The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  Simon’s wife of long standing, posh, plain and pleasant Jan, had apparently never suspected a thing while her husband steadily worked his way through London’s Lucindas and Mirandas, Serenas and Marinas, like a bulimic at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  “Tricky.”

  “And now, just before we came out, Serena phoned the office in tears. She’s furious.”

  “Oh no,” Tamara said, pouring another glass.

  Their food arrived. Simon didn’t even glance at his plate.

  “She said I said she had tits like empty bed socks.”

  “What?” Tamara put down her fork and tried to summon the image. “Bed socks? Has she? Did you?”

  “No. That’s what Lucinda told her I said.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “No word from Lucinda now, either,” he said, checking his pager. Tamara, beginning to tire of his story and keen to embark on her own, ate her lunch in silence. He clipped his pager back on his belt.

  “So how’s the escape plan?” he asked.

  Tamara was baffled, and then she realised he was enquiring about the subject she had been hoping to introduce into the conversation since they arrived.

  “She was an obnoxious old witch,” Tamara said. “Wouldn’t tell me a thing about her life, but when she got onto the theme of her brilliant career, about the boring stories she’d broken, about the boring politicians and soldiers she’d known, she wouldn’t stop talking. I thought I was never going to get out of there and—”

  Simon’s mobile phone rang. Tamara looked away to conceal her envy: she really wanted one of those gadgets. The only people she knew who could afford them were senior editors, who got them on expenses, and drug dealers.

  It was Jan, calling about their son’s eighteenth birthday party.

  “Okay, sweetie …” Simon said. “Go with the marquee … Whatever you think … Yes … Whatever Dexter wants … No. Business lunch … Can’t talk now … Bye … Love you too.”

  He turned off the phone and Tamara continued.

  “I’ve been trying to reach the publishers to arrange another interview, and they won’t return my calls.”

  Simon was drumming his fingers on the table.

  “And you know how much this means, this commission,” Tamara added. “I mean, writing for S*nday is a real breakthrough for me.”

  He looked up, signalled to the waiter and ordered two more glasses of wine along with the bill. He had not touched his risotto.

  “Get a grip, Tamara,” he said, taking out his credit card. “You’ve just got to move on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, if you really want to pursue this story, you have to show some initiative.”

  This was unfair.

  “I’m doing my best. I’m not even sure what angle Lyra wants on this piece, and she won’t answer my messages.”

  “You don’t need any hand-holding from Lyra,” Simon said.

  “I just feel I’ve reached a dead end. All I’ve got is a lousy interview, with maybe one halfway decent quote, and some cuttings. I’ll never wring four thousand words out of that.”

  He took out his pager.

  “Come on, Tamara. You can do better than that. Honor Tait’s a public figure. She’s out there. Watch her at work. Something will turn up.”

  The pager was bleeping like a heart monitor. He paid the bill, tucking the receipt into his pocket. He was very good at dispensing brisk professional advice, Tamara thought resentfully, but the only work he would be doing this afternoon would entail locating a paper clip, fastening this receipt to an expenses form and writing: “Lunch. Contacts. Features Ideas. £36.”

  The interview had served one useful purpose, kick-starting a process that was long overdue. The disturbing phone call was a further spur. How had she, Honor Tait, the arch antimaterialist, the scoffer at sentimentality, taken so long to get round to this? She had the urge, but not the energy, to strip it all, or, better still, to walk out of the door and chuck a Molotov cocktail behind her. But the freeholders of Holmbrook Mansions would not thank her for it, and her neighbours might object.

  This time, without hesitation, she wrenched Tad’s hideous seascape from the wall. It was not as heavy as she had feared. Clumsy watercolours of seas and hills, woods and waterfalls gave him a pleasure the landscapes themselves never could. “Yep,” he would say, coming up behind her as she stood by the window in Glenbuidhe. “The mountains are still there. And the loch. That’s still there too. Let me know when they move ’em.” But he had to be restrained from buying the abysmal paintings of local views offered for sale in folksy tearooms, alongside souvenir tea towels and handcrafted fudge.

