The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  “Chapter Seven. The Hotel Deutscher Hof. Nineteen thirty-eight.”

  She snapped the book shut and gave Tamara a challenging look.

  “Tea with Hitler? How would that suit you?”

  “Great!” Tamara said.

  It would do for starters, she supposed. Hitler was not Sinatra, but he was a celebrity, of sorts. At least everyone had heard of him. She leaned over her notebook and wrote: “Chk chapter seven.”

  Honor sat back in her chair and spoke in a weary monotone.

  “The German army had mobilised in Czechoslovakia, and Hitler was refusing to meet the foreign statesmen who had assembled in Nuremberg. The world’s press were there, too, and suddenly Ribbentrop announced that tea was to be held in Hitler’s honour at 4 p.m. We were all invited.” She paused. “Is that the sort of thing you wanted?”

  Tamara’s eager nod was encouraging, and entirely insincere.

  “I was sharing a table with Unity Mitford and Robert Byron. Unity was making sheep’s eyes at the Führer, who was sitting next to Lord Brocket on the next table; the two men were chuckling over some joke but Hitler kept looking across at Unity, seeking her out.” Honor’s voice gradually became more animated; by naming these long-dead phantoms she was calling them, and herself, to life. “I went over to his table with her,” she continued, “and when Brocket got up, presumably to smoke a cigar outside—Hitler abhorred smoking—I slipped in beside him …”

  Apart from Hitler, Byron was the only name Tamara recognised, and poets, living or dead, were of no interest. Occupying her time until Honor Tait said something useful, Tamara continued to redraft her story.

  I’m ten minutes late, which, as any Londoner will tell you, given the state of traffic in the capital, amounts to being early. But Honor Tait, doyenne of British journalism and vieille terrible of Maida Vale, is not happy. “What time do you call this?” she snarls, as she grudgingly admits me to her cluttered flat, filled with decaying mementoes of her glamorous youth.

  Was the girl actually getting this down? Honor wondered.

  “But of course you’ve read all this already,” she said.

  Tamara looked up, startled.

  “In the book,” Honor added tartly.

  “Yes. Yes. Of course.”

  Tamara needed to deflect the old woman’s scrutiny with another question.

  “And what did you have?” she asked.

  “Have?”

  “For tea. Cake? Sandwiches?”

  Honor’s lip curled in tremulous disbelief, then she closed her eyes and gripped the arms of her chair.

  “Let’s see … Unity had, if I remember rightly, scones with cream and raspberry jam. No. It was plum. She couldn’t abide the pips. And Hitler had Sacher torte, chocolate and marzipan, two slices, but he declined the crème anglaise …”

  She was nodding now—her involuntary tremor had taken hold—and she opened her eyes to see Tamara conscientiously taking notes.

  “Oh for goodness’ sake!” Honor said. “Of course I don’t remember. This was a moment of historic importance. Europe was on the brink of war. Everyone, except the Nazis, was hoping desperately to avert it. The last thing on anyone’s mind was tea.”

  Tamara sat up, rigid.

  “Yes. Absolutely. Your interview with Hitler …”

  “You have read this?”

  The girl’s face was as expressionless as a doll’s. She did seem very stupid indeed.

  “Of course,” Tamara said with unpersuasive emphasis. She shifted in her chair. There seemed to be an orthopaedic cushion at her back, grubby and pink as an old Elastoplast. There was something faintly insanitary about the elderly. She felt a surge of nausea.

  “I suppose you’ve done your homework too, gone through the archives, studied the cuttings?”

  “I read as much as I could, yes,” Tamara protested. “I was only assigned the interview this week, and I’ve been doing other stories in between. Could we get back to your tea with Hitler?” She looked over at her Sony: still recording.

  Honor chided herself for lowering her guard for a moment. The girl was a hostile presence, professional in her scepticism if in nothing else, not some neophyte sitting rapt at her feet, revelling in her recollections.

  “I’ve said all I need to say on the subject. You can read—you can reread—the episode in the book. Next question …?”

  “Could you tell me something about your childhood?”

