The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  Free from the taint of money, Honor had had no shortage of “admirers,” though for her that term, once a euphemism for licentious petitioners, had largely reverted to its literal meaning. The exhilaration of boundless physical profligacy, the delicious sense that one could seduce the world if one wished, had vanished. All part of time’s cruel process of de-pleasuring.

  “No need to humour me,” she said.

  Bucknell worked swiftly, with the cold-eyed hostility of a sniper.

  It must be a chemical signal, or its absence—the musk of fertility had evaporated long ago—that now rendered her invisible to most men. On occasions, though, she had felt that she was not invisible enough; once or twice she had found herself watching an attractive young man, a stranger, imagining his smooth body unclothed, the swells and hollows of his musculature, the silky tuber stirring in its nest, willing the warmth of his breath on her cheek and his cupped hands at her breasts, when the focus of her idle yearning, sensing that he was being observed, had looked up and, at the sight of her, shrunk back, unable to conceal his horror. Did they fear that old age might be contagious? She had news for them: it was. Early death was the only way to avoid it.

  At least in the case of this dolt kneeling by her chair, the revulsion was mutual.

  Tamara watched as Honor Tait faced the lens with an enigmatic smile, like a fossilised Mona Lisa. Was that a smile of self-satisfaction or contempt?

  The photographer, a man of few words at the best of times, asks if he can snap away while we chat by the hearth.

  “No,” says Miss Tait firmly. “You can do me now.”

  As he unpacks his equipment, her impatience grows.

  “And don’t make such a business of it. It’s a fetish. Just fire away.”

  Bucknell, back on his feet, made several tentative suggestions with the air of someone, arms aloft, attempting to reason with an armed assailant. Would Miss Tait consider, perhaps, resting her cheek on her hand? Might she see her way to holding up her book? Would she possibly, for a second, contemplate posing with the deerstalker hat hanging on a peg by the door?

  “Do you expect me to make a total fool of myself?”

  He took a few more token pictures and sullenly began packing his cameras away.

  The doyenne of British journalism greets us at the door of her £200,000 apartment, eyes flashing wildly …

  “The trouble is,” Honor said, talking over him conspiratorially as he crouched by his bags, “they all think they’re artists these days.”

  Tamara smiled. The difficult business with Bucknell was over, and Honor Tait was acknowledging her, woman to woman, as a fellow professional. Tamara allowed herself a certain pride. Her status had soared because of her association with Britain’s most respectable glossy magazine.

  Beneath her steely exterior, Honor Tait, fearless newshound and former femme fatale, has a 50-carat heart …

  The old woman looked at Tamara with a wily smile: “I hope you don’t think you’re an artist too, dear. There’s nothing more absurd than a reporter who thinks she’s an artist.”

  Was Bucknell sniggering? Tamara murmured a denial, bent over her notebook and worried her pencil across the lined pages: “Face-lift?” she wrote. There was an unnatural silvery sheen across Honor Tait’s cheeks, and she appeared to have difficulty smiling. But that could be down to temperament.

  “A voice recorder and a notebook?” Honor asked, arching her sparse eyebrows at the tiny machine.

  The old woman could raise her eyebrows anyway, which was more than Lucy Hartson could do.

  “Belt and braces. If one fails, the other won’t let me down,” Tamara said.

  Honor leaned towards her, as if she was about to share a confidence.

  “Very wise, dear,” she said. “It would be disastrous if one of your stories were to be lost to the reading public. Like Alexandria’s library all over again.”

  Tamara caught the hostility but not the reference and smiled—a jaunty, dishonest grin—right back. Okay. She got the picture. Honor Tait was not going to make it easy, or pleasant. But Tamara was a professional. She had come here to get a story, to advance her career, not to make a friend.

  “Yes. I suppose so,” she said, with a light laugh intended to suggest that she got the joke but was generous enough to let it pass.

  In her notebook she wrote: “Chk: who is Alexandria? What happened to her library?”

  “We’d better get this over with,” Honor said. Her gloating smile contracted into a pucker of displeasure, and she drew back into her chair.

