The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  “Oh, come on,” Ruth had said when they discussed advance publicity for Dispatches, “an interview with the most respected magazine in the land? In the comfort of your own home? Where’s the harm in that? And in publicity terms it’s infinitely better than a double-page advert.”

  Cheaper, too. So Honor had capitulated. But she knew it was a mistake. On the few occasions in her life that she had consented to be interviewed, she had never admitted any reporter to her home. Even the most well-disposed journalist would regard the flat and its contents as her psyche’s porthole, curtainless and illuminated in the dark. The South Bank Show conversation with Melvyn had been filmed at the London Library, where she had previously agreed—in a moment of reckless narcissism, justly rewarded by the photograph itself (a Halloween fright mask in hell’s reading room)—to pose for Vogue.

  Hotels, impersonal no-man’s-lands, stripped of signs and souvenirs, were best for these encounters. The most energetically malevolent reporter would find it hard to take you to task for the blandness of the interior decoration, the stains on the sofa or the musty smell pervading your room. Even then, in a corporate suite of beige leather and chrome, where the only indigenous books were the Gideon Bible and the Yellow Pages, you could be caught out, like poor John Updike. She had written him a note of sympathy after one newspaper interviewer had spotted a discarded pair of underpants under a chair in his hotel room and went on in her article to use the white briefs as a metaphor for what she considered to be the casual, masculine attitude to sex reflected in Updike’s fiction. It was the priggishness Honor had abhorred. Here in her flat, at least, thanks to the maid, there would be no underwear on view.

  It was an old technique: alight on an apparently insignificant object and use it to construct a catchpenny psychological case history of its owner. How else to sum up a life on the evidence of an hour’s conversation and a little legwork in the cuttings library? Honor had resorted to the practice more than once herself, particularly when the interviewee was unforthcoming. Every tchotchke tells a story. Even in the newest New Journalism, some things never change. She recalled her own blood-sport thrill when she had spotted the netsuke mule on MacArthur’s bureau in Tokyo; a playbill for a Max Miller burlesque in Beckett’s Montparnasse redoubt; the copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets by Mme Chiang Kai-shek’s hospital bedside; and the signed photograph of Ida Lupino in de Gaulle’s austere wartime office in Carlton Gardens.

  Could her own photographs, still on the bookcase and on the walls where Tad had first placed them, withstand such scrutiny? One black-and-white shot showed her as a young war reporter, lithe as a lioness and chic in fatigues among the grinning doomed boys before Normandy. Next to it was the iconic image, for Collier’s, sitting with Franco, newly appointed commandant general of the Canary Islands. Above the waist she was primly professional, her notebook and pen raised in a posture of exaggerated attentiveness, like a thirties stenographer. “Take a letter, Miss Tait.” Below she was all showgirl. Her long tanned legs, in tailored shorts and high-heeled sandals, looked as if they were on temporary loan from the Ziegfeld Follies. The picture was syndicated all over the world. “The Newsroom Dietrich,” they had called her. All on the record. All part of the myth. Nothing could be done about that now.

  The doctored paparazzi shot of the candlelit dinner—a fund-raiser for the Progressive Party—might be more contentious. In its unexpurgated form, with Sinatra by her side, whispering in her ear, it certainly had been at the time. He was married but openly dating Ava Gardner when the picture was taken, and the gossip pages had been exultant, though with the sycophantic tone of those more innocent days; mortals enviously ogling the sport of gods. Now the mortals were in the ascendancy and the gods in the stocks, pelted with rotten vegetables. She lifted the photograph from its hook and held it in her hands, admiring—yes, why not admit it?—the way the light fell across her shoulders, illuminating her gardenia corsage. The blooms were as soft and dewy as her guileless young face, apparently caught in a state of precoital deliquescence. How the camera lies, and sometimes in our favour. She had been a matron by the standards of the time; she had hit thirty, with one war, one miserable marriage and several ill-advised romantic liaisons behind her. Two further wars—three, if you counted Algeria—lay just round the corner. She had been in no mood for that kind of evening—her old friend Lois, then working for the Henry Wallace campaign, had strong-armed her—and Honor had been irritated to find that the seating plan had twinned her not with Alvin Tilley, a progressive playwright, one of the Hollywood Eleven, but with the kitsch crooner Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, too, clearly had other plans for the evening, though he had been civil. His murmured proposition, as recorded by the camera, was actually a conversation about the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.

