Eating Crow (23 page)

“They were very smart girls, actually.”

“Really? What have they got? A masters degree each in fellatio and frottage?”

“I know what this is.”

“What what is?”

“This. It’s the green-eyed monster.”

“You think I’m jealous?”

“It’s like I said last night. I’ve changed. I’ve moved on, and you don’t like it.”

“You’re right about that. I don’t like what you’ve become.”

“What? Successful, rich, famous—”

“At the risk of repeating myself, I was thinking more along the lines of ‘arsehole.’”

“You’re going to have to get over this, Luke.”

“What you did to your girlfriend this morning—”

“What I did to my girlfriend this morning was stupid and insensitive and clumsy. I know that. But the thing is, Luke, I can deal with it. I can make it right. I’m a professional. I can make anything right.”

Behold: the monster is now only on nodding terms with reality.

J
ennie announced the end of our coupling in a memo circulated to senior members of the staff. It said, “The relationship between the Chief Apologist and his chief of staff has concluded. This will in no way interfere with the running of his office.” I was in awe. She had dispatched our affair in just twenty-five words, and not one of them was an adjective. It wasn’t a “close” relationship or a “personal” relationship or even, heaven forfend, both. The word “sadly” would have sat neatly at the front of the statement, but she had chosen to do without it. She could have written, “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Really,” at the end. But she didn’t. She stuck to the essentials. We were. Now we aren’t. That is all. Carry on.

This was all the more awful for me because I really did feel guilty. It wasn’t just the offense, although that was bad enough. It was the familiarity of the victim. In my role as Chief Apologist I had performed the same apology to a number of different people, but I had never needed to apologize twice to the same person for different things. I felt guilty for being in a position to feel guilty again. Unfortunately a surfeit of guilt is no help in the apology business, particularly when adjectives are so scarce. Doggedly I had a crack at it anyway, at the end of one of our morning meetings.

“Jennie, I just wanted to say, about what happened in my—”

“There is nothing to say, Marc.”

“No, but really, Jennie, I think I owe you—”

“I’m not interested.”

“But—”

“Nope.”

“Really, I—”

She was already on her feet. Glumly, I watched her leave, her files held tight against her chest. It was all terribly discouraging. Nobody had ever refused one of my apologies before. I found myself examining the possible reasons for this failure. Jennie had mistaken my personal feelings of guilt for the kind of professional guilt I exercised as Chief Apologist; that it really had been just another day at the office. I could see how such a mistake could be made. This made me feel better about the rejection, but it didn’t deal with the guilt itself which was still there, gnawing away at me. I knew what I had to do, though. I had to find someone else to say sorry to. That would cure it. That would be my magic bullet. Of this I was certain, if nothing else.

The very same day I went into a department store and, instead of holding the door open for the elderly lady coming in behind me, let it swing back. I spun about eagerly to say sorry, but she scowled at me and backed away as if I were a crazy person. I had forgotten I was in New York, where unexpected acts of kindness to little old ladies are regarded as an overture to some con or ruse, which, in my case, I suppose it was.

I tried my hand at petty larceny by stealing a copy of the
New York Times
from a newsstand at Grand Central Station, but I had failed to consider the impact my notoriety might have on the adventure. When I returned fifteen minutes later to admit my guilt, not only did the news vendor refuse to accept my apology, he also refused to accept my money.

“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re doing great work. Have this one on me. Come by any time. Be my guest.”

I had been too modest. I needed to do something which would actively disrupt and inconvenience. While traveling across the city in a cab, I noticed a NO FOOD OR DRINK sign stuck to the greasy plastic barrier that separates driver from passenger. I offered him an extra ten bucks to stop at the next coffee shop and wait for me while I purchased a large cup of coffee, which I promised to hold carefully. I brought it back to the cab, this bucket-cup of full-fat foam and mud-colored liquor, and as we moved off, spilled it all over the backseat. When I attempted to make amends, the driver told me not to worry and asked, instead, for my autograph.

I even tried hanging around a pathway junction in Central Park I knew to be popular with joggers in the hope that I might be able to trip some of them up, but I just got kicked in the shins. I went home feeling sorry only for myself, which wasn’t the plan at all. Willy Brandt would not have been proud.

