Eating Crow (5 page)

M
aking an apology, I now know, is like initiating a first kiss. It demands bravery. It demands a willingness to be rebuffed combined with a sturdy belief that the moment is right. The apologizer has to be convinced that he can co-opt the apologee into a moment he has artificially created in the hope that it might become more real and therefore less artificial the longer the exchange continues. Professor Thomas Schenke devotes almost thirty pages of his groundbreaking text on international apology to the subject.
^*
He calls it “the maintenance of shared illusion.”

On the day I spotted Harry Brennan, of course, Professor Schenke and his six laws and his shared illusions were still some way in my future. I had no support staff to help me make my apologies. I had no team of psychologists employed to analyze the mindset of my apologees. I was flying solo, making it up as I went along. All I knew was that apologizing to Fiona Hestridge had made me feel wonderful and that the sight of Harry made me feel awful again. That he did not move when I said his name, as if it were unfamiliar to him, led me to believe I was about to make some dreadful mistake. He continued staring into the antique shop window. But the Hestridge exchange really had revealed to me reserves of bravery. I called out again.

“Harry?”

He turned and squinted at me, an old man awoken suddenly from thought.

“It’s me. Marc.” I smiled broadly, but against his blankness, the smile began to fade. “Basset …,” I said, hoping it would help.

Suddenly he came alive. He reached out, clapped me on the shoulder, and barked, “Dear god, the boy wonder himself. The young turk. The sharpest pen in London. What a joy, what a great and kindly surprise, what a …” He showered me with enthusiasm as we gripped hands and shook and laughed at the pleasures thrown our way by chance.

I felt like a total shit, which was good. It gave me impetus. Here was the man whose livelihood I had stolen, whose stomach I had turned inside out, whose very life I had ruined, and he was greeting me like a lost son. The familiar knot of guilt retightened in my stomach. I knew for certain I couldn’t leave things as they were. This had to be dealt with, and now. If I could apologize to Fiona Hestridge, damn it, I could surely clear the air with old man Brennan.

I waved across the road at a nearby Hungarian coffee shop. “You have time for …?”

“You know, I think I do.” He glanced at his watch. “Yes indeed, why not. For old times’ sake. Let us away.”

We took a table in the window and ordered coffee.

“Cake!” the middle-aged, Mittel-European waitress barked. This was an order, not an invitation.

“Will you, Harry?”

“No, but you must. I insist.” He nodded toward the cabinet on the other side of the room. “Have one of those,” he said, pointing now at an obscene multilayered mille-feuille of sugared pastry and cream and strawberries and fragile slivers of chocolate. “A young man like you could surely do it justice.”

I shrugged at the waitress as if admitting defeat after a long battle. “One of those then, please.”

She sniffed. “I bring you cake.”

For a moment we sat in silence. I toyed with the silver cutlery on the table and straightened my place mat. Finally I looked up.

“Harry, there’s something I have to tell you.”

I told him everything, exactly as it happened: That I had never planned to steal his job, that it had been an accident. No, not an accident exactly. A misfortune. A bad piece of planning. That I had swapped the plates out of gaucheness and embarrassment; that I had meant no harm even though I had known I might cause him some.

As I spoke I felt my throat tighten and my mouth become dry. I knew my voice was becoming thinner and more unsteady, and regularly, I looked down at the table, unable now to meet Harry’s gaze. For a second I stopped, terrified that I was about to start weeping again.

I took a deep breath and flexed my scarred and battered toes so that a low-voltage current of pain nudged me on. Finally I said, “Harry, I am so terribly, terribly sorry.”

He stared at me slack jawed. The edge of his mouth began to edge upward until suddenly the laughter exploded out of him, furious, eye-drenching laughter that seemed wild and hot and necessary. Even when the waitress came with our coffee and my patisserie, he did not stop, and soon I joined in the laughter. She stared at us, appalled, as if our hysterics were as offensive to her sense of decorum as a pair of rutting dogs in her kitchen.

“Cake!” she said as if it were an admonition.

“Thank you,” I said as best I could.

When she had left us and we were calmer, I said, “You don’t hate me?”

He took a deep breath. “Not at all, dear boy. You want to know what? You saved my life.”

“I did?” I cracked the top layer of the mille-feuille with the edge of my fork and scooped a little into my mouth.

“A few days after Bob Hunter sacked me, I went to see the doctor. Touch of the aches in the old ticker,” he said. He patted the left side of his chest. “He told me I was a gnat’s whisker away from an early grave. Massively high blood pressure, furred arteries. Had to have a couple of them bypassed, actually. Ask me nicely I’ll show you the scar.”

