Eating Crow by Jay Rayner Page A

you finally recognize someone it’s hard to imagine how there was ever a time when you failed to identify them. Watching Jennie stride toward me now, down the wide, empty space of the corridor that led to the Foreign Office entrance hall, she was so very much herself that I felt only foolish. How could I not have recognized her? The carefully designed swish of her loose black trousers and the matching jacket may not have belonged to the Jennie Sampson I once knew. There may now have been a pair of sculptured heels beating out a confident rhythm on the checkerboard stone-tiled floor where once there would have been the silence of flat soles. But none of that interfered with the essentials. She was still recognizably Jennie Sampson, the woman I had humiliated.
    I had turned up unannounced shortly before one on the off chance that she might need to break for lunch. If she hadn’t been available, my great plan—and it really was no more developed than this—was to leave my number in the hope that she might call. I didn’t need to. The receptionist had announced tersely, “Ms. Sampson will be down presently,” and now here she was, hard-faced and businesslike. She reached out to shake my hand, as though I had arrived for a prearranged meeting, and said, “I read your column occasionally. You know your stuff but you are sometimes unnecessarily cruel.”
    “Yes. You’re right. I’m attempting to deal with that. It’s why I—”
    “Walk with me,” she said, looking toward the bright rectangle of daylight beyond the open doorway. “I have a package to deliver.” She lifted a manila envelope held in the crook of her neatly tailored arm, before turning to stride out into the sudden clamor of the busy London street. I rushed to catch up, feeling clumsy and uncomfortable beside her self-containment.
    “As I was saying, it’s why I came.”
    “Yes?” This impatiently.
    “I wanted to talk to you about us—well, me. About what I did to you a long time back.”
    “Go on.”
    “Good. Yes. Right. The thing is, I’ve been thinking back to, you know, our time at York together and the way I—well, I lied about you. It was a horrible, dreadful thing to do, nasty and cruel and thoughtless, and I came here today to see you because I wanted to say sorry. I don’t expect you to accept it just like that, but—”
    “Hmm.”
    “—I still feel it’s the right thing to do.”
    We were walking briskly now, she clearing a path through oncoming pedestrians, her gaze fixed dead ahead, me all but skipping to keep up. I felt like I was trying to sell her something she didn’t need—which was, I suppose, the case.
    “Because there’s no point apologizing if you already know someone’s going to accept it, is there? I mean, it’s got to be for its own sake, hasn’t it?”
    “Yes?”
    “And it doesn’t matter how much time has passed, does it?”
    “No?”
    “The thing is, you know …” I was hunting around, trying to work out exactly what the thing was, when the phrase came to me. “The thing is, there’s no statute of limitations on a hurt.”
    I had walked on a few yards before I realized she had stopped. I turned back to her. Suddenly she was alert.
    “What did you say?”
    “Erm, that there’s no, you know, statute of limitations on …”
    “Yes?”
    “… a hurt.”
    “Did you read that somewhere?”
    “No, I just—”
    “It didn’t come from a law book or—”
    “I just made it up, I’m afraid.”
    “And to be absolutely clear, you’re saying sorry to me?”
    “Well, I’m trying to, yes. That’s the plan.”
    “Apologizing?”
    I shrugged. “I suppose so. I don’t expect you want to hear it, but—”
    “No no no. I do want to hear it. Really.” She seemed excited now, as if she had just caught sight of an item in a shop window she had been trying to find for months. She glanced at her chunky watch and said, “Do you have half an hour to spare? My place is not too far from here, just