It was another week before I found someone who would let me say sorry to them, and that was at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. They could hardly refuse; it was what we were all there for. We were attending the First Close-Proximity Apology Round, a new forum designed to bring together, in a neutral environment, sets of nations which held various grievances against each other. They would meet in neighboring rooms within the cool, echoing interior of the United Nations headquarters in Switzerland and make their apologies in sequence. This first session had been timed to coincide with Germany’s monthly apology to Israel for the crimes of the Second World War. Taking my plausible apologibility from my father, I would be saying sorry on behalf of Switzerland to both Israel and the World Jewish Congress for the Swiss banks’ mishandling of monies belonging to Jews murdered in the Holocaust and for the refusal by the authorities to grant asylum to those fleeing persecution by the Third Reich.

The plan was that Israel would then apologize to representatives of the Palestinian people who would be waiting in the next room. The Israelis had agreed to do so as long as the Palestinians in turn apologized back to Israel for the violent acts that had been committed against them by various Palestinian terrorist organizations.

By chance, outside one of the meeting rooms, I met Max, who was there on temporary assignment to the German delegation. The expected cigarette was there between his yellowing fingers, and as he spoke, he exhaled a long gray mist.

“Have you heard?” he said. “The Israelis and the World Jewish Congress have laid on food.”

“It’s a catered apology?”

“And how! Chopped liver, bagels, some great new green pickles. It’s like Katz’s Deli in there.”

“How do you think it will go?”

“It should go fine as long as we don’t have too many people going down with indigestion.” He laughed at his own joke, the sound soon dissolving into a ripe, bubbling cough from somewhere deep at the bottom of his lungs. We agreed to meet later for dinner.

For my apology on behalf of the Swiss, I dug deep into my father’s prejudices about the country. I talked about the excess of bureaucracy. I talked about the ghoulish fascination with order; the preoccupation with hillsides and cows; the love of meadow flowers. “My father used to tell me that in Switzerland the blooming of the gentians was headline news.” That, I said, was the problem. The Swiss looked at the details and never took in the bigger picture. “We look clever and considered. But really we are nothing of the sort. We were so enamored of our own beauty that we failed to see our flaws, and as a result we treated your people badly. We were a disgrace to the civilized world, to ourselves, to everybody.” I spoke for a short while about how wretched this killer combination of arrogance and efficiency made me feel, before concluding with, “I’m so very, very sorry.”

Everybody seemed very moved by my speech. A few of them wept and they even gave me a big bag of bagels to take away as a token of their respect. For my part, though, it felt more professional than emotional. I recognized it was a job well done but little more than that. I could imagine my father standing in the corner of the room, arms crossed, shaking his big, fat soft-cheeked head at the idiocy of it all.

“So the Swiss are boring boogers? And for saying this, they will pay you?”

“They pay me for the apology. The bit about the Swiss is the way to get to the apology. And it’s
‘buggers.’”

“That’s what I said.”

“Of course.”

“Me, I would have told them the truth about the Swiss for free.”

“Now you want my job?”

“I’m just saying. For free. Maybe I would even pay. To be rude about the Swiss, I would pay.”

I came out feeling only more frustrated.

Thankfully I didn’t have much time to dwell upon it because I was immediately called to an emergency meeting. The previous night, Satesh told me, the Israelis had demanded that the Palestinians not only apologize to them but find someone else to whom they could also apologize.

“They are insisting upon a longer chain of apology,” he said. “I think they feel there’s safety in numbers.” Historical and Verification had thrown up a family from Ramallah whom the Palestinian militias had failed to protect back in the 1940s. “Apparently three generations of this family were killed in an ambush by a company of British soldiers.”

I said, “That should be just the thing, then.”

“It is. A representative of the family was flown in early this morning and the Palestinian apologist is in with them right now. But there’s a general feeling that we should have a second apology to the family, something to deal with the massacre itself, just to tie up any loose ends.”

“Good idea.”

“Guess the name of the commanding officer of the British soldiers involved?”

“Hit me.”

“Captain Roderick Welton-Smith.”

“Uncle Roddy?”

“You know him?”

“Knew him. My mum’s older brother. Dead now.”

“A real personal connection, then?”

“I didn’t like him much. He always called me fat boy.”

“Well, a chance for you to make him a better man than he was.”

“Oh sure. My speciality. When do we do this?”

“Twenty minutes.”