I swallowed some more cake. “Later, perhaps.”

“And my cholesterol level—well, I tell you if it were an Olympic sport …”

“You’d have won gold?”

“Exactly. The doc told me to cut out the booze, the fats, the red meat, the salt. Everything. If I’d still been in the job I would have had no chance at all. Dead. Gone. In memoriam Harold Brennan. You did me a favor. I feel bloody marvelous these days on the new regime. Have done for the past couple of years, actually. Peak of fitness. Enjoying life. Can’t recommend a healthy retirement more highly.”

“Well, I’m pleased,” I said as I started to attack the second half of my plate.

“Do you know what my downfall was? I’ll tell you.” He tapped my plate with the tip of his coffee spoon. “It was the desserts. They were my downfall.
That
would have been a death sentence to me.”

I lay down my fork, very deliberately, next to the remaining shards of crisp pastry and the thick whorls of cream. I saw in my mind the sudden perforation of an artery and felt queasy for a few seconds.

“Aren’t you going to finish it?”

“Don’t think so,” I said. “It’s good, but …”

“Rich?”

“Yes, exactly. That.”

“Probably for the best, dear boy.”

“Yes.” I pushed the plate away. “So, you’re really not cross with me?” I wanted to get back to the safer ground of our history.

“No, not at all. Interesting tale. Glad you told it to me. Touched, in fact. But I bear you no ill will.”

I felt the same warm lightness that had suffused me after my conversation with Fiona Hestridge. I felt relaxed and at peace. I had a distinct sense of having closed up an aged wound.

Harry Brennan leaned back in his chair. “Good to get things off your chest, I imagine.”

“You know, it really is,” I said enthusiastically. “I don’t want to make you feel like you were just one on a list, but I’ve made a couple of apologies recently. Well, just the one other, actually. The thing is, it’s a good feeling. A very good feeling. It’s the right thing to do and it even has its own rewards.”

Harry raised one tangled salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Dear boy, you sound like you have found your religion.”

“And the thing is, old man Brennan is right. He’s absolutely right. I’ve found something to believe in.”

“Marc darling, that’s great. I’m pleased for you. But that still doesn’t explain why I come home to find you standing in the middle of the living room wearing only your underpants and smeared with dust and dirt.”

I looked down at myself. Lynne had a point. It wasn’t the prettiest of sights. “Enthusiasm, I suppose,” I said. “I just wanted to get going.”

“With what, exactly?”

“Those.” I pointed at two shabby cardboard boxes on the sofa, their corners reinforced with packaging tape, which I had only recently dragged from the loft. Above us, in the living room’s ceiling, the hatch was open and the smell of old dust and paper hung in the air. “I was wearing a suit and I didn’t want to get it dirty. I couldn’t see any point in putting on jeans just to crap them up so …”

Behind me the television was on and tuned to a news channel. I turned to watch, distracted by the sound of Lewis Jeffries III. The slavery reparation talks in Alabama had broken up again and a crowd of African-American men, the armpits of their once crisp cotton shirts stained with sweat, were gathered about their delegation leader as he prepared to make a statement to the media.

“Our search for a way to heal history’s wounds goes on, though they be deep and grievous …”

“He’s a class act, isn’t he?”

“Marc!”

“Hang on a second.”

“… but until our fellow Americans accept the stain of their past there can be no hope of reconciliation …”

I walked over and peered at the screen. “I recognize her,” I said absently. “Don’t know where from, but …” A white woman about my age, dressed in too structured a blue suit for too hot a day, stood at the back of the crowd, watching. She was with the crowd but not of it. I touched the screen with one index finger and felt the static that had collected upon it. “You are so bloody familiar, lady …”

“Marc!”

“… who the hell are you?”

“Marc, for god’s sake!”

There was a click and the television went off. I stood up and turned around. Lynne was standing, her weight rested on one hip, with a look of just contained anger upon her face. She held the television remote control in an outstretched hand, pointed now at me, as if it were a weapon.

“Please, will you tell me what is in those boxes that is so damn important?”

“Yes. Of course. Right.” I walked over and started rummaging through one of them, suddenly aware that I was essentially naked and beginning to feel a chill. “Photographs,” I said. “Old stuff. Me with friends at school. Outings. Later stuff of teenage parties.” I picked up a handful of the pictures and started shuffling through them, discarding them back into the box in a fall of dust and crumbling paper as I went. “Me on holiday when I was a kid.” I stopped at one image: me and Luke, both being held aloft by my mountainous, bare-chested dad, all three of us grinning at the camera, somewhere pine-forested and hot. I must have been about seven, Luke five. “Me with Dad.”

