Eating Crow (19 page)

“And then,” Will said, “we brief him when he comes to us for a quote that we cannot possibly comment on a private meeting between the Chief Apologist and the president.”

“But,” Jennie said, “we don’t deny anything.”

“Exactly,” Satesh said. “It’s the apology that never happened. Enough to dig Masuba out of his hole, but slight enough to protect the integrity of the main event.”

“Okay, Satesh,” Jennie said. “Set it up with Max. For tomorrow PM if possible.” Satesh wasn’t listening. He was staring across the table. We all followed his line of sight to where Ellen Petersen was seated, head down, furiously taking notes. We had become so used to her presence that we had forgotten she was there. Alerted by the silence, she looked up to find us watching her.

“What? What is it?”

“Ellen,” Jennie said quietly, “you can’t report any of this.”

She looked down at her notes and then back up at us. “I didn’t hear anybody say it was off the record or—”

“Ellen,” I said self-importantly, “we’re trying to save lives here. You report any of this, and it will be wasted effort. People will die.”

She closed her notebook very deliberately. She put the lid back on her pen and placed it across the notebook as if laying down her weapon. She looked at me.

“Okay. Quid pro quo?”

“What are you thinking?”

“That photograph?”

“I won’t stunt anything.”

“My magazine would not allow anything to be contrived. It must be authentic. We need to capture an authentically penitential moment.”

I let this pass. “And that notebook stays shut?”

“You have my word.”

“Meet me tomorrow morning in the foyer.”

“Foyer?”

“Lobby.”

“Done.”

The next morning Ellen Petersen got her photograph, something spontaneous and sharp, as I happened to rub my face with both open hands. Later that day Cyril Masuba got his apology, as I emptied a glass of Perrier over his navy blue, brass-buttoned blazer. After I had loudly showered him with words of regret and sorrow at the mess I had made I placed a hand on each of his shoulders, pulled him to me, and whispered in his ear, “Now you may go home and tell whoever you need to tell that you had a private meeting with the Chief Apologist where he expressed regret over a number of issues. We will not contradict you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Basset,” he said, with a shy nod of his head. “You have the gratitude of my people.”

“Think nothing of it, Mr. President.”

At 3:00 PM on the third and final day of the congress, I settled into the warm embrace of a brown velour armchair opposite the aging president of Zambia and delivered the slavery apology. Essentially it was the Jeffries text but recombined with an element of my family’s story, which made the sentiment my own. The old man sat across from me, a solid meaty hand placed on each armrest, chin down on his chest, lips pursed, listening. When I was done, he sighed heavily and closed his eyes for a minute, until I thought he had fallen asleep. He opened them again and in thickly accented English said only, “History will remember us both.”

Which was fine by me. If history needed people to remember, why shouldn’t it recall me? I was back in the game, back in charge of my own emotions. The buzz was there and it was rich and it was profound and it was fulfilling. Together we had done a good thing, the president and I.

As we boarded the Gulfstream for the flight back to the States, Ellen Petersen said, “You’re a sharp political operator.”

I said, “Don’t make too much of that. I prefer to think of myself as an ordinary man who happens to be in extraordinary circumstances.”

“I like that. An ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances. Very good.”

“How do you think the magazine will play it?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“Oh, the usual things. The outcome of the German elections. Whether the current round of the world trade talks reaches a conclusion. Acts of God.”

I liked the sound of this. Marc Basset was now jostling for position with Acts of God.

Marc Basset; Acts of God.

Acts of God; Marc Basset.

I could see how this would be a tough call for any editor.

A
t the German general election the incumbents were returned. The latest round of the world trade talks in Zurich ended in a stalemate. And there were no earthquakes, floods, or other divine interventions that resulted in major loss of life. As a result Ellen’s profile made the cover of that week’s
Time:
a huge close-up of me, my face hidden behind my fleshy, feminine hands.

The headline read:
WHO’S SORRY NOW?

Beneath it was the subhead:
The man who can’t get enough humble pie.

The article began: “Marc Basset is an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances.”

Other interview requests followed.

“… and we’ve had one from a Mr. Robert Hunter in London,” Francine said, reading from a long list in her message book. “Told me to say hi, wonders whether you’d like to write a diary of a week in the life of the Chief Apologist. He says it can be as positive as you like.”

“Nice.”

“He sounded lovely.”

“Jennie, is it okay with you if I just tell him to fu—”

“Don’t burn any bridges, Marc.”

“You deal with it, then. Tell him I’m …”

“… really sorry, but up to your eyes?”

“Exactly.”

Jennie scribbled in her own notebook. She said, “There’s one invitation I think you should accept. Helen Treasure’s people called. They want you for Sunday night.”

This was an unrefusable offer. Treasure’s program,
Powertalk
, was a clear hour of live one-on-one chat with People Who Count. Millions watched it, coast to coast, though less for the razor-edge insight than the Kleenex moment. Somehow Treasure always got her interviewees to weep on camera: vice presidents, senators, retired generals—all of them had sobbed in her armchair. If you only ever watched
Powertalk
you would presume the United States to be ruled by a tight coterie of emotionally incontinent men. Through it all, Treasure would remain clear-eyed, her glossy lips pursed in close-up sympathy, head tilted to one side. The words “Just take a moment” had become her catchphrase. Well, I was done with the weeping thing. I had wept for the world. I would not need a moment.

