Eating Crow (4 page)

I shook my head. “I don’t want to intrude.” And I certainly didn’t want to be there when the sandwiches came round.

I said good-bye to Charlie, who merely sniffed and took another bite from her bread. Fiona led me out, past the table with the dish of dark chocolate petits fours. Even they didn’t appeal after the John Hestridge Memorial Loaf. Outside on the pavement, one shoulder leaning back against the front door, she said, “I really don’t think you have to blame yourself. But even so, thank you for coming.” She took a sudden deep breath through her nose, her lips pursed, fighting back a wave of the dread emotion she had so far managed to smother.

“And thank you for apologizing,” she said, her voice now thin and unstable. “It matters.” I nodded. Her eyes were wet and glazed but had yet to overflow. “I’m going inside now,” she all but whispered, pointing to the depths of the restaurant. She mouthed the words “thank you” again, turned away from me, and went back inside.

I stood on the pavement for a good two minutes, not daring to move, examining the feelings of lightness and joy that were now seeping into me. I felt my shoulders—ntense and my breathing become easy. It was clear that something—something very special—was happening.

In the last few weeks before my father died, by then bedridden, he took my brother’s battered tape recorder and gave an account of his times which he said was for us to listen to “later,” without saying when “later” might be. According to André Basset, his life had been full of “deafening moments”: the deafening moment when, as a child, he had discovered the reassuring alchemy of the stove; the deafening moment, in adolescence, when he had become intoxicated by the tight geometry of architecture; the deafening moment in his late teens when he had realized he would have to leave Switzerland to have any hope of happiness. These, he said, “were the moments that deafened me as a person and deafened my life.”

Now here I was, experiencing what the Basset brothers always referred to, in memory of their father, as a truly deafening moment. I, Marc Basset, who had never before apologized for anything, or at least not for anything important, who had never before seen the point of repentance, had finally said the word “sorry.” And I felt wonderful.

M
ost people assume happiness to be a basic right, like access to clean drinking water or forty channels of cable TV in hotel rooms. Maybe it’s because my dad died when I was young—an excellent excuse for most things—or simply that I’m a gloomy bastard, but I’ve never felt that way. For me, happiness has always been something I’ve had to work at. It’s not that I loll about constantly with a face like a winter’s sky, always on the lookout for somewhere handy to hitch a rope; it’s just that the easy, untroubled sunniness enjoyed by others seems to escape me. I don’t do sunny.

Which was what made the whole Fiona Hestridge experience so damn intoxicating. I left her restaurant swelling with pleasure. I believed I had been a good person, not just to Fiona but to myself. I had brought succor to the needy and soothed the hurt, and in so doing, I had atoned for my sins. I thought of all these things as I walked east along the Fulham Road, past the locations of no less than three restaurants which had closed shortly after savagings by me. (“The Wooden Table may not be the very worst restaurant in the world,” began one, “but I sense that the title is now well within its grasp.”) Euphoria is funny like that; it is a pleasure that blinds. I loved myself.

And then I saw him standing, stooped and round-shouldered, examining the contents of an antique shop’s window, and in an instant, self-love turned to self-loathing. It was as if somebody had turned up the force of gravity, so that my heart, my liver, my entire viscera were dragged downward toward the pavement by a ballast of guilt. He was very much smaller than I remembered him (for which I immediately blamed myself) and the big, soft, jowly head was now thin and slack-skinned, but he was still recognizable as Harry Brennan, the man whose job I stole.

At the time, a little over four years ago, I was a copy editor on the newspaper’s review section. Brennan had been the restaurant critic for almost twenty years and had taken on the kind of legendary status that is accorded those whose achievement is survival. It was rumored that on a trip to the Pacific in the 1960s, he had taken part in a cannibalistic burial ritual for the experience of tasting human flesh. In addition to dog, cat, and snake, which he had tried on a press trip to China, he was also said to have eaten, on separate occasions, both braised otter and roasted badger. It was said that he once dispatched an entire bottle of a 1900 Château d’Yquem, worth six thousand pounds, without offering a single drop to any of his companions at the table; that he had been thrown out of Simpson’s on the Strand for eating over three pounds of the prime rib of beef from the cart and only then announcing that he should not have to pay for it because it was overcooked. Even now, long after he had left the field, they told “Harry stories.”

