Eating Crow

by Jay Rayner

  “Passive empathizing?”

  “These folk, they’re worried they’ll start having feelings just by being near you.”

  “So?” Jenny said, rocking back on her heel again.

  “You know how it is. It’s about the money. They wanna raise—like we don’t all want one of those. So anyway, none of them will come in here till management sorts them out. In the meantime, it’s just you, me, and Alice and Francine here.”

  We all stared at each other in silence. Francine stepped forward.

  “Mr. Basset, can I say how much I loved the video of your apology? I’m just so looking forward to seeing you emote in person.”

  On my first full day in New York, instead of going to the office, I started walking the streets, and late that afternoon I found the Matterhorn Café. I went there every evening after that and ordered the same thing—fondue, salad, a carafe of white Jura—until on the fourth night the waitress didn’t even give me the menu but simply said “The same?” and I nodded. I snatched a couple of mobile phone conversations with Jennie—she had handed us each a new mobile at the airport—but she was always brisk and businesslike. She told me she was “getting to the bottom of things” and that I should “get settled in.” Will Masters called me once, to check a couple of details on my contract, and Satesh phoned to see whether I wanted to take in some new Finnish movie with him, at an art house on the Upper East Side. I told him no thanks, I was getting enough gloom and angst at work. He laughed and said everything would be sorted out soon enough.

  On that fourth night at the Matterhorn, just after my fondue had been placed on the burner in front of me, Jennie appeared at my side. She was wearing jeans and no makeup and her hair was pulled back and tied with a simple black velvet band. It was like seeing your teacher outside school.

  “I didn’t think fondue would be your kind of thing.”

  “A fine dish,” I said, skewering the first piece of bread. “You want to?” She sat down and they brought us another fork. She leaned into the steam. “It smells pretty good.”

  “Over the past few days I have come to consider the fondue the height of gastronomic endeavor.”

  “How so?”

  “You look at this bowl. What’s in it? At base nothing more than grapes and milk. If you broke it down to its constituent parts you would have just a bunch of grapes and a big jug of milk on the table. But happily some genius has gone to all the trouble of turning those grapes into wine and that milk into cheese. Imagine life without cheese. Can you? Can you imagine life without cheese?”

  “I can imagine life without Edam.”

  “Oh sure. And we could probably lose that weird smoked German stuff in the plastic skin.”

  “Anything that’s been processed, actually.”

  “Of course. But apart from those—could you imagine a world without cheese?”

  “No. No, I couldn’t.”

  “Exactly. And then what happens? Someone comes up with a glorious plan to combine these two ingredients which are themselves the pinnacle of culinary invention, to create yet another dish. The fondue is indulgence squared.”

  I dunked a piece of bread deep into the fondue and felt it take on the weight of the molten cheese. Quickly, before the bread fragmented and dropped away to be lost in the depths, I put it in my mouth and whipped it off the fork. Jennie watched me eat.

  “You can be a real nerd sometimes,” she said. “You know that?”

  “Thank you. For a long while I have only aspired to nerd-dom. Now I appear to have achieved it.”

  We ate in silence for a minute.

  “They’ve settled the dispute,” she said.

  “That’s good news.”

  “The first admin officers started moving in this afternoon. A new desk plan for the delegations has already been drawn up.”

  “Excellent.” I dragged another piece of cheese-clogged bread out of the bowl.

  “I thought you’d like to know.”

  “I do.” I was about to plunge another piece of bread into the pot, when a thought occurred to me. I lifted my fork and pointed it at Jennie, accusingly. “How the hell did you know where I was?”

  She smiled. “We had you tailed,” she said. “For your own safety.”

  “You what?”

  “Alex and Franky here,” she said, nodding over my shoulder. “Your security detail.” I turned around. The man at the bar in the loud checked jacket and the crew-cut guy in the booth with the magazines grinned at me and each raised a hand in salute. I managed a feeble wave back.

  “You had me followed?”

