Was or would have been?

Hello, some days ago a native speaker didn't attend a meeting with
me because he was sick, then he sent me an email, one of whose
lines was:

"I hated to miss the meeting, but I don't think I was very helpful."

I felt really confused about this line.
Then I realized that he meant that, as he was sick,
if he had attended he wouldn't have been useful.

Being an esl student, I'm still confused about the right way of
saying this. Could help me with this?

==============

Hi Jezabel,

"would have been" seems the more sensible of the two but as I'm not privy to the complete context I can't say for sure. This person may have been referring to something else. If you ask anybody around here, they'll tell you that I always stress, "context context context". Language can be virtually opaque when you don't know the context.