  Tamara summoned a TV weather girl’s brightness.

  “Congratulations!” she said. “It’s a terrific book.”

  The girl’s accent, Honor noted, had a trace of suburban whine, and her insincerity was almost heroic.

  “A book? You think so? It’s not what I’d call a book,” she said. “If This Is a Man is a book. Ulysses is a book. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a book. What you’re referring to is a collection of miscellaneous articles culled from many years’ work in the journalistic trade—a small block of granite representing a stonemason’s lifetime toil.”

  “Oh no,” Tamara insisted. “It stands up very well as a book. A truly great read. A classic.”

  “So you’ve read it?”

  “Of course. Marvellous.”

  “Well then, you know everything about me that you need to know.”

  “Not quite everything, no. Your book raises questions, too.”

  Tamara instantly rued her clumsiness. She was setting a trap for herself. Sure enough, Honor Tait tugged the wire.

  “What questions might they be?”

  “Oh, general questions … Global politics. History. The nature of journalism. It was very thought-provoking.”

  “And which elements of the book, precisely, provoked these thoughts of yours?”

  “Difficult to say. All of it, really.”

  Tamara was keen to steer the subject away from the book, or, more specifically, from her opinion of it. She had agonised over the best way to start this interview; the first question often set the tone and determined the outcome. Should she go in hard, cut out the foreplay and interrogate the old curmudgeon about the only really interesting aspects of her life—the famous love affairs? The Hollywood parties? Her privileged childhood should provide some anecdotes, too. Dusty details about her work could be woven in from the cuttings later. This method, Tamara knew, often threw naive interviewees off guard: taken aback by the interviewer’s boldness, even rudeness, they would overcompensate with a politeness that had the same result as a truth serum. The more blunt and ill-mannered the question, the more frank and self-damning the answer. But Honor Tait was a cunning old pro, and not overburdened with courtesy. She would show Tamara the door within the first minute.

  As if to prove the point, the old woman replied with a viperish smile: “All of it? Really? The highest praise.”

  “I’m your greatest admirer,” Tamara said.

  Honor’s smile shrank to a fleeting wince.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “No, honestly. I’m your biggest fan. I’ve been following your career and reading your work forever.”

  “Really! How old are you exactly?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “You were born in 1970?”

  Tamara nodded cautiously.

  “Let’s see,” Honor said. “I was covering the aftermath of the Kent State killings in Ohio that year. I suppose, between nappy changes, you were following my reports on the anti–Vietnam War movement? Reading me in your cradle, were you? Cheering me on with your rattle?”

  Tamara’s cheeks reddened, with suppressed rage rather than embarrassment. Was the old woman trying to provoke her? This was simple antagonism.

  “No. No. I mean I read your work when I was at Poly. They’re set texts in Media Studies.”

  “I always thought that was a contradiction in terms: Media. Studies …”

  Tamara’s throat
tightened, and she coughed nervously. The old woman was psychotically irritable. How long had they been sitting here? She had not yet managed to ask a single question. But how to begin? Tait would clearly not be seduced easily into conversation. Especially by a woman. If Tamara had been an attractive young male reporter, or even a louche middle-aged toff like Simon, she might have been in with a chance. Best to play it straight.

  “I wonder, what was the most memorable story you ever covered?”

  Honor gave her a crooked smile. She knew she was being perversely obstructive, but the girl was such a little dunderhead, and so cheerfully dishonest, it was irresistible.

  “Memorable? I like to think that they were all worth committing to memory.”

  “Well, you know … historic. Your Pulitzer Prize, for instance. That must have been amazing, winning something like that in your twenties.”

  “Considering the subject, what I’d seen, the prize seemed ridiculously unimportant. A frivolity.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Tamara nodded, trying to remember the subject of the award-winning piece. She wished she’d had time to read it. Was it Korea? Vietnam?