  Two decades later Tad, in another squall of jealousy, had cut the picture in half, removing the singer, with his fallen-seraph smile, as well as the encircling photographers and fans. The original unedited picture was still in circulation, owned by one of the big agencies, and had been used in the recent documentary. Posterity, savagely capricious, had kept Sinatra’s forty-watt gifts ablaze in the public imagination, while numberless brighter talents had been extinguished. Might Honor’s interviewer, the bathetically named Tamara Sim, recognise this version in her hands as bowdlerised and conclude that Honor, a thwarted lover perhaps, had taken the scissors to the photograph herself? Could it set the girl off on a false trail? Honor had no wish to encourage any prurience from The Monitor, or its Sunday magazine.

  On the brink of a new millennium, and despite their journalists’ shambolic private lives, drink problems and drug habits, despite the widespread commodification of the most arcane sexual practices, newspapers faced with any story of the mildest marital impropriety still responded like Edwardian spinsters confronting their first flasher. Honor was permitting this newspaper to invade her privacy only up to a point, and for one purpose only: to sell the wretched book. Or, more precisely, to make money and pay some bills. Best to be safe. The photograph should go. Clutching it, breathless again, she turned back to her chair. She must sit down.

  Seven miles away in Hornsey, in a narrow street of subdivided semis, Tamara Sim sat in the perpetual dusk of her basement flat squinting into a mirror. Lipsticks were scattered like spent shells on the dressing table, and there was an artist’s battery of cosmetic brushes at her elbow as she applied her makeup with the infinite care of a girl about to embark on her first date. Which in a way she was.

  When the editor of The Monitor’s prestigious S*nday magazine had sent a message asking Tamara if she would interview Honor Tait, she had replied instantly.

  “Of course! Old-school journalistic heroine!! I’d LOVE to do her!!! …” Tamara’s response began.

  In fact she had been surprised to learn that the legendary reporter was still alive. Her knowledge of Tait’s oeuvre was limited—a piece on the wife of a Chinese dictator from the 1950s had been a set text in Tamara’s Media Studies course. According to the lecturer, Tait had borrowed a nurse’s uniform, bluffed her way into a hospital where the old woman was being treated and spent an hour at her bedside. The interview itself was as dry and uncompelling as a broadsheet leader, and Tamara got through her finals without actually reading it in its entirety.

  Chinese history, or history of any sort, had never much appealed to her. Nor, for that matter, had old-school journalistic heroines. In-depth profiles of elderly writers were not her usual beat, and the deadline—three weeks—was tight. But she had been exhilarated by Lyra Moore’s terse proposal, sent via the office computer, that she “write 4,000 words on Honor Tait’s life and work, deadline 19 Feb for S*nday issue of 30 March, to coincide with Tait’s 80th birthday and publication of her new book.”

  Tamara worked four days a week on The Monitor as a freelance subeditor and occasional writer for Psst!, the paper’s Saturday celebrity gossip and TV listings magazine—a leering lout to S*nday’s snooty metaphysician. The world described in
the primary-coloured pages of Psst!, peopled by sex-addicted soap stars and feuding boy bands, footballers’ anorexic molls and drug-taking TV hosts, was as remote from the intellectual aristocrats of S*nday as was Pluto, in both its planetary and Disney incarnations. Lyra Moore’s magazine, irreproachably elegant and cerebral, was regarded as the British riposte to The New Yorker, with the added appeal of pictures. Its pages, soft and slippery as silk, had most recently hosted a meditation on medieval aesthetics by Umberto Eco, a disquisition on Kierkegaard by George Steiner and an essay by Susan Sontag on the potency of the Polaroid, accompanied by instant photographs—mysterious, personal and touchingly ill-composed—taken one day last March by the recently besieged citizens of Sarajevo. All three writers were strangers to Tamara and, though she did her best to tackle their contributions to S*nday, she felt no compulsion to pursue their acquaintance by reading their books. Never mind the inclination, where would she find the time?

  She decided against the vampish slash of red lipstick—it accentuated her incipient cold sore—wiped her mouth with tissue, and opted for frosted pink. She had to look the part today. Groomed but unthreatening. A knee-length navy bias-cut skirt and matching jacket, white cotton blouse, beige trench coat and low-heeled court shoes—the sort of unexceptional outfit Princess Diana might wear on an official visit to a children’s hospital.