“Marc?” Her voice was softer now, almost careful, as if she were trying to coax me out of a dark cave.

I turned to her and smiled reassuringly. “No, honestly, love, it’s fine. I’m fine. Hang on.” I carried on going through the pictures. “Sometimes you need pictures to remind you of all the things you’ve done, don’t you? All the people you’ve screwed over. The mistakes you’ve made.”

Lynne was standing next to me now as I flashed through my youth in a set of garish, creased images. All she said was, “I see.”

Finally I found the picture I had been looking for. It had been taken at a friend’s party: There was the living room, empty of furniture. (It was customary to remove it all, in case it got trashed.) My friends were sprawled about on the floor, cans of beer and bottles of cheap wine at hand. A few couples were deep in their various clinches in the corners. At the center of the shot, the reason for this picture, apparently, was a pile of adolescent boys sitting on top of each other in a heap, four deep, grinning at the camera. Stefan was on top. I wasn’t in the heap so I must have taken the photograph, but I’m sure I thought the pile of humanity bloody funny. We must have been about fourteen or fifteen at the time, a point when, if you are drunk enough, piling on top of each other can be hilarious.

My interest in the image lay elsewhere, though, off to one side: a dark-haired, rather pretty, rather large girl, sitting with her back to a fitted cabinet and staring up at the camera with complete disdain.

“There she is,” I said, resting the top of my thumb against the blurred image of her face.

Lynne squinted at the image. “Who is she?”

“Someone I knew when I was a kid,” I said, distracted once more. I heard Lynne sigh with irritation.

I turned to her. “She’s a girl I used to know called Wendy Coleman,” I said. “And I owe her an apology.”

M
y mother comes from one of those old English families which have always believed in giving service to the state, much as popes have always believed in God. Whenever there was a colony that needed ruling or a war that needed fighting, a people that needed subduing or exploiting or indoctrinating, you could be certain a Welton-Smith would be on hand, ready to help out. There were Welton-Smiths at Trafalgar and Balaklava and Ladysmith. They helped Cromwell rampage through Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 and still managed to be cheering at the coronation of Charles II a few years later. They skippered slave ships into Jamaica, ran tobacco plantations in Kentucky, and mined diamonds in South Africa. Buccaneering and valiant they may have been. Political radicals they were not. There are members of my mother’s family who are still not convinced that giving women the vote was a terrific idea.

The nearest thing they had to a revolutionary was my mother, Geraldine. Damn it all, but the woman married a bloody foreigner. She never claimed the title, of course. I don’t think it would ever occur to my mother to make claims for herself. In any case her brigadier father did it for her. Roger Welton-Smith continued to decry the “unsuitability” of her love match right up until his death, which occurred a good few years after the death of the son-in-law he was complaining about.

My father, on the other hand, liked to think of himself as a maverick merely because he had left Switzerland. His family never understood why he went. Who would willingly leave a country so rich in scenery, grass, cows, and bells to put on them? I remember once his twin brother, Michel, whom I never met, writing him a letter, passages of which Dad read to me:

“The yellow gentians in the meadow above the house are in bloom, though Maman insists they are only weeds.” Dad crushed the letter into a ball and threw it in the bin. “In Switzerland, Marc, ‘Flowers in Bloom’ is classed as headline news.”

His was the politics of opposition, to most things. He read broadsheet newspapers by sitting sideways at the breakfast table and holding them aloft, spread full, as though the task of consulting them was something only he was built for. Then he would exhale in fury at whatever story had caught his eye, so that if you were in front of him, all you would see was the wide, crackling sail of newsprint which would buck and bow out toward you each time he let free another belch of furious air.

“So Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Nixon sign nice treaty to limit war. Now I feel safe.”

I recognize that we weren’t exactly a family of urban Marxist terrorists. But in practical terms I see now that there was an innocent radicalism about the way our household functioned. Even before my father’s death my mother worked four days a week in a local solicitor’s office, and because my father worked from home, his was the presiding influence. He did all of the cooking, of course, and he soon inculcated us into its rituals so that the stove became a place of male bonding. We didn’t clean it much.

