Eating Crow (3 page)

Afterward, when we were done, we lay on the bed and she said, “I thought about jumping you at college but I’m glad I didn’t. You’d only have done something childish to piss me off. Now that your secret’s out you can’t do that because I’ll always see through you.”

I sat bolt upright and shouted, “Bugger it!”

“I’m not that bad a proposition, am I?”

“No. No. It’s the lamb. I’ve ruined the lamb.” The sound of self-congratulatory laughter filled the room: our relationship had been born just as our first dinner together had died.

That was almost six years ago. We were still together, she was still saying “It will all be fine,” and I was still happily believing her. Or at least, I had been until that dark February evening in front of the television, with the last of the tobacco truffles finally breaking apart on my tongue and the screen now sitting blank in the corner. A man was dead, a little girl was without her father, and whatever my mother, my editor, or my girlfriend said about not blaming myself, I couldn’t escape feeling responsible. It was my review that John Hestridge had taped to the oven door before he climbed inside. Not pages of the
Larousse Gastronomique.
Not the definition of the word “chef” from the
Oxford English Dictionary.
My review. That surely had to stand for something.

S
he found me in the early hours, hunched in the night darkness, my face steel gray in the glow of the computer screen.

“What are you doing, love?” she said in a thin voice, still drunk with sleep. I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the pixeled words on the screen.

“Reading.”

“Reading what?”

“Me. My last piece. The Hestridge piece.”

“Marc, sweetheart, there’s a time for narcissism, and three o’clock … no, Christ … half past three in the morning is not it.”

“Funny.”

Lynne moved to the sofa alongside me and sat down in the corner, folding her feet in beneath herself. She picked up an overstuffed pillow to hug to her belly. There we sat, in the darkness, dressing-gowned and chilled.

“You couldn’t sleep?”

I shook my head and reached forward to tap the screen, as if it were the guilty party. “I thought this was so bloody funny when I wrote it,” I said. “I thought it was clever and smart and—”

“It
was
clever and smart,” she said. “It still is. You’re brilliant.” I heard her yawn but I didn’t turn to look. “You know that.”

“No. I know. I mean …” I swiveled around on my office chair to look at her, hiding back in the shadows for warmth. “I’ve always been confident about my writing. About my ability to turn a phrase, to keep people’s attention. Whatever. I might have my other insecurities—”

“Yeah. It’s the thing that stops you being insufferable, my love. If you were a smart-ass
and
you thought you were gorgeous, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Let me finish. It’s a package. I need to believe in the column, that it’s doing a good job, that it’s right, to balance the other stuff. But this Hestridge thing—”

“You can’t blame yourself. I’ve told you.”

“I wasn’t an innocent bystander.”

“You didn’t open the oven door and usher him in.”

“Lynne!”

“You know what I mean.”

“I wrote a column that was the …” I hesitated, searching for the right word. “… catalyst.”

“Can’t we talk about this in the morning? It’s so bloody late, it’s early.”

I turned back to the screen and said, more sharply than I intended, “Go back to bed.”

“Marc …”

“Just go to bed and I’ll work it out by myself. Go back to bed.”

She came and stood behind me, a hand resting on each of my shoulders. I could smell the familiar, comforting musk of bed and dressing gown and sleep-sweated skin beneath. She stroked my neck with one hot hand and I realized how cold I was. “What do you want to do about it, Marc?” she said gently.

“I want to go and see her. I want to go and see Fiona Hestridge.”

“And say what?” I looked up and over my shoulder at Lynne, my lips pursed as if they were restraining the words.

“I want to apologize,” I said. She nodded very slowly and lightly. “I’m not pretending it will make everything right,” I said. “I know it won’t. But it might make her feel a little better.”

“And you too?”

I looked back at the screen and shrugged, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to me before. “Perhaps.”

She turned me about on the chair so that my face brushed against the soft, underwashed toweling of her dressing gown and the rise and fall of her breast beneath. She held my face in her hands. “Marc Basset apologizing?” she said quietly as she looked down at me. “It must be serious.”

I nodded. “It is.” We looked at each other in silence through the backlit darkness. “I’ll turn off the computer now,” I said eventually.