The apologee was a thin, wiry man in late middle age, with black eyes and a light covering of graying stubble about the chin. He wore a pinstripe suit that had seen better days and, beneath the jacket, a dark woolen tank top over a beige, wide-collared shirt. When we were introduced, he took my hand in both of his and in faltering English said only, “I thank you to be here.”

An interpreter stood at his side and I invited them both to sit. Obviously there was no time to prepare anything on the scale of the Swiss apology, but I had no doubt I could wing it. This, after all, was my territory. A little bit about my family and its colonial adventures. Perhaps mention the slavery and the
Lady Bountiful
stuff to prove just how much a part of my family’s life all of this was. Use the phrase “the dark stain of history” because that always goes down well, and then move on to the “deepest sorrow” conclusion before the “sorry, sorry, sorry” finale. I was confident that each narrative beat would lead me comfortably on to the next. I had started out in this game by extemporizing. It would be good to give it another go.

I was on the closing straight when it happened. I don’t even recall being terribly distracted. As far as I was aware, I was doing the job very well. I was even beginning to enjoy the process, taking satisfaction from the knowledge that my uncle would have hated anybody saying sorry on his behalf for any of his actions. It made me all the more contrite and penitent. Still, as I was talking, the thought crept into my head, like a cat trying to slink unseen into a room, that because of this unexpected apology I was going to be late for my meeting with Max. I glanced down automatically at my watch. Unfortunately, my jacket cuff had slipped down my wrist so I had to reach down to pull it back. Now it was a two-handed operation, a whole-body affair, and as I tipped my head to one side to get a clear view of the watch face I could hear the two men opposite me shifting restlessly in their seats. I looked up. They were both regarding me with total disdain. The old man turned and said something to the interpreter, who translated:

“He asks if we are keeping you from something more important.”

Believe me, as the world’s leading practitioner of the art of the international apology, I know: it is impossible to come back from something like that.

T
hat was when my feet started to hurt again, both little toes bitching against the hardness of my new leather shoes. My feet had not given me grief since the day Wendy Coleman saw to them, but they were at it now, punishing me for the casual cruelty of my footwear choices. It was as if they had been woken by the day’s events from a long and restful sleep.

“You hungry?” Max asked as I limped into the taxi, and I realized that I was, for the first time in many months. The combination of aching feet and an aching hunger was comforting. It was a Marc Basset I recognized. Back in London my feet had always hurt. Back in London I had always been hungry. Or, at least, I had always had an appetite, which could amount to the same thing if you were being kind.

We were driven out across this tidy city on the lake, along darkening, well-swept streets, and up into the hills. An old wooden chalet lay hidden at the end of a long drive, its presence betrayed by the warm buttery glow of candlelit windows flickering through the trees. Max told me he had borrowed it from a wealthy friend, as if we should all have friends with beautiful houses to borrow, as if we all did.

We were shown into a warm, wood-lined room with a view out over the lake, where in the darkness a mother-of-pearl moon hung low and heavy. A table had been laid for a dinner of many courses. I sensed that other than ourselves and those here to serve us, the house was empty. As soon as we were seated we were each brought a taster on a glass plate frosted with ice: a disk of white chocolate the diameter of a golf ball but only a few millimeters thick. On top was piled half a teaspoon of Osetra caviar.

“The chef has told me we must eat this in one go,” Max said as if challenging me. I looked down at the plate. The dish was clearly intended to make the eater feel by turns curious and uneasy. Fish and chocolate? Together? What empty-fridge desperation had dreamed up this nightmare? Instead I felt excited, like a skier who has been off the piste for far too long staring once more down the slope. I knew how to do curious food. The muscle memory was all there. It was just a matter of pushing off. We slipped the white chocolate disks into our mouths.

The taste was sublime. There was the clean measured saltiness of the eggs and the sweet creaminess of the chocolate, and then a separate flavor that emerged shyly out of the two. It reminded me of the savory backtaste of the salt caramels I had once loved back in London, only more so. White chocolate and caviar made me homesick.

I said, “That was extraordinary.”

Max looked up over my shoulder and gestured for the server to step forward. He placed before me a printed sheet. I read it.

“A chocolate menu?”

“My friend also lent me his chef,” Max said proudly, “and I’ve had him hunting around for a few chocolate dishes that we thought might amuse you.”

