The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  We arrived a dilatory fifteen minutes late and flustered at Honor Tait’s elegant mansion flat, and the doyenne of British journalism received us with glacial formality. “You’re late,” she said as she directed us into the bijou, memento-filled sitting room.

  Tamara knew she needed to loosen up and find her S*nday voice; a cultivated but breezy charm was the aim. A few jokes, some of the self-deprecating humour that was always appreciated at Psst!, would help too.

  My anxieties about meeting the legendary Miss Tait were already running high. My boyfriend had dumped me the week before, I was late with my council tax, I’d developed a hideous cold sore that made me look like a Medieval plague victim and now, the morning I’m due to meet my all-time heroine, the doyenne of British journalism, we get stranded in traffic backed up all the way to Regent’s Park. It couldn’t get worse. It did.

  She winced at the memory of her unprofessional weeping fit. It might have given her a temporary advantage—the old woman had not chucked her out, after all—but Tamara did not like this feeling of helplessness, this sense that she was at the mercy of her emotions, that even her work could be jeopardised by her lover’s callousness. It had been more than a week now, and she still wasn’t over it. She felt a renewed anger towards Tim. No word from him. Love conquers all, except cowardice.

  His wife was getting suspicious; he could not face the expense of another divorce and the wearying possibility of a third batch of children. (Not that Tamara wanted children. Not yet, anyway.) Naturally he had not put it like that. They needed space, he had said.

  “I’ve got all the space I need,” she had retorted. “I see you once a week for a couple of hours at my place, and the occasional Saturday afternoon while your wife takes the twins to ballet lessons, if you’re not heading into the office to deal with a late-breaking story, or playing village cricket, or relaxing with the family by an Andalusian pool. In between, I’ve got plenty of space. Gobi bloody deserts of space.”

  She should have seen it coming. Nearly a month ago, Christmas—the singleton’s annual Armageddon—had loomed. He had promised a snatched Boxing Day night in a country-house hotel to sweeten the miserable prospect of two days holed up in suburban Leicestershire with her father and stepmother, ludicrous Ludmilla, and their six-year-old son, Tamara’s half brother, the podgy, pampered little prodigy Boris.

  Her first Christmas with her father since her mother’s death had been the nightmare she had anticipated—Boris playing exhibition games of chess; Boris reciting Russian verse, in Russian; Boris giving timed displays of Rubik cube dexterity; Boris working through his grade 2 clarinet repertoire, all to rapturous parental applause in a wasteland of discarded gift wrap. Somewhere beneath the torn and crumpled paper, the twinkling heaps of golden ribbons and silver bows, lay the very latest electronic toy, a Tamagotchi pet that Tamara had gone to some trouble to buy, tossed there by Boris as soon as he’d opened it, with a cursory “Fanks.” Ross, her full brother, her father’s troubled eldest child, had been banned from the house after some grisly bender. No phone call from Tim, no country-house hotel, no escape.

  The New Year had been a fiasco, too. She had decided against her friend Gemma’s party, choosing instead to wait at home for another promised phone call, another promised night of passion. Neither materialised.

  In El Vino last week, Tim had tried to soothe her, stroking her hand and whispering. It had been so intense, he said. They needed time to think.

  “Think? What’s thinking got to do with it? When have you ever spared a thought for anyone but yourself?”

  It had not helped that she was already three glasses up by the time he had arrived, late again, for their date. Tears, she knew, never helped in these situations, but she had found herself blubbing like a smacked child. Did anyone weep picturesquely? She could tell, even as he handed her a paper napkin and sighed sympathetically, that he was repelled by her pink, puffy eyes and the bubbles of phlegm at her nostrils, and he wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Was it an intentional irony that his coup de grâce was delivered in El Vino, the bar where, six months earlier, after her big TOP COP’S SON IN DRUG SHAME splash, it had all started? It had taken two “dates,” a fumble in the car park and a promise of oral sex to persuade the strapping sixteen-year-old to part with his pocket money.

  “Okay,” the boy had groaned. “Here’s the money. Give me the dope. Then can you do that thing again with your tongue?”

