Eating Crow by Jay Rayner

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,