He was a scoundrel and a reactionary and his prose was irredeemably pompous (“I journeyed this week to Lombardy, perchance to taste the black jewel of this land, which is the truffle …”), but for all that, I respected him because he knew his stuff. He, in turn, liked me. I had become his copy editor first by chance, then by habit, finally by edict. He knew that I cooked and he trusted me to catch his errors, which were, to be fair, few.

Late one morning he appeared at my shoulder in the office and stood wheezing and coughing over me. His eyes were wet and rheumy, and every half minute or so, he lifted one plump, pink fist to his mouth to smother another hacking, fluid cough. He told me, in a phrase that was pure Harry, that he was “held fast within the grip of an infection which puts me at some disadvantage.” He was due that day to have lunch at the Noble Scallop, an aging fish restaurant in London’s St. James’s that he had visited frequently but not reviewed for many years. The management, who were close personal friends, had just employed a new chef. He had no doubt the food would be perfect, he said, but he was not fully equipped to judge. The cold he was suffering from had stolen his sense of taste. He asked if he might borrow mine.

“We shall order the same dishes. I can then make judgments upon texture and presentation, and you, dear boy, can tell me whether the flavor is up to snuff.” Of course I agreed. I was flattered by the proposition. And anyway, it was a free lunch.

So we went to the Noble Scallop, where we were seated at a prime corner table. Glassware stood polished and erect. Napkins were unfurled. Brown bread was offered and taken. Naturally the maître d’ made a fuss of us; any pretense of the restaurant critic’s anonymity was pointless here. We began with a serviceable plate of razor clams in garlic and chili which Harry described as “a studied act of innovation” for a restaurant which had been serving some of its dishes for thirty years. I said all the right things: I described the smokiness of the foaming butter and the sweet aromatics of the garlic and the deep brown nuttiness of the chili, the burn from which was not overwhelming. We polished our plates with the bread, drained our glasses of a slightly overchilled Pouilly-Fumé (Harry drank mostly French wines), and awaited the main course, a dish of roasted cod with cockles.

Harry left the table for what he called “a moment’s discreet micturition,” and while he was away, our food arrived. I knew, even before the plate landed in front of me, that something was up. The people at the table on the other side of the restaurant should have known. If they had, they did not show it. Maybe they were just being polite, because the cod stank. The smell of a fishmonger’s slab at day’s end cut through by the acute tang of unemptied trash can hung over the table. I liked my fish dead, but not this dead. I leaned down, sniffed the plate, and gagged. Then I looked about the room. It was business as usual. The maître d’ saw me looking around. He smiled and took a step forward as if to come to my assistance, but I waved him away with a cheerful wink and a single raised hand, flat palm forward. How could I announce that the fish was off? Harry was friends with the owners. The maître d’ had greeted him as if he were family. Harry would be mortified. Or at least, I didn’t want to take the chance that he might be. It wasn’t as if we knew each other that well and I certainly didn’t want to screw up on this, my first meal out with him.

I knew I had no option. I checked that no one was watching and then swiftly switched the plates so he had mine and vice versa. I sniffed Harry’s. It seemed fine. It did not smell poisonous. It was not threatening. He returned, coughing and spluttering and wiping his nose with a crumpled handkerchief, and immediately launched into a story about the time he had caught a chef rinsing his hands in the toilet bowl at a restaurant because the sinks were not working.

“… and he was there, in his stained whites, bent double over the porcelain, I tell you, his hands plunged into the water right up to the elbow …”

At the end of each phrase he took a deep breath, but his cold was so thick and intense that he could breathe only through his mouth. He detected nothing. While he talked he held in one hand a fork, which he waved about to punctuate his story. I glanced down at the toxic plate in front of him.

“… so I said to the chef, ‘Dear boy, is it common practice in this establishment for the kitchen brigade to rinse its hands in the latrines?’”

Occasionally he too looked down at his fish and his fork headed toward it as if he were about to plunge in. Unconsciously, as the fork descended, I would hold my breath. But then, like a falcon teasing its prey, the cutlery would swoop upward again and I would exhale with desperate relief.

“… and he said, ‘If you think this is bad you should see the fahrking kitchens.’” He paused. “The food was rather good, actually.”

Again Harry looked down at his plate. The fork went in for the kill. Here he goes, I thought, dicing with death. This is the moment when it all goes horribly, gastrically wrong. But what had started as a small rumbling laugh at his own cleverness soon turned into a roaring, hacking cough, and once more he broke off to smother his furious mouth. I let out my breath, closed my eyes, and waited. Finally Harry’s coughing subsided. I opened my eyes.

