The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  At the thought of Tim, Tamara’s eyes filled with tears. Outside, raindrops streamed down the café windows in sympathy. Or was it mockery? She dabbed at her eyes with a napkin—her mascara seemed to be intact—and turned back to the cuttings: a long life of ingenuity and striving shrunk to a bundle of paper scraps. Honor Tait had been a beauty, and the early photographs, many taken with soldiers and politicians, showed a starlet’s glamour and a dazzling full-lipped smile. She was said, even now, to be a man’s woman, who did not suffer other women gladly. Simon, Tamara’s editor and ally at Psst!, had met Tait at a charity event a couple of years ago and claimed her interest in him had not been entirely professional.

  “She’s a randy old goat,” he told Tamara when he heard that she was about to interview Tait. “Collects men. The younger the better, apparently. But she’s not that fussy—she was all over me.”

  She was, according to Simon, grander than Martha Gellhorn and so vain that she had commissioned Snowdon to take her passport photo.

  “She’s known as the Messalina of Maida Vale,” he added. “They say she pays for sex with younger men.”

  Tamara had wrinkled her nose in disgust—at her age? It did not bear thinking about—though his reference to Messalina was puzzling. Wasn’t that the Italian resort where they held last year’s Monitor management junket? Did Honor Tait trawl European seaside towns in search of attractive young men? Tamara decided to ignore the reference—when in doubt, she had always found it best to stay silent. It saved time, and the unadorned facts were interesting enough in their own right.

  “No! She actually pays for it? Really?” she had said.

  “Really! How else do you think she manages to pull?”

  Tamara had laughed uneasily. Simon liked to gossip—who didn’t? His stories were always entertaining, but their accuracy could not be guaranteed.

  She looked at her watch—still no sign of Bucknell—and flicked through the new book once more. Spanning sixty years, it included reports from papers and magazines that no longer existed—The News Chronicle, Reynold’s News, Collier’s Weekly—and covered the Spanish civil war in the thirties, postwar Berlin in the forties, Korea in the fifties, Algeria and China in the sixties, Vietnam in the seventies … Tamara yawned. The cumulative effect of all these dates and place names was deadening, like looking at an obsolete train timetable.

  Turning back to the cuttings, she was relieved to see that there were some stories about Honor Tait herself, rather than merely by her. These were briefer, easier to skim and fillet, and helpfully illustrated with photographs. Tait was pictured in the mid-forties—her curvaceous figure made the demure twinset look almost raunchy—after winning a Pulitzer Prize for her reports on the liberation of a Nazi death camp. She would have been about the same age that Tamara was now. There was an even earlier photograph, taken in a beachside café; she was wearing a clinging halter-neck top and skimpy shorts that showed off her model’s legs. Her interviewee, a dapper man in uniform who looked like a minor customs official, was gazing appreciatively at her knees. The caption read: “Press corps golden girl Honor Tait interviewed commander general of the Canary Islands, Francisco Franco, two weeks before he joined the military revolt that launched the civil war in Spain.”

  Another clipping showed her on a speedboat around the same time, scanning the horizon, shading her eyes, her skin dark against the white of her two-piece bathing suit, perfect teeth displayed in a carefree laugh, fair hair rippling behind her like a pennant, standing at the helm with “U.S. ambassador’s son, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr.”

  In fawning gossip columns, in cuttings as fragile as papyrus, she featured alongside Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth and Jane Russell, and was pictured at Hollywood parties and Broadway first nights. One photograph—glittering, flashlit, black-and-white—showed her emerging from a Bel Air restaurant with “newlyweds Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.” At first glance you would be hard-pressed to decide which of the two beautiful women was the screen goddess and which was the intrepid reporter.

  Tait was said to have dated Sinatra—there was a picture of them, “enjoying an intimate dinner together,” that looked as posed and flawless as a still from a classic fifties movie. She was wearing a corsage of white flowers, and her moist lips were parted in a smile as he whispered into her ear. Liz Taylor was a friend, thanks to Tait’s third marriage to Tad Challis, the American director of once much-loved, now seldom seen, British comedy films. She had holidayed with Nureyev, partied with Picasso, was photographed “sharing a joke,” and a suspiciously fat cigarette, in a Paris jazz club with a group of friends including Louis Armstrong, and huddled, sheathed in clinging satin—HIGH IQ IN LOW-CUT GOWN, read the caption—with Orson Welles at a Hollywood shindig.