  “You’re an emotional bloke, Marc. That’s why you got the job. I knew this would be a stressful few days, but I didn’t have time to baby-sit you, so—”

  “I didn’t need baby-sitting.”

  “Of course not. That’s why Alex and Franky have been employed to keep an eye on you, just to check everything is fine.” She leaned in toward me. “You’re an important man now, Marc. We have to take great care of you.”

  I slumped back in my seat. “Is this what the new job means?”

  “You’ll get used to it. And Franky and Alex are great guys. You’ll like them. Trust me.”

  “So what happens now?” Languidly I skewered another piece of bread. Fondue may well have been the pinnacle of gastronomic achievement but it was also getting boring.

  “There’s a big file on your desk. Tomorrow morning you go in to your lovely big corner office and you start reading.”

  “Yeah? What’s the file about?”

  “Oh, you know. Your family’s total complicity in the creation and maintenance of the US slave trade.”

  “Aaah, that,” I said, and pulled the bread off the fork.

  Sixteen

  Chocolate has played an important part in my life. It has comforted and reassured me. It has focused and fattened me. It has indulged me. And one afternoon, many years ago, chocolate almost helped me kill my brother.

  It was another dull Sunday, a few months after the annoying heehaw incident, and our parents had been foolish enough to leave us alone together for a few hours. They thought we were now friends. They thought that, at base, we approved of each other. But how could we? Remember: Luke was nine; I was eleven. We were of different species. Still, for the first half hour we managed a certain peaceful coexistence, like two ancient enemies who can’t even be bothered to rattle the sabers anymore. He sprawled on the sofa in front of the television while I turned my attention to the high mantelpiece on the other side of the living room and the Lady Bountiful that stood upon it.

  The Lady Bountiful was a box. It still is. The joints are half-lap, as befits a casket made around 1796. It is a foot square and it is fashioned of thickly waxed, blackened oak. In the middle of the tightly fitting hinged lid is an oval silver plaque. It bears the legend William Welton-Smith in a pinched italic. Beneath that are the words The Lady Bountiful. This, my mother told me, was the name of a great merchant ship of which her ancestor William had been owner. The vessel was wrecked in 1794 off the coast of South Carolina, a little north of Sullivan’s Island. According to the story, William Welton-Smith had considered the Lady Bountiful to be the foundation of his great fortune and felt its loss keenly. To commemorate its part in his making he salvaged just enough of the oak deck to make this box. It had been passed down through the family to my mother’s uncle, her father’s elder brother, who in turn bequeathed it to his niece.

  I recall her using it, at first, as a jewelry box, although it was no place for valuables. There was a lock on the front but the key had long ago been lost. Inside she padded it with small, self-stitched linen bags of kapok and overlaid these with a lining of purple satin, tacked into the base. Much of her modest collection of jewelry—some fine-link silver bracelets, a delicate gold chain with a teardrop of amber as a pendant—lay free upon the satin bed. Other pieces—rings, brooches, a pearl necklace—were encased within separate boxes that then went into the Lady Bountiful. I came to associate
the smell of that open casket, the mustiness of a dusty cupboard overlaid by the floweriness of the heavy wax, with nighttime glamor, for it was opened only when my parents were preparing to go out for the evening. I now know that some of the aroma was the slick of perfume that she would apply before choosing her jewelry and which would cling to the necklaces when she had taken them off, but to me it was all of apiece.

  One Christmas my father gave my mother a new jewelry box of burgundy leather which held special compartments for bracelets and ridged cushions for rings. There was even a lock on the front, the key to which she placed on her key ring. The Lady Bountiful now became free for another purpose. The padding and the satin were removed and it was lined instead with that year’s leftover tissue-thin Christmas wrapping paper.

