by Jay Rayner
“Hee-haw.”
Luke screamed, picked up a full glass of water, and threw it at me, glass and all. I ducked so that the glass sailed over my head and smashed against the wooden dresser behind me. He was shouting at me now, throwing cutlery at me, trying to clamber across the table to pull my hair out. André Basset was on him in a moment, grabbing hold of him beneath the armpits and pulling him away bodily from the table and out of the room.
He was still shouting “shutupshutupshutupshutup” as Dad dragged him up to his bedroom.
Mum looked at me, genuinely startled. “What in god’s name was all that about?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. You know Luke. He’s always been a bit”—I leaned toward her and dropped my voice to a whisper—“special.”
She said, “Don’t be so bloody silly.” Then we cleaned the kitchen.
Even now, more than twenty years later, I could not look at Luke seated at a table laid with the rigorous geometry of a dinner setting without seeing him explode across it at me in a shining fury of glassware and cutlery. This evening as I entered the restaurant he merely slipped back in his seat and jutted his jaw upward in greeting. His perfectly carved and shapely jaw. My little brother is me, only in focus: his waistline is narrower, his features more definite and assured, his hair tamed rather than rising up in some spirited revolt. His feet, of course, are shapely and boast a definable arch. Luke is the kind of man who can wear a cheap suit well. Despite this he chooses to wear only expensive ones because he is a distressingly wealthy lawyer and can afford to do so.
As I sat down, he said, “A definite four.”
“A four?” I nodded approvingly. “Chair or table?”
“Chair.”
“A good sign.”
Our father, displaying the Swiss precision he tried so hard to deny, told us when we were boys that the quality of a restaurant could be defined by what it did with your napkin when you left the table to pee. If the waiters ignored it so that it remained in a neglected crumple on your chair, it was a substandard place undeserving of his—or our—attention. If they folded it back into the original arrangement—fan, mountain peak, or, Lord preserve us, swan—and positioned it on your place setting, they were trying too hard. True quality was a single vertical fold, the prepared napkin then laid over the back of the chair, for that presumed the meal to be a work in progress and the napkin a tool. We Basset boys had, in adulthood, adapted the napkin test into a formal competition, awarding one to five points for how intrusive waiters were when performing the act, whether they managed to get the job done before you came back or if they changed the napkin altogether on grounds of staining. It was a remarkably consistent indicator. Very few restaurants that scored four or five on the napkin test served poor food.
Tonight we were in a new place called the Hanging Cabinet, near London’s Smithfield meat market. The proposition: great cuts of perfectly reared organic meat, classically prepared. The décor was pure meatpacker chic: bare brick walls, sanded floors, elegant bare lightbulbs; the kind of understated minimalism that £130 for two buys you in London at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here hollowed-out beef bones, sealed at one end, were used as vases for a single blood red tulip. Bread was served in the cranial hollow of an upended sheep’s skull that rocked back and forth on its ridged peaks. The Hanging Cabinet was not shy about its intent.
When we had ordered, Luke said, “Lynne called me.”
I jutted out my bottom lip fiercely and dropped my aitches. “You ’avin an affair wiv my bird?”
He grinned. “Yes, of course, but in my youthful foolishness I have let the cat out of the bag by telling you she called me.”
“An elementary mistake.”
“Indeed. I shall learn next time.”
“Does she know about your size problem …” I nodded toward his groin.
He opened his eyes wide. “Yes, she’s afraid she won’t be able to fit all of me in.”
I recoiled in disgust. “Aw, thank you, Luke. That’s a delightful image.”
He scratched the back of his neck and looked away over my shoulder. “Actually, she thinks you’re going bonkers.”
“Yeah? In what way.”
“Oh just, you know, generally. She’s a bit concerned.”
I grabbed a heavy-crusted chunk of bread from the sheep’s skull.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worrying about it. I’ve always known you were a maladjusted prick. But Lynne, you know …”
“What did she say?”
Luke shrugged. “That you’re on some major apologizing jag. Saying sorry to everyone. Chefs, teachers, garbagemen. She tells me you even dug out Wendy Coleman. Is that true?”
I chewed my bread and nodded. “It was good to see her.”
“Did she slip her hands down your—”
“Stop it, Luke. Let’s be a little more adult about this.”
He rolled his eyes and I immediately regretted the phrasing. He bowed his head sarcastically and said, “Sorry, big brother of mine.” We were silent for a moment, weighing up the overloaded baggage of a brotherly relationship.
And then: “Is she still, you know, a big girl?”
“Didn’t notice,” I lied. “Irrelevant. Not what I was there for.”
He sighed irritably. “And what were you there for?”
“To have my feet done.”
“Eh?”
“She’s a podiatrist.”
“Big Wendy’s a podiatrist?”
“We each of us follow our calling.”
“I think that even beats Stefan’s decision to join the army.”
“Let’s not go there.”
He reached for his own bread.
“So, seriously, what are you up to? Should me and Mum be getting you committed?”
I shrugged. “It feels like the right thing to do, that’s all. Actually, it’s why I invited you here tonight.”
He leaned back in his chair. Now he was interested. “Go on.”