My mother had other fiefdoms but they were defined solely by her talents. She understood, for example, the ways of our monstrous old boiler and its polyphonic arrangement of hiss and clank, all of which completely escaped my father. I took this free-floating division of labor to be entirely natural, which it was, though not compared to what went on in my friends’ houses. For most people in the 1970s, gender politics was still something that happened only on the evening television news, more spectator event than contact sport. I like to think my family’s arrangement gave the Basset boys a proper understanding of, and respect for, women.

I like to think this, but plainly it didn’t. How else can I explain the appalling way in which I, like my friends, treated Wendy Coleman? We saw her in terms only of the things she might allow us to do (or, as in my in case, fail to do) rather than who she was. I’m not suggesting for a moment that there was even the slightest element of coercion involved, because there wasn’t. The abuse she suffered at our hands was purely verbal and emotional and, for the most part, out of her hearing. But still, we did deny Wendy respect, and for that alone I felt she deserved an apology. I knew it would be a unilateral act and I had already worked out that I would first have to make her aware of the hurt before apologizing for it, but that did not deny the imperative to do so. She had the right to hear the word and I was hungry to say it. (You will accept from this that even before I had heard of Professor Schenke’s book, I had by myself begun to work out the psychosocial complexities of apologizing.)

She was easy to find. Her parents still lived in the same house, and when I telephoned, they told me she was now a podiatrist at a small practice in the same corner of North London. I flexed my feet within the hard casing of my shoes and felt once again the sharp insult where the smallest and most pathetic of my toes, salt-crusted with corns and calluses, made contact with the leather. I made an appointment with her secretary.

Wendy Coleman saw me the next day in her small white-tiled office, which smelled sourly of disinfectant just as our house had done when Dad was ill. There was only one meager slash of color, provided by a huge photograph of a dissected foot that hung on the wall, flaps of beige, graying skin pulled back to reveal the bloodless tramlines of tendon and muscle that had long ago been separated from their owner by a practical incision above the ankle. Wendy did not look up from her notes when I came in. She waved at the large articulated doctor’s chair in the middle of the room and said:

“Take a seat, please. Shoes and socks off. Don’t touch anything.”

I did as I was told. I am always compliant in podiatrists’ offices. My feet, the final joke upon which the whole ludicrous charade of my body is based, demand nothing less.

She snapped on a pair of thin white latex gloves and turned to look at me. She was exactly as I remembered her, save for a little harder-boned definition to the softness of her face. She wore a blindingly white coat, so that against the blank tiling, she seemed almost to be a part of the room itself. She had remained a woman at ease with the space she filled.

“Hello, Wendy. It’s Marc …”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve already seen your name in the book.” This coolly, as if I were merely proving the accepted fact of my stupidity. I felt horribly exposed (which is to say, even more exposed than I usually feel in a podiatrist’s chair, with my shoes and my socks off and my trousers rolled up and my feet on full display). It felt good. It felt right. An apology demands humility, and you cannot be anything other than humble before a woman who is willing to repair your feet.

With one hand she examined the toes on my left foot, pulling the smallest digit up and away from the protective custody of its larger brothers. With the other hand, and without looking, she picked up a sliver of steel scalpel.

“Your tendons are tight, and a regressive locking of the joints, particularly in the small toes, is causing you to walk increasingly on the balls of your feet, leading to a buildup of callused skin underneath and a roll inward, thereby depressing the bridge.” She sniffed. “You should consider having the toes broken and reset.”

“Do you do that sort of thing?” I said. “Break bones?”

“No,” she said. “I deal only with soft tissue.” I looked for a smirk, an acknowledgment of double entendre, for any recognition of the past, but there was nothing. She was a woman at work. Methodically, head bowed, she now began to cut away at my little toe; slicing, whittling away at the rough sleeve of hardened flesh. Each stroke of the blade raised the possibility of pain, suggested it, without delivering on the promise, like the suggestion of chili heat at the end of a tobacco chocolate. Fragments of my skin sugar-dusted the floor about her.

I said, “Do you like feet?” A podiatrist once told me that of all the fetishisms—latex, rubber, dwarves, amputees—the one that most appalled him was foot fetishism. That, he said, was truly aberrant behavior.

“Feet are straightforward,” she said. “The other end of the body from the mouth, so there’s no emotional rubbish …” She paused for a second as she started to dig into the crumpled eye of the corn on my little toe. “And with feet there’s always a solution.”

“What solution?”

“If worse comes to worst, you cut off the foot.”

There was silence in the room, save for the buzz of the overhead track lights and the self-sufficient murmur of a small clinical fridge.