  Then it was filled with chocolate. And so it began. Occasionally something of quality would find its way in there: a few rectangles of buttery Italian praline wrapped in greaseproof-lined gold paper, or a cellophane bag of misshapen truffles heavily dusted with a bitter cocoa powder the color of rust, both gifts from clients of Dad’s who saw in his Alpine chalet designs the exotica of what was still then called “the Continental” (as in “Continental breakfast” or “Continental quilt”). But for the most part the box contained what I would later come to call, dismissively, Civilian Chocolate. There were bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with the minimum cocoa solids needed to keep them in one piece at room temperature. There were the glucose overload of Mars bars, small bags of Maltesers, the loose contents of a tin of Quality Street, their garish wrappers a more potent reminder of Christmas than the lining paper could ever be.

  The thing I remember most about the Lady Bountiful was its fullness, for Dad appeared to refill the box more quickly than Mum ever allowed it to be emptied. (It was a long time before I clocked that he was attacking the contents every night after we went to bed and refilling from a private store he kept in his desk.) It would come down off the mantelpiece irregularly, usually on Sunday evenings as some sort of consolation for the impending threat of school the next day, but even then its pleasures would be rationed. Mum would say, “Only three, Marcel,” and as my hand slipped inside she would reach out to squeeze my growing love handles, unfairly accentuated by the action of me needing to bow down to peer inside because she held it so close to her. “Just like your papa,” she would say, with a shake of the head, so that the chocolate also became a guilty consolation for some small token of motherly humiliation.

  To be left alone that Sunday afternoon was to be offered unchallenged access. While Luke sprawled, I dragged over a chair from the kitchen table and brought the Lady Bountiful down onto the ancient rug. I killed a Mars bar first, then a packet of Maltesers. Next I broke off a few chunks of Dairy Milk, and then a few more. Every now and then I looked up at Luke who was desperately trying to ignore me. He could sense danger here. Yes, I was the one breaking the rules, but somehow he suspected that, no matter what he did, it would rebound upon him. (Well, of course—he was my younger brother. He had “fall guy” written all over him.) I finished the bar of Dairy Milk, unwrapped some of the Quality Street, particularly the square ones with the liquid-soft caramel centers, stuffed them in my mouth, and threw him a bag of Maltesers. I needed allies and he was the only other person in the room—Luke had to eat. He lobbed them back at me unopened and returned to staring at the television. I chucked them back to him; he back to me. I weighed the bag in my hand. I chucked it up in the air a couple of times to feel its unexpected weight. Then I threw it back again, but hard, with a serious flick of the wrist, so that it crashed into the side of his head with a stinging crack. I imagined the little balls of chocolate-coated honeycomb shattering within the bag, a contained explosion of crisp recrystallized sugar. He yelped, pressed one shocked hand to the side of his head, and burst into tears. I grinned at him.

  Now he was upon me, a simple leap of unexpected grace. This was nothing like the kitchen table lunge. That had been a dam-burst of uncontrolled psychotic rage. This was lithe and focused, and I, weighed down by a stomachful of dissolving chocolate, was immediately thrown back onto the floor where my head cracked against the place where the rug ended and the floorboards began. From that point onward the afternoon could only end badly. We were both hurt and fighting for survival. I lay dazed for a second, and then, using what little energy had not been sapped by the effort of digestion, righted myself and lunged at him. Luke did the only thing he could in the face of my size advantage, rolling onto his back and kicking out with one shoeless foot, but for once I was too quick for him. I dodged the foot and the moment his leg reached full stretch, leapt up and straddled him.

  Luke’s legs were irrelevant now. He could kick all he liked but he could not reach even the hollow of my back, and with my knees pinning his arms to the floor, he could not hit me either. All he could do was scream but I knew a way to deal with that too. The unopened bag of Maltesers lay just a few inches away. I picked it up and ripped it open with my teeth while my other hand took hold of his jaw and wrenched his mouth open.

  “Eat them, you little dickweed!” I shouted. “Eat them!” And with one deft action, emptied the entire contents of the bag into his mouth, the shiny chocolate balls spilling deep and sudden into the froth-flecked cavity. He tried to say something, but all except the most guttural of noises was swiftly smothered, so that he could only stare at me bug-eyed and arch his head upward at me imploringly. I grinned at him again. Job done.