  Tamara knew this commission was going to be a trial of endurance, requiring a long interview and the obligation to write it up, at considerable length and in polysyllabic words, within a bracingly brief span of time. Four thousand words would, she was aware, be a struggle for someone more used to turning in a two-sentence caption story, a twelve-line list or a two-paragraph column on celebrity mishaps. Her occasional interviews might run to eight hundred words, and she had been called on to produce two pieces of a thousand words each—a chequebook job with a transsexual lap dancer who claimed to have slept with a children’s TV presenter, and an exposé of the drug-taking teenage son of a senior policeman—for The Sunday Sphere. But four times that length?

  A great deal of typing would be involved, not to mention research.

  It was daunting, but a commission from Lyra Moore was the highest compliment any journalist could be paid. Five years after the launch of S*nday, its title was still uttered with quiet reverence, despite occasional stumbles over the typographic tic. Snobs admired Lyra Moore’s glossy for its intellectual cachet, while pragmatic hacks envied its lavish budget. And as an ambitious journalist with a wide freelance portfolio, no sick pay, holiday or pension provision, no access to a trust fund and a dependent brother, Tamara could not afford to turn down this opportunity.

  She had fretted that her reply, which she’d typed within seconds of seeing Lyra’s message flashing on her computer screen, had been perhaps too effusive—“… I’d LOVE to do her!!! … I SO much admire! … I’m THRILLED to be part of!! … Amazing magazine!!! … Fantastic writers!!! …” Did the editor of S*nday prefer an aloofness in her contributors that matched her own? Could this explain Lyra’s failure to respond to that message, or to reply to any of Tamara’s subsequent messages or phone calls? Was it possible that, as with men, one could be too enthusiastic?

  As a weekly fixture at Psst!, Tamara was a “regular casual,” with the job security of a day labourer on a dodgy building site. But as long as she was useful and enjoyed the patronage of Psst!’s editor, she had an income and a desk to sit at for four days a week, Monday to Thursday, leaving her three days to find freelance work elsewhere. She had written pieces for Monitor Extra, the paper’s daily features section, known as Me2, run by the hollow-eyed adrenaline junkie Johnny Malkinson. These pieces were chiefly lists, ring-rounds and vox pops, but she was getting a reputation—extending beyond The Monitor to an encouraging number of copy-hungry magazines and papers—as a reliable supplier of humorous low-cost fillers.

  Tamara had done her time—three months—as a junior reporter on The Sydenham Advertiser, before moving on to become an adaptable contributor to professional and corporate newsletters, including Inside the Box: The Voice of the Cardboard Packaging Industry; Glaze: The Chartered Institute of Food Stylists’ Quarterly; and The Press: Trade Paper of the Laundry and Dry Cleaning Industry. She had graduated to hobbyists’ house journals, addressing weekend mountaineers, ballroom dancers and budgerigar enthusiasts, switched to general consumer magazines—Glow and Chicks’ Choice—and eventually worked and wheedled her way as a freelancer into news sections, features pages, diary columns, travel sections and weekend supplements on many national and regional papers, tabloid and broadsheet. The process had equipped her with a diverse knowledge base, giving her a familiarity with the advantages of aluminium ice axes and polypropylene pants, the relative merits of carbon tetrachloride and perchlorethylene, the difference between the mambo and the merengue, and the correct spelling of Melopsittacini.

  In the course of duty, she had travelled business class and seen the world. In Mexico City, where she had been sent to report on Expo-Pack1995, she enjoyed frozen daiquiris and three days of furtive sex with a big-box retailer from Nebraska; in San Diego she had fallen in love, painfully unreciprocated, with an Italian photographer while covering a three-day Salad Styling Workshop; and in Mauritius she went deep-sea diving for the first—and last—time during an avian veterinarians’ conference on the treatment of clinical megabacteriosis. She took pride in her professional versatility and, reflecting on her “regular casual” role at Psst!, saw her working life as a mirror of her love life—she was playing the field, having fun, and felt no pressure to commit until the right publication came along and made an attractive offer. Only then would she be prepared to consider a serious, more monogamous working arrangement. If only Tim Farrow, editor of The Sunday Sphere, had delivered, she would be looking at a satisfactory resolution on both fronts. But he had proved a serious disappointment.

