by Jay Rayner
Luke tried to corral questions, but before he could identify the first speaker a voice called out from the front of the crowd.
“Mr. Basset, do you expect us to believe you when you say you didn’t know you owned three million shares in Caucasia Oil and Gas?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m in a position to expect anything. I can only tell you how it is. I did a really stupid thing and I’m sorry.”
Quickly Luke pulled up the next questioner, an American woman halfway down the room.
“Will you be apologizing to the people of Abkhazia also?”
“I’m hoping this apology will be heard and accepted by the Abkhazians too. But to be honest, I think the best thing I can do after today is just keep quiet.”
“So are you retiring from the apology business?”
“Absolutely.“
Another shouted question: “Mr. Basset, is it true that while Chief Apologist for the UN, you authorized your security detail to harass and intimidate members of the US Women’s Olympic Paraplegic Team after your appearance with U2 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia?”
Luke turned to look at me as if I had just belched offensively. I blinked, swallowed, and leaned down into the microphone. “There was an incident at Veterans Stadium, yes, for which I am very, very sorry. It was a misunderstanding on the part of my security men, who felt I might be under threat. Obviously I’d like to apologize to the women involved for any distress that was caused. It was never my intention that anything like this should happen. I’m really sorry. Really.”
Another question, from the other side of the room: “Mr. Basset, is it true you claimed to be the heir to the legacy of Willy Brandt, the late chancellor of the former West Germany?”
“Pardon?”
“We have a statement from a member of the civilian staff at Dayton Air Force Base in Ohio. He says that on the opening night of the inaugural UNOAR conference held there last year you had a private meeting with Mr. Olson at which you said, quote”—the journalist looked down into his notebook and back up again—“‘I am the new Willy Brandt.’”
I laughed nervously. I could feel the whole room recoiling from me.
“Well, no—I mean, yes, I did say that. But I think it was more of a question.”
“What? You were asking if you could be the next Willy Brandt?”
“No. Yes. Look, it was a weird time and I was under pressure and I was having this conversation with Max—I mean, Mr. Olson—and …” I stopped and attempted to steady myself. “If I have offended anybody, anybody at all, by saying that, then I am, naturally, terribly sorry. I didn’t mean it to be taken wrongly. I was just feeling my way and I thought it was a private meeting and—”
Luke grabbed the microphone from me. “Next question.” He picked out a woman standing at the side of the room and shoved the mike toward me.
“Mr. Basset, is it the case that you cheated on your then girlfriend with two cocktail waitresses from Des Moines, Iowa?”
Luke pulled the microphone back toward him. “Oh yeah, that’s true. He definitely did that.”
I pulled the microphone over to my side once more. “Thank you, Luke.” I turned to the audience. “Yes, I’m afraid something like that did happen …”
Under his breath I heard Luke mutter, “Something exactly like that.”
“… something exactly like that did happen. I suppose the thing is, you know, we all make mistakes in our private lives and those things stay private, but because of how I’ve been employed my life is a little less private than other people’s, so …”
“Are you blaming the young women concerned for revealing what you did?”
“No, no, of course not. All I’m saying is, I didn’t think through the consequences. It was a terrible thing to do, and you know, I welcome the opportunity to apologize here to all involved and I hope they’re able to hear my words of regret and, well, I’m sorry.”
I sat back and folded my hands in my lap. I was exhausted and the press conference had only been going ten minutes. I felt ambushed, overrun, drained, defeated. And there was still more to come. This time, it was a male French voice.
“Monsieur Bassay—”
“Basset,” I corrected.
“Monsieur Basset, the French government has announced that its ambassador to the United Nations will be proposing a motion to the General Assembly next week calling for the disbandment of the United Nations Office of Apology and Reconciliation. They say your activities have brought it into disrepute and they are proposing its replacement by the Nation-State Psychotherapy Unit being piloted in Vienna. How do you comment?”
“I, er, I know some of the people—well, one of the people involved in the psychotherapy project—and it’s very promising and it’s doing lots of good work. But I’d hate to think that UNOAR would come to an end just because of a few mistakes I made—” There was a short laugh of disbelief from the room. “Okay, okay, because of the many mistakes I have made. I think we did some great work at UNOAR and I think it has the potential to do much more.”
A British journalist this time. “We’re hearing from New York that Professor Thomas Schenke has issued a statement in which he calls you, and this is a direct quote, ‘a lazy, feeble-minded shyster who has destroyed the good name of Penitential Engagement purely in the interests of greed.’ What do you have to say?”
Now I was cross. “Oh, come on! Schenke’s a madman. He’s deranged, psychotic. You can’t listen to a word he has to say.”
“So your only response is to call the founding father of one of the most influential political movements of modern times a madman?”
I barked into the microphone, “Have you met Schenke?”