  Sunsets, too, left him cold. At the end of each day in Glenbuidhe, when she liked to walk down to the lochside and watch the blazing sky, he had always insisted on accompanying her. But he would stand there in the cooling evening air, stamping his feet impatiently. He didn’t get it. Yet he spent a ridiculous sum on a lurid oil, in which broad sweeps of mauve, rose and orange conjured a grotesque pastiche of nature. That was one picture she had happily dumped straight after his death—his goddaughter had expressed a liking for it and was bundled off with it in a taxi after an uneasy tea. Honor hadn’t seen her since.

  She scooped up armfuls of books and took them with the painting to the cupboard in the hall—how much time was there left for reading, let alone rereading?—and placed them in there with the relics from her recent clearout. She began to gather up the photographs. Who was she doing this for? Would she accede to Ruth’s badgering and invite the foolish Tamara back? Or was she expecting another visitor, who might sneer, with some justification, at the display of her vanished splendours? Pompeii in happier times, as the caption cliché goes.

  She took down the photograph of her younger self with Franco. Much had been made of the fact that she had conducted the interview while costumed like a chorus girl. In fact she had been holidaying in Tenerife with Thierry, and it was Franco—unknown, recently demoted, restless in exile and, it turned out, only weeks away from the uprising that would provoke the civil war—who had sought her out for the interview. Hearing that the young reporter, whose smile had already illuminated several RKO newsreels and who wrote for the American news magazines, was on the island, he had tracked her down and surprised her at a harbourside café. She had concealed her irritation at being disturbed by this officious little man, borrowed a notebook from an amused waiter and politely conducted an interview, only half listening to the answers, about the administrative problems of this cluster of extinct volcanoes moored just north of Africa. Her interview, a few workaday paragraphs in Collier’s, did not survive. The picture did. A local photographer had caught the moment and must have made more money from that single picture—so often reproduced that, sixty years on, it was a visual cliché—than he did in a lifetime’s career spent snapping wedding parties, overdressed infants and first communions.

  The sitting room was beginning to look satisfyingly austere. Who could have guessed that such pleasure was to be had from this systematic pillaging of the past? If only memories could be ordered and dispensed with so easily. She had struggled to make progress with her coda. She worried that, as she got older, she had lost her sure touch as a writer, that her ear for good prose could no longer be trusted, and she found it increasingly difficult to assemble her thoughts in the service of a story. The phone call had been a further distraction, scattering her thoughts.

  Fighting exhaustion, she gathered up the proofs of The Unflinching Eye. If she could not write, she could surely read.

  Morocco, 25 October 1956—The massacre in Meknes began in a fashion that would have been comic if the outcome had not been so tragically grisly. A demonstration against French rule in Algiers was proceeding relatively peacefully, until a Moroccan police officer, using the butt of his rifle as a club against more enthusiastic elements of the crowd, accidentally shot himself in the foot. The rumour spread that supporters of the French had opened fire. The
mob turned on any Europeans who had the misfortune to be in the area. A husband and wife were hacked to death with axes in the presence of their children, a hospital assistant was bludgeoned to death with paving stones as he knelt to aid a wounded man in the street and three men were burned alive in their car as they tried to flee. A total of thirty men and women, mostly French, were brutally murdered.

  She could not go on. She was going through the motions of work, the pantomime of purposefulness. Why was she bothering? The world was a mess then. It continued to be a mess. And rereading her younger self, breathless with excitement in a place of horror, was disquieting. All that had changed was her attitude; her youthful solipsism had persuaded her that she could combat injustice and transform the world. Today she knew better. There was consolation in this, as well as reproach.

  Six

  It was stubborn pride, and anger with Simon, rather than journalistic zeal, that took Tamara two nights later to the drab parish hall of the Strict and Particular Baptist Church off the Archway Road. As she stood shivering in the queue outside to buy her ticket (the cost equivalent to a night at the pictures, fares included, or a couple of decent bottles of wine), Tamara regretted her choice of wardrobe for the evening. Jill Dando was tonight’s role model, but the Crimewatch presenter’s sensible girl-next-door charm, achieved with some hair gel, pearl earrings and a black trouser suit, marked Tamara out from the crowd as an interloper. Most of the women were dressed in fleeces and waterproofs as if for a trek in the Hindu Kush, while a few in tiered skirts and festooned scarves suggested a delegation from a Gypsy campfire.