  The last sentence was excised from the tape transcript published in The Sphere.

  Tim had invited Tamara to celebrate her triumph at a boozy working lunch with three of his henchmen, and when she felt his hand under the table creeping up to stroke her thigh, with a jolt of intoxicated rapture she knew that their tentative flirtation—the sly smiles over the subs’ desk, his hand brushing hers as they looked through the snatched photos—would be consummated that afternoon.

  It was fun. And more than fun, she had persuaded herself. It had the makings of an iconic romance. He was a late-twentieth-century Bogie to her Bacall—Hugh Grant to her Liz Hurley, Rod to her Rachel. Didn’t he feel the melancholy undertow, the separation pangs, after the euphoria of their long weekend in Paris? He had gone there on a management trip and managed to wangle her fare, first class on Eurostar, as a business expense. They might have been in Scunthorpe for all they saw of the City of Light as, sustained by champagne, cocaine, Ecstasy, the minibar and room service, they feasted on each other for forty-eight luxuriant hours.

  She had packed a black velvet sheath dress and borrowed a diamanté necklace from Gemma for a night in a fabled restaurant, where dinner for two cost three times Tamara’s monthly income, but she need not have bothered. Her transparent lilac nightdress, with satin ties and thigh-length slits, also turned out to be superfluous. They did not wear a thing all weekend, startling the timid waiter when he first wheeled in their room service trolley. After that, whenever he reappeared, they lay rigid as corpses, fighting the urge to laugh, with the duvet pulled up tight under their chins.

  They talked, too. Tim had told her (at some length—cocaine can have that effect) about his unhappy time at boarding school, the bullying, the sadistic gym master. She described her parents’ divorce, the succession of ridiculous stepmothers, her own mother’s illness and Ross’s decline. She had never talked like that to anyone. And when the moment came to part at Waterloo Station, as she watched him walk away, his touchingly bulky figure shrinking into the distance, she was overcome by a sadness that seemed very like love.

  But it was always a mistake to sleep with editors. That much she should have learned in a media career spanning six years. Initially, apart from any physical and emotional satisfactions, there were obvious professional advantages. After their affair started, Tim commissioned three big pieces from her for The Sphere’s features section. She had spent a hilarious weekend in a hotel with a lap-dancing transsexual who claimed to have slept with a cabinet minister; she had done a fortnight’s undercover work in a rubber suit for the paper’s in-depth investigation into the kinky tastes of an elderly soap star, and interviewed a junkie masseur who claimed he had once been the gay lover of a second division goalkeeper. When one of the Sphere’s reporters was drying out in a South London clinic, she had been called in to the office to do a couple of shifts on the paper’s news desk. And then there had been the promise of a staff job.

  “I’ve just got to square it with the managing editor,” Tim had said. Now that, along with their romance, was all off. When an affair with an editor ended, your job was on the line too. Tim had muttered about “head counts” and “budget squeezes,” but he had managed to find outrageous sums of money to poach The Monitor’s politics editor, a tweedy matron with the accent of a prewar BBC announcer. Bernice Bullingdon would be as out of place in the office of The Sunday Sphere as Margaret Rutherford in a porn movie.

  Why would Tim want to make Tamara a permanent fixture in his office when he was ejecting her from his bed? Or, rather
, ejecting himself from her bed? Her final freelance feature for The Sunday Sphere, on the killer handbag epidemic—“the fashion for oversized bags that is endangering the posture, and the lives, of a generation of young women”—was to be delivered next week to BioSphere, the tabloid’s health and beauty section. She knew it would never be published now. She would get a generous kill fee, brokered by Tim’s secretary, and she would never write for the paper again, until Tim himself was purged from his job in one of the periodic newspaper putsches. She prayed nightly, with a fervour unusual in an agnostic, for a putsch.

  Before it all went wrong, The Sphere office had seemed to her a twenty-four-hour carnival of mischief, where the gleeful staff did not so much report for work as cartwheel into the party. It was hard to imagine how the pompous Bullingdon, whose idea of a night off was a hand of bridge with a couple of cabinet ministers, would fare at a newspaper whose greatest contribution to contemporary journalism was its Readers’ Husbands page, a weekly feast of coy Quasimodos in string vests and grubby Y-fronts. In comparison with The Sphere, The Monitor, even in its most playful manifestations, such as Psst!, or Johnny’s features desk, was as dull, subdued and rigidly hierarchical as a building society branch office.