Our food appeared and we began to eat. “I’ve thought back over our childhood and, you know, I just want to say sorry. I treated you badly.”
Now Luke was flustered. He scraped away chunks of meat from the oxtail bones on his plate. “That’s what big brothers are meant to do, isn’t it?”
“Why should we just accept convention? That day I made you so antsy you almost leapt over the dinner table, for example. It was—”
Luke laughed. “It was ingenious.”
“It was horrible.”
“Does it matter?”
“I think it does. I feel terrible about it. I’m sorry, is all.”
He nibbled his lip and looked embarrassed. “How’s your food?” He pointed at my plate of roasted pork belly with pickled plums.
I laid down my knife and fork and pushed the plate away. “Dismal. The crackling is flabby, the fat hasn’t been rendered. It’s a soggy waste of good meat.”
Luke narrowed his eyes. “Do I sense a Marc Basset special coming on? How about, ‘The only meat that ought to be inside the Hanging Cabinet is the chef’s’? Something like that. You can have that one for free.”
I smiled thinly. “I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. I called for the menu and ordered again, this time choosing the steak and kidney pie.
“What in god’s name are you doing?”
“I don’t want to leap to conclusions. Maybe it’s unfair to judge a place on just one dish.”
“Marc …?”
“I’m serious. They’ve got a whole menu, and from it we’ve chosen just the pork belly and your oxtail and—how is it, by the way?”
He looked at his plate. “Fine. It’s braised oxtail.”
“Good. You see? If I’d judged the kitchen on mine alone it wouldn’t have been fair.”
“Lynne’s right. You are ill.”
“Bollocks. I’m merely refusing to accept that everything has to be done the way it’s always been done.” I hesitated
. “Anyway, where was I?”
“Er, apologizing to me for that noise-torture thing which I thought was hysterical.”
“No you didn’t. You tried to kill me.”
“Okay. I didn’t like you for it, but I don’t care about that now. It’s called personal history. You can’t rewrite that.”
“No, you can’t. But you can reassess it. Historians do it with world events all the time. Just wars become evil wars. What looked like a smart policy at the time fifty years later becomes an outrage. Why can’t people revise their own histories?”
They took away my pork belly and replaced it with the steak and kidney pie, the dark stew held in beneath a golden dome of puff pastry. I cut through the crust, and a burst of steam escaped ceiling-ward. I tried a couple of pieces of steak.
“Bugger!”
“What is it?”
“Gravy’s insipid.” I chewed on another piece of beef. “And the meat hasn’t been in there for long enough.”
Luke raised his hands. “See? This place is crap. Admit defeat.”
“Service is good. The bread is fine. And it got a four on the napkin test. That has to stand for something. Pass me the menu.” My brother let out a little whimper, an echo from a Sunday afternoon so many years ago. I chose a sirloin steak, rare, with fries and a béarnaise sauce. By the time it arrived, Luke was sitting with an empty plate in front of him. He watched me hawklike as I cut into the caramel-browned meat. It yielded softly to the knife, folding back to reveal its glossy purple innards. It was a fantastic steak. Finally the cow had been given a reason to die.
“See?” I said, carving happily. “I knew this place could do good.”
“It’s a steak. They grilled you a steak and you want to give them a medal?”
“The simplest things are the hardest to get right.”
“No they’re not. They’re the simplest to get right.”
“That’s just cynicism, Luke.”
“I’ve had enough. I’m going to call for the bill and a straitjacket.”
Nine
Later, back at the flat, I emptied the Vice Drawer of its brittle store of Manjari and poured myself a large vodka. Lynne was out, hosting a reading by a bunch of gloomy Czech writers, and wouldn’t be home until much later. The place was mine. I stoked up the computer, finished the chocolate, and swilled the vodka around my mouth to strip away any residue on my tongue. It was time to write.
By Marc Basset
Once, in this column, I claimed that a dish I had eaten had tasted like dog food, only without any of the grace notes. I said of another that it would probably taste better coming up than it did going down. I have used words like “effluent” and “slurry,” “contagion” and “toxic scum.” I once called for a chef to be tied to a pole in a market square—any pole, any market square—and pelted with platefuls of his own glutinous mash. I suggested another might like to try grilling one of his own kidneys, to see if he would then treat the poor, maligned organ with a little more respect. Most recently I argued that a chef should face the death penalty for the crimes against cooking of which he was guilty.
I said all of these things partly because I really did hate the dishes I had been served, but mostly because I believed that my job as a restaurant critic was to serve you, the readers, not necessarily by providing information but by presenting you with something readable and entertaining. To judge from my mailbag I had good reason to believe that like the Parisians who crowded about the guillotine, you appreciated these sudden outbursts of violence.