  The men were mostly crushed academics in quiet corduroy; wraithlike elderly hippies, their surviving wisps of hair, long and grey as carpet underlay, tied back in frail tribute to a ponytail; and a handful of peaky teenagers, shoulders hunched under the weight of book-filled backpacks. In the hall porch, a goateed pensioner in a patchwork waistcoat was sitting at a table selling tickets. Without looking up from his tin cash box he took Tamara’s money and handed her a numbered cloakroom ticket. Useless for expenses.

  “Could I have a receipt for that?”

  “We don’t do receipts,” he said, holding his hand out to the teenager behind her. “Next?”

  The rows of red plastic chairs in the hall had already begun to fill. The audience murmured and nodded as they made their way to their seats, and the general mood seemed to be one of simmering indignation. Tamara, anticipating a long evening and determined to make a swift exit as soon as she had gathered the information she needed, took an aisle seat in the back row. She planned to follow Honor Tait’s advice: “Through meticulous observation and a ravenous hunger for detail, all will be revealed.”

  On the walls, primary-coloured posters, pasted up for the benefit of tonight’s audience rather than for the Strict and Particulars, celebrated liberation struggles in Latin America, urged the release of political prisoners, called for the boycotting of goods from unfashionable countries, enjoined trades union members to pay their dues and, in a mock-up photograph, showed John Major outside Number Ten Downing Street with a Hitler moustache painted above his simian upper lip and his right arm raised in a Nazi salute. Over the proscenium arch of the small stage, a portrait of the queen in her comely youth had been partly obliterated for the evening by a plastic plaque depicting Che Guevara, eyes upturned in ascetic rapture like a medieval Christ. Faded velvet drapes framed the stage, which was bare, apart from four bentwood chairs.

  Tamara looked around and marvelled that the hall was almost full; so many people for whom a few hours of dreary speeches in a church hall represented a good night out. Most of them, she saw now, were morbidly unattractive, and more conventional evening pleasures would be unavailable to them. As she scanned the audience, she caught sight of only one exception, someone who possibly could have a life if she chose to. Tamara registered the profile, almost saccharine in its delicate perfection and framed by a fall of dark hair that shone like liquid jet, before she recognised its owner: Tania Singh. What was she doing here? Didn’t she have a groundbreaking play to go to? Or an opera? Or a Web diary to write?

  The general murmur faded as a rugged figure with parched sandy hair and combat fatigues, who looked as if he had just choppered in from an Amazonian guerrilla encampment, strode from the wings across the stage towards the microphone. As soon as he spoke Tamara recognised him as the blunt-jawed correspondent from the TV news programme that preceded Blind Date. Paul Tucker, roving reporter, a middle-aged hulk in an Action Man costume, the liberal intelligentsia’s equivalent of a celebrity, with a presence on prime-time TV. Though he did not qualify as famous in the proper sense of the word—his private life was not interesting enough to make the tabloids—his name would be worth dropping for S*nday readers. The audience applauded tentatively but respectfully, and the sound was of an uncertain scattering of spring rain. Tucker was joined on stage by a tall, angular woman whose disproportionately wide hips, encased in taupe slacks, seemed to have been borrowed from a fat friend. Tucker introduced her as the “well-known philanthropist and human-rights activist, Clemency Twisk.” Well known to whom? To everyone in the audience, apart from Tamara, it seemed. They demonstrated their familiarity with the woman and all her works, in a renewed and amplified round of clapping—a prolonged April shower of noise.

  Twisk acknowledged the audience with a modest nod as the next speaker came on to more grudging applause: a local Labour MP, an eager-to-please young barrister and member of the shadow cabinet, who had been putting himself about, garnering publicity in advance of the coming election, like an “It girl” on the party circuit. Only last week he had been pictured grinning in leathers astride a snorting Harley-Davidson on the cover of Biker’s News, and he had appeared in Country Life’s New Year issue in a waxed jacket, squinting dreamily at distant hills. Having covered the Hell’s Angels and Barbour constituencies, tonight he was focusing on the traditional Labour voter. He gave the audience a chummy wave as he took his seat and Tucker announced the evening’s special guest speaker. The applause increased in volume and intensity—a clamorous monsoon on a vast tin roof—as Honor Tait walked slowly from the wings. She smiled graciously. Some younger members of the audience stood to cheer and whistle, and soon everyone was on their feet; a standing ovation before the old woman had even opened her mouth. Tamara remained resolutely seated.

