the flat, to celebrate. And I asked a whole bunch of my school friends. Including the girl I’d met at the fifth year dance the year before. Fiona. We’d been going steady for the whole of sixth year, and I was head over heels for her, Sophie. Completely besotted. She was tall and willowy and dark and sultry, and had me totally wrapped around her little finger.”
“Uh-oh.” Sophie had already seen it coming. “And Jack came to the party, too?”
“He was in the house, so it was hard for him not to be a part of it. And I suppose he cut a kind of glamorous figure for all my friends. The older man. Experienced, but still young. And good-looking, too. Jack had always been a good-looking boy.”
Enzo sighed and sipped contemplatively on his whisky.
“It was another six months before I discovered that Jack and Fiona were having a relationship behind my back.”
“After meeting at the party?”
“Yes.” He broke off to collect himself, wondering how it could possibly still hurt after all these years. “It was a double betrayal, Sophie. My girlfriend and my brother.”
“Your half-brother,” Sophie corrected him, and he flicked her a glance. “So what happened?”
“I had a furious row with Jack. It felt like he’d been fucking me up all my life. And this was the final straw. Stealing the first and only girl I’d ever been in love with.”
“You can’t steal people, papa, you know that. My mother didn’t steal you, did she?”
Enzo turned on her angrily. “That was different!”
“Was it?”
“Yes, it was. It wasn’t what Jack and Fiona felt for one another that hurt. People can’t help their feelings, I do know that. It was the betrayal. They lied to me, Sophie. And connived, and hid their relationship from me. Fiona could just have ended it with me. It would have broken my heart. But it would have been clean, and honest. Instead, she continued with the charade for a whole six months. They both did. I wasn’t just hurt, I was humiliated.”
“So you never forgave them? Either of them?”
He sighed in exasperation, partly from his recollection of events, and partly with himself. “You get locked into these things, Sophie. I was young, I was angry, I was humiliated. Jack and I had the most awful falling out. I couldn’t bear to be in the same house as him. Couldn’t get out of the family home fast enough. I was starting university in the fall, and got involved in a flat-sharing arrangement with some friends, including the girl that would become Kirsty’s mum. That’s how I met her, really, although I’d been vaguely aware of her for a couple of years. We kind of fell into a relationship, me on the rebound. It was all far too fast, of course. We were married before I had time to realize what a mistake it would be.”
“What happened to Jack and Fiona?”
Enzo drew a long, slow breath, wondering why it should still hurt after all these years. “They got married, had kids, and as far as I know went on to live happily ever after. The last time I saw or heard anything of Jack was at dad’s funeral. And that was thirty years ago.”
Enzo woke up, startled, in the dark. For a long, disorientating moment he had no idea where he was, before remembering Marc Fraysse and the unsolved murder at the tumbledown buron. In the dim light of the digital bedside clock, his bedroom slowly took shadowed shape around him. He glanced at the time. It was three o’clock. Sophie had left not long after midnight, and he had spent some time on his own sitting in the dark, drinking more whisky than was good for him, going over again and again in his mind memories that he had purposely put aside for most of his adult life.
He could only have been asleep for an hour or two, and already his head was starting to hurt from too much whisky. Something had wakened him. Some bleak, disturbing nightmare that had vanished with his sleep, like smoke in the wind.
He found himself thinking again about Jack, trying to put features to the memory of him. In his mind, he remembered him clearly, but his mind’s eye could no longer furnish him with the physical details. And from nowhere, he suddenly recalled an incident that he had not thought about for close on forty-five years. A moment overlooked, buried under an avalanche of other memories.
He had been nine years old, still in his first year at Hutchie, while Jack was in his last. The threats over keeping his mouth shut and the incident at the pond were things that had long retreated into the dark lockers of unwanted memory. In truth, beyond that first day, he’d had little or no contact with Jack or any of his friends.
There was a group of boys in fourth year at secondary, who had been going around terrorising the younger kids. Just bullies, forcing boys much younger than themselves to hand over food from the tuck shop, or toys, or cigarettes, or anything that took their fancy.
It was a day toward the end of the summer term when Enzo fell foul of them for the first time. It was just after his birthday, and he’d been given money by an aunt. He’d decided to spend it in the tuck shop, buying packs of chips and bubble gum and candy bars, and sharing them among his friends. Which was making him very popular.
It also attracted the bully boys like flies to the dung. They pushed their way through Enzo’s circle of admirers to demand that he hand over the goodies. It was Enzo’s first lesson in the meaning of fair weather friends. Within a matter of seconds, they had all melted away, leaving him to confront the big boys on his own.
He hadn’t yet acquired the silver stripe that streaked his dark hair, but he had a stubborn streak that ran through him, a character flaw rather than a physical one. He refused to hand over his stuff, and the older boys quickly lost patience. One of them, the ringleader, a boy called Andy, grabbed Enzo by his collar and slammed him up against the school wall. His goodies from the tuck shop spilled all over the playground. And a single, sharp voice cut through the melee. “Leave him alone!”
Andy and his mob turned around to see who’d had the temerity to interfere in what was clearly none of his business. And as the boys parted, Enzo saw Jack standing there. “What’s it to you?” Andy demanded.
Jack hesitated a long time. “He’s my wee brother. So just take your hands off him, okay?”
Enzo could hardly believe his ears. Andy looked at him in disbelief, then laughed. “What? The wop ’s your brother?”
Enzo saw Jack flinch, and his voice carried an edge of anger almost too fierce in its denial. “He’s not a wop! And I’ll kick your fucking head in if you say it again.”
Andy’s face contorted into an ugly sneer. “You and who’s fucking army?”
Although a year younger than Jack, they were big boys all the same. From the fourth year first-fifteen scrum. And Jack was on his own. But he didn’t flinch. He said to Enzo, “Get your stuff and go.”
Enzo had hesitated, then, but Jack was insistent.
“Go! GO!”
And Enzo stooped to quickly gather his spilled comestibles, and scurry off toward the far classrooms without looking back. No one made a move to stop him. All the focus had turned toward Jack.
It was with a sharp sense of guilt and regret, that Enzo remembered now how Jack had returned home that night, bruised and bloodied. He’d gone straight to his room, retiring like a wounded animal, and told their parents that he’d been hurt playing rugby.
That he had taken a beating for Enzo was without question. But neither had spoken of it, and it had never been referred to again.
And for some unaccountable reason, lying there in his bed in the dark, with whisky on his breath, and a head full of memories, Enzo felt tears fill his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-two
Madame Fraysse seemed a little shadowed around the eyes this morning, as if perhaps she had not slept. But in response to Enzo’s enquiry, she professed to have slept the sleep of the dead. She took her seat opposite him at the breakfast table and her smile seemed very slightly forced.
She had her back to the view, as if all these years of exposure had made her immune to it. But Enzo could
