Eating Crow (29 page)

It was, I suppose, inevitable. I had made my name, and my fortune, by saying sorry, and I had said it with such intensity and to so many people and so often that eventually nobody wanted to believe me anymore. No one could be that sorry. No one ever was. Not even Marc Basset.

Soon the journalists had departed to file their reports, leaving behind the camera operators to coil up their cables and the sound boys to unplug their microphones. There was just one person left sitting at the back of the phantom audience, her head down. I stood up and walked through the vacant aisles to sit down next to her. I stared up at the podium.

“Well,” I said quietly, “that went okay.”

Lynne nodded. “It could have been worse.”

“You think so?”

“Oh, sure. They could have stormed the front and ripped you limb from limb.”

“That’s true. There was no limb rippage.”

She smiled. “Indeed. No limb rippage.” She looked around the room, now being emptied of its chairs by Savoy staff.

I said, “Luke tells me you’re seeing someone else.”

She shook her head. “He had little hips. I could never waste too much time on a man with little hips.”

“Right.” And then: “Thank you for coming.”

“You know me. Always one for a good show.”

“Yes.”

“You hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

“Come on.”

She hailed a cab from the front of the hotel and told the driver to take us to our old flat in Maida Vale, and I didn’t question her. Inside she led me to the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and retrieved two bottles of a fine New Zealand sauvignon blanc.

“Two bottles?”

“You’ll need one to cook with,” she said, and she reached further into the fridge to retrieve a hunk of pancetta and a net bag of clams. “There’s Parmesan and flat-leaf parsley in the bottom of the fridge and you know where the dried chili and garlic are.”

She left the room and I went to work. I heated the olive oil and threw in the flakes of chili and, while they were cooking, chopped up the pancetta into small bite-sized pieces. I added them to the oil too, where they writhed and bucked pleasurably in the smoking oil. When the bacon fat was almost rendered and crisp and golden brown, I threw in a crushed garlic clove and followed that with the white wine, which fizzed and offered up an impressive sheet of blue flame which soon dissipated.

Finally, I tore open the little net and I threw in the clams, which rocked in the simmering liquor and slowly began to open until they were smiling up at me and at last I was content and in control. I knew what I was doing and how the cooking process would end. What’s more, I had done nothing for which I needed to apologize in at least the last half hour. I was guilt free. I was making dinner. I was home.

T
here is one last thing you should know: I have lied to you. I would like to claim it was a small lie, but if I’m honest—and I am trying to be—the size of the falsehood doesn’t matter. The fact is, Lynne didn’t take me back to the flat at the end of the press conference and I didn’t cook her dinner. We went to some small, bog-standard trattoria in Covent Garden and ate mediocre pasta. I told her how bad I felt about everything and she observed me as if I were some naughty schoolboy who had finally admitted his sins. At the end of the evening we went our separate ways.

I suppose I wanted to give you an ending less dripping in pathos, a sense that not all was lost, and in my attempt to do so, I tumbled into fantasy. Of course you would be entitled now to wonder what else I have lied about, to question whether I am an unreliable narrator, but I think we all know that I’ve told the rest of it as it happened. The story hardly does me any favors, and even the lie I told didn’t ring true. How would my dad have described Lynne? A sensible girl. She’s not the type to just take me back, is she?

It seems I am not terribly gifted when it comes to manipulating people’s opinions of me. The day after the press conference, for example, I issued a statement saying I would be donating every penny I had earned from the Caucasia contract to the Free Abkhazia Campaign. I thought this would do my image no end of good. Unfortunately, I didn’t earn anything. Rashenko declared that by speaking out, I had breached the confidentiality clause in my ORB contract. He then siphoned off all the funds, dissolved the company, and went to live with his therapist in a dacha outside Moscow. Apparently he’s very happy these days.

Meanwhile I’m doing okay. I’ve started writing the occasional restaurant review for Hunter, who is, I think, endlessly amused by the way things turned out. And I still see Lynne. We meet up for dinner every now and then (she says she wants to get some meat back on my bones) and she told me a few nights ago that I wasn’t a total idiot, so there may be hope for us yet.

