldn’t hear me sobbing when finally he came to bed. Which is when I realized that my mattress was soaking. Drenched in cold water poured from tumblers by mischievous hands. I cursed aloud. And I could hear the stifled giggles of apprentices in the corridor outside.

  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 café. 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 cafés or restaurants. Tallys, the cafés were called, and no one made ice-cream like the Italians. My mom worked at the café, 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.”