“You do that,” she said, and she stooped to kiss the top of my head.

Hestridge at 500 sat on a cluttered, scrubbed stretch of London’s Fulham Road, guarded on one side by antique shops selling things that probably weren’t, and on the other by interior design shops selling things nobody needed. It was a street of fakery and superfluity and at its nexus was a restaurant that, according to my review, was a celebration of both. I stood a little distance away on the other side of the road so nobody within could see me before I wanted them to, and stared at the frontage through the clatter of the London traffic. The look of the place still infuriated me: the frigid glass and brushed aluminum facade, sounding an overture for the brushed aluminum and concrete interior that I had compared unfavorably in my review to a public parking lot:

… only less useful. This is a part of town that could really do with a public parking lot. Here they have built one, and yet—by mistake? by design? who knows with these people?—they have filled it with ugly tables and chairs for the serving of ugly food. Every time I drive past it in future I will have to restrain myself from steering my knackered Volvo straight through the frontage, out of some desperate desire to put it to its proper use.

That was all irrelevant now; my review was superfluous too. I took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then stepped out to cross the road. It was a little after eleven in the morning, and as I pushed open the door, chairs were being stacked on tables by a busboy who was vacuuming the polished wood floor. I asked for Mrs. Hestridge and he nodded back toward the hard, gloomy depths of the room. I found her sitting at the farthest table, just in front of the back bar (six girders stacked one on top of another and topped with polished granite). She was surrounded by ring binders full of papers and was staring at a ledger, the mass of unruly curly hair that she had bequeathed to her daughter falling down over her eyes. There was a glass of sparkling mineral water on the table, and a cup of coffee, a plate of cookies, a bowl of olives, and a dish of dark chocolate petits fours, all untouched, as though someone had been trying to feed and water her, unsuccessfully. I emerged quietly into the pool of light around her table, dropped from the pinprick track lights up above, the only ones that were illuminated here in the restaurant’s lower reaches.

“Mrs. Hestridge …”

She started at the sound of my voice and looked up, squinting, as if my face were half-remembered. “Yes,” she said tentatively.

“Marc … Basset. I’ve come to …” But my words died as she dropped back in her chair and looked me up and down.

“I know who you are.”

“Yes. I imagine you would.”

We stared at each other in silence for a few seconds until I gestured at a chair by the table and said, “May I sit down?”

“I’m not sure,” she said coldly. She looked at the mass of papers surrounding her. “Are you any good at accounts?”

I shook my head. “I’m terrible with numbers.”

“Only good with words?”

“I’m not even sure about that anymore.”

“No?” Suddenly distracted, she looked back past me, at somebody else who had entered the room. “Charlie, it’s all right. You can come out of the shadows. My daughter Charlotte, Mr. Basset. Charlie, this is—”

The little girl emerged on the edge of the pool of light.

“I know who you are,” she said in a small voice. “I saw you on the video with Mummy. Mummy says you’re the dickhead who made Daddy kill himself.”

“Charlotte!”

I closed my eyes and put one hand up to silence her mother. “No, really. It’s all right.”

“It isn’t bloody all right, Mr. Basset. I don’t want my six-year-old daughter using language like that.”

“But you were the one who said he was a dickhead, Mummy.”

“Please, Charlie!”

“Anyway, what does dickhead mean?”

“Charlie, go back upstairs and I’ll come and see you in a minute when Mr. Basset—”

“No. Hang on,” I said. “Just a moment.” I turned to Charlie and got down on my haunches so I was at her level, so that my knees creaked and my ample thighs stretched the thin material of my trousers. “It’s okay.” I looked at her straight on. Maybe this was the way to do it. Say the words to the daughter. If I could say it to the little girl, get it out there, it would be more real, more meant, more true. I would have played my part and I could go. I chewed my bottom lip for a moment. Charlie stared back at me from beneath her bangs.

I spoke slowly and deliberately. “I am so sorry that the things I said about your daddy’s restaurant made him go away—”

“He didn’t go away,” she said sharply. “He killed himself. In the oven. Back there. In the kitchen.” She pointed to a swing door in the corner.

I closed my eyes, sniffed, and tried to recover myself.

“Charlie!”