As to the lie I told you, well, I know what I should do now. It is the thing I am most qualified to do, isn’t it? The one thing at which I am practiced. But will you understand if I say I no longer have the stomach for it? That the luster has gone? I think I’ve said the S word enough for all of us over the past year or so. I’ve certainly said it enough for me. So I’m hoping I don’t have to say it again. I’m hoping you’ll be understanding if it’s not the last word on this page. I’m hoping you’ll give me a break. Tell me I don’t have to say it again. I don’t have to say it again. Do I?

A
lthough this is a work of fiction not everything in it is invented. Most of the dishes on the chocolate menu in chapter 29 are real and the chefs responsible must get the credit. The white chocolate and caviar buttons and the chocolate delice with popping candy with which the meal begins and ends are to be found at Heston Blumenthal’s remarkable restaurant The Fat Duck, at Bray in Berkshire. I was advised on the game, chocolate, and chili soup by Henry Harris of Racine, 239 Brompton Road, London SW3, although he serves nothing like it, preferring instead his own brand of classy French country cooking. The lobster with cocoa powder is available at Vineet Bhatia’s groundbreaking Indian restaurant Zaika, 1 Kensington High Street, London W8. The roast venison in a chocolate sauce is similar to, if not exactly the same as, a dish served at London’s only establishment with three Michelin stars, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, 68 Royal Hospital Road, London SW3.

Marc’s favorite chocolatier, L’Artisan du Chocolat, is to be found at 89 Lower Sloane Street, London SWl, and the salt caramels are as good as he says they are. The Chocolate Loft, home of Garrison Chocolates, is located at 119 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011. Sandor’s, which supplies the stocks for Lewis Jeffries’ meal in chapter 20, is at 2984 South County Highway 395, Santa Rosa Beach, FL 32459. The Destin Seafood Market, which supplies the scallops, is not far away from Sandor’s at 9 Calhoun Avenue, Destin, FL 32541. The Houston branch of Central Market mentioned in chapter 20 is to be found at 3815 Westheimer, though there are others across the state. The Cock Tavern, where Marc and Luke have breakfast in the last chapter, is on East Poultry Avenue by London’s Smithfield Market and is one of the few pubs in the city licensed to sell beer from 6:30
AM.
All other restaurants mentioned or reviewed are fictional.

I would also like to thank: members of egullet.com’s Southeastern US bulletin board for advice on food suppliers in the region; Steven A. Shaw for gastronomic directions around New York; Julian Barnes for his thoughts on wines; Simon and Robin Majumdar for the napkin test (it’s not much but it is theirs); Sam Daws and Carne Ross for their knowledge of the United Nations; Fergal Keane and Jonathan Freedland for their understanding of Bill Clinton’s trip to Rwanda; Marina Warner for her work on the culture of the international apology; Claire Rayner for her medical knowledge. Eric Schlosser’s book
Fast Food Nation
was the source on the early days of McDonald’s, mentioned briefly in chapter 13.

Gary Younge and Maureen Mills read the manuscript and made incisive comments. They are not, however, responsible for any of its contents. My agents, Pat Kavanagh at PFD and Sam Edenborough and Nicki Kennedy at ILA, both in London, and Joy Harris in New York, were always enthusiastic and supportive. I was cheered on by all my editors but particularly fortunate to have in Toby Mundy of Atlantic Books an editor of rare precision and tact. He showed me how to make this a much better book than it might otherwise be. He also didn’t blame me when he experienced food poisoning after we went for dinner one night to a place of my choosing.

Finally, my wife, Pat Gordon Smith, not only put up with my moods but read every chapter as it was written, told me how to improve it, and poured the wine when it became necessary, which was often. I couldn’t have done it without her.

Jay Rayner is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster who is now the London
Observer’
s restaurant critic. He is married and lives in London.

*
Grievance Settlement Within a Global Context
, Professor Thomas Schenke, Columbia Law School Press.

*
This Sorry Business: Apologies for Home and Hearth
, by Professor Thomas Schenke, Heartfelt Editions.

*
A Very Sorry Business: Further Apologies for Home and Hearth and Sorry Situations: Perfect Apologies for Weddings, Funerals, and Bar Mitzvahs
, both by Prof. Thomas Schenke (with others), Heartfelt Editions.