We flew south in the jet to Washington, DC, took a couple of suites at the Willard, and ordered lousy pasta from room service.

“You want me to come with you?” Jennie said, spooling up another forkful of overcooked, underseasoned linguine.

“I think I can handle Treasure by myself,” I said.

I was collected from the hotel at sundown by a television company limo, which drove around two sides of the White House, as if giving me the tour. We picked up Pennsylvania Avenue going west, and then turned south again to an industrial-looking block tucked away in the shadow of the Watergate complex. In the middle of the building, reached through corridors overlit by buzzing fluorescent tubes and past darkened scenery stores, stood Treasure’s set. It looked much like the hotel suite I had just left: overstuffed sofas and armchairs; heavy, rucked floral drapes; priapic-standard lamps. And in the middle of it all, Helen Treasure, a hostess waiting for a party to begin, knees together, shapely calves shining in glossy tights, one high-heeled foot tucked demurely behind the other.

Just before broadcast, I eyed the box of tissues hidden out of sight behind a cushion and said, “I don’t think you’ll be needing those tonight.”

She looked down at the box.

“Those, honey? They’re just for retouching my lipstick during the breaks.”

She gave me a fearsome smile of icing sugar-white teeth that made the corners of her eyes crease away into cracks of expensive skin-care products, and said,

“Trust me, dear. It will all be fine.”

Now why did she have to go and say a thing like that? It was reverse psychology. In the past, when I heard those words, they were being used to soothe an anxiety which Lynne had identified before I had articulated it. This time all it did was make me question whether I ought to be more anxious than I was. I found myself eyeing the tissue box like it was a bottle of hard liquor that I might later need to slug from.

At first the interview was straightforward. She asked me what Jeffries was like. She asked me all the Petersen questions about being in touch with my emotions. She asked me how it felt to know that a video of one of my apologies had been emailed across the world. I said it felt odd at first but that, given time, you can get used to anything. “I just hope people got something out of it.”

She fixed me with another ice white smile that I took to be more punctuation to the conversation than encouragement. “In your country they refer to eating humble pie, I think. Here we also eat crow. Does the difference in language cause you any problems?”

“Indigestion is the same the world over, Helen. It doesn’t matter what meal caused the problem, does it? We’re all people. We’ve all got feelings and that’s the level I work on.”

“Tell me how you got started in this game.”

So I told her: about Hestridge’s suicide and the effect it had on me. About Ellen Barrington and, without naming her, Wendy Coleman. (“We don’t need to go into details, Helen, for the lady’s sake. But let’s just say I treated her badly and I needed to face up to that.”) I didn’t talk about Harry Brennan because who needs to hear about an old man losing his lunch? But I did make it clear I’d done a big number on myself before embarking on the job.

“My, that’s remarkable Mr. Basset. You really did apologize for everything you had ever done wrong.”

Suddenly, into my mind came a memory and I shivered under the hot studio lights: an ancient garden shed, a single shadow of two people intertwined cast against the battered, clapboard wall, and one pretty boy’s face caught in an expression which said only, “What have you done to me?”

“No, Helen, not everything. There is something left.” And I began to talk.

Her name was Gaby Henderson and I loved her, although that barely does justice to the car crash of overwrought emotions. We met at university when we were both eighteen, at a party. The only curiosity was that we had not met before, because we took a number of the same courses in our first year and we already knew people in common. They had mentioned her, discussed her vivacity and her appealing eccentricities as if she were an exotic island they only got to visit occasionally, but none of the things they said did her justice. She had short dark hair cut in a gamin bob, dark eyes, and a laugh that made you feel like you were the only person in the room. I want to compare her to Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
, because men always want to compare the women they have loved to Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
, but that doesn’t do her justice, for she had none of the worrying vulnerability or faux innocence.

Later I learned that she had made all the long, silky, ankle-length skirts that she insisted upon wearing, which suggested an instinctive understanding of her own long, lissom body. She read books by Anaïs Nin, which sounded like a filthy thing to do even before I got to read a single page, and collected records by people I had never heard of, like Chet Baker and Bobby Darin. She knew how to cut cloth on the bias. She knew how to make a martini. She knew a lot of things.

I invited her out to dinner, to an American place in town used by the richer students. I was convinced the sophistication of the gesture would win her over, but then appetite kicked in and I ordered the one thing on the menu I could not resist. There was, I can see now, no chance of her falling for me when my fat cheeks were smeared with spare rib sauce and my fingers spent most of the evening in and around my mouth as I tried to rip the meat from the bones. Gaby didn’t recoil in disgust. She laughed at my jokes and I laughed at hers and at the end of the night she put her hands around my neck and said, “That was really lovely. You’re really lovely. Let’s do it again.” She kissed me on the cheek. I floated home.