Luke pulled it away from me again. “Last question, please.” He pointed to a man waving his arms furiously up by the public-address system control desk. “Mr. Basset, sir …” Another American journalist, his speech gilded with his country’s common courtesies. “Mr. Basset, sir, Lewis Jeffries III of the African-American Slavery Reparations Committee, he’s just made a statement to the media in Louisiana.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, if it’s okay by you, sir, we already have a recording here.” He looked down to a technician sitting on the floor at his side, leaning over a laptop. “It’s downloaded?” The man nodded. “Sir, we have the feed here and we could put it through the PA system for you to listen to and—”
I sat back and raised my arms as if to say, “Whatever.” The crowd hushed and they each turned an ear toward the nearest speakers, which crackled and fussed with digital static. Jeffries’ voice boomed out down the hall.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I had hoped never to have need to make this statement,” he said, “but I have concluded that in the present circumstances to withhold the truth would be to further amplify the offense of which I am talking today.” I closed my eyes and waited out one of Jeffries’ dense theatrical pauses, for what I knew was to come. He sighed deeply, as if the weight of history were on his shoulders. And then: “It is with great regret that I must tell you today that the apology for the Atlantic slave trade made on behalf of the Federal Government of the United States and other colonial powers by the Chief Apologist of the United Nations here at Welton-Oaks was not Mr. Basset’s own work.” There was a gasp from the room, followed by a quick burst of shushing so that not a word should be missed. “Mr. Basset did present an apology, but it was neither robust enough nor elegant enough for the purposes of the process with which we were engaged, and for the sake of that process, I wrote the apology myself.” Another gasp. “Mr. Basset just wasn’t up to the job. It is, I fear, in the nature of the relationship between African-Americans and the rest of the US that we should be required to draft our own apology for the hurt we have suffered at their hands, but I hope, indeed trust, that now that a settlement has been reached, we may as a people be able to move on from the sorry charade over which Mr. Marc Basset has presided.”
There was a little
more static hiss as the recording came to an end. I opened my eyes. The room was silent. The photographers had lowered their cameras and were staring at me. The reporters were staring at me. Luke was staring at me.
Slowly I bowed my head over the microphone. “What can I tell you? I’m just so bloody sorry.”
There was a second’s silence before a voice from somewhere in the hall boomed out, “Who wrote that apology for you, Basset?” and the Lancaster room exploded into mocking, exclusive laughter. I pushed myself back from the table and watched as, shaking their heads at the idiocy of it all, at the constant, charming ability of the world to confound their expectations, the press corps rose as one and left the room. So this is how it really ends, I thought, here in this grand room with its mirrored doors and its fussy lighting and its row upon row of emptying chairs. Next to me Luke stood up. He looked down at me, opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it as if he had thought better of it. He shook his head and walked away.
It was, I suppose, inevitable. I had made my name, and my fortune, by saying sorry, and I had said it with such intensity and to so many people and so often that eventually nobody wanted to believe me anymore. No one could be that sorry. No one ever was. Not even Marc Basset.
Soon the journalists had departed to file their reports, leaving behind the camera operators to coil up their cables and the sound boys to unplug their microphones. There was just one person left sitting at the back of the phantom audience, her head down. I stood up and walked through the vacant aisles to sit down next to her. I stared up at the podium.
“Well,” I said quietly, “that went okay.”
Lynne nodded. “It could have been worse.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, sure. They could have stormed the front and ripped you limb from limb.”
“That’s true. There was no limb rippage.”
She smiled. “Indeed. No limb rippage.” She looked around the room, now being emptied of its chairs by Savoy staff.
I said, “Luke tells me you’re seeing someone else.”
She shook her head. “He had little hips. I could never waste too much time on a man with little hips.”
“Right.” And then: “Thank you for coming.”
“You know me. Always one for a good show.”
“Yes.”
“You hungry?”
“I’m starving.”
“Come on.”
She hailed a cab from the front of the hotel and told the driver to take us to our old flat in Maida Vale, and I didn’t question her. Inside she led me to the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and retrieved two bottles of a fine New Zealand sauvignon blanc.
“Two bottles?”
“You’ll need one to cook with,” she said, and she reached further into the fridge to retrieve a hunk of pancetta and a net bag of clams. “There’s Parmesan and flat-leaf parsley in the bottom of the fridge and you know where the dried chili and garlic are.”
She left the room and I went to work. I heated the olive oil and threw in the flakes of chili and, while they were cooking, chopped up the pancetta into small bite-sized pieces. I added them to the oil too, where they writhed and bucked pleasurably in the smoking oil. When the bacon fat was almost rendered and crisp and golden brown, I threw in a crushed garlic clove and followed that with the white wine, which fizzed and offered up an impressive sheet of blue flame which soon dissipated.
Finally, I tore open the little net and I threw in the clams, which rocked in the simmering liquor and slowly began to open until they were smiling up at me and at last I was content and in control. I knew what I was doing and how the cooking process would end. What’s more, I had done nothing for which I needed to apologize in at least the last half hour. I was guilt free. I was making dinner. I was home.
Epilogue
There is one last thing you should know: I have lied to you. I would like to claim it was a small lie, but if I’m honest—and I am trying to be—the size of the falsehood doesn’t matter. The fact is, Lynne didn’t take me back to the flat at the end of the press conference and I didn’t cook her dinner. We went to some small, bog-standard trattoria in Covent Garden and ate mediocre pasta. I told her how bad I felt about everything and she observed me as if I were some naughty schoolboy who had finally admitted his sins. At the end of the evening we went our separate ways.