  She must not think of Tim. It would ruin her mascara. She had sobbed for a fortnight and needed to move on, and up. The S*nday commission was timely. One door closes, another opens. She had served her apprenticeship slogging in the foothills of trade publishing, laboured on to do her share of latrine cleaning in the tabloid base camp and now, at this stage of her career, at the age of twenty-seven, she could aim higher and set her sights on S*nday, the Chomolungma of British newspaper publishing. With a little perseverance, a staff job or a fat freelance contract with the most admired publication in the UK would be hers for the taking.

  She frowned at herself in the mirror. She wished she could afford a trip to the hairdresser’s. Her highlights badly needed retouching, but the cut—a high-street approximation of Diana’s layered bob—was neat enough. She gathered up her notebook, pencil and tape recorder and stowed them in her bag.

  Honor Tait was famously tricky. Even her publisher acknowledged as much, warning that any details of her author’s private life were offlimits. But Tamara would be prepared. She had The Monitor’s cuttings library file on Honor Tait’s life and work, printouts from the publishers, an advance copy of the new book, and another unappetising hardback—grim and dense as a sociology textbook—of an earlier collection of Tait’s journalism, which apparently included a Pulitzer Prize–winning article. Though Tamara had not had a moment to look at any of the research material in depth, she had already jotted down some questions in her notebook. As she walked to the bus stop on her way to the interview, she felt armed and ready for combat.

  Two

  Honor’s energy was fading; the span of alertness between the first cup of coffee and the swooning urge to nap was dwindling daily. But she had to complete this task. Forty-five minutes to go. The picture of Tad on the rosewood side table could stay. As twinkly eyed, white-haired and pink-cheeked as a clean-shaven Selfridges’ Santa, a patron saint of goodwill and constancy: the irreproachable, dead, final husband. He had given the photograph to her, in a typical gesture of ingenuous egotism, as a wedding anniversary present. What could be more uxorious?

  The one
photograph in the flat that she had framed herself, clipping it between two Perspex squares bought from the stationer’s, was safely out of range of reportorial eyes, on her bedside table. The summer sun had bleached the boy’s untidy thatch of hair, and his shirt was coming loose from the woven belt girding his shorts. Honor, wearing a polka-dot frock cinched at the waist with a patent belt, held his hand a little too tightly. Behind them was the solid Georgian bulk of Glenbuidhe Lodge, with dripping candelabra of fuchsia by the front door and, in full sail in the drawing-room window, a ship in a bottle, another appeasement offering from Tad. Daniel’s head was tipped on one side, shyly challenging the photographer, and his left eye was closed, as if winking, against the light flaring on the loch. It was Lois who took the picture. She had brought Daniel up on the sleeper for the Easter break. Later she sent Honor the photo with a presumptuous note: “Look after him, Honor. He’s more fragile than he seems.” Honor had thrown the note on the fire. In the end Tad had urged her also to destroy the picture, and she had concealed it for years. She could not get rid of it, though she was ashamed of this maudlin attachment. Now Tad was gone, too, and she could do as she liked.

  Propped on the sitting-room mantelpiece above the black maw of the coal-effect gas fire was a postcard, a picture of a graceful coolie-hatted figure in a paddy field. It was a dutiful dispatch from Saigon sent by Tad’s goddaughter, who seemed to have spent the last decade on what they called a “gap year.” Honor’s own Saigon gap years had been somewhat different. No blithe backpackers drifting to exotic destinations with the unconscious imperialism of the young, no pleasure trips on the river, stultifying student bacchanals in ethnic bars, no folkloric dancing or crafts markets. It had been noise, mud, bombs, blood and transcendental terror. There had been comradeship, too, and even passion. Watching colleagues die beside you does concentrate the mind, and body, on the pure animal pleasures of being alive. When they were not working, away from the battlefield, it had been one long, orgiastic rout. Back home, she had sometimes felt echoes of that hellish hunger at polite funerals, without the proximate opportunities for satisfaction. The practised poker faces of the undertakers, the whispers and muffled sobs of mourners, the comically slow pace of the cortège, all could trigger inappropriate cravings.