  “But I suppose,” Honor continued, picking at a loose thread near the hem of her dress, “if it meant that more people read the article than might otherwise have done, it was worthwhile. And now it’s been reprinted, so you’ve read it too, and a new generation can learn lessons from the mistakes of the old.”

  “Yes. Right … But, apart from that, I mean, what were the biggest historic events you covered?”

  Honor sighed.

  “Nuremberg? Poland? Berlin? Korea? Was that the sort of thing you had in mind?”

  Tamara feared the worst. She had interviewed old people before. While they might forget what they had said five minutes ago, their long-term memories could be horribly intact. The last thing Tamara needed now was a sustained historical soliloquy; a torrent of words and dates without a single usable quote. Her eyes widened, and she nodded again in feigned enthusiasm.

  “Or were you thinking more of Madrid?” Honor asked. “Or Vietnam? The Cultural Revolution?”

  “Madrid … The Vietnamese Cultural Revolution. Great. You choose.”

  The pleasure Honor had derived from taunting the girl was beginning to drain away. She was reminded of those absurd games that had been imposed on her and her brothers at Christmas. A dull word contest, perhaps: agony for the children, hilarious for the adults. Or charades: an opportunity for drunken grown-ups to show off to one another.

  “You could always pick something from the book,” Honor said.

  “I don’t want to just lift whole passages from it,” Tamara replied, though that was precisely what she intended to do. “It would be useful to convey a sense of you in conversation, relaxed, at home …”

  That she was at home Honor could not deny. But relaxed? And in conversation? With this girl?

  “An interview is not my idea of a conversation. Perhaps you should just get on and ask your questions.”

  Tamara bit her pencil and glanced over at the Sony. The red light was still glowing; the machine dutifully recording her humiliation. Bucknell, who was taking an unusually long time to pack away his equipment, was back on his knees, fussing over his bag. This would be all round The Monitor in hours.

  “What was it really like to be a woman journalist in the nineteen forties and fifties?” asked Tamara with a sudden briskness.

  “Much the same as it was to be a male journalist,” Honor said. “Though the scarcity of sanitary napkins in war zones was less of an issue for them.”

  There was another cough—a smoker’s gurgling hawk—and Honor and Tamara looked over to the photographer, who was now standing, apparently chastened but impatient.

  “When this young man picks up his handbag and leaves,” Honor said, “we can have a cup of tea. Perhaps it will help you get your thoughts in order.”

  Bucknell glanced at Tamara and raised his eyebrows in an unwelcome expression of solidarity before turning to go.

  “You can let yourself out, can’t you?” Honor said, rising stiffly from her chair.

  She went into the kitchen, and Tamara caught a glimpse of cream vinyl and fluorescent strip lighting. Bucknell, keeping an eye on the door, gingerly pulled a smaller camera from his pocket, took some general shots of the room, then moved in for close-ups of the photographs on the bookcase and wall, as well as one of a smiling elderly man on a side table by Honor Tait’s chair. The magazine was bound to need additional material to illustrate the piece, and this legitimate pilfering of a few extra images would save time and costly hours of picture research. As Honor filled the kettle and clattered crockery, he looked at Tamara and winked—a gesture even more repulsive than his thumbs-up. Pausing to peek into the bedroom down the hall and take one last picture, he left the flat, shutting the door quietly behind him.

  “Milk and sugar?” Honor called from the kitchen.

  “Just milk, please,” Tamara said, pressing the pause button on her tape recorder and getting up to take a closer look at the photographs. She recognised the Golden Girl picture from the cuttings. Was that really her, Honor Tait, pert and voluptuous in shorts, smiling at the moustachioed soldier? With Franco. Or was it Castro? Hard to believe that the crooked hag filling the kettle in the kitchen was once this soft-eyed beauty who, according to the cuttings, had outfoxed and bewitched some of the most famous men of the past century.

  Tamara shuddered. She wanted to get old—it was better than the alternative. Her mother’s breast cancer had inoculated Tamara against the romantic view, expressed by flippant friends, that early death with smooth complexion and toned physique was preferable to life post-menopause as a slack-skinned frump. Her mother, who had died at forty-six, would have chosen life at any price. But looking at the radiant girl in the photograph, and hearing her decrepit counterpart shuffle around the kitchen, Tamara knew she did not want to get that old. There were limits.