  With Hollywood, Tamara was on home territory. Her grasp of the subject, her degree in Media Studies, and long nights and marathon weekends spent watching black-and-white movies on TV would be invaluable. Even at Psst!, an elite academy of TV, pop and movie trivia scholars, she was regarded as a special authority—she had written her dissertation on “Hollywood Romantic Comedy” and was seen as a repository of arcane show-business lore and a grand mistress of gossip. You could not survive a week at Psst! without an extensive knowledge of contemporary popular culture, but Tamara’s expertise was extrasensory. She knew more about stars’ private lives—about the Spice Girls’ rivalry, about Madonna’s tempestuous relationship with Carlos Leon and her tantrums on the set of Evita, about Michael Jackson’s skin disease and his recent marriage to his frumpy nurse—than she did about the biographies of her own family and friends.

  It seemed that she picked up this information by osmosis, having only to look at a gaudy line of TV and film gossip magazines on a newsstand for their entire contents to migrate instantly to her hippocampus. Who was having an affair with whom? Who was up for which role in what soap opera/film? Who was in rehab? Who should be in rehab? Who’d had plastic surgery? Who should have? Who was secretly gay? Who was secretly straight? This was what animated her conversations with friends and colleagues and made her work entertaining, if not exacting. Her expertise was valued and Psst!, more than any other job so far, satisfactorily combined her personal interests with her professional life.

  Apart from writing the weekly A-List (Ten Best/Ten Worst) and the What’s In/What’s Out, Going Up/Going Down, Good Week/Bad Week lists, most of her working day was spent tightening other contributors’ copy, composing readers’ letters when there were none or when the genuine letters were too imbecilic to publish, and helping out on the jokey captions that accompanied pictures of drunken stars grimacing outside nightclubs. Simon also threw the occasional interview her way.

  Psst!’s relaxed regime also offered expenses, free phone calls and stationery, computer and word-processor facilities, an infinite supply of floppy disks, access to a fax and a photocopier, the use of the cuttings library (the journalistic equivalent of an academic’s twenty-four-hour pass to the British Library), a subsidised canteen (where Tamara occasionally enjoyed a lone late-night supper under the pretext of doing overtime), the pleasures of comradeship and useful networking possibilities. It was as important to put in face time in the wine bar after work as it was to be seen behind the desk during the day.

  The commission from S*nday had proved just how useful it was to maintain a regular presence in a newspaper office. She had received a herogram message from Johnny, the features editor, for her “Ten Best Soap Opera Shags,” and last month he had asked her to step in and turn round a quick column for Me2—an eight-hundred-word why-oh-why in forty-five minutes with picture byline, when their regular columnist, Liselotte Selsby, a soap-opera cutie with a reputation as an intellectual (she had once claimed that The Wretched of the Earth was her favourite book) and a taxing coke habit, had failed to deliver. The invitation to write the Tamara Sim Column, a prominent picture-bylined platform for highly paid, lighthearted, pun-filled musings involving no research, amounted to journalistic apotheosis, and Tamar
a hoped it would become a weekly fixture in Me2.

  Disappointingly, Johnny had been unable to find space for a follow-up since Selsby, or rather her ghostwriting publicist, had repented of her truancy and become a scrupulous observer of deadlines. But these things do get noticed, and Tamara’s reputation had clearly radiated upwards at the paper, like a thermal current, beyond the second-floor features desk and finally reached S*nday, way up in The Monitor’s penthouse office suite. Lyra Moore would have been looking for someone with a light touch to leaven a potentially deadly subject; for who, in their right minds, was honestly interested in an old biddy’s memories of the Vietnam War? Simon must have hymned Tamara’s wit in morning conference, or at a features meeting, or maybe Johnny had commended, in Lyra’s hearing, her “Soap Opera Shags.”