  She wiped away unwelcome tears and noticed that the geek in the corner was no longer looking at his screen. He appeared to be staring at her. She scowled at him, and he bowed his head, tapping intensely at his keyboard once more. There was always work, Tamara consoled herself. Lovers came, and they unfailingly went, but the need to make money was constant. She had her brother to think of, too. Feckless, vulnerable Ross. She dreaded speaking to him on the phone—gauging his mood, his intoxicant intake, from the timbre of his voice, his relative incoherence—yet whenever she couldn’t reach him she lay awake all night, sleepless with anxiety. Where was he? What was he doing? Who with?

  The last she had heard from him was an answering machine message left a fortnight ago. His voice was slurred, and it was hard to make out what he was saying but he sounded happy, and Tamara had tried to cheer herself with the thought that he might be merely drunk. She had called him back but his landline had been cut off. She would end up paying the bill again, and the reconnection fee; it was cheaper in the long run, less time-consuming and far less agonising than the bleak journey through the urban wilderness of King’s Cross to track him down.

  By supporting Ross was she subsidising his decline? Or was she saving him from going under completely? She could not turn her back on him, as the self-help books advised. She would rather have her brother’s dealer on her payroll than risk the consequences of walking away. If anything happened to Ross, she could not bear the guilt. Work, her work, was the only way out for both of them.

  She picked up Dispatches and scanned the index—nothing on Crosby or Taylor. Would she have to read through the entire book to glean any salty stories? Life was short, and deadlines imminent. She turned to Tait’s first book, Truth, Typewriter and Toothbrush, which apparently contained the Pulitzer Prize–winning piece. Here it was. April 1945. “On Goethe’s Oak.” What kind of headline was that? She sighed heavily and began to read.

  On 27 September 1827, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great Renaissance genius of German letters, then in his late seventies, took a morning stroll with a friend in the forest on the flanks of Ettersberg mountain above the town of Weimar. They stopped on a hillock to breakfast on roast partridge, white bread and “a very good wine out of a cup of pure gold.” Sitting with their backs against the trunk of a sturdy oak they looked out over the broad valley of the Unstrut, its villages sparkling in the clear autumn sunlight. Beyond it, to the south and west, ranged the magnificent Thüringer Wald mountains, to the north, the violet peaks and ridges of the distant Harz.

  The woodland hike of a nineteenth-century poet? This surely didn’t qualify as news, even in 1945.

  “I have often been in this spot,” said Goethe, “and of late I have often thought it would be the last time that I should look down hence on the kingdoms of the world, and their glories; but it has happened once again, and I hope that even this is not the last time we shall both spend a pleasant day here … Man shrinks in the narrow confinement of the house. Here he feels great and free—great and free as the scene he has before his eyes, and as he ought properly always to be.”

  Such stuffy, sermonising prose. This was rambling on an exorbitant scale. No journalist would get away with that now. It was arduous reading for this time of night. Across the office the geek had switched off his screen and was stuffing his belongings into what appeared to be a school satchel. He left without a word. Tamara was on her own. She returned to her writing with a sense of relief and opened her thesaurus. She might not be in the running for a Pulitzer, but this had to be the best piece she had ever written.

  I arrive late, red-faced and out of breath at the soigné mansion block in Maida Vale. Honor Tait, the formidable doyenne of journalism, opens the creaking door of her crepuscular apartment and fixes me with an icy stare.

  “You’re late!” she rasps.

  She seems reluctant to let me in.

  Is this the delectable siren who once charmed and harried world leaders from Franco and Castro to Kennedy, who was seen on the arm of some of the twentieth century’s greatest icons of entertainment—playboy painter Pablo Picasso, crooning golfer Bing Crosby, actor and mobsters’ friend Frank Sinatra and Cats author T. S. Eliot? I name-check the plate under the doorbell. Tait. This little old lady is indeed her: the reporter who covered some of the greatest news stories of the past century—the outbreak of World War Two, the Korean War, (fill in later …)—and doorstepped some of the most notorious and celebrated figures of recent history. But would she let this humble reporter past her own doorstep? And if she did, what stories would she share with her?