  Looking at the photographs of Honor Tait in resplendent youth displayed so proudly in her £250,000 London flat and turning to her now is like watching that scene in Last Horizon, or was it Lost Horizon?, the movie masterpiece, when the chthonically beautiful (chk name) flees the protection of the magically hermetic valley only to wither horribly, ageing a thousand years in minutes before her lover’s terrified eyes.

  The crockery rattled as Honor Tait carried in a tray bearing a teapot, two vividly patterned gold-rimmed cups, a jug of milk and a saucer of sliced lemon, and lowered it shakily onto a leather stool between the chairs. Tamara knew that an offer of assistance might cause offence. She watched apprehensively as the old woman poured the tea and the brown stream wavered dangerously over the cups.

  Using a pair of tongs, Honor dropped a sliver of lemon into one cup and passed the milk to Tamara. The girl could serve herself.

  “Well? Where were we?” Honor asked, raising her cup to her lips.

  Tamara’s gaudy cup rocked in its flooded saucer. For a reckless moment she was tempted to suggest that Tait had been in the middle of a detailed appraisal of Frank Sinatra’s performance in bed, but she held back and flipped through her notebook, looking at some of the questions she had prepared earlier, buying time.

  “You were telling me about the difficulties of being a woman in journalism when you started out.”

  Honor pursed her lips over the tea, then drew them back sharply, recoiling from the heat.

  “Was I? Well, I suppose journalism, like much else in those days, was a male domain. The newsroom was pungent with testosterone.”

  Was this what had attracted her to the job in the first place? Honor had sometimes wondered. It had provided an escape route, obviously, from family, from the limited roles available to women at that time, from the silken straitjacket of her class, offering freedom, purpose, adventure. Her parents had wanted nothing more for her than marriage to a member of their caste—landed, wealthy and philistine—and the nuns had groomed her for a life of modes
ty and self-abnegation. Both options were perfectly compatible, she knew. They were also abhorrent, denying curiosity, passion and ambition. She wanted to make her own way, forge a new kind of life, devour the world. Was there also an exhibitionist’s pleasure in storming the grim gentlemen’s clubs—part barracks, part monastery—that were the newspaper offices of the thirties and forties? Was it like breaching Mount Athos in a bathing costume? As she crossed the newsroom floor in her neat crepe suit, her heels tapping counterpoint to the thrumming wires and the clattering typewriters with their musical pings, had she enjoyed the sense that her colleagues were watching her, craning their necks, hungrily following her progress, mesmerised by the kinetic retreat of her stocking seams? Perhaps she had relished, more than the story itself, the moues of surprise from taciturn newsmen when they learned that it was a woman, and an attractive woman, who had turned in such an exemplary piece of work. There had also been the singular rigours and, it could not be denied, the pleasures, of work in the field—fighting with them, eating with them, sleeping with them—the sole woman among men of action and men of war.

  “That must have been tough,” Tamara said.

  “I imagine it’s all lipstick and cheap scent at The Monitor these days,” Honor said.

  Tamara ignored the slight and looked again at her list of questions.

  “I wonder if you could tell me in your own words about some of the real-life incidents that inspired the book.”

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed to two sparks of spite. She had been prepared, for a moment, to give the girl the benefit of the doubt, but this was ridiculous.

  “Real life? In my own words? Do you think I made the whole thing up? And whose words are you suggesting that I used? Are you accusing me of plagiarism?”

  “Absolutely not. Of course not.” Tamara’s laugh, meant to be hearty, sounded panicky. “I just wanted to get some quotes from you that aren’t directly drawn from your book.”

  “So you’d like me to paraphrase my own words?”

  Tamara nodded.

  Honor stared into her cup for a full minute, as if reading her tea leaves, then leaned over to the side table, picked up her book and opened it at random.