  Honor rolled her eyes.

  “Is that really necessary?”

  The last time Tamara had encountered anything approaching this degree of obstructiveness was when she interviewed a third-rate American TV star who was taking over the lead in a long-running West End musical. He had agreed to open a new shopping centre in Sydenham. After queuing for twenty minutes in the corridor outside his hotel suite with half a dozen other journalists, Tamara had been ushered into his presence by flunkies and given exactly five minutes to wring out three hundred words for the Sydenham Advertiser’s In Town show-business column. He lay sprawled on a sofa, his hair a lacquered bonnet, his tan so florid it could have been a symptom of advanced liver failure, puffing on a cigar and chugging champagne. He had sniggered malevolently at all her questions. But she had persevered.

  Now she gathered her resolve and gave Honor Tait a challenging look.

  “Childhood. That’s usually the starting point in these in-depth interviews,” Tamara said.

  Honor shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, Tara. We’re here to talk about the book. I’m a journalist, not some attention-seeking actress. And you are not hosting a television talk show.”

  Tamara wondered if the old woman was deliberately getting her name wrong. She lowered her head, scribbling randomly in her notebook to allow herself time to collect her thoughts.

  “But it is relevant,” she said, looking up at last. “Your past. What made you take off like that? Break with tradition, the expectations of your class at that time?”

  “Goodness! A Marxist! How recherché.”

  “I mean your mother. Wasn’t she an aristocrat or something? She wouldn’t have … in those days … Did it affect your relationship?”

  “The psychoanalytic approach, too?”

  Honor laughed. She had often marvelled at the resilience of the twentieth century’s greatest pseudo-science. She remembered the ascetic room with its Buddhist memorabilia, like the vestibule of a Thai restaurant, where she had visited Dr. Kohler five days a week during a tricky patch in the sixties. They had talked about her childlessness, her mother, and her father, and her governesses, and the nuns, and her dreams; all a stupendous waste of money and energy. And time. She could forgive Dr. Kohler, a kindly old humbug merchant, not a charlatan, but what had she been doing? A grown woman whining and mewling like an infant about her barrenness—a choice made in her twenties that became inescapable biological fact in her thirties—and her long-dead mother? And her dreams? Since then Honor had thought that advances in neuroscience had seen off that canard. But no, the horoscope-reading class continued to look for portents and insights in the random electrical impulses generated by the brain at rest. And this little nobody, clearly, was a member of that class.

  “They’re just the standard interview questions. The questions we ask everyone,” the girl said, with unexpected firmness.

  “Standard questions? As in one size fits all? Don’t you ever wonder why your interviews are so bland and devoid of substance?”

  Tamara stiffened. She was not going to be defeated. What Honor Tait had not accounted for was the core of steel in her heart.

  “It’s a formula, yes. But it’s a formula that works. You must have asked the same questions, now and again, of your soldiers and politicians, your actors and artists, your writers. The questions might be the same but the answers are always different. It’s the answers that make the story.”

  She had a point. But Honor was not going to concede it, and, perversely, it spurred her to attack.

 
“In that case, why did you bother coming here at all? Why not send me a multiple-choice questionnaire? How would it go, your ‘standard interview’ questionnaire? ‘One: As a child were you—(a) abused? (b) happy? (c) witness to an unspeakable family tragedy? Two: As an adult did you have—(a) ten lovers or fewer? (b) twenty lovers or fewer? (c) numberless hordes?’ ”

  Tamara’s face coloured. She thought again of her interview with the psychopathically arrogant American TV star.

  “I loathe your TV show,” she had wanted to tell him. “And above all I loathe you, you ridiculous, bloated has-been.”

  But she had thought of her salary, clenched her fists and, instead, asked him: “What are your impressions of Sydenham? Do you have any plans to see more of the area?”

  Now she was fighting the urge to tell Honor Tait that she had no interest in her, her work, her family or her so-called book.

  “I’m sorry,” Tamara mumbled. “I know the really important stuff is about your work … politics, history and all that. But we need the human angle too, to bring all this to life. Our readers need to get an impression of you as a person.”