  Tamara’s confidence was returning. She might actually enjoy this. But there were more urgent demands. She had already missed her deadlines for two pieces, commissioned last month by her regular freelance outlets. Mile High, the in-flight magazine for Prêt-à-Jet airline, was pressing her for the travel piece on their new destination in Holland, while Oestrus, the glossy monthly “for the discerning older woman,” was still waiting for her consumer report on vibrators. She would honour these obligations, then she would concentrate on the real prize. And Tim Farrow, by that time, with luck, permanently exiled from newspapers and churning out press releases for a plumbing supplies company, would regret the day he ever passed up the chance to share his life with a star writer like Tamara Sim, a twenty-first-century press corps golden girl.

  First work—then vengeance.

  Unwary visitors to Alkmaar are confronted by a curious spectacle each September—the sight of giant portions of Edam and Gouda cheese rolling down the steep cobbled streets of the ancient Dutch town. And not a cream cracker in sight!

  Honor looked up at the clock garlanded with worry beads. Almost midnight. The interview, absurd though it had been, haunted her, and the girl’s inane questions had forced her to pose more pertinent ones of her own. Even as she had struggled to make sense of her life, to give it a simple, clear—and, yes, honourable—shape for the benefit of The Monitor’s readers, unwanted fragments of her past had floated up, ugly motes in her inner eye, to desecrate the picture and torment her. And how near she had come to unburdening herself before that little vulgarian. Not quite a case of casting pearls before swine; more of strewing facts before fools. But who else was there to talk this through with?

  Honor did not mind solitude. Loneliness was another matter. In the two years since Tad had died, she had amassed her group of young friends, her Boys, the Monday Club. And why not? The old friends were dead, if not physically, then, like poor Lois, in every other sense. Honor had first met her in postwar Berlin, where Lois was working as an interpreter. She was a brilliant linguist, on secondment from Bryn Mawr, with the dark, slanted eyes and long neck of a Modigliani and the limber body of a dancer. When Honor moved to Los Angeles and Lois
, by then a Progressive Party activist, was living in Brentwood, their friendship strengthened, and it was sustained over the ensuing decades by rare and punishingly expensive phone calls, rarer but lengthy letters—all lost in the fire—and reunions, at least one a year, usually in Italy, where they would visit museums and churches, eat at neighbourhood trattorias, drink prosecco and talk into the night. Lois finally moved to London in 1970 to work for the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and bought a little flat in Mayfair. They had seen each other regularly—galleries, concerts, lunches, suppers—and every spring Lois would take the sleeper to Scotland and they would hike the hills around Glenbuidhe.

  Lois’s romantic life was decorous and comparatively chaste, but she had seen Honor through two marriages and countless crises d’amour. And then, after the collapse of Honor’s marriage to Sandor, there was the spell of depression that Lois, in a classic display of projection, had put down to childlessness. Whatever its cause, Lois had seen her through. When Honor met Tad, he had been threatened by the closeness of her friendship with Lois. He did not believe a relationship of such intensity could be innocent of desire. He would call Lois, with leaden sarcasm, “the Darling Girl,” and Honor wondered if Tad had secretly rejoiced when Lois began to lose her mind seven years ago.

  Today a few of Honor’s contemporaries might be reasonably intact neurally and breathing unassisted, but they had become body bores, obsessed by their infirmities, competitive about challenging new symptoms and excruciating medical procedures. Her Boys, though often glib and ignorant, had more to talk about than colonoscopies and CAT scans.

  She switched on a lamp and walked to the window. The garden was empty, a shadowy stage set poised expectantly between the infants’ matinee and the teenagers’ evening performance. She closed the curtains to discourage curiosity from the flats opposite. Not that there was anything to see here. An old woman, head bowed, sitting alone, waiting. Waiting: the chief business of the old.