  There were drawbacks to the job on Psst!: It was insecure, it did not stretch her, and the pay was paltry—freelance rates and staff wages on The Monitor’s main midmarket broadsheet rival, The Courier, were lavish in comparison. Only S*nday magazine, and the tabloids—The Sun, The News of the World, The Sunday Sphere and The Mail—offered real money. A staff job on any of those titles would be like a lottery win, and, until Lyra Moore’s message, just as likely. With regular, well-paid work Tamara’s life would be transformed. And so would her brother’s. She felt the familiar quiver of panic. She had not heard from him for a fortnight. Silence, in Ross’s case, was rarely golden. She would have to make the journey to his grim council estate to check up on him. Her urge to sort him out was not entirely selfless. She did not want to spend any more time worrying about him.

  The rain had stopped. If the photographer was much longer, there was a danger that the old woman might cancel the interview altogether. Tamara was sure that the picture desk had sent Bucknell because she worked on Psst!, which was held in contempt by many of the staff at The Monitor. She felt a stubborn loyalty to the magazine, and to its editor, Simon Pettigrew, an ideal boss who had become a good friend. He had started out as a show-business correspondent, where he earned a reputation as a genial fellow who would never stitch anyone up under his own byline. Since then, after an embarrassing incident involving an editor’s mistress, he had been fired from every national paper in Britain but had always managed to charm his way into a new sinecure. He had worked, variously, as a diarist, feature writer, columnist, deputy editor, section editor, leader writer, advertising executive, personnel officer and project manager. He was boyish and accident prone—a stammering, weaker-chinned James Stewart, with wattles and a Bertie Wooster accent—and he made people laugh. Their relationship was chaste—Simon’s love life was complicated enough, and Tamara had never found him attractive, even when she was catatonic with drink after her first Monitor features party. She was not his type either, she was sure of that. Trouble was his type. Posh trouble.

  But he had become a mentor to her, generously overlooking the fact that he had hired her in error, believing Inside the Box to be a TV gossip magazine. He had taught her more about journalism, and the demands and intricacies of expenses forms, than she had learned in her three years of Media Studies, or in any of her other jobs. And he had been very kind over the Tim affair, sending her home in a taxi after she had spent a morning weeping in the office. For him, despite her relative youth, Tamara seemed to fulfil the role of agony aunt, a nonjudgemental confidante to whom he compulsively described the latest twists and unravellings in his labyrinthine love life.

  It was not a demanding role. He did not seek her advice or opinion. All she had to do was listen, and try to avoid yawning, or laughing. And she had another, extrajournalistic skill he had come to value—a minor talent for forgery. This had more to do with patience than with any gift for calligraphic mimicry. Each month Tamara would take home a large brown envelope of blank receipts, acquired by Simon from accommodating taxi drivers, restaurateurs and hoteliers, and, using a variety of coloured Biros, felt-tips and pencils, she would spend evenings filling them in, writing out bills for fictitious cab journeys, imaginary five-course meals and fancy bottles of wine for invented “contacts,” in extravagant forward-facing loops or in cramped back-slanting script. She found the process curiously restful, and Simon was appreciative and reciprocated, as her immediate boss, by signing her expenses forms without glancing at the figures or the receipts.

  She flicked through Tait’s file again. There was more gore than glamour, angry reports from the battlefront and not a trace of humour or gossip in her writing. Honor Tait had, in an apparent fit of masochism, left the bountiful comforts of Beverly Hills to sleep rough with the GIs in Quang Tri. There were stomach-turning accounts of burned children and mortally wounded young soldiers, tedious and unsurprising statistical litanies—literacy in India, infant mortality in Africa—but after that her newspaper articles began to thin and were replaced by longer magazine pieces.

  For Time she wrote about a visit to a German orphanage, for Granta she fulminated about the changing face of newspaper reporting, and then she was reduced to reviewing, at arduous length, books about the Second World War, Vietnam and Korea for the New York Review of Books. In The New Yorker, at even greater length, relieved only by apparently random line drawings of gardening implements and small dogs, Tait had written about an American politician with a comb-over called McGovern and had championed the Irish writer Dominic Behan in his plagiarism case against Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan! The singer’s name leapt out at Tamara like a friendly face in a rush-hour crowd.