  An existential fatigue began to settle over Honor like an autumn mist.

  “As a person? What I look like now, as opposed to then? Whether I’m kindly or crotchety? Fragrant or malodorous? Whether I’m a fascinating raconteur or a tedious old bore?”

  Tamara wrote: “malodorous, tedious old bore.” She compressed her lips in a grim smile.

  “No. No. We just need something about your life outside of work. Your parents—what were they like? A few sentences, that’s all. What kind of child were you? Your love life, home life, hopes, dreams, fears … Then we can get down to the real story.”

  “I’m afraid, Tara,” Honor said, her voice strained with the effort of patience, “that, like most journalists of my generation, I have an allergy to the first-person singular. You wouldn’t understand this, of course. You believe in ‘letting it all hang out,’ don’t you? That’s still the phrase, isn’t it? Well, my view is, ‘Put it away. It’s neither interesting nor decent. No one else wants to see it.’ ”

  “But they do want to know! You’ve seen a lot. You’re wise. We could learn from you.”

  Honor wondered what possible “wisdom” might be imparted in an account of her “love life,” past and present. Her love affairs had been another subject for the analyst’s parlour, but her agonised monologues, occasionally punctuated by Dr. Kohler’s neutral yet encouraging murmurs, had yielded no insights or pleasures. She could more usefully have spent the fees retaining the services of a full-time gigolo.

  “ ‘The man with insight enough to accept his limitations comes nearest to perfection,’ ” Honor said. “Goethe. That’s wisdom for you. But it requires a certain intelligence, which may be beyond you, to learn from it.”

  Tamara’s eyes were smarting. She should get up and leave right now. How much did she really want this contract?

  “A few simple questions, that’s all,” she pleaded. “What did you do when you filed your pieces and headed for home? When and where were you happiest? And who with? Hobbies. Family. Pet peeves. Most embarrassing moment. Your husbands, lovers. Just a word or two. Name-checking, really. That sort of thing.”

  “Really? Look around you at the state of the world, the injustice, the suffering.” Honor gestured, with trembling arms, as if her room contained the sum of the world’s miseries. “And you want to exercise your talents, such as they are, by describing the emotional landscape of a vanished childhood, or the extinct love affairs of an elderly woman in one minuscule, privileged corner of a vast and suffering world? What interest is this to anyone?”

  “Our readers are interested,” Tamara said weakly.

  The possessive noun would convince no one, she knew. She could not care less about S*nday’s readers, with their superior attitudes, worthy causes, expensive homes and exotic holidays. But she knew she could not work at Psst! forever. She could not afford to.

  “If their chief concern is this sort of trivia, then your readers aren’t worthy of consideration,” Honor said, reaching for her cup.

  Tamara turned to her notebook and wondered if the price of success could ever be too high. She bowed her head to her work once more and, for a moment, Honor imagined that they had swapped places; Honor was the young reporter again, nervous but determined, braving the inhospitality of a grand and grudging interviewee.

  “I just wanted some background,” Tamara said, and her voice had the falling pitch of defeat.

  “If it’s biography you want,” Honor said, “you’ll find everything you need on the inside back flap of the book jacket.”

  She picked up her book again and read aloud: “ ‘Honor Tait was born in Scotland and educated in Brussels and Geneva. She worked at a news agency in Paris, before going to Spain to cover the Civil War. She was with the American troops at the Normandy landings, covered the liberation of Buchenwald, the Nuremberg trials,’ etc. Are you writing this down or are you leaving it to your recording machine?”

  Tamara wrote on, furiously: “My interview with the famously frosty Miss Tait has turned her gloomy, antiques-filled flat into a deep freeze.” She despised the old woman. And she would not be beaten by her. On the other hand, did she really want a job where her days would be spent fawning on egomaniacs? She thought again of Tim with a pang. On The Sphere her job would have been to scythe these people down.

  “Any brothers and sisters?” Tamara asked.

  “You?” the old lady countered.

