Peter May - Blowback

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.

“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.