  Later clippings that bore Tait’s byline came from even worthier, illustration-free magazines, in which long grey slabs of print—reflections on Asia, the Middle East and Latin America—were broken by shorter slabs of unrelated and mystifying verse by obscure poets. Then again, Tamara reflected, all poets were obscure. Would she have to mug up on poetry for the S*nday piece? Or pretend to? Honor Tait was said to cultivate an artistic set.

  One diary clipping from the 1960s showed her, imperious and elegant in hat and fur coat, with a group of awkwardly grinning men in suits, bland as bank managers, in a publisher’s boardroom. One of the men, the caption revealed, was T. S. Eliot. At least Tamara, a fan of West End musicals, had heard of him. All the same, the task of familiarising herself to bluffing level with arcane verse and ancient wars was a depressing prospect.

  It might be necessary, however. S*nday employed some formidable writers, and its standards were exacting. She was troubled by what she had heard Johnny refer to, with sombre awe, as the “S*nday ethos.” Could she match the magazine’s tone, which could be both reverential and haughtily sceptical, its syllable-clotted style, its seasoning of italiccised foreign words?

  Even S*nday’s adverts—stark studio shots of gem-studded watches handcuffed to slender wrists, brooding portraits of tank-size cars perched like stags on mountain ridges—were intimidating. It was said to be a writers’ magazine, written by writers’ writers, and was not intended to be taken recreationally. Reading it, Tamara sometimes felt a dress code was required: “smart casual,” at least. Embarked on systematically as a weekly course in self-improvement, even with the promise of a significant salary hike, it was tough going. But Tamara, though she had never seen herself as a writers’ writer (more of a readers’ writer, really), was not afraid of words. They were important weapons in a reporter’s armoury.

  She had her mother’s two-volume Oxford English Dictionary, frequently mined Roget’s Thesaurus and, as someone who, as a child, had enjoyed fierce games of Scrabble with her brother, she collected words, recording them in her notebook, delighting in the unusual and trying to slip them into a story or, more often, a list, whenever pedestrian subeditors were looking the other way. Only last week she had come across “transgressive” (in a report of a gruesomely fascinating murder trial), “crepuscular” (in a pretentious fashion piece on sequins), “chthonic” (from Tod Maloney’s latest album, Chthonic the Hedgehog) and “hermeneutic” (an arresting headline on an arts-page piece about the Spice Girls).

  A diligent reader of well
-crafted detective stories and contemporary romances, as well as countless newspapers and magazines, possessed of a curious mind, respectable vocabulary and a serviceably wide education—solid A-levels in Drama and French (her grasp of both enhanced by six months as an au pair to a flamboyantly self-harming preteen in Lyons), and a B.A. in Media Studies (she narrowly missed an upper second)—known for her nimble humour, cutting comments, encyclopaedic knowledge of the personal peccadilloes of the major cultural icons of the late twentieth century, Tamara was well equipped to join the S*nday team. Lyra Moore, a writers’ writer’s editor, had recognised her promise and her feisty streetwise touch, so lacking in S*nday magazine, and was willing to give her a chance.

  At the bottom of the cuttings file was a printout of a profile, ten years old and doggedly respectful, from the long-vanished Sunday Correspondent. Tamara did not have time to read it all but at the end, in convenient bullet points, there were some bald biographical details. “Childhood: stately home in the Scottish Highlands.” A toff, then. “Education: governesses, followed by a Belgian convent school, Swiss finishing college and the Sorbonne.” A French-speaking Catholic toff. “Employment: Agence France-Presse, the Herald Tribune, L’Espresso, Collier’s Weekly, Der Spiegel, Picture Post …” A multilingual Catholic toff with good contacts. “Marriages: three. Marquis Maxime de Cantal, Belgian-born theatre impresario; Sandor Varga, Hungarian publisher; and Tad Challis, American-born film director.” A goer, confirming Simon’s claims; for three husbands read thirty lovers, at least.