“I didn’t just come here because of my feet,” I said eventually, as she lifted my left foot up a little and began to work on the callused motherlode beneath.

She said, “Hmm?” But she did not look up. I sensed she was enjoying herself, in a quiet sort of way.

“I came because I wanted to say sorry.” For a second she hesitated, the blade poised over the ball of the fourth toe, as if she were trying to recall a face or a name or a smell. She went back to work.

“I wanted to apologize for the way we—I mean
I
—treated you when we were kids.” Up to this point I had been sitting up a little in the chair, tensing my neck, so I could look down at her as she worked, but now that I had revealed my reason for being there I felt I could relax. I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The chair was my confessional; Wendy Coleman, my priest. She moved on to the other foot.

“We were just adolescent boys, dosed up on hormones, and well, I think that made us a little crazy. That’s not an excuse. More of an explanation, really. There are no excuses, of course not, but we were cruel to you and …”

I was on a roll now, comfortably negotiating the emotional landscape of apology. We had talked ill of her, I said, seen her less as a person than a challenge, and that was wrong. I hoped she didn’t mind me explaining all of this, I said, but I wanted to deal with the past. I finished up with, “So anyway, I don’t expect you to accept my apology or like me for it, but I did just want to say it.” She was dabbing at my feet now with a little astringent disinfectant, which did not so much sting as remind me that all the time there had been living skin buried down there. Now she lay down her cotton balls, job done. She got up and pulled off her gloves as she walked back to her notes.

“You can put your shoes and socks back on now,” she said as she wrote. “Do not leave it so long next time before you are seen, and if you think for a moment that I have spent even a minute of the last twenty years considering you and your little friends, then you are tragically mistaken.” This without even a pause for breath or a change in intonation, so that it took me a second or two to notice that she was acknowledging a word I had said.

She turned to look at me. “You were a sad bunch of tossers who could never get it up and I only feel sorry for the poor women you have all doubtless convinced to be your partners. That will be forty-five pounds. Pay at the front desk.”

And that was it. I paid at the front desk and left. The buzz was subtler than those produced by the Hestridge and Brennan apologies. I would even call it mellow, but it was sweet for all that. The Wendy Coleman account had been closed and I liked the feeling very much. Back home, in the corner of the living room above my desk, I assembled the Wall of Shame, a patchwork of photographs of those who deserved to hear from me. Over the next few days I began visiting them.

For Marcia Harris I prepared a soup of white beans and vine-ripened tomatoes, thick with chopped chervil. Marcia was a butcher’s daughter from Merseyside who at university had undergone a conversion to vegetarianism of such ferocity and vigor that she had broken off all links with her family. She took to wearing only rubber shoes that squeaked wherever she went, so you could hear her coming. Despite her refusal to have anything to do with them, her bemused parents continued to send her checks. She called them “blood money” and set fire to each and every one, with which guttering flame she lit her rank hand-rolled cigarettes. Short of cash, she turned to her friends for the occasional meal, “just to see me through,” but would nevertheless patrol our kitchens like a customs officer angling for promotion, sniffing out animal products. This infuriated me.

One night I made her a minestrone soup using a rich veal stock as the base. I waited until she had eaten two bowlsful before telling her. She screamed and ran out the front door. I chanted “baby-cow juice, baby-cow juice” at her as she threw up into some tired rosebushes. Then I took from the oven the spare ribs I had prepared in anticipation of her departure and ate the lot.

I took her the white bean and tomato soup in a cobalt blue pottery tureen that I had purchased especially for the occasion. She stood at the front door of her mansion block in deepest South London, where she now practiced as an aromatherapist, with her arms crossed, and said, “Why should I trust another bowl of soup from you?”

“Because it would be bizarre for me to repeat the stunt again after nearly fifteen years.”

“And this isn’t bizarre?”

I shrugged and bowed my head. “You don’t have to accept my apology. I just wanted to make it. I’m really sorry. I was not respectful of your views.” I placed the tureen on her step. We both stared at it.

I said, “Are you still a vegetarian?”

“Yes, but I eat fish now.”

I nodded. “I like fish.” She smiled thinly, picked up the soup, went inside, and closed the door. It was, to be honest, only a division two apology. My genuine sorrow at what I had done and relief at having atoned for it were undermined by my deep-felt hatred of vegetarians. I noticed that she was still wearing rubber shoes, although I didn’t hear them squeak. Still, I stuck a gold star on Marcia Harris’s photograph to indicate that she had been dealt with.