I suppose I wanted to give you an ending less dripping in pathos, a sense that not all was lost, and in my attempt to do so, I tumbled into fantasy. Of course you would be entitled now to wonder what else I have lied about, to question whether I am an unreliable narrator, but I think we all know that I’ve told the rest of it as it happened. The story hardly does me any favors, and even the lie I told didn’t ring true. How would my dad have described Lynne? A sensible girl. She’s not the type to just take me back, is she?
It seems I am not terribly gifted when it comes to manipulating people’s opinions of me. The day after the press conference, for example, I issued a statement saying I would be donating every penny I had earned from the Caucasia contract to the Free Abkhazia Campaign. I thought this would do my image no end of good. Unfortunately, I didn’t earn anything. Rashenko declared that by speaking out, I had breached the confidentiality clause in my ORB contract. He then siphoned off all the funds, dissolved the company, and went to live with his therapist in a dacha outside Moscow. Apparently he’s very happy these days.
Meanwhile I’m doing okay. I’ve started writing the occasional restaurant review for Hunter, who is, I think, endlessly amused by the way things turned out. And I still see Lynne. We meet up for dinner every now and then (she says she wants to get some meat back on my bones) and she told me a few nights ago that I wasn’t a total idiot, so there may be hope for us yet.
As to the lie I told you, well, I know what I should do now. It is the thing I am most qualified to do, isn’t it? The one thing at which I am practiced. But will you understand if I say I no longer have the stomach for it? That the luster has gone? I think I’ve said the S word enough for all of us over the past year or so. I’ve certainly said it enough for me. So I’m hoping I don’t have to say it again. I’m hoping you’ll be understanding if it’s not the last word on this page. I’m hoping you’ll give me a break. Tell me I don’t have to say it again. I don’t have to say it again. Do I?
Acknowledgments
Although this is a work of fiction not everything in it is invented. Most of the dishes on the chocolate menu in chapter 29 are real and the chefs responsible must get the credit. The white chocolate and caviar buttons and the chocolate delice with popping candy with which the meal begins and ends are to be found at Heston Blumenthal’s remarkable restaurant The Fat Duck, at Bray in Berkshire. I was advised on the game, chocolate, and chili soup by Henry Harris of Racine, 239 Brompton Road, London SW3, although he serves nothing like it, preferring instead his own brand of classy French country cooking. The lobster with cocoa powder is available at Vineet Bhatia’s groundbreaking Indian restaurant Zaika, 1 Kensington High Street, London W8. The roast venison in a chocolate sauce is similar to, if not exactly the same as, a dish served at London’s only establishment with three Michelin stars, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, 68 Royal Hospital Road, London SW3.
Marc’s favorite chocolatier, L’Artisan du Chocolat, is to be found at 89 Lower Sloane Street, London SWl, and the salt caramels are as good as he says they are. The Chocolate Loft, home of Garrison Chocolates, is located at 119 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011. Sandor’s, which supplies the stocks for Lewis Jeffries’ meal in chapter 20, is at 2984 South County Highway 395, Santa Rosa Beach, FL 32459. The Destin Seafood Market, which supplies the scallops, is not far away from Sandor’s at 9 Calhoun Avenue, Destin, FL 32541. The Houston branch of Central Market mentioned in chapter 20 is to be found at 3815 Westheimer, though there are others across the state. The Cock Tavern, where Marc and Luke have breakfast in the last chapter, is on East Poultry Avenue by London’s Smithfield Market and is
one of the few pubs in the city licensed to sell beer from 6:30 AM. All other restaurants mentioned or reviewed are fictional.
I would also like to thank: members of egullet.com’s Southeastern US bulletin board for advice on food suppliers in the region; Steven A. Shaw for gastronomic directions around New York; Julian Barnes for his thoughts on wines; Simon and Robin Majumdar for the napkin test (it’s not much but it is theirs); Sam Daws and Carne Ross for their knowledge of the United Nations; Fergal Keane and Jonathan Freedland for their understanding of Bill Clinton’s trip to Rwanda; Marina Warner for her work on the culture of the international apology; Claire Rayner for her medical knowledge. Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation was the source on the early days of McDonald’s, mentioned briefly in chapter 13.
Gary Younge and Maureen Mills read the manuscript and made incisive comments. They are not, however, responsible for any of its contents. My agents, Pat Kavanagh at PFD and Sam Edenborough and Nicki Kennedy at ILA, both in London, and Joy Harris in New York, were always enthusiastic and supportive. I was cheered on by all my editors but particularly fortunate to have in Toby Mundy of Atlantic Books an editor of rare precision and tact. He showed me how to make this a much better book than it might otherwise be. He also didn’t blame me when he experienced food poisoning after we went for dinner one night to a place of my choosing.
Finally, my wife, Pat Gordon Smith, not only put up with my moods but read every chapter as it was written, told me how to improve it, and poured the wine when it became necessary, which was often. I couldn’t have done it without her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jay Rayner is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster who is now the London Observer’s restaurant critic. He is married and lives in London.