I see now that I was serving you badly. Cruelty may entertain us for a moment, but it is a transitory and, ultimately, feeble pleasure; a tiny one compared to the pleasures of a good meal easily taken. I have concluded I should be finding you fewer cruel jokes and more good meals. And so, from here on, you will no longer find anything negative in this column. If I tell you about a restaurant it is because it is good. If I mention a dish it is because it is worth eating. Life is too short to be wasted on the substandard. I shall, instead, seek out for you only the diamonds in the rough. Which brings me, rather neatly, to the Hanging Cabinet in Smithfield …
I finished with a few rapturous words about my steak and Luke’s oxtail. I printed it out, scribbled Lynne, if you’re sober enough, have a look at this across the top, and went to bed. It was to be the last restaurant review I would write for a very long time.
“He’ll sack you.”
“No he won’t.”
“I’d sack you.”
“You’re not Hunter.”
“No, I’m your girlfriend and I’d still sack you.”
“It’s the hangover talking.”
“It’s the girlfriend talking with assistance from the hangover.”
“Why will he sack me?”
“Because your columns will be boring.”
“What’s boring about good restaurants?”
“Nothing. It’s reviews of them that are boring.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Yes, necessarily. It’s the way you are. You write better when horrible things happen to you. Happiness makes you gauche, at least in print.”
“Maybe that’s the way I was. Maybe I have woken up to nice experiences.”
“This isn’t you, Marc. None of it’s you.”
“Maybe it’s just that you don’t like the idea of me moving on—”
“And what? Discovering yourself? Finding the real you? Listen, if you’re thinking of going for a spot of rebirthing, give me a warning so I can lay down a few towels.”
“All the apologies I’ve made will be worthless if I merely carry on writing nasty reviews. I’ll be creating new victims to whom I’ll need to say sorry. What’s the point of that?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“What d’you mean?”
“You said it. What’s the point of apologizing to people? You asked the question.”
“No, what I said was—”
“You said, ‘What’s the point?’ I heard you and you’re right.”
“It’s about … it’s about sorting through the things I’ve done wrong.”
“No it’s not. It’s about enjoying the purging of guilt. It’s all about you wanting to experience extremes again.”
“Again?”
“You’ve always done it. You pretend to be so cool and still, an emotional dead calm, but really you’re just swinging between the ends of the scale.”
“No I’m not.”
“Absolutely you are. Marc Basset is unattractive. Marc Basset can’t get laid. Marc Basset hates this restaurant, loves that one, is the best writer. Adores his dead father—”
“Lynne!”
“Okay. Unfair. But only a little. You major in self-pity and self-congratulation. Nothing by halves. So now you’re hooked on this apologizing thing because you like the ride. In fact, shall I tell you why you should rewrite this column? Because if you carry on shit-bagging restaurants, that will give you a whole bunch more people to apologize to and you’ll just love that.”
“There’s no point in rewriting it.”
“Why not?”
“The paper already has the copy. I sent it last night.”
“Oh, terrific. Did you also write ‘Please sack me now’ at the bottom? You might as well. In fact, why don’t you email them? Go on. Press the self-destruct button. ‘Dear Robert Hunter, I don’t want my job, Yours sincerely, Marc Basset …’ Marc! Marc, are you listening to me. Marc!”
The television was on in the corner of the room, muted. I had been staring at it studiously as a way of avoiding eye contact with Lynne, but now something really had caught my attention. The news was on, and even though the sound was off I could tell that the item was about the international aid workers being held on the Russian-Georgian border and efforts by their families to get the various governments to do something to secure their release. I had seen the huddle of parents and siblings being interviewed once before: their skin, slack and gray from wor
ry and lack of sleep; the blinking mothers trying not to weep; the tense jaws; the heads tipped attentively toward the interviewer. This time they were standing outside the heavy gray doors of the British Foreign Office on King Charles Street in Whitehall, where presumably they had just met ministers who had tried, and failed, to sound reassuring.
It was not they who interested me. It was the woman advancing up the street behind them toward the entrance who I was looking at, the same woman I thought I had recognized in items from outside the slavery reparations talks in Alabama, days before. This time I really did recognize her. I pointed at the screen.
“Look at the way she’s holding those books out in front of her.”
Lynne turned toward the screen, irritably. I was pointing now. She said, “Who?”
“Her. Coming toward us. Look. It’s her. Don’t you remember? That’s exactly what she used to do at university. The books. Up and in front of her, a bit defensively. Hiding herself—”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is. It’s—”
“So what if it’s her? What difference does it make? It doesn’t make any difference.”
“You know it does. You know what I did to her. You know what happened.”
“You think I’m the person you should be discussing this with?”
“If there’s one person I should say sorry to, it has to be her.”
“Shit, Marc, there’s only so much of this I can take.”
Jennie Sampson. Even just the sound of her name could make me think of myself as repulsive. We were students together in York, where we both studied politics, she intently, me with deliberate casualness. For two years and seven months we barely exchanged a word, even though we were often in small group tutorials together. When we passed each other on campus, we would find ways to look at the ground or the trees or anywhere else but at each other because we had both grown tired of saying only “hello” with a fixed grin. She was intense and earnest, and although she made an effort to indulge the latest fashions, there would always be something—the terribly sensible shoes on her feet, or a beige cardigan worn over a zipper top—which suggested she couldn’t really be bothered with it all. She had a fine narrow nose, delicate lips, and she wore no makeup. I always thought of her as more than just a little pleased with herself.