Peter May - Blowback

“Papa.” Kirsty threw her arms around his neck and gave him a long, lingering hug. Then he held her for a moment at arm’s length, looking at her.

“Papa? What happened to ‘dad’?”

She grinned. “Guess I must be turning into a vrai francaise.”

“You look well,” he told her. And she did. Gone was the pallor and the smudged shadows beneath her eyes that he had noticed at their last meeting. Her face seemed fuller somehow, slightly flushed, and her eyes shone.

Raffin watched them in brooding silence, and Enzo wondered briefly if he was jealous of their relationship. After years of estrangement, Enzo and Kirsty had rediscovered the affinity of father and daughter. Something, strangely, that had not suffered from the revelation that she had actually been fathered by his best friend. He had always been her father, and she his little girl. And nothing could change that.

She flicked long, dark hair out of her face, and folded her willowy figure back into the dining chair. “Sit down. Roger will crack open a bottle of something nice.” She flicked a glance at Roger, and the journalist responded with a tiny nod of acquiescence and went in search of that something nice. “So how have you been?”

“Apart from being beaten up by one of Sophie’s jealous suitors, and someone trying to blow my head off up on the Massif, everything’s hunky dory.” He grinned, and Kirsty was unsure if he was being serious or not. He heard Raffin laughing in the next room.

“Still in the wars, then?” His raised voice came through the open door.

“‘Fraid so.”

“How’s it going? The Fraysse enquiry, I mean.”

“It’s slow, Roger. Hardly anything to go on. But I recovered his missing cellphone and the number of someone who arranged to meet him up at the old buron the day he was murdered.”

Raffin appeared in the doorway, eyes wide with interest. “Really? Whose number?”

“I’m still working on that. But I did find out that he owed a Parisian bookie more than a million euros, and that he’d put up the restaurant as collateral.”

Raffin whistled softly.

“And that’s not to mention the affair he’d been having with the wife of his second.”

“Jesus, Enzo! That’s hardly what I would call slow.” Raffin approached the table clutching a bottle and two glasses.

Enzo smiled. “Maybe it just feels like it up there on the plateau in the mist and rain.” As Raffin put the bottle on the table, he noticed for the first time what it was. “Dom Perignon 1995! What’s the celebration?”

“A visit from my dad is always cause to celebrate,” Kirsty said, a touch ingenuously. She seemed tense as Raffin popped the cork with a flourish, her smile a little strained.

Raffin raised the bottle, along with an eyebrow, in Kirsty’s direction. But she shook her head.

“I’ll stick with what I’ve got.”

Raffin filled the two glasses with foaming champagne and handed one to Enzo before lifting his own. Kirsty refilled her glass from a bottle of Badoit sitting on the table beside her and raised it in a toast.

“Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Damn few, and they’re a’ deid.” A classic Scottish toast.

But Enzo didn’t lift his glass. He glanced from one to the other. “What’s going on?”

Kirsty’s face colored slightly, and she cast a look at Raffin.

“We’re getting married,” Raffin said.

And Enzo’s heart went still, as if someone had touched a button and put it on pause. He looked at Kirsty, who could hardly meet his eye. She had known, as had Raffin, that Enzo would not approve. Enzo made a huge mental effort to press the play button and get his heart beating again. He raised his glass and forced a smile. “Well, congratulations.” And he and Raffin sipped their champagne, and Kirsty her water, in embarrassed silence. “Why?” he said, when he took the glass from his lips. “I mean, these days why bother? Lots of people just live together without ever getting married.”

“Because I’m pregnant.” Kirsty’s words dropped like stones into the silence of the room. Enzo was not sure why he was quite so shocked. But he was. He stared at his daughter in disbelief. “It’s a boy,” she said. “So I’ll be giving you a grandson.” She made herself laugh. “Bet that makes you feel old.”

Finally, he found his voice. “Yes,” was all he could say. He raised his glass to his lips again and took a mouthful of foaming fizzy, giving himself a moment to recover his presence of mind. “Well, then, double congratulations are in order.” In spite of everything he felt about him, he reached over to shake Raffin’s hand, resisting the temptation to crush limp fingers in his stronger grip. And he leaned across the table to kiss his daughter’s forehead. He slipped a hand through her hair to cradle the back of her head and draw her toward him until their foreheads touched. And he felt her hand close around his wrist and gently squeeze it.

Then he sat back in his chair to sip again on his champagne, his mind and his heart racing, memories crowding consciousness. How was it possible? His little girl. She said, “So, anyway, it’s made me think a bit. Being a mother, I mean.”

“Think about what?”

“Family. Parenthood.” She took a sip of her water and fixed him now in her gaze. “I missed you, dad. All those years when I was growing up.”

And he felt tears of guilt and regret prick his eyes.

“I don’t want that for my son. I want him to have his parents around him. And his grampa. His whole family.” She hesitated, momentarily breaking eye contact until she summoned courage to meet his eye again. “And your son shouldn’t have to suffer that, either.”

“Kirsty…”

But she talked down his protest. “No, dad, listen to me. We’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, right?”

Enzo refrained from correcting her. If the mistake was being repeated, it wasn’t through any choice of his.

“You’ve got to speak to Charlotte, dad. You do.” She looked at him earnestly, reaching out to wrap long, elegant fingers around his hand. “Call her. Please.”

He squeezed her hand in his, staring at the table for a long moment, before looking up. “I already did. I’m meeting her tonight.”

The Cafe aux Deux Magots was the classic Parisian tourist cafe in the heart of Saint Germain des Pres. It stood right on the boulevard, and had been made famous by its most celebrated client, the writer Ernest Hemingway. The American had spent his impoverished youth in the 1920s making a single coffee, or a beer, or a glass of wine last him all morning while he scribbled in his notebook in a corner of the cafe, penning the stories that would make him the most revered writer of his generation.

Enzo had supposed that Charlotte had chosen it because it would be full of tourists, busy and anonymous. It was easier, perhaps, to exchange angry words in such a place than in some less frequented establishment where their words would draw curious looks.

Enzo ordered a glass of red wine from a waiter in a long black apron who balanced his huge circular tray just above his left shoulder. The cafe was packed. Enzo never ceased to be amazed at how easy it was to be lonely in a crowd.

Charlotte was nearly twenty minutes late. Whatever his feelings about her might have been, the sight of her pushing through the crowds to join him at his table, still made his heart beat faster. She wore a long, black coat open over a woollen polo neck sweater and jeans. The rain glistened in sparkling droplets all over the black curls that tumbled about her shoulders.

She looked well as she leaned over to kiss him on each cheek, then drop into the chair opposite. Her face was flushed with the cold, her eyes dark and shining, the darkest eyes Enzo had ever known. Unfathomable pools that bewitched and hypnotised him. A smile split her face and she seemed genuinely happy to see him.