I raised my hand again to silence her mother. “No, really, it’s okay,” I said. I paused again and took a deep breath. “Charlotte, I’m really sorry your daddy killed himself after he read the things I wrote.” I felt something cold and wet slip down the side of my nose and drop off toward the smooth floor below. Charlotte frowned at me and then looked up and over my shoulder.

“Mummy, this man’s crying.”

“That’s all I need,” Fiona Hestridge said, “another weeping male. I’ve had a kitchen full of them this week.”

I said, “I’m sorry,” and lifted one open hand to my face to wipe the tears away from my hot cheeks.

“Mr. Basset. Marc … come up here. Sit down. Please. Have a drink of water.”

I pulled myself up and went to the table. I smiled thinly and sat down. Charlotte sat down next to me and reached across the table for a chocolate. I watched her greedy hand and the stare from her mother that said, “Just the one and no more.”

“I really am sorry,” I said as the lozenge of bittersweet chocolate disappeared into the little girl’s velvet pouch of a mouth. I turned to her mother. “I didn’t mean to hurt John or you or …” Another tear ran infuriatingly to the end of my nose and dropped off onto the crisp linen tablecloth below.

“Enough, please. Stop,” she said. She passed over the glass of water and a tissue. I drank deep, until I could feel the cool liquid flowing through me and calming my breathing.

When I was done, she sat back again and said, “You don’t need to blame yourself.”

“But really …”

She silenced me with a simple shake of the head. “John was severely depressed. Had been for about a year, maybe two. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to do himself in. To be honest, I was surprised it took him so long.”

I said “I’m sorry” because it seemed the only thing worth saying.

Fiona let out a sharp, ironic laugh. “Do you want to know the truth? I’ll tell you the truth. John was a lousy chef. A really terrible chef. And the real tragedy of it was, he knew it. He knew exactly how bad he was. That was what destroyed him. Not you. Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s the way it is.”

“There was still no need for me to be cruel.”

“Much of what you said was right.”

I looked around the gloomy dining room and then nodded toward the ledgers. “Will you sell?”

“Christ no, can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“We’re doing too well. The place has been packed each service since John died, because of the press coverage. We’re doing two sittings in the evenings. I think they were coming in to find out how awful it was, but Ralph, John’s sous-chef, has taken charge of the stoves and he can actually cook, so the food’s great. I’m afraid that does mean that there are lots of people who now think you’re a vindictive monster who hounded someone unnecessarily to his death.”

I said, “I think I can live with it.”

A chef in pristine whites stuck his head around the swing door to the kitchen. “The first batch is cool enough now, Fiona,” he said.

“Thanks, Ralph.” She turned to me. “Come through. There’s something you should try.” We trooped through to the kitchen, where a team of four young men with cropped hair and serious brows were deep into preparations for the lunch service, chopping and arranging, dicing and mincing. On a set of wire trays placed upon a burnished metal work surface stood half a dozen loaves of bread, some round and golden with a light shiny glazed crust, others oval and matte and a darker blue-gray color. Fiona Hestridge picked up one of the lighter loaves, sniffed it, and then turned it over to tap the bottom. It sounded hollow and she nodded approvingly. She sawed the loaf into wedges on a cutting board and then smeared them with a thick layer of pale, creamy butter before handing them around. I took a bite. The bread was warm and had an almost sweet nuttiness, cut through by a just discernible sourness from the yeast.

“Is this a new recipe you’re trying out?” I said, my mouth full. I took another bite.

“No, no,” she said softly. “This is the first bread cooked in the oven since John was found in it.” She nodded toward the huge industrial bread oven in the corner. “I wanted to do something special for when people come back here after the funeral this afternoon so I told the boys not to clean the oven out and just to bake. I think it’s rather nice. It will be like having John with us, won’t it?” She and Charlie took chunks out of their pieces of bread, happy now to be consuming the essence of the man who had left them so suddenly.

The thick, sodden mush of bread was still sitting in my mouth. I blinked and swallowed and felt it drag itself down to my hollowing stomach. I had eaten enough.

I said, “I should go now. You’ve obviously got a lot to do before this afternoon.”

“You’re welcome to come to the funeral. Michelle Grey will be there.”