Peter May - Blowback

“I need your credit card.”

“What?”

“Your credit card. To pay for the download.”

“You’ve found it, then?”

“Would I need your card if I hadn’t.”

Her logic was impeccable. Annoyingly, he could hear himself in it. They were far, far, too alike. He reached for his satchel and took out his wallet, and held out his card.

“Just read it out to me.”

“Where did you learn to be so damned bossy, girl?”

“You, papa. Read!”

He sighed and read out the details of his card while she tapped them into the computer.

She hit the return key with a flourish. “ Et voila!” She beamed at him. “Downloading now.” It took several minutes to download, and then Sophie installed it before passing the laptop back to her father. She squeezed up close to him so she could peer at the screen as he opened up moi. dssr, and entered Marc Fraysse’s password to unlock the document. “What is it?”

“Wait…” Enzo scanned the first few lines, then scrolled quickly through several thousand words of text, stopping occasionally, scrolling back, then forward again. “Elisabeth was right,” he said finally. “Marc Fraysse was writing a memoir.”

“You mean like an autobiography?”

“Sort of, I guess. Although, this really just looks like notes and anecdotes. As if he was gathering his thoughts before getting down to the real meat of it, so to speak.”

Sophie grinned. “As a chef would do.”

Enzo scrolled back up to the top of the document, to a date and a place where, for Marc Fraysse, it had all begun. And the voice of the young Marc spoke across the years to Enzo and Sophie, as clear as if he had been there in the room with them.

Clermont Ferrand, 1972

I had just turned seventeen, and wasn’t doing so well at school. I never did get my Bac. The truth is, I didn’t see the point. I was going to work in the kitchen at the auberge. Everyone knew it. Mama, papa, Guy. So why did I need to know about about algebra and geography? What possible reason was there for learning about history. It was past, gone. Only the future mattered. And right now, I knew what my future would be. It was to follow in the footsteps of my brother. Footsteps that would lead me straight to the kitchen of les freres Blanc, where papa hoped I was going to learn how to keep him in his old age.

I didn’t want to go. Guy had been there a year, and I had heard enough of his stories to know that however much I had hated school, I was going to hate Jacques and Roger Blanc a whole lot more.

School had broken up in July, and I had spent the summer working at the boulangerie in Thiers, treading water till I would go to Clermont Ferrand in October. The prospect of dragging myself out of bed at three every morning all through that summer to work in the stifling, flour-filled heat of the bakery had infused me with dread. In the event, I loved it. I loved being up and working while the rest of humankind was asleep. It felt, somehow, as if I had inherited the whole world, and had it all to myself. The boulanger was a grumpy old bastard to most people. When I say old, he just seemed old to me. He was probably just in his early forties. But he never had a harsh word for me. He could see I loved my work, I loved being there, and I worked damn hard for him.

I also adored the fact that when everyone else was working during the day, I was free as a bird. Free to climb the hills and wander the plateau. Free, it seemed, for the first time in my life. The apprenticeship in Clermont was the only cloud on my horizon. In the early summer it seemed a lifetime away. But as the weeks passed, it started to loom dark, and ever closer.

For the first time in my life I had money in my pocket. Money earned through the sweat of my own labour, even if I did give most of it to my folks to pay for my keep. Of course, I also helped mama in the kitchen for lunch and evening service, but I was in bed by eight. And I slept like I have never slept before or since.

It seems strange to me now when look back on that time. But the fact was, I didn’t really want to be a chef. Long hours of mind-numbing work in the cramped and claustrophobic heat of a restaurant kitchen was something I already knew about. And it wasn’t how I wanted to spend the rest of my days. But when you are seventeen, and without qualifications, or ambition, life stretches ahead like a prison sentence. And you do what you have to. You do what you know.

I didn’t realize it then, of course, but the twin tyrants of Jacques and Roger Blanc, though I would grow to hate them, were the ones who would give me both the skill and the motivation to be what I am today.

I remember well the day I left home. It was late October. The weather had turned and the equinoctial gales had already stripped the trees of their leaves. Cloud was settled on the plateau and a fine wetting rain colored everything black. It all seemed to bear down on me, like a pressing weight, and reflected the color of my mood. Papa had bought me everything I would need for my sojourn in Clermont. Laid out on my bed were two white chef’s blouses, two pairs of grey and white checkered pants, and two pairs of rubber clogs. And that was it. My uniform for the next three years, a uniform that would be stained by sweat and by cooking and by hauling coal, and washed and washed until it was almost threadbare.

I remember looking at those things, and the open suitcase on the bed beside them. I remember looking around the room where I had lived my whole life up until then. Walls that bore witness to the scars of my childhood, walls which had seen all my tears and joys, my growing pains, my first fumbled attempts at masturbation. And those walls bore witness to the last tears that I would ever shed within them.

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 representant 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 commercants, politicians, some of whom were now making the trip from Paris just to eat and be seen there.