After the white chocolate and caviar came a soothing gamy soup of woodcock, flavored with dark, unsweetened bitter chocolate, chili, and crisp pieces of pancetta. That was followed, as a fish course, by lobster on the half shell, in a pungent lobster
jus
the color of terra-cotta. Once it had been placed upon the table, another server approached holding a fine beige muslin pouch, one hand gripped tightly about the neck of the bag, the other held flat underneath where it bulged with what looked like ground spice of some kind. He leaned over and, with delicate precision, shook the bag across my plate, dusting it with what turned out to be a fine, earthy cocoa powder that only pointed up the sweetness of the shellfish.

For the meat course we were served thick pink slices of venison, carved tableside and laid one across the other over pieces of caramelized fennel and Jerusalem artichoke, the whole drizzled with a fruity chocolate sauce that played terrifically against the ripe field-and-meadow flavor of the meat and the anise kick of the fennel. We finished with a delice of chocolate with a glazed shell that glistened and shone beneath the candlelight. At its heart was the most ear-ringingly intense chocolate mousse I had ever tasted, and to keep the mouth alive, the base had been filled with shards of popping candy that fizzed and crackled on the tongue. I ate this meal like a man who has just discovered the pleasures of food, holding each mouthful for a second longer than necessary so that the flavors might have a chance to develop, eyeing the menu between courses as we talked, trying to guess what result the combination of ingredients listed on the sheet might achieve. I felt settled and unburdened by the ballast of anxiety which I realized had been weighing me down for weeks now.

At the meal’s end I asked for mint tea and they brought me fresh leaves in a glass of hot water, trailing wisps of aromatic steam. With it came a plate of chocolates including those salt caramels from London which, Max said, had been flown in that afternoon.

“Chocolate to Switzerland?”

“The chef cares only about the very best products. Not their origin.”

I put one in my mouth and felt the liquid center flow out across my tongue. When I was done I said, “I am terribly touched, Max. You did all this for me?”

“My spies told me you were in need of a little care.”

“Who’s been snitching?”

“Franky. Alex. They were concerned. Said you’d been chasing your tail a little. To quote Franky”—Max dropped his East Coast patrician tones in favor of something swampy from the Deep South—“‘Like a rack-
coon
in heat.’” We laughed.

“They’re good boys, those two,” I said. And then: “It has been a bit crazy recently.”

Max leaned back and lit a cigarette, killing the flaming match with the same quick flick of the wrist that I remembered from our first meeting at the Foreign Office. He observed me like I was a new exhibit at the community museum. “You do a difficult job, my boy, and don’t ever allow yourself to pretend otherwise. No surprise if it gets on top of you sometimes.”

I told him what had happened that afternoon during my apology to the Palestinian.

“What did you tell him?”

“Said I was on medication and needed to check when my next dose was due.”

“Did he believe you?”

I grimaced. “Don’t think so. He refused to shake my hand at the end.”

Max rolled his eyes as if to say, There’s no accounting for folk. “One apology out of so many. Don’t worry. Everybody else thinks you’ve done great.”

A relaxed silence fell between us. I looked out of the window at the dark, oily, nighttime slick of Lake Geneva, far below. “Do you know this is the first time I’ve been to Switzerland? I seem to recall I even have a flat here somewhere that comes with the job.”

“I think you’re right, though you’re staying at the hotel with the rest of the crew?” I nodded. He took another drag. “Your dad never brought you here?”

“Oh, he talked about us all going one day, but …”

“He died when you were a kid, right?”

“I was thirteen. Almost thirteen.”

“A bum deal.”

“Exactly.” I held my breath before saying what had come into my mind. “I can’t get him out of my head at the moment, actually. Keep hearing his voice.”

“There’s always unfinished business.”

“You’re not wrong. It’s like there’s this big conversation we were meant to have, one I keep trying to have.”

“Nothing shameful there. I talk to the dead all the time.”

“You do?”

“Those who will listen,” he said with a thin smile. He tapped his ash.

“Problem is, they don’t always answer back the way you want them to, do they?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’m asking for too much. I suppose I’m just still angry with him for, you know …”

“What are you after? An apology?”

“Nice idea. I don’t get too many people apologizing to me in this game.”

“Well, if it helps, I know how you feel. I was way too young when my old man died, too.”

“Really?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well, then.”

“Exactly.”

“How old were you?” I leaned in to him, intrigued.