“You all right, chap?” he said. “You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine.”

Harry looked down at his plate again. “Lunch, then,” he said with a special certainty and enthusiasm, and he smiled at me.

“Yes,” I said. “Lunch.” I watched as his fork went down and the first rancid flakes of pale fish came up and disappeared into his mouth. He closed his lips around the end of the fork and smiled. “An interesting texture,” he said, and I nodded. Doubtless it was.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but at first nothing happened. We simply ate our lunch. Harry held forth on great chefs he had known and I chipped in with knowing oohs and aahs at the right moment, though I couldn’t stop myself from examining his face for signs that something might be awry. We ordered dessert, a pear tarte Tatin each (though, naturally, I wanted the chocolate fondant cake), and we ate it with gusto. I began to relax. Maybe the fish was not that badly off after all. Maybe it was just a little high. Or maybe not.

Shortly after we ordered coffee Harry began shifting about in his seat. Then he began belching, one hand pressed flat against the roundness of his tummy as if to ease the passage of the air. Droplets of sweat formed along his top lip, and the color drained away from his face. Finally, just as the coffee was being poured, he pushed his chair back from the table, stood up unsteadily, and muttered, “You will have to excuse me for a moment. It’s all been rather too good.”

I watched, appalled and fascinated. I knew what was about to happen. It had been inevitable from the moment the main courses arrived. The only question now was whether he would make it out of the dining room before the fish made it out of him. He leaned forward a little to steady himself against the table. He opened his mouth as if to burp one more time, his hand rested again upon his stomach. There was a small hiss, like air escaping from a punctured bicycle tire, and then he threw up in a raging, creamy torrent that splashed against the table’s edge and downward to the floor.

The staff were immediately upon us, cleaning and wiping and lifting poor Harry away to a banquette in the bar, upon which he fell back, his greasy, gray eyelids fluttering with the exertion. I wanted to help, but alongside their professionalism I was only getting in the way. So instead I stood against the wall, feeling childlike with guilt. I had done this to Harry Brennan. Me. Just because I couldn’t face a little embarrassment. After he had been sick twice more into an ice bucket placed at his side for the purpose, he gestured for me to approach him. He gripped my hand and stared up at me from the upholstered softness of his makeshift bed.

“Harry, I’m really sorry but …”

He silenced me with a sad shake of his head. “There’s no time, dear boy,” he said in a thin voice, as if the light were fading. “I can’t go on. You must do my work for me, now. You must take my place.” And then, in a whisper, his head lifted just a little off the bench: “They are expecting my copy by six this evening.”

I was horrified. “But Harry, I’ve never …”

He let go of my hand, closed his eyes, and let his head drop back. “You know what to do, Marc. You know what to do.” He turned his face toward where I stood, and with a certain elegance, vomited once more, neatly, into the ice bucket.

For two hours I paced about my flat, eyeing the clock. How the hell could I stand in for Harry Brennan? The great Harry Brennan? How could I be him? I sat at the computer and started the review five, six, seven times, but each attempt was clumsy or dull or simply irritatingly stupid. Half an hour before deadline I poured myself a large measure of vodka from a bottle that had been lying in the freezer for a few weeks, just to steady my nerves. It steadied me so well that I poured myself another and then a third. I ate three squares of Manjari, a couple of white chocolate truffles, and a handful of thickly coated macadamia nuts. Five minutes after that I wrote an introduction that seemed suddenly to make an awful lot of sense:

You can learn much about the quality of a restaurant’s cooking by the speed with which the food disappears into a diner’s mouth. You can learn rather more if it happens to come flying out again.

This was what was needed, I told myself. Something sharp. Something deliberate and unflinching. Think of poor Harry lying there, pale gray against the sea green velveteen. Didn’t he deserve the truth? Isn’t that what he would want? And so I continued to write, a full one thousand coruscating words partly about old restaurants which should know when to give up the game, but mostly about the experience of watching your dining companion throw up. (“It is, I think, bad manners to identify the dishes as they make the return trip.”) I filed my copy an hour late and poured myself another large vodka to celebrate.

The next morning, as I was soothing my hangover, Robert Hunter called me from his office. He had read my review. He liked it. He liked it a lot. In fact he liked it so much he had decided to sack Harry Brennan and give me the job.

That’s how it happened: I became a restaurant critic because of one poisonous serving of old cod that should have been mine, but wasn’t.