We did go out again. To the cinema. To the pub. For weekend afternoon walks in the park. She held my hand. She still laughed at my pathetic jokes. She still only kissed me on the cheek. It took me about three weeks to clock that this one was getting away from me; that I was heading again for Most Favored Friend status. Two months into our “friendship” I got drunk on Thunderbird wine at a party and told her I loved her.

“Oh, Marc. I love you too. You’re lovely. I’m just not in love with you.”

Bugger.

The next morning, terrified I’d blown my chances for good, I phoned her. I said: I get a bit emotional when I’m drunk. You know how it is. I’m really sorry. Ignore me. What a fool I’ve been. What a terrible fool. She said: No, darling. It’s fine. It was really lovely that you felt so comfortable with me to be able to say that.

“Lovely” was a big word with Gaby Henderson.

She came over to the student house I shared and I cooked her dinner, which clearly impressed, because she knew her way around a kitchen but had met few boys who did. Soon we began cooking together. We even held dinner parties for our university friends, great overinvolved tableaux of neomaturity, complete with guttering candles and ice buckets for bottles of German Hock. Our friends watched us, working together at the stove or bringing dishes to the table. After we had served the main course I would sit at the head of the table and Gaby would stand by my side, a hand resting lightly on my shoulder as we took their compliments. And our friends would say:

“Look at you two. Like a married couple.”

I would glow because the bond between us had been recognized. But of course, we were not a couple or anything like it. One night I went round to her house to collect her for a party. I was directed upstairs to her bedroom by her housemates, where I found her getting ready. We were talking about the night to come when, as she opened the wardrobe door and without looking at me—without even glancing, to acknowledge my presence—she pulled off her T-shirt. She was braless.

“Hope you don’t mind,” she said, as she riffled through her clothes looking for a new top. “But it is only you.”

I had dreamed of seeing her naked, often more than was strictly healthy. And now I was being granted a viewing because I was only me. Oh, how I wished I was someone else. That night I got very drunk again.

It was not, I think, an accident, that Gaby hadn’t met Stefan. No fat boy should ever introduce the girl he loves to his thin, good-looking friend, so unconsciously or otherwise, I kept them apart. I had been to visit Stefan in Bristol, where he was a student, but whenever he suggested coming to stay with me for the weekend I came up with a reason for why he should not. I was a realist, though. I knew he would have to visit me in York one day, and that when he did, my two closest friends would meet. The moment they did so, the outcome wasn’t in doubt. These were two very attractive people sizing each other up. I could tell from the look Gaby gave him that when Stefan got round to seeing her naked it wouldn’t be because
he
was only
him.
We were sitting in a pub not far from my house. I feigned tiredness, withdrew from the field, went home and sobbed. I did not want to witness the first kiss.

It could, I suppose, have been worse. Gaby and I at least remained very close, even when Stefan came to visit, which was nearly every weekend. Sometimes we formed a little triumvirate, Stefan, Gaby, and I, our friendship reasonably equal and balanced all the way up to the bedroom door, which they closed behind them with deliberate finality as they set about inventing sex. She did still confide in me, which was something, and she had the sensitivity not to talk too much about their coupling when we were together, which was more than could be said for him. I had comforted myself that the affair would be short-lived because Stefan’s always were. He would see how far he could get, squeezing the juice from the lemon until it ran dry, and then move on. But this one was different. They stayed together for the rest of that first year at university and into the second.

“I always thought falling in love would be really scary,” Stefan said to me late one night as we were sitting, just the two of us, in my bedroom, getting stoned on a little grass. “But it isn’t, you know. It’s the easiest thing in the world. I really think I’ve found the one for me.”

I said, “I’m really pleased for you,” but I wasn’t. I fantasized about him falling under a bus or a train. The tragedy would force Gaby to turn to me for support and comfort, and swept along on a wave of emotion, she would finally realize that I was the one.

“It’s a terrible thing that Stefan died the way he did,” I heard her saying in these dramas of mine. “But at least we finally discovered our true feelings for each other.”

“Yes,” I would reply, “something good came from the tragedy. I know Stefan would be happy for us.”

Although the relationship hadn’t yet failed as I had expected it to, I held fast to the notion that it would eventually buckle under the strain of their separation at different universities. Naturally I assumed this would happen because Stefan would give in to his urges and run off with someone else, whereas Gaby would remain faithful. It didn’t work out like that.

It was the spring term of our second year. Gaby and I were at a Saturday night party, the usual crowd. For some reason Stefan couldn’t be there that weekend. It was late, we were drunk, and she was sitting on my lap, head rested into my neck, the gentle curve of her back eased into the softness of my belly. We were peoplewatching, swapping opinions on friends we had known for years and whom we now felt we could see in a new light, courtesy of the distance and feverish newfound adulthood provided by college life. Into our field of vision strode Gareth Jones: broad shouldered; meaty thighed; testosterone enhanced. Gareth played football. Gareth played rugby. He was studying engineering. Gareth was the kind of boy who, when we were 15, would have been first onto those heaps of adolescent males that we thought it hysterical to build at parties. Gareth had always been quick to laugh at my jokes, which meant he was fine in my book, although as far as I could recall he had never given me anything to laugh back at.