  Tamara clenched her fists with anger.

  “My siblings aren’t relevant to this story,” she said.

  “Nor mine. Now Tara, that’s a good Irish name. ‘The Harp that once through Tara’s halls / The soul of music shed, / Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls / As if that soul were fled.’ I suppose people quote that to you all the time.”

  “No, actually. It’s Tamara. Which is Russian. But I’m not.”

  “Russian-Irish,” mused Honor, seized by another wild urge to provoke. “A heady combination. Do you have the Gaelic? A chailín mo chroí? Or was Russian your first language? Dorogaya moya?”

  “No. Neither. I’m not Irish. Not Russian either. Now if we can—”

  “So where are you from?” taunted the old woman. “Tell me about your background. Isn’t that what all you young journalists want to talk about these days? Yourselves, your pasts, your feelings, your relationships.”

  Honor watched as the girl lowered her head again. Was she fighting tears? Honor had sometimes wondered what it would have been like to have had a daughter. She was sure she would have been singularly ill equipped—the soft toys and fairy talk, the pastel frocks and glitter, the grooming and hair care, the histrionics …

  The girl looked up, and there was a flare of what could have been hatred in her eyes. Well, Honor thought, that was more interesting.

  “I’m not the subject of this interview. You are,” Tamara said in a dull whisper.

  She could see her S*nday contract slipping away. As if the double blow she had recently suffered—dumped by her lover and a prize job on The Sphere snatched from her grasp—was not painful enough.

  “Really? This isn’t about you?” Honor tilted her head and gave Tamara a penetrating look. “I thought the papers liked nothing better than interviews with nonentities, by nonentities, these days.”

  It was the wrong moment and entirely the wrong place, but Tamara could hold back no longer. The awful truth struck her like a whip across the face—her escape route was barred, she would have to go on compiling cheery lists for Psst! and grubbing for work in ever-more abstruse regions of the trade press, she would be unable to help her brother and he would sink further, out of sight, and she would end her days, alone and broke, in a shabby rented flat. It was unprofessional, she knew, but she could do nothing about it as the tears seeped from her eyes, spilled down her cheeks and dripped onto her notebook, where they trembled in little quicksilver pools.
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  Honor was alarmed. Faced by tears, she had always felt revulsion. Tad had been comically lachrymose. He would weep over television adverts—haiku biopics for building societies or insurance companies, in which implausibly handsome young families romped through life to graceful maturity and silvery senescence in soft focus. Maybe she was deficient. She had sometimes wondered whether her apparent lack of tear ducts represented weakness rather than strength. Did it indicate a kind of emotional colour blindness?

  The girl was shuddering softly now as she tried to compose herself. What exactly had prompted this fit of weeping? Was something else troubling her? Honor felt embarrassed on her behalf; to be so reduced, in the course of one’s work, too, amounted to a kind of incontinence. Whatever the cause of this display, Honor wanted it to cease at once.

  “What would you like to know?” she asked gently.

  Tamara looked up, wiping her eyes on the cuffs of her blouse.

  “Sorry?”

  “Shall I just talk?” Honor asked. “And you can tell me if it’s the kind of thing you want …”

  Tamara sniffed. Had she gained some advantage here?

  “Could we start with your Hollywood experiences?” she tried tentatively. She saw Tait’s sudden scowl, and her voice grew more faint with every syllable: “Marilyn? Or Sinatra?”

  Honor Tait put her hand to her brow.

  “Liz Taylor?” Tamara hazarded, pulling a pack of tissues from her bag and dabbing at her notebook.

  The old woman’s Gorgon stare was unnerving, but she was also nodding vigorously.

  Encouraged, Tamara added, “Any reminiscences of the stars would do, really.”

  Though the old woman continued to signal her apparent approval of Tamara’s questions, she remained silent.

  “Your circle of young male friends?” Tamara asked.

  Honor was relieved to see that the girl had finally composed herself. Only two panda patches of pink around her eyes betrayed her lapse. But her questions? If this had not been so intrusive, and such a waste of precious time, it might have been comic.