  It was a good minute before I realized he was choking. He had managed to push some of the Maltesers out of his mouth with his honeycomb-crusted tongue so that now I could hear the hard rasp from the very depths of his throat as he fought for air. But it was the way the veins on his neck stood proud and erect that finally told me something was wrong. His neck looked muscular and developed. Nine-year-old boys do not have muscular and developed necks. Would that not be a stupid way to go? Killed by a Malteser?

  I rolled off him.

  “Luke, are you …?”

  He bucked onto his side, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, tears running down his cheeks, his whole head jerking upward with the effort of trying to clear his windpipe of the mash of confectionery. The color was draining from his cheeks.

  “Luke, speak …” I knew now that the situation was serious but my vital intelligence went no further. All I had was a clatter of images harvested from the limited range of information offered by early 1980s British television (the television which was still talking to itself, oblivious to the real drama unfolding on the carpet in front of it).

  So I did what I had seen done. I turned Luke over onto his front, reached underneath him to clasp my hands about his chest, and then squeezed him to me with as big a wrench as I could manage. He writhed in my arms, limbs uncontrolled and loose. Once. Twice. Three times. And then, with a huge barking cough, the coagulated ball of half-dissolved chocolate and fractured honeycomb and a few whole Maltesers shot out of his mouth and landed with a deadened splat on the carpet. Luke let out a deep, weary sigh and fell forward, gasping, onto the floor.

  I brought him water to drink. I loosened his clothes, and when he still appeared drowsy I helped him upstairs, undressed him, and put him to bed. Downstairs I cleaned the carpet and hid the evidence—those empty chocolate wrappers—in the trash can outside and returned the Lady Bountiful to its place on the mantelpiece. Occasionally I looked in on Luke but he was soon asleep, and when my parents returned, as day faded into evening, I told them my younger brother had suddenly fallen ill. My mother took over then, flitting up and down the stairs, taking temperatures and drinks, and all that evening I sat curled in the corner of the sofa, eyes fixed on the television screen, waiting for the call from upstairs which would announce the game was up, but it never came. Later that night while my mother was again upstairs, Dad looked inside the Lady Bountiful. He saw that it had been pillaged and challenged me on it and I quickly confessed to that minor crime, grateful for the opportunity to confess to anything at a
ll. He nodded gently and said, “Better for special occasions,” and never mentioned it again.

  Luke never said a word about what happened that afternoon either. I was grateful to him for his silence and that was the key. In that moment when I rolled off him and pulled him to me and dislodged the wedge of confectionery that was killing him, I think we recognized something about each other: that we were all we had. On more than one occasion after that I took the rap for his crimes, and I always looked out for him at school. It was why that particular insult didn’t need an apology. All the sorries had been said, however silently, and Luke knew it. The next Sunday and any Sunday after that when the Lady Bountiful came down off the mantelpiece, I abandoned my seniority and let him go first. After his experience that afternoon I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had turned away from the contents of the box altogether, but he was still a nine-year-old boy and it was still chocolate.

  The Lady Bountiful had taken on another layer of significance. All families have stupid secrets, secret because they are so stupid, and the rituals around the Lady Bountiful were one of ours. We were the Bassets and we ate chocolate because Dad was Swiss. And it was kept in a box that was made from a ship that had been owned by one of Mum’s ancestors. And chocolate in that box had almost helped me kill my brother but had ended up bringing us closer together. When I set up the Vice Drawer in my desk at the flat I was trying both to sate an appetite and re-create a fragment of my childhood. It was my tribute to the Lady Bountiful. After Dad died, the box stood untouched for months, as if to open and eat from it were to somehow forget that he had gone, until one spring morning Mum, in a quiet rage, snatched it from the mantelpiece and threw the moldering contents in the bin and ripped out the lining so that it crumpled in a shower of discolored paper from that Christmas so many years before. She took to storing postcards and letters in there from friends, from family, and eventually, once we had left home, from Luke and me. I found it hugely comforting that it still played a role in the story of my family.