“Me? Jeez. Let me think. It was so long ago. I was … yeah. I was forty-seven.”

I sank back into my chair. “Very funny.”

“I’m serious, Marc. There’s no good age. I was forty-seven and I still hadn’t finished the great conversation. Angry as hell, I was. Talk to any guy who’s lost his pop and they’ll tell you the same thing. There’s never a good age.”

“Are you telling me to lighten up?”

“Lighten up?” He took another deep drag and coughed ripely into his linen napkin, which he pressed primly to his lips. He stubbed out the cigarette. “Not the phrase I had in mind. But I was just thinking to myself, the job you’ve been doing, it’s forced you to take a lot of things very seriously.”

Now I was curious. “So what
are
you saying? That I should quit?”

“I’m saying maybe you need a change of scenery, a chance to enjoy a few of the simpler pleasures. I think you need to find a life which is just, how should I put it, a little less important?”

“Well, I’m open to suggestions.”

“Why don’t we call for a small
digestif?”

“Tell me you haven’t got one of those foul chocolate liqueurs. Not that Mozart stuff. There are limits.”

“It’s okay. You can trust Max. No chocolate liqueurs.”

Professor Thomas Schenke’s first penitential work,
Grievance Settlement Within a Global Context
, had become the kind of crossover success of which publishers can usually only dream: a serious, expensively priced academic text, with all the intellectual cachet that brings, which also sold to a general readership. The edition for general readers came complete with an “apology card,” for it was discovered that while hundreds of thousands of people had bought the book, very few had read more than a few pages. The card enabled these guilty readers to send the professor a note, care of his publishers, apologizing for not having made more of an effort. A quarter of a million people did so, though it’s unlikely he appreciated the gesture.

It was, of course, only a matter of time before Professor Schenke produced a sequel. (There had already been two follow-ups to the mass market text for domestic apologies, although these merely offered more scenarios rather than developing the initial premise.
^*
) The new book,
More Grievance Settlement Within a Global Context
, a proof copy of which Max gave me that evening, took as its starting point the successful establishment of UNOAR and welcomed that which had already been achieved. “The world has made a great effort to pluck its apology chicken,” the good Professor wrote at one point in the introduction, which proved his writing style hadn’t improved with practice. That effort, he said, must continue, but new challenges lay elsewhere. As well as opening up ancient hurts, the end of the Cold War had, he argued, proved a victory for the free market over the corporatist approach. It was unthinkable now that any moderately developed economy would choose a nationalized energy or telecommunications system when it was accepted that the private sector could do a better job more cheaply. In fact, he said, the private sector could do everything more cheaply: education, health care, pensions, you name it. Big government had gone on a diet, taking inches off its waistline, and far less was now expected of it. As the state had retreated, so private corporations had advanced to fill the vacuum, taking on more and more of the state’s traditional responsibilities.

Naturally with these new responsibilities would come something else: an increasing likelihood that corporations would cause great hurt. People always screw up, as Schenke didn’t think to put it, but should have done. “In the future it will be the multinational corporation which will be called upon to make apologies,” he wrote instead. “And once again there will be sound economic reasons for doing so.”

On the face of it this read like a simple return to the commercial tort—avoidance which had got the ball rolling in the first place; a little squirt of hot cheese sauce onto a lovely bare knee here, a spilled cup of coffee there. But Schenke, to give him his due, was thinking far more ambitiously than that. “The great apologizable events of the twenty-first century may be a land inadvertently poisoned by a mining company, an ancient hillside wrongly deforested by a logging company, a people displaced by a new hydroelectric project.” In conclusion, he wrote, “there are a whole new flock of chickens ripe for the plucking.”

Max warmed the bell of his cognac glass between his palms. “The thing is, my boy, these corporations will need qualified, experienced people to make their apologies for them.”

“They won’t be setting up their own internal departments to deal with it?”

“Why bother? Unless they’re either unlucky or criminal, most of them will only have to make one or two of these big apologies over, say, a twenty-year period. Far better to outsource the work to professionals with serious credibility.”

“What are you proposing, Max?”

He sipped his drink. “A private consultancy. You, me, Rashenko.”

“Rashenko? That sob-monster?”

“Don’t worry about him. Turns out he was just a bit depressed. He’s been much better since they put him on the happy pills. And he has terrific contacts east of the Urals, which is bound to be a big market for us.”