  The noise subsided, and it was Twisk who walked first to the microphone. Tamara groaned quietly and glanced at her watch. She had hoped Honor Tait would give the opening speech, leaving her free to escape and salvage something of the evening, and as Twisk talked, with high and quavering voice, at length and in detail, of the genesis of the new pressure group, Kids’ Crusaders, which had been set up by her foundation, Tamara felt a creeping desolation.

  “The purpose of KC,” said Twisk, in a sustained yodel, “is to fight child exploitation wherever it is to be found, in third-world factories, in the grotesque barbarities of the sex industry, in Eastern European sweat shops, or in the economically privileged but spiritually impoverished environment of the Western middle-class home …”

  Tamara, numb with boredom, gradually drifted into a pleasant daydream involving Tim, his newspaper’s irascible proprietor, and some compromising photographs taken in the bedroom of the Georges V. That the images of Tim, taken at his most sexually playful, when he had used her pink thong as a hairnet, existed solely in Tamara’s mental photo album did not diminish her enjoyment of the revenge fantasy. She was shaken from it by the crackle and thunder of sudden applause. Honor Tait was on her feet again. Tamara gripped her pencil, steadied her notebook and wrote: “Frail. Small. Dwarfed by microphone.” All eyes in the hall were focused, unblinking, on the speaker. Of Tait’s speech, a querulous inventory of cruelty featuring child weavers, underage gold miners (would that be minor miners?) and prostitutes, Tamara took no record; Clemency Twisk’s mission statement had exhausted any reserves of social concern. “Rousing. A fury. Reminiscences. India. Philippines
. Thailand. Lithuania,” were the only notes Tamara made. On it went and, though she tried her best, she could not reclaim her delicious reverie of retribution. She would have to revive it later in bed.

  She looked at her watch again and judged by the falling timbre of her voice that Honor Tait was winding up. Quickly glancing behind her to check that her exit route was clear, Tamara saw that it really was standing room only. Leaning against the walls or seated cross-legged on the floor, as if at a yoga class, were several dozen people ranging in age, she guessed, from sixteen to seventy. All of them were gazing enthralled at the tiny figure on the stage.

  Tamara’s attention was drawn to a tall latecomer who was pushing open the door. His hair was a tangle of Romany curls and, despite the wintry evening, his shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows of his muscular arms. He looked incongruously heroic in this hall full of pallid whiners. Lady Chatterley’s lover, fresh from some butch business in the potting shed. He was the only attractive man in the room, and he appeared to be alone. Surely he could have found something better to do on a cold evening in January?

  They were all applauding again. Honor Tait must have finished. Five minutes ago, Tamara would have taken this as the signal for immediate departure, but the prepossessing stranger had added a new element of interest. She willed him to look in her direction. Paul Tucker was speaking now, grasping the microphone in his freckled fist like Henry VIII at a hambone. It was time for questions from the audience and a bustling figure of indeterminate gender in a purple anorak was waving a microphone in the aisle. Only Tamara’s curiosity about the brooding figure by the door kept her from bolting for the exit.

  “Could Honor Tait tell us something more of her experiences in South East Asia?” asked a blowsy hiker with owlish glasses.

  Of course she could. The real question was whether Honor Tait could stop telling us more about her South East Asian experiences. Tamara tried taking notes again—“Manila, Chiang Mai, Cambodia, Laos”—but gave up. She could not listen to this stuff, let alone write it down. And who would want to read it? She looked over at the latecomer by the door. His arms were crossed against his broad chest and he was leaning back, one foot braced against the wall, in a pose that suggested defiant boredom, or perhaps rapt surrender to the potency of Honor Tait’s oratory. Tamara preferred the first explanation; it was heartening to think of him as a kindred spirit, a fellow contrarian at this prigs’ convocation. But she was here in the line of duty. What was his excuse?