Eating Crow by Jay Rayner Page A

furred arteries. Had to have a couple of them bypassed, actually. Ask me nicely I’ll show you the scar.”
    I swallowed some more cake. “Later, perhaps.”
    “And my cholesterol level—well, I tell you if it were an Olympic sport …”
    “You’d have won gold?”
    “Exactly. The doc told me to cut out the booze, the fats, the red meat, the salt. Everything. If I’d still been in the job I would have had no chance at all. Dead. Gone. In memoriam Harold Brennan. You did me a favor. I feel bloody marvelous these days on the new regime. Have done for the past couple of years, actually. Peak of fitness. Enjoying life. Can’t recommend a healthy retirement more highly.”
    “Well, I’m pleased,” I said as I started to attack the second half of my plate.
    “Do you know what my downfall was? I’ll tell you.” He tapped my plate with the tip of his coffee spoon. “It was the desserts. They were my downfall. That would have been a death sentence to me.”
    I lay down my fork, very deliberately, next to the remaining shards of crisp pastry and the thick whorls of cream. I saw in my mind the sudden perforation of an artery and felt queasy for a few seconds.
    “Aren’t you going to finish it?”
    “Don’t think so,” I said. “It’s good, but …”
    “Rich?”
    “Yes, exactly. That.”
    “Probably for the best, dear boy.”
    “Yes.” I pushed the plate away. “So, you’re really not cross with me?” I wanted to get back to the safer ground of our history.
    “No, not at all. Interesting tale. Glad you told it to me. Touched, in fact. But I bear you no ill will.”
    I felt the same warm lightness that had suffused me after my conversation with Fiona Hestridge. I felt relaxed and at peace. I had a distinct sense of having closed up an aged wound.
    Harry Brennan leaned back in his chair. “Good to get things off your chest, I imagine.”
    “You know, it really is,” I said enthusiastically. “I don’t want to make you feel like you were just one on a list, but I’ve made a couple of apologies recently. Well, just the one other, actually. The thing is, it’s a good feeling. A very good feeling. It’s the right thing to do and it even has its own rewards.”
    Harry raised one tangled salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Dear boy, you sound like you have found your religion.”

    “And the thing is, old man Brennan is right. He’s absolutely right. I’ve found something to believe in.”
    “Marc darling, that’s great. I’m pleased for you. But that still doesn’t explain why I come home to find you standing in the middle of the living room wearing only your underpants and smeared with dust and dirt.”
    I looked down at myself. Lynne had a point. It wasn’t the prettiest of sights. “Enthusiasm, I suppose,” I said. “I just wanted to get going.”
    “With what, exactly?”
    “Those.” I pointed at two shabby cardboard boxes on the sofa, their corners reinforced with packaging tape, which I had only recently dragged from the loft. Above us, in the living room’s ceiling, the hatch was open and the smell of old dust and paper hung in the air. “I was wearing a suit and I didn’t want to get it dirty. I couldn’t see any point in putting on jeans just to crap them up so …”
    Behind me the television was on and tuned to a news channel. I turned to watch, distracted by the sound of Lewis Jeffries III. The slavery reparation talks in Alabama had broken up again and a crowd of African-American men, the armpits of their once crisp cotton shirts stained with sweat, were gathered about their delegation leader as he prepared to make a statement to the media.
    “Our search for a way to heal history’s wounds goes on, though they be deep and grievous …”
    “He’s a class act, isn’t he?”
    “Marc!”
    “Hang on a second.”
    “… but until our fellow Americans accept the stain of their past there can be no hope of reconciliation …”
    I walked over and peered at the screen. “I